Chapter Twenty-Seven
JUNIE
The family clause took eleven days to negotiate, and I got to watch, and I want to state for posterity that watching Lars Lindell negotiate is the closest I will ever come to watching him play goal from inside the net.
He turned the NHL down on a Tuesday, by phone, standing at my counter in a T-shirt, and it took him under a minute, and the minute included pleasantries.
Then he called his agent, a lovely doomed man named Priya’s-dad-energy Steve, and told him he was re-signing in Austin, and Steve took that fine, honestly, Steve had watched the same playoffs as everybody.
What Steve did not take fine was the condition.
“A family clause,” Saint said, in his flattest register, the load-bearing one.
“In the contract. Written. If the franchise relocates, ever, for any reason, I go unrestricted, full release, no penalty. And a formal commitment on file to the school partnership program.” A pause while Steve said agent things.
“No, Steve. It’s not a starting position.
It’s the whole position. I’m a wall, it’s what you sell. ”
Eleven days of the Chupacabras’ lawyers explaining that no team writes that, and Saint replying, in escalating drafts of the same four sentences, that this one would.
Rich caved on day eight, allegedly mid-sentence, allegedly crying, and legal held out three more days over commas.
The clause that went to the league office has a number, 14(c), and a nickname in the group chat, the Theo Amendment, and my beloved signed a below-market contract with a smile you’d need my training to detect, and Steve sent a gift basket to my apartment addressed TO THE ONLY PERSON HE LISTENS TO, which was defamatory and correct.
That was June. This is July, which is what I actually sat down to tell you about.
Austin in July operates like a dare. The rink fights the sun and mostly wins, the bats come off the bridge at dusk in a ribbon you can set your calendar by, and my apartment, top floor, has a skylight over the bed that the landlord calls a feature and the sun calls a target.
By ten a.m. the place is a terrarium. By July, Saint had a drawer, then a shelf, then a cast-iron pan I was banned from washing wrong, and neither of us had said anything administrative about it, because we had spent fifteen months administrating our feelings and were both in recovery.
Then, on a Saturday, it rained. Real rain, the first in five weeks, the kind Texas saves up and spends all at once, drumming on the skylight like applause.
He’d been to the hardware store that morning, allegedly for balcony chair bolts.
He came back with a small paper bag, and he set it on my counter next to the fruit bowl, where Tuna was sitting on the bananas in open defiance of three separate house rules, and he took out two keys on a plain steel ring, still bright from the cutting machine, and set them down without a word, because of course without a word, and looked at me.
“Those are my keys,” I said. “You have my keys. You’ve had my keys since May.”
“They’re mine,” he said. “To my place. You don’t have those.”
I looked at the keys. Tuna looked at the keys. The rain did its drumroll.
“Lars Lindell. Are you asking me to move in with you by hardware?”
“No.” He turned the ring a quarter-turn so it sat square to the counter edge, aligned, the maniac.
“I’m asking to stop pretending there are two addresses.
Yours has the skylight and the sister within queso distance.
Mine has parking and a bathtub built for a goalie.
I don’t care which one wins. I care that the cat has stopped commuting. ”
Tuna, from the bananas, said nothing, like a witness with representation.
And then he did the thing. He came around the counter, slow, and he lifted his hands, and I knew from the way he set his shoulders that it was going to be ASL and it was going to matter, because he goes still first, like at a faceoff.
He signed it small. The size of the sentiment turned inward instead of out. Flat hand settling down through the air, gentle, twice.
I knew the sign. I’d learned it in October, in a library, on a lunch break, off a video I’d watched enough times that the presenter felt like family.
And I knew the shape of it from somewhere else too, from a night in this apartment in March, his hands moving slow against my bare shoulder while I hovered on the edge of sleep, a sign I never looked up afterward on purpose, because it was his, in his language, in the dark, and asking felt like reading his mail.
“That’s what you signed,” I said. My voice came out at half volume. “In March. On my shoulder. When you thought I was asleep.”
“You weren’t asleep?”
“I was mostly asleep. I never translated it. I decided it wasn’t addressed to me yet.”
“It was addressed to you,” he said. “It was always addressed to you. I just sent it before I could afford the postage.” He signed it again, and this time he gave me the word with it, out loud, the word from the last night of the season, the one I’d sassed him about because sass was easier than dying: “Stay.”
The rain on the skylight. Tuna on the bananas. Fifteen months of amendments, and rule 8 still blank in a renamed file, and a man in my kitchen holding out the one word he’d been signing at me since before either of us confessed anything.
I didn’t answer in English. I went to the hook by my door, and I took my spare key, the one Hazel calls the audition key, off its ring, and I came back and set it on the counter next to his two, and I nudged it a quarter-turn until it sat square, aligned with his, because I speak Lindell now, and I said, “Counteroffer. The skylight address. You bring the bathtub energy and the cast iron. Hazel keeps visitation. Tuna keeps the fruit bowl.”
