Chapter 3
ELI
On the ice, I last seven minutes before trying to do too much.
The first six minutes are good. The first six minutes are the speed, the edges, the clean crossovers that made scouts write "generational" in their notebooks and that I do not love the word generational but the speed is real and the speed is mine and the speed is the one thing about me that is not a performance.
The speed is just physics. Muscle and steel and the specific relationship between a blade and a frozen surface that my body has been negotiating since I was four years old on a rink in Tampa that had no business existing in Florida but that existed anyway because my mother wanted her son to play hockey and my mother gets what she wants.
Minute seven. The forechecking drill. I get the puck along the boards and my brain says: make the play, the safe play, the correct play. My body says: make the highlight.
My body wins. It usually does.
I try to deke through two defensemen instead of chipping the puck up the wall and cycling.
The deke is creative and ambitious and would be spectacular if it worked.
It does not work. The first defenseman strips me cleanly and the second defenseman, who I will later identify as Mikhail Volkov (Russian, enormous, scar through his eyebrow, built like the concept of defense made flesh), hip-checks me with the casual efficiency of a man swatting a mosquito.
My feet leave the ice. I travel an improbable distance through the air and land against the boards in a configuration that the human body was not designed to assume.
"Again," the assistant coach snaps, and this time he doesn't toss me a new puck. I have to skate after the one I lost.
The ice is cold against my face. This is the only observation my brain produces.
A hand appears above me. Large. Scarred at the knuckles. Volkov's face is completely neutral. Not apologetic. Not amused. The face of a man who has done this ten thousand times and considers it comparable to filing taxes.
I take his hand. The strength in the pull is absurd. I'm on my feet before my equilibrium catches up, and for a moment I'm standing very close to him, his hand still gripping mine.
He says nothing. The nothing is somehow kind.
This happens two more times during practice. Different drills. Same result. I am fast enough to get to the puck and not disciplined enough to keep it. The gap between speed and strength is the gap between potential and production, and the gap is where careers die if you don't close it.
After the drill, I skate to the bench for water.
From here I can see the full ice, the full roster, the specific choreography of thirty men moving through patterns that have been rehearsed and refined over seasons.
And within the choreography, the thing I noticed on my first day and have not stopped noticing:
Cole Briggs and Mik Volkov on the blue line.
They communicate without words. Cole shifts left, Mik adjusts right, the gap between them constant.
During the water break, Cole says something that makes Mik's face do the thing I've learned is the Volkov version of laughter: a loosening of the jaw, a softening around the eyes. If you blinked, you'd miss it.
Wes Chen, the former enforcer, doing defensive drills with controlled intensity. On the bench between shifts, the equipment room door opens and Luca Moretti passes a thermos through without looking. Wes takes it without looking back. The not-looking is the intimacy.
Jonah Park, running a passing drill, talking the entire time, to no one in particular and to everyone simultaneously. His energy is a weather system: you don't engage with Jonah so much as exist within the radius of his warmth and accept the conditions.
Mars Santos at the far end, in the crease, doing the Mars thing. Talking to his left goalpost during a water break. I have been told this is normal. The posts, apparently, are good listeners.
I watch all of it. The couples. The culture.
The team that built something the sports world can't stop writing about.
And I think: I am sitting inside the thing I came here for.
Not the hockey. The hockey is the vehicle.
The thing itself. The building where the hiding is optional.
The roster where five couples exist in the open, and the open is ordinary, and the ordinary is the revolution.
I am inside it and I am still hiding.
The hiding is not about courage. I am not a coward.
The hiding is about timing. About readiness.
About the distance between knowing who you are and being ready to let the world know, and the distance is not a straight line.
The distance has corners and detours and rest stops, and I am somewhere on the road, moving, but not at the destination.
"Mercer!" the assistant coach barks from the bench. "Use your speed with your head attached."
I nod. I go back to the drill. I make the safe play. The safe play works. The assistant coach does not comment, which is the coaching version of approval.
After practice, I'm walking toward the cafeteria when I pass the main corridor and see them.
Cole and Mik, walking to the parking lot.
Cole's hand is on the back of Mik's neck.
The gesture is casual and owned, performed with the ease of two people who have been touching each other in public for years and who no longer think about whether the touching is visible.
Nobody in the corridor reacts. Nobody flinches. The touching is normal.
My chest does something complicated that I file under "do not examine during business hours."
I find food in the cafeteria. Protein and carbs and vegetables arranged on a plate with the nutritional precision that professional sports demands.
I eat alone at a corner table because the cafeteria is still the territory of established players and I have not yet earned the right to sit with anyone.
There's a plate of biscotti at the end of the service counter. A note: Help yourself. Welcome to camp. (heart) L.
I take one. The biscotti is extraordinary. Almond and anise and the specific balance of crisp and tender that separates food made with love from food made with competence.
This team is different. Twelve hours in and I can feel it in the air.
Later. The side video room. The lights are low and the screen shows the forechecking drill from this morning, frozen on the frame where I got stripped.
Nikolai is waiting.
He's in the chair nearest the screen, reading glasses on, the glasses adding something to his face that I cannot identify and do not want to examine. He looks up when I enter. The reading glasses catch the blue light from the screen and for a moment his eyes are unreadable behind the reflection.
"Sit," he says.
I sit. Two chairs away. The two chairs are the neutral zone.
