Chapter 14
ELI
The interview happens on a Tuesday after a win against Columbus.
The reporter is from a hockey blog with decent traffic and a reputation for asking real questions instead of the "how does it feel" template that most post-game scrums run on.
She's small, sharp-eyed, and asks her questions with the economy of a woman who has been told she talks too much in editorial meetings and has responded by making every word count.
"The Reapers have been called the most progressive team in professional sports," she says. "Five openly queer couples on one roster. What's it like playing in that culture as a young player?"
The question is standard. I've heard versions of it in every interview since camp. The standard answer is ready: great organization, inclusive environment, focused on hockey. The answer is true and safe and the safety is the grin deployed in interview form.
"This team makes space for people," I say.
"All kinds of people. The culture isn't a policy.
It's not a memo someone wrote. It's how the guys treat each other every day.
It's Luca leaving biscotti in your stall before you've played a single shift.
It's Mik staying after film to point at the screen until you get it.
It's the fact that nobody in this locker room has ever made me feel like I had to be anything other than what I am. "
The answer is longer than the standard. The answer is real. The answer escapes the grin and enters the territory of honesty, which is the territory where the grin has less authority and the underneath has more.
The reporter hears it. The reporter is good at her job and the hearing is her job.
"Including you?" she asks.
Two words. The follow-up that the standard answer was designed to prevent. "Including you?" is the question that turns a cultural observation into a personal disclosure. "Including you?" is the door.
The checkpoint runs. It evaluates the question for risk.
If I say yes, the yes will be interpreted.
The interpretation will be public. It will travel from this blog to the aggregators to the comment sections, and the comment sections will do what comment sections do, which is reduce a human being to a category and then argue about the category.
The checkpoint recommends: deflect. Redirect. Give the standard non-answer that preserves the ambiguity.
The checkpoint is overruled.
"Yeah," I say. "Including me."
Three words. The shortest truth I have ever told and the largest. The words exit my mouth and enter the recorder and enter the reporter's notes and enter the air of the media room, which is the same air as the locker room and the facility and the building where the hiding is optional, and the words are the first time I have made the optional into an action in a professional context.
The reporter nods. She does not push further, which tells me she is good at her job in the specific way that good reporters are good: knowing when the answer is the answer and the answer does not require elaboration.
She moves on to the next question. Something about the power play. I answer it on autopilot.
After the scrum, in the corridor, my phone buzzes. Then buzzes again. Then the buzzing becomes continuous in the specific way that phone buzzing becomes continuous when the internet has decided you are today's conversation.
I don't look. Not yet.
In the locker room, I change out of my gear. Bennett appears at my stall. Bennett's face is doing the Bennett thing, which is the expression of someone processing information and is processing it through every emotion simultaneously.
"Bro," Bennett says.
"Yeah."
"That was huge."
"It was three words."
"Three huge words." He claps me on the shoulder with the force of a man who expresses support through structural damage. "I got you. Whatever you need."
Jonah appears. Jonah's face is the Jonah face: warm, vibrating, the restraint of a man who wants to say something supportive and is containing it through heroic effort.
"I'm not going to make a thing of it," Jonah says.
"Thank you."
"But if I were going to make a thing of it, the thing would be that I'm really proud of you and also do you want pad see ew, because Ren is ordering and we're getting extra."
"Pad see ew sounds great, Jonah."
Cole catches my eye across the room. The look is brief.
The look is the Cole look, the look of a man who did this first and who knows what the next forty-eight hours will feel like and who is saying, through the look: I'm here if you need me.
The look does not require a response. The look is its own response.
I drive to Nikolai's apartment. Our apartment. The word is becoming ours even though neither of us has said it.
Nikolai is on the couch. The reading glasses are off. The phone is in his hand. He has been reading the internet. The internet is doing what the internet does.
"You saw," I say.
"I saw."
"Are you mad?"
He looks at me. The look is not anger. The look is something I haven't seen on his face before. The look is pride, quiet and specific, the pride of a man who keeps his emotions in a vault and who is currently allowing one to be visible through the vault door.
"You said 'including me,'" he says.
"Yeah."
"In a media room. On record. To a reporter."
"Yeah."
"You are the least cautious person I have ever met."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It is a fact that terrifies me and that I find..." He pauses. The pause is the vault door opening another inch. "Admirable."
I sit next to him. His arm does the automatic thing. The arm goes around me because the arm goes around me.
"The internet is going to be a lot for a few days," I say.
"The internet is always a lot. The internet is the least useful data source in existence."
"Mars would disagree."
"Mars would be wrong."
