Adrian’s hands went flat on the bar. Eyes on Milo.
“Sault Ste. Marie,” Milo said. He meant the junior team. Sixteen and a bus ride from everything he’d known, a billet family’s basement with a window that frosted over by the first snow and stayed that way until spring. Every game-day program he’d ever been printed in had this information. He said it anyway because saying it was different from it being known. “First season. Sixteen.”
“Long way from home when you’re sixteen.”
“My mom sent me to my aunt in Lagos for a summer when I was fourteen,” Adrian said. He’d straightened from the counter, weight forward. His glasses had slipped and he didn’t push them up. “Two months. Felt like a decade.”
Lagos. Fourteen. Milo had done that same math in the billet basement. The distance from home was the same size even when the miles were different.
“She send care packages?” Milo said.
“Every six weeks. Last month there was a framed art print. With a note.” Adrian stopped. When he started again his voice had dropped into his mother’s cadence. “‘It’s not too much, is it?’”
A framed print. A mother’s handwriting. A question that was really love in the only shape it knew how to take.
“My mother sends socks,” Milo said. “Wool. Same pattern every year. I have fourteen pairs.”
Adrian looked at him. His chin lifted. “The same ones?”
“Different colors. Otherwise identical.” He wore them because she sent them and it cost him nothing, and he couldn’t tell her the truth about anything else, so the socks were a language they both spoke without saying what it was. “I wear them.”
“Of course you do.”
Milo laughed.
Short, surprised, a sound his body made without permission. In the bar, with the bass in its quiet section and the room down to just the two of them, the laugh went out and had nowhere to go.
Adrian’s hands went still on the bar.
Milo was already closing. Jaw coming back, face locking into place. His hand found the glass, his eyes found the bar top.
He looked up.
Adrian was leaning on his palms, fingers spread on the mahogany, the paint along the edge of his left thumb. Brown eyes behind the glasses, face open. Both hands pressed to the bar.
Milo looked at the bar top. He reached for his wallet. Set cash on the rail and stood.
“Night,” he said.
“Good game tonight,” Adrian said.
Milo was already moving. Twelve steps to the door. He covered them without looking back, the bass line following him through the room until he pushed through the door and the cold took it away.
* * *
The cold hit him and he crossed the street and got into the car.
He started the engine and put his hands on the wheel. Cold through his palms, the parking structure radiating through theleather. He left the heat off. His breath fogged the windshield at the corners.
He wasn’t thinking about the laugh. He was thinking about what had come before it. His shoulders had dropped at some point during the socks conversation, the tension leaving before he noticed. His jaw had unclenched for one second before he’d locked it back down.
He knew his own system. He managed the doors. The laugh had not been a door he’d opened. It had gone through without asking.
Brody’s road-trip jokes hit correctly, setup, turn, landing, and produced an exhale through the nose. The exhale for Brody was measured. The laugh in the bar had not been measured, and his body knew the difference.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum.
He thought about the glass. Between the second bourbon and standing up, there had been a moment. Adrian reaching across to take the empty, Milo’s hand resting beside it, and Adrian’s fingers closing on the glass a half-inch away. The brush of Adrian’s index finger against the outside of Milo’s hand. The paint-rough texture of it. A quarter-second of contact that went through his skin and dropped through his stomach and kept going. The goal horn had traveled through the ice into his skates and stopped at his legs. This hadn’t stopped.
