Page 3 of Rookie Mistake
"No," he says. "I am your temporary inconvenience."
I should explain something about the Reapers, because the Reapers are not a normal hockey team.
Five openly queer couples. On one roster. Cole Briggs and Mikhail Volkov (the kiss on the ice that changed everything). Jonah Park and Ren Briggs. Wes Chen and Luca Moretti. Mars Santos and Theo Kimura. And the newest, Jamie Kowalski and Declan Osei, the rookie and the journalist who found each other last season while I was watching from Tampa and thinking: that team. I want to be on that team.
Not because of the couples. Not entirely. Because of what the couples represent: a building where the hiding is optional. A culture where the performance doesn't have to include straightness. A place where a twenty-two-year-old bisexual winger from Tampa who has been performing since puberty might, possibly, be allowed to stop.
I haven't told anyone in professional hockey. The bisexuality lives behind the grin, in the space between who I am in public and who I am at 2 AM when nobody's watching.
The Reapers built a building where the hiding might not be necessary.
I am standing in that building with a coffee stain and a duffel bag and a match-strike in my sternum from touching Nikolai Sokolov's fingers for a fraction of a second, and I am thinking: this is either the safest place I've ever been or the most dangerous.
Both. Both is usually how my life works.
Behind us, at his desk by the door, the man in the Reapers polo pulls out his phone. He types something. He puts the phone away. He returns to watching.
Later, much later, I will learn that his name is Gerald. That Gerald has been watching people in this building for thirty-one years. That Gerald texts his wife Lorraine about the things he sees, and that Lorraine texts back, and that their text thread is the most accurate record of the Reapers' emotional history in existence.
Gerald's text: Another one.
Lorraine: The rookie?
Gerald: The rookie and the Russian.
Lorraine: Again?
Gerald: Different Russian. Same story.
NIKOLAI
The rookie is in my apartment.
This is not a sentence I anticipated producing today. Today's anticipated sentences included: attend rookie orientation, distribute onboarding materials, complete evening film review, cook dinner, read, sleep. Nowhere in the sequence did "accommodate a twenty-two-year-old with a coffee stain and a grin that should require a permit" appear.
I unlock the door and step aside. Mercer enters the way Mercer does everything: at full speed, with commentary.
"This is the apartment of a man who folds his T-shirts emotionally," he says, looking around at the slate-gray couch, the floor-to-ceiling windows, the bookshelf with the hardcovers arranged by language and then by author.
"This is the apartment of a man who does not enjoy living in a mess."
"It's like walking into a Scandinavian hostage situation. Where's the evidence that a human lives here?"
"You are looking at it."
He grins. The grin is the thing I have been cataloging since the corridor, because the grin is a tool and I recognize tools. I spent my childhood in my mother's skating studio watching herevaluate every student's technique in the first thirty seconds of a session, and my mother taught me that the thing a person shows you first is the thing they use most. The thing they use most is the thing they trust most. The thing they trust most is rarely the truest thing about them.
Mercer's grin is his first tool. The grin is what he trusts. The grin is not the truest thing about him.
I show him the guest room. Clean, simple, a bottle of water on the nightstand because hydration is not optional regardless of how inconvenient the guest. He drops his duffel bag on the bed with the casual violence of a man whose relationship with personal belongings is adversarial.
"Towels are in the bathroom. There is food in the kitchen. Practice is at eight. Do not be late."
"When have I ever been late?"
I look at him.
"Today doesn't count," he says. "Today was a systemic failure involving a parking deck."
