Twenty-Two

You fall asleep with the phone on your chest and wake up with the screen pressed into your cheek.

The last text in the thread is from him, sent at 1:12 a.m., after the conversation had gone quiet. go to sleep. we have a flight at 10 and you are slow when you are tired.

You read last night's messages once in the gray light, scrolling up, wincing at a few of your own. You don't delete anything. You don't save his number under his name, either. You save it as 71 and tell yourself that's a practical choice.

The strip of light under the connecting door is off. On the other side, the shower is running.

You get dressed very fast and leave for breakfast before it stops.

Minneapolis is eleven degrees and furious about it.

The visiting team's practice rink is an old barn of a building with a ceiling full of faded championship banners and a heater that clanks like it's dying. Everyone's breath fogs. Kenny skates circles around the faceoff dots in a toque with a pom-pom his grandmother knitted, giddy as a puppy in snow.

"Did you see the pass?" he keeps asking anyone who'll listen. "From behind the net? Who does that?"

"We all saw the pass, Kenny," Des says.

"I'm just saying, nobody does that."

"He does," Pasi says from his crease, eyes closed, doing some kind of breathing. "We have a magician now. Be quiet and let him work."

Nikolai, for his part, says almost nothing. He runs the drills. He passes where you'll be instead of where you are, and this time you let him. You don't cut early. You count. Twice in an hour, the puck lands on your stick like it was always going to, and the second time Kenny actually applauds with his gloves on, a soft whump-whump that echoes off the rafters.

"Stop clapping," Nikolai tells him, but there's no bite in it.

"Sorry. Can you teach me that saucer pass? The high one?"

Nikolai looks at him for a long moment. Kenny's face is so open it hurts to look at, freckles and earnest blue eyes and a chipped front tooth from juniors.

"After," Nikolai says. "Fifteen minutes. Bring pucks."

Kenny looks like he's been handed a puppy and a car.

You skate past Nikolai on your way to the bench and say, low, "You made his whole year."

"He asked."

"Nobody else on this team would've stayed after for you."

He glances at you. The rink lights catch his eyes, that strange pale green, and you feel it in your stomach like a missed step.

"I know," he says. "That's why I said yes."

You go back for your water bottle twenty minutes after everyone's left the ice, and that's the only reason you see it.

Nikolai is at the far end of the rink, by the Zamboni doors, still in his gear but with his helmet off. A man in a Northmen jacket is standing there awkwardly, and next to him, in a wheelchair, is a kid. Maybe nine. Bald under a knit cap, a blue hospital mask over his mouth and nose, an IV port taped to the back of one tiny hand.

The kid is wearing a Forge jersey. Number 71. Old one. The trade is two days old and somewhere a nine-year-old is still loyal to the guy who left.

Nikolai is crouched down so their eyes are level. He's signing a stick. You watch him write something long, longer than a signature, and then hand it over and say something that makes the kid laugh behind his mask.

The father reaches for his phone. Nikolai shakes his head, quick and polite.

"No pictures, please," you hear him say. "This is just for him."

The father nods, a little confused, a little teary. Nikolai stands, ruffles the kid's knit cap, and turns.

He sees you.

For a second you're both caught. Him, with that soft look still on his face before he can put the other one back on. You, with your water bottle in one hand like an idiot.

He doesn't say anything. He just walks past you down the tunnel. As he goes, he says, barely loud enough to hear, "You didn't see that."

You stand there a long time after he's gone.

Beau calls that night while you're lying on the hotel bed, staring at the new connecting door. Different hotel, same layout. Same stripe of light underneath.

"So," Beau says. "How's your new boyfriend?"

"Not funny."

"Little funny." You can hear him smile. Beau has the best smile in Oregon; it's why the network hired him two weeks after his doctors told him he'd never play again. Golden hair, dimples, a face that makes grandmothers watching the late game sit up straighter. "Kenny posted a video of Volkov teaching him a saucer pass. Three hundred thousand views. Kenny's crying in it."

"Kenny cries at commercials."

"I'm just saying. People are starting to like him." Beau's voice changes. "Are you?"

You don't answer fast enough.

"Ethan."

"He's a good center, Beau."

"I know he's a good center. I watched him be a good center from the ice right up until he put me into the boards."

It's quiet on the line.

You remember it whether you want to or not. Two seasons ago, Saskatoon, second period. Beau chasing a puck into the corner, head down, the way he always did, the way the coaches always told him not to. Nikolai coming in hard from the side. Not late, the league ruled later. Not high. Just a big, clean, terrible collision, and Beau's helmet hitting the dasher at exactly the wrong angle, and the sound. You'll never forget the sound.

Beau didn't move for four minutes. They took him off on a stretcher. Eighteen thousand people in Saskatoon clapped politely while the man who'd hit him stood at center ice alone, and didn't look at anyone.

The headlines afterward called Volkov a lot of things. Butcher. Coward. He never once answered them.

"He never apologized," Beau says quietly. "Not in public. Not once."

"I know."

"So just..." Beau exhales. "Be careful. Okay? You've got a soft spot for wounded animals and that guy's not wounded. He's a wolf. It's literally his name."

You almost tell him about the kid in the wheelchair. No pictures, please. This is just for him. You don't know why you don't.

"I'll be careful," you say.

"Liar. Love you. Score a goal for me."

He hangs up. Through the wall, Nikolai's TV is murmuring something in Russian, low.

At the morning meeting, Coach Mayhew puts a face on the screen and the whole room groans.

Blond, square-jawed, handsome in a mean, cartoon-villain way, with a smile that says he's never once been told no. Dutch Kjellberg. The Northmen's enforcer. Thirty-one, six-four, a hundred and ninety career penalty minutes and a mouth on him that the league has fined four times.

You know that mouth. Two years ago, the week after you came out, Kjellberg skated past you in warmups and said a word you've never repeated to your mother. He's said it every game since. The league fined him once. He paid it with a grin.

"He's going to try to get under your skin," Mayhew says, looking right at you. "Do not give him the satisfaction, Ethan. Do you hear me? Not one penalty."

"I hear you."

From the stall beside yours, so quiet only you can hear, Nikolai says, "What does he say to you?"

You don't look at him. "Nothing I can't handle."

He doesn't answer. But when you finally glance over, he's watching Kjellberg's grinning face on the screen with an expression you've seen exactly once before.

Right before he hit Beau.