Chapter 5
ELI
The suit is Nikolai's. Charcoal, Italian, the kind of wool that costs more per yard than my first car cost per mile. In the hotel bathroom mirror, I look like I belong at a professional event instead of the children's table.
The tie is also his. Black silk. The note that arrived with it at my stall said: Media event tonight. Wear this. Try not to speak without supervision.
I've read the note four times. The handwriting is doing almost as much damage as the suit.
The door to the bathroom lounge opens. Nikolai enters in his own suit (navy, fitted, the shoulders of a man who has been filling doorframes since puberty) and stops when he sees me.
The stop is brief. Less than a second. But I have been tracking Nikolai Sokolov's micro-expressions for five days and I know what a stop means.
A stop means the control has received input it was not prepared for.
A stop means the analytical brain, which operates three moves ahead of the emotional brain, has been ambushed by the present tense.
I am the present tense.
"Good?" I ask, because I need to say something and the something needs to be casual because the alternative is saying "you stopped when you saw me and the stopping is the best review I've ever received."
He walks toward me. The walking is measured, the Nikolai walk, each step the product of a decision rather than a reflex. He stops in front of me. He looks at the tie.
"Crooked," he says.
He reaches for the knot. His fingers are at my throat.
The fingers are precise and warm and operating with the focused competence of a man who has been tying ties since his mother entered him in youth skating competitions at age eight and who considers a properly executed Windsor knot a matter of personal honor.
His face is close. I can see the texture of his beard.
The line where the dark skin meets the darker hair.
The concentration in his eyes, which are lowered to the knot and which are not looking at my face because looking at my face would require acknowledging the proximity and the proximity is the thing the control is trying not to process.
"You look different in a suit," he says.
"Different good?"
"Different." A pause. The fingers adjust the knot. The fingers do not leave. "It looks better on you than it does on me."
The sentence lands in my sternum. Not the video room compliment - that one was professional, analytical, defensible.
This one is personal. Nikolai Sokolov, whose control is an art form, has just told me I look better in his clothes than he does.
He is acknowledging the suit is his. The wearing.
The specific, intimate, clothing-as-proximity dynamic that has been operating since I opened the garment bag and put my body inside the fabric that has been on his body.
"You can't just say things like that," I say.
His fingers leave the tie. He steps back. The control reasserts. The reassertion is visible: the jaw tightens, the posture straightens, the analytical brain resumes governance.
"The event starts in twenty minutes," he says. "Try to limit yourself to three jokes per conversation."
"That's a generous allocation."
"It is the maximum I can defend to the coaching staff."
The event is in the hotel ballroom. Sponsors.
Front office staff. Local media. The specific, chandelier-lit, open-bar ecosystem of professional sports networking that I have attended exactly zero times before tonight and that Nikolai has attended approximately one thousand times and that the difference in our experience levels is visible in every interaction.
Nikolai works the room the way he works the ice: with precision and economy, each conversation calibrated for duration and content, each handshake firm and brief, each exit executed without the person feeling exited.
He introduces me to sponsors ("Eli Mercer, our first-round pick, very fast, still learning to stop") and a media contact asks what I miss most about juniors.
I open my mouth with something charming and stupid ready to go.
Nikolai cuts in first. "He misses less," he says.
The reporter laughs. I look at Nikolai and have the unpleasant realization that being understood is hotter than flirting.
We move through the ballroom as a unit. This is not something we discussed.
The unit-ness happened organically, the way defensive pairings happen: two bodies that have established a spatial relationship and that maintain the relationship through instinct.
Nikolai gravitates to the serious conversations.
I gravitate to the warm ones. When a sponsor's wife tells us we "clean up well together," I grin and Nikolai does not grin and the combination of my grin and his non-grin makes the sponsor's wife laugh, and the laughing is the sound of two people who are complementary in a way that other people can see even when the two people are still pretending they can't.
A reporter I don't know makes a joke. "Looks like the rookie's in good hands."
Good hands. The line stays with me.
The event ends at ten. The ballroom empties with the gradual, champagne-pace dispersal of people who have been networking for three hours and whose faces are tired of smiling. Nikolai and I walk toward the elevator bank.
The elevator arrives. We step in. The doors close.
The elevator is small and mirrored and suddenly, with the doors closed and the ballroom behind us and the corridor between us and the rest of the world sealed, the elevator is the most intimate space I have occupied since Nikolai's kitchen.
The mirrors multiply us. Three angles: his height and my height, his navy and my charcoal, his severity and my grin. The elevator is small enough that his suit on my body starts to feel like a confession.
"Most people," Nikolai says, his voice quiet in the mirrored space, "did not spend the evening in my suit."
I look at him. "Is that what's wrong with you tonight? I'm wearing your clothes?"
"Yes."
