Chapter 7 Soucy
The room is still loud when we leave, celebrating the series-tying game that gets us to game seven. One win away from the next round. Marchetti running a chant about Berger’s spreadsheet. Baz explaining Bug’s entire existence to Davis, who doesn’t own a cat and didn’t ask.
We slip out the way we always slip out. Two goalies and a quiet exit. A parking garage that smells like spring and exhaust. Lundy drives us home through a city that’s still up celebrating a thing it didn’t think we’d hand it.
“They’ll be at the bar till two,” I say.
“You want to go?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“Marchetti’s going to make Berger frame that spreadsheet.”
“Berger already framed it probably. It’s matted.” He takes the long way without either of us calling it the long way. Same as all season.
“You were square all night,” I tell him. “Even on the third one. They had you moving post to post and you never got beat across, you got there first and let it come to you.”
“You watch the whole game from the bench like that? Frame by frame?”
“I watch you. It’s not the same thing.”
“Most guys would’ve said the whole game.”
“Most guys aren’t backing you up. I’ve got one job, and it’s knowing how you’d play the puck I’m about to face if they pull you.
So I watch how you play it. It’s a depth chart.
” I watch the buildings go by outside the car.
“That glove save in the second, on the tip, you were already low before it came off the stick.”
“I guessed.”
“You didn’t guess. You saw the winger open his blade and went low because you knew he’d tip it. Own it.”
“Says the man who watched too many replays of one goal in a game we won by four.” He glances over at me.
He knows my patterns. I told him about them months ago. The OCD. Gwen. The building on Juniper and the support I get there a couple of times a month.
“The goal mattered.”
“It went in during garbage time of a four-goal win. It mattered to exactly one person in the building.”
“That person has to live in my head.”
“I know.” He says it to the road, easy, no push. “I’m trying to make it nicer in there.”
I don’t have anything for that, so I look out the window, and he lets me.
“You believe it yet?” he says after a block. “Where we are in the playoffs? That we are one game away from round two?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Berger’s got us climbing the chart and recalculates after every win. He’ll run out of decimal places before we run out of series.”
“We’re going to win this round.”
He looks over, eyes wide. “You don’t usually say things like that.”
“I’m saying it once. Write it down. We win this round, and nobody in that building in October would’ve put a dollar on us taking a single game.”
“Game’s in two days. You think you’ll get in again?”
“If we’re up big. Or down big. Garbage time’s my whole career.”
“It’s not garbage when you’re in it. Another twenty minutes in your first playoff run counts, Soucy.” He says my name like it’s part of the sentence. “Say it counts.”
“Ask me again in two days when I’m mopping up another blowout and letting one in.”
“I’ll ask you every time.”
“That might be a lot of asking.”
“I’ve got the time.”
The window’s down and the night’s loose. I’m apparently a person who says things tonight, so I say one more.
“I’ve been looking at cats.”
He doesn’t laugh. That’s the first gift he gives me. “Yeah?”
“It’s a stupid idea. I travel. The apartment’s the way it is for a reason. I built a whole list of why it doesn’t work and gave it to Gwen. She let me get to the end of it and then told me there was a name for what the kittens did to me anyway.”
“What’d they do to you?”
“My hands stopped. The thoughts stopped.” It’s the first time I’ve said it to anyone who isn’t paid to hear it. It comes out flatter than it sat in my chest. “For a while at least. I didn’t notice till they started up again.”
“When did you start looking for a cat?”
“After Tikh’s living room. The night Bug decided I was there for her.”
“She has taste.”
“She has no taste. But then she picked me.”
“She did pick you.” He says it light, but there’s something behind it. I’ve been clocking it since the off-day and haven’t been able to place it.
He’s been a half-beat behind himself all week. A man with something he isn’t sure what to do about.
“You good?” I ask him, which isn’t a thing I ask people, because asking opens a door both ways.
“Long few days.” He says it to the windshield, then lets out a sigh. “Tikh bought me coffee and rearranged some stuff in my head and didn’t help me move any of it back.”
“That sounds like Tikh.”
“It’s exactly like Tikh.” He doesn’t say what it was and I don’t ask.
He pulls up outside my building and puts it in park. Twelve seconds, normally. Bag, door, a simple see you tomorrow.
My hand isn’t on the door though. I notice that, and I leave it where it is.
I told myself I study him. That was a true statement. Years ago when I first saw his film, before we ever shared a bench. I knew he was who I wanted to be in front of the net, what I wanted to strive towards.
But the study isn’t why I know he hums when he tapes his stick. Not why I know his calm is a thing he builds at night, not a thing he gets naturally. I’ve been cataloguing this man the way I catalogue the things that keep me upright. I called it scouting. But it doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.
My hands are still, but not the crease-still, where the brain goes clean. A different register. A frequency finding a place that fits.
Both flat on my thighs, not moving. Not because I’m holding them but because nothing is asking them to move.
My body registered him before I let myself notice.
I’ve never wanted anyone the way other people describe wanting.
Attraction has always worked differently for me.
Slow, specific, built out of attention paid over months until the knowing becomes its own gravity.
But the thing the words are afraid of isn’t the want.
The want arrived on its own schedule instead of mine.
Except now, I find my heart going like I’ve taken one off the mask, sitting here in a parked car.
I’ve spent my whole life being precise. I choose the words. I’ve never chosen any words more carefully. The smallest door I own and the only one that matters.
“You can call me Jules.”
He doesn’t ask what it means. He doesn’t turn it into a moment, which is the thing that undoes me. I’d braced for the moment and there isn’t one.
He just turns in the seat, unhurried. Same as when he took the names for the goalposts the first time I handed them over. No questions. Of course they like to be called that.
“Not in the locker room. But between us, call me Jules.”
“Okay,” he says. And then, fitting it into his mouth, gentle and plain and without ceremony. “Jules.”
That’s the whole asymmetry of us in one syllable.
Not a question. Not a test. Not the way Gwen says Julien, like opening a book to the right page.
He says it the way he said Gertie and Quessa, the way he says everything I give him, as if it was always there and he was just waiting for permission to use it.
Easy. Like coming home to a room he already knew.
It cost me everything I have to push the words across a console. It costs him nothing to catch them. The nothing isn’t carelessness. It’s a man who decided a long time ago that whatever I needed I could have, and never thought to make me watch him decide it.
I’ve studied his face all season. I know it frame by frame.
So I catch the exact half-second where the easy thing changes into something with more weight under it. I understand all at once what the furniture in his head was, and who moved it, and why he couldn’t set it down.
For one of the few times in my life, I don’t overthink. I just do and lean over the console and press my lips against his.
The same brain that learned his angles inside the net over the years, now learns the rest of him in the space of one breath. Fast and total. No drama at all, because there’s none of the noise here. No count. No list. Just getting to where I already knew I was going.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck. He kisses me back like the answer was always going to be yes and he’d only been waiting for me to find the question.
When I pull back an inch, the city is still out there celebrating its own thing. The car is still in park.
One of my hands has come off my thigh and fisted in the front of his shirt.
The pattern gone. Nowhere. Replaced.
Lundy’s eyes open, and he watches me for a second. “Was that okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
He stills.
I put my hand in his. “Not no. Just not sure. Different category.”
His thumb moves once along my skin. “Okay.”
“That was a bad answer.”
“It was an honest answer.” He doesn’t make it smaller than it is and he doesn’t make it heavier. “Jules,” he says again, not asking anything, just keeping it. Setting it somewhere he plans to use.
And I sit in the wreck of every system I’ve ever built and let him be there with me.