Nolan
Chapter six
Misha lived on the top floor of a converted shoe factory in Midtown, with twelve-foot ceilings and multi-pane industrial windows that started two feet above the floor and stretched nearly to the beams. He furnished his loft with a chair that cost more than my first car and a card table he claimed came from a monastery.
The rest was folding chairs and a massive TV.
We were knee-deep in a third round of poker.
It was a Misha institution. He always hosted a card game in the rest-gap before the Cup Final, whether or not we were in it.
It was small stakes, phones placed in a wooden bowl.
Two years ago, a rookie live-streamed Brick losing against a straight flush.
The rookie got traded, and the bowl became a fixture.
Elias's phone was the only one not in the bowl. He'd said "working phone" when he sat, and Misha nodded once.
I folded a pair of nines because Jamie Loughlin was holding something huge, and everyone knew it. The kid had a tell you could see from the cheap seats. He sat up straight and brushed his hair with his fingers.
"Fold," Brick said, tossing his cards in. "Wes, get out now. Save yourself."
"I'm pot committed."
"You're twelve dollars committed. Your kids will never know."
Wes called. Jamie laid down a full house, jacks over nines, and then he apologized.
"Sorry, guys."
Everyone exhaled. It sounded like a massive tire deflating.
"Don't apologize," Wes said, pushing the pot across. "Apologizing only makes it worse. Take my money like a man."
"He means take his money like a center," Brick said. "He gives it away every June anyway."
Misha dealt like a goalie. He had his own rhythm with small ceremonies attached.
He cut with his left hand and squared the deck twice.
Behind him, he had a steel shelf full of padlocks, dozens of them.
Some were brass, and some were iron. Many were more than a century old. He insisted that none of them had keys.
He said he picked them open with tools when he couldn't sleep. I'd asked him what he did with a lock once it was open. He looked at me like the question made no sense.
Elias sat between Jamie and the window with a modest stack in front of him. He'd come as part of his job and planned to stand by the door like furniture, but Brick allowed that for about three minutes.
"Sit down, you're making the room nervous. If he stands there for one more hand, I'm calling the police."
So he sat, and now, ten hands in, he had his own style. He played tight and forgettable. Folded early, called small, won one modest pot and pushed it around as if it embarrassed him. Meanwhile, he tracked everything. I watched his eyes as he followed every move around the table.
"Question," Brick said, pointing a chip at Elias. "In your line of work, is bluffing learned in professional development, or does the license cover it?"
"The license is mostly for parking."
"See, that's a bluff right there."
"It's really not. You can park anywhere if you stand next to the car looking serious. That's a perk."
Jamie laughed hard enough to knock over his stack.
It was a relaxed room. None of us mentioned the Final simmering in the background. Elias followed his trademark pattern: ask, listen, ask.
Elias's phone buzzed once in his pocket. He glanced down but didn't reach for it. He moved his chair back three inches, ending up with the window on his left and the door in his sightline.
Nobody else looked up, but for me, the temperature in the room had changed.
"Mercer." Misha said. "Are you in or are you decoration?"
"In," I said, and put money on a hand I hadn't registered.
The evening ended how it always did. Wes cashed out first, twenty up, citing a six-year-old who woke at dawn.
Jamie was next. Brick counted the kid's money for him at the door, declared him solvent, and told him to take a cab and not tip like a rookie.
That left Brick and Elias at the table, with Misha and me.
Brick complained about a hand he lost in Winnipeg in 2019.
Misha got up and headed for the kitchen, nodding just enough for me to get the hint. The kitchen had a refrigerator, sink, six feet of counter and an induction burner. He pulled an electric kettle out of a cabinet, filled it, and plugged it in.
"Good game in Vegas," I said.
"Game was good," he said. He had thirty-eight saves, two of them impossible, and "game was good" was all he told the reporters.
He opened another cabinet and took down a glass. It was one of those Russian ones in a metal holder. He set it on the counter and squared it to the edge, the way he squared the deck. Behind me Brick's voice rose, "I had it won, full house," and Elias said something too low to hear. Brick whimpered.
Misha watched the kettle.
"Body is talking, Mercer," he said.
The refrigerator hummed.
"You listening?" he asked.
He wasn't looking at me. He was talking to the kettle. I'd had a response ready for months. Sooner or later, one of my teammates would say something. Thirty-four, everybody's body talks, mine says good morning was the plan.
"How long have you heard it?" I asked instead.
Misha considered the question, and then he shrugged.
"I watch. Is the job." The kettle started to steam.
He took it off before it whistled and poured.
The smell of black tea filled the small kitchen.
"In game, everyone watches the puck. I watch bodies.
Shooter says nothing, but his body says everything.
Always." He set the kettle down. "Your body talks too, Mercer.
You tell it shut up, but it talks to me. "
"Is that a compliment?"
"No."
He picked up the glass by its metal holder and drank. Vern had seen the hip from a chair in Dogtown with his eyesight fading. The trainers saw it and adjusted my program in silence. The coaches shortened my shifts.
And now Misha, who read bodies for a living because his living depended on it, was telling me mine had been talking to him. Every single person who'd heard it decided the polite thing was to let me keep pretending it hadn't said a word.
"How long have you known about the hip?" I asked again.
"Long time." He drank. "Is not my business."
"Then why say anything now?"
Misha looked at me over the glass. "Because now is important time," he said. "Okay."
That was the end of the conversation. For Misha, okay was a period, full-stop.
"Nolan." Elias stood three steps away with my jacket folded over his arm. Brick was behind him, pulling on his own. "Brick's heading down," Elias said. "We can follow him."
"Yeah." I pushed off the corner, good side first.
