Adrian poured anyway. Same glass, same measure. “Same ritual either way?”
Milo picked up the glass and didn’t answer. Adrian moved on. No pressure. The unanswered question just sat there, and the room held it, and that was fine. Milo drank and the bourbon settled warm on top of the goal horn that was humming in his chest.
Somewhere around the second drink he understood why he’d come. Not the routine. The overtime win was in his body, the goal horn and Brody’s hand on his neck and the tension between his shoulder blades finally letting go, and he had nowhere to put any of it. He picked up his phone, scrolled through a short list of names, set it back down. His sister would ask how many points. His father would make the sound he made, the lowhmthat covered wins and weeknights with the same mild acknowledgment.
He left the phone face-down on the bar.
“What is this?” he said.
Adrian glanced at the ceiling. “Khruangbin.”
Milo waited.
“Texas band. Three people. They do this thing with the bass where it carries everything and the other instruments orbit it.”
Milo went looking for the bass line and found it underneath the guitar, a low persistent pulse that had been there the whole time. Once he heard it, the guitar pulled back and the organ pulled back and the bass was the thing holding the room up from the bottom.
“Hm,” Milo said.
The corner of Adrian’s mouth moved. He went back to the cloth.
He hadn’t pushed. He’d pointed Milo at the bass line and let him find it, and when Milo offered one syllable, Adrian took it as a complete sentence. Milo had been ending conversations foryears because people heard a one-word answer and kept going. Adrian heard a one-word answer and stopped.
“You always pick the music?” Milo said.
“Whoever’s behind the bar picks. House rule. You have a request?”
Music was background. No lyrics when he needed to think, something with a beat when he needed to stop thinking. He had no artists, no opinions, no vocabulary for it. “Not my area.”
The cloth stopped. “What is?”
“Hockey,” Milo said.
“Obviously.” The mouth corner again. “And?”
Theandsat open. Adrian leaned on his forearms, and he was closer than he’d been all night, and Milo caught it for the first time. Underneath the bar smell, underneath the wood and the old beer, something that was just Adrian. Paint thinner and soap and skin. Milo’s mouth went dry. He picked up the glass and drank and the bourbon didn’t help.
The honest list was short. Equipment, schedule, game film, the routines that filled the hours between ice time. The route from the arena to this bar to the apartment.
“Not much,” he said.
Adrian nodded like that was a perfectly fine answer and went back to wiping. Milo watched his hands. The blue paint was concentrated at the base of his thumb, paler toward the fingertips, a smear along his index finger where he’d dragged it across something wet. Milo was cataloguing another man’s hands at eleven o’clock on a weeknight and he was going to deal with what that meant later. Much later. Possibly never.
The bar emptied. Adrian flipped the record one-handed. The bass picked up where it had left off.
“I grew up in Ontario,” Milo said.
He hadn’t planned on saying that.
“Cold there?” Adrian said.
“Yes.”
“Cold here too. Different cold, though. Ours is wet.”
Ontario cold had been dry, the kind that went into the lungs clean and came back out visible. Detroit’s cold was heavier. The lake in it. His mother still sent wool socks, two pairs at a time, and the cold found the bone anyway.
“Yeah,” Milo said.
