Chapter 8 Nate - January 2018, Philadelphia #2
Then he said, "There was a girl. Maddie, from home.
Four years, basically. Cabin summers, the whole thing.
And I want to say this part right, because people get it wrong, so listen.
" His voice was completely level. "I loved her.
Not as a cover, not as a warm-up, not as a thing I was doing while I waited.
All the way down. I would have driven her anywhere.
That was real and I'm not taking it back for anybody. "
"I believe you."
"Good. Say it again in a month when it's convenient not to."
"I'll believe you in a month."
He breathed out.
"Bisexual," he said.
The word came out flat and steady and exactly on time. And under it, from eight inches away in a dark room, I could hear his heart going like a bird.
I didn't say anything. I did not have one single thing that was worth putting on top of that.
The silence afterward had furniture in it. It was thick enough to bump into.
And then Riley Kowalski laughed at the ceiling, one flat, disbelieving laugh, like a man reading his own file.
"Twenty-two years old," he said. "First time I've ever said that out loud. In a Courtyard. Off exit fourteen. To a Sinclair."
I lay there for a while.
Then I got up and walked across the room in the dark and went into the bathroom. I put the light on, and put both hands on the edge of the sink, and looked at myself.
I did not turn around. I left the door open.
"I'm gay," I said.
It sounded so strange in my own voice. That's the thing nobody tells you. I'd heard the word my whole life, in rooms, out of guys' mouths, as a punchline, as a slur. I'd never once heard it in my own voice, and it did not sound like a word, it sounded like a noise I made.
I'd never said it to my mother, a friend, or a pillow.
In the mirror I could see the edge of the doorway behind me, and Riley in it, holding absolutely still, like a man watching something land that might take off again if he moved.
Nothing happened.
That's what I could not get over. The world just kept going. The ice machine down the hall dropped a load. A car went by out on the access road. The bathroom fan kept running.
I'd spent years assuming that sentence would end everything. I said it out loud and the world declined to end, and I had no idea what to do with the part that comes after.
That's the thing nobody prepares you for. Not the saying, but the surviving it.
I turned the light off and went back and got into the bed. Neither of us touched the moment, not once, not with one word, because we were both terrified men.
What we did instead was negotiate.
There was a notepad on the nightstand with the Marriott logo on it and a pen with the logo on it, and we drafted the whole thing on that, sitting up against the headboard at one in the morning, and I wrote because my handwriting is better.
"Rule one," he said. "No sleepovers."
I looked at him. He was under the same blanket. Neither of us had moved for an hour.
"Write it down, Sinclair."
I wrote it down.
"Two. Nothing during playoffs. That's real, that's not a joke rule. You get eliminated, I get eliminated, whatever happens happens, but during, we're dark."
"Agreed."
"Three, awards weeks. Too many cameras. Too many rooms with people in them who get paid to notice things. Four, offseason. There's no schedule in the summer. If there's no schedule there's no reason, and if there's no reason then we're just…" He stopped.
"Just what?"
"Then we're just doing it," he said. "On purpose. Because we want to. Write four."
I wrote four.
"Five," I said. "No real homes."
He didn't argue. There was a foil pan in my freezer that neither of us had mentioned since January and we both knew what number five was about.
"Six," he said. "Nothing that leaves marks. Nothing that leaves evidence."
And as he said it he reached over, completely absently, and put his thumb on a spot just below my collarbone where there was a bruise about the size of a nickel that he had put there ninety minutes earlier, and pressed it, and looked at it.
"Write six," he said, and did not move his thumb.
I wrote six.
Then there was a gap.
It's the most important thing that happened in that room, and neither of us said a word during it.
There was a space on that notepad between rule six and where the two of us were going to write our names, and there should have been a seventh rule in it, and we both knew what it was, and we both looked directly at it.
No feelings.
That was the one. That was the rule that went there. Every agreement like this has that rule in it. It's the first one people write and the one you say in the doorway on the way out.
We looked at the gap. Neither of us said it, and neither of us wrote it.
Because you cannot outlaw a thing that isn't in the building. Writing it down would have been the loudest possible way of admitting it was already in there with us, sitting on the end of the bed.
So we left the space empty and signed under it, and the empty space became the most binding thing on that page.
Then, because we could not stand what we had just done, he took the pen.
"Okay," he said. "New business. We need a channel."
"What?"
"Nate, our phones have a lock screen. Somebody picks up my phone on a plane, they read a preview, and it says 'hotel bar, eleven,' and that's it, that's the whole thing, that's both careers, and my mother finds out from a blog.
" He was writing on the pad. "So we need a language that reads like garbage to anybody who isn't us. "
"Such as?"
"A fantasy league."
"A what?"
"A two man fantasy hockey league." He was already grinning, drawing boxes.
"Fake, obviously. But we make trade proposals, and they're insulting, because an insult is the safest possible thing for either of us to be caught sending the other one.
Nobody has ever looked at a man being rude to a rival and thought, well, there's a romance.
And underneath it, it's a system. A proposed jersey number is a room number.
If I offer you my thirty-seven for your nineteen, that's a room. "
"That's insane."
"That's tradecraft."
"And the counteroffer?"
"The counteroffer's the yes," he said. "You come back furious. You call it robbery. You say you'd rather retire. That's a yes. The angrier you are, the faster you're coming."
I looked at him. He was sitting up in a Courtyard Marriott bed at one thirty in the morning with a hotel pen, designing an encryption system out of a joke.
"Write it down," I said.
Two days later I was in the C gate at Pittsburgh International with a coffee and my phone buzzed.
Riley: formally proposing my 41 for your 22, plus a conditional 6th
Riley: this is a fair offer and your continued silence is noted
I stood in a jet bridge line and read it twice with a completely straight face.
Four games a season. That was what the schedule guaranteed, and four was a manageable number, and four was a number you could tell yourself was an accident.
What we had just built on Marriott notepaper was four games plus every single time the schedule blinked. Every snowed out connection, every shared hotel, every neutral city, every stray night for as long as both of us kept playing.
I knew that standing at the gate. I understood exactly what I was accepting.
Nate: That's not a trade, that's a robbery. 41 has no value and you know it.
Nate: Counteroffer attached. Take it or don't.
I turned my phone over and got on the plane.