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“Because that isn’t the sound.”
“It is recording the sound.”
“It’s recording nineteen thousand people through one microphone. You can’t hear the bench. You can’t hear skates cut when the crowd drops for half a second. You can’t feel the glass move.”
He says it without selling the game to me. He is describing something he knows from the inside, to a woman who has only ever seen it through a screen, and he does not suggest that I should come and find out.
I want to go. Cold coming off the ice. The boards under the noise. A faceoff starting before I know which part of it matters, and Colt somewhere in the middle of it talking while everyone around him already speaks the language.
The list arrives much too easily.
I close the clip before the wanting becomes visible.
“Measurement.”
“Coward.”
“Wall.”
He laughs and stands.
The reach stops below last week’s mark.
Colt looks at my hand beside the wall and tries to take the arm higher.
“That is enough.”
“Give me a second.”
“I have the measurement.”
He holds my gaze for one beat, then lowers the arm.
No argument. No extra attempt after I turn away.
Every box on that sheet is filled. He did exactly what I asked, every day, and the number went backward anyway.
Fuck.
I write it down, because writing it down is the only part of this I can still do properly.
“That good?”
“No.”
“Appreciate the optimism.”
“You asked.”
“I did. Bad habit.”
The rest of the assessment is shorter, because there is no benefit in asking a man’s body the same question six ways. During the controlled rotation I keep one hand over the front of his shoulder and ask for one clean set.
His skin is warm under my palm. The muscle changes texture before the movement reaches his hand, tightening under my thumb, and I am aware of the exact moment when what I am doing stops being measurement and becomes something I am letting myself have.
Guerra passes the open doorway wearing a navy tie covered in small white sailboats.
He has worn variations of that tie for the three years I have worked beside him and I have never decided whether it is a joke I am not in on.