He plays the clip. I watch myself get stripped, overcorrect, and spend the rest of the drill a half-beat out of rhythm. The watching is not fun. Watching yourself fail in high-definition slow motion is the hockey equivalent of reading your worst text messages out loud in a courtroom.
"There," Nikolai says, pausing the frame. "You see it?"
"I went for the dramatic option."
"You went for the dramatic option."
"In my defense, it would have been spectacular."
"In reality, it was embarrassing."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
His mouth does the thing. The fraction-of-a-smile. The geological event. I am collecting these the way some people collect stamps: obsessively, with full awareness that the hobby is unhealthy.
He stands. "Stand up."
I stand. He steps behind me, then pauses.
"I am going to put my hands on your hips," he says. "To show the angle. Yes?"
"Yeah."
His hand settles at my hip. His other hand touches my side. His chest is close enough to my back that I can feel the warmth of him through my shirt, though we are not quite touching.
"This is your problem," he says. His voice is low and close and Russian and I am experiencing a technical difficulty in the region of my higher brain function. "You open too far here. Weight here. Not forward. If you lunge, you lose the read."
His fingers adjust my hip angle by two degrees.
The adjustment is clinical. The adjustment is also his hand on my body, and the hand on my body is warm and large and precise and the precision is the thing that undoes me because the precision says: I know exactly where to touch you and the knowing is professional and the knowing is also something else.
"All you are thinking about," Nikolai says, "is getting past the first body."
"That's not all I'm thinking about."
The sentence exits my mouth before the checkpoint catches it. The sentence is honest in a way that my sentences are not usually honest in professional contexts, and the honesty hangs in the air of the video room like a flare.
His fingers flex once against my hip. The flex is involuntary.
The flex is the control slipping, the same slip I saw in the corridor, the shoulder-tightening that lasted a fraction of a second.
This time the slip is in his hand. On my body.
And the slip is louder than the corridor slip because the slip is contact and contact has a frequency and the frequency is resonating in my rib cage.
He steps away. The stepping-away is the control reasserting. The air between us cools by several degrees.
"On the ice tomorrow," he says, voice level, the Russian accent thick in the way it gets when he is managing something, "do not think about being impressive."
"What should I think about?"
His gaze drops to my mouth. The drop lasts less than a second. The drop is the most honest thing his body has done in my presence.
"Being effective."
He turns back to the screen. He presses play.
We watch two more clips. He points. I learn.
The silence between us is functional and loaded and I am sitting in a video room at 6 PM with a man whose hand was on my hip thirty seconds ago and whose eyes went to my mouth and whose control is the most beautiful and infuriating thing I have ever watched a person maintain.
I want to break it. I want to find the crack and press on it until the control gives.
Not because I enjoy destruction. Because I saw the underneath, in the kitchen, when the grin-absent voice said "you're not most people" and Nikolai's face did something it does not do in public.
The underneath is the real one. The underneath is worth the breaking.
After the session, in the corridor, he says: "You played better in the afternoon."
"The afternoon was the safe plays."
"Yes."
"You want me to play safe?"
"I want you to play smart. Smart includes the dramatic option when the dramatic option is the right option. You have not yet learned the difference. You will."
I look at him. He looks at me. The corridor is empty. The fluorescent lights hum.
"That was almost a compliment," I say.
"It was an assessment."
"From you, that's the same thing."
The fraction-of-a-smile. The geological event. The third one today. I'm keeping count.
"Goodnight, Mercer."
"Goodnight, Sokolov."
I walk to the parking lot. Gerald is at his desk. He watches me pass with something that might be amusement.
"Night, Gerald."
"Night, kid. You're limping."
"Volkov happened."
"Volkov happens to everyone."
"That's comforting."
"It's not meant to be. Drive safe."
I drive to my apartment. My apartment, the team-arranged one-bedroom that cleared earlier than housing predicted. The apartment is clean and furnished and anonymous and contains zero evidence that a human with preferences lives here.
I sit on the couch. I eat a protein bar. I think about Nikolai's hand on my hip and his mouth not-quite-smiling and the way his gaze dropped to my mouth for less than a second.
Less than a second. That's all I got. Less than a second of the underneath.
I want more.
The wanting is the problem. The wanting is always the problem.
I want the NHL and I want the roster and I want the career and I want the man in the video room who cooks pasta at 10:30 and folds his T-shirts like acts of worship and whose control is a fortress and whose fortress has a crack and whose crack is me.
Rookie mistake, probably. Wanting all of it at once.
But wanting is the thing I do best. The wanting is the speed. The wanting is the grin. The wanting is the thing that got me from Tampa to this couch in this city on this team.
The wanting is going to get me into that fortress.
I just have to be smart about it.
Smart includes the dramatic option when the dramatic option is the right option. Nikolai's words. Applied to hockey. Applicable to everything.
I turn off the light. The apartment is quiet. The quiet is not safe the way Nikolai's quiet was safe. This quiet is just empty.
I think about the hand on my hip. I think about the reading glasses catching the blue light. I think about "you speak whenever silence becomes too intimate" and the way the sentence made me feel like I'd been X-rayed by a man who found the film interesting.
I close my eyes. I do not sleep for a long time.
When I do, I dream about skating on a frozen lake at night, the ice black and endless. A figure standing still ahead of me in the dark. Not chasing. Just waiting.
I know who it is.