Page 12 of Power Play
“Fine.”
“I’m serious. I starfish. I’ve been told I starfish.”
“By whom.”
Shane opened his mouth, shut it. “People,” he said, and Theo filed that, the flinch, Shane’s loudness and the trapdoor under it, and did not pull on it.
They built the wall. Two pillows down the center of the king, a soft Maginot Line, and they lay down on their backs on either side of it with the lights off. Theo on the left, Shane on the right, eleven inches between them and the breadth of a cold war. Two enormous tired men holding themselves rigid and straight, arms at their sides, the geometry of not-touching. Theo kept his right shoulder pinned, as he had for two days now, the joint unhappy and patient, the kind of patient that was really just waiting. The radiator ticked. The parking lot hummed. Neither of them slept.
“You awake?” Shane whispered, after a while.
“No.”
“Liar.” A rustle of sheets. “I can’t sleep in new places. Never could. On the road I just lie here. Vibrate. My mom used to driveme to away tournaments when I was a kid and I’d be up all night in the motel just staring at the ceiling, and she’d be exhausted, she had two jobs, and she’d still get up and sit on the edge of my bed and just — talk. About nothing. Till I went under.” His voice was different in the dark, the volume drained out of it, younger. “Weird thing to remember.”
Theo lay still on his side of the wall and considered the dark. He was not a man who traded confidences; confidences were currency, and he kept his accounts closed. But it was late, and the room was strange, and there was a wall of pillows between them that put them outside of real, in that register where the things you said wouldn’t count in the morning.
“My mother sang,” he said. “Not well. She is a terrible singer, it is famous in our family. But she would sing in the kitchen, very loud, very bad, and it meant everything was — fine. Safe. When she stopped singing, I learned to be afraid.” He stopped, surprised at himself, at the door he’d just cracked. “There were years she did not sing. After my father got — when he got sick. The not-singing years. I learned to make myself useful in those years. Small. Quiet. A boy who did not add to anyone’s trouble.” He shut the door again, firmly. “Anyway. You should sleep. We have a game.”
“Theo.”
“Mm.”
“Why’d you really do it. The marriage thing.” The pillow wall shifted; Shane had turned toward it, toward Theo, a dim bulk in the dark. “And don’t say the visa. I know the visa. I mean, you could’ve found somebody else. Some girl from back in Sweden, some — anybody. You picked the guy who screams at you on the bench. Why.”
Theo was quiet for a long time.
“Because you would never love me,” Theo said, finally, into the dark. He stopped. He had not known that was the answeruntil it was already out of his mouth, sitting there between them, and he hadn’t meant to say it. “That was the reason.” He could feel a larger shape around it, a weight he had no word for yet, about safety, about the cost of it. He let it go. “I chose you because you were safe.”
The radiator ticked. Somewhere down the hall a door closed.
“Huh,” Shane said, very softly, and didn’t say anything else, and Theo lay awake listening to his breathing not even out, both of them very much not asleep on either side of a wall of pillows that had stopped, somewhere in the last few minutes, from being protection and become the only thing holding the line.
* * *
Theo knew the exact moment the shoulder was going to go: a half-second of warning, the air before lightning.
He’d played the second of the back-to-back on a body that had nothing left, the team running on fumes, and he’d blocked two shots in the third on legs that didn’t want to and the shoulder had taken a cross-check in the corner that he’d absorbed wrong, just slightly wrong, and ever since he’d been managing it, keeping the arm close, sleeping (trying to sleep) with it pinned carefully to his side. And then he turned over. In his sleep, or near it, the old animal turn toward the warm side of the bed, and the joint, tired and angry and a decade past trustworthy, slid.
Not all the way out. It had only fully dislocated three times in his life, and each one was a memory he kept in a locked room. This was the lesser horror, the partial, the subluxation, the shoulder leaving its home a centimeter, and the centimeter being enough that Theo’s body locked around a white bolt of pain and he made a sound he would have died before making if he’d been awake enough to stop it.
The light came on.
“Theo. Theo. Hey—” Shane was up, the pillow wall scattered, his hands already there, and here was what Theo would think about for weeks: Shane did not ask what was wrong. Shane, who narrated everything, who needed every situation explained to him twice, took one look at Theo’s right arm and went silent and certain, and his hands found the shoulder, and he said, low and fast, “Okay. Okay. It’s the shoulder. Don’t pull on it, don’t — here, can you let it hang? Let the arm hang, let me—” and he was easing Theo to sit on the edge of the bed, getting Theo’s forearm cradled across his own knee so the weight came off, doing exactly the right thing, what a trainer would do, gentle traction and patience, and Theo breathed through his teeth and the joint, after a long terrible moment, slid its grudging centimeter home.
“There,” Shane said, low. “There it goes. Okay. Okay. Breathe. You’re okay.”
Theo sat hunched on the edge of a hotel bed at three in the morning with his enemy’s hands on the most secret broken part of him and his face an inch from his enemy’s bare shoulder, and he was shaking, fine tremors, shock and adrenaline, and Shane did not move his hands away. Shane held the shoulder, both palms warm and certain over the old scar, and waited, and breathed slow on purpose, giving Theo a rhythm to match, and the radiator ticked, and neither of them said a word for a long time.
“How long,” Shane finally said. Quiet. No volume in it at all. “How long has it been this bad.”
“It is not bad.”
“Theo.”
“It is — managed. Juniors. The surgery was when I was eighteen. It comes out if I brace wrong. I know how to live with it.” Theo made himself sit up, made himself find the flat voice. “It is nothing. It is not in the injury report and it will not be inthe injury report. You understand? Pete does not know how bad. No one knows how bad. If the org knows my shoulder cannot be trusted, I do not get the call, I do not get a contract, I do not stay. It stays in this room.”
He braced for Shane to use it. That was the reflex; that was the math Theo ran on everyone, always: what will they do with the part of me that’s weak. The answer was always use it, because a weakness was currency you surrendered and someone else got to spend.
