Page 74

The footsteps come very slowly toward the closet. They stop outside the door.

"Captain," Gus says through the door. "You in there?"

Owen looks at me. I look at him. His face is bright red.

"Yeah," he says. "Getting tape."

"Need any help finding it?"

"No."

"It's on the left. Second shelf. Where it's always been for twenty years."

"Thanks, Gus."

"Rookie in there with you?"

I take my hands off my mouth. "He's helping me find laces."

There's a long pause.

"Laces are on the right," Gus says. "Take your time, boys."

The footsteps go away, just as slow. Owen leans his forehead against the shelf of spare laces and closes his eyes.

"He knows," he says.

"He's known since the night on the ice. He gave you the keys, Owen. He wore unplugged headphones."

"That doesn't mean he knows."

"He said boys," I say. "Gus doesn't say boys. He says kid and Captain. He said boys on purpose."

Owen opens one eye and looks at me.

"You can't be here," he says. "It's a closet."

"I know," I say. "Believe me. I know it's a closet."

It's the second week of December, and we've been doing this for a month.

We're good at it now. Nobody tells you this about hiding: you get good at it. You learn all the little tricks. You learn to leave the rink five minutes apart. You learn to take separate cars, and to park on different levels of his building's garage, and to take the stairs up two floors before you get on the elevator, so the doorman thinks you're visiting somebody on nineteen. You learn to delete texts. You learn to say my roommate instead of his name when your mom asks who you're having dinner with.

You learn to stop jumping on him after goals.

I don't even decide to do it. It just happens. We play Boston at home, and I score on a two-on-one, and I turn around, and he's coming toward me with his arms open, and I just—don't. I tap his glove. I tap Sorel's glove. I skate to the bench.

He looks at me funny on the bench. He doesn't say anything.

After that I stop doing the slide, too.

I don't know when I decided that one. Maybe it was the night in Brandt's video room that Owen told me about. Maybe it was the reporter asking about private lessons. Maybe it was the graphic Nadia taped to the door, our two faces side by side with GRUMPY AND SUNSHINE under them, and somebody in the comments writing lmao they're def fucking, with thousands of likes, and Sorel reading it out loud in the locker room as a joke and everybody laughing, including Owen, whose laugh sounded like somebody else's.

I just figure: if I'm quieter, there's less to look at.

The near-miss with Sorel is in Columbus.

It's one-thirty in the morning, and Owen's in my bed, because rule five says in here I'm in charge, and I've decided that in hotel rooms, in here means my bed. He's asleep on his stomach with his arm across me, the way he always ends up, like I'm going to roll off the edge of the world if he doesn't hold on.