"Thank you for being the reason I took it off."
The lamp glowed. The cat purred. The man breathed.
And somewhere in Atlanta, in an arena where five goals had gone through, the net was empty and the ice was marked and the game was over. But the game that mattered, the one that was not played in arenas, the one that was played in dark rinks and lit bedrooms and the space between two people who had found each other in the space between, was just beginning.
-e
-e
MARS
Mik found me in the parking lot after practice, which was never a good sign because Mikhail Volkov did not seek people out. Mikhail Volkov waited for people to come to him, and the fact that he had walked across an entire parking lot to stand next to my car meant that something had been observed and the observation required address.
"Santos," he said.
"Volkov."
"You are distracted."
"I am not distracted. My save percentage this week is .931."
"Your save percentage is excellent. Your behavior is distracted. These are not the same thing."
He leaned against the car next to mine, arms crossed, the posture of a man who had decided this conversation was happening and had allocated the time for it. Mik was the only person on the team whose silence was louder than mine, and when he deployed it strategically, which was always, the silence had the effect of a pressure chamber. You either talked or you suffocated.
"I am not distracted," I said again.
"You smiled at practice today."
"I did not smile at practice."
"You smiled. During the breakout drill. Luca said something to you near the boards and your face moved in a direction that I have not previously observed it move, and the direction was upward, and the movement was what other humans call a smile."
"It was a facial adjustment."
"It was a smile. I have been watching you for three seasons, Santos. You do not smile at practice. You do not smile at games. You smile at your posts, which is a behavior I respect but which has never previously extended to people. Today it extended to a person."
I said nothing. The parking lot was empty except for our two cars and the afternoon sun and the specific, inescapable sensation of being read by a man whose own mask was so comprehensive that he recognized others' masks the way ornithologists recognized birdsong.
"The figure skater," Mik said. Not a question.
"How do you know about the figure skater?"
"Luca told Cole. Cole told me. The information traveled through the team communication network in approximately four hours, which is standard propagation speed for gossip involving a teammate's romantic life."
"There is no romantic life."
"There is a figure skater and a smile and a disruption in a three-season behavioral pattern. In my experience, which is relevant because I spent eleven years hiding a romantic life and the hiding produced exactly the kind of micro-behavioral changes that you are currently producing, this combination of variables indicates a romantic life."
I opened my car door. I did not get in. The opening was a gesture of escape that I was not yet committed to executing.
"I am not asking you to confirm," Mik said. "I am telling you that I see it. And I am telling you because the seeing means others will see it. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But eventually. And when they see it, you will need to have decided what the seeing means to you."
"What it means to me."
"Whether you will do what I did. Or something else."
What Mik did. The public kiss on the ice after Game 7. The Sports Illustrated cover. The demolition of a closet that had been load-bearing for eleven years. Mik had done the loudest possible version of what I was beginning to understand I would eventually need to do, and the loudness of his version was both inspiring and terrifying because my version would not be loud. My version would be quiet, because I was quiet, and the quiet version required a different kind of courage.
