Shane didn’t use it. Shane sat back on his heels on the hotel bed and looked at him, loud face gone soft and serious, and said, “Yeah. Okay. It stays in this room.” And then, because he was Shane: “But you’re letting Pete look at it when we get back. I’ll tell him I tweaked my back, get us both in the room, you can have the table. Nobody’ll know.”
“You would do that.”
“I’d—” Shane stopped. Frowned, like he’d surprised himself. “I’d lie to the trainer about my back to get you a table. Yeah. I guess I would. Don’t make it weird.”
“You are making it weird.”
“I’m not — you’re shaking, you don’t get to—” But he was almost smiling, and his hands were still on Theo’s shoulder, and the moment had gone on too long to be anything other than what it was: two men touching in the dark for no reason hockey could explain, and they both seemed to realize it at once.
Shane took his hands back. Cleared his throat. “Lie down,” he said. “On your left. So it can’t — so the arm’s safe. I’ll take the wall.”
They lay back down. The pillow wall was gone, scattered to the floor, and neither of them rebuilt it. Theo lay on his left, the shoulder pinned safe, facing the edge, and behind him the heat of Shane Novak in the dark, close, not touching, the line of control abandoned somewhere around three a.m., andhe listened to Shane’s rhythm go slow and then deep and then, eventually, into the wet rattling honk he would never in his life admit to, and Theo Lindgren, against every term of the agreement, against the locked room and the flat voice and twenty-seven years of careful arithmetic, slept.
* * *
He woke tangled.
No other word for it, no pretending otherwise. Sometime in the last hours of the night, the two of them had drifted across the dead zone like ships off their anchors, and Theo woke with the gray morning in the curtains and Shane Novak’s face slack and young six inches from his own. Shane’s arm lay across Theo’s ribs, heavy and warm, the weight of him, all two hundred and ten pounds of Shane Novak redistributed in sleep into something that had forgotten to be armored. One of Shane’s bad-in-the-cold hands was fisted loose in the front of Theo’s shirt, holding on, the knuckles pale. Theo lay in the space of his own stillness and took inventory the way he took inventory of everything: the arm’s weight, the heat of another body that close, the slow rise and fall of Shane against his ribs, in and out, steady. The shoulder didn’t hurt. That was the first thing he noticed, with the strange clear stupidity of just-waking: the shoulder didn’t hurt, for the first morning in longer than he could remember. The second thing he noticed was that he did not want to move.
He lay still, good at lying still, had been good at it since the not-singing years, and looked at the sleeping face of the man he had married for a visa, and what he had been refusing since a parking lot eleven days ago rose through him slow and warm, and he thought, in Swedish, as he thought the truest things: oh no.
Shane stirred. His eyes opened, found Theo’s, an inch away. For one suspended second neither of them did anything at all.
Then Shane went, “Nope,” and rolled away and off the bed in one motion and stood up and clapped his hands once, too loud, “okay, morning, great, we gotta catch the bus, I call the shower,” and was gone into the bathroom, and the door shut, and the shower ran, and Theo lay in the warm dent Shane had left and stared at the ceiling and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the body knew, the body had known for days, and the brain was just the last to hear about it, and the bus left in forty minutes.
On the bus, Shane sat one row up and across the aisle, his usual seat, and put his headphones in, and performed normal so hard that Theo, who performed normal for a living, recognized every seam of it. They did not look at each other. That was the rule now, apparently, the unspoken amendment to the agreement: whatever had happened in the dark of a hotel room belonged to the dark of a hotel room, and out here, in the gray bus light, they were defense partners who tolerated each other, and the gap between those two things was the width of an aisle and an entire ocean.
But somewhere south of the state line, Shane fell asleep, the only place the loud man ever went quiet, and his head tipped and came to rest against the window at an angle that Theo knew, by morning, would leave a crick in his neck that his bad-in-the-cold hands would make worse. And Theo sat across the aisle and watched him sleep and did the math he could not stop doing. The math said this is a complication. This will cost you. There is a call-up at the end of the season with one name on it and a divorce written into the deal, and you have just added the one variable that makes the equation impossible to solve cleanly: you have started to want what you are supposed to be able to walk away from.
The math was correct. The math was always correct. And Theo looked at Shane Novak asleep against a bus window with his neck at the wrong angle, and against every line of the arithmetic, the terrible tenderness of wanting to fix that angle moved through him clean and exact.
He didn’t fix the neck. They weren’t there yet. But he wanted to.
Chapter 6
They lost Saturday because of Shane, and everyone in the building knew it, and worst of all Shane knew it.
The loss had been in his legs since the buzzer. Third period, tie game, a chance to climb out of the wild-card scrum into safer ground, and Shane had jumped up into the play on a read that wasn’t there, the gambler’s read, the one that made him special on the power play and a liability everywhere else, and the puck had gone the other way and there’d been nobody home because the one time Shane needed the house, he’d built the gamble on a night the house couldn’t get back, Theo a half-step slow on a shoulder he was hiding, two-on-one and then a goal and then the dagger and then the buzzer, and then thirty-eight minutes of sitting in full gear pretending he was fine.
Mercer didn’t even yell. That was the worst part. He just looked at Shane in the room after, a long flat look, and said, “We’ll talk Monday” (I am too tired to tell you what you cost us), and left, and the room emptied out in the grim shuffle of a team that needed a drink.
The dive bar near the rink was called the Blue Line, because of course it was, the place the Blaze went to be sad in private, and Shane sat at the end of the bar nursing a club soda because even now, even sick with it, he wouldn’t break the diet, and he stewed.
The team filtered in around him, in twos and threes, the postgame ritual. Wozniak and a couple of the kids took thepool table and pretended the loss hadn’t happened, which was how the young ones coped. Marek sat with the older guys near the door, nursing one beer, holding court as captains did, and at one point he looked down the bar at Shane sitting alone and his face softened, and Shane braced for him to come over and say the captain thing, the shake it off, kid, it’s one game thing, and Marek didn’t. He just lifted his beer an inch, a small acknowledgment, I see you sitting down there flagellating yourself, and left Shane to it. Somehow worse and kinder both.
Tripp Vandenberg was at the pool table being loud about a shot, twenty-one and untouched by the loss, and Shane watched him and the gap between the AHL and the show had never been wider, a canyon you could spend your whole career failing to clear. He turned back to his club soda. He thought about his mother, three hundred miles away, asleep or not asleep, her legs a little worse than last month. He thought about a number that wasn’t his problem anymore because a Swedish iceberg had made it his own problem instead, paid in full, up front, and how that should have been rescue and was drowning in a different ocean.
Theo found him there an hour in. Sat down one stool over. Ordered a beer he wouldn’t finish, because Theo Lindgren didn’t drink so much as hold a drink as a social prop, and for a while neither of them said anything.
“Say it,” Shane said.
“Say what.”
“That it was my fault. The goal. Get it over with.”
“It was your fault,” Theo said, agreeably, and Shane’s head whipped around, and Theo took a slow sip and added, “and I was slow on the back side, because my shoulder is bad, which you know, which you helped me hide, so it is also my fault, and we will both think it is entirely our own fault all night, separately. It is stupid. It was a bad shift. It happens. Eat something.”
“Stop telling me to eat.”
