Page 69 of Puck You Both

"The minutes will reflect that you said something perfect and then looked embarrassed about it." He hooks an arm around my neck and hauls me into his side, and I go, laughing, and we stay like that for a while, his heartbeat under my ear going faster than his face would ever admit.

The correct response to a charged conversation before eight a.m. is pancakes. This is a known fact. Call time for day two of hammer theater isn't until noon, which leaves a pancake-shaped hole in the schedule, and I know a place on 5th that Lindqvist swears by.

I find my phone in the sheets and open Wall's thread.

Me: al's on 5th. 40 min. pancakes are on Patrick. he doesn't know yet.

Beside me, Patrick cranes his neck. I snatch my phone away from his eyes. "What don't I know?"

"Nothing. Wear the blue thing."

My phone buzzes against my palm.

Wall: :thumbs_up_emoji:

That’s it. One yellow thumb, from a man I watched come apart in an armchair eight hours ago. I flop back into the pillows and grin at it like the idiot I am.

***

AL'S ON 5TH has a corner booth and laminated menus older than me. Patrick and I get there first and I take the side facing the door, so I get the full sequence when Wall walks in at 8:30 exactly: the pause on the door, the sweep of the room, the half-second where his face changes once he spots us. He crosses the floor and folds himself into the booth across from us, and the table becomes very small, and nobody says anything about any of it.

"You walked?" I ask.

"Six blocks." He picks up the menu and frowns at it, a man conducting due diligence on hash browns.

The waitress arrives with coffee before he's done deciding. Patrick hands his menu back without opening it and orders for the table. Chocolate chip pancakes, egg whites, oatmeal, wheat toast dry, and a double side of bacon for me, because I'll steal his otherwise and he's done pretending that's not an issue.

Wall's mouth was already open to order. It closes. He looks at Patrick, suspicious and grudgingly impressed.

"I know what I’m doing," Patrick says, and hands over the last menu.

The waitress squints at him on her way through collecting them. She's got reading glasses on a chain, a Vipers pin on her apron, and I watch recognition arrive in stages. "You're the goalie." A finger comes up. "Patrick Grez... Grzesh..." The glasses come down. She commits. "Patrick Gravity."

"Close enough," Patrick says, pleasant.

"It suits you," Wall says, without looking up from his coffee.

I choke on nothing. The waitress leaves happy. Patrick looks out the window like he’s storing retaliation for later. Under the table, his knee presses against mine and stays.

What happens over the next forty minutes is nothing special, and I want to keep all of it.

Wall says something about the Vipers' penalty kill that's fifty percent compliment and fifty percent insult, and Patrick, instead of absorbing it with his usual diplomatic nothing, takes a napkin out of the dispenser and starts drawing. A rectangle for the net. A syrup bottle relocated to serve as the strong-side post. Two jam packets become shooters, and within three minutes there are four napkins on the table and two goalies are having a full technical disagreement about pad-stacking on wraparounds, complete with arrows.

"You're giving up the far post," Wall says, tapping the napkin.

"I'm taking away the pass."

"The pass isn't there. I watched you do this in November. The pass was never there."

"The pass was there in November." Patrick rotates the napkin without surrendering it. "Groover fanned on it."

Wall takes the pen and starts drawing his own rebuttal net, and I sit there with my chin in my hand, watching two of the best goaltenders alive litigate geometry on napkins at a diner where the coffee costs two dollars.

Here's what I know about after. I'm the after guy. I've had a lot of breakfasts where the other person checks their phone in a specific way. Where the conversation is a rental car you're both returning, and you're so nice to each other because niceness is the clean exit. I know that meal in every city in this league.

This is not that meal.

Nobody’s checking their phone and nobody's leaving. Wall eats his egg whites in systematic quadrants. When I weigh in on the napkin war ("As the person who actually scores, you're both wrong. Shooters aim for whatever's twitching") they turn on me as one unit, two full technical rebuttals colliding, and I laugh from somewhere so deep in my chest it startles me.