Page 140 of Puck You Both

WE DRESS SLOWLY, loose and stupid and warm, trading clothes back across the bench. It's Theo who goes quiet first.

He's standing at the gate with his shoes in his hand, looking down the ice. At the far end, the visiting crease sits in half-dark, blue paint fading to gray where the work lights give up.

I follow his eyes, and the date we've all been tip-toeing around for weeks climbs out of the schedule and onto the ice with us.

Last game of the season. Chicago, here. Their spot is locked. Ours isn't. Win and we're in, lose, and the season is over. Behind us, on a bench, working his feet back into street shoes, a man who will skate out of that far crease in full gear, in this building, and try with everything he has to end our season.

He'll be right to.

We've known all year. It sat on the calendar like any other home date, right up until tonight made this ice ours.

Theo exhales at the far net and sums it up on a single exhale. "Well, fuck."

Chapter 28

WALL

ON MONDAY MORNING, our text thread develops a constitution.

Theo: HOUSE RULES, GAME WEEK EDITION. no scouting reports over pillow talk. no tape talk at dinner. no psychological operations of ANY kind. this is a CLEAN household

Theo: violators sleep in the chair

I read it twice, put the phone down, and go about my morning. By noon I've almost violated it once.

It happens on its own. I'm reviewing Milwaukee's power play for work, which is allowed, and then the clip rolls into Patrick fighting off a screened point shot, and his glove is a hair late coming out of the butterfly, and my thumbs are already in the thread typing out the fix.

Three sentences in, I surface, realize what I'm doing, and hold the delete key until the whole confession is gone.

Noticing him is older than wanting him, and now the noticing has nowhere legal to go until Saturday, when it gets aimed straight at his net with his season on the line.

Tuesday, Patrick strikes first. No warning, no context, into the thread at ten in the morning:

P.G.: :tomato_emoji:

That's his whole operation.

I stare at the tomato through one full cup of coffee. It does a lot of heavy lifting. It's a joke about my hair. A comment on my playoff readiness. An olive branch. A declaration of hostilities. It's whatever I decide it is, and knowing him, the ambiguity is the point.

I send back a chair gif.

Theo: I'm reporting this entire thread to the league

Theo, for his part, declares neutrality on Wednesday and starts selling intelligence to both sides within the hour. The market rate is snacks. For a bag of gummy worms he informs me, in a hallway whisper over video call, that Patrick has been watching my short-side tape all week. That evening, for pretzels, he apparently tells Patrick something about my crease depth that has never once been true. His information is garbage in both directions. Business is booming anyway.

Underneath it all, all week, there's the other thing, and it doesn't have an emotional outlet.

Saturday, my job is to end their season.

Not just beat them. End them. Milwaukee needs the points and we don't, and there's no version of Saturday where all three people in this thread get what they want. I keep waiting to feel torn about it and finding something worse instead. I'm not torn. I'm going to try to win with everything I have, and that was always going to be the case. What that says about me keeps me up exactly one night before Patrick says it out loud on the phone so I wouldn't have to.

"If you let in a soft one for us," he says, "I'll never forgive you."

"I wasn't going to."

"I know. Goodnight, Wallace."

***