Page 143 of Puck You Both

"Great," he gets out. "Perfect. Cool. That's—" He gives up, grabs us both by the shirts, one fist each, and hangs on.

We stay where he put us.

Chapter 29

PATRICK

I'VE NEVER WATCHED playoff hockey from a seat.

From a crease, sure. From a couch with the sound low and my own failure for company. Never from a box in the United Center with a beer I'm not drinking and my heart lodged behind my teeth over Chicago's net, of all nets.

Game one of round one, Linda Wallace pats the chair beside her the moment Theo and I walk in. It’s a demand, not a suggestion. Within one period she confiscates Theo's phone during play, informs Devon that his puppy-eyed screaming helps no one, and asks me, without turning her head, why my boyfriend keeps coming out that far to meet their zone entries, or is she seeing things, and if that’s legal.

My boyfriend, like it's nothing, one eyebrow daring me to make it strange.

She isn't seeing things. I lean in and explain what he's doing.

By game three we have a system. Theo supplies her coffee and I supply the tactics; the verdicts are all hers. When a guy in the elevator asks which one of us she's here with, she says we’re both her boys and leaves it at that.

The jersey debuts that same night. Theo peels off his hoodie in the family box and stands there in a Wolves home WALLACE jersey with GRZEŚKOWIAK taped above the nameplate in hand-cut silver letters, each one a slightly different size.

"Both my guys," he says, arms out. "One garment. Efficiency."

"The letters are crooked," I tell him, ignoring whatever my heart is doing.

He shrugs. "Good. Kiss me anyway."

Chicago wins that night, which settles it: the jersey is protocol now, and it cannot be washed, adjusted, or questioned until the run ends.

The clincher in round one is Wall’s game. Their opponents throw the whole first period at him and he fights the onslaught off each time, and I sit in that box discovering, in real time, what it costs to watch the man you love do the exact thing you do, with your whole body and no stick in your hands.

I feel every shot in my knees. I drop with him on every scramble, seal posts from the wrong side of the glass. Twice Leila hands me back the drink I didn't know I'd abandoned. There's no standings math for me tonight, no season of my own. All of that grief has quietly turned into holding my breath for the man playing his heart out at the other end of the building. When the horn goes, the sound I make embarrasses the whole box, and I could not have stopped it with both hands.

Watching him used to be my job. It has never once felt like this.

The second round sends them west, so we serve the road games from my couch in Milwaukee, and the couch develops customs. Theo in the double-jersey, cross-legged, out-talking the broadcast. I pause the feed to complain about coverage, he yells at me for pausing. By the second period we're both on our feet shouting at the same doomed forward. Between periods the thread lights up, and Wall gives us his intermissions.

Wall: Their winger tips everything.

Theo: …

Theo: stop admiring him and drink your water

He steals that one in overtime—a pure robbery that keeps it alive, and half a minute later, Groover ends it at the other end. Theo bites me on the shoulder, clean through the shirt.

Home games are worse for my composure and better for the spectacle.

Home games have The Boyfriend Cam.

It starts organically, if anything Theo does can be called that. A scramble save late in a tied game, and he's out of the box and down the stairs before Leila can catch his sleeve, arriving at the glass behind Wall’s net just to hammer both fists on it, a Milwaukee Viper in a double-named Chicago jersey, pounding the plexi over a Chicago save.

It catches on fast. The broadcast finds him by his third trip. By the conference final there's a camera operator whose entire evening assignment is waiting for Theo to make the run, the graphics package has a name for the cutaway, and league discipline has reviewed the matter and fined him zero dollars, presumably on entertainment grounds.

"You're on national television every night," I tell him after one of these trips, his fists still red.

"Good," he says, breathing hard. "Let them all see how it's done."

He means loving somebody out loud.