Chapter 19 #2
Cameras hunt everything in moments like this, so I pull him in like I'm shouting about the game and put my words against his ear, under all the noise, for him and nobody else. "You like me this way."
His grin goes private for half a second, arena be damned. "Tragically."
The crowd chants my first name. This city made a practical decision about my surname years ago.
The campaign handshake line forms at center. Becker reaches me first. "That was absolutely disgusting."
I accept the compliment with a nod.
Ace takes my hand and looks at my glove like it owes him an explanation.
Then comes Wall.
His composure is fully reinstalled, but his jaw is working overtime underneath it. His hand closes around mine and stays one second past regulation. "That was the best save I've ever seen in person."
The chanting, the cameras, all of it goes distant. He watched that save the way only one man in this building could watch it, knowing the geometry, the edge I had left, exactly what it cost. Highlights will run and re-run it all week and none of them will give me what those four words just did.
I hold his eyes. "I know."
One corner of his mouth curls up. Then my hand is empty and he's following his team off the ice.
The locker room is in that intoxicating, post-win way, and it holds me for about four minutes before I find the tablet and pull up their goal. Kane's release. Groover's stick, arriving.
Damn, Groover.
A towel drops over the screen, and Theo's hand lands flat on top of it. "No autopsies on game night."
I hook two fingers under the towel. "Move."
He presses down. "Cause of death: tip. Time of death: second period. Next of kin notified. Let the puck rest."
I pull the towel aside far enough to expose the frozen frame. "It changed direction off Groover."
Theo looks up at Lindqvist passing behind us. "Cap, he's disturbing the body."
Lindqvist yanks the tablet out of my hands without breaking stride. "Media."
I hold out my hand. "I need that."
He looks at my bare legs, then at my half-fastened shirt. "You need trousers."
Theo puts a hand over his heart. "Leadership."
I put on trousers.
Media wants the save and the standings, in that order, and I hand out angles and seam coverage until one reporter leans into his microphone, producing feedback. "Best save you've made this season?"
Wall's hand is still warm in mine. That's the problem. Those four words are for me, and for me only, and this microphone is getting none of them. "Best save I made tonight."
***
WALL'S BAG IS the first thing I see when I enter my place.
Compact, black, parked next to the coat rack like it belongs. At some point in the recent past that stopped being a thing anyone announces, and I couldn't tell you when exactly. It just kind of happened.
Media made me the last man home to my own apartment. Theo used his key. Wall brought his bag. The two facts hang there by the shoe rack, waiting to see what I do with them.
Voices reach me from the kitchen. Theo's, running its usual marathon, Wall's underneath, low, dropping in a word here and there.
I stop in the kitchen doorway, and for a few seconds, they don’t notice.
Theo is barefoot on my counter, cross-legged, eating out of the container labeled MONDAY.
Today’s very much not a Monday. Wall stands at the island in a black hoodie, working through a second container with my good fork, the one fork in this apartment worth calling good, which he has located on his first unsupervised evening here.
On the television above the cabinets, my glove is catching Ace's shot with the sound low.
And at my usual spot at the island, under a sheet of foil, sits a plate.
They made me a plate.
I make the plates. That's the constitution of this kitchen. I know Theo eats double after games and ignores anything green unless it's hidden under chicken. I know Wall announces he isn't hungry and then wolfs down everything within arm’s reach for an hour.
That's my data. I collected it.
And while I was busy collecting it, these two were keeping their own book on me, because I can tell from the doorway that the plate under that foil holds the bigger piece of chicken, the one I portioned this morning without either of them knowing why.
Something goes through my chest that no spreadsheet of mine has a column for.
I built this apartment for one man with one schedule.
One set of containers, labeled by day, one fork worth defending.
Now there's a bag at my coat rack and bare feet on my counter and my save replaying for two men who watched it live from opposite ends of the rink, and a plate they prepped for me, in my own kitchen.
I peel myself off the doorframe and point at Theo's container. "That was Monday's lunch."
He lifts his fork in salute. "It was. Then you became a hero and earned the right to watch us eat it."
Wall looks down at his container. "Your portions are inefficient."
He says this holding my good fork, eating my food, and the tenderness of the whole arrangement comes at me sideways. I reach for faux-irritation instead. "Get out."
