Chapter 2
NIKOLAI
The rookie is in my apartment.
This is not a sentence I anticipated producing today.
Today's anticipated sentences included: attend rookie orientation, distribute onboarding materials, complete evening film review, cook dinner, read, sleep.
Nowhere in the sequence did "accommodate a twenty-two-year-old with a coffee stain and a grin that should require a permit" appear.
I unlock the door and step aside. Mercer enters the way Mercer does everything: at full speed, with commentary.
"This is the apartment of a man who folds his T-shirts emotionally," he says, looking around at the slate-gray couch, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the bookshelf with the hardcovers arranged by language and then by author.
"This is the apartment of a man who does not enjoy living in a mess."
"It's like walking into a Scandinavian hostage situation. Where's the evidence that a human lives here?"
"You are looking at it."
He grins. The grin is the thing I have been cataloging since the corridor, because the grin is a tool and I recognize tools.
I spent my childhood in my mother's skating studio watching her evaluate every student's technique in the first thirty seconds of a session, and my mother taught me that the thing a person shows you first is the thing they use most. The thing they use most is the thing they trust most. The thing they trust most is rarely the truest thing about them.
Mercer's grin is his first tool. The grin is what he trusts. The grin is not the truest thing about him.
I show him the guest room. Clean, simple, a bottle of water on the nightstand because hydration is not optional regardless of how inconvenient the guest. He drops his duffel bag on the bed with the casual violence of a man whose relationship with personal belongings is adversarial.
"Towels are in the bathroom. There is food in the kitchen. Practice is at eight. Do not be late."
"When have I ever been late?"
I look at him.
"Today doesn't count," he says. "Today was a systemic failure involving a parking deck."
"Goodnight, Mercer."
"Goodnight, Sokolov."
He closes the guest room door. I walk to the kitchen. I stand at the counter. The apartment is quiet except for the muffled sounds of Mercer unpacking, which involves the duffel bag hitting the floor, a shoe hitting a wall, and a word in Spanish that I suspect his mother would not approve of.
The quiet is the thing I have built. Three years of it, since Alexei, since the dismantling. A second toothbrush in the bathroom cup would have been enough to ruin my week three years ago. Tonight it is only enough to make my grip tighten on the mug.
I do not think about Alexei.
I think about the corridor instead. The folder.
The fingers. The fraction of a second where Mercer's skin touched mine and my body produced a response I did not authorize.
Heat, low and immediate, followed by a tightening in my shoulders that I suppressed in under a second but that Mercer saw. Because Mercer sees things.
This is the inconvenience. Not the housing arrangement.
Not the duffel bag on my guest bed. The inconvenience is that Eli Mercer, who has been in my building for fewer than twelve hours, reads people.
Behind the grin is an observation system operating at full capacity.
He saw my shoulders tighten. He saw the fraction. He filed it.
He files things the way I file things: automatically, comprehensively, without the option of unfiling.
I do not need a person in my life who files things.
He is also, technically, my rookie. The buddy program assignment is on the team's shared coaching calendar.
Onboarding mentor, in writing, with a defined scope: housing, schedule orientation, film, integration.
The folder I handed him in the corridor was a professional document.
The heat in my hand when our fingers brushed was not.
One of those things is allowed in this apartment.
The other is a problem I am required, by every reasonable standard of my position, to keep on the wrong side of the wall.
I make tea. The kettle clicks off. The mug is warm in my hands. The routine holds, the way it has held for three years, and the routine does not accommodate rookies with coffee stains and match-strike fingers.
The guest room door opens.
Mercer appears in the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, barefoot, hair damp, looking significantly less catastrophic than he did in the lobby and significantly more like a problem I will have to manage.
"Are you cooking?" he asks.
"No."
"Something smells like garlic."
"I was preparing tomorrow's meal."
"At ten-thirty at night?"
"I meal prep."
"Of course you do."
He leans against the counter. The leaning is casual. The casual is the performance. But underneath the performance is a young man in an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar apartment who cannot sleep because the unfamiliarity is too loud.
I recognize this. I was twelve when my mother moved us from Moscow to Detroit.
The first night in the American apartment, I lay in a bed that was not mine in a room that smelled like paint and carpet cleaner and I listened to my mother on the phone with her sister in Saint Petersburg, speaking Russian, and the Russian was the only familiar thing and I held onto it the way a drowning person holds onto anything.
"Sit down," I say.
He sits at the counter. I take out a pot. I fill it with water. I salt the water. I heat olive oil in a pan.
"You're cooking," he says.
"You need food."
"You just said you weren't cooking."
"The situation has changed."
"The situation being that I showed up looking pathetic in your kitchen?"
