Niko
Chapter twenty-four
The section the website called value seating had one real value for me. Nobody up there cared who I was. For two periods I sat twelve rows from the roof between a man keeping score on paper and a family of four in matching jerseys.
When he scored in the third, everyone leaped to their feet to cheer. The man with the scorecard pounded my shoulder like we’d known each other for years. Rafe was a hero, and three weeks ago half of them had booed him every time he touched the puck.
Halfway through the game, I decided I didn’t want to remain in the rafters. With two minutes on the clock, I got up and worked my way down the empty concourse stairs. I had a number that could get me where I wanted to go.
Mark, a PR man with the Ironhawks, had shaken Ma’s hand at the Palmer House and given her his number. She shared it with me. Now I was ready to call in a favor.
He picked up on the second ring.
“Mark Corley.”
“It’s Niko Gregory. I’m in the building.”
He paused for a half-second. “Where?”
“Section 318. Top of the stairs.”
“Stay there.”
The horn sounded while I waited, and I felt the cheers through the concrete. Mark arrived in less than five minutes, wearing a suit with a lanyard and no tie.
He didn’t ask where I wanted to go. He just said, “This way,” and badged us through a door marked STAFF into the concrete guts of the building.
“Good game,” he said on the stairs.
At the bottom, he pushed open a door, and the sound changed. We were near the dividing line where the tunnel from the ice turned into a hallway into the garage. Down at the far end, the media gathered around the locker room doors, dozens of voices asking questions over each other.
Mark stopped me short of all of it, in the open stretch where the players would pass on their way out. He stepped back several feet, put his hands in his pockets, and pressed himself against the wall.
I took my place at the mouth of the tunnel, in a place fans normally couldn’t go, and waited.
At first, I couldn’t see Rafe at all. I saw only the glow of the camera lights and the boom mic hanging in the air like a giant fishing pole.
Then I heard his voice coming through a gap in the questions.
He finished. He told them that he had nothing more to say. Somebody laughed, and the boom mic lifted away. Suddenly, about fifty feet away, the crowd parted enough for me to see him.
He was looking toward the way out. He saw the hallway first, and then he saw me.
His face broke into a massive smile, and then he walked toward me.
He didn’t hurry. A few of the reporters followed his sightline and spotted me. They didn’t follow him, and I watched smiles form on their faces, too.
The hockey star was on his way to claim his craftsman boyfriend. When he reached me, Rafe didn’t speak. He pulled off a glove, shoved it under his arm, and took my chin in his bare fingers.
Then he kissed me in front of a wall of cameras.
Lights flashed, and I heard one reporter gasp, “Oh, my God.” It wasn’t an angry exclamation. It was one of wonder at being in that place at precisely that moment.
Mark made no move to stop any of it.
Rafe pulled back enough to whisper in my ear. “Come home with me.” Before I could answer, he added, “Tomorrow morning I mean. Not tonight. I’m too wired. I’m still half on the ice, but in the morning, I want to come get you and take you home with me.”
“Yes,” I said.
It all lasted less than a minute, perfect to appear on TV and phone screens across the country. They wouldn’t hear the whisper. They would only see the kiss. I was happy to let them have that.
He pulled back from the kiss. “Morning.”
“Morning,” I confirmed.
Rafe backed up a step, and the media crowd swallowed him. I turned the other way and passed Mark, still pressed against the wall.
“Mr. Gregory,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said.
***
I was awake and downstairs in the shop by seven a.m. Max had sent eleven messages between midnight and one a.m. I considered that impressive restraint.
The first ten were variations on a theme. I laughed about the eleventh.
Max: I’m not going to call you. I want credit for not calling you. I’ll take payment in dinner, Chinese
I waited and have to admit that I was fidgety for one of the first times in my life. I’d wiped the bench down a fifth time when I heard a truck pull in and park at the curb across the street.
When I heard the thunk of the door, I put my rag down and walked to the door. I opened it at the first rap of knuckles.
He’d navigated his night well. His arms hung loose at his sides, and he was wearing a coat over a henley, properly zipped up. The morning cold still colored his cheeks rosy pink.
He spoke first. “Good mor—“ and I didn’t let him finish before wrapping him in a hug.
