Page 10 of Power Play
“You could not.”
Dana turned out to be in her forties, sharp and unsentimental, with a desk full of other people’s hope. She had Theo’s file open before they sat down.
“I’m going to be straight with you both. The government assumes you’re lying. A foreign athlete whose work visa is lapsing marries a citizen mid-season: that’s the textbook shape of marriage fraud. They will look for it. And if they find it, it’s not just a denial. It’s a permanent bar for Theo, and a federal charge for you.” She looked at Shane. “People do time.”
Shane’s hands went flat on his thighs.
“So,” Dana said. “I need a straight answer. Is this a real marriage, shared home, shared life, or did you do this on paper?”
Theo opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He looked at Shane.
“We live together,” Shane said, and his voice was steady, no pause, no tell, answering for both of them before Theo had to figure out how. “Same apartment. A one-bedroom. We share everything: the rent, the groceries, the stupid life. We’re figuring it out, like anybody. It’s new. But it’s real. We’re not faking the marriage. We’re just—” he glanced at Theo “—private about how it started. That’s not a crime. Being private.”
Dana studied them both for a long moment, the practiced read, and whatever she saw, two enormous men sitting too close in client chairs, one of them having just answered for the other without being asked, made her face settle.
“No,” she agreed. “Being private isn’t a crime.” She closed the file. “I’ve sat across from the real arrangements. They don’t look like you two.” She slid forms across the desk. “Live your life. Keep the lease in both names, the joint account. Don’t rehearse. The couples who fail are the ones who memorize. The ones who pass are the ones who just answer.” She stood. “Build a real marriage, gentlemen. Best legal strategy I’ve got.”
In the elevator down, neither of them said anything for several floors.
“‘Build a real marriage,’” Shane finally repeated, staring at the numbers. “As a legal strategy.”
“The truth is always efficient,” Theo said.
“Theo. If I get the answers wrong in some room someday, you don’t just get deported. It’s never-coming-back.”
“I know.” Theo watched the floors tick down. “I have known. I did not tell you, because you would have said no, and then your mother—” He stopped. “We do not fake it. We live it. Then there is nothing to catch.”
The elevator opened in the lobby. They walked out into the cold Loop wind, and Shane thought about building a real marriage as a legal strategy, and about the one bed, and about Theo unable to lie in Dana’s office, and his stomach lurched on a bad change, the ice opening.
* * *
The good shift happened in Cleveland.
It was the second period of a tight one, and Mercer had them out against the other team’s top line, and it clicked. Shane never could explain it after, not to himself, not to anyone. The two of them finally on the same clock, the bodies doing the thinking. Shane jumped up into the rush, the gamble, the move Mercer yelled at him for, and instead of getting caught, he heard it. Actually heard it over twelve thousand people, Theo’s voice, one word, “go,” and he knew without looking that Theo had already rotated back. That he was already the house, was already covering the ice Shane had abandoned, and so Shane went, and the gamble worked because the safety net was real. He put it in the top corner, and the lamp lit and the building groaned, andShane wheeled around looking for the only person on the ice he wanted to find.
Theo was already there. They crashed into the glass together, and Theo’s gloved hands were fisted in Shane’s jersey, and Theo Lindgren, who had a resting expression like a man reading a tax bill, was grinning. Actually grinning, a real one, wide and stunned and young, right into Shane’s face, close enough that their cages clacked, and he said, “There. That. You see? When you trust the house—”
“Shut up, that was all me—”
“It was the system—”
“It was my shot—”
And they were yelling, yelling the way they always did, except they were both laughing while they did it. The rest of the line piled in, and nobody on that ice knew that the two men screaming joy into each other’s facemasks had stood at a beige counter eight days ago and signed a marriage license. Shane skated to the bench on legs gone strange beneath him and sat down next to his husband and was, for the length of one shift, so happy he forgot to be ashamed of any of it.
Theo bumped his shoulder pad against Shane’s, once, on the bench, and Shane bumped back, and neither of them said anything, and the deal was supposed to be cold, and nothing about this was cold, and the standings, somewhere, ticked one notch tighter in the Blaze’s favor.
* * *
The team went to dinner after the Cleveland win, the road-trip ritual, a long table at a chain steakhouse, and the hard part turned out not to be the dangerous moments. The hard part was the ordinary ones.
He and Shane sat across from each other because sittingbeside each other felt too obvious and sitting apart felt obvious in the other direction, and so they performed the careful middle distance of roommates while Marek held court at the head of the table and Wozniak told a story about a billet family’s dog and Tripp ordered the expensive thing on the menu because the prospect’s per diem was the prospect’s per diem. Shane caught Theo watching him twice. Didn’t say anything. The third time he looked up, Theo was already looking somewhere else, and Shane’s knee found Theo’s under the table once, by accident, and stayed, by not-accident, a warm point of contact neither of them acknowledged for the length of an entire dinner.
“You two are different,” Marek said.
He’d come down to their end of the table to steal fries off Wozniak, or that was the story, and he said it low, just to them, his steady eyes mild. “Since you moved in. On the ice. You read each other now. It’s good hockey.” A beat. “It’s also — you know. Different.” And he took his fries and went back to the head of the table, and that was all, but it was the second narrowed look, the captain’s slow accumulation, and the cover story thinned a little more, thawing.
“He keeps doing that,” Shane murmured, after, when the table noise had closed back over them. “Marek. The look.”
