Chapter 7 Riley - December 2017, Pittsburgh
The morning after October I lay in a wrecked hotel bed for a long time writing the speech.
That was a one time thing, we were both flying, no harm done, see you in December.
I had it about six different ways. I kept running it and it kept coming apart in my hands, and it took me until it was light out to work out why.
The speech only worked if you wanted the guy gone.
And I was lying there looking at Nate Sinclair, twenty-one years old, national television property, hockey royalty, asleep face down on my discount pillow with his mouth open, actually drooling, hair standing straight up on one side.
And what I felt was the exact opposite of gone.
So I delegated it. I handed the whole problem over to morning-Riley, who is a coward, and morning-Riley handed it to the text thread. The thread had it now, and the thread had become the best hour of most of my days, unevenly distributed across all of them.
Nate: Your line was 62% in the offensive zone last night. That's a real number.
Riley: it is a real number and you memorized it
Nate: It was on a graphic.
Riley: at what point in the broadcast? during which intermission? name the analyst.
Nate: Go to sleep, Kowalski.
Riley: you first. you've got a morning skate and a face to maintain
Nate: I'm already asleep.
Riley: liar
I was playing two seasons that fall. There was the one in the newspaper, where I was scoring close to a point a game and had a nickname and a stall-door transcript and the whole league writing about the rink rat.
And there was the other one, which nobody was covering, in which I was undefeated at pretending this was nothing.
December 27th, our building. I answered October the only way I knew how.
Two goals. The second one was a tip in the slot late, off Moose of all people. We won by one, and that made the season series even at one apiece with two to play, which is a symmetry I absolutely did not track.
The truce lasted four hours.
At eleven I was in the hotel bar attached to the arena district with a beer and half a plate of wings, alone, because our guys had gone to a place with music in it. The Sentinels flew out at seven that night. That was a fact about the schedule, and I knew a lot of facts about the schedule.
Nate came in wearing a coat over his suit with the collar still up from outside. He stood in the doorway and found me.
"Well," I said. "Sit down before somebody photographs you standing there deciding."
He sat. He put his phone face down and didn't take his coat off. "You tipped that on M?kinen's stick. On purpose."
"Obviously on purpose. What am I, lucky?"
"You're extremely lucky. You've been lucky since April. It's becoming a workload issue for the rest of us."
"I'm elite, Sinclair, there's a difference, and the difference is a lot of hours in an empty building and one man's television career."
"Your charter left at seven," I said.
"It did. I told the team I was staying a day to see family in the area," he said, level, turning his glass a quarter turn. "There's an optional skate tomorrow and a commercial flight at six. It's been handled."
"You don't have family in the area."
"No," he said, and looked at me for the first time since he sat down. "I don't. That's twice now. Tonight and October. That's twice one of us has beaten the other one in a building and then walked into a bar about it."
I put my beer down.
That was the thing about him. That was the whole problem with him. You could joke for an hour and he'd joke back and win half of them, and then out of nowhere he'd put something on the table completely straight and just leave it there.
"Yeah," I said.
"Lightning's not supposed to hit twice. That's the entire appeal of lightning. It's a one time event you tell people about at a wedding."
"So it's not lightning," I said.
He looked up.
I had not planned to say that. Once it was out of my mouth I would have paid actual money to have it back, and he did not blink for what felt like six minutes.
"No," he said. "I guess it isn't."
Neither of us drank anything for a second.
"Fourteen twelve," he said, standing.
"You didn't finish your…"
"I didn't order anything."
"No. That's a fair point. You came in here, sat down, told me a true thing, and left." I said the last of it to his back, because he was already going. "Fourteen twelve."
He had the door open before I got my hand up to knock.
"That's a security problem," I said. "You can't stand behind a door in a hallway waiting on a man. That's how people end up in a newspaper."
"Get in."
"I'm making a serious professional point about…"
"Kowalski, get in before someone sees you."
I got in. He got a fist in the front of my coat and put me against the inside of the door with it, and the door thumped shut with both of us on it.
This kiss was not October's kiss. October was a collision. This one he took his time with. He held my face in one hand, thumb along my jaw, and came in slow enough that I could hear him breathe out through his nose. Then his mouth was on mine and open, and he tasted like the mint from downstairs.
