Page 10 of Blind Side
"I am."
"Okay. Two weeks."
I hung up and stood in the hallway for another minute. The cafeteria noise filtered through the door, the low murmur of athletes eating and someone laughing too loud.
Hayes. That was Hayes's laugh, filtering through a closed door.
Kieran and I were in the equipment room the day before departure. We had our own rhythm in here, the shorthand of two goalies who shared a position and all the weird intimacy that came with it. We taped sticks in adjacent stalls. We talked about pads and angles and the way a glove needed to bebroken in before it felt right. We didn't talk about much else—not because we weren't close, but because goalies operated on a different frequency. We understood each other the way soldiers understood each other—through shared experience, not shared conversation.
He was re-taping his stick, that methodical process that was half preparation, half meditation, and I was checking my chest protector straps when he spoke.
"You've been thinking."
It wasn't a question. Kieran Walsh didn't bother with questions when statements were more efficient.
"I'm always thinking."
"More than usual." He kept his eyes on the tape. His hands were steady, each wrap overlapping the previous one by the same amount. He had goalkeeper's hands, enlarged knuckles and the tape-calloused fingers that had caught ten thousand pucks. "And you're doing that thing where you go still when you don't want people to notice you processing."
"I wasn't aware I had a thing."
"You have several things." He paused, still focused on the tape. "Whatever you're deciding… Don't decide it for the wrong reasons."
The equipment room was quiet. It smelled like tape adhesive and old leather. Down the hall, a compressor cycled on.
"What would be the wrong reasons?" I asked.
Kieran finished the wrap and pressed the end down, examining his work with the critical eye of a man who found imperfection intolerable. Then he looked at me with the same expression he wore when he was reading a two-on-one and had already decided where to commit.
"You know what the wrong reasons are." He stood up and put the tape down. "You've always known."
He walked out.
That was the entire conversation—Kieran Walsh in his purest form. A single comment, delivered without excess, and then he was gone.
I sat in the equipment room and thought about what the wrong reasons might be. Staying for safety. Leaving for safety. Deciding based on fear rather than want. Deciding based on a door you hadn't tried because you'd convinced yourself it was locked.
I thought about my cousin Marcus. Thirty years old, sitting across from me at a bar in Portland three months after coming out, he told me that the hardest part wasn't other people's reactions. "The hardest part," he'd said, holding his beer with both hands, "was the years I spent thinking it made sense, Clay. Silence was efficient. Then one day I was thirty and I realized I'd built my entire life around a variable I'd never questioned."
In the years since, I'd thought about that a lot.
The thing was, the calculation I'd been running—the same one Marcus had run—had produced consistently manageable results. Date women. Be the uncomplicated, reliable presence in every room. Don't make it complicated. Don't make it visible.
Until Jamie Hayes started leaving a mug on the shelf for me and I noticed the handle orientation.
Kieran hadn't specified the wrong reasons. He didn't need to.
The question was the answer.
I was at Jamie's apartment later that night.
This was our established pattern. We ordered food or one of us cooked—or, most often, Jamie had already made something. His kitchen was always stocked and his instinct was always to feed people. His apartment reflected him. It was warm and slightly cluttered, built for comfort rather than display.
There were books on the coffee table and a blanket on the couch that had been there since last winter. Photos hung on thefridge—team pictures, a family photo with his four siblings, a candid from last year's Cup parade where he was mid-laugh.
The kitchen was at the heart of the space. Jamie moved through it, opening cabinets without looking. He handed me a beer and then, without asking, reached for the shelf above the stove and pulled down the blue mug with the chipped handle.
My mug.
