Page 18 of Power Play
“Tighter. Slower. Yes.”
“You feel that? That’s both of us, that’s us together, I scored tonight and this is still the best thing that’s happening to me today—” and he kept talking, he never stopped talking, faster and filthier as the rhythm built, how the breakout pass had looked from the bench, how Theo looked under him right now, flushed down to the chest, and Theo pulled him down by the back of the neck and kissed him to drink the noise straight from the source, and the rhythm climbed, slow building heat with nothing of the dive-bar fury in it, that was want, plain and chosen, and Theo broke the kiss to say “close” against Shane’s mouth, one syllable, fair warning, and Shane said “good, come on, come for me, I’ve got you,” and Theo came first with Shane’s name in his mouth, spilling hot over Shane’s knuckles and both their stomachs, and Shane worked him through it and then himself, fast, ragged, “keep looking at me, just like that,” and followed half a minute after into his own grip with a sound he pressed into Theo’s good shoulder, and Theo held on and lethimself be held and didn’t narrate any of it, didn’t file it, didn’t do the math, just lay there in the wreck of the hotel bed, both of them sweat-stuck and laughing a little at the state of the duvet, wanting nothing more than the exact place he was.
Shane cleaned them up with a hand towel from the bathroom, inefficient, mostly an excuse to keep touching, and climbed back in on Theo’s good side without being told which side that was.
After, tangled in the dark, the road humming below the window, Shane said into Theo’s good shoulder, drowsy: “That wasn’t blowing off steam.”
“No,” Theo agreed. He stared at the ceiling. “It was not.”
“We should be smart about that.”
“Yes.”
Neither of them moved. The clock by the bed said 1:14 and the season had its hooks in everything and there was a call-up out there somewhere with one name on it, and Theo lay in a hotel bed in a city he wouldn’t remember with a man asleep on his chest and understood that amenity had been a lie the second he’d said it, that this had stopped being a transaction and become a want, helpless, all the way down, and that wanting things was how you got them taken, and he held on anyway, he was learning to hold on, and did not sleep, and they had a game tomorrow.
* * *
They broke in small ways. He’d planned for the big breaks. Sex was a big break, he understood sex, sex could be a transaction, a perk, an amenity. He had not planned for Shane starting to leave the bathroom light on for him because Theo got up before dawn for shoulder work and the overhead was too bright. He had not planned for the morning Shane came back from thegrocery store with a Swedish hard bread Theo had mentioned exactly once, mentioned with no expectation, the knäckebröd his mother sent at Christmas, and Shane put it on the counter without a word and didn’t make it a thing he had to respond to, and Theo stood looking at a box of crackers for an embarrassingly long time.
He had not planned for the rule-breaking on the ice. The ice was public. That was what made it dangerous. They were winning now. The pairing that screamed at each other had become, almost overnight, the best top-four in the division, and the room knew it. Mercer knew it, sliding them more minutes. The reason was simple and unspeakable: Theo trusted him now. When Shane jumped up into the rush, Theo’s body went back without a flicker of doubt, because the doubt was gone, because somewhere in the cold apartment the contempt had drained out and left behind a frictionless certainty that this man would not, could not, let him down. They moved as one. People noticed.
“You two,” Marek said.
It was after a Wednesday optional, just the captain and Theo in the room, Marek having arranged it that way, the room cleared first, the conversation last. Marek Dvorák was thirty-four and had a body that mapped everywhere the game had been unkind to him and the steadiest eyes Theo had ever met.
“You and Novak,” Marek said. “Something changed.”
“We figured out the pairing.”
“Mm.” Marek pulled a skate lace tight, didn’t look up. “I’ve been in this league since you were in school, Lindgren. I’ve roomed with married guys, divorced guys, guys hiding all kinds of things. You learn to read it.” He tied off the lace. “You two have a look.”
