Page 104

Two secrets in one drawer. His and mine.

I get the ice bag out of the freezer. I sit down in the armchair by the window, where I can see him asleep on the couch, and I put my foot up on the coffee table and press the ice to my knee, and I sit there in the dark with the Christmas lights still blinking over the window, in April, because he never let me take them down.

It's three in the morning before the ice turns to water. He doesn't wake up. He doesn't see.

That used to be what I wanted.

Chapter Twenty-Two

RÉMY

The playoffs are a different sport.

Nobody tells you that. Or they tell you, and you nod, and you don't believe them until you're in it. Everything's faster. Everything hurts more. Every shift feels like the last forty seconds of a tied game, even in the first period. Guys who've been polite to you all season will put their stick in your ribs in a scrum and then look at the ref like they don't know how it got there.

We beat Minnesota in the first round in six games. I score four goals. Owen scores two, both of them ugly, both of them from right in front of the net where he's been planting himself all season like a fence post.

Now it's the second round, against Denver. It's tied three games to three. Game seven's tomorrow night, in Denver.

That's where it happens with Kowal.

It's late in the hotel. Not the same hotel as October, a different one, with a lobby full of fake plants and an elevator that smells like somebody's cologne. Owen and I are coming back from the team meal, walking a little too close together down the hall, because it's late and it's quiet and nobody's around.

He stops outside our door. He reaches out and fixes my collar, which is folded under on one side, the way it always is, because I never look in the mirror before I leave.

His fingers stay on my neck a second longer than they need to.

Behind us, the elevator dings.

We both freeze. Owen's hand drops. I turn around.

It's Kowal. He's standing in the elevator in a team tracksuit, holding a plastic bag of ice from the machine on the lobby floor. The doors are open. He's looking at us.

He doesn't say anything. He just looks. At me, at Owen, at the space between us where Owen's hand just was.

The elevator doors start to close. Kowal puts his arm out and stops them. He steps out into the hall.

"Cap," he says.

"Kowal," Owen says. His voice is completely normal. I don't know how he does it.

Kowal walks past us, toward his own room at the end of the hall. He doesn't look back. He opens his door with his key card and goes inside, and the door clicks shut behind him.

Owen doesn't move.

"He saw," I say.

"He saw me fix your collar."

"He saw you fix my collar and not take your hand off."

Owen closes his eyes. He opens the door to our room and goes in, and I follow him, and he sits down on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands.

"It's Kowal," he says. "He came in with Brandt that night. With the tutu."

"I know."

"If he tells Brandt⁠—"