Milo
He kissed Adrian three days ago and hadn’t slept right since.
I shouldn’t have done that.
Yeah. You should have.
Three days. He went to practice. He ran drills.
He ate what the nutrition plan told him to eat and drove the routes the schedule told him to drive and the system held the way it always held, except it had a hole in it now and the hole was shaped like Adrian’s mouth and four words that wouldn’t stop playing.
He needed to be thinking about the power play and the road trip and his minus-two from the last three games.
He needed to be better, Kovac’s word, the only word that mattered.
He didn’t need to be thinking about a bartender’s hands on his face and the warmth of paint-stained palms cupping his jaw like it was something worth holding.
He needed wins. He did not need a boyfriend. He did not need whatever Adrian was. He did not need any of this.
He didn’t go to the Grotto.
He went somewhere else instead. A bar near the arena with a sports name he’d already forgotten, six televisions, and a menu laminated in plastic. The bartender said “what can I get you” before Milo had fully sat, which was efficient and completely wrong.
He ordered bourbon and it came in a pint glass.
A pint glass. Designed for beer, the weight wrong in his hand, too light at the top, the bourbon sitting at the bottom with room for six more inches of liquid it wasn’t going to get.
A woman two stools down was telling her friend something with her whole body, elbows up, the universal geometry of a story that kept growing.
The fryer had been going since he walked in, coating the roof of his mouth.
The bourbon sat at the bottom of the pint glass like something abandoned in a well.
He drank a third of it, left money for the full, and stood. The cold outside landed against his face like a correction.
* * *
He spent three mornings on the ice before the team arrived.
He skated by six-fifteen, the overhead banks at half-power, the Zamboni-fresh surface smelling cold and mineral.
He could hear his own edges without thirty other people’s blades.
His feet knew the drills. Stick, puck, timing, all clean, all fine.
And between every rep his brain supplied Adrian’s wrist under his thumb, the ridge of the tendon, the warmth of the pulse point, and three words that had no business in a forechecking sequence.
Yeah. You should have.
Three mornings in, his mind was not following his legs anywhere useful.
He put Kasner into the boards at the end of a rush drill.
The hit wasn’t outside the scope of the drill.
They were running a forechecking sequence, contact expected.
But the extra percentage was added without decision, and Kasner’s shoulder hit the dasher harder than the drill required.
Kasner turned around with gloves up, chin dropped, and the flat eyes of a man who’d been hit beyond what he’d signed up for.
Nobody moved for about two seconds.
Kasner shoved him back once, glove to chest, and skated away. The drill continued with the too-loud energy of a group pretending nothing had happened.
Kovac came by on the way to the next set. Didn’t stop. As he passed: “Vance.” One syllable. His stick tapped the ice once.
Milo ran the next rep at regulation contact and said nothing.
The locker room after was steam and rubber and the industrial cleaner losing its eternal war with sweat. Milo sat in his stall and unlaced his left skate. Top eyelet, cross, cross, pull. The routine held.
Brody came out of the shower with his hair going several directions and a towel around his waist.
“You good?”
“Fine.”
“You hit Kasner like you were settling something.”
“I was running the drill.”
“You were running the drill the way you run a drill when something else is in the way.” He pulled the towel off his head. The Boston flatness of his vowels made everything sound like a weather report. “You don’t have to tell me. Just get it sorted.”
“It’s sorted.”
Brody held the look two seconds longer than the answer deserved. One eyebrow doing more work than most people’s entire face.
“I’ll get you a coffee,” he said. They went to the rink café, a narrow room that smelled permanently of burnt drip coffee and microwaved breakfast sandwiches, and Brody talked about the road trip and the hotel situation and whether the return flight was going to have the good meal or the bad meal.
“I swear to God if it’s the pasta again I’m filing a grievance.
” Milo drank his coffee and followed approximately none of it.
Brody, who knew this, kept talking anyway.
That was the thing about Brody. He filled silence the way people filled waiting rooms. Not to communicate. To cover.
It wasn’t sorted. It wasn’t anywhere close to sorted.
