This fine had architecture. Load,bearing walls. A foundation I was actively monitoring for cracks every time Felix Wren skated within fifteen feet of me, which at practice was, conservatively, every forty,five seconds.
I was doing well. I wanted it noted, by whoever was keeping score, that I was doing spectacularly well.
Monday practice: clean. Focused. I ran every drill at the right pace, hit my marks, said nothing that wasn't useful. Coach Denny looked at me twice during the neutral zone work with the expression of a man recalibrating something, which I chose to interpret as professional admiration.
Tuesday: same. Possibly better. I blocked out a shot in the corner that I had no business getting to and didn't celebrate it at all, just turned and went back to position like a man who did this constantly, like a man who was not running on the specific energy of someone who had spent the previous evening lying on his own ceiling thinking about anokaythat had no bottom to it.
Wednesday, Kieran fell into step beside me on the way off the ice and said, in the tone of a man approaching something unstable: "Are you sick?"
"I'm fine."
"You haven't said anything in three practices."
"I say things."
"Useful things," Kieran said. "Tactical things. Things Felix says." He paused. "Shay. You told Mivo his positioning was good."
"It was good."
"You told him it wasgood. Not 'good for a man who skates like he's apologizing for something' or 'good if we're grading on the curve of people who learned to skate from a YouTube tutorial.' Just. Good."
I looked at him. "Mivo's positioning has improved."
Kieran stared at me for a long moment. "I'm going to need you to say something mean to someone in the next twenty,four hours or I'm going to assume you've been replaced by a very convincing robot."
"I'll see what I can do."
He didn't look reassured.
Reeves, passing us in the corridor, glanced between us and then at me with the particular expression of a man who had been watching and had thoughts. "You good?"
"Fantastic," I said.
"Right," Reeves said, in a tone that meantsure, and kept walking.
I was fine. I was a robot apparently.
The thing about watching Felix at practice was that it had always been involuntary. I had made my peace with that a long time ago , the way your eye found him on the ice, the efficiency of him, the way he knew where the play was going three seconds before it got there and was already there, already waiting, already right. I had watched him the way you watch something that works exactly as it should, with the helpless appreciation of a person who notices when things are correct.
This was still happening. The watching. The noticing.
What was new was the second layer underneath it: watching him not look at me.
Felix, I had learned over four years, was a man who looked at things. Specifically, directly, without the social performance of pretending he wasn't. He assessed. He catalogued. He was, in Hartley's words once and only once,economical with his attention, which meant that when he gave it you knew you had it.
He was not giving it to me.
He was giving me the peripheral version , the skate,past, the shoulder acknowledgment, the functional eye contact of two people running a drill together. Professional. Correct. Exactly what two linemates who had not been on a couch together twice in two weeks should look like.
It was the most attention he'd ever paid to not paying attention, and I could feel every degree of it like weather.
I ran my drills. I hit my marks. I did not say anything mean to anyone, which Kieran was clearly tracking, because at the end of Wednesday's session he handed me a protein bar with the energy of a man offering tribute to something he didn't fully understand.
"What's this for," I said.
"Preventative," he said.
I ate the protein bar.