After a quick kiss, he nodded toward the stairs. “Do you need anything from up there?”
“Coat, and it’s down here. That’s it.”
The truck was warm and smelled like Rafe. He pulled out onto the street and started talking. It wasn’t an excited flood. It was a simple recap of the past several hours.
Varga had claimed credit for the kiss in the team chat on the grounds that he had taught Rafe everything he knew about boyfriends. Heath shared the news that the puck he’d given the kid at the glass was already framed on the kid’s dresser, in a case meant for a baseball.
His phone buzzed twice on the console while he talked. He didn’t look at it.
***
I stopped two steps inside the door to Rafe’s apartment. The last time I was there, I’d carried a console up with him and left with a story untold.
How did that masterful tapestry get there?
Now there were more questions to ask. There was a bowl on the console. It was ceramic, covered in a blue-gray glaze, applied by hand. Beside the couch was a reading lamp I’d never seen.
The pieces had been carefully chosen. The sectional was still there, but scattered through the room now were objects Rafe wanted.
He watched me read the room and said nothing. He just took my coat and hung it beside his on hooks by the door.
When I stepped up to the console, staring at the tapestry above it, Rafe finally spoke.
“You asked me once,” he said, “why it was the only thing in here that looked like somebody cared about making it.”
I turned around. He was just behind me.
“I remember your answer. You said you just liked it.”
“That made it sound like I grabbed it at the airport.” He reached for my hand, and we both turned to look at the piece.
“I was fifteen,” he said. “I was on a church mission trip in Ecuador. It was two weeks, and it rained almost every day. I joked that we never saw the tops of the volcanoes.” He squeezed my hand.
“The last full day we were there, they took us to a street market, and everybody wanted to walk it end to end. Three stalls in a woman was working a loom outside her shop. She had it tied to a post and the other end tied to her. She leaned against the tension, and the cloth just—came into existence. From colored strings.”
He stared at the intricate blend of colors while he spoke.
“Everybody else kept walking, but I stayed and watched the woman. She spoke little English, and I only knew the Spanish words picked up on the trip, so mostly she showed me. The red came from a bug that lives on cactus. She had a jar of them, dried and looking like gravel, and she crushed some in her palm with a little water to show me how her hand turned the color of a stop sign. She told me she’d been working on the piece on the loom for months. ”
“How long did you stand there?”
“They came back for me,” he said. “That’s how long.
Our youth minister thought I’d gotten lost. I’d been with the woman for two hours.
” He took a breath. “Since it rained all the time, I hadn’t spent most of the money I brought on the trip.
I spent almost all of it on a finished piece she had.
I carried it, wrapped in paper, on my lap on the plane because I was nervous about damaging it in my bag. ”
He leaned in and kissed my cheek.
“I’ve moved eight times since then. I lived with billet families during juniors, and then I moved here to Chicago.
I didn’t care about anything else I brought with me or bought when I got this apartment.
I put the tapestry up first in every place.
I asked the families if I could put a nail in their wall.
” His voice softened. “Nobody told me to like it. It doesn’t go with anything.
I just saw it and wanted it and bought it. ”
“Thank you,” I said, “for telling me.”
He nodded and looked lighter, having told his story.
“Rafe,” I asked, “what do you want?”
He looked back at me.
“I want you to leave your stuff here,” he said. “I want you to have a toothbrush in my bathroom. I emptied out a drawer in the bedroom last night.”
“There’s a spare key for you in the shop,” I said. “It’s been in the bench drawer for over a month now. I cut it after you squared my block plane. Now I know why.”
The morning light had moved while we stood there, off the weaving and out across the room, and I kissed him in the middle of it.
He led me down the hall by the hand. The bedroom was hotel-neat, bare dresser and hospital corners on the bed.
“I keep thinking I should turn a lamp on,” he said. “Which is stupid. It’s daytime.”
“It’s not stupid.” I came to stand in front of him. “We’ve never done this where we could see everything.”
He reached for the hem of my shirt, and I lifted my arms. We undressed each other slowly. We had the whole day ahead of us. Coach Markel had given the team a full day off.
I’d had Rafe’s body against mine twice in the dark, and I’d thought I knew it.
