Chapter 28
WALL
ON MONDAY MORNING, our text thread develops a constitution.
Theo: HOUSE RULES, GAME WEEK EDITION. no scouting reports over pillow talk. no tape talk at dinner. no psychological operations of ANY kind. this is a CLEAN household
Theo: violators sleep in the chair
I read it twice, put the phone down, and go about my morning. By noon I've almost violated it once.
It happens on its own. I'm reviewing Milwaukee's power play for work, which is allowed, and then the clip rolls into Patrick fighting off a screened point shot, and his glove is a hair late coming out of the butterfly, and my thumbs are already in the thread typing out the fix.
Three sentences in, I surface, realize what I'm doing, and hold the delete key until the whole confession is gone.
Noticing him is older than wanting him, and now the noticing has nowhere legal to go until Saturday, when it gets aimed straight at his net with his season on the line.
Tuesday, Patrick strikes first. No warning, no context, into the thread at ten in the morning:
P.G.: :tomato_emoji:
That's his whole operation.
I stare at the tomato through one full cup of coffee. It does a lot of heavy lifting. It's a joke about my hair. A comment on my playoff readiness. An olive branch. A declaration of hostilities. It's whatever I decide it is, and knowing him, the ambiguity is the point.
I send back a chair gif.
Theo: I'm reporting this entire thread to the league
Theo, for his part, declares neutrality on Wednesday and starts selling intelligence to both sides within the hour.
The market rate is snacks. For a bag of gummy worms he informs me, in a hallway whisper over video call, that Patrick has been watching my short-side tape all week.
That evening, for pretzels, he apparently tells Patrick something about my crease depth that has never once been true.
His information is garbage in both directions. Business is booming anyway.
Underneath it all, all week, there's the other thing, and it doesn't have an emotional outlet.
Saturday, my job is to end their season.
Not just beat them. End them. Milwaukee needs the points and we don't, and there's no version of Saturday where all three people in this thread get what they want.
I keep waiting to feel torn about it and finding something worse instead.
I'm not torn. I'm going to try to win with everything I have, and that was always going to be the case.
What that says about me keeps me up exactly one night before Patrick says it out loud on the phone so I wouldn't have to.
"If you let in a soft one for us," he says, "I'll never forgive you."
"I wasn't going to."
"I know. Goodnight, Wallace."
***
SATURDAY, THE MILWAUKEE visitors' space is filled with a looseness we haven't earned yet, and Becker gets up on a bench to fix that.
"Gentlemen." He waits for quiet. "Tonight we face a desperate team, a hostile terrain, and the second best goalie in this division, right after the one wearing our laundry. Tonight, we destroy Wall's boyfriends. With love." He raises a fist. "And also goals."
The team answers with applause. Kane pulls him off the bench mid-encore.
At the far stall, Washington tapes his stick in his own bubble of quiet, last regular-season game of a long career. When he catches me looking he just tips his head at the tunnel. Time to work.
I spend the warmup holding my crease and not looking down the ice.
It takes actual effort. Down at the far end there's a man I sleep beside, stretching against his post, and between us, at center, a smaller man in the colors that aren’t mine, who belongs to both of us, skating his loops too fast. The stands are already at playoff volume. The cameras want a story tonight.
The story is the game. They’re not getting anything else.
***
THE GAME IS the best one I've ever played, and I'd erase the memory of it if I could.
It goes scoreless for two periods, and not the boring kind of scoreless.
Their forwards keep coming with the season on their sticks.
My reads arrive early and my rebounds land where I put them.
At the other end, every time we generate something, Patrick erases it with that flat, bored affect that used to keep me up at night for one set of reasons and now keeps me up for another.
He robs Ace with his glove in the second and the Milwaukee crowd chants his first name in unison.
Theo plays like his hair is on fire. He's everywhere, finishing hits, howling at his bench, dragging his line up the ice shift after shift, and every time he gets pulled off, he takes it personally. Twice he gets a puck with the whole game open in front of him, and twice I take it away from him.
The second one is both tragic and magnificent.
He's alone at the back door with an empty net's worth of daylight and I get across anyway, without any right to.
The puck smacks leather, and the whistle comes.
He skates around my crease slow, with his mouth going and no sound in it, just shapes, aimed up at my mask.
LATER, his mouth says.
PROMISE? mine says back.
Every lip-reader on the internet is going to feast. Let them.
Then the puck drops and I go back to taking food off my family's table.
Every save is personal. I stop pretending otherwise somewhere inside the third.
The air gets tighter and the Vipers get better and Patrick, at the far end, is playing the game of his life too, I can tell from here, from how small his whole net looks.
It changes nothing about what I'm here to do.
The horn ends regulation at nothing-nothing, and both teams skate to their rooms amidst a sound I've never heard fans make, hope and dread in the same register.
Overtime is four minutes old when it ends.
