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Gotta say, though, I was impressed that you’d asked that question. Nobody had asked me that before. In fact, nobody had ever asked me if I liked hockey, period. Of course, I did. I like to think I would’ve spoken up if I’d wanted to quit, but no one asked.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, my parents asked, but when I was, like, ten. And they’d ask me every year if I wanted to register for the upcoming season, and when I said yes, I guess they took that as confirmation that I did like the sport.

Do you remember what I said to you when I got over the sheer shock of you asking that question? I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something like, hockey makes me feel alive. I’d never said that to anybody before (and haven’t since), but it was true then and it’s true now.

You know, I spend a lot of my life being watched. By fans, by cameras, by the crowd at a game, by coaches, by sponsors, by my agent. And I perform a lot. Like, a lot. It doesn’t always feel that way in the moment, but I do. I perform for the crowd, for social media reels, for reporters and sportscasters, for the fans at community engagement events, and sometimes even for my teammates. There’s a lot of being “on” in professional sports, which isn’t something they tell you before going into it.

But you . . .

You’ve always been so easy to talk to that I forget to perform around you. I don’t need to be “on” with you, and you don’t expect me to be. I don’t think you realize how refreshing that is. Instead, you let me buy ginormous couches for no reason and then enable me by gifting me overpriced accent pillows. Like, seriously? What the fuck, Nolan? Your response to my couch choice should’ve been, a) Do you have enough room for this gigantor couch? (I do, as a matter of fact, but if I hadn’t, I would’ve been fucked, and it would’ve been all your fault.) Or b) Why the fuck do you need such a stupendously enormous couch?

Or a combination of the two.

(The answer to that second question, by the way, is because home comfort is important. I don’t have to be “on” there either.)

So, thanks for being an enabler, I guess.

(I’m kidding, I love my accent pillows.)

From,

Eli

Nolan was laughing so hard by the time he reached the end of the letter that he almost didn’t hear his phone ring. “Thanks for being an enabler,” Nolan said, still laughing. “Christ, Eli.”

He let the call go to voicemail, too happy in this bubble of . . . contentment? Joy? Wonder? And he wasn’t ready for that bubble to burst yet. He wanted to live with Eli’s words a little longer, with their honesty and humor and very Eli-like rambling way of speaking. The letter felt lived-in. Alive, almost. Like Nolan could reach into it and pull Eli right out of it.

What was the point of it, though? The way he’d opened the letter in the same way Freddie had—Do you remember the day we met?—made him think that Eli was writing to Nolan for the same reason Freddie had written to Annie.

Not that Freddie’s letters held an obvious why either. They were romantic in nature but not overly so. Not mushy or sappy or even poetic. Just raw and quietly vulnerable.

Nolan read Eli’s letter a second time . . .

And it was just as raw and quietly vulnerable as Freddie’s, if in a different way. Eli was funny and sincere and emotionally intelligent without sounding pompously profound.

And he’d thought Nolan was cool. And effortlessly sexy. Amused, Nolan shook his head. Back then, he’d been a few years into his career and trying to make a name for himself while struggling to figure out how to adult but still enjoy life. Like Freddie said, fake it till you make it. A decade later, Nolan still didn’t feel like he had his shit together, but did anybody? Was there an adult out there who actually felt like an adult and not like they were flying through each day by the seat of their pants?

Surely a true adult was a mythical being.

The part of Eli’s letter that Nolan kept getting snagged on, though, was where Eli admitted to forgetting to be “on” around him. Nolan swallowed hard and tried to ignore the flutter in his chest. It was a simple confession, yet at the same time, there was nothing simple about it. It encased the whole world.

Nolan’s world at least.

To be the person Eli felt comfortable enough around to be himself was humbling.

Freddie had written to Annie, his partner.

Eli had written to Nolan, his . . .

His what?

Were there deeper feelings that Nolan had been oblivious to? He was ninety-nine percent certain Eli was attracted to him—their brief time in the storage room had proved that—but attraction and feelings didn’t always go hand in hand.

His phone rang again. The caller ID showed his best friend’s name, so he answered and put his phone on speaker. “Hey, man. Did I miss a call from you earlier?”

“Uh, no,” King said in that deeply gruff voice of his that made him sound like a grumpy asshole.

Of course, he was a grumpy asshole, but he was Nolan’s grumpy asshole. At eight years old, King had been the tallest kid in their age group at camp, and he’d rebuffed everyone’s attempts at friendship. Until he’d single-handedly accidentally knocked over the life-sized dominoes the camp counselors had set up as an afternoon activity, and Nolan had taken the fall.