Chapter 4 #2
“It comes out of the same account that paid your mother,” Theo said, in the elevator, flat. “It is already gone. You arguing about it does not bring it back. It only makes the elevator ride long.”
“I’m just saying I could—”
“You could not.”
Dana turned out to be in her forties, sharp and unsentimental, with a desk full of other people’s hope. She had Theo’s file open before they sat down.
“I’m going to be straight with you both.
The government assumes you’re lying. A foreign athlete whose work visa is lapsing marries a citizen mid-season: that’s the textbook shape of marriage fraud.
They will look for it. And if they find it, it’s not just a denial.
It’s a permanent bar for Theo, and a federal charge for you.
” She looked at Shane. “People do time.”
Shane’s hands went flat on his thighs.
“So,” Dana said. “I need a straight answer. Is this a real marriage, shared home, shared life, or did you do this on paper?”
Theo opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He looked at Shane.
“We live together,” Shane said, and his voice was steady, no pause, no tell, answering for both of them before Theo had to figure out how.
“Same apartment. A one-bedroom. We share everything: the rent, the groceries, the stupid life. We’re figuring it out, like anybody.
It’s new. But it’s real. We’re not faking the marriage.
We’re just—” he glanced at Theo “—private about how it started. That’s not a crime. Being private.”
Dana studied them both for a long moment, the practiced read, and whatever she saw, two enormous men sitting too close in client chairs, one of them having just answered for the other without being asked, made her face settle.
“No,” she agreed. “Being private isn’t a crime.
” She closed the file. “I’ve sat across from the real arrangements.
They don’t look like you two.” She slid forms across the desk.
“Live your life. Keep the lease in both names, the joint account. Don’t rehearse.
The couples who fail are the ones who memorize.
The ones who pass are the ones who just answer.
” She stood. “Build a real marriage, gentlemen. Best legal strategy I’ve got. ”
In the elevator down, neither of them said anything for several floors.
“‘Build a real marriage,’” Shane finally repeated, staring at the numbers. “As a legal strategy.”
“The truth is always efficient,” Theo said.
“Theo. If I get the answers wrong in some room someday, you don’t just get deported. It’s never-coming-back.”
“I know.” Theo watched the floors tick down. “I have known. I did not tell you, because you would have said no, and then your mother—” He stopped. “We do not fake it. We live it. Then there is nothing to catch.”
The elevator opened in the lobby. They walked out into the cold Loop wind, and Shane thought about building a real marriage as a legal strategy, and about the one bed, and about Theo unable to lie in Dana’s office, and his stomach lurched on a bad change, the ice opening.
* * *
The good shift happened in Cleveland.
It was the second period of a tight one, and Mercer had them out against the other team’s top line, and it clicked.
Shane never could explain it after, not to himself, not to anyone.
The two of them finally on the same clock, the bodies doing the thinking.
Shane jumped up into the rush, the gamble, the move Mercer yelled at him for, and instead of getting caught, he heard it.
Actually heard it over twelve thousand people, Theo’s voice, one word, “go,” and he knew without looking that Theo had already rotated back.
That he was already the house, was already covering the ice Shane had abandoned, and so Shane went, and the gamble worked because the safety net was real.
He put it in the top corner, and the lamp lit and the building groaned, and Shane wheeled around looking for the only person on the ice he wanted to find.
Theo was already there. They crashed into the glass together, and Theo’s gloved hands were fisted in Shane’s jersey, and Theo Lindgren, who had a resting expression like a man reading a tax bill, was grinning.
Actually grinning, a real one, wide and stunned and young, right into Shane’s face, close enough that their cages clacked, and he said, “There. That. You see? When you trust the house—”
“Shut up, that was all me—”
“It was the system—”
“It was my shot—”
And they were yelling, yelling the way they always did, except they were both laughing while they did it.
The rest of the line piled in, and nobody on that ice knew that the two men screaming joy into each other’s facemasks had stood at a beige counter eight days ago and signed a marriage license.
Shane skated to the bench on legs gone strange beneath him and sat down next to his husband and was, for the length of one shift, so happy he forgot to be ashamed of any of it.
Theo bumped his shoulder pad against Shane’s, once, on the bench, and Shane bumped back, and neither of them said anything, and the deal was supposed to be cold, and nothing about this was cold, and the standings, somewhere, ticked one notch tighter in the Blaze’s favor.
* * *
The team went to dinner after the Cleveland win, the road-trip ritual, a long table at a chain steakhouse, and the hard part turned out not to be the dangerous moments. The hard part was the ordinary ones.
He and Shane sat across from each other because sitting beside each other felt too obvious and sitting apart felt obvious in the other direction, and so they performed the careful middle distance of roommates while Marek held court at the head of the table and Wozniak told a story about a billet family’s dog and Tripp ordered the expensive thing on the menu because the prospect’s per diem was the prospect’s per diem.
