Three Steps Across

The suite is on the fourth floor of the athletes' residence, and the key card works on the second try.

You know he's in there before you open the door. You can smell the soap.

Tarquin Fairbrother is lying on the kitchenette counter, on his back, his head on a rolled-up hoodie and his bare feet crossed at the ankle, eating dry cereal out of the box. He's wearing grey sweatpants and nothing else. There is a lot of him, and all of it looks like it was designed by someone with an unfair budget.

He doesn't sit up. "Seventeen."

"Get off the counter."

"I'm acclimatizing." He tips the box at you. "Want some? It's the good kind. Marshmallows."

"You're a professional athlete."

"I'm a professional athlete who's never once been told no by a marshmallow." He finally swings his legs down and stands, and the suite gets about forty percent smaller. "Tour? It'll take four seconds. Bathroom. Kitchen. Your room." He points to the left, at a door three steps away. "My room."

He points to the right. Through the open door you can see a bed that's already unmade, a duffel exploding across the floor, and a window with the whole white sweep of Calgary and the mountains behind it.

The left door opens on a bed, a desk, and a wall.

"You took the window."

"I got here first." He leans in the frame of his door like it's a photo shoot. "Early bird gets the mountains. Late bird gets," he squints into your room, "drywall."

"I was late because my flight was delayed."

"And I was early because I'm better than you." He grins. The split in his lip from Saturday has healed to a thin pink line. You did that. "Don't worry. You can visit the window. Knock first."

You throw your bag in the drywall room and shut the door on his laugh.

Signy Haverkamp is six feet tall, wears a grey crewcut and a team-issue parka, and doesn't use a whistle. She doesn't need one. She stands at center ice and everyone just stops.

"Line one," she says, reading off a clipboard she clearly doesn't need. "Ofori, left wing. Ethan, center. Fairbrother, right wing."

Twenty-five of the best hockey players in the country turn to look at the two of you. Someone in the back actually says oh no.

"Coach," you start.

"No."

"I didn't say anything yet."

"You were going to say you've never played with him, Ethan." She doesn't look up. "That's why you're going to."

Beside you, Kob is shaking with silent laughter. On your other side, Tarquin is leaning on his stick, looking at you sideways through his cage.

"Don't worry, Seventeen," he says. "I'll make you look good."

It goes badly.

It goes so badly that by the end of the first drill the backup goalie is filming it on his phone. You and Tarquin have spent six seasons learning exactly where the other one is going to be so you can get there first and hit him. Your whole bodies are trained for it. So on the first rush he cuts to the middle at the exact second you do, and you collide at center ice hard enough to hear it in the stands.

You both go down. He lands half on top of you.

His face is three inches from yours. For a second neither of you moves.

"Hi," he says.

"Get off me."

"Working on it." He doesn't, for one more second. His eyes flick over your face like he's checking something. "You okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You hit your head."

"I have a helmet, Fairbrother."

He gets up and offers you a hand. You don't take it. He leaves it there anyway, open, until you get up on your own, and then he shrugs and skates off like it doesn't matter.

The second collision is in the corner. The third is your fault. Haverkamp watches all three without a single word, and somehow that's worse than yelling.

At the end she calls you both over to the boards.

"You know where he's going to be," she says to you. Then, to him: "You know where he's going to be. You've both spent years using that to hurt each other." She tucks the clipboard under her arm. "Use it for something else. You have three weeks."

Team dinner is loud. Beau Beaumier, the starting goalie, a Quebecois who narrates his own life in two languages, gives a ten-minute speech about the collision and calls it "the most beautiful disaster since the Titanic." Kob cries laughing. Even Tarquin laughs, tipping his chair back, and the rookies watch him like he's a movie star, because he is one, sort of.

You don't laugh. You go to bed early.

The walls in the residence are made of something optimistic and thin. You lie in the dark and listen to him come in at eleven, run the shower too long, hum something off-key. His door doesn't close all the way. Neither does yours. The hall between them is three steps of carpet and a strip of light from the bathroom.

At midnight your phone lights up.

Sleep.

Day one is always ugly. The first collision was his fault: he cut early. The next two were both of you trying too hard to not need each other. You'll figure it out. You always do. Sleep.

You stare at it.

The federation posted clips from practice. You saw them. Everyone in the country can watch you and Tarquin Fairbrother fall over each other at center ice on loop. Still. Trying too hard to not need each other. It's a strange thing for a fan to see.

You turn the brightness down and read it again anyway, because it helps. It always helps.

"Who's texting you at midnight, Seventeen?"

You freeze.

His voice comes from the dark across the hall, low and lazy, not loud enough to wake anyone else. You can see the edge of his doorway, a shadow on the carpet that might be his arm hanging off the bed.

"Nobody."

"Nobody has your face doing that." A pause. "Girlfriend?"

You should tell him to mind his business. You've been telling him to mind his business for six years.

"No," you say.

The silence stretches. You hear him shift on the mattress, the creak of a body turning toward the door.

"Boyfriend?" he asks.

He doesn't ask it like a chirp. He doesn't ask it like a joke. He asks it quiet and careful, the way you'd step onto spring ice, and you realize nobody in professional hockey has ever asked you that question, not once, not in eleven years.

And Tarquin Fairbrother asks it like a man who already knows the answer.