Alexei finishes the game with zero shots, zero chances, zero access. The zero is the answer. The hockey is the answer. Theanswer says: you have no power here. The seeing belongs to someone else now and the someone else does not weaponize it.
We win 4-1. The locker room is loud. I change. I shower. I sit in my stall with my phone in my hand.
The phone is the phone I did not use three days ago when I should have called Eli and told him about the trade. The phone is the phone I did not use last night when I lay in an empty bed and knew what I needed to do and waited for the morning.
The morning came. The morning brought the game. The game brought Alexei. Alexei brought the two words. The two words brought the nothing. The nothing brought the clarity.
I call Eli.
He picks up on the first ring. The first ring is the Becca protocol, the Ava protocol, the protocol of people who answer immediately for the person they love.
"I need to tell you something," I say. "Not about Alexei. About me. About what I am afraid of. Can you come?"
The pause is two seconds. Two seconds of Eli's breathing on the phone.
"I'm already in the car," he says.
ELI
The drive is eleven minutes. I know because the clock on the dashboard counts them and I count with the clock because counting is what I do when the grin is off and the performance is off and the underneath is driving to an apartment in Atlanta at 10 PM after a phone call that said "can you come" in a voice that was not managed.
The voice was not managed. That is the thing that put me in the car before Nikolai finished the sentence. Not the words. The voice. Nikolai's managed voice is the voice I've heard for three months: measured, precise, Russian-accented, each word selected before deployment. The voice on the phone was none of these things. The voice on the phone was raw and unmanaged and the unmanaged is the underneath and the underneath called me and the underneath does not call unless the door is open.
I park. I walk to his building. The elevator. The hallway. The door.
He opens the door. No reading glasses. T-shirt and sweats and bare feet and his face in the doorway is the face from the kitchen before the first kiss, the face that is not the managed face, the face that is open and showing the underneath without the barrier.
But this face is different from that face. That face was hungry. This face is not hungry. This face is clear. The clarity is new. The clarity is the face of someone who has seen something on the ice tonight that resolved something off the ice and the resolution is visible in the way he holds the door: wide open, all the way, the door not a crack or a gap but an entrance.
"Come in," he says.
The apartment is clean but not immaculate. The distinction matters. The sneakers are gone (mine, at my apartment). The plant needs water. But the teaspoon is in the mug. The sofrito is in the cabinet. The reading glasses are on the counter, not on his face. He set them down before I arrived. Deliberately.
"Sit," he says. "Please."
I sit. The couch. He sits in the chair across from me. The distance is four feet. The four feet are his. The four feet say: I need the space to say what I am going to say.
"I played Alexei tonight," he says.
"I know. I watched."
"You watched?"
"On television. From my apartment. The cold one."
His jaw does the thing. The thing is not the management-thing. The thing is the flinch-thing, the thing that happens when Nikolai hears something that hurts and the hurt is visible because the wall is not there to hide it.
"He said something during a board battle," Nikolai says. "'Your rookie.' That was all. Two words."
"And?"
"And nothing. The words arrived and the words found nothing. No wall. No response. No reaction. The words bounced off nothing because there was nothing to bounce off."
He leans forward. His elbows on his knees. His eyes on mine.
"The wall was built for Alexei. I built it because Alexei weaponized the access and the weaponizing was the worst thingthat had happened to me and the worst thing produced the wall. But the wall was not for the world. The wall was for one man. And the one man was on the ice tonight and the one man is small. The one man has declining foot speed and a two-year contract and the words he said meant nothing because the man who said them is nothing."
"Nikolai..."
