He read it. Set the phone down. Picked it up again because the score didn’t tell him what he wanted to know, which was how Milo was, and the score would never tell him that, and he was going to have to sit with that until the intercom buzzed or it didn’t.
He scrolled through the post-game highlights because he had no dignity left and had stopped pretending otherwise. The Hounds’ winning goal was a breakaway, and the player who scored it was Milo, and Adrian watched the clip three times and could see even through a phone screen that Milo was playing angry, not focused-angry but something rawer, the kind of angry that came from somewhere other than the game. The hit that preceded the breakaway was hard enough that the broadcast team called it “a statement.” Adrian didn’t know what the statement was. He knew it wasn’t about hockey.
He kept scrolling. The pre-game warmup footage was there, the way it always was, thirty-second clips the team accounts posted for engagement. The Fury’s warmup. Adrian recognized Cole Kiernan from the interviews he’d watched on his phone in this studio at two in the morning while Milo slept in his bed, the ones where Kiernan talked about hockey with the specific ease of a man who had stopped performing and was just being a person on television. In the warmup clip, Kiernan was skating past the Fury bench. The other player, Lindqvist, was at the boards. Kiernan’s stick tapped Lindqvist’s shin pad as he passed. One tap. Brief. The camera caught it and moved on.
Adrian set the phone down and looked at the studio ceiling and breathed.
One tap. Public. Casual. The smallest possible gesture of belonging, the kind of thing couples did a thousand times a day without thinking about it, the hand on the shoulder, the knee pressed against a knee under a table. Except these two were doing it on an NHL ice surface in front of cameras and twentythousand people and the whole infrastructure of professional sports, and the cameras had caught it and moved on because it was nothing. It was normal. It was two people who belonged to each other doing what people who belonged to each other did.
Adrian looked at his hands. The paint in his knuckles. The wrist where Milo’s thumb had been.
He made pasta in the kitchen corner. The olive oil he kept next to the turpentine and had once, memorably, confused. He ate standing at the worktable and washed his dish and went back to the canvas and waited.
* * *
He heard the intercom at eleven-fifteen.
“It’s me,” Milo said.
Two words. Adrian’s chest went tight and warm at the same time, which was becoming a familiar problem. He buzzed him in.
Two flights. The loose board. The door.
Milo came in with the cold on him, the smell of the arena underneath his jacket, sweat and rubber and tape. His face was the operational version, jaw set, but something underneath it was moving, a pressure Adrian could see in the way Milo stood in the doorway and didn’t take off his jacket right away, his hands in his pockets, his eyes going to the painting on the east wall and staying there. There was a bruise forming on his ribs that Adrian saw when he finally took the jacket and Milo’s shirt rode up. He didn’t ask about it. He hung the jacket on the third hook, where it went now, because the jacket had a hook now, because Milo had been here enough times for the jacket to have a hook.
“Good game,” Adrian said. He was already filling the kettle.
“How did you know.”
“I set up a notification. Weeks ago. I wanted to know when you were playing.”
Milo stood in the middle of the studio. The work lamp caught the smaller canvas on the worktable, warm tones, the heavy line in the upper quadrant. The large canvas was in shadow. Adrian watched him process the notification thing, the weeks-ago thing, the fact that someone had been tracking his schedule not because they had to but because they wanted to.
“Tea?” Adrian said.
“Yeah.”
They sat with their mugs. Adrian on the worktable stool, Milo on the wooden chair near the south wall, the one with the paint on the seat that he’d chosen before and chose again now, like the studio was starting to have a geography that included him. Adrian talked about a chapter on blue pigment he’d been reading, how blue light scattered differently than warm light, his free hand drawing the light-scatter pattern in the air between them. Milo asked one question about undertones, whether a warm ground changed how the blue read, and got a longer answer than he’d expected, and Adrian watched him follow the answer the way Milo followed everything, with his full attention or none of it.
But Milo was somewhere else tonight. Adrian could see it. The tea held in both hands but the thumbs not moving, the body present and the mind running a loop somewhere Adrian couldn’t follow. He’d seen this before in the bar, the nights Milo came in after a loss and the jaw was set so tight the muscle was visible from across the room. This was different. This wasn’t a loss. This was a win, and something about the win was eating him.
“You played Chicago tonight,” Adrian said.
Milo’s thumbs stopped on the mug.
“The Fury,” Adrian said. He kept his voice even. “Kiernan and Lindqvist are on that team.”
Milo looked at him. The jaw did its thing. “Yeah.”
“Was it strange. Playing against them.”
The pause was long enough for the radiator to cycle. Milo looked at his tea. He looked at the painting on the east wall. He looked at his hands wrapped around the mug.
“They did this thing during warmups,” Milo said. His voice was flat, the register he used when he was trying to keep something level. “Lindqvist tapped Kiernan’s shin pad. Just once. Everybody saw it. The cameras, the other bench, twenty thousand people. Nobody cared.” He drank his tea. “I scored on a breakaway in the third because I hit a guy so hard he lost the puck. I didn’t know I was going to hit him that hard until I was already doing it.”
Adrian sat with that.
“Nobody cared,” Milo said again. Quiet. Not to Adrian. To the room.
