Page 136 of Puck You Both

A kid. Juniors, out west, seventeen.

He watched the media clip forty times, he says. Nobody in his life knows. He was starting to think guys like him had to pick, hockey or the whole rest of it, and then some winger stood up at a podium and taught a room full of cameras to say his boyfriend's name.

how did you know it would be okay, he writes, no caps, no punctuation, the way you type when you're trying to sound casual about something that matters.

I start typing three different jokes and delete all three.

It takes me twenty minutes, but I do tell him the truth. That I didn't know. That I was scared the whole time and did it anyway, in stages, with backup. That there are more locker rooms like mine and Wall’s than he'd believe, and the people worth keeping are the ones who never once ask you to be smaller, and hockey has more of them than it knows what to do with. I tell him to take his time. I tell him my DMs stay open, and that one's true forever.

He sends back one word: okay. Then, a minute later: thanks 11.

My juniors’ number. He knows my number.

I screenshot the thread and put it in the folder where I keep the things I'll never delete, and then I sit there on Patrick's couch for a long time, holding my phone against my sternum, listening to two goalies argue in the kitchen about the correct way to store rice, of all things, and something in me that's been braced my whole life finally, quietly, stands down.

My whole career I've been the guy with the volume knob missing. Too loud for the room, too much for the roster, a great time. The exact size of me has been the problem since I was old enough to be measured.

And now it's public record, all of it. The name-yelling, and the cheesehead, and the whole entire too-much of me, posted at nine-fourteen on a Tuesday with no caption.

Maybe I'm not too much.

Maybe I'm exactly enough for two whole people, and there's a kid out west with my number in his pocket who knows it.

"Theodore," Patrick calls from the kitchen. "Come tell him he's wrong."

I take up all the space between the couch and the kitchen, every inch of it, at full volume.

There's room.

Chapter 27

PATRICK

THE QUIET THAT fills my apartment in the middle of the night isn’t new.

What's new is, I can hear it.

For most of my life, some part of me has stayed on shift while the rest of me slept, planning, drafting answers to questions that hadn't been asked yet. Tonight that part clocked out. There's nothing left for it to guard, and instead of resting, I keep mentally wandering back to the empty space to stare at where the worries used to live.

Theo sleeps like he was dropped from a height, one shin flung over mine. On my other side, Wall barely appears to breathe. Between them, with eyes wide open for hours, buzzing like a wire: me, a man who has slept through playoffs and injury scares, wide awake in the middle of a peace he has no training for.

At half past midnight I stop pretending and wake them, trying to convince myself that tomorrow’s a day off, so they won’t mind.

Wall's eyes open before my hand lands. Theo requires excavation, and aims one eye at me.

"Get dressed," I say.

"It's midnight," Wall points out, voice dripping with sleep I’ve just robbed him of.

"I know."

"He's finally lost it," Theo tells the ceiling, but he’s already rolling off the bed.

Wall asks no questions on the drive. Theo asks a constant stream of them—about everything except where we're going.

That warms me the whole way there.

***