He laughs, wet and caught off guard, and turns into me, all six and a half feet of him folding toward the smaller man for once.
Gaspard thumps up onto the foot of the bed and glares at us both and stays.
I lie there in the dark holding a man who has never once let himself be held. My hands still. The hum in them finally quiet. Three still places in my entire life and every one of them somehow in this room tonight. I understand that I've justhanded him something he doesn't yet know what to do with, and that neither entirely do I.
Chapter 12: Lundy
Two hours before a game that tilts the whole Boston series, the room is too loud, which is how I know everyone's scared. Quiet rooms are confident rooms. This one's got Baz dealing cards to a game nobody agreed to play.
"It's Pres," Baz announces. "Everybody antes. Tikh, you're in."
"I'm not in."
"You're sitting at the table, that's in. Berger, ante."
"I'm watching tape," Berger says, not watching tape, watching the door. "That call in game four was a hook. I've decided. I've reviewed it in my heart and it was a hook and the league owes me a letter."
"The league isn't writing you a letter about your heart," Thompson says.
"They wrote Marchetti a letter."
"They wrote Marchetti a fine," Marchetti says, taping a stick he already taped. "Different letter. Worse letter."
"Ante or fold, both of you, this is the most boring crime I've ever run." Baz fans his cards at nobody.
"Nobody's playing your game, man." Ash, passing through, ruffling Baz's hair just to watch him hate it.
"Avi's playing. Avi believes in me."
"Avi believes in pregame naps," Avi says, eyes shut, chin on his chest, not opening them. "Wake me for warmups or for love, nothing else."
I do my twenty-two minutes in the back, where the equipment guys stack the spare sticks. Eyes shut, breathing on a count. It's not calm. It's manufactured calm, same as every game, the daily work of building what the room thinks I was born holding. Tikh's the only one who's ever watched me come out of it and known what he was looking at.
"You good," he says now, dropping onto the bench beside me, not really a question, more a check of the gauges.
"I'm good."
"You're always good." He bumps my shoulder. "That's the problem with you. Nobody in here ever knows when you're not. They all think the calm comes free."
"It works for them. They need one guy it's free for."
"Sure." He lets a beat go by. "Just don't forget I can see the meter. One guy should get to."
Soucy comes through for his pads and the room rearranges around him without anybody deciding to. The corner left open, the bag already off the bench so he doesn't have to ask. A machine nobody built on purpose. He drops down on my other side to strap in. Close, our shoulders touching. For a second he leans in, the whole warm line of him against my arm.
Then he straightens. Puts six inches between us like he caught himself. Goes very busy with a buckle that's already done.
"You sleep?" I watched him not answer two texts last night.
"Enough. Gaspard decided three a.m. was social hour. He stood on my face."
"You let a feral cat sleep on your face."
"I let a feral cat do whatever he wants. I'm aware of how that sounds, you don't have to do the eyebrow." The flicker at the corner of his mouth, there and gone, and then the retreat again, the lean-in and the pull-back. "Go do your thing. You've got the game face that isn't a face."
"Stick to your side tonight. Their five hole guy crashes the net late."
"I always stick to my side." He says it light, and it lands heavier than light, or exactly as heavy, and I can't tell which, and that's the whole trouble lately. I read shooters for a living. He's the one read I keep getting half of and never the back half.