Wall takes another bite. "No."
Good.
On the television, my glove closes around the shot again. Theo points his fork at Wall. "He's watched it six times."
"Three."
Theo ignores him. "The first two were standing up."
I take out my phone.
I chuckle. "You're both very normal about hockey."
Wall finally looks at me. "You already saved it to your phone, didn’t you?"
I did. It sits in my camera roll to deal with later, along with a text from my father.
Theo moves on to demolishing the vegetables now, which means the container is in its final minutes, and Wall goes back to the replay, five viewings now, or whatever number he's willing to admit to, and there's a bag by my door because he plans to still be here tomorrow. Nobody asked me to approve any of this.
My phone burns a hole in my pocket.
My father knows the save already. He's probably watched it more times than Wall. He knows my glove hand, my numbers, the standings down to the decimal, because that's the version of my life I ship to him. The broadcast cut. Edited for content, family-friendly, delivered by a thumbs-up.
The two men in this kitchen never got the broadcast cut. They walked into the middle of the live one and started making plates.
Theo’s voice yanks me out of my own head. "Everything okay?"
"Yes." It comes out fast and polished. I look at the foil and think back about the bag in my hallway, then shove my hand into my pocket, my fingers closing around my phone. "I need five minutes."
Wall's attention in still on the screen. "Take ten. We can manage without you."
I go to my bedroom, and pull the door most of the way shut behind me.
The bed takes my weight and the post-game aches arrive, the whole night's work settling into my hips and my wrists. I pull up my father’s contact and I press call before any speech can start assembling, because if I give myself time to draft one, I'll still be up here at dawn, editing.
He answers on the first ring. "That last save took five years off my life."
His kitchen radio is going in the background. I press my free hand into the mattress.
Hockey, offered one more time, and I take it, because I am brave in increments. "You say that after every game."
"Because you have taken seventy years already. I should be dead."
"You sound healthy to me."
"Out of spite. It’s very sustaining."
I laugh, and it loosens my chest a little.
"Big win," he adds. "You needed it."
"We're above the line now, barely, but still. Thursday could give us room—"
"Patryk."
I drag my calm along the comforter. "What?"
"You called. Usually after a win you send me a thumb."
I chuckle. "I send words."
"Last month you sent 'good.' It was a holiday."
Beyond the door, Theo laughs at something. Wall's answer runs too low to catch. I could still bail out of this. Ask about his knee. Ask whether he changed the tires. I stare at the strip of light under the door. “Tato…”
“Yes?”
My next swallow is painful in my constricted throat. “Do you remember… Remember how you said I sounded lighter?”
"I remember."
“Well… There's a reason."
"Oh?"
One word, and then he leaves the space open. My grip tightens on the phone. "I'm seeing someone."
There. Three words, and my pulse takes off like I'm facing a penalty shot. The plan, if I can even call it that, goes: someone, then a man, then survive whatever his next breath sounds like. Step one, deployed. Step two, loading.
"The red one, or the loud one?"
Everything stops then.
I hear the words fine. Individually they're simple words.
Assembled, they refuse to mean anything, because the question is impossible.
My mind actually goes looking for women.
A redhead. Someone loud. It scrambles through years of introductions and comes back holding nothing, because there is nothing to hold.
He skipped it. The confession I've been building toward for half my life, the a man, the terrible pause, the listening to his breathing for a verdict — my father just stepped over the entire staged production and asked me which of the two men, in the tone he uses to talk about car tires.
He knows.
He's known long enough to narrow the field, apparently. Long enough to pick out descriptions.
I sit on the edge of my own bed, motionless, stripped to nothing by one question, and underneath the exposure, arriving like water after a long game, is this: he knows I'm seeing a man, and his voice hasn't changed.
It hasn't changed at all.
I take a slow breath and close my eyes. “B— Both, actually."
The radio plays. I can hear the presenter turn a page. Then my father exhales through what is unmistakably a smile. "You always were an overachiever."
A laugh rips out of me, wobbles halfway through, then stops pretending to be just a laugh. I press the heel of my hand against one eye and hold it there until words are possible again. "How did you know?"
"I guessed."
I lower my hand. "What do you mean, you guessed?"
"I have eyes. And there are many videos."