Page 48 of Five Hole

“There he is.”

So I move. And it’s warm and slow and stupidly, embarrassingly happy, nothing like a single night that came before it. He laughs at something I say, hands on my hips, then quits laughing because I do a thing on purpose. He puts his palm flat in the middle of my chest, the way I’ve put mine on his all season, and holds it there.

“Look at me,” he says.

“I am looking at you. I’ve been looking at you since the equipment room. Ask anybody.”

He gets his hand around me and I go first, because of course I do, I have never had restraint about anything in my life. He goes right after, saying my name into a room with the light on, and I fold down onto his chest and neither of us moves for a while.

After, we’re a mess and neither of us cares. His hand does a slow thing up and down my back. My ear is over his heart, listening to it come down.

So I say it. Out loud. In the light. With nothing under it and no exit picked.

“I love you.”

It doesn’t cost what I spent a whole season thinking it would cost. That’s the part nobody warns you about. I built a beautiful machine to avoid that exact sentence, a big loud thing with a hundred moving parts, chirps and grins and a scouted way out of every room, and it turns out the sentence weighs about as much as a puck.

He doesn’t say it back. I knew he wouldn’t. That part matters, so I’ll say it plain. I didn’t say it to get it back. I said it because it’s true and because I’m done keeping true things in a drawer where nobody can check them.

What he does is this. He takes my hand off his chest. He turns it over. And he presses it flat against him again, harder, right over the place where his heart is going like a man who just took a rush at him.

Then he holds it there and doesn’t let go.

That’s the answer. Him saying it in the only language he had before I ever got here, and I speak it now. I’ve been fluent for a while.

“Yeah,” I say into his collarbone. “I got it. Loud and clear, you.”

And I lie there on top of a man in a room with the light on and let myself be told.

* * *

The Trough gets loud again after that. It went quiet for a while in the bad stretch, everybody eating with their heads down, waiting for the goalie thing to blow the season up. Now it’s a zoo every night. Girard spends one of his nine words a season to end a hot dog argument and the table detonates. Moose comes through with something for the freshmen to sign. And he hands one of them the wrong pen on purpose, straight-faced, watching the kid work out why it won’t write.

“Moose. That pen’s been dead since I was a freshman,” I say. “Crisse, you want me to get him a crayon? And a helmet? He’s going to be out there all afternoon pressing harder, thinking it’s a him problem. That’s your whole coaching philosophy right there, that.”

“He’ll figure it out,” Moose says, and doesn’t look up.

And it’s the funniest thing anybody’s done all week. Rocco sits at the head of it and lets the noise happen around him, which is the whole of what a captain does at dinner. “Sit down, Fortin,” he says, to nobody, to me, and I don’t. There was a version of me who would’ve told you the net was the only thing worth having. He’d have been lying. He’d have told you anyway.

The scout comes back.

Of course he does. I clock him in the first period, same seat, same notebook, because you never stop clocking them. But he isn’t writing about the room. Scouts don’t grade the room. They grade one man’s tape and one man’s tools, and what’s on Casimir’s tape now is the best hockey of his life.

A notebook cares about that and nothing else.

The scout came for one question, the only one they really ask. Can this goalie make the last save of a final the same way he makes the first save of the season? For a stretch there the tape didn’t answer it, because a man coming apart at the seam gives up soft ones and soft ones live on film forever. Casimir isn’t coming apart anymore. The tools were always in him. Now they’re on the tape too, every shift, and the tape doesn’t lie.

And here’s the sweet, backward joke of it, the one I turn over on the bus rides home with my head against the cold window. All season I told myself the math was zero-sum, that loving him and beating him were the same knife pointed both ways. I had it exactly upside down. Beating him was never what was going to put him on a scout’s page. Being whole was. I gave the net back, gave him the quiet, and he did the rest himself, one save at a time, in the only language a notebook reads.

“He’s going to get his look,” I tell Vinh at the Trough, over the ordinary end-of-night noise. Guys wronging the microwave. Somebody down the table hollering, “Does it count if it hangs off the edge?” at a shuffleboard puck that doesn’t care either way. Across the room Casimir is not-eating, in the place he sits that’s near the room and never in it, except he’s a little more in it than he used to be. Nobody made an event of that either.

“The pro thing,” I say. “He’s going to get it. You feel it coming? Because I feel it coming.”

Vinh peels the label off his water and doesn’t look up. He came up through figure skating, so he reads weight, edges, where a body is going before it goes there, and right now he’s got all of it pointed at me.

“And you’re okay with that.” Not a question. Vinh doesn’t really do questions. He does the thing where he says the answer and lets you catch up to it.

“I’m the reason he’s going to get it,” I say.