“See?” Shay said. “Thank you.”
Henry caught my eye.
It was barely a thing. Just a glance across the table, the kind you share with someone when you’ve both been watching the same slow disaster unfold for months and have just arrived, together, at the moment where it stops being a disaster.
I lifted my glass.
He smiled into his wine.
Not big. Not showy. Just a quiet, contained smile that said, This is what I meant.Thisis what it looks like when someone finally stops choosing the version of themselves that doesn’t need anything.
Under the table, Felix’s hand stayed where it was.
Shay didn’t pull away.
He shifted his grip, just barely, like he was settling into it.
The conversation rolled on. Sauce, Reeves, some terrible pun from Shay that made Henry sigh and me groan and Felix say,without missing a beat, “That was worse than your neutral zone coverage last month.”
Shay beamed at him.
No one at the table said what we were celebrating.
We didn’t have to.
It was all there , in the food, in the wine, in the frequency of the room, in the quiet weight of Felix’s hand over Shay’s and the way Henry’s eyes softened when he looked at us.
It was there in the simple, ordinary fact of four people at a table on a random weeknight, living through something hard and coming out the other side of it.
For dessert, Henry brought out something that had been planning itself for at least two days.
Shay made an obscene noise about it.
Felix squeezed his hand under the table once, brief and sure.
Loud enough.
Epilogue
Shay
The thing about team buses was that they had their own frequency.
Not the sharp, compressed chaos of the locker room, not the echoing noise of a rink. Bus noise was lazier. Looser. A long, stretched,out sound made of bad stories, worse snacks, and twenty,something men who had just done something hard together and were now trapped in a moving tube with nothing but time and each other.
I lived for that, too.
We were halfway to the airport. Night outside the windows, highway lights sliding past, the low hum of the engine underneath everything. Mivo was across the aisle, gesturing with a bag of chips. Kieran was in the seat ahead of us, turned around backwards like a raccoon that had learned to talk.
“Okay,” I said, “but listen. This is important historical information. The people deserve to know what you did to that poor rental car.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Mivo said.
“You put it in neutral at a red light,” I said. “On a hill.”
“It was an experiment.”
“It was a cry for help.”