Shane caught Theo watching him twice. Didn’t say anything.
The third time he looked up, Theo was already looking somewhere else, and Shane’s knee found Theo’s under the table once, by accident, and stayed, by not-accident, a warm point of contact neither of them acknowledged for the length of an entire dinner.
“You two are different,” Marek said.
He’d come down to their end of the table to steal fries off Wozniak, or that was the story, and he said it low, just to them, his steady eyes mild.
“Since you moved in. On the ice. You read each other now. It’s good hockey.
” A beat. “It’s also — you know. Different.
” And he took his fries and went back to the head of the table, and that was all, but it was the second narrowed look, the captain’s slow accumulation, and the cover story thinned a little more, thawing.
“He keeps doing that,” Shane murmured, after, when the table noise had closed back over them. “Marek. The look.”
“He knows something is different. He does not know what.” Theo turned his water glass a careful quarter-turn.
“He is the kind of man who waits. He will not ask. He will just accumulate. Until one day he knows, and he will have known for weeks, and he will not be surprised.” He glanced at Shane. “Your knee is on mine.”
“Yeah,” Shane said, and didn’t move it. “Is that — should I—”
“No,” Theo said, before he could decide not to. “It is fine. The tablecloth is long.” And he looked back at his plate.
Shane looked back at his own plate. Under the table, neither of them moved.
He didn’t know how long they sat like that.
Long enough for the check to come, long enough for Marek to push back his chair at the head of the table and call time on it.
And when they finally stood and filed out into the parking lot, Theo’s shoulder passing close in the cold Ohio air, Shane noticed that Theo didn’t put any distance between them.
Not even when there was room. He just walked, not touching, but close, hands in his jacket pockets, face pointed straight ahead, and Shane filed that away and didn’t look at it too closely.
* * *
A few nights later, the next road trip, the visitors’ room in Cleveland after a tight ugly road win.
The signal had started earlier that same night, on the ice, two periods before the laces.
Late in the second, hemmed into their own end, Shane had glanced back for his partner and Theo had rapped his stick twice on the boards, two flat taps, and Shane had understood it without a word: go, I have the back side.
He’d gone. The play had worked. It became theirs after that, the two taps, go, the one piece of language between them that never needed saying out loud.
Shane’s hands had gone bad on the bus, the way they did in the cold after a hard game, an old thing, knuckles that swelled and locked, nothing he’d ever mention, you didn’t mention your hands when your whole edge was your hands, and he was sitting at his stall trying to work the laces of his shoes with fingers that wouldn’t close, and failing, and starting to get the hot panic he got when his body wouldn’t do a simple thing, and Theo crouched down in front of him.
Just crouched. Didn’t say anything. Took the lace out of Shane’s clumsy fingers and tied the shoe.
Both shoes. Calm, unbothered, checking a tire, while Shane sat frozen and furious and undone above him, and the rest of the room didn’t notice because the rest of the room was a hockey team and a teammate tying your shoe was nothing, was funny, was aw, the lovebirds, somebody would’ve said if they’d looked, but nobody looked, and Theo finished the second shoe and stood up to his full ridiculous height and said, in a normal voice, “Your hands are bad in the cold.”
“They’re fine.”
“Eat more. You bonk in the third because you do not eat.” And he walked away to his own stall.
That was the whole of it.
Shane sat there. The room was loud, Wozniak holding court at the far end, Tripp’s music bleeding through one earbud, and Shane sat in the middle of all of it with his shoes tied by the man he was supposed to keep at arm’s length, and the resentment was still there, real, honest, he hadn’t made it up, the indignity of needing and the worse indignity of someone seeing the need and handling it without making it a thing.
He hated that. He hated it the way he hated being helped off the ice, hated his mother’s friends bringing casseroles after the diagnosis, charity with a face on it.
Except Theo hadn’t put a face on it.
He’d just crouched down. Done the lace. Walked away.
And the cold arithmetic that had been sitting in Shane’s chest, the this is just the rent, the don’t get tangled, it didn’t disappear.
But the weight in it moved. Like he’d been braced for a check that came in low instead of high, and now he was standing in a different way than he’d meant to be standing, and he didn’t know how to get back to where he’d been, and he already knew he was going to act on it.
Not now. Maybe not this week. But at some point he was going to do one decent thing for Theo Lindgren because he wanted to, not because the agreement said to, and he was going to do it quietly and walk away, and it was going to cost him, and he was going to let it.
He hadn’t decided to decide that. It was just already decided.
“Don’t,” he told himself, on the bus, forehead against the cold black window, the highway unspooling. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
Three rows up, Theo was reading in Swedish, and the dome light was on over his seat, and Shane watched the back of his stupid blond head for a while and then made himself stop, and the bus carried both of them home to the one bed and the one couch and the certificate squared to the laminate, and Shane did not sleep well, and it had nothing to do with the cold.