Page 51

“That’s not asking. That’s giving him room to disappear.” She shook her head. “You keep saying he has to say yes to the bite. Fine. Sure. But what about all the little yeses before it? Do you want to sit next to me on a couch? Do you want to come over on Saturday? Do you want, I don’t know, to get coffee like a person? You’ve built a cathedral out of one big consent and forgotten all the small doors.”

I sat very still.

She was right. I hated that she was right.

“Also,” said Tamsin, casually, “you’ve never been with anyone. Have you?”

My head came up.

“I don’t discuss—”

“It’s fine. I’m not asking for details. I’m saying it out loud so that you know that I know.” Her eyes were kind. “Nine years. I’ve never seen you with a woman. Or a man. And I have wondered, on and off, what you do with all that.” She hesitated. “I think you watch, Maksim. I think that’s how you stay near it.”

I could not have spoken if I had wanted to.

“I don’t think it’s a kink,” she said. “I think it’s a way of standing at the window and pretending you’re inside.” She touched my cheek, briefly. “You can come inside. That’s all I’m saying. He’d let you.”

The lamp buzzed. Far off, the piano began again, softly, someone humming to it.

“Thank you,” I said finally, and my voice was not entirely steady.

“Don’t mention it. Ever. I’ll deny it in court.”

I drove home through the last of the night with all the windows down.

It was not warm. It was minus six. But I needed the air to move against my face, I needed the sky to be large, and I wanted to see the birches go by in the headlights like a row of pale soldiers. I passed the arena. Its great black bulk sat at the end of the boulevard, ringed with lamps, and I felt an odd, absurd tenderness for it, as for a friend who had witnessed something private.

I parked at the guest house and sat with the engine off. Snow was starting. Thin, dry flakes drifting down through the lamplight.

I took out my phone.

I have eaten, I typed, and then I deleted it, and then I typed it again.

I added the rest, and looked at it for a very long time. And then I did something that would have appalled the man I was two weeks ago. I typed, into a message to a young American hockey player who ate too little and talked too much, the smallest, sideways face I could construct from a colon and a bracket.

I sent it.

His reply came in nine seconds.

LEX (DO NOT ANSWER IF IT’S 3AM): WHAT

I laughed out loud in the empty car. It felt strange. It felt like using a muscle I’d forgotten I owned.

When we had exchanged goodnights, when I had sat for some time in the dark holding the phone against my chest like a foolish boy, I went inside, and up the stairs, and down the hall, and let myself into the room I had shared with him for three nights.

It was quiet. It smelled of him still, faintly, in the pillow on the big bed. I stood in the middle of the floor. Then, very carefully, I picked up the pillow, and held it against my face, and breathed.

A small door, I thought. There are small doors.

I decided that tomorrow I would ask him to have coffee.

It began at practice.

I do not know how long it had been going on before I noticed. I had been distracted. Tired in the way one is tired after a long famine, and happy in the way one is when the famine ends, and I did not hear it.

But I hear everything, eventually.

I was on the ice, going through a line drill, and the whistle was in the middle of a long blast, and underneath it, threaded into the hush of the building like a needle through wool, was a sound that did not belong. It was a thin whine, as fine as a thread, the kind of sound a human ear could not catch, the sound of a very small motor or a lens focusing.