Chapter 12
Casimir
The bus takes the mountain road out. The storm takes it back in behind us.
I watch it happen through the window. The pass goes white while we are still on it.
The ridge coming down in one long slow curtain.
By the time we reach the hotel on the far side, the road we came in on is gone.
Closed. A man in a plow truck at the turn, waving us past with a gloved hand.
There is a certain peace in a road closing behind you.
It decides a thing you were going to have to decide yourself.
You cannot go back. So you stop spending the strength it takes to want to.
The bus was quiet on the way in. It is always quiet on a mountain road in a storm, even a busful of hockey players, even the loud ones.
The driver took the switchbacks at a crawl with both hands high on the wheel and I watched the world narrow to the little cone the headlights could hold, and found, to my surprise, that I liked it.
A storm is a kind of order. It makes the choices for you.
There is one road and one speed and the next turn.
A man who has spent his life squaring plates against the dark can rest. Rest a little.
Inside weather that has already decided everything.
Sowa is across the aisle with his hat in his lap and his eyes shut. I take him for asleep until he isn’t.
“You like this,” he says, without opening them.
“Nobody has to decide anything.”
“Mm.” A long stretch of switchback goes under us. Chains on a truck coming the other way, then gone. “That is why men like us are dangerous in a good season. Nothing decides for us. So we go looking for something that will.”
“That is not a coaching point.”
“No,” he agrees. He does not open his eyes, and he does not say another word the rest of the mountain, and I sit with it the whole way down the far side, which is exactly what he intended and both of us know it.
Half the rooms the team booked have gone to travelers stranded off the highway.
The lobby is full of them. Families in the wrong coats.
A baby somewhere winding up. Marquette works it with the front desk in his low way and comes back with fewer keys than we have bodies.
Moose comes down the aisle of the lobby with his clipboard and the face that shows nothing and reads the new pairings off it.
Flat. Name by name. The way he reads everything.
He gets to the bottom of the list.
“Goalies,” he says, and hands me a key. One key.
I look at the key. I look at Moose. Moose Tessier has handed a wrong-size glove to every freshman on this roster.
Straight-faced. For the sole pleasure of watching each one work it out.
In slow dawning horror. Moose sees everything in this program and says a tenth of it.
Moose does not make mistakes with equipment.
A rooming list, in Moose’s hands, is equipment.
“One key?” I say.
“One room. One bed. Storm. Problem?”
Fortin arrives at my shoulder out of nowhere with his bag already up on it. “Is there a problem, Wrobel? The man asked if there’s a problem.”
“No problem.”
“He says no problem, Moose.”
“I heard him.”
He is already moving on down the list. Already handing the next key to the next pair. Over his shoulder. In the flat voice he uses for the weather and for everything else the world does: “You’ll manage.”
He does not look back. Watching the back of his head go, I would swear to a smile. Something almost like one. In the set of his shoulders. Moose. Sees everything. Says a tenth of it. Routes the last of it, apparently, straight at me.
* * *
We ride the elevator up together. Because there is only the one, and there is no version of this where we take separate cars.
That is the first crack in it. On the road we always take separate cars.
We stand at the doors and watch the numbers and wait each other out.
It is stupid. It is careful. It has kept us safe all season.
Tonight there is one elevator and one key and one storm.
We stand in the small moving box together with our bags between us.
Not touching. And the careful thing we built does not have a rule.
Not a rule for a mountain closing a road.
The room is small and too warm. There is one bed. There is nowhere in it for the two things that do not know about each other. Nowhere for them to stand apart.
The danger sits in exactly that. On campus there are two rooms and the thin place between them, and a door I open on my own terms, in the dark, when I have decided to.
Here there is one door and one bed and a boy sitting on the end of it unlacing his boots, pretending his hands are steady on the laces.
Every rule I built was for off-ice. This is off-ice with no map.
I set my bag down square to the wall, out of habit, before I have thought about it, and I understand that I brought the order into the room with me, because the order is the only luggage I never learned to put down.
He watches me do it and says nothing about it.
That is one of the things I have come to trust in him.
On the ice it would be intel. Here he just lets it be a thing I do.
The radiator ticks under the window. The storm leans on the glass. He gets one boot off and sets it down and does not look up. Which for him is a kind of noise.
“I can take the floor,” he says. “That what you want?” Not meaning a word of it. Watching me sideways. The way he watches a shooter coming down the wing. Reading which way I will go before I go there.
“No,” I say.
That is all it takes. One word. He gets the other boot off and stands and crosses the small warm room, and I meet him in the middle of it.
It is not the door-in-the-dark thing. It is not the quick hard contained thing we do at home.
Not with a wall to hide behind. It is his hands coming up to my face.
Both of them. Mine going to the small of his back.
The whole long day coming down all at once.
The bus and the ridge and the two elevators.
When we get to the bed it is slow. Slower than we have ever let it be.
There is no clock in the room and neither of us reaches for one.
There is no wall. There is no one on the other side of anything to be quiet for.
No team down the hall. No thin place. No daylight waiting to make us strangers again in the morning.
There is a storm on the window. A lamp we do not turn off.
A boy under my hands. A boy who has stopped pretending anything at all.
I take my time with him. I have not been allowed to take my time.
Not with anything, not ever. I learn him the slow way, with my mouth and my hands.
His breath catches high in his chest when I get my teeth into the muscle over his ribs.
It goes out of him all at once when I put my mouth low on his hip, and he says my name there like it surprised him.
He is not quiet. He was never going to be quiet.
Here, for the first time, he doesn’t have to swallow it, and I get to hear the whole of it.
