Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Heath
The line was quiet. No music. No theatrics. Just the scrape of skates and the dull thud of gloves meeting gloves.
Helmets off. Eye contact. A quick, "Good series," or nothing at all.
Boston in six. Their arena was loud enough to feel in my teeth.
By the time I stepped off the ice, sweat had already cooled under my pads. The rink air slid into the gap at my collar and stayed there, sharp and clean. My hands smelled like tape and iron. My mouth tasted like blood I hadn't earned.
We made it to the conference final. Our season ended there.
In the locker room, nobody talked about next year. Cross said you don't. You sit, and you let the straps fall open one at a time.
I leaned forward and pressed my forehead briefly to the top of my stick before I peeled the tape off the blade. Habit, not superstition. A way to mark the end of something that mattered.
Across the room, Kieran stripped tape from his own stick with precise fingers, one long pull, no hesitation.
He didn't look at me at first. When he did, he held it.
Three seconds, maybe four. Long enough that Varga, mid-sentence about something, trailed off and looked between us before picking his thread back up.
No one was yelling. No one was throwing gear. It hadn't been that kind of loss. They outplayed us. Outlasted.
Rook walked past me with a duffel over his shoulder and clapped my helmet once before I could take it off. "Hell of a run, kid."
I nodded. "Yeah."
He didn't say more. He'd cleared space for me all year, net-front and in meetings. He did it again now by not delivering a speech.
Varga sat three stalls down, one shin pad off, one still strapped, staring at the Ironhawks crest on the wall. "I had a whole speech prepared," he said to no one in particular. "Eloquent. Moving. Historically significant."
"Save it," Pratt said from behind his mask. Goalies grieved differently.
"I'm saving it. I want you all to know that I'm saving it, and that it was brilliant, and that none of you deserved it." Rook tapped him on the back of the head as he passed. Varga shut up.
At the far end, Markel stood with his hands in his pockets.
"Donnelly."
I straightened. "Coach."
He took in my stall. The nameplate still bolted in place and the stack of clean practice jerseys folded at the bottom. The tape bits stuck to the rubber mat under my feet.
"You earned your spot." Calm. Measured.
The words landed in my gut, like a nail driven flush. "Thank you."
He nodded. "Be smart. Don't be small."
He didn't look at Kieran when he said it. He didn't look at anyone else either. His gaze stayed on me long enough to make sure it landed, and then he walked out.
Clean-out day came two mornings later. The room smelled like detergent. Gear bags unzipped wide. Nameplates unscrewed. The low industrial hum of the dryers cycling through one last load.
I packed deliberately. Each piece went into my bag with care, elbow pads scuffed from net-front traffic and gloves with the palm thinning where my stick rubbed. The smell of leather and salt stuck to my fingers even after I wiped them on a towel.
This time, I wasn't packing like a call-up. Not folding jerseys with the neatness of someone afraid they'd need to leave the stall spotless for whoever came next. Not checking my phone for a message from my agent.
I knew the numbers now. The extension was signed. Dad's surgery was paid for. The mortgage would hold through the summer and into fall. Maggie had confirmed the math twice, and I'd confirmed it a third time because I was still me. My stall would be mine when I came back in the fall.
Kieran found me after his exit interview. He stepped into the hallway outside the locker room with his phone in his hand. He'd loosened his tie.
"I'm going to Shedd," he said. "Then I'm calling my dad."
I understood what he was saying. He'd been circling the call since before the playoffs.
"You sure?"
"No." He looked at me. "But I'm done waiting to be sure."
I wanted to touch him. The hallway was empty, but muscle memory ran deep, nine months of calculating sightlines and camera angles and who might come around which corner.
"I'll be at my place." He nodded.
I watched him walk toward the parking garage. Controlled, unhurried steps.
I called Maggie from my car. She answered on the second ring. "You're done?"
"Yeah."
"How's your body?"
"Still attached."
A soft laugh. In the background, I heard the click of her keyboard. She was at work.
"Kieran's calling his dad today," I said. Silence on the line. It was a focused hush, meaning she was updating a ledger in her head, moving a number from one column to another.
"Telling him everything?" she asked.
"Yeah."
