Page 41 of Power Play

“Your mother,” Theo said, not a question.

“My mother,” Shane confirmed, looking at the screen and grinning. “She found the Swedish broadcast feed online somehow. She’s sending me — okay, she’s sending me a recipe, and a picture of your mom’s cat, your mom sent her a cat, when did your mom get a cat, and now she’s asking if you’ve eaten.” He showed Theo the screen, the cascade of messages from Marion, the heart emojis, the cat. “She texts me more than she texts you, this is insane, you have one job as her son—”

“She knows I will not answer,” Theo said, serene. His own phone had been buzzing in his pocket for an hour. He had not looked at it. He would look at it in the morning, as he always did, and there would be eleven messages from his mother and nine from Marion and a group chat the two of them had started that Theo had been added to without consent and could not figure out how to mute and did not, if he was honest, want to. “It is a system. They text you. You answer. The information reaches me. I never have to touch the phone. I have built an efficient arrangement.”

“You built a system to never answer your phone.”

“I built a system to be loved by two mothers without having to use a phone. It is genius. I am a genius.”

Down the bar, the situation between the two captains was deteriorating in the way that wasn’t deteriorating at all. Nate Koskinen had said a flat few words in his Finnish-accented English, and Carter James had laughed, a sharp unkind laugh, the kind you used as a weapon, and answered in a way that made the big Finn’s jaw tighten, and now they were arguing in low fast voices across the single empty stool, both of them leaningin, neither of them leaving, the empty stool between them less a barrier with every exchange.

“He thinks he’s funny,” Carter James was saying, to the bartender, to the room, to nobody, gesturing at Koskinen without looking at him. “Captain of Finland. They gave the C to a guy who communicates in grunts. It’s a beautiful country, terrible decision—”

“You talk,” Koskinen said, “so that you do not have to feel anything. It is a strategy. It is a bad one.” He said it without heat, which made it land harder, and Carter James’s mouth opened and shut, and for one second the loud American captain had nothing to say, which Theo suspected did not happen often, and the silence between them was so charged it had a temperature.

“I hate him,” Carter announced, to the bartender, cheerful, final. “On the record. For the tournament. Pure hatred.”

“On the record,” Koskinen agreed, deadpan, and signaled for another drink he would nurse and not finish, two stools that had become one stool, and neither of them moved, and the hatred sat between them radiating, and Theo and Shane watched like people who already knew the ending.

“It’s so loud,” Shane murmured, delighted. “The hate. It’s so loud. Were we that loud?”

“Louder,” Theo said. “You screamed at me about a third goal for fifty-five minutes once. Marek timed it.” He sipped his prop beer. “They have no idea. None. Look at them. They think it is hatred. They think it is the tournament.” He shook his head. “It is not a question of whether. Only of which one of them says it first. And the loud one always says it first.” He glanced at Shane, dry. “I have data.”

Shane laughed, the real one, head back, the laugh Theo had spent a whole season learning to cause on purpose, and the sound of it cut clean across the bar, and for a second even the two captains two stools apart glanced over, the Finn and theAmerican, at the loud dark-haired man laughing in the corner booth and the enormous fair one watching him like he’d hung the moon, and recognition flickered across both their faces, or longing, or the first cold dawning suspicion of what they’d each spend their own long way around refusing to name, and then they both looked away fast, back to their drinks, back to their hatred, back to the empty stool that wasn’t empty anymore.

Theo barely noticed them. He was watching his husband laugh.

He thought about a lot of things, in that moment, the inventory he could never quite stop taking. He thought about a billet house and a beige courthouse and a phone he wouldn’t answer. He thought about the seam in his shoulder and the seam in the boards and all the things a body learns to live with. He thought about two hundred and twenty thousand dollars and a paid-off Volvo and a certificate squared to a laminate counter ninety miles from the show. He thought about the version of himself that had come over at twenty, certain he was only ever going to be useful, only ever the means to someone else’s end, never chosen, only needed, and he thought about how wrong that boy had been, how completely wrong, and how nobody could have told him, how he’d had to find out the long way, as everybody does.

Shane was still laughing about the cat. Outside the window the European city was dark and strange and not home, and Sweden wanted Theo back for two weeks, and after that there was a flight to Chicago and an apartment in Rockford and two mothers and a managed shoulder and a green card in a drawer and a whole life he had built by accident out of a transaction, and Theo Lindgren, who had been so sure he would be sent home, looked at the man he’d married and thought, in the language he only used for the truest things:

I get to keep this.

And he did.