Page 24 of The Lies We Play

The door opens before I can attempt a fifth pass.

I don’t turn my head, but I hear his footsteps cross the tarpaper.

I know his footsteps now.

That is not something I am prepared to discuss with myself.

“You’re early,” he says.

“I’m comparatively early.”

“Comparatively.” His voice carries the shape of a smile.

“It’s a defensible position.”

He moves into my peripheral vision and sits in his chair. Beer on the parapet. Book on his thigh. He doesn’t open it.

I am also not reading. I am maintaining the posture of someone reading while my entire peripheral attention is on the man six feet to my left.

“How was your day?” he asks.

“Long. Chemistry exam on a Friday.” I groan. “My professor has decided we should all be punished for choosing chemistry.”

“That sounds fair.”

“Yours?”

“Long. Training for the away games. My coach has decided we should all be punished for choosing hockey.”

“Also fair,” I remark.

He almost smiles.

It is unfair when he does that. The almost-smile. The corner of his mouth moves before he stops it, as if joy has to get permission from someone in management. There is still a boyishness to him when he’s tired, when his hair falls over his forehead, and he forgets to arrange his face into the version people expect from a professional athlete. Then he shifts, and the rest of him returns. Broad shoulders. Strong hands. That physical ease that looks casual until I remember it is probably built from years of drills, ice, and men slamming into him on purpose.

I watch the way he sets the beer down. The way his fingers wrap around the bottle. The line of his forearm when he stretches it along the arm of the chair. The way his hair, too long at the front for someone who spends so much of his life in a helmet, falls forward when he leans.

I’ve cataloged these things the way I catalog brushwork in a Caravaggio. With patience. With the quiet attention of a person trying to decide whether the thing in front of her is what she thinks it is.

It is.

A couple of weeks.

That is all it has taken for my brain to become deeply embarrassing.

Of course, I have to ask, “What’s away games?”

He turns his head.

I lift a hand before he can answer. “Listen, I am catching up with the hockey thing. I now know defenseman is not, in fact, a person who defends hockey as a concept.”

He scoffs. “That’s progress.”

“Thank you. I’m academically gifted.”

“Away games are games we play in another team’s arena,” he says. “We travel for them. Sometimes one city, sometimes a few in a row.”

“So you leave.”