Page 22 of Five Hole

“You two are so weird about each other.”

“He’s not wrong,” I said.

Casimir watched the numbers go. “He is not wrong.”

Then we got out on six and went to separate rooms like two men who had just agreed on nothing whatsoever. Then his door, late, in the dark, and all of it comes off. All the careful. For a few hours there’s no depth chart, no scout, no wall. There’s just a guy who runs his whole life in perfect rows letting me mess up every single one of them, on purpose, with my hands, thanking me for it with his mouth.

The one I watch is Vinh. Not because he’d ever say a word, Vinh would take it to his grave. Because Vinh sees. He’s been reading me since the first day of the season. He reads everything. He has never once made a show of it. So I keep an extra foot between me and Casimir whenever Vinh’s in the room. I chirp a little louder. And I make sure the daylight version of me is loud enough to cover the other one.

He sits down across from me at the Trough one night with a tray and no agenda at all, which is when he’s most dangerous.

“You’re in a good mood.”

“I’m always in a good mood. It’s the brand. It’s printed on the label.”

“No.” He starts in on his food. “You’re in a good mood. Different thing.”

“Those are the same thing, Tran.”

“They’re really not.” He doesn’t look up. He never looks up when he’s doing this. “Bruno was in a good mood for about a month and I couldn’t work out why for the whole month.”

“And what was it?”

“Me,” Vinh says, and eats.

I laugh. It comes out one size too big for the joke, and I hear it come out one size too big, and so does he. Neither of us says a word about that either. He lets it go, and Vinh lets a thing go completely or not at all, and asks me to settle whether a hot dog is a taco, and I could put my forehead down on the tray with gratitude.

Because I’m the only one in this building supposed to know the two games are the same game. What do you do with a guy who sees all of it and just never asks? Am I hiding it half as well as I think I am?

I keep waiting for it to feel like a secret I’m ashamed of. It never does. Not once. It feels like the one true thing in a life I’ve spent performing for whoever was in the room. The performing is the daylight, the chirp and the grin and the good-time backup who fills the corner so nobody clocks he’s never been anyone’s first pick. He’s the dark. The dark is the only place I’ve ever gotten to be real, which is a funny thing to say about a guy whose whole life is a war on the dark. He built himself a chapel to keep it out, and I climb into it every night to finally let mine in. I don’t know what to do with that. I put it in the drawer with everything else about him I’ve got nowhere to put.

Here’s the part I don’t tell him.

I’ve still got the drawer. The one where I keep him. Every tell. The two fingers on the corner. The way the horn undoes him. The water at the same stations. The fact that his whole game is one rope held in two hands. I told myself once it was scouting. It was scouting. Now it’s just knowing him, which is what you call it when you’d take a puck in the teeth for a guy.

Except I can’t unknow the scouting part. Some of it is literal. There’s a folder on my phone, notes I thumbed in the dark of a film room back when I still called it work. Very professional. I’d hire me. The rest is in my head, which is the half that matters, because that’s the half I couldn’t lose if I dropped the phone in a river. A whole map of exactly how to take this man apart. I did the work before I loved him, and the work doesn’t delete itself just because the reason changed.

Nobody tells you this part about being the guy who finds the gap. How do you unfind it? I could go up the middle on him any night I chose. And every night I choose not to. Every night I lie down next to the open gap and cover it with my own body instead. But choosing not to isn’t the same as not being able to, and some nights the difference keeps me up worse than he does.

Some nights, lying next to him with his breath gone even and slow, I catch myself adding to it. Not on purpose. I don’t decide to. He does a thing in his sleep, says a word in Polish I don’t understand, soft, into the pillow, and it goes in the drawer anyway. Because I can’t not. Because the part of me that gathers people like ammunition doesn’t have an off switch, and I have looked for one. I lie there in the warm dark next to the best thing that ever happened to me and I hate that I can’t turn it off. I hate that even here, even now, with his heart going slow against my back, some part of me is still quietly loading the gun. Who does that to a guy who trusts him?

Because the math hasn’t changed. Not one number of it. I keep hoping it will change, keep waiting to wake up and find the numbers came out different overnight. They don’t. Every start coming to me is a start he doesn’t get. Every step I take through his door in the dark is a step toward his net in the daylight. I’m the guy in his bed who keeps the dark out just by breathing even on my side, and I’m the guy coming for the one thing holding him up. Those are the same guy. I did that math a hundred times, and it comes out the same guy every time.

One of these nights, the two games are going to find out about each other. I know it the way I know weather off the ridge. You can smell it before it turns.

I keep telling myself I’ll get rid of the drawer. Burn it, so all that’s left is the knowing you get from loving a person, the clean kind, the kind you’re allowed. But you can’t burn the half that lives in your own head. You can only choose, every day, not to open it. And when have I ever been that guy? I opened his shelf on a dare from nobody. Not opening things is the one skill I was never issued.

I don’t tell him any of that. I kiss the back of his neck. I match my breathing to his until I can’t tell his tide from mine, and I lie to us both by staying quiet.

What are we doing? I think it into the dark, into his hair, into the good clean smell of him.

Neither of us answers. That’s the deal. That’s the contained thing. We don’t answer.

Chapter 12

Casimir

The bus takes the mountain road out. The storm takes it back in behind us.