My hands come up to him without any instruction from me. They settle into his fur. They stay. The idle hum that runs them goes quiet under his weight, the way a frequency cancels whensomething warm meets it. No restlessness. No need to move them anywhere at all.
"Gaspard," I say.
Lundy lowers himself onto the other end of the couch, careful of the cat, careful of me. "Gaspard."
"He's clearly a Gaspard. Look at him. He's appalled by everything and he's staying anyway." The motor revs under my palm. "It's a serious name. He's been through things. He's earned a serious name and I'm not going to insult him with Mittens."
"I'd've lost money betting on Mittens." Lundy reaches over, slow, telegraphing every inch of it, and gets exactly one finger of contact along the cat's spine before Gaspard's head whips around with intent and Lundy retracts the hand at the speed of a man who reads angles for a living. "Noted. No hands."
"He likes the ones who hold still and let him come to them."
"Yeah," Lundy says, and he's not looking at the cat anymore. "I'm getting that."
?
Two days later he texts me an address and a time and the single word studio, no other context, which from Lundy is a held door of his own. I show up at a storefront with brown paper over the windows and no sign, and he lets me in himself.
The space inside is wrong for him in the way the tank is wrong for me. The one room in a life that doesn't match the rest of it. Pale wood floor worn to a shine. A wall of mirror. A barre along the back. Afternoon light coming gray through the papered glass.
He's in soft clothes I've never seen on him, and there's a woman's framed photograph on the little shelf by the speakers, a dancer caught mid-leap, and I don't have to ask.
"My mother," he says anyway, because he wants to say it. "Kate. This was her thing before my dad's career ate the wholefamily. She was good. Could've been more than good, but you don't run a hockey household and a body that demanding at the same time, so she picked us." He toes off his shoes. "The one piece she kept was sticking me in classes. Saturdays. She'd drive me an hour each way and sit in the lobby and not say a word about my father's road trips."
"Does the team know you do this?"
"The team knows I do ballet. They think it's a flexibility thing for the splits, the lateral push. Baz outed it two months ago and I let everybody believe it's cross-training." He walks out to the center of the floor. "It's cross-training. It's also the only forty minutes of my week that are hers and have nothing to do with stopping pucks. Nobody's been in here with me. You're the first."
"Why me?"
"You showed me a shark that's going to need a bigger house." The shrug isn't easy. It costs him, and watching it cost him is the most undressed I've seen him with his clothes on. "Seemed fair. You let me see your loud thing. This is my quiet one."
I stand in the doorway of somebody else's private room and I understand exactly what it costs to hand over a key like this, because I handed mine over in a basement with a 250-gallon tank and a bull shark that eats frozen squid on Tuesdays.
The rooms we keep locked aren't locked because they're shameful. They're locked because they're the realest thing in us and we can't afford to let the wrong person in and watch them shrug.
He's not going to shrug at my shark. I'm not going to shrug at his mother's barre.
He puts me at the barre and it's absurd immediately. The two of us, the biggest men in any room we've ever walked into, hands on a rail built for someone half our size.
"Feet out. From the hip, not the ankle. There." His hand lands flat between my shoulder blades. "Now drop your weight. You're bracing."
"I'm standing."
"You're bracing. You hold tension like you're waiting for a shot that already beat you. Let the floor have it. You know this, it's the crease. Weight low, weight even. Ready to move any direction at once."
"That's a great deal of theory for standing up straight."
"It's not standing up straight. It's the opposite of everything your brain wants to do, which is hold still and control the variables. You can't control this. You have to let it move you and trust you'll catch up." He steps off to the middle of the floor. "Watch. Don't analyze it. Just watch."
And he does something I have no vocabulary for, a slow controlled unfolding, all of that mass moving like it weighs nothing, like the laws that apply to the rest of us got a waiver in his case.
The pattern-recognition brain that catalogues a shooter's tell from forty feet lights up trying to map it. It can't. There's no tell. There's just a six-foot-five man being briefly, privately, the most graceful thing I've ever watched move.
"Okay," I say, when he stops. "That isn't a flexibility thing."
"No."
"That's the thing you do that nobody gets to see."
