Page 9 of Rookie Mistake
"Night, Gerald."
"Night, kid. You're limping."
"Volkov happened."
"Volkov happens to everyone."
"That's comforting."
"It's not meant to be. Drive safe."
I drive to my apartment. My apartment, the team-arranged one-bedroom that cleared earlier than housing predicted. The apartment is clean and furnished and anonymous and contains zero evidence that a human with preferences lives here.
I sit on the couch. I eat a protein bar. I think about Nikolai's hand on my hip and his mouth not-quite-smiling and the way his gaze dropped to my mouth for less than a second.
Less than a second. That's all I got. Less than a second of the underneath.
I want more.
The wanting is the problem. The wanting is always the problem. I want the NHL and I want the roster and I want the career and I want the man in the video room who cooks pasta at 10:30 and folds his T-shirts like acts of worship and whose control is a fortress and whose fortress has a crack and whose crack is me.
Rookie mistake, probably. Wanting all of it at once.
But wanting is the thing I do best. The wanting is the speed. The wanting is the grin. The wanting is the thing that got me from Tampa to this couch in this city on this team.
The wanting is going to get me into that fortress.
I just have to be smart about it.
Smart includes the dramatic option when the dramatic option is the right option. Nikolai's words. Applied to hockey. Applicable to everything.
I turn off the light. The apartment is quiet. The quiet is not safe the way Nikolai's quiet was safe. This quiet is just empty.
I think about the hand on my hip. I think about the reading glasses catching the blue light. I think about "you speak whenever silence becomes too intimate" and the way the sentence made me feel like I'd been X-rayed by a man who found the film interesting.
I close my eyes. I do not sleep for a long time.
When I do, I dream about skating on a frozen lake at night, the ice black and endless. A figure standing still ahead of me in the dark. Not chasing. Just waiting.
I know who it is.
NIKOLAI
Ileave a note in his stall.
This is not a thing I do. I do not leave notes. I do not initiate contact with rookies outside the professional framework of the onboarding program. I do not write on yellow sticky paper with a pen borrowed from Luca Moretti's equipment desk because my own handwriting implements are in my apartment and the impulse arrived at the facility and the impulse would not wait.
The note says: Film. 10 PM. Room 3.
No signature. My handwriting is identification enough. My mother calls it "aggressive cursive."
I have been thinking about the video room. About Eli Mercer's hip under my hand. About the sentence that came out of his mouth when my fingers were on his body.
"That's not all I'm thinking about."
The sentence was honest. The honesty was the danger. The grin is the performance and the honesty is the underneath, and the last time I let anyone past the underneath, his name was Alexei and the access was mutual and what came after was the destruction.
I am in the film room at 9:47. Thirteen minutes early. I arrive before things so that things arrive into my space. The distinction matters.
