Page 25 of The Grumpy Defenseman
Lena made pancakes. The kitchen smelled like butter and the warmth of a house where someone lived a normal life. Not a contract-year life. A life with pancakes and a kid who thought Frost Bank Center needed a moat. A life not measured in video sessions and trainers asking me to rank my pain from one to ten.
After breakfast, I fixed the loose hinge on the cabinet above the stove. It took four minutes. Lena handed me a screwdriver without being asked, because she had been handing me screwdrivers since I was old enough to hold one, and the rhythm of it, her anticipating and me receiving, was one of the steadiest thingsin my life.
“You don’t have to tell me about her,” Lena said from behind me while I tightened the last screw. “But you should know, whatever’s happening, it looks good on you.”
I did not turn around. Just stood there with the screwdriver in my hand, the hinge perfectly aligned, the sound of Tommy building in the next room and Ranger’s tail thumping on the hardwood, my sister’s voice behind me saying something I did not know how to hear yet.
“Thanks,” I said.
She hummed, dry and fond, with a layer of love underneath that she would deny if I pointed it out.
Later, I took Ranger to the batting cages.
I was not any good at baseball. My swing was functional at best and embarrassing at worst, and the machine did not care. That was the point. On the ice, every movement had consequences. Every decision fed into a system of evaluation, measurement, and judgment. Here, in a cage with a pitchingmachine and a dog who thought the sound of a bat was the greatest thing that had ever happened, there were no consequences.
Just contact. Rhythm. The satisfying crack of a ball I did not need to do anything with.
Ranger sat outside the cage, tongue out, completely unbothered by my performance. He watched each swing like it was the most interesting thing he had ever witnessed, which it probably was, because Ranger’s threshold for fascination was approximately zero.
I swung until the tokens ran out. Then I leaned on the bat and stood there, breathing easy for the first time in hours.
I thought about last night.
Not the facts of it, the music and the drinks. Those were logistics. I thought about the feeling. The physical experience of sitting across from Samantha Cole in a room full of jazz and watching her watch me like I was someone worth seeing.
She had looked at me the way she looked through her camera: precise, patient,waiting for the moment that mattered. Except last night, the camera was not there. It was just her eyes. And what they had seen was the version of me I kept locked in a room without windows.
Ranger pressed his nose against my leg. I reached down and scratched behind his ear, the right one first, because he had opinions about the order, and he leaned into my hand with the full-body trust of an animal who had never once questioned whether he was welcome.
“You’ve got it easy,” I told him. “No contracts. No media days. No figuring out what it means when someone kisses you outside a jazz club.”
I clipped his leash and walked the long way back to the truck. The sun was lower now, the air cooling, the world settling into that late-afternoon pause where everything slowed down enough to think.
Last night, I had kissed a woman and felt every wall I had ever built come down at once. This morning, I had fixed a cabinethinge, built a moat with my nephew, and hit baseballs with a dog who loved me without conditions.
Two different kinds of truth.
Both real.
Both mine.
The question was whether I could hold them both without dropping one.
I opened the truck door. Ranger jumped in, circled the passenger seat twice, and collapsed with the contented exhale of a creature who had spent the afternoon watching his person hit things with a stick and considered it a perfect day.
I started the engine. My phone sat in the cupholder, screen dark.
I picked it up. Opened the messages. Her name sat at the top of the list.
But I did not delete the conversation.
And when I got to my condo and set the phone on the counter, when I stood in the kitchen where last night’s bourbon glass still sat next to the sink, I knew, with a certainty that felt like ice under myblades, cold and undeniable, that whatever I was building with Samantha Cole was no longer something I could take apart and pretend had never existed.
The walls were not gone. They were still there, standing where I had built them, familiar as old injuries. But there was a door now. One I had not installed. One she had found without looking for it.
And last night, for four seconds, I had opened it.
Samantha