I laugh. The laughing is the relief. The three words are out. Public. They cannot be unsaid. The unsayability is the freedom: the performance cannot recapture territory that has been ceded to honesty. The grin cannot cover a truth that has already been told.
Later. The bedroom. The amber lamp.
I initiate. This is new.
The first time, the initiation was the kitchen fight: mutual, explosive, the control detonating.
The second time, the initiation was Nikolai's: slow, chosen, deliberate.
Tonight the initiation is mine. Tonight I am the one who puts my hands on his chest and pushes, gently, until his back hits the headboard, and the pushing is not the kitchen-fight pushing (desperate, frantic).
The pushing is confident. The pushing is the pushing of a man who said "including me" in a media room three hours ago and who is done asking for permission.
"Eli," he says.
"Shut up," I say, and I'm smiling, and the smiling is the grin except the grin is not a performance. The grin is delight. Pure, stupid, uncomplicated delight at having my hands on this man's body and the right to put them there.
I undress him slowly. The slowly is my pace, not his. The slowly says: I'm driving tonight. The slowly says: your job is to receive.
He receives. The receiving is the variable that changes.
The first time, Nikolai was free (the control gone, the hands articulate).
The second time, Nikolai was deliberate (the control repurposed, the pace chosen).
Tonight, Nikolai is received. Nikolai is lying against the headboard with my hands on his body and my mouth mapping the geography I've been learning for weeks and his only job is to let it happen.
The letting is hard for him. I can feel the hardness in his muscles, the instinct to manage, to calibrate, to maintain the gap between himself and the vulnerability. The instinct fires and I feel it fire and I put my mouth on the scar at his ribs and the instinct dies.
I do something clumsy. My elbow hits the lamp.
The lamp wobbles. I catch it with one hand while the other hand is in a location that makes the catching architecturally ambitious.
The catching produces a position that is, objectively, ridiculous: one arm fully extended toward the nightstand, the other arm fully committed elsewhere, my body spanning the distance between the two with the structural integrity of a bridge designed by a drunk.
Nikolai laughs.
Not the fraction. Not the geological event. Not the eye-smile that Marcus identified. A laugh. An actual, full, audible laugh that comes from his chest and fills the bedroom and sounds like a thing I have never heard from this man and that I want to hear every day for the rest of my life.
The laugh is startled and warm and completely involuntary and the involuntary is the thing.
Nikolai has not laughed during sex because sex has been serious.
Sex has been managed. Sex has been the control applied to the body or the control released from the body, but either way the control was the frame.
Tonight the frame is gone. Tonight the frame has been replaced by a twenty-two-year-old who nearly knocked over a lamp while trying to do two things at once and who is now grinning at Nikolai from an impossible angle.
"That was smooth," he says, and his voice is warm with the laugh still in it.
"I am a professional athlete. Everything I do is smooth."
"You almost destroyed the lamp with your elbow."
"The lamp is fine. The lamp will recover."
He pulls me up. He kisses me. The kiss has the laugh in it. The kiss tastes like joy, if joy had a taste, and joy tastes like Nikolai Sokolov laughing during sex because a twenty-two-year-old knocked a lamp with his elbow, and the taste is the best thing I have ever experienced in a bedroom.
The sex that follows is different from the first two times.
The first was frantic. The second was slow.
This is playful. Two men learning each other's bodies with curiosity and humor and the irreplaceable intimacy of being able to laugh together while naked.
The laughing is the intimacy. The thing the control could never produce, because the control is serious and laughing is the opposite of serious, and the opposite is the medicine.
Afterward, he holds me. The holding is not the first time's holding (tentative, the six inches, the "mistake"). The holding is not the second time's holding (deliberate, the hair-stroking, the two mugs). The holding is easy. The holding is the holding of someone not thinking about the holding.
"You laughed," I say.
"You assaulted my lamp."
"You laughed during sex."
"This is not unprecedented."
"It is for you."
He is quiet for a moment. The quiet is not the managed quiet. The quiet is the thinking quiet.
"It is for me," he says.
I press my face into his shoulder. The shoulder is warm and broad and mine.
The internet is going to be a lot tomorrow.
The comment sections are going to say things that the comment sections say.
The word "bisexual" has not been spoken yet, not publicly, and the not-speaking means the speculation will fill the gap with whatever the speculation prefers, and the speculation will prefer "gay" because "gay" is the vocabulary the internet has for men who say "including me," and the vocabulary is wrong, and the wrongness is a fight I will have to fight, but the fight is tomorrow's fight.
Tonight, Nikolai laughed during sex. Tonight, the control produced a sound it has never produced. Tonight, the fortress had joy in it for the first time.
The lamp survived.
We survived better.