I hadn’t known it at all. Daylight showed me everything the streetlamp only suggested: the map of a hockey season written on his flesh, with a bruise on his hip gone yellow-green at the edges, and a fresh one over his ribs from Minnesota.
There was the flush that started at his cheekbones and went all the way down his chest. He watched me look and held still for it while his breathing turned shallow.
“You too,” he said.
Nobody had examined my body so closely in years.
I’d forgotten what it asked of me. He reached up and patiently ran his fingers over me, missing nothing.
He traced the line of an old chisel scar across the heel of my left hand, and then a burn on my forearm caused by a careless afternoon with a heat gun.
“Come here,” I said, and I pulled him down onto the bed with me without unmaking it.
We moved slowly at first, but being able to watch Rafe’s face changed everything. In the dark I had to read him by sound and grip. In the light, I caught the exact moment a touch landed, tracking when his eyes lost focus.
When I kissed my way down his chest, he was loud in a way he hadn’t let himself be at night. I dragged my mouth over his hip, avoiding the bruise, and he nearly shouted my name.
“The neighbors,” he said.
“Are at work.”
“What if they work from home?”
“Then they’ll know my name,” I said, and took him into my mouth.
It was the first time I had him in my mouth.
He balled the comforter in his fists and pushed his head back hard against the pillow.
It exposed his throat, Adam’s apple rising and falling.
I took my time, easing off when his breathing told me he was close, until he was trembling and laughing at the same time.
“Niko, don’t stop,” he said.
“Tell me what you want.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “I want you inside me. I’ve thought about it. I want it to be now, while I can see you in the daylight.”
I took a breath and then kissed his chest.
“Nightstand,” Rafe said. “I bought what we need. I had to drive to a pharmacy in Skokie so it wouldn’t end up on a gossip site.”
The drawer held a box and a bottle.
I opened him with my lubed fingers and more patience than I knew I had, reading his face the whole time for the difference between new and wrong. He watched me back, taking long, deliberate breaths.
“That’s different,” he said. “Okay, that feels good. Oh!” When I crooked my fingers and found what I was hunting for, his body jerked, and he swore, and then he laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, now. Before I think about it too hard.”
“You’re allowed to think about it.”
“I’ve thought about it for over a month, Niko. Now.”
The first push took work. He was tight and new at this, and my cock went in by half-inches with sweat popping out on my forehead while I watched his face.
It was too much at one point. I saw it in his face and stopped. He breathed through it with his eyes on the ceiling and one hand gripping my forearm.
“Talk,” he said. “About anything. Wood.”
“The bed’s cherry,” I whispered against his ear. “Whoever made it did honest work. Mortise and tenon at the corners. It doesn’t creak because it can’t.”
“How can you tell mortise and— “ and then his body let go all at once, the last resistance leaving him like a clamp released. I slid home, and there was no sound except for our breathing. We lay there joined in the light, his eyes an inch from mine, both of us panting as if we’d carried something heavy up the stairs.
We found a rhythm together, slow and then faster. I could see it all when the pleasure hit him, and he kept his eyes open the whole time, focused on my face.
Rafe wrapped a hand around the back of my neck. The headboard knocked the wall twice, and we ignored it. The bed didn’t creak, but it could move.
“Close,” I told him.
“Keep your eyes open,” he said.
I came looking at his face, and I stroked him until he came, too.
Afterward, we lay wrecked across the bed, the comforter half on the floor.
We slept in each other’s arms and woke and talked about nothing. He went to the kitchen and brought back water. I drank it while he answered two texts, one from his mother and one from Max.
We got hungry around one and ate standing at his counter. He made chicken salad sandwiches with grocery store chicken salad Varga recommended.
It was nearly three when I noticed the light.
It came in sideways through the living room window, exactly as I’d told Rafe it would. It crossed the floor and climbed the console, and the walnut did what walnut does in low sun. The brown turned deep red.
“Rafe,” I said.
He came out of the kitchen drying his hands, and I nodded at the console, and he stopped.
“You told me about this,” he said. “The day you brought it. You said I’d see it in the summer, because I’m never home at three.”
“You’re home at three.”