He looked up. "About what."
"Whatever's in your head right now. You've been in there since the third period."
His jaw shifted. "It was a coverage breakdown. I should have,"
"Felix."
He stopped.
"Not the game," I said. "What's actually in your head."
He looked at me for a long moment. The bar light caught the line of his face, the careful architecture of him, and underneath it the thing I'd been seeing more of lately , the thing that showed when he was tired of holding everything at the right distance.
"I don't know how to turn it off," he said. Quiet. "The analysis. After a loss. It just," He stopped. "It runs."
"I know."
"It's not useful."
"It's also not a choice," I said. "You can't logic your way out of caring about the game."
He looked at his glass. "You don't do it."
"I do it differently. I get loud instead of quiet. Same thing." I leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You think I was doing all that talking tonight because I was having a great time?"
He looked at me. Something shifted in his expression , understanding landing, quiet and specific. "The loss," he said.
"Yeah."
"You were,"
"Coping badly in a different direction. Yeah." I picked up my drink. "We're both disasters. Yours is just better dressed."
His mouth did the thing. Just barely. In the amber light, with his guard down at the edges the way it only got when it was late and he was tired and there was nobody left to perform for , it was devastating. He was devastating. I had known this for two years and the knowing had not made it easier.
"Shay," he said.
"Yeah."
He looked at me with the look. The one from the dinner table, the one I'd lost the thread for. Not trying to look away.
"We should get back," he said. "Early skate."
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
The hotel was three blocks. The night was cold , the specific, clarifying cold of late season, the kind that made everything feel more precise. We walked without talking, not because there was nothing to say but because there was too much, and the cold had a quality that asked you to just move through it. Our shoulders were close. Not touching. Close.
The lobby was quiet. The elevator was quiet. The hallway was quiet in the way hotel hallways always were , that suspended, in,between hush of a place that existed only for transition.
I used my key card. The door opened.
The room was dark except for the city light coming through the gap in the curtains , a thin strip of amber crossing the floor between our beds. Felix set his jacket on the chair. I dropped my bag. The sounds were the same as always: the particular thud of gear hitting carpet, the hum of the air conditioning, the muffled distance of the city outside.
I sat on the edge of my bed.
Felix stood in the middle of the room, still in his coat, not quite moving toward anything. He was doing it again , the running, the analysis, the version of himself that stood at the blue line after a loss and couldn't put the game down. I could see it. I always could.
"Hey," I said.
