“Your adventure is better than mine. Happy?”
Relief rolled through me in a way I didn’t let show. I wanted her impressed. I wanted her to understand there was more to me than skates and contracts and a lease that renewed month to month. Bringing her there hadn’t been about showing off. It had been about letting her see something I didn’t let most people near.
To bear witness, I suppose, on a version of me that was more than hockey.
“Are you just buttering me up because you’re relieved I’m not some psycho maniac?”
“That’s a huge part of it,” she said, a slight smile curling her lips.
Her gaze dropped to a sketch pinned above my workbench, a rough drawing of a dining table I hadn’t started yet. She studied it, then looked back at me.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked. “Retire at forty, and open a furniture empire?”
I shook my head. “I don’t need an empire. Just something that’s mine. An escape.”
She held that, and I could see the calculation behind her eyes. She was filing it away, adjusting whatever story she had told herself about me.
“You’re not who I thought you’d be,” she said.
“In a good way, or bad?”
Sage narrowed her eyes, pretending to think really hard as she studied me. “Undetermined.”
“That’s generous.” I laughed, fixing the array of tools on the bench.
“Call it ongoing research.”
I smiled at that. “You’re always this thorough?”
“Only when it matters.”
The words hung there between us, weighted with more than either of us was willing to unpack.
I reached past her to grab a tape measure from the bench, careful not to crowd her. My hand came close to her hip before I redirected, and the proximity shifted the air in the unit.
“You aren’t measuring anything,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why pick it up?”
“Needed something to do.”
She studied me with an expression that bordered on understanding. “Because you get uncomfortable when the attention’s turned on you.”
“I get cautious.”
“Same difference.”
I set the tape measure down. “No, it’s not. You don’t know what I have to deal with on a daily basis, okay.”
She tilted her head. “So explain. Tell me.”
I glanced around the unit, at the pieces in various stages of becoming something else. “On the ice, attention means performance. In here, it just means I make something worth looking at. Those aren’t interchangeable.”
She moved closer. “Do you play to prove you deserve your spot,” she asked, “or because you know it’s where you belong?”
The question didn’t come out as an attack. It came out as curiosity sharpened by experience.
