Page 11 of In the Crease

The bar after dinner had duct tape on the booth vinyl and the settled ease of a place the team had claimed long enough that it had stopped noticing. Ryan went to the end of the bar where he could see the full room. I clocked it and went to find Griffin.

He pulled me into a corner booth immediately.

“Real version. How are you?”

The goalie eyes. The ones that had been reading me since I was little. I’d given him fragments over the phone—the friendship that went sideways in October, the professor who’d made me feel small in front of forty people, the general mud-walking of the fall. I’d kept the real edges back because he was several states away and I didn’t want to be the thing he worried about from a distance.

“Better,” I said. “Really better. Not because you’re watching.”

He studied me the way he studied everything and then nodded once. “Good.”

“That’s it?”

“You’re not performing anything. So yeah, that’s it.” He knocked his shoulder against mine. “I’m glad you came.”

“Me too.” I meant it all the way through. “Even with the temperature.”

I looked at my brother in the low light—the easy certainty of him in a place he’d built. The watchfulness he carried everywhere was down for the night. I’d been missing this version of him for months.

“You get used to it,” he replied.

“I feel like that’s impossible.” I looked at my drink for a moment. “I’m proud of you,” I said. “What you’ve built here.”

He blinked. “For what.”

“This.” I gestured at the room. “It’s real.”

His face went quiet and warm, the way it did when he felt more than he was going to say. He tapped the back of my hand with his knuckle—the Callahan shorthand for everything that didn’t fit into words. “So did you,” he said quietly. “Down in Tempe.”

Across the bar, Ryan had taken his jacket off and rolled his sleeves, and I was looking at the opposite wall with great concentration.

“Your roommate,” I said.

Griffin’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “What about him.”

“Nothing. He’s quieter than I expected.”

“He talked to you for forty minutes in the truck. You guys were chatting when I got home.”

“He answered every question I asked. He just didn’t volunteer anything extra.”

Griffin was quiet for a moment. He turned his beer in his hands. “He’s my best friend.”

“I know.”

“He’s the first person I’ve ever played with who makes me want to be better without making me feel like I’m not enough. You know what I mean?”

I understood exactly what he meant.

“Most guys like that, the good ones, the real ones, they’re either trying to prove something, or they don’t notice you at all. Ryan just…” He shook his head. “He sees the whole ice. Every time. On it and off it.”

“That’s a good person to have in your corner.”

“Yeah.” He looked across the bar. “It is.”

He held my gaze for a beat and then stood. “Another round.”

I watched him cross to the bar and land next to Ryan. Something was said. Ryan looked my way. Griffin shook his head and laughed.