Page 81 of Craving Poison Ice

Three. I have known since Tuesday, and I’ve said nothing, because Lex Pendleton is the kind of person who, if you point at his feelings, will punch them.

Four. I’ve counted the number of times he’s said the word “Maksim” this week, and I’m at sixty-three. I stopped because I ran out of fingers.

Five, I’m fine. I’m totally fine. I’m the best-adjusted person I know.

I want to be clear that I’m not a stupid guy. People think I am. I’ve got a good face and a bad laugh and I once got locked in a Zamboni for forty minutes, so I understand where they get it. But I’ve been playing defense for fifteen years. Do you know what a defenseman does? He watches. He watches everything. Where the play is going, who’s tired, who’s about to make a bad decision. It’s the only job in hockey where being nervous is the skill.

So I noticed things.

I noticed that Lex stopped sleeping in the cot around Monday. That he came back at dawn with his shirt on inside out and a look on his face like he’d been struck by lightning and enjoyed it. That there was a small bruise on his neck in the shape of a mouth, and he wore a scarf for two days to hide it, in a building heated to eighty degrees.

I noticed the underwear. Oh, man, the underwear. I still think about it. Every pair of boxers, folded into a little crisp square, and the big Russian handing me the bag at the door without a word, and then that voice, so low I nearly missed it: Has Lex eaten?

Like a mother. Like a husband.

I noticed, on Thursday, when Lex came back from the media event, that he’d been crying. He said he hadn’t. He said it was “allergies.” It’s February in Halden, nothing’s blooming, the only thing in the air is diesel and regret.

I noticed I was scared for him.

I noticed I was hurt.

That’s the one nobody warns you about. I’d have been happy for him. I’d have made a playlist. I’d have shown up with a casserole. But he didn’t tell me, and I lay in the dark on my cot, listening to him breathe and not sleep, and I thought: I’ve known this guy nine years. He’s the person I’d call at three in the morning. And he didn’t trust me with this.

Which is a stupid thing to be hurt by. I know. He’s got walls like a fortress. He didn’t tell his mother he broke his collarbone in ‘19. But it stung anyway, right in the place where I keep the stuff I don’t say out loud.

I’m twenty-six. My mom’s moving to Florida. My ex told me last spring that I was “great, but in the way a golden retriever is great,” which is honestly a fair assessment. I’ve got three good friends, and one of them is on a different team, and another has a baby. Lex is the guy I actually see. And he was lying on a cot ten feet away from me, so lonely he could hear himself, and I couldn’t cross the floor.

So I did something dumb.

I went and found the Russian.

It took me a while, because he wasn’t in the rink or the dining hall or the gym. I checked 214 and knocked, feeling like a man trying to talk his way past a lion, and nobody answered. I finally found him at eleven at night, on the roof, in the cold.

There’s a fire door at the end of the third floor that’s supposed to be alarmed and isn’t. I went through it, up a narrow concrete stair, and came out on a flat gravel roof under a huge, frozen sky. The stars were out. The wind was brutal. And at the far edge, near the parapet, with his back to me and his hands in the pockets of a black coat, stood Maksim Volkov, looking out over the lights of Halden like a man at the rail of a ship.

He didn’t turn.

“Reyes,” he said.