Milo had kissed Adrian across a bar and Adrian had said you should have and Milo had walked out and driven home and sat on his bed in the unlit room and replayed it until his chest hurt, and then he’d jerked off to it, and then he’d replayed it some more, and none of that had sorted a single thing.
He had a road trip in four days and a minus-two he needed to fix and a power play that needed him in the right position at the right time and instead his brain was full of paint thinner and soap and the sound Adrian made when Milo’s jaw trembled against his mouth, which was no sound at all, which was a held breath, which was worse than any sound could have been because it meant Adrian had felt it and chosen not to speak and that was the kind of care Milo had no defense against.
He finished his coffee and went home and sat in the apartment where the refrigerator hummed and didn’t go to the Grotto.
* * *
He went back four days later.
He didn’t decide to. He finished the day, practice, treatment, the drive home, forty-five minutes in the apartment, and got in the car. The car went where it went.
The donut sign threw green neon against the wet pavement. He crossed with his hands in his pockets and pushed through the Grotto’s door.
The warmth hit him. His shoulders dropped. The tension that had been pulled tight across his back for a week found slack that only happened here.
He sat on the third stool. The mahogany was warm under his forearms.
Adrian was at the near end, finishing with a couple. Milo tracked him coming back along the rail, collecting glasses in one hand. He looked at Milo. One beat, eyes moving across his face, and then he reached for the bourbon and poured without measuring and set it down.
“Same thing?”
What Milo heard underneath: are we still doing this. Are you here.
He put his hand around the glass. Warm from Adrian’s fingers.
“Yeah,” he said.
Adrian nodded and moved back to his circuit.
Didn’t make the return into a moment. He just poured the drink and moved on, and Milo sat there with bourbon that tasted right for the first time in a week and understood that Adrian got it.
Walking back through the door was the answer. It didn’t need a conversation.
The bar emptied. By late it was just the vinyl and Milo and Adrian.
Adrian didn’t look at the clock. Didn’t signal that it was time to go.
Milo looked at the chairs stacked against the wall. He got up from the stool and picked up the first one.
Adrian turned around. Looked at Milo holding the chair. The corner of his mouth moved. He went back to the rail.
They stacked chairs from opposite ends, meeting in the middle where the floorboard by the jukebox creaked. Milo had never stood on that floorboard before. Adrian turned off the lights. They put on their jackets in the unlit bar.
* * *
They walked. Not toward the parking structure.
Milo’s keys were in his jacket and his feet went the other direction, toward Adrian’s building, and his body apparently considered this settled.
Adrian walked with his hands in his pockets, breath clouding, the line of his jaw visible when he turned to check the crossing.
They didn’t talk. The silence between them was different from Milo’s usual silences, which were walls with locks on them.
This one felt like the space after you set something heavy down and your arms were buzzing from the absence of it.
Two blocks in the cold. A restaurant exhaust fan pushed warmth and garlic into the night air as they passed through it. Adrian’s building had good windows and bad heating, the kind of place where the radiator knocked at odd hours. Two flights up, the loose board on the fourth step.
At the door, Milo said: “Show me the painting.”
Adrian’s key was in the lock. His hand paused. He turned the key.
“Okay.”
* * *
The smell hit first. Turpentine, sharp, and linseed oil underneath, and then the older smell of paint that had soaked into the plaster over years of sessions.
Adrian turned on the work light and the room opened up around Milo and he stopped in the doorway because he wasn’t ready for it.
Canvases against every wall. A worktable under the window with palettes and brushes, the bristles splayed at different angles, some stiff with dried color, some damp.
A coffee cup had been drafted as a solvent container.
The floor had paint on it, drips dried into flat circles, a smear near the worktable where a brush had been dragged.
Books stacked against the wall with pages marked.
The palettes were dense with layers of mixed color pressed into each other, every session leaving its own record.
Milo’s apartment had white walls and new floors.
His apartment looked like no one had ever done anything in it, because no one had.
This place looked like someone had been doing things in it every day for years, and the doing had left itself everywhere, and none of it had been cleaned up because cleaning it up would mean the doing was over, and the doing was the point.
He walked in.