"All the best records are specific."
I kissed him. On the ice. In figure skating blades and hockey skates. The kiss was brief and cold because the rink was cold and our mouths were cold and the cold was part of it, part of the language of two people who had built their relationship on a frozen surface and who were not interested in warmer venues.
The rink at 5 AM. Our rink. The place where a goalie watched a skater through glass and the glass became a door and the door became a bridge and the bridge became a life.
The reading lamp was here. Not the lamp from my nightstand, though that lamp was now on Mars's nightstand at his apartment because his apartment had acquired a reading lamp the way it had acquired a second toothbrush and a cat carrier and a sewing kit and the accumulated evidence of a life expanding from one to two. This was a different lamp. A small, battery-powered LED that I used for costume sketching at the boards, the portable version of the light that had become the symbol of the Power Play series, the light that said: someone is here. Someone is paying attention. Someone bought a lamp because of a sentence you said five years ago, and the buying was love, and the love was permanent.
The lamp sat on the boards, glowing amber in the blue-grey light of the predawn rink. Mars's coffee was in the cup holder of row three, where it would go cold, because the coffee always went cold, because Mars Santos did not drink coffee at the rink. He held it because the holding was ritual and the ritual was identity and the identity was goalie and the goalie was the man I loved.
We skated together. Badly and beautifully. Mars on hockey skates that he'd changed back into because the figure skating blades were, in his words, "an affront to the laws of physics and the sovereignty of my ankles." Me on my blades, weaving around him, showing him edges and turns that he would never master and that he attempted anyway because the attempting was the point.
The morning light came through the windows. Atlanta waking up. A city that had no business loving hockey but did. A team that had no business producing four love stories in one season but had. A rink that had no business being the most important building in two people's lives but was.
"Mars?"
"Mm."
"A goalie's job is to stop things."
"Yes."
"What happens when a goalie lets something through?"
He looked at me. The eyes. Dark. Open. The mask off. The face real.
"When a goalie lets something through, the usual result is a goal against. Which is failure. Which is the thing I've spent my entire career trying to prevent."
"And what did you learn when you let me through?"
He was quiet. The ice hummed beneath us. The lamp glowed on the boards.
"I learned that the thing on the other side of the mask isn't a goal against. It's a person. And the person is worth every goal I'll ever let in."
I took his hand. We stood on the ice in the morning light and the standing was the simplest thing in the world, two men on a frozen surface, holding hands, and the simplicity was the beauty, and the beauty was the point.
Between the lines. The space where the game lives. Between the glass and the ice. Between the watching and the flying. Between the fear and the landing. Between the mask and the face.
Mars Santos found me in the space between, and I stopped falling.
Or maybe I kept falling. But the falling, with him, was the same as flying. And the distinction, which had once seemed like the most important distinction in the world, turned out to not matter at all.
Because the landing was always going to be clean. The landing was always going to be him.
Last line: A goalie's job is to stop things. Pucks, shots, goals. I spent my whole career stopping. Theo Kimura taught me what happens when you let something through. And what comes through, when you're brave enough to let it, is everything.
-e
GERALD
Ihave watched a lot of people find each other in this building.
The blond one and the Russian. The enforcer and the equipment manager. The center and the younger Briggs. I have watched them from behind my desk in the lobby of the practice facility, and I have watched them on the TV during games, and I have watched them at the barbecue in the backyard with the grill and the bread and the string lights, and I have learned, over thirty-one years of watching people, that love announces itself long before anyone is ready to hear it.
The goalie was the last one. The quiet one. The one who arrived before dawn and left after dark and who treated human interaction the way some people treated dental appointments: necessary, uncomfortable, to be completed with minimum duration and maximum efficiency.
Marcus Santos. Twenty-six. From Miami by way of Brazil. Talked to his posts, which I know because I heard him through the corridor one morning when I was doing my rounds, and the conversation he was having with the left post was more emotionally substantive than most conversations I overheard between actual humans.
I liked him. I liked him the way I liked all the quiet ones, which was from a distance and with patience, because quiet people reveal themselves on their own schedule and the worst thing you can do is rush them.
