Page 9 of Puck My Pain Away

I’m up fast. Too fast, wrong, the knee screaming now that the absence has filled back in with fire. And I do the thing I do. I grab my stick off the ice and slam it across the top of the boards as hard as I’ve got, both hands. It cracks. The blade end spins off into the bench, and I’m standing there with half a stick in my fists, breathing like I’ve run a mile. Nobody says anything, and that’s worse than if they’d laughed.

Blake starts toward me with her hands a little out, that gentle approach you use on a spooked animal, and I can’t stand it. “Don’t,” I tell her, and my voice is shaking. “I’m fine. The edge was bad. Somebody sharpen my skates wrong, I’m—” and I don’t finish it because even I can hear it, the excuse with nothing under it, the same noise my father makes.

Across the rink, Elias hasn’t moved. Hasn’t come running, hasn’t softened, just stands there at the boards taking me in with those pale eyes, and somehow that’s the only thing in the building I can breathe near. He’s the one person not performing sympathy at me. I look at him for one second too long. Then I limp off the ice past all of them. My phone buzzes in my bag in the tunnel, and it’s Dara, because of course it is. The text says Great news! Gear company wants to lock the comeback shoot, can we give them a date??

A date. I just fell down on flat ice in front of six people. I turn the phone off without answering and I keep limping.

—

I go back that night to make him snap.

That’s the truth of it, the thing I won’t admit until much later. I tell myself I’m going in to use the late slot, the second session he added, but I time it late, after everyone’s gone. I go in already lit, two more pills and the last of the bottle in me. I find him in the empty facility doing paperwork in that bright back room, and I get in his space and start swinging words.

I’m good at it. I’ve spent my life learning where people keep the soft parts. I go after the coat, the control, the cold. I tell him he’s a glorified massage therapist with a god complex. I tell him I’ve had surgeons, real ones, and he’s a guy who counts to ten while other men do the actual work.

“You get off on this,” I say, swaying a little, jabbing a finger at the empty bright room, the locked building, the two of us alone in it. “Right? The little kingdom. Everybody scared of you, nobody allowed in. You picked the one job where you get to own grown men and call it medicine.” I’m close now, too close, in his space. He hasn’t backed up an inch, and that just winds me tighter. “I had a guy like you in juniors. Coach. Loved having broken kids who needed him. You’re the same, you just went to school for it.”

I tell him he likes the late sessions because he’s got nothing to go home to, that I’ve seen it, that a man this buttoned-up is always rotting around something, and I get right up close when I say it, close enough to smell the clean nothing of him, daring him to shove me, to yell, to give me the fight my whole body is begging for because a fight I understand, a fight is the one currency I’ve still got.

Some part of me, way down, isn’t even doing it to hurt him. I’m doing it to make him real. Everyone else in my life right now is a soft surface, my father’s disappointment, Dara’s optimism, Theo’s worry, Niko’s worship, and I’m a fist going through all of them and hitting nothing, no resistance anywhere, falling through the world. I need one solid wall to hit. I need one person who won’t bend when I throw myself at them, because if everything gives then there’s nothing holding the room up and I’m just going to keep falling. So I throw myself at the coldest, hardest thing in the building. I think, underneath, I’m praying he holds.

He doesn’t give me one inch.

He sets his pen down. He listens to all of it, every cut, and his face does nothing. His eyes just stay on me, steady and patient, not even angry. And the longer he doesn’t react the more I escalate, and the more I escalate the more I can hear how it sounds, a drunk man swinging at fog, until I run all the way out of words. I’m just standing there in his space breathing hard with nothing left to throw.

The silence after is terrible.

“What are you so afraid of?”

That’s all he says. Quiet. Just the question, set down flat between us like he set the pen down, and it goes through every wall I’ve got like they were paper.

Because that’s the thing nobody asks. Everybody asks when I’m skating again. Everybody asks about the timeline, the comeback, the date; my father, my agent, the gear company, all wanting the same answer. And not one of them, not once, in all of it, has asked me what I’m scared of. The reason they don’t is that they don’t think there’s a person in here to be scared. There’s a player. There’s an asset. And this cold man in a back room at midnight just looked straight past all of it and asked the one question that assumes I’m real.

My throat closes. My eyes go hot, fast, before I can lock it down, and my voice when it comes out is wrecked: “That there’s nothing left if I can’t—” And it cracks clean in half on the word, like it’s been cracking since the tunnel. I hear myself about to say the thing I’ve never said out loud to a living soul, that without the hockey I don’t know that there’s anybody home. And I can’t, I can’t do it, not in front of him, not in front of anyone.

I turn away fast. I scrub my face with the heel of my hand, hard, furious. “Forget it. I’m drunk.” I grab my bag and get out of there before he can see any more of me than he already has, which is more than anyone’s seen in years. And I hate him for it. I drive home one-footed and shaking, and I cannot stop hearing the question.

—

By four a.m. the whiskey’s gone and sleep is a country I can’t get a visa to.

I’ve tried everything. The pills are down to the number I’m not supposed to go under and I take one anyway and it doesn’t touch the thing the question opened up. I lie in the dark of the glass box, the blinds shut, the city not caring, the knee beating, the silence so total I can hear the refrigerator and my own pulse. The loneliness is a physical thing now, sitting on my chest with all its weight. I have never in my life felt this far from another human being. There used to always be someone. A team. A bus, a plane, a hotel floor full of guys, a phone that wouldn’t stop. You don’t notice the noise of belonging until it cuts out, and then the quiet it leaves is the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. I had a whole world built out of other people needing me on the ice, and the second I couldn’t give them the ice, the world went home, and I’m finding out at four in the morning exactly how empty the house was underneath all of them.

I think about Theo, who’d pick up. I think about the dinner, the kids, the open door. And I can’t because Theo would be kind, and kindness would break me the rest of the way. Because Theo knew the whole man, and I can’t let him watch the demolition.

I think about the question instead. What are you so afraid of? And the cold man who asked it, who didn’t flinch at the wreck of me, who’s the only person in weeks who looked at me and didn’t see a stat line on legs.

I keep coming back to how he held. How I hit him with everything I had, every cruel true thing, and he just absorbed it, stayed standing, then reached past all of it for the realest part of me like the cruelty was just noise he had to wait out. Nobody’s ever done that. Nobody’s ever let me be that ugly and not flinched and not left. My father would’ve matched me, my mother would’ve gone quiet and disappeared, the women I dated would’ve cried or thrown something back, and Theo would’ve hugged me, which is its own kind of leaving, the kind that needs me to be okay so he can stop worrying. Elias just stood there and let me wreck myself against him and didn’t need a single thing from me, not even that I be okay. And some broken animal part of me has decided that’s the safest I’ve felt in years. A man who can take the worst of me at full force and not move. I want to put my whole weight on that and find out if it holds. I want it like the pills. I’m too tired and too sad and too far down to lie to myself about which want it is anymore.

I pick up my phone. I tell myself I won’t. I watch my own thumb find his name in the contacts, the doctor’s number they gave me for emergencies, and I type two words, delete them, type them again, and before the sober part of me can get a hand on the wheel I send it.

you up

Then I lie there in the dark holding the phone against my chest, heart going stupid and fast, certain he won’t answer, certain it’s pathetic, four in the morning, drunk, texting my doctor like a—and the screen lights.

Three dots. Right away. He’s awake too. The three dots pulse in the dark, him typing. I stare at them like they’re the only light left in the world, and something in me that has been falling since the ice came up stops falling for just a second and waits.

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