Page 8 of Rookie Mistake
I stand. He steps behind me, then pauses.
"I am going to put my hands on your hips," he says. "To show the angle. Yes?"
"Yeah."
His hand settles at my hip. His other hand touches my side. His chest is close enough to my back that I can feel the warmth of him through my shirt, though we are not quite touching.
"This is your problem," he says. His voice is low and close and Russian and I am experiencing a technical difficulty in the region of my higher brain function. "You open too far here. Weight here. Not forward. If you lunge, you lose the read."
His fingers adjust my hip angle by two degrees. The adjustment is clinical. The adjustment is also his hand onmy body, and the hand on my body is warm and large and precise and the precision is the thing that undoes me because the precision says: I know exactly where to touch you and the knowing is professional and the knowing is also something else.
"All you are thinking about," Nikolai says, "is getting past the first body."
"That's not all I'm thinking about."
The sentence exits my mouth before the checkpoint catches it. The sentence is honest in a way that my sentences are not usually honest in professional contexts, and the honesty hangs in the air of the video room like a flare.
His fingers flex once against my hip. The flex is involuntary. The flex is the control slipping, the same slip I saw in the corridor, the shoulder-tightening that lasted a fraction of a second. This time the slip is in his hand. On my body. And the slip is louder than the corridor slip because the slip is contact and contact has a frequency and the frequency is resonating in my rib cage.
He steps away. The stepping-away is the control reasserting. The air between us cools by several degrees.
"On the ice tomorrow," he says, voice level, the Russian accent thick in the way it gets when he is managing something, "do not think about being impressive."
"What should I think about?"
His gaze drops to my mouth. The drop lasts less than a second. The drop is the most honest thing his body has done in my presence.
"Being effective."
He turns back to the screen. He presses play. We watch two more clips. He points. I learn. The silence between us is functional and loaded and I am sitting in a video room at 6 PM with a man whose hand was on my hip thirty seconds ago and whose eyes went to my mouth and whose control is the mostbeautiful and infuriating thing I have ever watched a person maintain.
I want to break it. I want to find the crack and press on it until the control gives. Not because I enjoy destruction. Because I saw the underneath, in the kitchen, when the grin-absent voice said "you're not most people" and Nikolai's face did something it does not do in public. The underneath is the real one. The underneath is worth the breaking.
After the session, in the corridor, he says: "You played better in the afternoon."
"The afternoon was the safe plays."
"Yes."
"You want me to play safe?"
"I want you to play smart. Smart includes the dramatic option when the dramatic option is the right option. You have not yet learned the difference. You will."
I look at him. He looks at me. The corridor is empty. The fluorescent lights hum.
"That was almost a compliment," I say.
"It was an assessment."
"From you, that's the same thing."
The fraction-of-a-smile. The geological event. The third one today. I'm keeping count.
"Goodnight, Mercer."
"Goodnight, Sokolov."
I walk to the parking lot. Gerald is at his desk. He watches me pass with something that might be amusement.
