Page 295 of The Lies We Play

“I will be close,” he says.

He opens the door for me, checks the room before I step inside, then moves aside.

The room is small. Too warm. It smells like a man who has been sweating in protective gear, taking it off, putting some of it back on, and doing that for ten years. There is a couch along one wall. A TV mounted in the corner, volume low, two analysts talking about a game I have not been able to care about in any useful way. A bench with a folded towel on it. A pair of skates on the floor in front of the bench, blades guarded, leaning against each other.

Then I see him.

Creed.

He is already wearing most of his gear, skates included, which means he is taller than I expect, even though my body seems to know exactly how tall he is. We are the same height without them. With the skates, he looks bigger. Not just taller. Built into the room. Shoulders wide beneath the pads, hair damp at the temples, tape job on one hand, half done.

He looks up.

For a second, neither of us moves.

He smiles lightly. “Hal.”

“Creed.” I bob my head.

He looks like he wants to step toward me.

He doesn’t.

That hurts more than it should, because I know why. He is afraid of hitting a boundary I can't remember making. Afraid of touching a man who might flinch. Afraid of needing something from me, I may not be able to give him back.

So I cross the room.

His expression changes before I reach him.

Relief.

Pain.

Then he opens his arms.

I walk into them.

I close my eyes and press my face into the side of his neck.

For one breath, the world narrows to the heat of him, the hard edge of his gear, the impossible fact that I know this feeling without knowing the memory that made it mine. I breathe him in. Sweat. Tape. Soap from the trainers’ room. Beneath all of it, Creed—warm skin, hard breath, the scent my body seems to remember before my mind knows what to do with it.

There is, in the back of my mind, the faintest pull of something I can't reach. A shape almost arriving. A door almost opening. A picture trying to come clear through fogged glass.

His neck under my mouth.

His arm around me in another room.

My hand in his hair.

My name spoken against my skin.

Then it slips.

Gone before I can catch it.

I stay against him for another beat anyway, because the closest I get most days, and I have learned to take what the almost gives me.

His arms close more firmly around me.