After the kiss in the lobby, we drove home. His apartment. Axel met us with the standard yowl of disapproval, which I was learning to interpret as feline affection expressed through the medium of complaint.
We sat on the couch. His silver medal was around his neck. He had not taken it off and I had not suggested he take it off because the medal on his chest was the most significant object in the apartment, more significant than the costumes and the manga and the reading lamp, because the medal was proof.
"You medaled," I said.
"Silver."
"Silver at your first competition in two years. After a quad loop that would have scored higher if the technical panel had any idea what they were watching."
"The technical panel scored it correctly."
"The technical panel scored the rotation and the landing. They did not score the context. The context was a man who couldn't jump in front of an audience for two years landing a quad loop in front of 2,000 people because a goalie in row three told him to fly. The context adds at least three points."
He laughed. The laugh was free and light and contained none of the guarded quality that his laughs had carried when we first met. The guardedness was gone. Not permanently, probably.Theo's anxiety was a chronic condition, not a curable one, and the management of it would be ongoing. But the management was no longer solitary. The management was shared.
"What happens next?" he asked.
"Next you enter another competition. A bigger one. More people. More pressure. And I sit in the stands and you look at me and the signal holds."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then we adjust. We read the data. We change the angle. That's what goalies do. That's what skaters do. That's what people who love each other do."
"You said love."
"I've been saying love. In angles and trajectories and cold coffee and 5 AM mornings and the specific, committed act of sitting in a seat and watching you do the thing you were born to do. I've been saying love since the first morning at the glass. I just didn't have the word for it because my vocabulary was designed for hockey and hockey doesn't have a word for what you are to me."
"What am I to you?"
"The thing I can't stop. The one trajectory I don't want to read because reading it would mean predicting it and predicting it would mean reducing it to data and you are not data. You are the one thing in my life that is not data. You are art. You are the flying. You are the thing that my brain cannot solve and my heart will not stop trying."
He took my hand. The contrast: his small, precise, performer's hand in my large, scarred, goalie's hand. The contrast that had been the point since the lobby, since the ice, since the beginning.
"I love you, Mars."
"I love you, Theo."
The words were simple and they were enough and they were the only save that mattered.
THEO
The Decatur rink at 5 AM. But different now.
Mars was on the ice. In hockey skates. Attempting to figure skate.
This was, objectively, the funniest thing I had ever witnessed, and I have witnessed Axel fall off a shelf into a bowl of pasta, which previously held the top position on my lifetime list of comedic events.
Marcus Santos, the starting goaltender for the Atlanta Reapers, a man whose body was a precision instrument calibrated to the hundredths of a second, a man whose positioning was so exact that coaches used his film as a teaching tool, was incapable of performing a basic forward crossover on figure skating edges.
"The blade is wrong," he said, gripping the boards with both hands, his legs at an angle that defied the principles of human anatomy.
"The blade is a figure skating blade. It's designed for edges and rotations."
"It's designed for torture. Hockey blades have a curve. These are flat. These are ice knives."
"They're not flat. They have a rocker. You're just not used to the contact point being further back."
"I'm used to the contact point being where God and the Bauer engineering team intended it to be, which is not here."