He turned my head where he wanted it with two fingers under my chin and kept coming back, a half inch off and then in again, each one deeper than the last, until I had a fistful of his coat and had stopped standing up entirely on my own.
I got a noise out of him a few seconds in. Just a low one in the back of his throat, when I opened my mouth under his, and I felt it in my chest before I heard it.
"Okay," I said, against his mouth. "Hang on, I have a procedural about anal sex."
"No."
"Sinclair." I got a hand flat on his chest and pushed an inch. "I've been reading."
He stopped.
He pulled back far enough to look at me. His mouth was already wrecked. There's something about that face, that specific, composed, media-trained face, with the mouth gone red and soft, that did something to me.
"You've been reading," he said. "Where?"
"I'm not telling you where."
"Kowalski!"
"The internet, obviously. Where else, a library? Excuse me, ma'am, whatever you've got on anal sex." I pulled the bag out of my coat pocket and held it up between us. "And I went to a store. In Pittsburgh. And I paid cash."
He stared at the bag. "You paid cash?"
"I'm not putting that on a card with my name on it, Nate. I'm a public figure."
And then Nate Sinclair, the most controlled human being I've ever met in my life, put his forehead on my shoulder and laughed until he had to hold onto my coat to stay up.
"Oh, that's great," I said. "That's really supportive. That's exactly the tone I was hoping for."
"You paid cash!"
"I did the work, Sinclair. I did research, I did procurement, and I stood in a line behind a man buying birthday candles."
He lifted his head. He wasn't laughing anymore, and his eyes had gone dark and steady in the way that shut my mouth every time.
"Fine," he said, and took the bag out of my hand. “Show me.”
I showed him, and we went through it together.
I dumped the bag onto the bed between us.
A bottle of lube that claimed to be silicone based and long lasting.
A box of condoms. A small packet of those finger cot things the internet had insisted on for the early stages.
A packet of wet wipes that felt like overkill until I remembered what we were about to do.
Nate picked up the lube first, turned it in his hands like it might have instructions printed on the side in fine print. I watched his face while he read the back of the bottle anyway.
"Thick," he said.
"Apparently that is the point. Less chance of it drying out halfway through."
He set it down and opened the condom box, counted them like he was checking inventory. "You bought a twelve pack."
"I am an optimist and also I did not want to go back to that store a second time."
He looked at the finger cots. "These are ridiculous."
"The forums were very clear about the early stages. You stretch with these, then you graduate. I am not inventing this, Sinclair. I am following a curriculum."
He laughed once, quiet, and then he was not laughing. He set everything in a neat line on the nightstand like he was arranging tools before a procedure. "Okay. Talk me through the order."
So I did. I told him what the sites had said about relaxation, about starting with one finger and waiting until the muscle stopped fighting before adding another. I told him about the angle that supposedly hit the prostate and how you were supposed to aim for it once things were open enough.
I told him about breathing through the burn and how the burn was supposed to turn into something else if you did not rush it. He listened the way he listened to video between periods, eyes narrowed, asking questions that made it clear he was already building a mental checklist.
Then we argued about logistics for a while, which was not really about logistics.
"You're overthinking it."
"I'm asking a reasonable question."
"You've asked four of those."
"Because you keep giving me answers you got off a forum, Riley. You said 'apparently' twice."
"Well, I've never done it with a man, have I? Neither have you. We're two guys with a hotel room, a bag from a store, and a lot of enthusiasm. This is a group project, Nate, and you are being extremely difficult about the group part."
He was sitting on the end of the bed with his tie off and his shirt open. He looked up at me and said, "Come here," and my entire nervous system quit.
It all went away the second it was his hands. That's the thing I didn't expect. The nerves, the jokes, the whole running commentary I had going in my head twenty-four hours a day. He got my shirt off and put his mouth on the middle of my chest and it just stopped, like somebody had pulled a plug.
"You're quiet," he said, into my throat.
"Enjoy it."
He kissed me again, slower, one hand spread flat and warm on my back. I could feel the calluses on his palm from years of stick work. His mouth moved from my throat to the hinge of my jaw and then lower, open and wet, and I tipped my head to give him more room.