Chapter 25
PATRICK
I'VE PLAYED ENTIRE seasons with less preparation than this.
Berg's office, eight in the morning, and I have talking points.
Sequence, fallback positions, an answer drafted for every question the man could reasonably ask and four he couldn't. I requested five minutes and brought Lindqvist along, because I need them both to hear it from me, and that’s the only way to do that in Gossipville.
Berg looks up from his line sheet. "Well?"
I take one steadying breath and rip the band-aid. The quicker, the better. "I'm in a relationship. With two people. One of them is Moreau. The other is Wallace. It'll most likely be public soon, and I wanted you to have it first." I deliver all of that on a single exhale.
Berg's eyes go to the ceiling for a moment, like he’s doing math, maybe. Or locating an emotion. "Does it affect your glove side?"
Well, then. He managed to find one that wasn’t in my draft. "No."
"Then I don't care." He goes back to the line sheet. "Door's always open if anyone makes it your problem, though."
That's it. That's the whole meeting. Somewhere in my bag, a folder of contingencies dies unopened.
One band-aid off. One to go.
Lindqvist walks me down the hallway in his usual silence. Then, at the door to the locker room, he tips his head a degree. "The Wallace part," he says. "Is that why your save percentage went up?"
I try not to smile, and fail immediately. "You can't prove causation."
The room, I do standing in the middle of the floor, before practice, gear half on, on purpose. The more casual this looks, the better.
"Sixty seconds," I start. Sticks stop being taped.
Somebody turns the music down. "You're going to see something online soon, and I'd rather you hear it from me.
I'm—“ I clear my throat. “I’m…” My pulse kicks up a thousand notches and beads of sweat start forming all over my skin as momentary panic overwhelmes every cell in my body.
The next couple of breaths come with effort as I dart my eyes from person to person, twenty pairs of eyes scrutinizing my face, because ‘I’m’…
what? My mind tries desperately to read my notes, but the pages appear blank.
I’m…? And just as I’m about to finish it with, ‘Nevermind,’ my eyes lock with Theo’s.
There’s no worry in them. Forehead scrunched, no eyebrows raised, just a smile, soft and small. You’ve got this.
I do.
There is no noun I need to provide to make my point. They’re not owed my identity. No one is.
I nod to myself. “I’m with Moreau and Wallace, both. Questions come to me, not to him." I nod at Theo, who has arranged himself on his stall bench like an exhibit. "That's all. Thursday, we have Detroit. Let’s make sure we’re prepped."
Silence. One full breath of it, the room deciding what it is.
Then Dziedzic, standing by the gear rack with a skate in one hand, starts to clap, slow and pointed.
It catches. It rolls around the stalls, speeds up, picks up a couple of stick taps on the floor, somebody whistles, a rookie yells "Let’s go!
" at full volume, and most of the team is grinning at me, and at Theo, and it's already turning back into a Tuesday, tape and music and someone asking about the Detroit flight.
Under all of it, from the far stalls, at a volume designed to be heard and denied: "Didn't need a press conference about it."
Theo's already off the bench before I’ve finished saying, “Don’t.”
"No, no, no. Hold on." He raises both hands like a conductor.
"Quiet, everyone. The man has notes." He crosses the floor and stops in front of Eric’s stall with his skates still untied.
"A press conference? He said six words and gave you a travel update, you absolute expired coupon.
You participation trophy with a mortgage—" the room is already going "—you know what an actual press conference is?
It's what your agent begs for after every game.
You, you, you human beige." He leans in a half inch.
"He is the only reason your plus-minus can be read aloud without a priest present.
So next time he tells you anything, you clap like Dziedzic, or you donate your jaw to somebody with something to say.
May both sides of your pillow be warm forever, you rented thumb. "
The locker room is gone. Half the team is doubled over their stalls, the rookie wheezing, Dziedzic wiping his eyes with the skate still in his hand.
Eric opens his mouth, finds the entire room laughing in the wrong direction, and develops a sudden fascination with his tape job, and whatever his mutter was trying to be dies right there, of embarrassment, in front of witnesses.
I came in here braced for containment. Nobody told me I'd be defended. It goes through my chest sideways, the way the plate under the foil did, and I have to put my mask on earlier than I need to.
At the drill's first whistle, Lindqvist glides past me, still not fully recovered. "Keep both of them."
I smile. "That's the plan."
***
THE WOLVES FIND out the Vipers know by lunchtime, because Theo can’t sit on a secret to save his life, and by dinner a couples' thread forms and is immediately mobilized. "Coming out logistics support," they're calling it, which in practice means my phone becomes a receiving dock.
Mateo sends a document. Four pages, cited, on media framing of polyamorous athletes, with a cover note apologizing for the length and a second attachment labeled cross-cultural literature review (optional, for your own curiosity, no pressure).
It's good, actually. I read all of it. I will never admit how much of it I highlight.
Devon doesn't send anything. Devon video-calls, studies me in silence for three seconds, and delivers two findings. The beard stays, it's working. And if I hurt either of them, he knows a parrot who can find me.
He hangs up before I can respond to either item.
"Our in-laws are insane," I tell Theo, still looking at the dead screen.
"Our in-laws," he repeats, glowing like I've handed him a trophy.
***
THE GALA PHOTO post hits four digits on a Tuesday night.
We're at my kitchen island, all three of us, takeout boxes almost empty, and Wall has the account open, frowning.
"Low-follower aggregator. No sourcing. Two blogs picked it up this afternoon, though.
" He sets the phone down in the middle. "It grows a little every hour.
Somebody bigger will find it by the weekend. "
"So we're on a clock," Theo says. He's uncharacteristically still tonight, cross-legged on top of the island, and his eyes keep coming to me. They've both been careful with me for two days, leaving me the decision without ever saying it's mine.
