He drank a third of it, left money for the full, and stood. The cold outside landed against his face like a correction.
* * *
He spent three mornings on the ice before the team arrived.
He skated by six-fifteen, the overhead banks at half-power, the Zamboni-fresh surface smelling cold and mineral. He could hear his own edges without thirty other people’s blades. His feet knew the drills. Stick, puck, timing, all clean, all fine. And between every rep his brain supplied Adrian’s wrist under his thumb, the ridge of the tendon, the warmth of the pulsepoint, and three words that had no business in a forechecking sequence.
Yeah. You should have.
Three mornings in, his mind was not following his legs anywhere useful.
He put Kasner into the boards at the end of a rush drill.
The hit wasn’t outside the scope of the drill. They were running a forechecking sequence, contact expected. But the extra percentage was added without decision, and Kasner’s shoulder hit the dasher harder than the drill required. Kasner turned around with gloves up, chin dropped, and the flat eyes of a man who’d been hit beyond what he’d signed up for.
Nobody moved for about two seconds.
Kasner shoved him back once, glove to chest, and skated away. The drill continued with the too-loud energy of a group pretending nothing had happened.
Kovac came by on the way to the next set. Didn’t stop. As he passed: “Vance.” One syllable. His stick tapped the ice once.
Milo ran the next rep at regulation contact and said nothing.
The locker room after was steam and rubber and the industrial cleaner losing its eternal war with sweat. Milo sat in his stall and unlaced his left skate. Top eyelet, cross, cross, pull. The routine held.
Brody came out of the shower with his hair going several directions and a towel around his waist.
“You good?”
“Fine.”
“You hit Kasner like you were settling something.”
“I was running the drill.”
“You were running the drill the way you run a drill when something else is in the way.” He pulled the towel off his head. The Boston flatness of his vowels made everything sound like a weather report. “You don’t have to tell me. Just get it sorted.”
“It’s sorted.”
Brody held the look two seconds longer than the answer deserved. One eyebrow doing more work than most people’s entire face.
“I’ll get you a coffee,” he said. They went to the rink café, a narrow room that smelled permanently of burnt drip coffee and microwaved breakfast sandwiches, and Brody talked about the road trip and the hotel situation and whether the return flight was going to have the good meal or the bad meal. “I swear to God if it’s the pasta again I’m filing a grievance.” Milo drank his coffee and followed approximately none of it. Brody, who knew this, kept talking anyway. That was the thing about Brody. He filled silence the way people filled waiting rooms. Not to communicate. To cover.
It wasn’t sorted. It wasn’t anywhere close to sorted. Milo had kissed Adrian across a bar and Adrian had saidyou should haveand Milo had walked out and driven home and sat on his bed in the unlit room and replayed it until his chest hurt, and then he’d jerked off to it, and then he’d replayed it some more, and none of that had sorted a single thing. He had a road trip in four days and a minus-two he needed to fix and a power play that needed him in the right position at the right time and instead his brain was full of paint thinner and soap and the sound Adrian made when Milo’s jaw trembled against his mouth, which was no sound at all, which was a held breath, which was worse than any sound could have been because it meant Adrian had felt it and chosen not to speak and that was the kind of care Milo had no defense against.
He finished his coffee and went home and sat in the apartment where the refrigerator hummed and didn’t go to the Grotto.
* * *
He went back four days later.
He didn’t decide to. He finished the day, practice, treatment, the drive home, forty-five minutes in the apartment, and got in the car. The car went where it went.
The donut sign threw green neon against the wet pavement. He crossed with his hands in his pockets and pushed through the Grotto’s door.
The warmth hit him. His shoulders dropped. The tension that had been pulled tight across his back for a week found slack that only happened here.
He sat on the third stool. The mahogany was warm under his forearms.
