And he does, how he finds everything, moving over me with that total attention turned all the way down to warm, no part of him rushing, until I'm loose under his hands in a road room and I've forgotten I have a wrist.
"You don't have to fix me," I tell him. "That's my line."
"I'm not fixing you. There's nothing wrong with you. I'm just here."
"Say that again."
"There's nothing wrong with you. I'm just here."
His phone lights on the bench. His mother and his brothers stacking up in a language I don't read. The seating chart and the tourtiere and the house forty minutes away that built itself around him before anyone had the word. His mother keeps an invisible list. Etienne translates love into spreadsheets. Numbers are the only dialect the two of them have ever shared. A thousand miles south a feral gray cat is sitting in a window because Thompson has a diagram, waiting for the man who wrote out which corner the litter box has to face. He had all of this before me. The family and the order and the cat and the tank glowing in the dark of an apartment I'm not in. A whole worldthat runs without my hands in it, that ran fine for twenty-four years before I ever nudged a skate guard square with my foot.
His thumb finds the last knot under my shoulder blade. I go loose under it. He stays and works it and takes care of me as I asked him to. He told me there's nothing wrong with me and that he's just here. I believe him. It lands clean.
And then I look past his shoulder at the stall he set up while I was on the ice, every piece in its place, and I think about my father's text sitting deleted in my phone, the scouting note he sent before the whistle for the first time in my life because the math is changing. The next series is the one where love and competition stop being two different rooms and become the same ice. Jules did the same math tonight. He saw what I'd need and built it before I asked. I'm lying here held exactly the way I wanted to be held. The question I can't put down isn't whether he loves me. The question is whether I'll ever learn the difference between someone building a place for me to land and someone deciding where I go.
The heat pad clicks off on its timer. The room hums. I stay where he put me, and I let it be enough for tonight, because tomorrow the series comes back and the doubt will still be there. I'll carry it the way I carry everything. Quietly, with both hands, where nobody has to see.
Chapter 19: Soucy
The puck dies under Hájek's skate behind my net and the whistle goes. For one second there's nothing to track. That's the second Matty picks. He comes off the wall heavy and finds the front of my crease the way water finds the low spot. His glove comes up into my mask, not hard, a wash. Then his forearm is across my throat with all of Montreal behind it.
"You look tired, Jules."
The barn is the loudest it's been all night. Their building loves this. A brother shopping his little brother into the boards in his own hometown. I shove back with both hands on his numbers and it does nothing. He's a wall. He's always been a wall. For half a second before the linesman gets an arm in, I see it. His eyes go somewhere else. Not anger. Not the performance. Something behind the anger that looks how it looked when he was fifteen and I was ten. He broke the banister and stood there holding the piece in his hand, mouth open, no sound coming out. Then the linesman's arm is between us and Matty's face closes back up, all jaw and show. My hands won't stop after. They're going under the blocker, thumb to index to middle to ring to pinky and back,faster than the pattern is supposed to run. I have no place to put them down. The crease is supposed to be the place. Tonight my brother is standing in it. I find one word in French I don't decide to find. It doesn't make it past my teeth. The puck drops and there's hockey again. The hockey is fine. The hockey is the one part of the night that's uncomplicated. I play the rest of the period clean because the saves were never the problem.
The horn ends it. We win the thing or we lose the thing in a way that tilts the series, not a way that ends it. I shake the line and Matty's hand grabs mine an extra beat at the end, his thumb pressing once into the back of my hand, the apology he'll never say out loud. Then we're down the tunnel, into the bus, into the hotel. The door closes. The city goes quiet behind it.
Soren is already moving when I come out of the bathroom, a water in his hand, the curtains pulled to the exact overlap that kills the parking-lot light. My bag set on the rack with the zippers facing out as I leave them, and he did all of it in the four minutes I had the door shut.
"Drink this."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your brother tried to put you through your own glass and your hands haven't stopped since the third." He holds the water out and keeps it there. "Drink the water."
"My hands are my business." It comes out with an edge I don't have for him, and he takes it, sets the water on the nightstand inside my reach, and doesn't push. He just waits, the way he waits, all of him turned toward me. The waiting is worse than pushing because there's nothing to brace against.
"Sorry," I say. "I'm not fine. Whatever the word is."
"There isn't one. You don't have to find it."
He sits on the end of the bed and I stay standing because standing is the only thing my body wants to do.
"What did he say to you out there."
"That I look tired. He said it with his forearm across my throat, so the delivery undercut the concern."
"That's a strange way to ask if you're sleeping enough."
"It's the only way he has. He's done it since I was nine. He gets scared and it comes out sideways and it comes out big." I make myself sit, on the other bed, across from him. "Tonight he's scared because he saw you. And I saw him be scared, right before the linesman got in. Half a second where his face wasn't his face. He looked the way he looked at fifteen when he broke something and couldn't put it back."
"Saw me what."
"Saw you standing next to me. Worked out what you are. So now he has to size you up, and he can't do it with words because we don't, in my family. So he did it with his body in front of his whole building."
"Did he get an answer."
"He got that you didn't drop your gloves and you didn't look away. He'll have noted it. He keeps track. It runs in the blood."
