Away Games - Prelude
He’d bought the tickets in October.
That was how he thought of it: the tickets first, the rest second.
Winnipeg Jets versus Minnesota Wild, Friday night, decent seats in the lower bowl.
He’d mentioned it to Kowalski at practice, casual, loud enough for the room.
Kowalski had said nice and gone back to retaping his stick and that was that.
Alibi established. Weekend accounted for.
The drive from Veil Lake to Winnipeg was five and a half hours.
He did it in five, the highway emptying out once he cleared the Shield and hit the flat country, the sky opening up until there was too much of it.
He had the radio on and then off and then on again.
He stopped once for gas and a coffee that tasted like the cup it came in and didn’t think about where he was going.
He was good at not thinking about things.
The hotel was on Portage, mid-range. He told himself he’d picked it for the price.
He checked in, rode the elevator to the fourth floor, stood at the window looking out at the city doing its Friday afternoon thing below.
Downtown Winnipeg in February had a hard, flat greyness to it, the cold coming off the river, the buildings huddled against it. Not pretty. Real, though.
He thought about the game. The Jets were three points out of a playoff spot, which made it a good time to see them. He had a good seat. He’d eaten at the hotel restaurant, nothing fancy, steak and a beer, and he’d watched the game on the bar TV while he ate and thought: I could just go.
He went upstairs instead. Showered. Changed into the clothes he’d packed in the bottom of his bag, the ones that weren’t hockey gear and weren’t the flannel and work jackets of Veil Lake.
Dark jeans, a fitted henley, boots that had seen some use.
He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror for a moment, then turned off the light.
Then he went out.
The bar was called The Meridian and it was on a street that required two transit connections from his hotel, which was part of why he’d chosen it.
The neighbourhood wasn’t what he expected: older buildings, a laundromat, a Vietnamese place with its lights still on, a corner store with bars on the windows that made him slow his pace without stopping.
The cold had cleared the sidewalks. His breath made small clouds and he walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and told himself he was just a man out for a walk in a city that didn’t know his name.
The Meridian had no sign. He almost walked past it. He would have, except for the door, and the low sound of music from inside, and the fact that he’d looked at this address enough times on his phone that he could have found it in the dark.
He went in.
It was smaller than he’d imagined. Maybe forty people, low lighting, a bar along one wall and tables along the other and a space in the middle that functioned as a dance floor without anyone dancing yet.
The music was something electronic and unhurried.
The crowd was mixed in the way of bars that don’t have to announce what they are: men and women and people who weren’t performing either, dressed in the range between going-out and barely-tried, all of them doing the thing people do in bars on Friday nights, which is look at each other.
He’d been walking into rooms his whole life: hockey dressing rooms, bars in small towns, arenas where the home crowd wanted you to lose.
You picked a line and walked it and you didn’t hesitate and the room accommodated you.
He did that now. Found a spot at the bar, flagged the bartender, ordered a beer.
Settled his weight on the stool with the ease he’d cultivated for thirty-four years.
Nobody looked at him twice. This was both a relief and faintly disorienting, because at home everyone looked at him twice.
They knew his name, his history, the team he’d played for, the coaching he’d taken on when his knees started making suggestions.
Here he was a guy at a bar with a beer. That was the point. He kept forgetting to enjoy it.
He was most of the way through the beer when the man sat down two stools over.
Not next to him. Two stools over. He signalled the bartender with the ease of a regular, ordered something without looking at the menu, and then looked over.
“Cold out,” the man said.
“Yeah,” he said.
The man nodded, like this was sufficient. He was maybe thirty-two, thirty-three, with the build of someone who took the gym seriously but wore it without performance. His hair was close-cropped, his jaw clean.
He had a drink. He looked at the room. He didn’t seem to need anything, which made him want to give him something.
“You come here a lot?” he asked, and immediately recognized it as the worst possible sentence.
The man looked at him, amused. “Sometimes,” he said. “You?”
“First time.”
“From out of town.”
“That obvious?”
“Little bit.” He said it without cruelty. Just the fact of it. “Where from?”
He considered this. “Northern Ontario,” he said. Which was true.