And I understand that I have been rationing something. Something I did not have to ration.
I press my mouth to the inside of his wrist and feel his pulse jump under it.
To the crook of his elbow. To the flat of his chest where his heart is going hard.
I want to know all of it. I have spent a season learning him against my own will, and now I get to do it on purpose.
With permission. In a warm room with the storm shut out.
I take everything the slow way. I move down him.
I take his cock in my mouth. Slow. The way I have wanted to and would not let myself.
He says my name and it comes out torn. His hand comes into my hair and does not push.
Only holds. He arches under me and says it again.
Ragged. He reaches for me and I let him have my weight.
The way I have never let anyone have my weight.
All of it. Nothing held back on the shelf for later.
There is no later in the room. There is only this.
The lamp. The two of us learning that slow is a thing we were never allowed. A thing we are allowed now.
There is oil in his bag. He tells me where.
His voice already gone. I warm it between my fingers first. Because the room is cold and he is not.
Then I open him up. Slow. Slower than he wants, and he tells me so, out loud, in two languages, at length.
I do not hurry for either of them. His face an arm’s length from mine the whole time, every catch of his breath landing somewhere under my ribs.
He rocks down onto my hand and says more.
Says please. So I give him more. I press up into him until his whole body pulls taut and his mouth comes open on nothing at all, and I stay right there.
Until he is loose and open and shaking. Until he is saying my name and yes and now.
Over and over. Into the warm air of the room.
He pulls me down. He says please. Once. Low.
Wrecked. A word I have never heard him use for anything.
“Yes,” he says, when I line myself up against him.
“Yes. I want it. I want you.” I give him what he asks for.
I press into him slow. Slower than I have ever let anything be.
I feel him open around me. I feel the moment the sting in him turns into something else.
His breath punches out of him. His legs come up around my back.
“Don’t stop,” he says. “Please don’t stop.
” I do not stop. I move in him slow. Until slow is not a thing either of us can stand another second of.
Then I stop being slow, and the sound he makes is the whole night coming open.
His hands find my back and hold on. His nails drag.
I get a hand between us and take his cock in my fist and stroke him in time.
He says my name. I say his. We are loud in a room with no wall to be quiet for.
When he goes, he goes with my name in his mouth.
I feel him clench tight around me. It takes me with him.
I spill into him deep. We come apart close enough together that I feel it go through him and through me at the same time. One thing. After, we do not let go.
Afterward he does not sleep. Neither do I.
The not-sleeping is a different animal than mine usually is.
Lighter. Not a watch kept against the dark.
Just two men awake in a warm room with a storm on the glass.
Not wasting the awake on sleep. I lie on my back.
He lies on his side facing me. One hand flat on my chest. Watching me in the low lamp.
I let him watch. That in itself is a thing I couldn’t have done when I got here.
“Is the road going to open?” he says, after a while, to the ceiling.
“Tomorrow. Or not tomorrow.”
“That is the calmest anybody has ever been about anything.”
“There is one road. It opens or it does not. Neither of us is going to plow it.”
He turns that over. I can feel him turn it over, through the hand on my chest. “Say that to me sometime when it isn’t about a road,” he says, “and watch how it lands.”
I do not have an answer for that, so I do not make one up.
Then I do the thing I have never done on purpose. Not in front of another living soul.
I let him watch me set the day down.
I do it in the air, from the bed, on my back, with two fingers.
The way I do it on the shelf. Glove. Blocker.
The corner touched, once. I move nothing real.
It is only the shape of it, the sentence spoken with my hand instead of my mouth.
I name none of it out loud. I do not have to.
He knows the whole of it and has for weeks.
I let him see me run it, where no one has ever been allowed to see it.
Not Sowa. Not Babcia at the end, when she could not have followed it anymore.
No one. I run the last course of the day in the air over my own chest with a boy’s hand resting on it.
It is not a thing he broke his way into. It is a thing I opened.
My hand shakes a little, running it out in the open like that.
I feel him feel the shake. Through the hand on my chest. He does not say anything.
He does not still it. He just lets it be a thing that is happening.
The way he let me set my bag square to the wall.
I get to the end of the sequence. The corner touched, once, in the empty air.
And the settled feeling comes. Here, of all the places I have ever been.
In a strange bed on the wrong side of a closed mountain.
With the one variable I could never manage.
Lying warm along my side. It does not come slow.
I will carry that. Every night of my life the peace has come slow.
If it came at all. Tonight it comes all at once. The moment I let him watch.
“Thank you,” he says. Quiet. He understands exactly what it cost. I can hear that he understands. There is no chirp anywhere in it. No grin. Just the low true version of him. The one only the dark gets.
I do not answer him. There is no answer in the order for it. I will not hand him a lie. Not in this room, of all the rooms. But I find his hand in the low light. The one flat on my chest. I close mine over it and hold it. That is an answer. We both know it is an answer.
Outside, the storm keeps the road shut. In here the radiator ticks and the lamp stays on and I hold a boy’s hand on my own chest and do not let go.
The dark stays out of the room without one wall between us to keep it there.
He keeps it out and does not know he is doing it.
That is the part I carry back over the mountain when the road opens.
Not the win. Not the net. I have not found the words to tell him and I am not sure I ever will.
Neither of us sleeps. Neither of us pretends to.
Everything at the bottom of the mountain is still down there waiting on us.
The thin wall. The two elevators. A list with my name at the top of it that has quietly begun to belong to him.
It can wait for the plows. For the length of one closed pass this room is the whole size of my life, the net and the boy both inside it and no wall between them, and it is enough.
I have never in my life said that about anything.