"Because I'll believe you."
"Good. I mean them."
His hands had stopped shaking. My hands were still around his. The lobby hummed. The vending machine dispensed nothing. Axel's carrier was on the bench, and the cat was watching us through the mesh with the detached fascination of a creature who found human emotional displays simultaneously baffling and beneath him.
I did not let go of his hands. He did not pull away.
THEO
Iinvited Mars to my apartment on a Saturday afternoon because the rink was not enough. The rink was where we existed in our professional identities: the goalie and the skater, the watcher and the performer, the signal and the noise. The apartment was where the identities dissolved and the people underneath were the only ones present.
He arrived at 2 PM. He was wearing jeans and a henley and he looked, outside the context of hockey equipment and arena lighting, like a person I had not fully seen before. The goalie's posture was gone. Not entirely (the body carried its training the way a dancer carries theirs, visible in the set of the shoulders and the centered balance) but the intensity was dialed down. Softer. More human.
Axel investigated him within four seconds of his entry. The cat leaped from the couch to the floor to Mars's legs and scaled him with the deliberate, possessive efficiency of a creature claiming territory. Mars, who had not been warned about Axel's greeting protocol, stood very still while an orange cat climbed his torso and settled on his shoulder.
"He likes you," I said.
"He's on my shoulder."
"That means he likes you. If he didn't like you, he'd be on the counter staring at you with murder eyes."
"This is the positive outcome?"
"For Axel, this is the equivalent of a standing ovation."
Mars reached up and scratched behind Axel's ear. The cat's purr was immediate and volcanic, a sound so disproportionate to his size that it seemed like it was coming from a much larger animal. Mars's face did the thing. The crack. The micro-shift in the sealed architecture that I had begun to recognize as the real Mars emerging from behind the professional one.
The apartment tour was short because the apartment was small. The kitchen, where I cooked. The living room, where Axel ruled. The bedroom, which I pointed toward but did not enter because the bedroom was a threshold I was not ready to cross, not because I didn't want to but because the wanting had a quality that demanded deliberation.
The costumes were the thing that stopped him. The dress form near the window, wearing the midnight-blue Chopin costume, the fabric catching the afternoon light and the sequins throwing small points of light across the wall.
"You made this," he said. Not a question.
"I make all of them. The costume is part of the program. It has to move the way the body moves. Commercial costumes are designed for standard bodies. My body is not standard."
"Your body is extraordinary."
The sentence was delivered in Mars's standard flat tone, the matter-of-fact register he used for observation, and the flatness made it more devastating than any inflection would have because the flatness meant he was not performing. He was reporting data.
"Thank you," I said, and my voice did something I did not authorize, a softening at the edges that revealed more than I intended.
I cooked. Oyakodon, the Japanese chicken-and-egg bowl that my mother made and that was the closest thing I had to a comfort food that was also a love language. Mars sat at the small kitchen table and watched me the way he watched everything: completely, precisely, with the focused attention that made the subject of his gaze feel simultaneously exposed and held.
"You move like you're still skating," he said.
"I'm always skating. The ice is just optional."
We ate. We listened to music. I put on Mars's bossa nova, the Getz/Gilberto album, because I had listened to it in my apartment alone after he'd mentioned it and had found it unexpectedly beautiful, the way the guitar and the voice wove around each other like two people who couldn't quite touch but were always reaching.
"It's geometry," he said. "The rhythms."
"It's movement," I said. "The way the melody moves around the beat."
"Maybe they're the same thing."
We were on the couch. Axel was between us, occupying the exact center of the available space with the territorial certainty of a cat who believed all surfaces belonged to him. The distance between Mars and me, with Axel as the demilitarized zone, was approximately eighteen inches.
Mars reached across the cat and touched my hand. Not holding. Touching. The pad of his thumb against the inside of my wrist, where the pulse lived, where the blood moved closest to the surface.
