In the parking lot, loading bags into the car, Theo stopped and looked at me.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. You just look like a person."
"I am a person."
"You look like a person in a parking lot with groceries. A normal person doing a normal thing on a normal Sunday. And six months ago you were a goalie who talked to his posts and drank cold coffee alone at 5 AM and had an apartment with no photographs on the walls."
"The apartment still has no photographs."
"The apartment has a magazine and a candle and a cat bed and a second coffee mug on the wrong shelf. That's photographs. That's evidence of habitation."
He was right. The apartment had changed. Not dramatically. Not the way Cole and Mik's apartment had changed, with photographs and jacket hooks and the visible infrastructure of a shared life. My apartment had changed in smaller ways. Theo's tea in the cabinet. Axel's carrier by the door. A second toothbrush. The turntable playing music I had not chosen, because Theo had discovered my vinyl collection and had opinions about it and the opinions resulted in records I would not have selected being played at volumes I would not have selected at times I would not have selected, and the not-selecting was the point. The not-selecting was the opposite of the system. The not-selecting was life.
THEO
On the drive home, we passed the Decatur rink. Mars glanced at it. I glanced at it. The parking lot was empty. The building was dark. Sunday at noon. The rink that had been our world was closed and quiet and the closedness felt right, because the world was no longer the rink. The world was a grocery store and a parking lot and an apartment with two coffee mugs and a cat who believed he owned all of it.
"Gerald asked about you," Mars said.
"Gerald?"
"The security guard. At the practice facility. He watches the games on the lobby TV. He asked me, specifically, whether the figure skater was doing well."
"How does Gerald know about me?"
"Gerald knows about everything. Gerald has been watching this team find each other for three seasons. He told me once that hands that stop shaking when someone touches them are telling a story the mouth hasn't started yet."
"That's beautiful."
"That's Gerald. He sees everything and says almost nothing and the almost-nothing is always the most important thing anyone says all day."
I put my hand on his thigh. In the car. In daylight. On a Sunday in Atlanta. The gesture was casual and domestic and it did not trigger the cascade and it did not require the dark and it did not require 5 AM or plexiglass or the specific conditions of the sealed world we had built.
The sealed world was open now. The glass had become a window and the window had become a door and the door had become unnecessary because we were no longer on opposite sides of anything. We were in a car. With groceries. Driving home.
Home. The word had changed. Home used to be a one-bedroom apartment with a cat. Then it was a rink at 5 AM. Then it was row three. Then it was a man's apartment with a turntable and no photographs and a coffee mug on the wrong shelf.
Now it was this. A car. A Sunday. Lemons and smoked paprika and a man whose system I had destroyed and who was, against every prediction his analytical brain had ever made, grateful for the destruction.
"Mars."
"Yes."
"The regional is in two weeks."
"I know."
"I'm going to enter."
The silence lasted one second. Then his hand found mine on his thigh and his fingers laced through mine and the lacing was steady and warm and the steadiness was not the steadiness of a goalie in the crease. It was the steadiness of a man who trusted the person next to him.
"Good," he said.
One syllable. Complete.
-e
