I let him hear me, something between a grunt and a howl. I came with my eyes open, gasping for breath.
He collapsed flat onto his back and pulled my head onto his chest. Then he reached for the lamp and turned it off.
“I’m tired, Luki.”
His fingers stopped combing through my hair.
“Not tonight tired,” I said. “The long kind. I’ve been so tired, and I kept thinking I could carry on until retirement, but tonight—I don’t think I can.”
He was very quiet. His heart beating was all I heard.
“The wall didn’t just hide us,” I said. “It hid me. I’ve been behind it so long that the only person who ever saw the whole man was you, and I turned even that into something we only did at night with the door locked. That has to end. I want what you want. Not for you. With you.”
He didn’t say anything. He turned his head and pressed his mouth to my hair and held it there while he breathed out, long and unsteady, and his arm wrapped tight around me.
“Then we don’t carry it until retirement,” he said. “We stop now.”
“We get ahead of it?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I exhaled. “We do it ourselves. Our words, our timing.” He nodded against me.
“On our terms,” he said.
For a while, neither of us said anything. Then it started—the shift in Varga. He took a deep breath.
“Cross won’t even blink,” he said. “You know that, right? He’ll do the thing—the nod. It would be like we’d just told him thebus was leaving at nine.” Varga did the nod against my shoulder so I could feel it. “Pratt already knows. Don’t argue with me; he knows, and he’s known all five years. Goalies see everything from back there. He’ll say one word in the hallway, and it’ll wreck you.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“Rafe’s gonna be a disaster,” he said, softer. “Good disaster. Kid’s been watching Heath and Kieran all season like he’s taking notes for a test.” He went quiet for a second. “Heath,” he said finally. “Heath’s gonna lose it. Three years he’s been sitting over there not saying anything, and the day we say it out loud in the room he’s gonna grin so hard he won’t be able to talk.” His voice dropped lower. “I’ve wanted to be his friend for three years, Rook. Now I can. I couldn’t because of the cover.”
“Because of the cover,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m not mad. I’m just saying I get him now.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought he’d stopped.
“You want to know the dumb one?”
“Tell me the dumb one.”
“I’ve thought about scoring,” he said. “Home game. Late. I wouldn’t go to the bench after. I’d go to you.” He held his breath against me, like he’d said too much. “We’d kiss at center ice in front of everybody. That’s the dumb one. You can laugh.”
I didn’t laugh. I lay there in the dark with his entire vision in my mind.
“Not dumb,” I said.
He breathed out.
I reached up and found his jaw in the dark, ran my thumb along it once, and felt him relax against me.
“Now we sleep,” I said.
The thought of coming out should have closed my throat. The entire world would know about us—the team, the league, and my parents. I lay there waiting for panic to rise, and it didn’t. Whatcame up instead was that I wanted it to be morning. I wanted the hours to pass so that we could start.
I stayed awake beside Varga. A little after three, I was still up.