She let that sit. I could almost hear her thinking. She'd made her peace with Kieran months ago, and she'd listened to me talk about him ever since.
"How are you?" she asked.
"I'm okay."
"Heath."
"I'm scared for him. Not for me."
"That's the same thing, and you know it."
She was right. She was usually right. Loving someone whose risks compounded your own, Maggie understood that arithmetic better than anyone. She'd been running it on our family's behalf since she was twenty-one.
"He signed the extension," I said. "He deferred Scripps."
"I know. You told me."
"I'm telling you again."
"Because you still can't believe it."
I pressed my thumb against the steering wheel. "Yeah," I said.
"He chose you, Heath. People do that sometimes. It's not a clerical error."
I laughed.
"When he's done with the call," she said, "tell him the invitation still stands. Mom's already planning what to cook. Dad wants to show him the workshop."
"Dad's workshop is a folding table in the garage."
"Dad wants to show him the folding table in the garage. Let him have it."
I sat with that for a second. My dad, who still moved carefully around his own house and measured his days in what his back would permit, wanted to show Kieran Mathers a card table with a pegboard behind it. He wanted to offer what he had.
"Okay," I said.
"Heath."
"Yeah?"
"You sound different."
"Different how?"
A pause. I heard her chair shift. "Like you're not bracing."
I didn't have an answer for that. She didn't need one.
"Call me later," she said. "Love you."
"Love you too."
Three hours passed before Kieran showed up at my apartment. He came in smelling like outside. Wind and the faint mineral edge of Lake Michigan.
His eyes looked different, less defensive. Like a window with the blinds finally pulled up.
He set his keys on the counter, in the stripe of light.
Stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides.
I saw the lake water drying in a faint tide mark along his hairline.
He'd been standing close to the glass at the reef exhibit, the way he did when he was thinking hard enough to forget where his body was.
"How was Shedd?" I asked.
"Stable. Salinity at 1.025. Ansel is still eating well."
"And your dad?"
He leaned against the kitchen counter. "I told him all the details. What I think about hockey, grad school, and you." I waited for more. "I told him I'm in love with you. He already knew if he'd been listening the last time, but I made it clear."
"What did he say?"
"He said he pushed me." Kieran looked at his hands on the table. "No defense or qualification. Then he said he needs time."
I watched his fingers press back against the counter, the tendons standing out across the backs of his hands. Hands that had held a stick since they were big enough to grip one.
"That's real," I said.
"Yeah." He looked up. "His voice broke. Just once. I've never heard that before."
A father listening to something he hadn't expected to hear about his son, and choosing to stay on the line instead of hanging up. I knew what that cost. I knew what it was worth.
"Your mom?"
"Texted. She said she's proud of me, and she knew before he did. She always knows before he does."
"Are you okay?"
He considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
"I'm still here," he said.
***
We didn't make a big announcement about moving. We just stopped pretending.
Kieran sold his condo and opted for a larger apartment in my neighborhood.
It was enough for two. It had a second bedroom that the realtor called an office and Kieran called a guest room.
Now, it held my gear bags and a folding table I'd brought from my old place because I refused to tape sticks on the kitchen counter.
Rook showed up Saturday morning with a truck that looked like it had been borrowed from a cousin who owed him money. It had a scratched bed, and the tailgate had a Blackhawks sticker half-scraped off.
"You two done playing house separately?" he asked, hauling one of my duffels toward the elevator. "Took you long enough."
Pratt followed ten minutes later, carrying a small hard case like it contained a surgical instrument.
Varga arrived twenty minutes after that, out of breath, holding a houseplant. "I brought a gift," he announced. "It's a fern. I named him Fernando. He requires indirect light and verbal encouragement."
"We didn't ask you to bring a plant," I said from the doorway.
"You didn't ask me to bring emotional depth to every locker room interaction either, and yet.
" Varga set Fernando on the kitchen island with the care of a man placing a centerpiece at a state dinner.
"I'm told ferns improve air quality. I'm also told they die if you look at them wrong, so this is either a gesture of love or a test of your commitment. I'll check back in two weeks."
Rook reappeared with another box. Looked at the fern. Looked at Varga. "It's already wilting," Rook said.
"It's adjusting."