Theo went very still. “I don’t—”
“I’m not asking,” Marek said, mild, final. “It’s not my business who you — it’s nobody’s. And on the ice it’s making uswin, so as your captain, I love it, keep it up.” He stood, and now he did look at Theo, and the steadiness had grief in it. “But I’m going to say one thing, as a guy who’s older than you, and then I’ll never say it again. This is a small league and a long season and there’s a call-up coming, and call-ups don’t take two. They take one. So whatever you two have figured out—” he tapped his stick once against the floor “—be careful. Because what’s making you good is also what’s gonna get one of you in a car to Chicago and leave the other one here. And I’ve seen what that does. I’ve been the one left here.” He shrugged into his coat. “Keep winning. Be careful. That’s all.”
He left, and Theo sat alone in the room with the truth laid out flat and undeniable, the way he liked truths, the flat arrangement that made them survivable. What was making them good was what would end them. There was one call-up. There was a divorce written into the deal. There was, at the end of all of this, a flight to Stockholm or a Volvo on the highway to Chicago, and either way two men who’d torn up a napkin going their separate ways with their separate prizes, and Theo had known all of it going in, had built the math himself, and the math had not had this in it. The crackers had not been in the math.
* * *
They won six straight, and the streak loosened the room, and a loose room watched each other less carefully. Wozniak found Theo asleep on Shane’s shoulder on the bus and said “aw, you do care” and grabbed his charger and never thought about it again. Mercer paused tape on a celebration and said, mild, “Lindgren, Novak, you two want a minute alone with the puck or can we run the breakout,” and the room howled, and afterward in the lotTheo said “we are being careless” and Shane said “I know” and neither of them stopped.
“It’s the rules,” Shane said that night, the two of them eating standing up at the counter. “The rules keep breaking. We said it doesn’t leave the apartment and then I’m covering for you on the bus, we said it doesn’t change the deal and then I’m buying you weird Swedish crackers—”
“You like the crackers.”
“That’s not the point! The point is the rules are — they’re a power play where everybody keeps drifting out of position, and it works for a while, it works great, and then one day the puck’s in your net and you don’t even know how it got there.” Shane set his fork down. “We’re gonna get scored on, Theo. I can feel it coming. The call-up, or somebody figures us out, or — something. There’s a goal coming against us. I know it the way I know it on the ice.”
Theo looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached over, very deliberately, breaking another rule, and took Shane’s bad-in-the-cold hand off the counter and held it, just held it, his thumb moving over the swollen knuckles.
“Then we get scored on,” Theo said. “We are down a goal for a while. It is a long game, Shane. You do not stop playing because you are down a goal.” And Shane held on.
* * *
The quiet night that wasn’t a date happened on a Thursday they both had off, a rare one, no game, no skate, snow falling thick and soft outside.
They didn’t plan it. That was important to Theo, later, when he was taking the night apart trying to understand it: nobody planned it. Shane was on the couch, Theo’s couch, the one Theo still technically slept on the nights they kept it businesslike,which was fewer and fewer, watching some cooking competition and yelling at the contestants, and Theo was at the table doing the immigration paperwork their lawyer kept sending, the endless forms, evidence of bona fide marriage, and at some point Shane said “this is depressing, come here,” and Theo, who did not take orders, came there.
They ended up cooking. Shane couldn’t cook and Theo could, a little, the plain Swedish things his mother had taught him, and Shane was a disaster of a sous chef who narrated his every action and dropped an entire onion on the floor and tried to cheat on the diet by stealing butter and got his hand swatted, and Theo found himself, noticed it from outside himself, watching it happen, found himself laughing, the real kind, the kind that hurt his face because the muscles were out of practice, and they ate the plain food standing up at the counter because they’d never bought proper chairs, two enormous men in a sixty-three-degree kitchen with the snow coming down, and Shane stole a forkful off Theo’s plate and Theo let him, and it was the single best evening of Theo Lindgren’s adult life and it terrified him so badly he could hardly breathe.