"The situation being that you have not eaten since the dining room and your performance tomorrow reflects on the onboarding program, which reflects on me, and I do not accept poor reflections."
The sentence is true. The sentence is also a lie. The sentence is the control producing a professional justification for cooking for another person at 10:30 PM, because cooking for another person is an act of care, and acts of care are the thing the control is designed to prevent.
I cook. Garlic in oil. Parmesan. Basil. The pasta is simple because simple is what I make when I am not thinking about what I am making and am instead thinking about the man sitting at my counter watching me with an expression I refuse to interpret.
"You know," Mercer says, "most people warm up to me faster."
"I am not most people."
"No. You're not."
The way he says it changes the sentence.
"You're not" should be agreement. A neutral confirmation.
Instead it carries weight, the tone lower, slower, the grin absent for the first time since I met him.
The grin-absent Mercer is a different person.
The one underneath. The one looking at me while I cook with an attention that is not performing.
I plate the pasta. He takes a bite. He makes a sound that is involuntary and inappropriate and my hand tightens on the counter.
"That's rude," he says. "To make food this good and then act like your personality is all murder and tax law."
"Eat."
We eat. The conversation turns. He tells me about Tampa.
His mother is an ER nurse. His father teaches PE.
His sister Ava is in law school and is "smarter than everyone in this building combined, including the coaches.
" He talks about juniors, about the speed that made scouts notice him and the inconsistency that made them hesitate.
He talks about wanting the NHL so badly that the wanting keeps him up at night, and the admission surprises him.
I can see the surprise: he did not intend to say that.
The grin was supposed to prevent that sentence from escaping.
"You are afraid if you stop performing, people will see you want this too much," I say.
His fork stops.
"Jesus," he says. "You're a lot."
"Yes."
"That's not... I don't mind that you're a lot. I mind that you're accurate."
"You flirt when you are nervous," I say.
The observation is automatic. I cannot stop the observations any more than I can stop the control.
The watching is my mother's gift. The assessment is my father's.
The understanding is mine. This man fills every room because the rooms he grew up in required filling, and the filling is not vanity. The filling is survival.
"I flirt when I'm breathing," he says.
"No. You flirt when the conversation approaches something real. The closer the real thing gets, the louder the performance becomes."
He stares at me. The underneath-stare. The stare of a man who has been profiled with uncomfortable precision and who is deciding whether the precision is an attack or a gift.
"You speak whenever silence becomes too intimate," I say. "That is not a criticism. It is an observation. You are allowed to be quiet in this apartment. The quiet is not a threat."
The sentence lands somewhere in his chest. His posture changes: the performing-upright becomes the actual-upright, and the difference between the two is small and enormous.
"That might be the nicest thing anyone's said to me in a while," he says. "Which is kind of sad, when you think about it."
"Do not think about it. Eat."
He eats. I wash the plates. He comes up beside me at the sink, too close, reaching for the dish towel, and our arms almost brush.
"You cook for all the disasters the team assigns you?" he asks.
"I am hoping food will make you quieter."
"That's a filthy lie. Carbohydrates only increase my powers."
"I know."
A pause. The pause is the silence I told him was safe, and the silence is safe, and the safety is the problem, because the safe silence is the intimacy and the intimacy is the thing the control cannot accommodate.
He is standing too close. I can smell the soap from my guest bathroom on his skin. The soap is mine. The smell of my soap on another person's body is a sensory input that the control is scrambling to file under "irrelevant."
The filing fails.
"Goodnight, Mercer," I say, and my voice is steady and the steadiness costs me something I will not examine.
The soap. My soap on his skin. The smell follows me down the hall.
"Goodnight, Sokolov," he says. His voice is softer now. The performing voice is gone. This is the underneath voice, the one that said "you're not" with weight, the one that is quiet and honest and more dangerous than the grin because the grin I can resist. The honesty is harder.
He walks down the hall. The guest room door closes.
I stand in the kitchen. The plates are clean. The stove is off. The apartment is quiet, and the quiet contains two people now, and the quiet knows it.
I turn off the light. I go to my bedroom.
The door between my room and the guest room is ten feet of hallway. Ten feet is a reasonable distance. Ten feet is the neutral zone. Ten feet is defensible.
I lie in the dark and I think about the control and the three years of quiet and the way Eli Mercer's voice sounded when he said "you're not most people" without the grin. The voice without the grin is the real voice. The real voice is warm and dangerous.
The control holds. The control has held for three years. The control will hold for one night with a rookie in the guest room.
I close my eyes.
Across the hall, the guest room light clicks off.
The apartment is quiet. The quiet contains two people instead of one, and the math does not explain why the quiet sounds different now.
Different. Not worse. Not better.
Different.
I do not sleep well.