3. Crossing Lines #2
“You’ve got good instincts,” Connor said, when Caleb got it clean three times running.
“You’re reading the ice and listening to your body.
Most guys your level are still reacting.
You’re anticipating.” He glided, considering.
“The technical stuff you can learn. The instincts either come to you or they don’t. ”
“Where’d yours come from?”
Connor glided beside him in silence. “My dad. He played. Nothing serious, just rec, but he loved it. He’d take me out on the lake starting way back when I was four or five. Before I could really skate. Just held my hands and pulled me around. He had good instincts too.”
The past tense did its work. Caleb didn’t push.
They skated to the far bank and sat on a log and caught their breath. The cabin showed between the bare trees, smoke still rising.
“You grew up here?” Caleb asked.
“Born here. My dad worked the mine. His dad worked the mine.” Connor turned toward the cabin. “When I was seventeen I got a scholarship offer. University in Ottawa. Hockey program, good one.”
“You went?”
“Just shy of two years.” He said it matter-of-factly.
“But my dad had an accident at the mine when I was nineteen. He didn’t make it.
” He went quiet. “I found out by phone. I was at practice. I remember standing in the hallway outside the rink in my skates, still in my gear, and the ice from the session was melting off my blades onto the concrete floor, and my coach was speaking to me and I couldn’t hear him.
Just the sound of the water dripping.” He picked up a small stone from beside the log, turned it over in his glove.
“That’s the thing I remember most. The dripping. ”
Caleb said nothing, stunned by this sudden vulnerability.
“My mom had two kids still at home. Jessie was thirteen.” Connor kept his eyes on the lake, thumb working over the stone in his glove. “So I came back.”
“And you gave up the scholarship?”
“Yep. And got a job at the mine. Third generation.” He set the stone down. “It wasn’t a hard decision. I mean it was hard, but it wasn’t complicated. You do what needs doing.”
Caleb sat with his own feelings about leaving, about what needed doing. The parents he chose to leave. The planning, reaching out to Maya, the relief that had embarrassed him. How little his freedom had cost him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About your dad.”
Connor’s practiced neutrality was gone; his features softened. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s been a few years. Most days it’s just part of the landscape.”
“Most days.”
“Most days.”
Smoke lifted from the cabin chimney behind them. Neither moved toward it. They stayed on the log until the cold reached through Caleb’s gloves.
“Why do you stay?” Caleb asked. “Now, I mean. Your siblings must be older. Your mom…”
“My mom’s fine. Mostly. My brother’s working in Sudbury.
Jessie is in school.” Connor studied the ice.
“I ask myself that sometimes. Honestly.” He said it like a man trying out the truth to see how it fit.
“I think, for a long time, staying was just… habit. And then it was home, which is different from habit but not always easy to tell apart.” He paused.
“But in the end… they still need me here.”
Caleb looked out across the lake. From here the cabin showed through the trees, the thin thread of smoke above it marking its place.
Connor had said everything plainly: the scholarship, the accident, the family he had come home to help support.
He talked about it the same way he talked about hockey or work.
“I get that,” Caleb said. “Staying for reasons you don’t have words for yet.”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “That’s it exactly.”
When the cold finally drove them inside, Connor made the invitation pointedly casual. Caleb accepted too quickly to hide his eagerness.
The cabin was the same as he remembered and yet completely different, because this time he was walking into it on purpose.
The fire was already going. Connor must have built it before he came out.
The space was warm and smelled of woodsmoke and coffee.
Caleb sat on the same end of the couch as last time and Connor handed him a mug and sat at the other end.
They were less than two feet apart, but the distance seemed vast compared to that day under the blanket.
They talked for a while about nothing much, which somehow made it easier when the talk eventually turned to more serious matters.
Caleb told him about his family: his devout dad, a hard-working mechanic who’d mapped his son’s future without consulting him, and a mom who loved him genuinely and completely within the confines of the rules she had never been taught to question, or perhaps taught to never question. Connor listened, leaning in closer.
“Did you know?” Connor asked. “When you left. Did you know what you were leaving for?”
