Page 36 of Five Hole

The room reads it wrong. Of course they do. How would they read it right? They see the hot kid pull up on the hurt senior and they file it under mercy, under toying, the guy who already won the argument being gracious about it. You tap a downed skater’s pads on your way past. That. A couple of the young ones grin at me like I did him a favor, like I was showing off my restraint. And it makes me want to skate into the boards.

Casimir reads it worst of all.

I catch his face after, the drill where I had him dead to rights and didn’t shoot. He comes up out of his crouch and finds me across the ice, and for one second the not-blank blank of him is gone and there’s a whole man in there instead. He doesn’t look grateful. He looks like I slapped him. The deciding is the cruelest cut I could have chosen, because the deciding means I could have. It means every night he stands in that net now, he stands in it knowing the kid who owns his soft spot is choosing, shift by shift, whether to be kind. A wall you can be spared from isn’t a wall. It’s a thing you keep by permission. I made his net a thing he holds because I let him.

I want to skate over there and grab him by the front of the jersey, right in the middle of practice. I want to say I’m not toying with you, you beautiful stubborn idiot. I want to say I’m in love with you, that I’ve been in love with you since the film room, since the tape rolled and I watched you reset after a goal like there was nobody on this earth standing behind you. That’s the night I stopped being able to grade it. I want to say I’d sooner cut my own hand off at the wrist than shoot the gap I know is there. I want to say pulling up wasn’t mercy, it was the only love I know how to show, in a language that doesn’t have any words in it.

I don’t say a single one of those things. Crisse, we could not-say it in our sleep, and most nights that’s exactly what we do, one wall apart. We have a whole language of chirp and needle and the flat two-word verdict, and not one word of it can carry the only thing I need to say.

* * *

He knocks that night.

Two fingers. Once. My own knock, the thing I lifted off his shelf and handed back to him, coming through my door in the dark like a word in a language exactly two people on this earth speak.

I’m off the bed before I decide to be off the bed. You want the tell? That’s the tell. Write it down, use it against me later, get in line behind everybody else who’s tried.

He’s out in the hall in a gray T-shirt with his hands loose at his sides. He doesn’t say anything, because opening with a word is a thing this man has never learned how to do.

“One door,” I say. “You walked one entire door. You want a water? A towel? Should I get the boys in here for a little ovation?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what.”

“Don’t be funny at me. Not tonight.”

And my mouth quits on me. Ask the whole roster. That has happened in my life exactly never.

I follow him the one door back down the hall into his room, which is the room of a man who irons his own weather. Books upright. Lamp squared to the corner of the desk. A bed made so tight you could bounce a quarter off it and then file a complaint about the acoustics. I have made fun of this room at volume, in daylight, in front of witnesses. Tonight I stand in the middle of it and none of it is funny. It looks like a house somebody built by hand out of nothing so the wind couldn’t get in.

He shuts the door and stands with his back against it. And here’s the part nobody in that barn would ever believe.

I have him. I know every seam this man has got. I know the horn undoes him. I know that if I put my mouth under his jaw and say his first name into the skin there, the whole ordered life comes off him like a coat on a warm day. It’s the best work I’ve ever done, that file, every page of it right there behind my eyes. I could spend one line of it tonight and have him.

I don’t open it. I have never opened it. Standing in a man’s room with my hands empty is the only honest thing I own, so that’s what I bring in with me.

“Casimir,” I say. Just the name. Nothing loaded on it. Nothing under it.

He comes off the door.

He kisses me the way he does everything, which is all at once after a long time deciding. His hands come up into my hair and hold on. Mine go under his shirt and find all that heat he keeps stored under two layers and a bad attitude, and he makes a sound against my mouth, low, half a word in a language I don’t speak. My knees do a thing I would deny under oath.

I pull back an inch. It costs me.

“Hey. Look at me. Say it out loud, because I’m not doing this if it’s a thing you have to take back in the morning.”

“I want this.” There’s no flat in it anywhere. “I want you. Say yes to me.”

“Yes. Ostie, yes. Yes in both languages I’ve got.”

He kills the lamp. He always kills the lamp. There was one room on the wrong side of a closed mountain where he didn’t, and that’s the only time I’ve seen this man’s face while he comes apart. I’ve stopped asking for it since, because you don’t ask a guy to hand over the last thing he’s still holding.

We get the shirts off somewhere between the door and the bed and that’s the most organized this night is going to be. He puts me down on the quarter-bouncing bed and follows me into it, and I get my hands on the whole broad cold-weather back of him and pull, because pulling is the only move I’ve ever owned. His mouth goes down my throat. Teeth in the muscle over my shoulder, hard enough to leave a thing I’ll have to explain to a trainer, and I want the thing to explain.

“You know what your problem is,” I tell the dark over his shoulder. “No bedside manner. None. Zero. You come at a guy like you’re killing a penalty.”

“Emile.”