Chapter 27 Riley - February 2024, Toronto #2
I did the next part before I had decided anything. I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket, where it had lived since a Stanley Cup Final, and put it on the bed with everything else.
He stopped breathing. I watched him do it.
A champagne cork with a bit of wire cage still on it.
"Las Vegas," I said. "June of 2018. A $400 bottle I stole off a table and carried up in my jacket like a guy in a movie, and the cork went off across the carpet and under a desk and you laughed at the ceiling."
"Riley."
"I woke up at eleven and the bed was made on your side and there was a hole under my ribs the size of a fist and I called it a hangover.
" My ears were going. "Then I got to the door with my hand on the handle, and then I went back across that entire suite and got down on one knee by a desk and reached under it in the dark, because it was the only object in that room that had been in it while it happened. "
He did not say anything.
"It's been to a World Championship. It's been to a sealed hotel in this city. It went to a Cup Final in a suit carrier." I put my finger on the bedspread next to it. "That's two cents of bark and it has more air miles than my mother."
And that was the scoreboard. For the first time since a handshake line in Chicago the two columns stood the same height, where both of us could see them. The argument I made in that doorway was still correct. It just had nothing left to hold up.
"That was a good argument I made," I said.
"It was the best argument in the room. It's the one I made in a basement. You gave it back at par."
"With the plates changed. And it didn't work."
"No," he said. "It didn't."
The kiss was nothing like the other ones. Every time either of us had put a hand on the other one it had been a collision. Doors, walls, entryways, seven years of arriving somewhere at speed with a clock running.
This one he came into slow enough that I had two full seconds to move and did not. He got one hand flat along my jaw, thumb under my ear, the other still at his side, and his mouth landed on mine and stayed there, warm and closed and certain, and he took his time about it.
I got a fist in the front of his shirt and pulled, and he let me, and came the rest of the way in.
I could hear him breathing through his nose.
I could feel the tie against my knuckles and the desk edge against the back of my hand.
When he came off it was an inch and no further, mouth still open over mine, his breath going into me, and he did not take his hand off my face.
"Say the terms," I said, against his mouth. "Say them out loud, because I'm not doing another seven years of inference."
"Not friends," he said. "Not nothing."
"No."
"I don't have a name for it. And I'm not going to promise you a thing I can't do. I can't tell you a date, I can't tell you what September looks like, and I'm not handing you something tonight and taking it back in an airport."
"I don't want the airport version."
"Then here's what I've got. Feelings attached. Stipulated. On the record. That's the whole document."
"That's a short document."
"It's the only true one I've ever signed."
We talked until the windows went gray, on the floor with our backs against the end of the bed, because both of us kept standing up and neither of us could work out why.
We did the whole seven years in order. The laundry room.
The pool in Bratislava, which I made him say out loud.
The withdrawal notice. The tray outside a door in a sealed building with the sugar burnt in a ring all the way around, which he had read as a goodbye, and when I told him what it actually was he put his head back against the mattress and shut his eyes for a while.
Then the talking stopped being the point, and he swept the evidence off the bed with one forearm, all of it, in one motion, and neither of us picked any of it up for six hours.
"Slow," he said into my mouth, with my shirt already on the floor. "I want it slow."
"You've said that twice. There's no bus, Nate."
"I know there's no bus. That's why I keep saying it."
So we paid down three and a half years in installments and neither of us hurried one part of it.
He took my hands off him twice and put them somewhere else without a word, and the second time I laughed into his shoulder and he told me to be quiet and I said make me, which he did, which took a while, and which shut the whole operation down the way it always had.
There was no flight. That's what I kept coming back to with my forehead against his, both of us still half-arguing about something.
"Say it again," I said, somewhere in the middle of it, with my hand on the back of his neck.
"Attached."
"Louder."
"There are feelings attached," he said against my ear, in the voice he used in a room in the third period. "Since Chicago. Stop asking me and stay where you are."
At some point he had one hand spread on my chest, over my heart, exactly where his own had been in Vegas when he ran out of that room at four in the morning. He did not move it and he did not say anything about it, and neither did I.
Afterward I did the arithmetic, because I always did the arithmetic, and there was nothing to count down to and no number came back.
At six I got dressed in the gray and he watched me from the bed on one elbow, which had never happened in seven years, because I had never once been the one leaving.
I picked the things up off the carpet and put them on the desk in a line, which was a Sinclair thing to do. Then I picked up the keychain and stood there with it.
"That's yours," he said.
"It was mine seven years ago."
"It's yours."
So I unclipped the little ring on my room key and put a $2 bulldog with the face worn off it on a card for room 1108, and it clicked against the plastic when I moved my hand.
"Okay," I said. "I'm going down eight flights now and getting into my own bed for forty minutes so a man from the league can knock on it at seven."
"Riley." He was sitting up with the sheet across his lap, hair destroyed, the mark from a February treaty just coming up under his collarbone. "Take the cork."
"No. Custody's contested. We'll do it properly."
And I went out.
At 6:01 I was standing in a stairwell on fourteen with my phone in both hands.
Riley: joint communiqué. the commissioner's office and the pittsburgh franchise jointly announce that the kowalski-sinclair invitational is reopened effective immediately under new bylaws.
article nine is repealed. the notice of withdrawal filed 28 january 2019 is vacated and struck.
all keeper rights restored in perpetuity.
relegation abolished. ratification pending nothing
Nate: Seconded. The office notes that it never accepted the withdrawal and has carried the franchise on its books at full value for five years, which is either an accounting error or the only honest thing in it.
Riley: it's both, sinclair. that's the whole league
Nate: Goodnight, Kowalski.
Riley: it's six in the morning
Nate: I know.
I got back to eleven and did not sleep. I sat on the end of my own bed with the light off and got the schedule up. March 14th, in my building. April 2nd, in his. And a bye week in March that a computer in New York had handed Pittsburgh eight months earlier.
I looked at two games and one bye week and started moving things around them. I'd have bet the building that eight floors up, at the same hour, a man who had never once left a calendar alone was doing it with the same four dates.
Four games a season. That was what we always said. That was why any of it happened, because we were two guys the schedule kept putting in the same city.
I sat there with a $2 keychain on my room key and finally understood what the calendars had always been for.