Just stop.
And the rest of him goes with it. The shoulders come down. The spine gives in to the chair. The closed face I’ve spent seven months failing to read doesn’t open, exactly, but it unlatches. He isn’t mapping the room. He isn’t arranging anything. For the first time off a sheet of ice, I’m looking at a version of him that isn’t holding something in place. It lands somewhere I don’t have a word ready for. I don’t go hunting one down.
I hold onto it. I don’t know what else to do with it, so I keep it.
Baz comes back in talking. I catch his eye. Tip my head a half-inch at the chair. Baz, who misses most things, gets this one and drops his voice to a stage whisper still louder than my regular voice.
“Oh my god, Bug picked him. Bug never picks anyone. Bug bit a vet.” He sits. He lets the cat have the room. It might be the kindest thing I’ve ever watched Baz do, and he will never know he did it.
Soucy’s thumb moves once over Bug’s ear. Slowly. Nothing like the pattern. Just a hand being a hand on something small and warm. Bug makes a sound like an engine that loves him.
I look up. Tikh is looking at me.
Not at Soucy. Not at the cats. At me, watching Soucy and the cats. It’s a flat, patient look that takes its time. I know it because I used to wear it months ago when he was sitting very still beside a man he hadn’t worked out yet. I was the one on the outside then, seeing the whole shape before he’d say a word about it. He holds the look a beat. Two. Then he goes back to the game like he never left it.
I don’t know what he thinks he saw. I let it go. There’s a viable project on the table and a goalie on the screen still cheating his glove. A soft April night in the window. A cat asleep on a man who doesn’t go soft around people. That’s plenty for one room to carry.
On the drive to his place, Soucy is quiet again, but it’s a looser quiet. The quiet from two cats riding out with him into the car.
“Bug’s a menace,” he says, around my block.
“Bug loves you. That’s worse.”
“It’s the same thing, with cats.”
“It’s the same thing with a lot of things.” I pause before adding the thing I was thinking earlier. “You should get one.”
“I travel.”
“So does Bug. She has a bag. Baz made him a packing list, laminated.”
“I’m not Baz.”
“Nobody’s Baz. The world couldn’t carry two.” I pull up outside his building.
“See you tomorrow,” he says in the voice that means it, as he gets out of the car.
I watch him go inside and sit at the curb a second before I pull away. Windows down and four blocks to my place. The image of still hands in my head.
Chapter 5: Soucy
The locker room empties after the optional skate. I’m half out of my gear with a cat I don’t own still taking up a corner of my head when Marchetti comes by and grabs the back of my neck with one damp hand. My whole body steps sideways out of it before I’ve decided to. He doesn’t notice. He’s already three stalls down, hand on somebody else. Touch lands on me like a thrown object and the body fields it before the brain signs off.
Lundy comes past with two coffees, hands me one, steers me toward the door with a flat hand between my shoulder blades, and it stays there the length of the hall. Nothing in me moves to correct it. Marchetti’s hand was a thrown object I have to brace against. This is not that.
“You coming to Tikh’s tonight?” he says. “Baz is doing a follow-up. He’s calling it a sequel.”
“I have a thing. With Gwen.”
“Come after the thing. I’ll save you a plate of the sequel.”
“Don’t. The first one was a casserole that fell over. A sequel to that’s a threat.”
“It’s already in the oven. You’re committed in spirit.” He peels off toward the players’ lot. “Text me how the thing goes.”
“It’s a thing. Not a game.”
“Text me anyway,” he calls back over his shoulder.
