Chapter 5 Nate - July 2017, Philadelphia
There was a Tuesday in late July that I have not been able to put down.
I was in the condo in Rittenhouse and had been done by an interior firm my uncle Marsh knew, and everything in it had been chosen by somebody who had never met me.
There were two chairs by the window that nobody had ever sat in.
There was art leaning against the wall in the hallway because nobody had decided where it went, and nobody had asked me.
I had the television on for noise while I ate, and the rookie preview came on, and my father said the thing about Riley Kowalski.
Product of effort, not talent. Honest. Replaceable.
I stopped chewing.
It's hard to explain what that did to me.
It wasn't like being embarrassed for somebody.
It was more physical than that. It went up the back of my neck and across my face and my ears got hot.
I actually had to stand up and go out onto the balcony in the wet heat, and stand there with my hands on the rail until my heart came down.
I knew Riley Kowalski for about seventy-two hours in April.
I knew where his phone number was. It was in my wallet on the kitchen counter, folded behind my license, where it had been for a hundred and some days.
I went in and got it. Then I sat on the couch and drafted an apology four times.
The first one was long. It had the words I want you to know in it twice and I deleted it because it read like a press release, which he’d hate.
The second one was short. That was out of line. I'm sorry. I looked at it for ten minutes. The problem with the short one is that "I'm sorry" from a Sinclair is an admission that the Sinclair was wrong, and I'd never once done that in writing.
The third one was a joke. Something about him being a great story and me being a hell of a bloodline. I deleted that fastest of all, because it was funny, and being funny with him was the actual dangerous thing and I knew it even then.
The fourth one was one line. I don't agree with him.
I looked at that for a long time.
And then I understood, sitting there at eleven at night, that there was no version of any of it that wasn't a confession. Not about my father. About the fact that I had watched forty seconds of television about Riley and gone out on a balcony over it.
I deleted the text and put the napkin back in my wallet.
The rest of that summer went by efficiently. I signed the entry-level deal with the Sentinels, who'd drafted me three years earlier and waited, which they made sure everyone knew was a great show of patience. There was a photo. I held a jersey.
At the lunch afterward, Uncle Marsh had a second coffee and said, in the middle of nothing, "We should talk about the next eighteen months."
"Okay."
"You're going to be extremely visible, extremely fast." He turned his cup a quarter turn.
"It's easier if we get in front of it. A few appearances.
Charity circuit, a gala or two. The right company at the right events.
All lighting, no touch. It answers the question before anybody asks it, and it costs you six evenings a year. "
"Answers what question?"
He smiled at me. "Nate, you're twenty-one and single and about to be famous."
"I'm going to play hockey."
"Sure. That's a fine answer for eighteen months," he said, and let it go, and paid. I did not ask myself out loud, on the drive home, what exactly I thought I was declining.
Then came rookie camp, and Angelo. He was a winger from South Philadelphia and he decided in the first four days that I was a project.
"Okay, so you live where?"
"Rittenhouse."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"With who?"
"That's what alone means, Angelo."
He invited himself and then he came over. He stood in the middle of my living room and turned in a slow circle with his hands on his head like a man at an accident.
"Nate, there's no stuff."
"There's furniture."
"Where's your stuff?" He opened a cabinet. "There's nothing in here. Nate. There's a bowl in here."
"I eat out."
He shut the cabinet. "Okay. My cousin Gia is a person you should meet. She's a nurse."
"No."
"She's fun, Nate."
Opening night, October 4th, in our building.
Eleven minutes in, Riley Kowalski scored his first NHL goal.
He scored it while my pairing was on the ice, off a forecheck where he came down on my partner like a car accident, stripped him, and put it far side before our goalie finished sliding.
And then he skated straight at our bench.
Not near it. At it. He came down the boards on the fly with both arms up and he celebrated approximately four feet from where I was standing waiting for a change. He was yelling something, and it was not for the crowd.
I felt it in my whole body. I know humiliation, I'd been humiliated in April in front of eleven thousand people. This was the opposite. Somebody had just delivered something directly to me, personally, addressed, in front of nineteen thousand people, and every part of me lit up like a switchboard.