He looked at the three keys on my counter for a long moment, the negotiator, the wall, and then he said, “Accepted. No terms.” and the smile got loose of his face entirely, both of them at once, the deadpan and the real one, a system failure, and I have seen this man stop forty shots from professional assassins and I had never seen him undefended before, not like that, not in a kitchen.
I got to him before the smile did whatever it was going to do next. Kissed him with my hands in his shirt, and he lifted me onto the counter beside the fruit bowl, displacing an apple, and Tuna departed with the dignity of a chaperone who has seen the schedule and knows what’s on it.
“Hi,” he said, between, forehead to mine.
“Hi. You live here.”
“I live here.” He said it like testing ice, and it held, and then his mouth was at my jaw, my neck, unhurried, a man with no flights and no film to study, and I laughed at the ceiling, at the rain, at the sheer administrative simplicity of joy, and I felt him grin against my throat.
“Bed,” I said. “We have a skylight to justify.”
He carried me. He always carries me, he claims it’s core work, and he ducked the hanging plant on muscle memory now, and we came down on the bed under the drumming glass with gray rain-light everywhere and nowhere to be until September.
We undressed each other like people with nowhere to be until September.
His shirt, my sundress, no urgency and all attention, and when the dress came off he did the thing where he stops, actually stops, hands stilled at my waist, and takes the reading of me like a fresh sheet of ice, and it used to make me want to fill the silence with a joke and now I just let him look, which Hazel says is the most growth I’ve ever demonstrated.
“Yes?” he asked, thumb tracing my hip, because he asks every time, it is the best standing contract in North America.
“Yes. All of it. It’s raining and you live here.”
“I live here,” he agreed, and laid me back and took his time about the fact of me, his phrase, entered into evidence forever, mouth mapping down my body like a route he now owned rather than borrowed, collarbone, sternum, the curve of my stomach, unhurried past every place that made me pull his hair, and by the time he settled between my thighs I was laughing and gasping in alternation, which is our house style, and he murmured something in Swedish against the inside of my knee.
“What was that one?”
“Trade secret.” And then his mouth was on me, patient and exact, no cameras, no clauses, no ceiling on the volume because Hazel had her own apartment as of June first, God bless nursing wages, and I was loud, gloriously, at last, with the rain covering nothing because nothing needed covering.
He worked me up slow and held me there, wicked, until I said his name like a demand, the real name, and he obliged, and I came apart with both hands in his hair and the skylight going silver above us.
He stayed where he was while the aftershocks did their business, chin resting on my hip, watching me with the patience of a man reviewing tape he liked. “Note for the record,” he said. “The acoustics in this apartment are excellent.”
“The acoustics in this apartment are me.”
“I know. I’m going to enjoy holding a share.” Thunder rolled somewhere out over the hill country, distant and showy, and he glanced up at the skylight like it had interrupted him in a meeting. “Still raining.”
“It’s Texas. It’ll rain eleven more minutes and then apologize.”
“Then we should be efficient,” he said, gravely, against the inside of my hip, and I felt him laugh at his own joke before I heard it, which is the only way he ever laughs at his own jokes.
From the hallway came a single interrogative meow, followed by the sound of one paw applied to the bedroom door, twice, procedural.
“Denied,” I called. “Committee’s in closed session.”
“Denied,” Saint confirmed, in the voice he uses on referees, and Tuna filed her objection with the door once more for the record and withdrew down the hall with her tail at full mast, appeal pending.
He kissed his way back up while I reassembled, and I got my hands on him, all of him, the ridiculous shoulders, the scar, the goalie thighs, and I pushed him over and sat astride and watched the most disciplined man in professional sports surrender the crease without a fight.
“Yes?” I asked, my turn, palm flat on his chest where the heart does whatever unbanned thing hearts do.
“Yes,” he said, half his voice gone. “Junie. Obviously. Forever. Is that on the record?”
“Everything’s on the record. I run the record.
” And I took him in, slow, and we both went still at the deepest point the way we always go still, one long open-eyed beat, taking the reading.
It held. It held with three keys on the counter and a cat in exile and a contract with a family clause four miles south, and then we moved, easy first, giddy, his hands at my hips like he was issued them, the rain keeping time, and it built the way summer storms build, all at once out of nowhere, and I bent down and he surged up and we finished wrapped around each other under the skylight, my name in his mouth, his in mine, the wind chime out on the balcony frantic with the weather, the two of us laughing before we’d even finished shaking, which was new, and stayed.
After, we lay crosswise on the bed because we had ended up crosswise and neither of us had anywhere to be, his hand drawing slow bookkeeping on my spine, the rain settling in for the night like it had signed something too. Tuna scratched at the door once, with dignity, and was denied, with dignity.
“Inventory,” he said at the ceiling, deadpan, my favorite radio station. “Two keys. One cat. One skylight. One family clause. One social media manager.”
“Head of content.”
“One head of content.” His arm tightened. “Assets correctly filed.”
Summer rain on the skylight. Nobody was performing anything.