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I don't mean to. We're lying on the couch under the green blanket I brought up from Chicago, because I couldn't stand to leave it behind, and he's got his head on my chest, and he asks, out of nowhere, "Who was the guy? From rule ten. The one who got traded and quit."

I've never said his name out loud to anybody. Not in fifteen years.

"Danny Lisowski," I say. "He was a winger. We came up together, my second year in Chicago. We were both twenty. We roomed together on the road."

He goes still against me.

"He was funny," I say. "He did impressions. He did the coach so well that the coach laughed. He was the only guy on that team I talked to. Really talked to." I look at the fire. "Somebody saw him at a bar in Boystown. That's all. Just at a bar. The room turned anyway. Nobody said anything to his face, but it turned. Guys stopped passing to him in practice. Stopped sitting with him on the bus. By February he was eating alone. By the deadline, they traded him to Winnipeg. He played a handful of games there and retired. He was twenty-one."

"What did you do?" Rémy asks, very quietly.

"Nothing." My throat hurts. "I did nothing. I stopped sitting with him, too. I was so scared that if I stood next to him, they'd look at me. That they'd see something." I close my eyes. "The last thing he ever said to me was on the day of the trade, in the parking lot. He said, I thought you were different, Owen. And I didn't say anything. I just got in my car."

The fire pops. Rémy doesn't say anything.

"Were you in love with him?" he asks.

I've never asked myself that. Not once, in fifteen years. I've been very careful never to ask.

"I don't know," I say. "Maybe. I think so. I think that's why I couldn't stand next to him."

He lifts his head off my chest. He looks down at me in the firelight.

"You were twenty," he says. "You were a kid."

"You're twenty."

"I'm braver than you were. I know that. It's okay." He puts his hand flat on my chest. The same place. It's always the same place. "You're not twenty anymore, Owen. You're standing next to me now."

"Not in front of anybody."

"Not yet," he says. "But you're standing next to me."

I pull him down and kiss him, and he lets me, and then he takes over the way he always does, the way I've learned to want. His hand on my jaw. His mouth slow and sure.

"Upstairs," he says against my lips. "I want you in a real bed. Not a hotel. Not the gray place. Here."

"Okay."

"Are you sure? This is—" He stops. "I want more tonight. If you want it. All the way. But only if you want it."

I look up at him. At his eyes, dark in the firelight, and the question in them that he's going to keep asking, I know, until I answer it out loud.

"I want it," I say. "I want you. Rémy. I want all of it."

He studies my face for a long second, like he's checking for any leftover hesitation. Then he smiles, soft and sure, and leans down to kiss me again—slow, deep, the kind that makes my stomach drop.

"Upstairs," he repeats against my mouth. "Come on."

We leave the green blanket on the couch. The stairs creak under us the way they always have. At the top he turns left into the bigger bedroom—the one that used to be Laurel's and mine. The bed is still made with the same white sheets. No curtains. Snow falls past the wide windows in fat, silent flakes, and the only light is the faint blue-white glow coming off the ice.

Rémy closes the door even though there's no one for miles. He turns to me.

"Take everything off," he says. Quiet. Absolute. "Then get on the bed. On your back."

I do it. Boots first, then jeans, then the rest. The air is cool on my skin. When I'm naked I climb onto the mattress and lie back against the pillows. My knee twinges once as I settle; he notices immediately.

"Bad?" he asks, already stripping.