Chapter 11
Emile
We get good at it fast. Too fast. That should’ve been the first warning, honestly, how easy it is, how quick two guys figure out the whole choreography of a secret when they’re supposed to be at each other’s throats over the one job worth having.
Nobody teaches you the choreography. There’s no drill for it.
But your body learns it anyway, same as it learns a new set of edges, until you’re doing it without counting the steps.
When to hang back. When to leave a room first. How to look at a guy across the Trough for exactly the number of seconds a rival looks at a rival, not one longer.
How to say his last name in daylight like it’s the only name he’s got.
We got good at all of it inside a week. And the getting-good should’ve scared me, because a thing you can hide that well is a thing you’ve already decided to keep hiding.
And a thing you keep hiding is a thing that eventually costs you.
Days, we’re rivals. I want to be clear that part is real.
I need that said out loud somewhere, for me, for later, in case I ever have to prove to myself I wasn’t a liar the whole way through.
It matters more than I can say. The wanting the net was true before he was and stayed true after.
I’m not faking the net thing to get in his bed.
I’d never. The net is the whole reason my heart still beats when I wake up.
So in daylight I chirp him, I push him, I go five-hole on him in the duel, and I win the mornings one rep at a time.
And I’m good. I’m really good. Good enough that the student site starts running my name in a bigger font than it used to, running it off practice, off the goalie battle, off a count nobody in that barn says out loud.
Good enough that Sowa watches me a little longer than he used to.
And Sowa doesn’t waste a look. The starts are coming.
Marquette said so with his own mouth. And every rep is a knuckle on the door I’ve been throwing my whole body at since I got here.
And nights, I knock on his door in his own rhythm.
Two fingers. Once. His rhythm, not mine.
Mine used to be whatever my hand felt like, and now it’s his, and I don’t remember deciding to switch.
He lets me in. The guy who won’t give an inch on the ice gives me everything in the dark, all of it, the stone coming off him like a sweater.
Neither of us says one word about what it means that those are the same guy.
The wall guy and the dark guy. We’ve got an unspoken deal not to notice.
I didn’t know it would be like this. I want to say that.
Whatever I pictured, back when I pictured anything, it wasn’t this.
I pictured a war, and maybe, if I got lucky and stupid, a couple of nights stolen out of the war.
I didn’t picture the small stuff. He learns how I take my coffee without me telling him, then just hands it to me one morning in the film room like it’s nothing.
Black and too strong, exactly wrong for anybody but me, exactly right.
“How’d you know?” I say.
“You’re loud about everything else.”
“Fair,” I say. “Nobody’s ever accused me of quiet. And nobody’s ever accused you of small talk.”
The next week he straightens my stall when I’m not looking, squaring it the same way he squares his own.
“Did you touch my stall?”
“No,” he says, and goes right on lacing.
So I let him deny it, because I’d rather have the straightened stall than the confession. That’s the stuff nobody warns a backup about. The stuff that gets in under the war and stays.
The thin place in the wall is the whole geography of us now.
His room, my room, the crack where the drywall gave up.
Some nights I don’t even go over. Some nights I just lie on my side of it with something on low, waiting, and after a while, always, I hear him settle.
The bed. The breath. I know he’s lying over there on his side, listening to my music fill the crack, letting it be the last thing before sleep.
It’s the most married thing I’ve ever done, and we haven’t so much as split a plate of fries in the daylight.
I’ve started picking the songs on purpose.
That’s a thing I haven’t told him and never will.
Back at the start I put music on because I put music on, because silence is a thing that happens to me and noise is a thing I do to it.
Now I lie there and I choose. Something low.
Something with a little ache down in the bass.
I send it under the wall like a note passed in a class we’re both failing, and I wait, and I hear his mattress take his weight.
Then I know he stayed up until I played something.
Two grown men conducting the tenderest thing either of them has ever had through a crack in the drywall, without one word.
It should be the saddest thing in the world.
It isn’t. It’s the best part of my day, and I wouldn’t trade it for a plate of fries in the sun with anybody.
Here’s what I’ve learned about him, the things no scouting report has a box for. He runs cold and sleeps hot. He talks in his sleep in a language I don’t have. He can’t stand to be pitied. And he will take a hundred small kindnesses if you do them fast and pretend you didn’t.
He hates to be thanked. I found that one the hard way.
“Thanks,” I said once, for something small. I couldn’t tell you now what it was.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t thank you.”
“It makes it a transaction. Then there’s a balance. Then somebody owes.”
“Ostie. Fine. What do I do instead?”
He thought about it four seconds longer than the question deserved, which is his whole personality in one gesture. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s the point of it.”
He has a laugh. An actual one, rare as a solar eclipse and about that worth planning your life around. I’ve gotten it maybe four times, and I keep every one of them in the good drawer. The one I don’t hate.
We’re careful in a way that would break your heart if you saw it laid out flat.
We don’t sit together at the Trough. I take the far end, he takes the end that isn’t near any end, the apart place he’s always taken.
We don’t walk out of the barn at the same time.
And on the road we take separate elevators, which is a thing I didn’t know two grown men could do to themselves until we started doing it, standing there watching the numbers, waiting the other one out.
One night a D-man got in with us and there was no version of it where we didn’t ride up together.
