Page 27 of Rookie Mistake
I sit at the counter. He hands me the mug. Our fingers brush on the ceramic and the brush is the first touch of the day and the first touch is casual and warm and ordinary and the ordinary is the thing I have been wanting since the booth.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning."
"Two mugs."
"Yes."
"That's progress."
"It is coffee."
"From you, it's a declaration of intent."
His mouth does the thing. Not the fraction-of-a-smile. The actual smile. Small, brief, gone before it fully forms, but real. The real smile is the rarest thing in Nikolai Sokolov's repertoire and I have just produced one over coffee mugs and I am going to be insufferable about this for the rest of the day.
"Don't," he says.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever your face is about to do."
"My face is about to be smug. You can't stop it. It's happening."
He takes his coffee to the couch. I follow him. We sit. The morning is quiet. The quiet is the shared quiet (from the video room, from the bag-move, from the staying) except the shared quiet now includes morning light and coffee and the unremarkable, revolutionary domesticity of two men on a couch at 7 AM who are not performing for anyone.
On the balcony last night, Ava said: the word is yours.
The word is mine. The word is bisexual. The word is the thing I have not told the man sitting next to me drinking coffee from the second mug.
I will tell him. Not this morning. This morning the two mugs are enough. This morning the real smile is enough. This morning the ordinary is enough.
But the word is coming. The word is mine and the word is ready and the word will arrive when the morning is strong enough to hold it.
NIKOLAI
Mik Volkov finds me in the weight room on a Wednesday, which is when Mik finds people, because Wednesday is film day and film day ends early and the weight room after film day is quiet enough for the kind of conversation Mik considers worth having.
Mik does not have many conversations. Mik has conversations the way he has fights: rarely, with full commitment, and with the understanding that the person on the receiving end may not recover quickly.
He is bench-pressing. I am doing cable rows. The weight room is otherwise empty because the other players have left and the emptiness is not accidental. Mik waited. Mik waits the way a predator waits: still, patient, aware that the waiting is the strategy.
He racks the bar. He sits up. He looks at me.
The look is the Mik look. I have been on the receiving end of the Mik look for three seasons and the look has never been directed at my personal life because Mik does not involve himself in personal lives. Mik involves himself in hockey and in Cole and in Dostoevsky and in the Russian-inflected silence that Mik treats as a primary language.
"Sit," he says.
I sit. The bench across from him. The weight room is quiet except for the hum of the ventilation and the faint, distant sound of Luca organizing equipment and humming something Italian.
"You are making this harder than it needs to be," Mik says.
The sentence arrives without context because Mik does not provide context. Mik provides conclusions. The context is the listener's responsibility.
"I do not know what you are referring to."
"Yes, you do."
