Chapter 22
ELI
Ifind out about Alexei from Jonah.
Not from Nikolai. From Jonah, who mentions it over lunch the way Jonah mentions everything: mid-sentence, embedded in a larger story about something else, delivered with the casual obliviousness of a man who does not know the information is a grenade.
"...and Carolina picked up Petrov in that trade, which is interesting because he's a decent middle-six forward but his numbers have been trending down and I don't know if he fixes their power play issue, but anyway, the point is the restaurant in Raleigh..."
I stop chewing.
Petrov. Alexei Petrov. The name Nikolai said in the dark with his voice flat and his sentences short and the telling costing him something with every word. The name that I held gently because the holding was the trust and the trust was the thing Nikolai gave me when he opened the door.
Petrov is in the Eastern Conference. Petrov is in the same division.
Nikolai did not tell me.
The not-telling hits harder than the news.
The news is external: a man from Nikolai's past signed a contract with a team we will play six times a season.
Manageable. The not-telling is internal.
Nikolai received this information (when?
yesterday? three days ago?) and decided to manage it alone.
The wall going back up. The old model running.
I finish lunch. I smile at Jonah. I contribute to the conversation about the restaurant in Raleigh.
The grin is operational. The grin has been back since the article and the grin is available for deployment and the deployment is automatic now, the muscle memory of a lifetime of performing through pain.
After practice, in the apartment, I wait.
Nikolai comes home at 5:30. The door-sound is the same: key, handle, frame-stick. The sneakers are removed, one kicked toward the wall. He walks into the kitchen. He opens the cabinet. He takes out the pasta.
"When were you going to tell me?" I say.
He does not turn around. His hand is on the cabinet door. The hand stills.
"Tell you what," he says.
"Alexei. Carolina. Eastern Conference. Same division."
The silence is three seconds. Three seconds during which Nikolai's back is to me and Nikolai's hand is on the cabinet door and the cabinet holds the pasta and the sofrito and the two things that represent the two of us and the two of us are in trouble.
"It doesn't matter," he says.
"You didn't tell me."
"It is not relevant."
"You are standing in our kitchen not looking at me and your jaw is doing the thing and your hand hasn't moved from the cabinet and you are telling me it's not relevant."
He turns. His face is the face I have not seen in weeks. Not the underneath face. Not the laughing face. Not the door-open face. The old face. The managed face. The reading-glasses-on face, except the glasses are not on. The face is producing the management without the prop.
"I am handling it," he says.
"You're not handling it. You're managing it. There's a difference. Handling is what you do when you trust someone enough to share the weight. Managing is what you do when you've decided the weight is yours and the sharing is the risk."
"The sharing IS the risk."
"The sharing is the relationship, Nikolai. The sharing is the whole point. You told me about Alexei in the dark with my hand on your stomach and I held every word and I did not use a single one of them as a weapon and you are standing there managing me like I might."
His jaw flexes. The flex is the tell and the tell is the evidence that the words have landed and the landing is not comfortable.
"You're doing it again," I say. "The management. The distance. You're deciding what I need to know based on what the old model predicts and the old model is wrong. The old model was built by a man who hurt you and you are applying his blueprint to me."
"I am protecting you."
"You are protecting yourself. I am not Alexei. I am not going to use the access against you. But you keep treating me like I might, and the treating is the thing that's going to push me away, not the Alexei story."
"Three days," I say. "You've known for three days.
You cooked dinner. You watched film. You slept next to me.
And the whole time you were managing a piece of information that directly affects us.
" My voice is shaking and the shaking makes me angrier because the shaking is the article and the comments and the week of performing fine and now this.
"The whole world is telling me what my own word means.
And now the person who's supposed to be on my side is deciding what I'm allowed to know about my own life. "
"I was trying to prevent this."
"Prevent what?"
"This." He gestures at the space between us. The space is four feet. The four feet are the kitchen. The four feet are the neutral zone. "This conversation. This reaction. This is what I was trying to prevent."
"You were trying to prevent me from reacting to something I deserve to react to.
That's not prevention. That's control. And control is what Alexei did to you.
Alexei controlled the narrative. Alexei decided what the world knew and what the world didn't know and the deciding was the power and the power was the weapon.
You are doing the same thing. Not with malice.
With fear. But the mechanics are the same. "
"You keep deciding what's survivable for me," I say. "And every time you do it you're telling me the person who knows me best is your fear, not me."
The shoulders tighten. The jaw locks. The eyes go flat.
"You should go," he says.
The two words are quiet and Russian and final.
"Nikolai..."
"You should go to your apartment tonight. I need to think."
"You need to manage. There's a difference."
"Please."
The "please" is the thing that stops me.
The "please" is not the management. The "please" is the underneath, cracking through the flat eyes and the locked jaw, and the cracking is the evidence that Nikolai is not choosing the wall.
Nikolai is being dragged behind it by a reflex that is older than us and stronger than the door we built and the reflex is winning.
I pick up my jacket. I walk to the door. At the door, I turn.
"I'm going because you asked. Not because I agree. And not because I'm the person you need to protect yourself from. I'm going because you need the night and I have given you nights before and the giving is the thing I do because I love you."
His face does something. The something is brief and enormous and I cannot stay to see it fully because staying would be the pushing and the pushing tonight would break something that is not strong enough to be broken and repaired in the same evening.
I close the door behind me.
The hallway is quiet. The elevator is empty. The lobby is dark except for the security desk, where a night guard who is not Gerald sits reading a magazine.
I drive to my apartment. The team-arranged one-bedroom that I have not slept in for two months. The apartment is cold and clean and anonymous and contains zero evidence that anyone with preferences lives here.
I sit on the couch. The couch is not our couch. The quiet is not the shared quiet. The quiet is the old quiet, the empty quiet, the before-Nikolai quiet that I filled with the grin because the grin was better than the nothing.
The grin is not available tonight. The grin is exhausted.
The grin has been running since the article and the headline and the comments and the erasure and the running has depleted the fuel and the depletion leaves the underneath exposed and the underneath is sitting on a cold couch in an empty apartment missing a man who is four miles away managing a crisis alone because alone is how Nikolai survives and alone is the thing that is killing him.
I do not call Ava. I do not call my mother. I sit in the empty apartment and I feel the weight of the night.
The night is heavy.