All of it right.
Jules doesn't look at the stall when I look at it. He's already up and moving for the trainer's room.
"I'll grab the wrap for that wrist. And the heat's on for the shoulder. You've been rolling the right one since the second."
He would, too. He'd have it wrapped right and the pad adjusted before I finished arguing, and I'd let him, as the whole season has been him learning the shape of taking care of me and me handing him the next thing to fix. He set up my stall the way I'd set it up myself. Every piece exactly placed. I notice it how I notice everything, from a small distance. Like it's somebody else's data. The thing I can't stop calculating is he did it without asking. The same way I straightened his skate guards without him seeing. The same instinct. Quiet management dressed up as love, or love dressed up as management. I've been on both sides of that math. I can't tell you from here which one this is.
"Don't," I say instead.
He stops. "Don't what."
"Don't get the wrap." My voice does a thing I don't recognize on the back half of it. I push my hair off my face and make my hand go still after, flat on my knee, how his go flat when the pattern stops. "Sit down. Come here."
He comes. He sits. The whole of him turned to me, that attention he gives three people in the world. I have it, and I'm about to ask for a thing I've never once asked anyone for. It won't come up clean.
"I want you to." It dies there. I find the next piece and hold it to the light before I let it out. "All night I had the net. All season I've had it handled. Yours, the team's, mine. I'm good at it."
"You're the best I've seen at it," he says. Quiet. Not a deflection. He's giving me room.
"It's the one thing I know how to be." The last piece costs the most. "I don't want to be it tonight. I want to be the one you take care of. I'm asking you to."
He doesn't make it a moment. That's the mercy in him nobody else gets to know about. He reaches over and takes my hand off my knee and turns it palm-up in both of his, those long careful fingers that catalog everything.
"Okay," he says. "Lie back."
I do. I let the biggest, most useful body in the room go heavy on a training table in a building that wants us gone, and I let him have it. He starts at the wrist, the heel of his thumb pressing slow and exact into the joint, reading me for a weakness to protect instead of one to exploit.
"You caught the one in the first with your elbow tucked," he says. "That's new. You've dropped that elbow all series. Tonight you tucked it."
"You watched my elbow."
"I watch all of you. The elbow's part of you." He moves to the shoulder I've been favoring and finds the knot on the first try. "The winger telegraphs with his top hand. You had him before he crossed the blue line."
"I told him so."
"I heard you. The whole building heard you. He's going to lie awake wondering how you knew." His thumb works the knot and I make a sound I don't mean to. He doesn't tease me for it. "Your glove dropped twice in the third. You were tired. Nobody scored on it because nobody else saw it."
"You saw it."
"I always see it." He says it into my shoulder, hands not stopping. "You square to the shooter a half-beat before anyone in the league. It's why you look bored out there. You're already where the puck's going."
"Bored is the goal."
"I know it's. I've watched you do it four hundred times. Breathe. I've got it."
He gets the ice without me telling him which drawer, because of course he knew which drawer, and works it down over the wrist. His hands move to the straps of my gear and start in on those too, loosening what's still on me.
"Your left pad strap's been loose two games. You keep cinching it in the second. I'll fix it before Thursday."
"It can wait."
"It's not going to wait. Tais-toi and let me." He says it without any heat, the French slipping out as it does when he stops minding the gate. He goes back to my shoulder.
"Tell me where it's bad."
"Everywhere. Nowhere. I don't have a word for it."
"Then don't use one. I'll find it."