“I knew on some level, though I didn’t have any words for it.” Caleb wrapped both hands around the mug. “What I knew for sure was that I was done living someone else’s version of my life. I just didn’t know yet what my own version was.”
“And now?”
“Getting there.”
Connor smiled at that, a real one, the flash of his teeth sending a thrill through Caleb’s body. It changed his face, made him look younger, closer to the nineteen-year-old before he’d been forced to come home to tragedy and duty, setting his own future aside for his family.
“What about university?” Caleb asked. “When you were there. Was it different? From here?”
Connor’s attention sharpened. “Different?” he said guardedly. “Yeah. It was different.”
“Good different?”
Connor watched the fire, considering his answer.
“Some of it. The hockey was serious. I mean seriously serious. And that was good, that was what I’d gone for.
But the rest of it.” He stopped. Started again.
“I grew up knowing everybody in Veil Lake. Everybody knew me. Something happens to you, growing up that way. Sometimes you become whoever those people need you to be, and then one day you’re far from home, in a big city, at a university with thousands of students and nobody knows your name, and you realize you haven’t got any idea who you are without the expectations. ”
“What did you find out?” Caleb asked.
Connor was quiet for long enough that Caleb thought he might not answer.
Then: “That some of what I’d been… not performing, exactly.
Leaving out. I think there were things I’d been leaving out because they didn’t fit the version of Connor that Veil Lake needed or expected.
Maybe even required.” He stopped there. The decision to continue was his.
“There was… someone?” Caleb said. He left the question there without asking Connor to fill it in. Connor looked surprised for half a second. Then he smiled and nodded.
“At school,” he said. “I was with him for about a year.”
He didn’t say more than that. He didn’t have to.
The fire burned down and the coffee cooled. Connor had said it quietly and let the words settle. Caleb traced the worn grain of the table with his eyes. Nothing in Connor’s expression suggested regret, and that stripped away the distance Caleb had maintained.
Caleb felt the familiar urge to retreat from the conversation. The cabin suddenly seemed smaller, the warmth smothering instead of comforting. He became aware of how easy it would be to steer the conversation somewhere safer, to make an excuse and leave.
Connor asked nothing of him. He simply waited, leaving Caleb room to walk through the doorway or leave it closed. Caleb stayed.
“Did it help?” Caleb asked. “Knowing?”
“Knowing?” Connor picked up his mug. “For me, knowing was never the question. We can convince ourselves of almost anything, but underneath it all, some things we just know. Did it help? Yeah. It was better than being alone in it. But then my dad died and I came home. He said he would wait, but I told him it wasn’t fair.
I wasn’t coming back. And here… I know everybody and they know me.
That part of me, well, it doesn’t fit so well here. ”
Neither moved. The fire had burned low, gathering amber light across the floorboards and the arm of the couch. Connor’s hand rested along the couch between them.
Connor set down his mug and angled his body toward Caleb.
Caleb closed some of the distance.
The last time they had been freezing and half-dressed under emergency blankets. Now it was Sunday afternoon. The fire needed another log soon; Caleb could hear one settling in the stove. Connor touched the stubble along Caleb’s jaw and waited.
Caleb answered by closing the remaining distance. Their mouths stopped a breath apart. Connor’s eyes dropped to his lips.
The kiss was firm, Caleb moving into it with more urgency than he meant to, for a second worrying he’d rushed it. But Connor smiled against his mouth and kissed him again, unhurried, giving Caleb time to catch up. Caleb found Connor’s arm and held on. Connor pulled him closer.
The questions were still there. The shame too, waiting beyond the reach of Connor’s mouth. But Connor smiled against him, warm and unguarded, and Caleb let that small tenderness contradict what he had been taught.
They stayed there, in that, for a long moment. Connor’s thumb brushed his cheekbone. Caleb quietly moaned into his mouth, feeling Connor breathe it in, and the intimacy of it was almost more than the kiss itself.
Connor pulled back first, only far enough to look Caleb in the eye.
His dark eyes were level, a quality Caleb had noted from the start. Beneath that calm, Caleb glimpsed the young hockey player Connor had been before he set his own future aside without being asked and spent years quietly paying for it.
“I should tell you something,” Connor said.
“Okay,” Caleb said.