Milo
He drove. The car found the route while his brain stayed on the ice, replaying the pass.
The click of tape-to-tape when the physics and the timing lined up.
The goal horn going off, which was a physical event if you were standing on the ice when it happened.
Sound came through the blades into his feet and up through his legs before it reached his ears.
He parked on the second level and looked at the donut sign. Five letters tonight. The D had come back.
He crossed the street and pushed through the Grotto’s door.
* * *
The warmth hit him, and the music was different.
Not wrong. Different. Up-tempo, a guitar doing something confident over a bass line that held everything together, more energy than Milo associated with this room. On bad nights the music was low and warm, trumpet or piano. Tonight it had opinions.
He sat on the third stool. The mahogany was warm under his forearms. The black walls pulled the room in close.
Adrian was at the far end, finishing with a customer in a flannel jacket.
Adrian. The name that had been taking up space in Milo’s head for a week, ever since the website, the staff page, the photo that didn’t look like him.
The name his brain supplied every time the man moved behind the bar whether Milo had asked for it or not.
Adrian closed out the flannel jacket with a nod and a settled tab, the cloth already finding a new section of wood before the customer had fully turned. Sleeves pushed to the elbows. Blue paint on his inner forearms.
He came to Milo’s end and reached for the bourbon and stopped.
Looked at Milo. Head tilted.
“You won tonight.”
Milo’s chest did something. Not because the words were complicated. Because the man had been paying attention to the schedule. The same way Milo had been paying attention to the staff page. And neither of them had said this out loud until right now.
“Yeah,” Milo said.
Adrian poured anyway. Same glass, same measure. “Same ritual either way?”
Milo picked up the glass and didn’t answer. Adrian moved on. No pressure. The unanswered question just sat there, and the room held it, and that was fine. Milo drank and the bourbon settled warm on top of the goal horn that was humming in his chest.
Somewhere around the second drink he understood why he’d come.
Not the routine. The overtime win was in his body, the goal horn and Brody’s hand on his neck and the tension between his shoulder blades finally letting go, and he had nowhere to put any of it.
He picked up his phone, scrolled through a short list of names, set it back down.
His sister would ask how many points. His father would make the sound he made, the low hm that covered wins and weeknights with the same mild acknowledgment.
He left the phone face-down on the bar.
“What is this?” he said.
Adrian glanced at the ceiling. “Khruangbin.”
Milo waited.
“Texas band. Three people. They do this thing with the bass where it carries everything and the other instruments orbit it.”
Milo went looking for the bass line and found it underneath the guitar, a low persistent pulse that had been there the whole time. Once he heard it, the guitar pulled back and the organ pulled back and the bass was the thing holding the room up from the bottom.
“Hm,” Milo said.
The corner of Adrian’s mouth moved. He went back to the cloth.
He hadn’t pushed. He’d pointed Milo at the bass line and let him find it, and when Milo offered one syllable, Adrian took it as a complete sentence. Milo had been ending conversations for years because people heard a one-word answer and kept going. Adrian heard a one-word answer and stopped.
“You always pick the music?” Milo said.
“Whoever’s behind the bar picks. House rule. You have a request?”
Music was background. No lyrics when he needed to think, something with a beat when he needed to stop thinking. He had no artists, no opinions, no vocabulary for it. “Not my area.”
The cloth stopped. “What is?”
“Hockey,” Milo said.
“Obviously.” The mouth corner again. “And?”
The and sat open. Adrian leaned on his forearms, and he was closer than he’d been all night, and Milo caught it for the first time.
Underneath the bar smell, underneath the wood and the old beer, something that was just Adrian.
Paint thinner and soap and skin. Milo’s mouth went dry.
He picked up the glass and drank and the bourbon didn’t help.
The honest list was short. Equipment, schedule, game film, the routines that filled the hours between ice time. The route from the arena to this bar to the apartment.
“Not much,” he said.
Adrian nodded like that was a perfectly fine answer and went back to wiping.
Milo watched his hands. The blue paint was concentrated at the base of his thumb, paler toward the fingertips, a smear along his index finger where he’d dragged it across something wet.
Milo was cataloguing another man’s hands at eleven o’clock on a weeknight and he was going to deal with what that meant later. Much later. Possibly never.
The bar emptied. Adrian flipped the record one-handed. The bass picked up where it had left off.
“I grew up in Ontario,” Milo said.
He hadn’t planned on saying that.
“Cold there?” Adrian said.
“Yes.”
“Cold here too. Different cold, though. Ours is wet.”
Ontario cold had been dry, the kind that went into the lungs clean and came back out visible. Detroit’s cold was heavier. The lake in it. His mother still sent wool socks, two pairs at a time, and the cold found the bone anyway.
“Yeah,” Milo said.
Adrian’s hands went flat on the bar. Eyes on Milo.
“Sault Ste. Marie,” Milo said. He meant the junior team.
Sixteen and a bus ride from everything he’d known, a billet family’s basement with a window that frosted over by the first snow and stayed that way until spring.
Every game-day program he’d ever been printed in had this information.
