He set the knife down and turned to face me. The stove light caught his eyes. He was standing between my knees now. His hands rested on the marble on either side of my thighs.
"You," he said. "I'm observing you. I've been doing it since the night you rearranged my mugs, and I haven't stopped, and I'm starting to think I'm not going to."
My heart was doing something inadvisable. I set theKalevalaaside and placed both hands flat on his chest, fingers spread, the same anchor I'd used the night I woke up in his bed and nearly bolted.
"Everyone who's watched me for the last year has been looking for evidence," I said. "You're the first person who's looked at me like—"
"Like what?"
"Like you're trying to see me instead of solve me."
His hands came up and covered mine.
"I see you," he said.
The facility was a different universe.
At the rink, we were Walsh and Varis. Six feet of distance in the hallway. Separate tables in the cafeteria. The neutral nod when we passed each other between drills, the same nod he gave Hayes, Eriksson, anyone. If our eyes met during practice, it was the brief, professional acknowledgment of a goalie tracking a forward, nothing more. Nothing that a teammate, a coach, or a reporter with a telephoto lens could interpret as anything other than two professionals coexisting.
The performance was exhausting. Not because it was difficult. I'd spent a year making myself invisible, and the skill hadn't atrophied. But the contrast between public and private had become so sharp that the transition felt physical, like walkingthrough a door between two climates. Cold at the facility. Warm at home. His hands on my skin behind a locked door.
One afternoon, we passed each other in the corridor outside the weight room. A group of guys was twenty feet behind us. Garrett, Morrison, and a couple of the younger forwards. Kieran's hand brushed mine as we walked. Not a grab, not a hold. Just the backs of his fingers trailing across my knuckles, a contact so brief and light that no one behind us could have caught it.
But I felt it. I felt it like a current through my whole arm, and I carried the ghost of that touch through the next two hours of practice and film session and cool-down. When we got home and the apartment door closed behind us, I turned and pushed him against it and kissed him until neither of us could breathe.
"What was that for?" he asked, his voice wrecked.
"The hallway."
"I barely touched you."
"I know."
He looked at me, those grey-blue eyes, the sharp features, the mouth that was swollen from mine, and wonder moved across his face. The specific wonder of a man who'd lived alone for eleven years discovering that another person's presence didn't diminish his space but expanded it.
In the guest room, the duffel bag sat in the corner, half-packed, still waiting.
15
KIERAN
Luca cornered me in the coaches' hallway after morning skate.
The hallway was empty. Everyone else had already filtered to the locker room or the cafeteria. Luca leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, still in his practice jersey, theCvisible on his chest like a badge he never took off. His expression was the one I'd seen him use in contract negotiations—patient, immovable, and prepared to wait as long as it took.
"We need to talk," he said.
"About?"
"Don't do that." His dark eyes held mine. "I've known you for ten years, Kieran. I was the first person you came out to. I was at your apartment when you told your parents. Give me the respect of not pretending you don't know what this conversation is about."
I leaned against the opposite wall and crossed my own arms, mirroring his posture. Two men who'd been through a decadetogether, standing five feet apart, having a conversation neither of us wanted to have.
"Okay," I said. "Talk."
"How long?"
"How long what?"
