Page 11 of Power Play
“He knows something is different. He does not know what.” Theo turned his water glass a careful quarter-turn. “He is the kind of man who waits. He will not ask. He will just accumulate. Until one day he knows, and he will have known for weeks, and he will not be surprised.” He glanced at Shane. “Your knee is on mine.”
“Yeah,” Shane said, and didn’t move it. “Is that — should I—”
“No,” Theo said, before he could decide not to. “It is fine. The tablecloth is long.” And he looked back at his plate.
Shane looked back at his own plate. Under the table, neither of them moved. He didn’t know how long they sat like that.Long enough for the check to come, long enough for Marek to push back his chair at the head of the table and call time on it. And when they finally stood and filed out into the parking lot, Theo’s shoulder passing close in the cold Ohio air, Shane noticed that Theo didn’t put any distance between them. Not even when there was room. He just walked, not touching, but close, hands in his jacket pockets, face pointed straight ahead, and Shane filed that away and didn’t look at it too closely.
* * *
A few nights later, the next road trip, the visitors’ room in Cleveland after a tight ugly road win.
The signal had started earlier that same night, on the ice, two periods before the laces. Late in the second, hemmed into their own end, Shane had glanced back for his partner and Theo had rapped his stick twice on the boards, two flat taps, and Shane had understood it without a word: go, I have the back side. He’d gone. The play had worked. It became theirs after that, the two taps, go, the one piece of language between them that never needed saying out loud.
Shane’s hands had gone bad on the bus, the way they did in the cold after a hard game, an old thing, knuckles that swelled and locked, nothing he’d ever mention, you didn’t mention your hands when your whole edge was your hands, and he was sitting at his stall trying to work the laces of his shoes with fingers that wouldn’t close, and failing, and starting to get the hot panic he got when his body wouldn’t do a simple thing, and Theo crouched down in front of him.
Just crouched. Didn’t say anything. Took the lace out of Shane’s clumsy fingers and tied the shoe. Both shoes. Calm, unbothered, checking a tire, while Shane sat frozen and furious and undone above him, and the rest of the room didn’t noticebecause the rest of the room was a hockey team and a teammate tying your shoe was nothing, was funny, was aw, the lovebirds, somebody would’ve said if they’d looked, but nobody looked, and Theo finished the second shoe and stood up to his full ridiculous height and said, in a normal voice, “Your hands are bad in the cold.”
“They’re fine.”
“Eat more. You bonk in the third because you do not eat.” And he walked away to his own stall.
That was the whole of it.
Shane sat there. The room was loud, Wozniak holding court at the far end, Tripp’s music bleeding through one earbud, and Shane sat in the middle of all of it with his shoes tied by the man he was supposed to keep at arm’s length, and the resentment was still there, real, honest, he hadn’t made it up, the indignity of needing and the worse indignity of someone seeing the need and handling it without making it a thing. He hated that. He hated it the way he hated being helped off the ice, hated his mother’s friends bringing casseroles after the diagnosis, charity with a face on it.
Except Theo hadn’t put a face on it.
He’d just crouched down. Done the lace. Walked away.
And the cold arithmetic that had been sitting in Shane’s chest, the this is just the rent, the don’t get tangled, it didn’t disappear. But the weight in it moved. Like he’d been braced for a check that came in low instead of high, and now he was standing in a different way than he’d meant to be standing, and he didn’t know how to get back to where he’d been, and he already knew he was going to act on it. Not now. Maybe not this week. But at some point he was going to do one decent thing for Theo Lindgren because he wanted to, not because the agreement said to, and he was going to do it quietly and walk away, and it was going to cost him, and he was going to let it.
He hadn’t decided to decide that. It was just already decided.
“Don’t,” he told himself, on the bus, forehead against the cold black window, the highway unspooling. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”
Three rows up, Theo was reading in Swedish, and the dome light was on over his seat, and Shane watched the back of his stupid blond head for a while and then made himself stop, and the bus carried both of them home to the one bed and the one couch and the certificate squared to the laminate, and Shane did not sleep well, and it had nothing to do with the cold.
Chapter 5
The rooming list went up in the locker room before every trip. This trip, the list said Lindgren / Novak.
“They put us together,” Shane said, reading over his shoulder, too close, smelling like the cinnamon gum he chewed instead of eating. “Obviously. We’re the roommates. It’d look weird if they didn’t.”
“Yes,” Theo said, and did not say the rest of the thought: the roommate cover story had a cost he had not fully calculated, and the cost was a hotel room, and a hotel room in this league, on a back-to-back, for two bubble guys, was going to have one bed.
It had one bed.
They stood in the doorway and looked at it. Single broad king under its taut hotel coverlet, lit gray by the parking-lot light through the curtain gap. The room was the size these rooms always were: one chair, one desk, one lamp with a shade the color of old teeth. AHL budgets. Theo had understood the math his first season and stopped arguing with it. They paid for two men in a room; this was the room. He set his bag down near the chair and heard, behind him, the door swing shut on its slow hinge with a click that landed as a verdict.
“I’ll call down,” Shane said. “Get a cot. Or a—”
“For what reason,” Theo said. “You call the desk for a cot, and the guy at the desk tells the bellman, and the bellman is a Blaze fan, and by Tuesday, the whole barn knows the roommateswould not share a bed. It is a small league.” He set his bag down. “It is a bed. We are adults. We have both slept in worse.”
“You keep saying that. ‘I’ve slept in worse.’ Where have you slept that’s worse than sharing a bed with a guy you hate?”
“Junior billet houses,” Theo said. “Bus floors. A bench in a train station in Malmö, when I was seventeen and missed a connection. A bed is luxury.” He was already taking off his watch, unhurried, building the wall of routine he built around everything that scared him. “Take whichever side. I sleep on the left at home but I do not care.”
“I’ll take the right.” Shane was doing the loud thing he did when he was nervous, narrating, filling the air. “We build a wall. Pillows. A demilitarized zone. The Theo-Shane Accords. Nobody crosses the line of control.”
