"The team will be fine," Mik said. "I am telling you this from direct experience. The team adjusted to Cole and me in approximately seventy-two hours. By day four, Jonah was making jokes about our relationship. By day ten, Wes was baking us bread. The adjustment period is shorter than you think."
"It is not the team I am concerned about."
"The public."
"The public. The league. The specific intersection of being Brazilian, being a goalie, and being gay in a sport that has not fully decided how to hold all three of those things at once."
Mik was quiet for a moment. The quiet was not his strategic silence. It was the thoughtful quiet of a man considering a problem he had personally solved in one configuration and was now examining in a different one.
"When I kissed Cole on the ice," he said, "I was not thinking about the league or the public or the intersection of being Russian and being gay. I was thinking about Cole. The rest wasnoise. The noise was very loud and the noise lasted for weeks and the noise produced consequences that I am still managing. But the noise was not the point. Cole was the point."
"Theo is the point," I said. The sentence came out without clearance from the analytical brain, which was a pattern I was noticing with increasing frequency and decreasing alarm.
"Then the rest is noise." He pushed off the car and stood straight. "And Santos."
"Yes."
"The smile. At practice. It was good. You should do it more. The posts deserve a break from being your only source of joy."
He walked to his car. I watched him go. Mikhail Volkov, who had been the most sealed man I had ever met, who had spent eleven years behind a fortress that made my own look like a garden fence, was walking across a parking lot in Atlanta having just delivered the most personal conversation he had ever initiated with me, and the conversation had been about a smile.
One smile. Observed by one person. Interpreted correctly. Communicated with precision.
The mask was cracking. Not the goalie mask. The other one. The one I had worn off-ice for my entire adult life, the one that said: I am a system, I am a position, I am a function. The mask that did not smile at practice and did not think about figure skaters during film sessions and did not play bossa nova in an empty apartment and did not stand at plexiglass boards pressing his palm against the place where another man's forehead had been.
The mask was cracking and Mik had seen the crack and the crack was a smile and the smile was Theo.
I got in my car. I drove home. I played Joao Gilberto. I did not think about the regional in three weeks or the public implications of what I was becoming or the noise that Mik had promised would be loud and temporary.
I thought about Theo. The point. The only point.
And I smiled again, alone in my apartment, at no one, and the smile was practice for the version that would eventually be public, and the practice was its own kind of courage.
-e
MARS
Bringing Theo to the team dinner was not a decision I made. It was a decision that was made for me by the convergence of six weeks of 5 AM mornings, one midnight rink session, one first intimate encounter, and Luca Moretti's relentless, solar-powered campaign to breach every remaining fortress in the Atlanta Reapers locker room.
"Team dinner Thursday," Luca said, appearing at my stall with the inevitability of a natural disaster. "You're coming."
"I'm considering it."
"You're coming. And you're bringing the figure skater."
I looked at him. He looked back with the steady, warm, completely non-bluffable gaze of a man who had known about Theo for approximately three weeks longer than I had told anyone about Theo, because Luca's emotional intelligence operated on a timeline that preceded conscious disclosure.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"Since the second 'I have' at The Crease. The first 'I have' was casual. The second 'I have' carried the weight of a man who has been watching something at 5 AM that he cannot stop watching. I told Wes that night. Wes said, and I quote, 'Good for him.' Then he went back to his bread."
"The entire team knows."
"The team has a strong suspicion. The team is also, as you may have noticed over the past year, a team that has developed an extremely high tolerance for love stories. We've had three. We're practically experts. Bring the figure skater. The table's big enough."
I brought the figure skater.
Theo wore a jacket that was slightly too structured for a casual team dinner and which I found unreasonably attractive because the structure was his attempt at formality and the attempt was endearing and the endearing was a quality I had not previously associated with formalwear.