"Special game when we win Cup," Misha said. "My deal again."
***
The condo was dark except for the small desk lamp on the side table by my recliner. It was past midnight. I should have been in bed with the pad on. Instead, I felt wide awake.
"Come here," I said to Elias. "I want to show you something."
My media room was at the end of the hall, past the guest room. I couldn't remember whether Elias glanced inside on his first walk-through. If he did, he didn't say anything.
I hit the panel inside the door, and the room lit up into a low glow, with a wall of screens waking in sequence.
"This is the only room in this place I kept away from the interior designer," I said. "I hired an entertainment guy for this. It's my space."
Elias walked in, scanning the chairs, racked controllers, and black acoustic panels on the walls.
"The sound treatment isn't for watching movies," he said.
"Guy who did it works on recording studios. You could fire a gun in here and the retired bond trader downstairs would sleep through it." I dropped into my chair, the left one, adjusted to cradle my hip, and pulled the second controller off the rack. "Sit. You're learning something tonight."
"Am I?"
"You spent all night reading the card table. Now, you can let down. This is my turf."
He sat. I put a controller in his hands and fired up a game on the center screen. It was the shooter I ran with Brick on road trips, with a solid easy mode for beginners.
Elias walked his guy into a wall. Then he stared at the ceiling for six seconds, unable to figure out how to look anywhere else. He turned in a circle, stopped, and turned back the other way, slowly, as if taking it slow would help.
"Thumbs," I said. "Left stick moves you, and the right stick moves your eyes."
"I understand the principle."
"You're looking at your feet."
"I'm aware of that."
It was the first time he sounded frustrated in my presence, and I liked him better for it. I leaned over and put my hand on top of his right hand, moving his thumb a half-inch down the stick. "Lighter. It's not a wrench. You're turning your head, not steering a truck."
"That," he said, "is the first useful comment you've made."
He was bad for about ten more minutes. Genuinely awful, and it made me laugh out loud twice. He took it the way good rookies do, with no sulking, just resetting and trying again.
"Why three screens?" he asked, eyes forward, thumbs working the controller.
"Center's the game. The wings run tape. I can put one on each side and watch while I play."
"So you built a film room and hid a game in it."
"Other way around."
He glanced at me for a second and went back to the screen. "And the chairs? Those aren't off a showroom floor."
"A guy in Austin builds them one at a time. He has an eight-week waiting list."
Around the fourth run, Elias's guy stopped looking at his feet. Around the sixth, he cleared a room in one pass, and I realized he'd stopped fighting the sticks and started treating them like extensions of his body.
"You've done this before," I said.
"Never."
"Nobody plays this cleanly in twenty minutes."
"I'm not clean. I've just stopped running into walls."
I put him in a game with me after that, the two of us on a squad against strangers. I carried him. He was the worst player in the room by a distance. He knew it, and he didn't care.
Elias called out what he saw while I did the shooting—left side, two of them, window above you—and he was never wrong. He couldn't hit anything, but he saw everything.
"Brick and I do this on the road a lot," I said. "We've said more to each other while gaming than everywhere else combined."
Elias looked over at me. The screens moved a little light across his face.
"That doesn't surprise me at all," he said.
We played until almost two. The menu music softened, and the screens dimmed to their standby mode.
Elias set his controller on the arm of the chair. I reached over to take it, but his fingers were still there, and my hand landed on his.
He turned his head. In the dim light I could see maybe a third of his face: the long line of his jaw and one eye steady on me. He didn't say anything or move his hand. He was waiting for my next move.
I leaned across the gap between the chairs and kissed him.
It wasn't long. His mouth was warm, and his lips parted slightly.
I pulled back. My heart raced as it did in a tie game with thirty seconds to go. I knew better.
"That was—" I started. Out of line. A mistake. I'm sorry. I had all three in my mouth.
"Don't." His hand stayed still under mine. "If you apologize," he said, "then we both have to pretend it was a mistake. It doesn't look like that from where I'm sitting."
I had nothing.
He paused for a moment, and then slowly turned his hand over in mine, palm up. For a second, we held hands like teenagers in a movie theater. Then he pressed my knuckles once and let go.
"It's late," he said. Elias stood, unfolding himself out of the chair. He racked his controller and got the alignment right, first try.
At the door, he stopped. The hall light silhouetted his long, lean body.
"Thank you for teaching me the game," he said. "You're a good coach."
His phone went off in his pocket.
He checked the screen, and the ease left his posture. "Seattle," he said. "I have to take it."
"It's almost two."
"They're two hours behind. They forget that other people sleep." He stepped into the hall, and I tried to listen to the shape of the call without deciphering specific words.
He was back in a few minutes, leaning in the doorframe.
"Everything boring?" I asked.
"The firm's sending me out tomorrow to look at a facility.
It's elite rehab and recovery—the founder was at that medical thing the other night.
He offered me a tour of his shop, and Seattle is vetting it before I take him up on it.
" It was more than he'd told me about any of his calls. "The owners have a brand name, Tarn."
I froze, and Elias noticed.
"You know it?"
"Heard the name somewhere." I racked my controller. "Fourteen years of training rooms. It all blurs."
He watched me for a few seconds more, then pushed off the door frame.
"Goodnight, Nolan."
"Night."
We had three more weeks together if the Steamers went the distance. Then Elias flew back to Minnesota, and I went back to being the only person who heard my alarm.
There was no version of what happened where kissing him cost nothing. I priced it four ways, and it came out ruinous every time. Still, I'd do it again.
The name Tarn rang inside my head, but I couldn't place it at first. My body answered, freezing up, but my two a.m. brain couldn't piece the puzzle together. Something about a training room and company polos, but it was fuzzy.