He got out on four and said it to the doors closing behind him, not to either of us.
“You two are so weird about each other.”
“He’s not wrong,” I said.
Casimir watched the numbers go. “He is not wrong.”
Then we got out on six and went to separate rooms like two men who had just agreed on nothing whatsoever.
Then his door, late, in the dark, and all of it comes off.
All the careful. For a few hours there’s no depth chart, no scout, no wall.
There’s just a guy who runs his whole life in perfect rows letting me mess up every single one of them, on purpose, with my hands, thanking me for it with his mouth.
The one I watch is Vinh. Not because he’d ever say a word, Vinh would take it to his grave.
Because Vinh sees. He’s been reading me since the first day of the season.
He reads everything. He has never once made a show of it.
So I keep an extra foot between me and Casimir whenever Vinh’s in the room.
I chirp a little louder. And I make sure the daylight version of me is loud enough to cover the other one.
He sits down across from me at the Trough one night with a tray and no agenda at all, which is when he’s most dangerous.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I’m always in a good mood. It’s the brand. It’s printed on the label.”
“No.” He starts in on his food. “You’re in a good mood. Different thing.”
“Those are the same thing, Tran.”
“They’re really not.” He doesn’t look up. He never looks up when he’s doing this. “Bruno was in a good mood for about a month and I couldn’t work out why for the whole month.”
“And what was it?”
“Me,” Vinh says, and eats.
I laugh. It comes out one size too big for the joke, and I hear it come out one size too big, and so does he.
Neither of us says a word about that either.
He lets it go, and Vinh lets a thing go completely or not at all, and asks me to settle whether a hot dog is a taco, and I could put my forehead down on the tray with gratitude.
Because I’m the only one in this building supposed to know the two games are the same game. What do you do with a guy who sees all of it and just never asks? Am I hiding it half as well as I think I am?
I keep waiting for it to feel like a secret I’m ashamed of.
It never does. Not once. It feels like the one true thing in a life I’ve spent performing for whoever was in the room.
The performing is the daylight, the chirp and the grin and the good-time backup who fills the corner so nobody clocks he’s never been anyone’s first pick.
He’s the dark. The dark is the only place I’ve ever gotten to be real, which is a funny thing to say about a guy whose whole life is a war on the dark.
He built himself a chapel to keep it out, and I climb into it every night to finally let mine in.
I don’t know what to do with that. I put it in the drawer with everything else about him I’ve got nowhere to put.
Here’s the part I don’t tell him.
I’ve still got the drawer. The one where I keep him.
Every tell. The two fingers on the corner.
The way the horn undoes him. The water at the same stations.
The fact that his whole game is one rope held in two hands.
I told myself once it was scouting. It was scouting.
Now it’s just knowing him, which is what you call it when you’d take a puck in the teeth for a guy.
Except I can’t unknow the scouting part.
Some of it is literal. There’s a folder on my phone, notes I thumbed in the dark of a film room back when I still called it work.
Very professional. I’d hire me. The rest is in my head, which is the half that matters, because that’s the half I couldn’t lose if I dropped the phone in a river.
A whole map of exactly how to take this man apart.
I did the work before I loved him, and the work doesn’t delete itself just because the reason changed.
Nobody tells you this part about being the guy who finds the gap.
How do you unfind it? I could go up the middle on him any night I chose.
And every night I choose not to. Every night I lie down next to the open gap and cover it with my own body instead.
But choosing not to isn’t the same as not being able to, and some nights the difference keeps me up worse than he does.
Some nights, lying next to him with his breath gone even and slow, I catch myself adding to it.
Not on purpose. I don’t decide to. He does a thing in his sleep, says a word in Polish I don’t understand, soft, into the pillow, and it goes in the drawer anyway.
Because I can’t not. Because the part of me that gathers people like ammunition doesn’t have an off switch, and I have looked for one.
I lie there in the warm dark next to the best thing that ever happened to me and I hate that I can’t turn it off.
I hate that even here, even now, with his heart going slow against my back, some part of me is still quietly loading the gun. Who does that to a guy who trusts him?
Because the math hasn’t changed. Not one number of it.
I keep hoping it will change, keep waiting to wake up and find the numbers came out different overnight.
They don’t. Every start coming to me is a start he doesn’t get.
Every step I take through his door in the dark is a step toward his net in the daylight.
I’m the guy in his bed who keeps the dark out just by breathing even on my side, and I’m the guy coming for the one thing holding him up.
Those are the same guy. I did that math a hundred times, and it comes out the same guy every time.
One of these nights, the two games are going to find out about each other. I know it the way I know weather off the ridge. You can smell it before it turns.
I keep telling myself I’ll get rid of the drawer.
Burn it, so all that’s left is the knowing you get from loving a person, the clean kind, the kind you’re allowed.
But you can’t burn the half that lives in your own head.
You can only choose, every day, not to open it.
And when have I ever been that guy? I opened his shelf on a dare from nobody.
Not opening things is the one skill I was never issued.
I don’t tell him any of that. I kiss the back of his neck. I match my breathing to his until I can’t tell his tide from mine, and I lie to us both by staying quiet.
What are we doing? I think it into the dark, into his hair, into the good clean smell of him.
Neither of us answers. That’s the deal. That’s the contained thing. We don’t answer.