Chapter 3 #2
The bed was a queen, made with the tightness of a man who’d learned to make a bed somewhere with rules.
There was only one bed because there had only ever been one person, and Shane stood in the doorway with his two duffels, everything he owned that mattered, two duffels, that was the sum of Shane Novak, and he looked at the bed and the duffels and the bed and couldn’t find where he fit in either of them.
“This is weird,” he said. “This is really weird, Theo.”
“Yes,” Theo agreed, from behind him.
“We hate each other.”
“Yes.”
“And now we live here. Married. In your apartment with your weird supplements and your one couch.”
“Yes.” A pause. “There is a story you should know, before it comes up. I keep the thermostat at sixty-three. This is not negotiable. My body recovers better cold.”
Shane turned around. Theo was standing in the little living room holding the marriage certificate, looking for somewhere to put it, the giant unsmiling man with a document that bound them, hunting for a spot on a counter that had nothing on it, and the laugh came up before Shane could stop it, the first real one in a month, and it surprised them both.
“Sixty-three,” Shane said. “You’re going to freeze me to death and collect the — wait, is there insurance? Did I marry you into a life insurance situation?”
“You are worth more to me alive,” Theo said, deadpan, and set the certificate down in the exact center of the empty counter, squaring its edges to the edges of the laminate, and Shane laughed again, harder, and hated himself for it, because the deal was clean and cold and nothing else.
He’d written it down. He’d pressed the pen so hard it tore the napkin.
And here he was on day one laughing in the kitchen of a man he’d sworn to keep at the length of a hockey stick.
“I’m taking the bed,” Shane said, to cover it.
“It is in the agreement.”
“I’m taking all the hot water, too.”
“There is not much.” Theo went to the closet and took out a blanket, folded into a perfect square, and laid it on the too-short couch.
He sat down on the edge to test it, and his knees came up almost to his chest. Shane stood in the doorway of the bedroom that was now his and watched his enemy try to fit his enormous body onto a piece of furniture that would never hold him, all so Shane could have the bed.
There was no name for it, no room for it in the agreement.
He went into the bedroom, shut the door, and stood in the cold with his two duffels and his mother’s secret and his ring-shaped future, and thought: this is going to be a problem. It was going to be such a problem.
* * *
The cover story rolled out at practice the next morning, and it went wrong, because Shane Novak could not, constitutionally, leave a simple thing simple.
The plan was nothing. The plan was: they’d moved in together, roommates, cheaper rent, closer to the rink, the most boring sentence in hockey, a sentence half the league could say without lying. Theo had rehearsed it in the car. We are roommates now. It is cheaper. That is all.
“—so yeah, we’re roomies now, which, I know, I know, believe me, I said the same thing, but the math just made sense, you know?
My place was a disaster, three of us crammed in, somebody was always eating my food, and Theo’s place is nice, it’s clean, it’s like aggressively clean, you could do surgery in there, and it’s like four minutes from the barn, and the rent split is good, anyway it’s temporary, probably, we’ll see, it’s a trial thing, a trial period—”
“It is not a trial,” Theo said, from two stalls down, because a trial period sounded exactly like the kind of thing a person said about a marriage they were hiding.
“—well, everything’s a trial, that’s just life, Theo, very Swedish of you to—”
“Boys.” Marek Dvo?ák, lacing his skates, not looking up, the captain’s mild voice that ended things.
“Nobody asked for the TED talk. You moved in together. Great. Wozniak’s been trying to find a roommate for a year, maybe take notes, Woz.
” And the room laughed and moved on, because that was the thing about a hockey room: it did not actually care, it had twenty other things to chirp about, and an over-explained living arrangement was forgotten by the time the Zamboni doors opened.
Except Marek looked up, once, after. Just for a second.
His steady eyes went from Shane to Theo and back, and he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t smile, and then he went back to his laces.
Shane watched Theo across the room: the set of his jaw, the stillness that had come over him, not looking at Marek again.
Shane didn’t look at Marek either. He pulled his laces tight and said nothing.
On the ice, it was worse and better. Worse because Shane was rattled, stiff, hyperaware of Theo in a way that had nothing to do with the system, flinching at contact in the corners like the contact counted now.
Better because when they did connect, Shane feeding him a puck, the puck landing exactly where it was supposed to, there was a new thing in it, a current Shane couldn’t name.
Mercer blew the whistle and barked, “Lindgren, Novak, you two are playing like you’re on a first date, knock it off, find your game,” and Shane’s ears went red under his helmet, and he skated hard for the far boards and stared at the ice and the word date rang around the empty rafters and didn’t stop.
After, in the lot, Shane caught him at the Volvo.
“I panicked. I panic-talk. It’s a whole thing, my mom says I’ve done it since I was—” He stopped.
Looked at his shoes. “Thanks. For not blinking. I said that whole thing about the surgery, aggressively clean, who even talks like that, and you just stood there like it was nothing. The room bought it.”
“The room buys everything,” Theo said. “The room wants to think about hockey and what is for dinner. It is not the room I worry about.” He glanced back at the barn, where Marek’s truck was just pulling out. “It is the ones who watch.”
Shane followed his gaze. The noise went out of his face for a moment, the trapdoor opening. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. We’ll be careful.” A beat. “Home?”
It was the first time either of them had called it that, by accident, home, a one-bedroom neither of them had chosen for love.
They both heard it, and neither of them corrected it.
Shane got in his financed car, and Theo got in his Volvo, and they drove the four minutes home in two cars to the one apartment, a small, ridiculous parade.
Shane’s hand found the loose ring on his finger and turned it once, and he thought, this is going to be such a problem, for the second time in twelve hours.
On the counter, in the dark, the license sat squared to the laminate, the only thing in the clean apartment that didn’t quite belong to either of them.
Outside, the snow came down on Rockford and on the barn and on the ninety miles of highway between here and everything they both wanted.
In the morning, they had practice, and the morning after that, and a whole season of mornings, each one a little harder to keep cold than the last.