“Long drive.”
“Game tonight. Jets.”
The man’s mouth curved slightly. Not quite a smile. “How was it?”
He looked at his beer. “Didn’t make it,” he said.
The not-quite-smile became a real one. “Marcus,” he said.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second that he hoped didn’t show. Ryan. He’d decided on the drive down, somewhere past Kenora. “Ryan,” he said.
Marcus nodded once, like they’d agreed on something, and turned back to his drink.
They talked for two hours. He couldn’t have told you afterward exactly what about: the Jets roster, a bar Marcus liked better than this one but was too far to bother with tonight, the bone-deep misery of February in the prairies versus February in the north, the hockey team Marcus had played for in high school before his knees made the decision for him.
Marcus worked in facilities management for the university, which he described without apology or inflation: it paid well, the hours were reasonable, he liked the campus.
He’d lived in this neighbourhood for four years. He knew the corner store owner’s name.
He asked questions that built on what had already been said.
He found himself saying things he hadn’t intended to say.
About the drive down. About the way the sky opened up when you cleared the Shield.
About Veil Lake without naming it, describing it as small and northern and the kind of place where everyone had a version of you that you had to keep up with.
“Sounds exhausting,” Marcus said.
“It’s home,” he said.
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He looked at him. Marcus was looking at his glass with the expression of a man who had said a thing and meant it. He didn’t ask.
Around ten Marcus said he was going to head out. He said he’d walk with him.
Outside, the cold was serious. Their breath made clouds. The street was quieter than when he’d arrived, the laundromat closed now, the Vietnamese place dark. Marcus walked with his hands in his jacket pockets, unhurried, a man in his own neighbourhood. He walked beside him and felt his own edges.
“You’re nervous,” Marcus said.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I know. You’re also nervous.” He said it without judgment, just observation. “My building’s the one on the corner. You coming up or you need a minute?”
He looked at the building. Four storeys, brick, a buzzer panel by the door. The neighbourhood dark and cold around it.
“Coming up,” he said.
The apartment was on the third floor, two rooms and a kitchen, lived in long enough to have stopped trying to impress anyone.
Books on a shelf that wasn’t quite level.
A decent sound system, components mismatched.
A kitchen that still smelled of dinner, onions and cumin.
The radiator knocked twice and went quiet.
It was the most ordinary room he’d been in in years.
Marcus hung his jacket and took his without asking and put them both on the hook by the door and turned and looked at him in the full light of the apartment for the first time.
“Beer?” he said.
“Sure,” he said.
Marcus got two from the fridge and handed him one and leaned against the kitchen counter and looked at him and waited.
He set the beer down on the counter and crossed the kitchen.
Marcus didn’t move. Let him come. When he got close enough he looked up at him. They were about the same height, Marcus slightly broader, and his expression didn’t change, just became more focused.
He kissed him.
Marcus kissed him back without hesitation. His hands came up to hold his face, thumbs along the jaw. He made a sound into Marcus’s mouth, low enough that he told himself it went unheard.
Marcus steered them without hurry, walking him backward until the backs of his thighs hit the edge of the bed.
The kiss stayed deep. Marcus pulled off his own shirt, then his, hands broad and steady as they moved over skin.
Marcus was gym-solid, shoulders and chest thick, stomach flat and warm under his palms. Marcus caught his wrists, pressed them down once to the mattress, then released them, fingers trailing down his arms instead, attentive, almost careful.
“Easy,” Marcus said. “Let me.”
He let him.
Marcus stripped the rest of his clothes away, mouth following the path of his hands.
Throat, collarbone, the center of his chest, the ridge of his hip.
He took his time at the crease of thigh and groin, tongue tracing the sensitive skin there until his hips twitched involuntarily.
When Marcus finally took him in his mouth it was slow and deliberate, tongue working the underside while one hand held his thigh open.
The heat of it punched straight through him.
He gripped the sheets, hips trying to lift, but Marcus pressed a forearm across them, holding him down without effort.
The room stayed quiet except for the low hum of the city outside and the wet, deliberate sound of Marcus’s mouth.