That’s the whole asymmetry of us in one syllable.
Not a question. Not a test. Not the way Gwen says Julien, like opening a book to the right page. He says it the way he said Gertie and Quessa, the way he says everything I give him, as if it was always there and he was just waiting for permission to use it. Easy. Like coming home to a room he already knew.
It cost me everything I have to push the words across a console. It costs him nothing to catch them. The nothing isn’t carelessness. It’s a man who decided a long time ago that whatever I needed I could have, and never thought to make me watch him decide it.
I’ve studied his face all season. I know it frame by frame.
So I catch the exact half-second where the easy thing changes into something with more weight under it. I understand all at once what the furniture in his head was, and who moved it, and why he couldn’t set it down.
For one of the few times in my life, I don’t overthink. I just do and lean over the console and press my lips against his.
The same brain that learned his angles inside the net over the years, now learns the rest of him in the space of one breath. Fast and total. No drama at all, because there’s none of the noise here. No count. No list. Just getting to where I already knew I was going.
His hand comes up to the side of my neck. He kisses me back like the answer was always going to be yes and he’d only been waiting for me to find the question.
When I pull back an inch, the city is still out there celebrating its own thing. The car is still in park.
One of my hands has come off my thigh and fisted in the front of his shirt.
The pattern gone. Nowhere. Replaced.
Lundy’s eyes open, and he watches me for a second. “Was that okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
He stills.
I put my hand in his. “Not no. Just not sure. Different category.”
His thumb moves once along my skin. “Okay.”
“That was a bad answer.”
“It was an honest answer.” He doesn’t make it smaller than it is and he doesn’t make it heavier. “Jules,” he says again, not asking anything, just keeping it. Setting it somewhere he plans to use.
And I sit in the wreck of every system I’ve ever built and let him be there with me.
Chapter 8: Lundy
There's a version of this building that's been screaming for two hours, and inside the cage I can't hear a decibel of it. That's the gear. Off the ice I hold the whole room at once on purpose, every face, every good thing. In here I hold one thing. The puck and the half-second before it. Nothing else gets through the bars.
Wire to wire, this one. We scored, they answered. We scored again, they answered again, and since the middle of the second it's been our one goal held against a building that can feel the round slipping and has decided not to let it go quietly. A goalie at the end of a series is playing two games. The puck and the shooter's belief about the puck. They've thrown everything at me for two periods to find out if I'll blink. The answer they keep getting back is the most boring answer in the sport. No. Not tonight. Try the next one. The boredom is the weapon.
Late in the second their captain comes in alone off a bad change and the building stands up early to watch me lose. I make him decide first, show him the whole net and take it away in the order I choose. He shoots where I left the door open a quarter-second ago and I've already shut it. That save is the game, except nobody knows it yet. A save is only ever the game in hindsight.
We're up one with four minutes left. The mistake every goalie makes closing a series is guarding the lead instead of playing the puck, leaning back to protect what's behind you instead of stepping out to take what's in front. The lead isn't my job. The next shot is my job. I say it inside the mask where only I can hear it.
They pull the goalie with two minutes left and the ice tilts. Six skaters in our end, the puck moving low to high while they hunt the lane that finally cracks me.
"Net's clean," I tell Davis on a whistle. "Just bodies. Box them out and let me see the puck."
"Copy."
Cross-ice pass, I'm there before it arrives, post sealed. Point shot through a screen, I track it through three bodies and smother it. The whistle. Faceoff, fifty-eight seconds. They win the draw back, one more look, a seam pass to the back door. I push across and get the toe of the pad on it. The puck sits in the blue paint for a half-second that lasts a season. I cover it. They've used everything they had.
