His mouth opens. Closes. His hand moves toward me, an inch, maybe less, and then stops and goes back to his side. He stays. Standing in my kitchen with his hands at his sides and his eyes on mine and everything I just said sitting in the air between us. Not fixing it. Not charming his way through it. He is standing still and letting the silence hold everything I said and he isn’t trying to make any of it smaller.
Then he says, quiet, “The Hájek protocol.”
I don’t know what I expected. Not this.
“You came in on your day off to rebuild it. I was in the weight room and I saw you through the glass, at your desk, with the research spread across the table. Three hours.” His voice is low and stripped and has nothing in it that sounds like the man who fills corridors. “And when Gary asked about it on Monday, you said it was just an adjustment. It wasn’t an adjustment. You rewrote the whole thing because the standard version wasn’t good enough for his movement pattern, and you handed Gary the credit like it cost you nothing.”
He stops. Swallows. His hands stay at his sides.
“I noticed. Not because I was telling myself a story. Because I was watching you and I couldn’t stop and the thing I couldn’t look away from was a man who does that and calls it nothing.”
It doesn’t fix anything. It isn’t enough. But the specificity of it sits in the quiet between us, undeniable, a fact that can’t be argued into a fantasy.
I put my hands back on the counter. The granite is cold. “I don’t know what to do.” My voice comes out quiet. “I don’t know how to want you and keep what I’ve built. I don’t know how to stand in that treatment room and pretend you’re a chart number. I don’t know how to watch you sing in the hallway and know it’s for me and act like it isn’t.” I am looking at the counter and I feel like a man who has run out of walls. “And I don’t know how to stop wanting any of it.”
The silence holds. His breathing and mine, separate rhythms in a quiet room. The refrigerator hums. Traffic moves on the street below. The world continuing while everything inside these walls waits.
Then his hand finds my arm. Not pulling. Just landing there. His palm warm against my bicep, his fingers resting with the weight of a hand that is asking rather than assuming. I don’t pull away. I don’t lean in. I stay where I am with his hand on myarm and the counter cold under my palms and the room full of everything we’ve said and everything we haven’t.
He steps closer. His other arm comes around me. I let him. My forehead drops against his shoulder and his arms tighten and I am being held by a man who just stood still through the worst of me and didn’t leave.
Neither of us has words for what comes next, or maybe the words exist but neither of us can find them yet. We’ve said too much and not enough and we aren’t finished. For now, the silence is full and we stay in it.
Chapter 23 — TEO
The morning skate runs clean. Fontenot finds a lane through the left circle during the scrimmage that nobody picks up, and Berger’s line buries it.
“That lane was open all week.” Berger says it on the way off the ice, the same words he’d deliver at full broadcast volume on any other day, but the delivery is flat, like he’s reading off a box score instead of narrating a highlight. “Thursday. Today. It will be open Saturday.”
Thompson glances at him. “No record this time?”
“What?”
“You usually say you’re maintaining a record.”
Berger blinks. “I am maintaining a record.” He says it like he’s remembering the line rather than living it, and then he’s through the tunnel and gone before anyone can follow up.
I pull my helmet off and walk toward the locker room. Thompson falls in beside me. Neither of us says anything about Berger, which is its own kind of saying something.
The treatment room door is open as I pass. Zay is at his desk, charting, squared to the table, giving the room nothing. Pen moving, shoulders locked. He doesn’t look up.
My hand lifts toward the doorframe. The gesture starts before I’ve decided to make it, my body reaching the way it has reached for months, and I close my fingers and put my hand back on my bag strap.
I keep walking.
In the locker room I strip my gear and sit in my stall. Mueller is arguing about the scrimmage’s offside call, which was correct, which Mueller will contest until approximately Thursday. Hájek is across the room, working through his cool-down stretches with the deliberate focus of a man who treats every physical instruction like it carries exam weight.
Berger is at his stall. Third shirt of the day, collar straight. He’s not talking. Not organizing his shoes. Not pitching a restaurant for tonight or filing a complaint about the coffee or building a case about anything. He’s changing his clothes and looking at his phone and the quiet from his stall is louder than anything Mueller is producing three spots down. A month ago he would have leaned over by now and told me where we were eating, what he’d heard about the menu, why the previous rating needed revisiting. The pitch isn’t coming. My mouth opens to say his name and ask what’s going on and then it closes again because I don’t have the words for anyone right now, not even the person I should be checking on.
Hájek comes over while I’m taping a new stick. He crouches beside my stall with the earnest posture of a student approaching a professor during office hours.
“The PK rotation from this morning. When Coach Bodie says pressure the strong side, does he mean commit fully or contain and angle?”
“Contain and angle. You don’t commit until the puck handler’s eyes go down.”
He nods, processing. “Thank you, Marchetti.” A pause. “You are quieter today.”
“Long week.”
