Not the room. The room was the same. I was different—or the giving was different, the transaction had changed in some way I couldn't fully articulate except that it felt less like a system and more like just being there. Wanting to be there. The crowd giving me the noise not because I needed it to know I was okay but because it was good, it was a good thing, the noise and the game and the team, and I could enjoy it without it being the only thing that told me I was worth anything.
I showered. I changed. I did the post-game the way I did the post-game.
Dylan found me before I left.
He didn't say anything. Just fell into step beside me the way he'd always been able to, quiet and inevitable, and we walked a stretch of corridor together and he said:
"Good game."
"Thanks," I said.
"The shot in the third was stupid," he said.
"It went in," I said.
"It was still stupid."
"Dylan."
"It went in," he said, conceding, which from Dylan was a standing ovation.
We walked a little further.
"He was there," Dylan said. Not a question.
"Yeah," I said.
Dylan nodded. Once.
We got to the place where the corridor split, his direction and mine, and Dylan stopped.
"Wes," he said.
"Dylan," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. The thing that was older than everything between us, the one I'd first seen on the ice in Toronto when Foster had his arms around him and Dylan had been coming for me anyway.
"Good," he said. Just that. Then he went his direction.
I went mine.
The corridor was quieter than the locker room. Quieter than the ice. The building had been full of noise, but now it was letting it go in stages, the crowd already gone, the facility settling into itself.
Nathan was at the end of it.
Dark jacket, no lanyard, hands in his pockets, standing the way he stood everywhere—like he'd assessed the space and decided where to be and the decision was final. He'd come down from the stands and through the facility the way people who had the right credentials could, and he was waiting in this corridor the way he'd waited in other corridors, patient and certain and not performing the waiting.
I stopped when I saw him.
"You looked for me," he said.
"I always look for you.”
Something moved through his expression. The real thing, the one under the wall, the one I'd been collecting since the first game and was now seeing every day, close up, in our kitchen, inour bed, in a corridor at the end of a game that I'd played healthy and clean and well.
He crossed to me.
His hand came up to my jaw.
