it's not a loophole it's how everyone gets a cat
Soucy
not one like mine. get one that likes people. he'd run your whole life in a week. i'm taking the dinosaur back. this conversation is over
Chapter 14: Lundy
The horn sounds and the building comes apart.
I've won series before. Two with Seattle, one that went seven and one that didn't. Both times the horn was a period at the end of a sentence I'd been writing for weeks. This isn't a period. This is a wall of sound that starts in the ice and climbs through my skates and arrives in my skull before my brain has finished processing the scoreboard. The two on our side is one more than the one on theirs. The clock has zeros in every window. Kowalski hits me from the left and someone else from the right and I'm at the bottom of a pile of men screaming things that have no words in them.
Game 6. Home ice. The series is ours and Boston is lining up to shake hands and the building is so loud I can feel it in my fillings.
I find him the way I always find him. I stop looking and let the ice do it. Soucy is near the far boards, helmet off, hair wrecked. Petrov has him in a hug that has lasted longer than any hug Petrov has probably given in his adult life. When Petrov lets go Soucy stands there for a second with his gloves off and his hands open. A look I've never seen on his face. A man who hasn't yetdecided what to do with a feeling because the feeling arrived faster than the system that sorts them.
I skate to him. There's no version of this moment that requires thinking about it first.
"Hey," I say, which is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said after winning a playoff series, and his face breaks into the grin, the real one, the one that rewires his whole geography, and he says, "Soren, we just won a fucking hockey game," like he can't believe it, like the evidence of twenty thousand people on their feet and the ice covered in hats isn't enough, like he needs to say it to a specific person before it becomes real.
"I noticed."
"In six."
"I was there."
"At home."
"Jules. I was there. I'm currently there."
He laughs. The full one. I've heard it maybe four times in seven months. His whole body participates and the sound comes from somewhere that has nothing guarded around it. He grabs the front of my jersey and pulls me down and presses his forehead against mine, right there, in front of the cameras and everyone. I let him hold me there because tonight there's no careful. No private. No navigating what this looks like from the outside. Tonight it just looks like what it is.
"You played a hell of a series," I tell him, because he did.
"We," he says. "We played a hell of a series. Don't do that thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where you put it on me so you don't have to stand in yours. You're in it. Stay in it."
So I stay in it. Through the handshake line, where Boston's captain nods and means it. Through the locker room, where the music is already too loud and someone has found champagne.Through Coach saying four sentences, because Coach has never once said five and every one lands. Through Kowalski on a table declaring himself mayor of a city that doesn't exist. Through someone FaceTiming Soucy's parents, his mother's voice coming through the speaker. Soucy's face goes soft in a way nobody else in this room will remember tomorrow but I'll carry for the rest of my life.
He finds me in the hallway outside the showers. The volume has dropped from impossible to merely ridiculous. His hair is wet. He's wearing someone else's shirt. He looks like a person who's happy. Just happy. No machinery visible. Not sorting a single thing. I realize I've been waiting to see this version of him the way you wait for a city on a long drive. Knowing it's coming. Not knowing what it looks like until the road opens.
"Good night," he says. Not a goodbye. A verdict.
"Good night." I mean what he means.
He leans into me. His shoulder against mine. His whole weight. I hold it without adjusting, without thinking about what comes next. He is happy and I am here and both of those are true at the same time. It's so simple that I almost don't recognize it as something I've been years without.
We stand there. The hallway smells like champagne and whatever industrial soap the arena showers use. Someone down the hall is singing badly. Someone else is telling them to stop. Both of them are laughing.
This is what it's for. All the road and all the mornings. This.
***
"You're nervous," I say, because he is, and because seven months has earned me the right to name the thing instead of pretending I can't see it.
Soucy has both hands at ten and two on a wheel that doesn't require that grip. His right hand is running its count against the leather at a clip I've learned to read like a temperature. He doesn't deny it. That's new too, the not-denying.