The word is flat and Russian and honest and the honesty is the crack. The yes is not the control speaking. The yes is the underneath. The control would have said "nothing is wrong." The underneath said yes.
"That's kind of possessive," I say.
He braces one hand beside my shoulder against the mirrored wall.
The bracing changes everything. The geometry of the elevator shifts from two men standing side by side to one man pinning the other against a mirror, and the pinning is not aggressive.
The pinning is deliberate. The pinning is Nikolai making a choice.
"Do not push," he says.
"You keep saying that like it's advice."
He kisses me.
The kiss is hard. His hand goes from the wall to my jaw, the same jaw he touched in the video room, except this time the touching does not stop at the cheekbone.
This time the touching continues: jaw, neck, the back of my head, his fingers in my hair, his mouth on my mouth with the force of a man who has been holding something back and who has decided, in an elevator, in a mirrored box between the fourth floor and the lobby, to stop holding it.
I grab the waist of his jacket to stay upright.
The grabbing is necessary because the kiss is not gentle.
The kiss is three years of control detonating in a vertical space that smells like cologne and metal and the specific, recycled air of a hotel elevator.
His mouth is demanding and his beard scrapes my jaw and his body is solid and warm and pressed against mine and I can see us in the mirror, reflected, his dark hand on my jaw, my fingers on his lapel, and the seeing doubles the sensation because the image is us from the outside and the feeling is us from the inside and both versions agree: this is happening.
I make a sound against his mouth. The sound is not dignified. The sound is the underneath's response to being kissed by a man whose control just failed, and the response does not go through the checkpoint because the checkpoint has been demolished by the kiss.
His mouth moves from my lips to my neck. The mouth on my neck produces a sensation that travels from the point of contact to the base of my spine and the traveling is immediate and total and I grip his jacket harder because the grip is the only thing preventing my knees from filing a resignation.
"Nikolai," I say. His first name. In my voice. Against the mirror. The name is two syllables and each syllable is its own kind of honest.
He pulls back. An inch. His forehead against mine. His breathing is not controlled. His breathing is the breathing of someone whose control has been overrun and who has not yet rebuilt the perimeter.
"This is why you are a bad idea," he says.
I am breathing too hard to be eloquent. "Feels like maybe you're the one with the decision-making issue."
His mouth twitches. The fraction-of-a-smile. In the elevator. After the kiss. The smile is the most dangerous thing I have seen on his face because the smile says the control is not reasserting. The smile says the control lost and the losing was not entirely unwelcome.
The elevator reaches the lobby. The doors open. The mirrored box becomes a regular elevator. Two men step out, side by side, maintaining the professional distance that the mirrors just proved is a fiction.
In the car, driving back to his building (because my things are still scattered through his apartment from the one-night housing arrangement that has somehow become a five-day housing situation that neither of us has addressed), the silence is the elevator silence: dense, populated, full of the kiss and the mirror and the sound I made and the "bad idea" and the forehead and the breathing.
At the apartment, he holds the door. I walk in. The immaculate space. The bookshelf. The couch. The kitchen where he cooked pasta at 10:30 and saw through the performance in the time it took to slice garlic.
"So," I say.
"So."
"You kissed me in an elevator like you were trying to break structural code."
"Yes."
"And now your plan is what? Bedtime?"
"Yes."
"That's insane."
"It is disciplined."
"It is emotionally repressed."
"Also yes."
I stare at him. He stares at me. The staring is the standoff, the two walls facing each other: my performance and his control, my noise and his quiet, my chaos and his order. The walls are still up. The elevator put a crack in both of them but the walls are still standing.
I should push. Every instinct says push. The dramatic option. The Eli option. Cross the room, grab his shirt, finish what the elevator started.
But the video room is in my head. "Smart includes the dramatic option when the dramatic option is the right option.
" The right option tonight is not the dramatic option.
The right option is letting the crack exist without forcing it wider.
The right option is patience, which is not my best skill, but which is, I am learning from a man who controls everything, sometimes the most effective play.
"Goodnight, Sokolov," I say.
The name is the distance. The last name is the professional. The last name says: I heard you. The control needs one more night. I'll give you one more night.
"Goodnight, Mercer."
I walk to the guest room. I close the door. I lean against it and press my palm over my mouth because my mouth is still warm from his mouth and the warmth is evidence and the evidence is the best thing I have felt in twenty-two years.
In the mirror across the room, I can see myself. Nikolai's suit. Nikolai's tie. My face. My grin, which is not a grin right now. My face, which is the underneath face, the one that exists when the performance is off and the room is empty and nobody is watching.
The underneath face is happy. The underneath face is terrified. The two things are the same thing and the same thing is the beginning of something I cannot control and do not want to.
Rookie mistake. Kissing a veteran defenseman in an elevator at a team event while wearing his suit.
Best mistake I've ever made.