On Paper

The thing about the good nights was that Cole never remembered deciding to do any of it.

He was already moving before the puck came loose along the far boards, already reading the angle the way you read a room you've been drinking in for years, and when it skittered free of two sticks and a skate he was there, and it was on his tape, and the lane opened up in front of him like somebody had unzipped the whole rink. He didn't look for Erik. That was the part he'd have tried to explain, if anyone had ever asked him and if he'd ever been able to say it out loud. He didn't look. He just knew — the way you know where the floor is in your own dark house — that if he dropped it back and to the left, into the empty space where no one was standing, someone would be standing.

Erik was standing.

The pass came back off Erik's stick a quarter-second before Cole understood he'd wanted it there, flat and hard across the seam, right onto the blade Cole was already leaning into, and Cole one-timed it low blocker side and heard the whole building come apart above him.

Four to one. He'd stopped counting his own numbers around the second period, which was the surest sign it was one of those nights, the kind where the game got quiet and enormous at the same time.

He wheeled behind the net with his arms half up and Erik met him at the corner, and for one second there was just the two of them in the roar, Erik's glove clamping the back of his neck, Erik's face doing the small careful thing it did instead of grinning — a flicker at the mouth, a warmth in the pale eyes that most people would have missed and that Cole had somehow, over a season, learned to read like weather.

"There he is," Cole said, or shouted, right against the earhole of Erik's helmet. "There's my guy."

Erik didn't say anything. He never said much on the ice. He just gave Cole's neck one more squeeze, firm and certain, steering him back toward the bench like Cole was a door he was closing gently, and let go.

They finished it six to one. Sandeen scored his first of the year in garbage time and skated back to the bench with his mouth open like he'd surprised himself, and the room ate him alive for it, in the way the room ate everything, with love disguised as contempt. Cole banged his stick on the boards and hollered something filthy and encouraging and felt, underneath the noise, that particular clean exhaustion that only came when the whole game had gone through him and Erik like water through two joined hands.

He didn't think about the hands. He'd have told you he never thought about the hands.

In the room afterward the win was a weather system.

Somebody had the speakers going before Cole was through the door, the bass thick enough to lean on, and Tommer was already howling the second verse of a song, all the wrong words delivered at full commitment, and a tape ball caught Cole square in the chest as he came in — Okafor, of course, grinning from three stalls down with another one already balled up in his fist.

"These two," Okafor announced, to the room, to Anchorage, to God. "The best two-man game in the whole miserable league, and one of them can't even talk."

"He talks," Cole said, dropping onto the bench in front of his stall, peeling the tape off his shins. "He just charges by the word. Swedish rates. You couldn't afford a sentence."

"Six points between you," Sandeen said reverently, thumbing his phone, because Sandeen kept the numbers the way other men kept faith. "Three and three. That's — since December that's —"

"Don't," Théo said from the far corner, where he was removing his goalie gear one buckle every geological age, holding court in his gear like a king who intended to be undressed by nightfall and not a minute sooner. "Do not read us the stats, petit. You'll jinx it. He's jinxing it," he told the room, gesturing with a blocker. "The two-man game is holy and the rookie wants to do accounting on it."

"It's not a jinx, it's math," Sandeen said.

"It's a jinx wearing math's jacket."

Cole let it wash over him. This was the part he was good at — better at, honestly, than the hockey, though he'd never admit that either. The easy back-and-forth, the room's chirp and pull, the way he could sit at the center of it and be exactly what everyone expected: loud, quick, generous with the joke, the guy you were glad was on your team and gladder still was buying. He tossed the wet tape at the bin and missed and someone booed and he took a bow. It cost him nothing. It had never cost him anything. He'd been doing this particular performance since he was fourteen and it fit him like his own skin, so well that he'd never once had cause to wonder whether it was his own skin or just the one he'd learned to wear.

Across the room, Erik sat down at his stall and began taking off his gear the way he did everything — without waste, each pad set where it went, his gaze somewhere quiet and inward. He hadn't said a word since the tunnel. He didn't need to. The room accommodated Erik the way it accommodated the weather, as a fixed condition; nobody expected him to perform and so nobody noticed that he never did.

Cole noticed. He'd have said he didn't. But his eyes went there, across the churn of the room, and stayed a beat past casual, and he didn't ask himself why, because asking himself why was not a thing Cole Brandt had ever learned to do.

Deke dropped onto the bench beside him and knocked their shoulders together, hard.

"Tell me you saw it," Deke said. "The look on Kessler's face when you buried the fourth. Man aged a year. I want it on my headstone."

