The crutch on my left side has slipped down the couch and is resting across his ankle. I see it. He sees it. Neither of us moves it. A week ago I'd have already been reaching for it. Apologizing. Fixing it. He would have already been adjusting it for me before I asked. The crutch stays where it fell. His ankle stays where itis. The undone thing sits between us and neither of us picks it up. The room doesn't collapse. I think, So this is what it feels like when the new rule holds.
He turns then, finally. That cataloging attention swinging onto me in the half-dark. There's nothing to read on his face because he isn't hiding anything. That's the rarest thing he owns.
"I'm not sorry I yelled," he says.
"Don't be sorry. Be here. Same ask you gave me in the car. Do nothing. Be wanted."
He pulls his shirt over his head in one motion. How he strips gear, efficient and unbothered. The light from the kitchen catches the small steel bar low on his abdomen, half-hidden at the waistline. I've undressed next to this man in a locker room for two seasons and never known it was there. He doesn't explain it. He doesn't cover it. He just lets me see it the way he's let me see every other locked room, by not closing the door.
He kisses me the way he does everything, with the full weight of his attention and nothing held back once he's decided, and I feel the small hard line of the barbell against my tongue, the steel I just learned was there surfacing now in the place where nothing stays hidden. My hands find the back of his neck. The leg keeps me where I am, flat and useless against the front of the couch, and for the first time in my life that isn't a failure, it's a gift, because it means I can't do the thing I always do.
"The leg," I tell him, against his mouth. "I can't do much tonight. You'd have to."
"I know what I'd have to do." He's already moving me, easing me back. "I want to do it, and that's not me taking care of you. Be clear on that. This isn't a service."
"I'm clear."
"Say it back."
"It isn't a service. Reste." The word leaves me before I choose it and I let it. "Stay where you are. Let me."
So I stay where I am. I let him. He undoes me slowly, his mouth and his hands taking me apart with the full weight of his attention. There's nothing for me to do. No strap to fix. No count to run. His weight settles over my good side, his hands learning the parts of me that have always been the engine and never the cargo. He takes his time with me the way I've spent a career taking my time with everyone else, and being on this end of it splits something open that has been welded shut since I was twenty-three.
"Julien," I say, because the name is the only thing I have to give and I want to give it.
"I've got you." His voice has gone rough, the economy stripped off it. "You don't have to hold anything tonight." His mouth moves down my chest, unhurried, and the barbell drags warm against my skin. "That's me wanting you with my hands full of nothing else to do. Just this."
The heat of his mouth closes over me and I lose the breath I was trying to keep. He works me as he does everything, precise and patient and total, the barbell a second sensation chasing the first, and I'm undone in a way I've never let myself be undone, flat and open and useless and wanted. When I reach for him to make it a transaction I know how to survive, he catches my hand and puts it back and shakes his head against my hip.
"No," he says. "Reste. Let me. I want to."
So I let him. I let him have me with nothing coming back, and it's the hardest thing he's ever asked me and the easiest thing I've ever done, and when it breaks over me it breaks all the way, and the only thing I give him is the truth of how completely he has me, which comes out of me in two languages I stopped being able to keep separate somewhere around the time he said my name. He stays with me through it, his hand flat and certain on my chest, and for once there's nothing underneath the reading that I need to hide from it.
After, he stays. He doesn't get up to be useful. He could. There's water in the kitchen. A blanket sliding off the couch. A leg that should be iced. A dozen small things a man like me would already be up and fixing. He does none of them. He understands, the way only he could understand, that getting up to fix something would be me handing him a job. Tonight is the one night I'm not allowed to have a job. So he lies against my good side with his hand flat over my chest where the breath is still coming back. The cat isn't here but the quiet is. We stay in it.
"Game 6's in our building," he says, after a long time, into my collarbone.
"I know."
"I’m going to be in the net."
"I know that too."
"You'll be on the stool at the end of the bench. Worst seat. Same information." His thumb moves once over my heart and stops. "I'm not going to be able to do one single thing out there."
"I know," I tell him, and pull him in, and mean it. Not an apology. That's the whole shape of the thing now. He's going to stand alone in that net with the season on him. I'm going to be able to do nothing about it. He came here anyway. I let him in anyway. Neither of those facts needs the other one to be useful. Game 6 is two nights away in our building with the whole season on it, and none of that's in this room. What's in this room is a man who came after me when I was worth nothing. A goalie who can finally believe the coming-after was the proof. A quiet that neither of us is working to hold up, because for once it's holding us instead.
Chapter 30: Soucy
"Seven across," I say.
"We did a crossword in the car already. You finished it before we hit the connector."
"That was the leftover Tuesday. This is the Wednesday. We're catching up."
"You kept a backlog."
"I have nine days of backlog. Seven across."
