Page 135 of Puck You Both

The room goes very quiet, very fast.

And Patrick smiles his camera smile and starts to answer anyway, smooth and merciful, the way he's answered to Patrick G and Grease-cow-ak and Mr. Greskovitch for a decade, because he gave up somewhere around his draft year, and everybody let him. And for the past few years I've watched him not correct people all season, and it never sat right, and tonight, with the whole world finally looking straight at us, it sits so wrong my chest actually hurts.

He stopped correcting them. Fine. I never agreed to anything.

I'm leaning into the mic before my right-side brain catches up with the left. "Okay. No. Everybody stop."

They freeze. Patrick's head turns a slow inch toward me, and I feel it, the wait in him, and I do not look, because if I look I'll lose my nerve, and this needs nerve.

"We're doing this once." I hold up a hand, three fingers. "Three parts. Repeat after me. GZHEH."

Silence. A roomful of people in suits, blinking at me.

"This is a participation exercise, people. GZHEH."

A ragged, disbelieving chorus: "Gzheh."

"SHKO."

"Shko." Louder. Somebody's laughing already.

"VYAHK. Gzheh-SHKO-vyahk." I point at the guy in the third row. "It's not hard, Chad. You say 'Niederreiter' weekly. You can do this. I believe in you."

"Gzheh... shko-vyahk," Chad says.

"There it is!" The press is laughing for real now, cameras up, and the sound rolls over me warm. "Ten years, that's all it took. Practice at home. There will be a quiz."

The scrum dissolves into noise and grins, and the PR head is making the wrap-it-up motion with a face that says she's already drafting an apology she doesn't mean, and I'm off the podium and almost to the door when I get asked the only question that was ever really in the room. "Mr. Moreau? Why does it matter so much?"

I stop and my eyes dart to Patrick’s face automatically. And the man looks…calm.

Well, damn.

I find the nearest camera and talk directly to the lens. "Learn the man's name already. He's important to me."

And I walk out, and behind me the room makes no sound at all, and that silence follows me down the hallway feeling exactly like applause.

Patrick catches up to me by the equipment room, presses me into the doorframe with one hand flat on my chest, and kisses me, deep, long, out in the open for the very first time.

Would you look at that? I might start liking press conferences after all.

***

MY MOM CALLS at seven the next morning, and she is already crying, and she has been crying, from what I can piece together, since Tuesday. "DEUX, Theodore?"

"Maman—"

What follows is four minutes of the fastest French ever produced in North America, of which I catch roughly every third word. Two. Goalies. The tall one's hands. The photo. She's had the toothbrush picture printed, which is not how the internet works, and framed, which is not how anything works, and it's going on the wall by my trophies, and Margaux has apparently explained twice already that you cannot frame a soft launch, and has been overruled twice.

"Maman. Maman. Yes. Yes, both of them— It's— I'll explain when I'm home."

"You better." She lets out a wet breath, and then her voice drops out of the storm and lands softly, right on the middle of my chest. "Mon grand. All that heart, and now look. It found somewhere to fit."

I have to stare at Patrick's ceiling for a while after that one.

***

THE DM COMES in on Saturday, from an account with no photo and a number where a name should be.