Kieran caught my eye across the kitchen. The corner of his mouth pulled upward, barely. Not at the joke. At the fact that these men had showed up on a Saturday morning with a truck and a fern and a hard case, and none of them had asked a single question about why we were moving in together.
They knew. Had known, probably, longer than either of us had been ready to confirm. Knowing hadn't changed anything that mattered.
Pratt set his hard case on the kitchen counter. Unlatched it. Inside was a portable water-testing kit. Lab-grade. Better than anything Kieran used at the aquarium.
"For the fish," Pratt said. Deadpan.
I watched Kieran's hands come to rest on the open case. His composure cracked along a seam that Pratt, of all people had found without trying.
"Thank you," Kieran said. His voice held. His eyes didn't.
Pratt nodded once. Left the kitchen. Went back to moving boxes.
Later, when Rook and Varga were arguing in the hallway about whether the couch fit through the door at its current angle, Kieran went still in the kitchen.
"What?" I asked.
He showed me. A text from an unknown number. Hey Kieran, Danny Moreau from the Tribune. Hearing you and Donnelly moved in together. Any comment?
The screen glowed between us.
I looked at it and then looked at him.
"Together?" I asked.
"Together."
I picked up the phone. My thumb hesitated over the keyboard for half a second, and then I typed:
Heath: This is Heath Donnelly. We're not making a statement today. When we do, it'll be on our terms. Have a good weekend.
I showed him before I sent it. He read it and nodded.
I sent it. Set the phone facedown on the counter. My hand wasn't entirely steady when I pulled it back. He saw that.
"Okay?" he asked.
"Okay."
Behind us, Varga was explaining to Pratt why Fernando the fern needed to face east.
That night, after we'd flattened the last box and settled the last argument about shelf placement, we sat on the floor with our backs against the couch.
Grad school brochures lay in a neat stack on the coffee table.
Scripps. URI. Miami. Dog-eared and annotated, the pages soft from handling. Beside them, the contract paperwork.
Kieran tapped the top brochure with one finger. "Deferred. Two years. Not abandoned."
"Same," I said, nodding toward the contract. "Two years in Chicago."
He studied my face. "You're sure?"
I leaned back and stretched my legs out, feeling the pull in my hip where Boston's defenseman had leaned into me along the boards.
"It's not either/or anymore," I said.
"We've got two years," he said. "Enough time to get a table."
"A table?"
"A real one. Not a folding table, Heath. Something you eat at."
"I know what a table is."
"Do you? Because your kitchen had a breakfast bar and a cutting board and nothing else."
"The breakfast bar was a table."
"The breakfast bar was a ledge with ambition."
We both laughed.
"Yeah," he said. "Two years is enough."
The new bed felt unfamiliar in the dark.
Sheets stiff from the first wash. Mattress firmer than mine had been.
The room smelled faintly of paint and the detergent Kieran used, clean and unscented.
It was the smell I'd learned to associate with his skin after a shower and his shirts left over the back of a chair.
A package sat on the nightstand. Pickle's handwriting was impossible to miss, large and crooked.
Inside: two pipe-cleaner figures twisted into rough shapes.
One was taller, slightly bent at the waist, leaning forward.
The other stood straight with its arms out, braced for impact or reaching for something.
They'd been welded together at the shoulder, touching, holding each other upright.
A Post-it stuck to the box: Takes up space. Both of you.
I set them on the nightstand beside Pratt's water-testing kit. Precision instruments and bent wire, side by side. The whole season in two objects.
Kieran lay back on the pillow and watched me. "Come here," he said.
I climbed onto the bed and pressed my lips against the center of his chest. He let his hand settle on the back of my head.
Then, his fingers walked down my spine, moving slowly. When his hand traced the line of my waistband, my pulse began to race. I lifted my head and looked at him. His pupils were dilated and lips parted. I kissed the underside of his jaw.
"We have time," I said against his skin.
"I know, but I don't want to wait."
His hips moved under me and his fingers dug into my lower back.
I braced one hand against the mattress beside his head and kissed him.
Outside, the city hummed. Cars. A train in the distance.
The world remained out there. In here was the sound of Kieran's breathing, the grip of his hands, and the heat between us. I stayed where my skates were.