Thursday practice ended late. Ice time ran over, Coach kept the defensive line for an extra twenty minutes of zone coverage work, and by the time the room had cleared most of the team had already cycled through showers and filtered out in ones and twos. I had stayed to work on something in my shot that had felt off for a week , a thing in my release, a half,second hesitation I could feel but not name, the kind of problem that responded to repetition and not to thinking about it.
I was not thinking about other things.
I was exclusively, professionally thinking about my shot.
The equipment room was on the way to the exit. I had my bag. I needed tape , I'd been meaning to grab a new roll for two days and had forgotten twice, which was unlike me but which I was choosing not to examine. I pushed the door open.
Felix was there.
Of course he was. Felix was always the last one in , or the first one out, depending on the day, depending on what the system required , and today the system apparently required something from the equipment room at the same time my shot required tape, and there we were.
He looked up when I came in.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
This was the full extent of what we'd had, the last four days. Hey. Yeah. The neutral zone drill. Pass and position and professional eye contact and two people who were very, very good at the thing.
I went to the tape wall. Found the right roll. I was very focused on the tape.
He was doing something with his gear bag , a strap, something stuck. I heard the small sound of it, the quiet efficient noise of Felix handling equipment, and I looked at the tape and thought about my shot and did not turn around.
"Got it," he said, to no one. Just , noting it. The way he narrated small victories to himself sometimes, quietly, when he thought no one was listening.
I knew he did that.
I had zero business knowing that.
"Good," I said, to the tape.
I heard him pick up the bag. Heard him take two steps toward the door. I was already turning , we were going to pass each other in the narrow space between the equipment shelves and the gear racks, the way we did approximately twice a week with no incident because we were professionals and the space was navigable and there was nothing,
My hair had been bothering me all practice. I'd meant to cut it two weeks ago and I hadn't and it kept falling forward, this one piece at the front, getting into my peripheral vision in a way that was distracting and annoying and had made me push it back off my face no fewer than seven times during drills today.
It fell forward now.
Felix stopped walking.
I registered this in my peripheral vision , the pause, the stillness, the particular quality of Felix going motionless that I had catalogued across four years and could identify the same way I could identify a change in ice conditions. The kind of still that meant something had arrived in him before he'd given it permission.
His hand came up.
It was not a decision. I understood that immediately, the way you understand something that happens before the brain engages , purely mechanical, purely reflex, the same kind of movement as catching a dropped glass or steadying someone who'd stumbled. His hand came up and his fingers pushed the piece of hair back from my face, tucking it back, gentle and certain and completely, entirely automatic.
The world was very quiet.
Then he froze.
I felt it , the arrest of motion, the fraction of a second where his hand was still at my temple and the touch had already happened and couldn't be taken back and we both knew it. His fingers were still. Not moving. Just , there.
Then he took his hand back.
Not slowly. Not the way he'd let go of my shirt in the hotel room, reluctant, gradual, the way you put down something you don't want to put down. This was the other kind , sharp, immediate, the reflex after contact with something hot, the instinctive pull,back of a man who had touched a surface that had burned him.
He looked at his own hand.
Not at me. At his hand, as if it had done something without his authorization, which it had, which it absolutely had, and he was now engaged in a silent and intense reckoning with it.
