Page 21 of Five Hole

I try Babcia’s words on it and neither of them fits. Spokój is the peace you build. This is a peace that arrived. It walked in with a speaker under its arm and a grin I spent a year trying to be unbothered by, and it lay down in my bed, and the dark did not come.

He is asleep with his hand open on the pillow where my arm was. I did not run a single ritual to keep the dark out. He kept it out. Just by being here, breathing even on his side. That is not a thing I know how to hold, so I stand in the cold of my own perfect room and try to hold it anyway, and it will not sit square, and I let it not sit square. Which is its own small ruin.

I look at him a long time. The line of his back in the low light coming under the door. The way he sleeps like a man who has never done a wrong thing. Open-handed. Easy. Taking up more of the bed than his share. The way he takes up more of every room than his share. I have spent a season telling myself he is a variable to manage, a threat to file, a boy who wants my net and will take it if I let him stand too close. Not one word of that stopped being true tonight. None of it explains why the dark stayed out of the room. A threat does not keep the dark out. A threat is the dark. He is both, at the same time, and I have no shelf that holds two opposite things at once. I am going to have to learn to build one. Or I am going to come apart.

I get back in the bed. I should not. I do it anyway. He turns into me in his sleep without waking. The whole warm loose weight of him. He lays his arm back across my chest like it goes there. Like it has always gone there. I let him. I lie awake inside a broken order with a boy’s arm holding me down to the mattress. I do not sleep. And for once in my life I am not entirely sorry.

Chapter 11

Emile

We get good at it fast. Too fast. That should’ve been the first warning, honestly, how easy it is, how quick two guys figure out the whole choreography of a secret when they’re supposed to be at each other’s throats over the one job worth having.

Nobody teaches you the choreography. There’s no drill for it. But your body learns it anyway, same as it learns a new set of edges, until you’re doing it without counting the steps. When to hang back. When to leave a room first. How to look at a guy across the Trough for exactly the number of seconds a rival looks at a rival, not one longer. How to say his last name in daylight like it’s the only name he’s got. We got good at all of it inside a week. And the getting-good should’ve scared me, because a thing you can hide that well is a thing you’ve already decided to keep hiding. And a thing you keep hiding is a thing that eventually costs you.

Days, we’re rivals. I want to be clear that part is real. I need that said out loud somewhere, for me, for later, in case I ever have to prove to myself I wasn’t a liar the whole way through. It matters more than I can say. The wanting the net was true before he was and stayed true after. I’m not faking the net thing to get in his bed. I’d never. The net is the whole reason my heart still beats when I wake up. So in daylight I chirp him, I push him, I go five-hole on him in the duel, and I win the mornings one rep at a time. And I’m good. I’m really good. Good enough that the student site starts running my name in a bigger font than it used to, running it off practice, off the goalie battle, off a count nobody in that barn says out loud. Good enough that Sowa watches me a little longer than he used to. And Sowa doesn’t waste a look. The starts are coming. Marquette said so with his own mouth. And every rep is a knuckle on the door I’ve been throwing my whole body at since I got here.

And nights, I knock on his door in his own rhythm. Two fingers. Once. His rhythm, not mine. Mine used to be whatever my hand felt like, and now it’s his, and I don’t remember deciding to switch. He lets me in. The guy who won’t give an inch on the ice gives me everything in the dark, all of it, the stone coming off him like a sweater. Neither of us says one word about what it means that those are the same guy. The wall guy and the dark guy. We’ve got an unspoken deal not to notice.

I didn’t know it would be like this. I want to say that. Whatever I pictured, back when I pictured anything, it wasn’t this. I pictured a war, and maybe, if I got lucky and stupid, a couple of nights stolen out of the war. I didn’t picture the small stuff. He learns how I take my coffee without me telling him, then just hands it to me one morning in the film room like it’s nothing. Black and too strong, exactly wrong for anybody but me, exactly right.

“How’d you know?” I say.

“You’re loud about everything else.”

“Fair,” I say. “Nobody’s ever accused me of quiet. And nobody’s ever accused you of small talk.”

The next week he straightens my stall when I’m not looking, squaring it the same way he squares his own.

“Did you touch my stall?”

“No,” he says, and goes right on lacing.

So I let him deny it, because I’d rather have the straightened stall than the confession. That’s the stuff nobody warns a backup about. The stuff that gets in under the war and stays.

The thin place in the wall is the whole geography of us now. His room, my room, the crack where the drywall gave up. Some nights I don’t even go over. Some nights I just lie on my side of it with something on low, waiting, and after a while, always, I hear him settle. The bed. The breath. I know he’s lying over there on his side, listening to my music fill the crack, letting it be the last thing before sleep. It’s the most married thing I’ve ever done, and we haven’t so much as split a plate of fries in the daylight.

I’ve started picking the songs on purpose. That’s a thing I haven’t told him and never will. Back at the start I put music on because I put music on, because silence is a thing that happens to me and noise is a thing I do to it. Now I lie there and I choose. Something low. Something with a little ache down in the bass. I send it under the wall like a note passed in a class we’re both failing, and I wait, and I hear his mattress take his weight. Then I know he stayed up until I played something. Two grown men conducting the tenderest thing either of them has ever had through a crack in the drywall, without one word. It should be the saddest thing in the world. It isn’t. It’s the best part of my day, and I wouldn’t trade it for a plate of fries in the sun with anybody.

Here’s what I’ve learned about him, the things no scouting report has a box for. He runs cold and sleeps hot. He talks in his sleep in a language I don’t have. He can’t stand to be pitied. And he will take a hundred small kindnesses if you do them fast and pretend you didn’t.

He hates to be thanked. I found that one the hard way.

“Thanks,” I said once, for something small. I couldn’t tell you now what it was.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t thank you.”

“It makes it a transaction. Then there’s a balance. Then somebody owes.”

“Ostie. Fine. What do I do instead?”

He thought about it four seconds longer than the question deserved, which is his whole personality in one gesture. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s the point of it.”

He has a laugh. An actual one, rare as a solar eclipse and about that worth planning your life around. I’ve gotten it maybe four times, and I keep every one of them in the good drawer. The one I don’t hate.

We’re careful in a way that would break your heart if you saw it laid out flat. We don’t sit together at the Trough. I take the far end, he takes the end that isn’t near any end, the apart place he’s always taken. We don’t walk out of the barn at the same time. And on the road we take separate elevators, which is a thing I didn’t know two grown men could do to themselves until we started doing it, standing there watching the numbers, waiting the other one out. One night a D-man got in with us and there was no version of it where we didn’t ride up together. He got out on four and said it to the doors closing behind him, not to either of us.