"Okay. Options," I say. "One, we ignore it and let them dig. Two, we deny it and urge the entire internet to dig. Three, a statement. Press release, maybe? Or an interview, sit-down, the works."
Theo makes a face like I've offered him decaf. "A sit-down. The three of us on a couch opposite some guy going 'so, walk me through it.'"
Wall considers it. "I think we should be… Boring on purpose.”
Boring on purpose.
The phrase sits between the takeout and the phone. It isn’t a plan yet. I can feel the shape of what I want the way I feel a play building before the pass arrives. No press cycle, no thanking anyone for their support. Nothing anyone can point a microphone at.
What I don't have is the move itself, and for once in my life I'm holding a clipboard with nothing written on it.
Theo goes still for half a second, mid-bite, fork in the air, then straightens up. His eyes drift to the middle distance, and a grin starts building. The slow one.
Oh no.
"Theo?"
He puts the fork down, hops off the island, and leaves the kitchen without a word. Down the hallway, a light clicks on.
I look at Wall. Wall looks at me and shrugs one shoulder, and neither of us moves, because Theo exiting a room quietly is an ominous event, and we're both listening for the crash.
"Get in here," he calls instead.
The light is on in my bathroom. Theo stands at the sink with his arms crossed, nodding at it.
"There," he says.
I look at my perfectly normal sink, and my perfectly normal mirror, then back at the crazy person next to me. “Where?”
Theo rolls his eyes like I’m the crazy one, then jerks his chin and points both his palms, along with half of his body to the left corner, as if saying, Duh.
My eyes follow and land on the cup by the faucet. In it, three toothbrushes, leaning wherever they landed, a fact I’ve gotten so used to I’ve long stopped noticing.
"That's the announcement," Theo says. "One photo, no caption, no follow-up. No tagged little heart, and no explanation as long as any of us live. All three accounts, same time. We post the cup."
It shouldn’t make sense, and yet…
Nothing to explain, nothing to deny. No statement for anyone to parse for tone.
Just a photo that says nothing and means everything, and then we go on like something that simply exists, the way furniture exists.
Nobody holds a press conference about the couch.
The couch is just there, every day, and no one ever asks it to justify itself.
"Well?" Theo's watching me, and under the showman there's the flicker he thinks he hides. The one braced for ‘You're a lot’. "It's stupid, right? It's too—"
"It's perfect," I say, and mean it so plainly that his mouth opens and produces nothing, possibly a first.
"It's…efficient," Wall says.
Theo recovers instantly and at volume. "Then nobody touch anything. I'm art-directing. Neither of you has any say. You'd shoot a spreadsheet and he'd shoot the spreadsheet's backup."
There are no grounds for argument. We surrender the bathroom, and wait just outside, while the art department works for ten minutes.
The lighting in my bathroom is the world's worst, one bulb of four burned out, everything slightly yellow, and Theo declares it perfect (“Staged looks staged, and this needs to look like what it is, which is Tuesday.”) He spends five minutes arranging the toothbrushes at expressive angles, swears in French, then shoves them back the way they always sit.
On the hook of the door behind us, visible in the mirror, hangs the cheesehead.
"It stays," Theo says, before anyone asks. "It's family."
Wall, meanwhile, has been silent in the doorway with his thumbs going ham across his phone screen, with what I assume is team business until he looks up and delivers a finding. "We post at nine-fourteen."
I blink. "Why nine-fourteen?"
"It's a strategically boring time. Too late for the evening cycle, too early for the night-shift bloggers. And Tuesday is the least-screenshotted day of the week." He pockets the phone. "Which is today. It's almost like we planned this."
I fight a chuckle. "And how do you know all that?"
Wall shrugs. "Just googled."
Theo takes the photo. Fourteen times, from three angles, until he lands one and shows us: the cup, the three toothbrushes, the terrible yellow light, a slice of cheesehead in the mirror. And in the bottom of the frame, on the edge of the sink, Wall’s watch, where it lives every night he stays over.
My first instinct is to move it and tell Theo to take the picture again, because one glance at that watch, and any halfway-motivated stranger is able to put two and two together. Then I remember that’s the entire point.
The watch stays.
An hour later, we sit on the couch with our phones, one draft loaded on each, no caption, three thumbs over three buttons while the clock crawls toward nine-fourteen, because Theo has demanded perfect synchronization.
"On my mark," Theo says. "This is the hottest thing that has ever happened in this apartment."
"Is it? Is it, really?" Wall asks, and Theo goes briefly and violently pink.
Nine-thirteen. My thumb waits over the button, and I go looking for the fear.
I know where it lives. I've been managing it my whole life, the cold drop behind the sternum, deny, contain, control, the second after words when the outcome stops being mine.
I braced against it in a video room, and in a diner, and in a hallway with a reporter's mic a foot from my face, and on the edge of my own bed with my father's radio playing in another state.
I go looking for it, and find that it's not there.
I check again, thoroughly. Nothing. Just a living room quiet where the wall used to be, because the wall's been coming down for months, one person at a time, and the men on this couch dismantled the first of it before I ever agreed to anything, and my father drove a truck through the middle of it with a trumpet joke.
There's no one left that I'm afraid of. No one that matters.
Brave. Terrifyingly.
"Mark," Theo says.
Three taps.
Somewhere out there, the internet inhales.
Theo breaks first, obviously, whooping, standing on the couch, already narrating the moment for future retellings. Wall reaches past him, collects all three phones, and sets them face-down on the coffee table in one line, and none of us reaches for them again all night.
My hands remain steady.