Chapter 26
THEO
I MAKE IT four hours, and I’m proud of myself.
The phones went face-down at nine-fifteen and I lasted until one in the morning, and if anyone ever asks, I slept the whole night through, peacefully, and nobody can prove otherwise.
The better men are asleep in Patrick's bed. I'm sitting on the edge of the tub with my phone, hiding, three feet from the cup that started it. If I'm going to spiral, I might as well do it at the scene of the crime.
Okay. Damage report. How bad can it—
Oh.
Oh wow.
The first comment under Patrick's post landed at nine-sixteen and says, "nice cup?" An innocent. A lamb. A person from a gentler time.
At nine-twenty-seven, the dots were officially connected for the first time, resulting in somebody’s post with three screenshots, side by side, with red circles on them.
Then, the great unraveling:
Isn’t that G’s bathroom?, under Wall’s post, along with Patrick’s old mirror selfie.
I swear I saw Moreau with that cheesehead, under Patrick’s.
WHY IS WALL'S WATCH ON THE SINK???? under mine.
It took the internet eleven minutes to crack what two hockey rosters couldn't in eight months.
I scroll through the avalanche with my heart going way too fast for a man sitting perfectly still on cold porcelain. The reposts, and the reply chains, and the omnipresent all-caps realization still sweeping the hockey world at two in the morning.
THE GOALIE WAR WAS FLIRTING?!
The edits are already up. Somebody took the faceoff clip, the famous one, eleven million views of my boyfriends insulting each other, and captioned it Foreplay. There's a slowed-down version with piano, and one with a French ballad over it.
And their junior final. The fluke goal, now dubbed The meet-cute.
I press the towel to my mouth so the sound I make doesn't wake them.
Both official accounts are silent. Not a word from the Vipers, not a word from the Wolves, and it's perfect, exactly the right type of nothing, except the Wolves social admin, whoever that beautiful maniac is, posted a single orange heart with no caption at nine-forty-one and logged off.
People are already writing tributes. By morning he'll have a folk song.
My thumb drifts to the search bar, and I tap in my own name, but stop myself at the last second.
I know how this goes. I've run this play before, after every trade rumor, every "energy guy" segment. You search your name and somewhere in the pile there's the one take, the why is he there, or the makes sense for the goalies but, and that’s the one that finds the soft place within you every time.
Not tonight. Tonight I'm not handing anyone the flashlight.
I delete my name one letter at a time and go back to the piano edit instead.
"It's the middle of the night."
I jump while still sitting.
Patrick's in the doorway, eyes half open, hair doing things the internet will never be allowed to see.
“You want to give me a heart attack?” I whisper-shout, then grin. "They decoded us in eleven minutes."
"Mm."
"Don’t you ‘’mm’ me. There are edits, Patrick. There are—"
He cuts me off with something Polish that definitely isn’t a compliment, takes my phone out of my hand, sets it on the sink next to Wall’s watch, and steers me back to bed by the shoulders.
From the dark, without moving, Wall mutters, "Eleven minutes was my over-under."
***
THE MEDIA ROOM on Thursday night has its usual smell of burnt coffee and cable insulation, except today it's full-full, and everybody in it is pretending they're here about Detroit.
Nobody is here about Detroit.
I'm on the podium next to Patrick because our PR head decided to pull a funny. The first few questions are real hockey questions, asked by real professionals, and then a guy in the third row clears his throat, and I know what’s coming before he opens his mouth.
I know that specific throat-clear. He's about to attempt the name.
"This is for, ah. Mr. Gres... Grezko..." Papers shuffle. "Griee... Mr. Moreau’s—" A pause with a whole cliff in it. "—partner."
The room goes very quiet, very fast.
And Patrick smiles his camera smile and starts to answer anyway, smooth and merciful, the way he's answered to Patrick G and Grease-cow-ak and Mr. Greskovitch for a decade, because he gave up somewhere around his draft year, and everybody let him.
And for the past few years I've watched him not correct people all season, and it never sat right, and tonight, with the whole world finally looking straight at us, it sits so wrong my chest actually hurts.
He stopped correcting them. Fine. I never agreed to anything.
I'm leaning into the mic before my right-side brain catches up with the left. "Okay. No. Everybody stop."
