Page 44 of Slashed Bonds

I’ve watched him on film. I never once looked at his face.

“Knox!”

I get two steps toward the concourse.

And he comes around the corner.

Not alone. He’s trotting, delighted, tail in the air, tongue out, ears forward, and his leash is in someone’s hand.

A man in goalie gear from the waist down. Pads still strapped on, skates swapped for slides, a black hoodie over the chest protector with the hood pushed back. Dark hair with a slash of white through the front of it, damp with sweat, shoved off his forehead.

Silver everywhere. Septum. Gauges. A ladder of rings up each ear. And a lip ring he’s turning absently with his tongue as he looks down at my dog and says, in a voice deep enough to move furniture…

“Sit, Knox.”

Knox sits.

Knox has never sat for anyone but me in his life.

The man looks up.

And I stop mid-stride.

Because I know those eyes.

Crevasse blue. Backlit, ringed darker at the edges, so pale they read as cut out and set into his face. Cold in color and never once cold in intent. I’ve looked into those eyes from four inches away more times than I could count, with a mask between us and with nothing between us at all.

Freckles across cheekbones I’ve never seen. Heavy. Spilling down a jaw I’ve imagined so many times that the real one lands like a slap.

And down the left side of his throat, disappearing into the hoodie’s collar, a pale island of skin with soft borders, bleached out between the freckles and the ink.

No.

The butterflies I thought had died with the girl I used to be come up out of the pit of my stomach like they’ve been waiting five years for the signal. Not fluttering. Screaming. Every one of them clawing its way up from the pits of fucking hell, and somewhere lower, in a place that has no business having an opinion right now, something flutters too.

No. No, no, no…

Frozen juniper. Blackcurrant. Crushed mint. Clean ice, cold and mineral, the exact note that comes up off an empty rink at six in the morning.

A goalie. He smells like the ice because he’s been standing on it for…

The crease. The gap. The three taps on the post.

The reason I couldn’t place that habit is that I’ve never seen it from the stands.

I’ve felt it. Twice a week for two and a half years, in the way he touches the doorframe before he leaves the room.

He knows.

It’s all over his face. He knew before he rounded the corner. He knew when he heard the dog’s name, and he knew when he took the leash, and he is looking at me right now with an expression I’ve never once seen on him, because I’ve never once seen his mouth.

He’s smiling.

Slow. Crooked. Utterly, unrepentantly pleased with himself.

And every question I’ve spent two and a half years refusing to ask arrives at once, shoving for the door.

Does he know who I am? Did he know before tonight? How long? Was the card in my jacket his idea…was Roz his idea…was any of this an accident, or did I get herded here like a fucking animal by a man who’s had his hands on every scar I own and never asked a single question about them because he didn’t need to?