He said it anyway because saying it was different from it being known. “First season. Sixteen.”
“Long way from home when you’re sixteen.”
“My mom sent me to my aunt in Lagos for a summer when I was fourteen,” Adrian said. He’d straightened from the counter, weight forward. His glasses had slipped and he didn’t push them up. “Two months. Felt like a decade.”
Lagos. Fourteen. Milo had done that same math in the billet basement. The distance from home was the same size even when the miles were different.
“She send care packages?” Milo said.
“Every six weeks. Last month there was a framed art print. With a note.” Adrian stopped. When he started again his voice had dropped into his mother’s cadence. “‘It’s not too much, is it?’”
A framed print. A mother’s handwriting. A question that was really love in the only shape it knew how to take.
“My mother sends socks,” Milo said. “Wool. Same pattern every year. I have fourteen pairs.”
Adrian looked at him. His chin lifted. “The same ones?”
“Different colors. Otherwise identical.” He wore them because she sent them and it cost him nothing, and he couldn’t tell her the truth about anything else, so the socks were a language they both spoke without saying what it was. “I wear them.”
“Of course you do.”
Milo laughed.
Short, surprised, a sound his body made without permission. In the bar, with the bass in its quiet section and the room down to just the two of them, the laugh went out and had nowhere to go.
Adrian’s hands went still on the bar.
Milo was already closing. Jaw coming back, face locking into place. His hand found the glass, his eyes found the bar top.
He looked up.
Adrian was leaning on his palms, fingers spread on the mahogany, the paint along the edge of his left thumb. Brown eyes behind the glasses, face open. Both hands pressed to the bar.
Milo looked at the bar top. He reached for his wallet. Set cash on the rail and stood.
“Night,” he said.
“Good game tonight,” Adrian said.
Milo was already moving. Twelve steps to the door. He covered them without looking back, the bass line following him through the room until he pushed through the door and the cold took it away.
* * *
The cold hit him and he crossed the street and got into the car.
He started the engine and put his hands on the wheel. Cold through his palms, the parking structure radiating through the leather. He left the heat off. His breath fogged the windshield at the corners.
He wasn’t thinking about the laugh. He was thinking about what had come before it. His shoulders had dropped at some point during the socks conversation, the tension leaving before he noticed. His jaw had unclenched for one second before he’d locked it back down.
He knew his own system. He managed the doors. The laugh had not been a door he’d opened. It had gone through without asking.
Brody’s road-trip jokes hit correctly, setup, turn, landing, and produced an exhale through the nose. The exhale for Brody was measured. The laugh in the bar had not been measured, and his body knew the difference.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum.
He thought about the glass. Between the second bourbon and standing up, there had been a moment.
Adrian reaching across to take the empty, Milo’s hand resting beside it, and Adrian’s fingers closing on the glass a half-inch away.
The brush of Adrian’s index finger against the outside of Milo’s hand.
The paint-rough texture of it. A quarter-second of contact that went through his skin and dropped through his stomach and kept going.
The goal horn had traveled through the ice into his skates and stopped at his legs. This hadn’t stopped.
His hand had not moved.
He’d sat there with Adrian’s finger against his knuckle and had not moved.
Adrian lifted the glass away. Milo put his hand in his lap.
Neither of them said anything. Milo had left the bar eleven minutes later with his jacket held in front of him and his jaw locked and his body carrying something it had never carried out of that building before.
He sat in the car. The heat was running and it wasn’t helping.
His jeans were tight and his skin was too warm and the parking structure was cold and empty and none of it was fixing the problem, which was that a man’s finger had touched his knuckle for less than a second and Milo was sitting in a parked car at midnight hard enough that his hands were shaking.
He put his forehead on the steering wheel.
He undid his jeans.
Not a decision. The same way the laugh hadn’t been a decision. His hand moved and his brain caught up three seconds later and by then it was too late to stop because stopping would require a version of him that was in charge and that version had left when Adrian’s finger touched his knuckle.
He kept his forehead on the wheel. Eyes closed. The parking structure was empty and the windows were fogged and nobody was here and he hated that the first thing he thought was nobody can see, hated that the thought was a relief, hated that relief was the thing that let his hand move faster.
Adrian’s hands on the bar. The paint in the creases. The way he’d leaned forward on his palms after the laugh, face open, glasses catching light, fingers spread on the mahogany. The forearms. The cloth stopping. Paint thinner and soap and skin.
His grip tightened. His breath came in short pulls through his teeth and the fogged windshield gave him nothing back, and when he came it was with his jaw locked shut and Adrian’s name in his throat where he held it.
He sat there after. Hand wet. Chest heaving. The car fogged to the edges of the glass.
He cleaned up with a napkin from the console and sat with his hands in his lap and stared at the windshield. No category for this. No file. No system that accounted for jerking off in a parking structure to the memory of a bartender’s hands.
He drove home. The apartment was cold and the bed was empty and he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling and his body was spent and his brain was not and the last thing he thought before sleep came was not the goal horn or the overtime win or the score.
It was paint thinner and soap and skin.
And the cloth stopping.