Page 18 of Five Hole

Or he kisses me. I will never be able to say which. I have tried, lying awake. Tried to find the line in it where I decided. There is no line. The horror lives exactly there. So does the other thing. The thing I do not have a word for that is not a lie. My body did the thing my body has never been allowed to do.

His hand comes up and fists in the front of my shirt and pulls. Instead of pushing. He pulls. He pulls me flush against him. His whole body a hot line down mine. I let him. I open my mouth over his and I stop counting anything at all. His lips part under mine. His breath goes ragged into me. I get a hand into his hair and hold. The other spreads flat between his shoulder blades and drags him closer. There is no closer. I want closer anyway.

His tongue slides against mine. Slow, then not slow. He tastes like tea and the cold of the barn. I make a sound into his mouth. A sound I have never let another person hear. He answers it. He presses in until the bench catches the back of his knees. My teeth find his bottom lip and he shudders, the whole of him, top to bottom, one long shudder against me. His hips push into mine. Hard against hard through two layers of denim, and neither of us pulls back from it, and he says something into my mouth that is not a chirp and not a joke. It has my first name still in it.

I pull back. It costs me. Every part of me leans after him when I do it. We are both breathing like the end of a shift. Hard. Through the mouth. His mouth is parted and gone red. His eyes are all pupil. His hand is still knotted in my shirt. Holding on. Like if he lets go the room will take it back.

“Okay,” he says, and his voice has nothing left in it. “Okay. That was.” He does not finish it. He cannot. For once in his talking life. The boy has run out of the end of a sentence.

I do not help him. There is no word in the order for this. I have broken the one rule the whole order exists to keep. Which is that nothing gets in. It got in. It is standing in the equipment room with its hand in my shirt. Looking at me. Like I finally reached up and handed over the net.

I leave. This time I am the one who leaves. I make my feet do it. One and then the next. Out the door and up the tunnel. And I do not look back. Because if I look back I will not go.

The wall of the day has a hole in it the exact size of him.

Chapter 9

Emile

So this is getting what you want. Nobody warns you it comes with a bill, and nobody warns you the bill comes due about a breath after, while your hand is still knotted in the guy’s shirt and your whole body is still ringing like a crossbar somebody just put a slapshot off of.

He kissed me. Casimir Wrobel kissed me. The wall, the monk, the saint who arranges his day into rows, he crossed a room he’s spent a year keeping people out of and put his mouth on mine.

Or I kissed him. Who moved first? I genuinely can’t tell you, which never happens to me. Knowing who moved first is basically my whole personality. I’ve made a career out of reading which way a body is going before the body knows, and the one time it counts, the one time I’d give a finger to have the tape, there’s no tape. There’s just his mouth and my hand and the flat gray light.

I keep going back to it all night. I run it and run it. How he crossed the room slow and sure. How he didn’t stop coming. The exact moment his stone came off. I couldn’t find that moment then. I can’t find it now, no matter how slow I run the thing back. And the sound. I keep landing on the sound. He made a sound with my first name still in it, and I’ve got a whole drawer full of Casimir Wrobel, not one thing in it prepared for that sound. So I lie there in the dark with the thin wall at my back and I want to knock on it. Just to hear him not answer.

And what does my idiot brain do with the best thing that’s ever happened to it?

It starts doing math.

Because two things are true at the same time now, and they won’t fit in the same room, and I have to live in the room. One. I’m getting starts, real ones, and the only way through that door is to be better than the guy on the other side of it, who is the guy who just kissed me like the building was on fire. Two. I want to kiss him again more than I want to walk through the door. How does that fit inside one guy?

You can’t have the net and the man. I did that math weeks ago, lying awake, and it came out ugly, and it hasn’t gotten one bit prettier for the kiss.

There’s one net, one crease, one job, one name at the top of the list, and I’ve wanted that name to be mine since I stood at the end of a bench in full gear watching a building come off its feet for somebody else. That want is the oldest thing I own. It got me out of a town two hours from anywhere and it’s the reason my mother worked the shifts she worked. You don’t get to set a want like that down because a guy kissed you in the equipment room.

Then there’s Casimir, who is the name at the top of the list, who I have to climb over to get it, who says my first name like it’s the only word he trusts. You can’t climb over a man you’d lie down in traffic for. Tabarnak, how does a guy carry both of those into the barn every morning and act like a person?

So obviously, being me, I decide I’ll have both.

That’s the plan. All of it. It’s a terrible plan, and I know it’s a terrible plan. You know the ice is thin. You skate out on it anyway. And I’m going to run it. Because the puck went out there. The puck is always out there. That has been the entire problem with me since I was small enough to fit inside the equipment bag.

I catch him the next morning before anyone else is in the barn. I get there in the dark, before even the rink kid with the mop, which I didn’t think was geometrically possible, and he’s already there. Because of course he is. The man beat me to the dark. First idiot in has always had exactly one competition and its name is Casimir Wrobel. He’s at the shelf. Glove, blocker, the two fingers on the corner, the whole quiet chapel of him. I stand in the doorway and watch him not-look at me the way only he can not-look at a person, a not-looking so total it’s the loudest thing in the room.

The equipment room has its usual cold in it, the one bad fluorescent ticking overhead and washing the color out of everything under it. It doesn’t wash out of him. He looks like the only warm-blooded thing in a walk-in cooler, moving through the sequence with his back half to me, each piece going down square to the next with a small click of foam on wood. I’ve watched him do this a hundred mornings. I watched it as a scout. I watched it as a menace. I’ve never watched it the morning after his mouth was on my throat, and it turns out that changes the whole thing. Now every square piece looks like a sentence in a language he taught me by accident. I stand in the door and read it, and my chest does something I’ve got no chirp for.

So I say the dumbest, truest thing I’ve got.

“I’m still taking your net.”

His hands don’t stop moving. “I know.”

“On the ice. Fair. I’m not going to stop coming for it just because you.” I make a gesture. The gesture covers a lot of ground. It covers a shirt and a mouth and a first name. “So if that’s a problem, if last night was a one-time short-circuit and now we go back to me being a menace and you being a monk, then tell me, okay? I’ll live. I’ve lived through worse. I’ve been the second guy my whole life. And there’s probably a trophy for it somewhere in my mother’s basement, second place, engraved wrong. I know how to want a thing and not get it and still show up in the morning.”

Now his hands stop. He turns around. And there it is, the window, up high where I found it, except this time he doesn’t slam the blind down over it. He lets me stand there and watch him decide something. It costs him. I can watch it cost him, same as I watched the lights stutter and cost him, the whole weight of a man leaning against a thing that leans back.

“Off the ice,” he says. Slow. Careful. Like he’s laying brick, like he’s building a small room he can survive inside of. “Off the ice is a separate thing. It stays off the ice. It does not touch the net. It does not touch the room. It does not touch the order. Two things that don’t know about each other.”