Being hated by Riley Kowalski at full speed is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to my body on a hockey rink.
I answered with two assists. The second one I made with a stretch pass off the wall that I had practiced countless times. I made it because he was on the ice and I wanted him to have to watch it. After it went in, I looked over at their bench and held it.
They replayed that in slow motion twice. My father narrated it. We won three to two.
The Forge stayed over. Noon flight the next day. I knew where they were staying.
I showered and I dressed. I told my teammates I was tired, and I got in a car by myself in a suit, and I went to their hotel bar.
I thought I was going to deliver an apology from July.
That's genuinely what I told myself in the car. I had it. I'd been carrying it since a balcony. I don't agree with him. Four words, and then a handshake, and then I'd leave. It would be over and I could stop having a thing about it.
I put sportsmanship on like a parachute and then I checked the straps about six times on the way in.
The bar was half full and mostly Forge guys at the far end. Riley was by himself at the near corner with a beer, still damp at the hairline, tie gone, top button open. He had a bruise coming up on his cheekbone from our number six, who had gotten him again, because our number six is genuinely slow.
He looked up.
And his whole face said oh, there it is. Like the night had finally started making sense.
"You're kidding," he said. "You came here."
"I was in the neighborhood."
He put his beer down. "Nobody's ever been in the neighborhood of a hotel."
I sat down on the stool next to him and put my hands flat on the bar and I did not say the thing about July.
I said, "You scored on Petey."
"I scored on your whole team, buddy, Petey was just the one holding it."
"You scored on Petey, who's twenty and got called up in March. Congratulations. Big scalp."
"Oh, that's how we're doing this." He turned toward me on the stool. "Okay. Say the number."
"What number?"
"Two assists," he said. "And you're going to sit there and act like you didn't look at our bench for four seconds after the second one like a guy checking if his ex saw him at a wedding."
I felt my ears go hot and I said, "It was two seconds."
"It was four."
"You counted?"
"You held it, Sinclair. I have never seen a man hold anything that long."
"You celebrated a garbage goal into my bench."
"That was not a garbage goal, that was art, that was a mugging in broad daylight, that was the single most well-earned four seconds of celebration in the history of the…"
"You said four."
He stopped. "Oh, I hate you."
The conversation went for another sixty minutes.
It moved from the bar to the sidewalk because the Forge guys started looking over and neither of us said anything about it. We just both stood up at the same time and went outside.
October on Broad Street at eleven thirty at night. Cold enough to see your breath. It did nothing at all to bring my temperature down.
He took apart my defensive pairs. I took apart their power play, which was genuinely bad.
He said something about my father's television career that was so far over the line that I laughed out loud on a public sidewalk. Then I said something worse about their coach. We were four feet apart and then we were two. I couldn’t tell who had moved.
Then a car came around the corner with a light bar on it and I stepped back and I said, "Inside."
The elevator went quiet.
Fourteen floors. Neither of us said anything for the first ten. I stood there and looked at the numbers and my hands were shaking, actually shaking, in the pockets of a suit jacket.
On eleven he said, "Say something."
"About what?"
"Anything."
"Your power play's still broken."
"Yeah," he said, "it is," and the doors opened.
We moved from the hallway to the room. There's the door, and there's the card, and then somewhere in there I was saying something about the way he crosses over on his backhand side and he was saying something over the top of it.
We were both still talking, we were both still arguing, and then we weren't.
The first time we kissed, we were still mid-insult. His hand was in the front of my shirt. I had a word half out of my mouth and it went into his. Neither of us finished the sentence.
It was clumsy. His hand caught in my collar.
I heard something tear and neither of us stopped.
The fabric gave with a sharp rip at the collar seam as his fingers dug harder, yanking the shirt open.
His mouth crushed against mine, hot and demanding, tongue shoving past my lips like he was trying to shut me up the only way left.
I bit him for it, and he groaned into the kiss, the sound vibrating straight down my throat. His other hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head back so he could deepen it, teeth scraping my lower lip until it stung.