I made tea. Green tea, the kind my mother sent from Seattle, the kind that tasted like her kitchen and my childhood and the specific warmth of being somewhere safe. I brought two cups to the couch. Mars sat with Axel on his lap and the tea in his hands and his face, which was usually sealed and angularand controlled, was open. The mask was on the counter at his apartment. The metaphorical mask was on the floor of the Decatur rink. What remained was the face underneath, and the face was younger and softer and more afraid than the NHL's starting goaltender should have been.
"I've never let anyone see me like this," he said.
"Like what?"
"Broken. Failing. Not in control."
"You're not broken. You're having a bad night."
"Five goals, Theo."
"Five goals. Not five fractures. Not five endings. Five data points in a season of data points. Tomorrow you'll go to practice and you'll face shots and you'll stop them because that's what you do. Tonight you're allowed to not be that."
"What am I allowed to be?"
"A person. A person who had a hard day and came to a rink in the dark and cried and got held and is now sitting on a couch with a cat and a man who makes costumes and can't compete in front of people. You're allowed to be the Mars behind the mask. The one I see at 5 AM. The one who watches me fly and cries when I land."
He put the tea down. His hands, which were the largest, most capable hands I had ever held, which stopped pucks that moved faster than most people could think, were trembling. Not with the panic tremor of my episodes. With the vulnerability tremor of a man who was allowing himself to be touched by something that his defenses had spent twenty-six years preventing.
I took his hands. The mirror of the lobby. His hands around mine when I was shaking. My hands around his now. The contrast reversed: his shaking, my stillness. My steadiness holding his unsteadiness.
"Mars."
"Yeah."
"I want to take the mask off. All the way. Not the goalie mask. The other one. The one you've been wearing since Miami."
"That mask is load-bearing."
"Then let me hold the weight."
The sentence was the door. He walked through it.
He kissed me. The kiss was not the precise, deliberate kiss of center ice. It was messy and raw and tasted like tea and salt from the crying and the specific, unmistakable flavor of a man who was done protecting himself.
I kissed him back. My hands in his hair, which was thick and dark and slightly damp from the rink. His hands on my waist, pulling me closer with a grip that was strong enough to stop a ninety-mile-per-hour puck and gentle enough to make me feel like something precious.
"Bedroom," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"I have never been more sure of anything in my life, and I say that as a man who was once sure enough to attempt a quad loop in front of 15,000 people."
"That didn't end well."
"This will."
The bedroom. The costume on the dress form, watching from the corner like a witness. The reading lamp on the nightstand, warm and amber, the specific light that I used for sketching and that was now illuminating the most significant physical event of my recent life.
Mars was larger than me. Broader. The goalie's body, built to fill a crease, to cover every angle. My body was built for the opposite purpose: to be minimal, aerodynamic, to defy the space that Mars was designed to occupy. The contrast, which we had discussed in theoretical terms over coffee and which we were now exploring in practical terms on my bed, generated its own electricity.
I undressed him with the deliberate, precise attention that I brought to everything physical. The henley first, revealing the chest that I had been thinking about since the lobby, broad and defined and rising and falling with breathing that was getting faster. His jeans next, the belt a minor obstacle, and then the boxer briefs, and then all of him, visible and vulnerable and extraordinary.
He lay on my bed and looked at me and the looking was not the goalie's reading. It was not analytical. It was want. Raw, unprocessed, unfiltered want, and the want was directed at me with an intensity that my body responded to immediately, comprehensively, every nerve ending activating at once.
I undressed. I stood at the edge of the bed in the amber light and let him look at me the way he had looked at me through the glass, except now there was no glass. No barrier. No distance. Just air and light and the eighteen inches between the mattress and my body.
"You're extraordinary," he said. The same words from the apartment, the same flat delivery, except now the context transformed the words from observation to declaration.
