Page 27 of Five Hole

“What’s it like, watching the kid?”

I consider the true answer for exactly as long as it takes me to refuse it.

“He is good.”

“That’s it? He’s good?”

“That is it.”

He does not write it down. There is nothing there to write down. The flat voice is a craft and I have spent my life on it, and tonight, for the first time, I am not sure it is a craft so much as a place I have been hiding.

He plays out of himself. I will not pretend otherwise to make myself feel better. He steals a game a weaker goalie loses. He is loose where I am sealed. Half of it is bad. The other half I still do not have the word for. The early read. The wrong commitment that turns out right. The glove full of a puck that should be in the net. The young ones on the bench watch him the way you watch a thing you cannot make yourself look away from. The barn makes its sound for him. I make myself watch all of it. It is a discipline. You do not look away from the thing that frightens you. You learn it, so it cannot surprise you. So goes the method. It has never once worked on him.

The scout writes when the boy makes the two-on-one save. I see the pen move. I have spent a season learning to read that pen from the ice and from the end of a bench, and it reads the same from up here. Tonight it moves for a save I did not make, in a crease I built my whole life to own. I sit very still and keep my face the way I keep my shelf, square, finished, giving nothing to the row in front of me. Inside I am doing a thing I have no name for. It is not clean jealousy. Clean jealousy I could hold. It is jealousy with pride laced through it and the two will not separate, and a thing that will not separate cannot be filed.

My leg is fine. Whole and useless in a pair of slacks, folded into a seat built for a man who came to watch. I tell myself I am scouting him, managing the variable. I am not. I am watching the man I cannot stop watching do the one thing I cannot stand to watch him do, and doing it beautifully, and I would not look away if I could.

Sowa catches me in the corridor under the stands with my tie still knotted.

“You watched him.”

“I watched the game.”

“You watched him.” He does not push. He never pushes. “What did you see?”

“A boy guessing right.”

“Try again.”

I do not try again. He waits about as long as a man can wait in a corridor. Then he lets me keep the lie, which he has not done before, and which frightens me considerably more than the correction would have.

He comes to the room that night still lit up from it. Still half in the game, as they are after, when the body has not caught up to the fact that the game is over. There is nothing left to do with all of it. His music comes down the hall ahead of him, low, the thread of it. Then he knocks in the rhythm, two fingers, once. The thing he stole off my shelf and made into a way to reach me.

I open the door and he is already talking, because he has been talking since the horn and has not found anywhere yet to set it down.

“Thirty-one shots. Thirty of them. Did you see the one in the second? Of course you saw the one in the second, you saw every one of them, you were up in the good seats with the free coffee. Was there free coffee? There’s always free coffee up there. Cas.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what.”

“Yes. I saw it.”

He stops in the doorway with the rest of the sentence still loaded in him. Something goes out of his face and something harder comes into it, because he has just this second worked out what it cost me to sit up there and watch it.

“Right,” he says. “I’ll shut up.”

“Don’t.”

I should send him away. I have every reason. He just won my net in front of my scout in my final year. The correct move, the ordered move, is the closed door and the quiet room. The day set down piece by piece until spokój comes home.

I do the opposite. I pull him in by the front of his shirt before the door is even shut.

It is not tender, not like the storm night with the one bed. It is teeth. It is the two things I am feeling with nowhere to put them but him. I get him against the door hard enough to rattle it in the frame. Nothing in me is soft anywhere. He gives it back the second I start. He always gives it back. He cannot be filed, a man who wins your net and then bites your lip like he means to take that too. “Harder,” he says into my mouth. “I mean it. Don’t be careful with me.” I taste blood, mine, and I do not stop. My hands are in his hair, dragging his head back so I can get my mouth under his jaw. Then his hips, hauling him into me, gripping hard enough to leave marks I will be glad of. His teeth come down on my throat and I let them. I want the mark. I want proof in the morning that this happened to a man who does not let things happen to him.

We do not make it to the bed. There is the dresser and the door and no patience left in either of us for anything farther. I get his fly open with hands that will not steady. He gets mine faster, his hands never anything but sure, and then he has my cock in his fist and I have his in mine and my forehead goes down on his shoulder because I cannot hold my head up through it. It is still a contest. Even here. Even now. Which of us breaks first. He strokes me rough and slick, talking into my ear, low and filthy and unbroken, until there is nothing left in me that knows how to hold still. He wins it. Of course he does. He is loud and I am not, and the sound he tears out of me is the last word in the argument. He goes a breath after me, hot over my knuckles, his body pulling tight and then giving out against mine. We finish standing, holding each other up, foreheads knocked together, breathing the same hard air. I do not think. The not-thinking is the only mercy I get all night.

Afterward we are wrecked and tangled. His heart is going against my side, slowing. The room is warm. It is not supposed to be. I lie there in the dark under his weight. And I almost tell him.