Page 102 of Puck You Both

The bed takes my weight and the post-game aches arrive, the whole night's work settling into my hips and my wrists. I pull up my father’s contact and I press call before any speech can start assembling, because if I give myself time to draft one, I'll still be up here at dawn, editing.

He answers on the first ring. "That last save took five years off my life."

His kitchen radio is going in the background. I press my free hand into the mattress.

Hockey, offered one more time, and I take it, because I am brave in increments. "You say that after every game."

"Because you have taken seventy years already. I should be dead."

"You sound healthy to me."

"Out of spite. It’s very sustaining."

I laugh, and it loosens my chest a little.

"Big win," he adds. "You needed it."

"We're above the line now, barely, but still. Thursday could give us room—"

"Patryk."

I drag my calm along the comforter. "What?"

"You called. Usually after a win you send me a thumb."

I chuckle. "I send words."

"Last month you sent 'good.' It was a holiday."

Beyond the door, Theo laughs at something. Wall's answer runs too low to catch. I could still bail out of this. Ask about his knee. Ask whether he changed the tires. I stare at the strip of light under the door. “Tato…”

“Yes?”

My next swallow is painful in my constricted throat. “Do you remember… Remember how you said I sounded lighter?”

"I remember."

“Well… There's a reason."

"Oh?"

One word, and then he leaves the space open. My grip tightens on the phone. "I'm seeing someone."

There. Three words, and my pulse takes off like I'm facing a penalty shot. The plan, if I can even call it that, goes: someone, then a man, then survive whatever his next breath sounds like. Step one, deployed. Step two, loading.

"The red one, or the loud one?"

Everything stops then.

I hear the words fine. Individually they're simple words. Assembled, they refuse to mean anything, because the question is impossible. My mind actually goes looking for women. A redhead. Someone loud. It scrambles through years of introductions and comes back holding nothing, because there is nothing to hold.

He skipped it. The confession I've been building toward for half my life, the a man, the terrible pause, the listening to his breathing for a verdict — my father just stepped over the entire staged production and asked me which of the two men, in the tone he uses to talk about car tires.

He knows.

He's known long enough to narrow the field, apparently. Long enough to pick out descriptions.

I sit on the edge of my own bed, motionless, stripped to nothing by one question, and underneath the exposure, arriving like water after a long game, is this: he knows I'm seeing a man, and his voice hasn't changed.