I don’t. I skate. I make the rookies faster by being the kind of target they won’t touch, not because they can’t, but because they respect what it would mean. I tell a kid to keep his head up and mean it two ways. I bury a puck in the top corner and think of her mouth opening on a breath she didn’t plan to give me.
After, in the hallway, in the shower steam, in the small stupid spaces where men turn back into the versions of themselves who need, I text her:Don’t let anyone touch your wrist today.It’s a selfish ask dressed like a boundary. I do it anyway. I follow it with permission she doesn’t need but I want her to know she has.
I don’t look for her in the stands during the day. I don’t walk the west hallway with my shoulders where the cameras can learn me. I fold my desire into a smaller shape and I stand in the equipment room with the door cracked and the radio low and I pack a plain box with navy knit gloves and a note that is not poetry because I don’t trust pretty language to do hard work.For the walk between your car andthe door.I check the cameras. I leave the box where the staff leaves deliveries for her office and make sure my route out intersects with no one’s.
Wayne catches me before I make the second turn.
“Knight.” His voice is a whistle without the hardware. “A word.”
We step into the shadow of the trophy case like two men about to pray for different things. He doesn’t waste mine or his.
“You’re coming to the gala,” he says. It isn’t a question. “You’re going to be a professional. You’re going to stay away from my daughter.”
There are responses that would make this easier.Yes, Coach,for one.I understand,for another. I don’t hand him either. “I’m going to be a professional,” I say. “And I’m going to respect your daughter.”
He laughs once, with no humor and all accuracy. “That isn’t what I asked.”
“I know.”
He hates that answer more than he hates me. He hates it because it’s the truth, because he knows what it costs to tell the difference between control and care, because he’s carried both and learned they weigh the same until you put them down.
“If you hurt her,” he says, and this part is not coach, not general; this part is just a father at the mouth of a cave, “I will take your career apart with my hands and feed it to you.”
“I know,” I say, and I mean it; I accept it; I would help him. “I won’t.”
“You don’t get to promise that.”
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep,” I say, and a face flashes in my head that isn’t hers. Andrew, sun in his eyes, grin tilted, the day he told me to stop hitting anything that said no.You’re not built to break what’s smaller than you, Knight. Don’t let the dark trick you intotrying.I turned that sentence into my spine. When he died, I built more of me around it.
Wayne studies my mouth like he can read lies off lips if he listens hard enough. He must not find one. He doesn’t soften. He doesn’t forgive. He does the thing men like him do when the cliff edge is the only path left. He steps back and lets me walk past him without permission. That’s the closest he’ll get to one.
In the gym, I wreck my legs until I can’t think. Then I ruin my lungs. Then I shower with the water cold enough to make other men swear, and I tell my body to remember what pain belongs in this building and what doesn’t. Want is welcome. What I do with it is the only thing that matters.
I see Langley because men like him don’t move through rooms—they mark them. He’s the kind of rich that compliments the curtain rods and thinks it makes him kind. I watch from the pro shop doorway while he does the smile and the lean and the elbow reach. It’s not a bad reach. It’s nothing. But her body goes electric and away, and I have to put my hands in my pockets because the thing that lives in me, the animal that would bare teeth, is not the man I promised her I’d be.Be careful,she told me.For you or of you?I asked.Yes,she said. I carry the yes like a coin I won’t spend.
She steps back before he touches her. I feel the victory like a bruise. I text herthank youand admit the thing I’m worst at—leaving her choices alone—because honesty is a workout I can fail and still get better at if I keep showing up.
When I see the ribbon edge flash under her cuff as she gestures to the auction tables, I have to leave the lobby. I put my forehead against the cool cinderblock in the back hall and breathe like I’m coming off a fight. Not because I’m angry. Because the sight of a blue shadow over her pulse made me feel civilized and brutal at the same time, and those are twowolves I keep fed to keep them from eating the wrong things.
At night, the building turns into itself. The fans go home with their plastic cups and their pictures of sons lunging for pucks that lasted a second longer on their phones. The staff picks up cups and coin wrappers and an old scarf nobody will claim. The cameras keep their lonely vigil. The north exit door remembers the weight of my hand.
I text her because asking is church.Tonight. Don’t answer if not.I make the plan small and quiet. I tell her I’ll stay gone if she doesn’t come. I mean it. If she doesn’t come, I don’t get to haunt. I get to learn to be the kind of man who can take a no without turning it into a dare.
When she writesTen,something unclenches in my chest I didn’t know I’d been holding since I left a ribbon where she would find it and blame the wind.
I unlock the door, then step back into shadow. I don’t pace. I don’t lean. I stand like I promised her I would—contained, visible if she wants, invisible if she doesn’t. The sound of her boots on old snow is a metronome I’ve been practicing to for months. When the door opens and she is there, the hallway learns what it means to have purpose.
“Hi,” I say, because I don’t know how to start in the middle even when we live there.
She looks like the weather is obeying her, just like her mother did when she wore blue. She looks like yes and like a woman who knows the cost of it. She looks like I should kneel without making a show of it.
“You have ten minutes,” she says, and I hear the lie andthe truth in it.
“I have as long as you give me,” I say, because consent isn’t a word I hang in my mouth; it’s the room I live in.
I hold out my hand and wait. I will always wait. If she never takes it, my hand will be a monument to the part of me that learned not to take what isn’t offered. When her palm finds mine, the world makes a sound I don’t let other people hear—a low, grateful thing animals make when they reach water.
Her wrist under my thumb is heat and history. I kiss the place where a vein confesses. It’s not an apology. It’s a thank you to the body that carried her here against every good argument we were both taught.
