The cover story rolled out at practice the next morning, and it went wrong, because Shane Novak could not, constitutionally, leave a simple thing simple.
The plan was nothing. The plan was: they’d moved in together, roommates, cheaper rent, closer to the rink, the most boring sentence in hockey, a sentence half the league could say without lying. Theo had rehearsed it in the car. We are roommates now. It is cheaper. That is all.
“—so yeah, we’re roomies now, which, I know, I know, believe me, I said the same thing, but the math just made sense, you know? My place was a disaster, three of us crammed in, somebody was always eating my food, and Theo’s place is nice, it’s clean, it’s like aggressively clean, you could do surgery in there, and it’s like four minutes from the barn, and the rent split is good, anyway it’s temporary, probably, we’ll see, it’s a trial thing, a trial period—”
“It is not a trial,” Theo said, from two stalls down, because a trial period sounded exactly like the kind of thing a person said about a marriage they were hiding.
“—well, everything’s a trial, that’s just life, Theo, very Swedish of you to—”
“Boys.” Marek Dvorák, lacing his skates, not looking up, the captain’s mild voice that ended things. “Nobody asked for the TED talk. You moved in together. Great. Wozniak’s been trying to find a roommate for a year, maybe take notes, Woz.” And the room laughed and moved on, because that was the thing about a hockey room: it did not actually care, it had twenty other things to chirp about, and an over-explained living arrangement was forgotten by the time the Zamboni doors opened.
Except Marek looked up, once, after. Just for a second. His steady eyes went from Shane to Theo and back, and he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t smile, and then he went back to his laces. Shane watched Theo across the room: the set of his jaw, the stillness that had come over him, not looking at Marek again. Shane didn’t look at Marek either. He pulled his laces tight and said nothing.
On the ice, it was worse and better. Worse because Shane was rattled, stiff, hyperaware of Theo in a way that had nothing to do with the system, flinching at contact in the corners like the contact counted now. Better because when they did connect, Shane feeding him a puck, the puck landing exactly where it was supposed to, there was a new thing in it, a current Shane couldn’t name. Mercer blew the whistle and barked, “Lindgren, Novak, you two are playing like you’re on a first date, knock it off, find your game,” and Shane’s ears went red under his helmet, and he skated hard for the far boards and stared at the ice and the word date rang around the empty rafters and didn’t stop.
After, in the lot, Shane caught him at the Volvo. “I panicked. I panic-talk. It’s a whole thing, my mom says I’ve done it since I was—” He stopped. Looked at his shoes. “Thanks. For not blinking. I said that whole thing about the surgery, aggressivelyclean, who even talks like that, and you just stood there like it was nothing. The room bought it.”
“The room buys everything,” Theo said. “The room wants to think about hockey and what is for dinner. It is not the room I worry about.” He glanced back at the barn, where Marek’s truck was just pulling out. “It is the ones who watch.”
Shane followed his gaze. The noise went out of his face for a moment, the trapdoor opening. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. We’ll be careful.” A beat. “Home?”
It was the first time either of them had called it that, by accident, home, a one-bedroom neither of them had chosen for love. They both heard it, and neither of them corrected it. Shane got in his financed car, and Theo got in his Volvo, and they drove the four minutes home in two cars to the one apartment, a small, ridiculous parade. Shane’s hand found the loose ring on his finger and turned it once, and he thought,this is going to be such a problem, for the second time in twelve hours.
On the counter, in the dark, the license sat squared to the laminate, the only thing in the clean apartment that didn’t quite belong to either of them. Outside, the snow came down on Rockford and on the barn and on the ninety miles of highway between here and everything they both wanted. In the morning, they had practice, and the morning after that, and a whole season of mornings, each one a little harder to keep cold than the last.
Chapter 4
The thermostat war started on day three.
Shane woke up at six because the apartment was the temperature of a meat locker, and he stood in the hallway in two pairs of socks and a hoodie with the strings pulled tight around his face and watched Theo do shoulder rehab on the living room floor, shirtless, in sixty-three degrees, a Viking who’d wandered into the wrong century.
“It’s freezing,” Shane said.
“It’s healthy.”
“It’s a crime.” Shane went to the thermostat and put it to seventy. Theo, not looking up from the resistance band he had hooked under one enormous foot, said, “If you touch the thermostat, I will put your protein powder in the toilet.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I have nothing to lose. I am a man who sleeps on a couch.”
Shane took his hand off the thermostat. He’d learned, in three days, that Theo’s threats were always small and exact and real, more frightening than a normal person’s for it. The man didn’t bluff. It was infuriating. Shane went and made coffee, banging the cupboard, and Theo finished his set with the serenity of a glacier, and this, Shane was discovering, was marriage: two men weaponizing household appliances at dawn.
The thing nobody warned you about a fake marriage was the dishes.
“You left a plate in the sink,” Shane said.
“You left three.”
“Mine are soaking. Soaking is a technique.”
“Soaking is what people say who do not wash plates.” Theo rinsed his single plate, dried it, and put it away, and the smugness made Shane want to commit a felony.
And yet.
And yet the rent was paid. And his half of it was less than the room on Kishwaukee had cost, just like the cover story said. And his mother had started the treatment on Monday. He’d watched the confirmation email come in while standing in this cold kitchen, first infusion scheduled, and he’d had to go into the bathroom and run the tap so the iceberg wouldn’t hear him lose it. And the iceberg had pretended, all evening, not to notice that Shane’s eyes were red. Shane was beginning to understand that this was the kindest thing anyone had done for him in years: Theo Lindgren’s enormous, deliberate, surgical not-noticing.
* * *