They freeze. Patrick's head turns a slow inch toward me, and I feel it, the wait in him, and I do not look, because if I look I'll lose my nerve, and this needs nerve.
"We're doing this once." I hold up a hand, three fingers. "Three parts. Repeat after me. GZHEH."
Silence. A roomful of people in suits, blinking at me.
"This is a participation exercise, people. GZHEH."
A ragged, disbelieving chorus: "Gzheh."
"SHKO."
"Shko." Louder. Somebody's laughing already.
"VYAHK. Gzheh-SHKO-vyahk." I point at the guy in the third row. "It's not hard, Chad. You say 'Niederreiter' weekly. You can do this. I believe in you."
"Gzheh... shko-vyahk," Chad says.
"There it is!" The press is laughing for real now, cameras up, and the sound rolls over me warm. "Ten years, that's all it took. Practice at home. There will be a quiz."
The scrum dissolves into noise and grins, and the PR head is making the wrap-it-up motion with a face that says she's already drafting an apology she doesn't mean, and I'm off the podium and almost to the door when I get asked the only question that was ever really in the room.
"Mr. Moreau? Why does it matter so much? "
I stop and my eyes dart to Patrick’s face automatically. And the man looks…calm.
Well, damn.
I find the nearest camera and talk directly to the lens. "Learn the man's name already. He's important to me."
And I walk out, and behind me the room makes no sound at all, and that silence follows me down the hallway feeling exactly like applause.
Patrick catches up to me by the equipment room, presses me into the doorframe with one hand flat on my chest, and kisses me, deep, long, out in the open for the very first time.
Would you look at that? I might start liking press conferences after all.
***
MY MOM CALLS at seven the next morning, and she is already crying, and she has been crying, from what I can piece together, since Tuesday. "DEUX, Theodore?"
"Maman—"
What follows is four minutes of the fastest French ever produced in North America, of which I catch roughly every third word.
Two. Goalies. The tall one's hands. The photo.
She's had the toothbrush picture printed, which is not how the internet works, and framed, which is not how anything works, and it's going on the wall by my trophies, and Margaux has apparently explained twice already that you cannot frame a soft launch, and has been overruled twice.
"Maman. Maman. Yes. Yes, both of them— It's— I'll explain when I'm home."
"You better." She lets out a wet breath, and then her voice drops out of the storm and lands softly, right on the middle of my chest. "Mon grand. All that heart, and now look. It found somewhere to fit."
I have to stare at Patrick's ceiling for a while after that one.
***
THE DM COMES in on Saturday, from an account with no photo and a number where a name should be.
A kid. Juniors, out west, seventeen.
He watched the media clip forty times, he says. Nobody in his life knows. He was starting to think guys like him had to pick, hockey or the whole rest of it, and then some winger stood up at a podium and taught a room full of cameras to say his boyfriend's name.
how did you know it would be okay, he writes, no caps, no punctuation, the way you type when you're trying to sound casual about something that matters.
I start typing three different jokes and delete all three.
It takes me twenty minutes, but I do tell him the truth.
That I didn't know. That I was scared the whole time and did it anyway, in stages, with backup. That there are more locker rooms like mine and Wall’s than he'd believe, and the people worth keeping are the ones who never once ask you to be smaller, and hockey has more of them than it knows what to do with.
I tell him to take his time. I tell him my DMs stay open, and that one's true forever.
He sends back one word: okay. Then, a minute later: thanks 11.
My juniors’ number. He knows my number.
I screenshot the thread and put it in the folder where I keep the things I'll never delete, and then I sit there on Patrick's couch for a long time, holding my phone against my sternum, listening to two goalies argue in the kitchen about the correct way to store rice, of all things, and something in me that's been braced my whole life finally, quietly, stands down.
My whole career I've been the guy with the volume knob missing. Too loud for the room, too much for the roster, a great time. The exact size of me has been the problem since I was old enough to be measured.
And now it's public record, all of it. The name-yelling, and the cheesehead, and the whole entire too-much of me, posted at nine-fourteen on a Tuesday with no caption.
Maybe I'm not too much.
Maybe I'm exactly enough for two whole people, and there's a kid out west with my number in his pocket who knows it.
"Theodore," Patrick calls from the kitchen. "Come tell him he's wrong."
I take up all the space between the couch and the kitchen, every inch of it, at full volume.
There's room.