Page 38 of The Reckless Rookie

The old ritual was two lives and one parking lot between them: strip the ranch off in the truck cab, drive south into the version of me a city pays to watch. Two men, one seam.

Now there’s a third man riding along, and he’s the happiest of the three, and he’s the one nobody in either place is allowed to meet.

I check my phone in the lot with the dome light off. There’s a text from her. Nothing anybody couldn’t read, east gate’s rehung, don’t let Jason tell you he did it, and I sit there in a gas station parking lot grinning at my own knuckles like a man who took a puck to the head. Eleven days of this. Twelve. I’ve stopped counting the way she counts, but I feel each one land.

Then I put the phone face-down in the console, and I drive the rest of the way into a life where she doesn’t exist, because she can’t, because the second she exists in it we both lose everything.

The rink knows something’s different before I do.

Not about her. God, not about her. Just that the kid who came back from suspension skating through wet sand is gone, and somebody who works pre-dawn ranch shifts only on the days the county schedule allows is playing the best hockey of his life.

“You’re moving good,” Ryan says at a stoppage, not looking at me, watching the far boards. “Better than good.”

“Ranch cardio.”

“That what we’re calling it.”

I don’t answer that. Ryan misses nothing, and I’ve started keeping a careful distance from the edges of his attention, because a man who notices everything is exactly the wrong man to have noticing me right now.

We’re pushing for a seed. Six games left in the regular season and the whole building’s done deciding about me. The boos went first, then the held breath, and now when I win a puck off the wall there’s a noise that’s glad, uncomplicated, the sound of a city taking a guy back. It should feel like everything. Two months ago it would have.

It feels like the fourth-most important thing in my life, and I can’t tell a soul why.

Mack corners me at my stall after, tape roll in hand, halfway through a story I didn’t ask for.

“You’re different,” he says, pointing a roll of tape at me like evidence. “Colt. Doesn’t he seem different?”

Colt looks up from his skate. Takes his time. “Calmer.”

“Calmer! That’s it. You used to vibrate. Now you’re all…” Mack does a thing with his hands that’s supposed to be serenity and looks like a man settling a soufflé. “What happened out there on the funny farm? You find God? You find a woman?”

The room keeps moving. Nobody’s listening. It’s a nothing question, the kind you bat away without thinking.

“Found a fence post,” I say. “Real spiritual.”

They laugh and it moves on. I lace my other skate with my face doing nothing and file the cold fact that I lied to two guys who kept me when the rest of the league didn’t.

The stolen hours are small and they’re the best thing I’ve ever had, which tells you something about the size of the rest of my life.

It’s ordinary, and ordinary gets under my ribs faster than anything dramatic could.

I want it. I don’t mean the coffee.

Take last Tuesday.

The paperwork’s done, the coffee’s cold, and she’s up on the counter in a dress.

That’s the first thing, and it stops me in the doorway. She doesn’t wear dresses. She wears the day: jeans gone pale at the knee, a shirt that’s carried a horse’s whole opinion. Tonight there’s a dress, something soft the color of a good dusk, and heels still on, which she never does in the house, and she put all of it on in an empty kitchen knowing I was the only soul who’d see it, and she’ll go to her grave before she admits she dressed up for a man. I clock it and I don’t say it, because saying it lets her take it back, and I’d rather have it.

“What?” she says, because she caught me catching it.

“Nothing.” I cross and stand between her knees, and she hooks a heel behind my leg and doesn’t let me go, and the kitchen changes over.

The second she hooks her heel behind my leg, restraint goes thin.

What I’m learning about slow: you don’t learn it, you get a half-second better at catching yourself. Eleven days of having her and my hands still go for her like the building’s on fire, like somebody’s about to blow a whistle, and I’ve got a fistful of that soft dress and my mouth already at her throat before her voice, living in my own head now, finally lands. Despacio.

So I make myself stop. Pull back. Set my hands flat on the counter on either side of her hips like a man cuffing himself to the furniture, and breathe, and try to do what she keeps showing me.