"I saw it."

"Marta said 'closer.'" Deke said it like he was reporting a miracle, which, from Marta, it was. "To you. I heard her. That's a parade. You get a parade."

"She meant the two of us."

"She meant you, you humble son of a bitch, take the parade." Deke was grinning, gap-toothed and easy, the closest friend Cole had in the room and the one who never let him get away with the modest version of anything. He grabbed the back of Cole's neck the way half the team grabbed the back of each other's necks, and it was nothing, it was the ordinary current of the room, and Cole thought — with no warning and no reason, a thought that arrived and left before he could catch it by the collar — that it wasn't like when Erik did it. He didn't know what the difference was. He let the thought go the way he let all of them go, downstream, unexamined.

That was when Tommer, over by the trade wire, said the thing.

Tommer read the wire aloud after every win, the way some men read the box scores, and tonight the deadline chatter was thick because the club had made its move two days back — sent a defensive prospect and a pick to Utah for a big-bodied winger, and the room had already worked the newcomer over in absentia, already named him. The suitcase. Every midseason acquisition was the suitcase until he proved he had feelings, and then he was the suitcase with feelings, and by then he was one of them.

"Says here the whole thing's hung up in paperwork," Tommer reported, in the normal voice he used for everything, the voice that made the strangest news sound like a weather report. "League office is refiling half the roster's junk because the deadline moved. Work permits, visas, all the import stuff." He said it to the room, to nobody. "Good luck to whoever's counting on the government of anywhere to do a form on time, am I right? Half you guys aren't even legal."

It got a laugh. It was nothing. It was the exact kind of throwaway the room manufactured by the ton, and it landed and dispersed and the bass rolled on over it.

Cole laughed too. And because he was looking — because his eyes had been over there anyway, resting on Erik at his stall for no reason Cole would ever have given you — he saw it.

Erik went still.

Not a flinch. Nothing anyone would have caught who wasn't already, stupidly, watching. Just a stillness that came down over him all at once, the way a lake goes flat when the wind quits, his hands stopping on the buckle of his elbow pad and holding there for a second too long, his jaw setting into a line Cole knew from the ice — the face Erik made in the last minute of a one-goal game, holding the blue line, giving up nothing.

Then it was gone. Erik finished the buckle. Set the pad down where it went. Reached for the next.

Cole opened his mouth without any idea what he meant to say into it.

"Erik —"

"Brandt." Théo, from his throne of half-shed gear, pointing the blocker like a scepter. "Settle a thing. The suitcase from Utah. Six-four, they say. You've played him. Does he have hands or is he furniture?"

And Cole was answering — furniture, gorgeous furniture, you could set a drink on him — was leaning into the chirp, was the room's favorite performance of himself again without ever deciding to be, and the moment folded up and put itself away, and he forgot it the way he forgot everything he didn't want to look at.

Almost. It sat under the noise for a second longer than it should have, small and cold, the picture of Erik going flat and giving up nothing. Then that went downstream too.

The tunnel out was concrete and cold after the heat of the room, the arena settling around them into its enormous after-hours quiet, and Cole was still half-dressed and loose-limbed and running his mouth about the Utah kid when Erik fell into step beside him and, without breaking stride, reached over and fixed Cole's collar.

It had gotten twisted under itself at the back, riding up against Cole's neck, and Cole hadn't noticed and wouldn't have — but Erik's fingers were there, folding it flat, smoothing it down against his spine with two passes of his thumb, unhurried, certain, the exact economy he brought to taping a stick or eating a hit or setting a pad where it went. Then he took the water bottle out of the crook of Cole's arm, where Cole was about to drop it, and put it back in Cole's hand the right way round, the nozzle where his mouth could find it.

"Drink," Erik said. "You didn't, all second. You cramp when you don't."

"Yes, Mom," Cole said, and drank, because he was thirsty, he realized, suddenly and completely, the way you only notice you're thirsty once the water's already in your hand.

Erik didn't answer. He walked beside Cole down the cold tunnel with his gaze forward and his face gone quiet again, gave no sign that fixing another man's collar in the dark was anything at all, and Cole, warm and winning and thoughtless, didn't examine a single second of it — not the collar, not the water, not the flat calm that had come down over Erik in the room, not the strange fact that of everything that had happened tonight the thing his body kept quietly returning to was the weight of a glove on the back of his neck and a voice charging Swedish rates telling him to drink.

He didn't examine any of it.

He'd have told you there was nothing there to examine.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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