It ends at the far end, where I can only watch. A broken play, three skaters converging, a shot I lose in the bodies. Then, the light behind Patrick is on and the score is one to nothing and the loudest building in the league goes silent all at once, roof to ice.
My guys pour over the boards past me, gloves raining, piling into the far corner. I stay in my crease.
Patrick hasn't moved either. He's on his knees now, mask tipped back, looking up into the lights, and the season I just ended is sitting on him, in front of thousands of people, and the shutout, the one that finally puts my ledger ahead for the season, tastes like ash.
I skate to the pile because my team won and they get all of me too. Becker's screaming something joyful into my ear. Over his shoulder, my eyes search the Vipers bench, and find Theo on it, head down, towel over his neck. He doesn't look up.
***
THE HANDSHAKE LINE forms at center, and tonight it's aimed at me.
The Vipers go through it classy and gutted. Lindqvist shakes my hand once, all business, and moves on.
Theo hits me mid-line at full speed, helmet first, no handshake at all, both arms around my ribs in front of every camera in Wisconsin.
The officials will need to find a way to let this go.
He doesn't say a word into my chest, his gloves shaking against my back.
And then he's gone down the line and I have to keep standing.
Patrick is last.
We meet at center ice, two creases' worth of history between us and none of it useful now.
His face is doing what it does for cameras.
His eyes aren't. He takes my hand, and his grip is private.
He leans in the regulation distance and gives it to me, quiet and even, "Best save I've ever seen in person. "
My face goes. I feel it go, in front of the cameras, the broadcast, the lip-readers, all of it. Whatever it shows them, it's never been public before, and I let it stay out for the full second he holds my hand.
"I know," I manage.
He taps my chest once with his blocker, over the heart, where the A would live if the league allowed it , and skates off to face his team.
***
I KNOCK ON my favorite door in Milwaukee around midnight, with a bag of gas-station cheese curds and no speech. I’ve been using my key for months now, and even though I know intellectually that this is ridiculous, I can’t ignore the part of me that screams: maybe tonight you shouldn’t.
I drove straight after media, which dragged for hours, past three exits that would've taken me home, and stood in the parking garage for a while, working out what a man says on the night he ends his boyfriends' season, and come up empty.
So the plan is the bag and me.
Theo opens the door. Eyes red, hoodie mine, face bare of everything he wears for the world. He looks at me, then at the bag, and steps back to let me in. He doesn't touch me, which tells me more about the score than the scoreboard did.
The apartment is dim and silent. Patrick's at the kitchen island, hands around a glass of water going warm. He looks up, and I stand there in the hallway with my terrible curds and I don't say I'm sorry, because I'm not, and they know it, and the lie would be worse than the loss.
What I say is, "These are the worst ones the state makes."
"Gas station on Layton?" Patrick asks.
"Yeah."
"Theo's favorite."
"I know."
He gets down three plates.
We eat garbage curds at midnight, mostly quiet. Their grief comes through in turns, and I let each one arrive without trying to save anybody from it.
Theo relives his back-door chance in a burst, hands carving the air, one inch, half an inch, and then runs out of it mid-sentence and leans into me instead, and I hold him up and keep my mouth shut.
A while later Patrick says, to his water, "Seventeen years and it never once felt like something happening. Tonight it did." He turns his glass a quarter. "Worst night of my season. Best game of my life."
"Mine too," I say.
Sometime past one, Theo surfaces from my shoulder with his jaw set. "You're winning the whole thing now. To the end, the Cup, all of it." He jabs a curd at me for emphasis. "Otherwise tonight was just a robbery, and I won’t have that."
"Okay."
"I mean it. I'm coming to every game. I will be extremely loud."
Patrick tilts his head. "I’m not sure that’s possible."
"Just you watch."
Patrick's mouth climbs on one side for the first time all night. The three of us breathe easier for it, and I commit, silently, to winning the Cup out of spite and love and cheese curds.
Then Theo straightens up all the way.
He wipes his face with his sleeve that’s actually mine, looks at Patrick, looks at me, and there's a full breath where the air rearranges itself around whatever he's about to do.
"Okay. No." He picks up the curd bag and plants it back on the same spot with force. "If you think I'm going through your playoff run—" a finger points at me, "—as your unlabeled emotional support—" the finger swings between Patrick and me" —you're insane. Say it. Both of you. Properly."
The word's been living with us for weeks now, fed and housed and never spoken.
Patrick sets down his glass and looks at Theo the whole time he says it. "Boyfriends."
Two eyes land on me, then four. My chest is a wreck, but my mouth, for once in its stubborn life, is ready. "Boyfriends."
Theo looks between us, jaw working, and loses the fight with his face on the worst night of his year, in a kitchen that smells like fried cheese, and laughs while he cries, both at full strength.
"Great," he gets out. "Perfect. Cool. That's—" He gives up, grabs us both by the shirts, one fist each, and hangs on.
We stay where he put us.