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He put me on the bed and took his time, his mouth tracking slow down my body while his hand worked between my legs, two fingers pushing into me and his thumb circling my clit until my hips were lifting into it on their own. He told me what I was in that low voice against my skin, beautiful, mine, look at you, there she is, and I was careful even then, I kept the sound down out of a lifetime of habit and because Iris was asleep in the house, and he pressed his thumb against my bottom lip and I closed my mouth around it and let him have the quiet.

There was nothing between us now. There hadn’t been since Christmas night, when we’d talked it through as two adults deciding a real thing, and neither of us reached for anything, and it still undid me every single time, the plainness of it and the trust folded into it. It told a woman who was building a barrier out of a teaching job and a blazer, in that very bed, that we don’t need one.

He moved over me, braced over me on his forearms, and I set my heels at the base of his spine and pushed my hands into his hair, and when he pushed into me slow and stopped with his hips against mine to let me have the second he always gave me, I did what I’d started doing in February and couldn’t stop doing. I memorized it. I memorized the weight of him, the beard against my jaw, the low sound he made in his chest when he held still for my sake, his hand finding my hair and spreading there, certain. I banked it. I lay under the best thing that had ever happened to me and catalogued it, packing as I went, because I’d been packing this house since January, and here was the last room, and I was wrapping it in newspaper even while it was still happening to me.

“Where’d you go?” he said, against my ear, moving. He always knew. “Come back here.”

“I’m here.”

“No, you’re not.” His hand fisted in my hair, tipped my head back, put my eyes on his. “Birthday girl. Right here.”

“I’m here,” I said again, and this time I made it true for as long as he was over me, because he could do that. He could pull me up out of my own head and pin me to the actual minute. So I let him. He moved in me slow and deep and in no hurry at all, his eyes holding mine until I couldn’t keep them open, and the pressure wound up slow and low and spread out through my hips until it tipped. I came around him with my face turned into his neck and his name in my mouth muffled so small only he could have heard it, the clench of it pulling long and slow, every bit of me gathered in tight to the one place our bodies met. He pushed deep and stayed and followed me there, his forehead down on my shoulder, his breath breaking against my skin, his hand spread in my hair, keeping my head together from the outside. I memorized that too.

Afterward he didn’t leave right away, which he hadn’t done before, and the staying was what nearly finished me. He lay in my small bed in the casita with the lamp on and my head on his chest, and his heart went slow under my ear, and he said, “Good birthday?” and I said, “The best one,” and meant it all the way down, and there it was, the problem, that the best birthday of my life was happening inside the one thing I’d decided to leave.

He went back to his own hall near two, because his door had to stand open two inches with the hall light on for Iris, and he had rules that outranked any bed.

I lay there in the warm dent of him and didn’t sleep. I got up at four, as I always did now, and turned the lamp to the wall, and I didn’t write. I sat with the laptop dark and looked at the wall I wrote against. His room was on the far side of the house, down his own hall, and I’d never minded the distance until that morning.

Then I opened my phone, because I was a coward with a calendar, and there it was where I’d left it, the little gray block I hadn’t told him about and wasn’t going to.

Wed. 9:45 a.m. Interview — Lorraine, Vista Verde USD. Bring portfolio. Wear the blazer.

It was coming up fast. I’d drive forty minutes past the edge of the city in the one blazer I owned, back toward the exact room I’d spent years leaving, while the man across the house chased a season into May and set my coffee out every night and had no idea, none, that the woman in his casita had an appointment to keep.

I turned the phone face down. I turned the lamp off, and sat in the dark in the one room that was still entirely mine, on the morning after the best birthday of my life, and let the date sit there on the calendar between us, buried in the yard of a house I didn’t own.

CHAPTER 33

Eli

I had never in my life cared about the eleventh of April, and now I couldn’t leave it alone.

It was the last day of the regular season. Eighty-two games ended there, and for most of the years I’d played, the eleventh was only the door I walked through into either a summer or a second season, and I found out which one in the last week. This year it had gone to the final weekend. We’d been climbing since February, since the week they’d made me sit with a brace on my knee and nothing to do about it, and I’d thrown everything I had at it from the day I got back, with a point to prove and no good reason I could name, which was the only motivation that had ever worked on me.

So the eleventh wasn’t a door to a summer. It was a date in the middle of a run. The season ran past it now, into a playoff round, into May if we were good, and every man in our room wanted it to run as long as it could.

I wanted it too. I couldn’t put it down. I was the only one in my house rooting for the calendar to get longer.

I’d spent four years making sure my daughter’s world had no end date on it. It was the real job, the one under the hockey. I moved a two-year-old across a border alone and I promised the small version of her, silently, over and over, nothing was ever going to pack up and drive off on her again, and I’d spent every day since making the promise true in ways she’d never see and I’d never mention. No no-trade clause in the league could protect a child from the people who walked out. I knew that better than most men. I’d married myself to a city with a pen so my daughter would never have to learn the word moving the hard way, and I’d done it gladly, and I’d thought I’d closed every door a person could walk out of.

I hadn’t checked the casita. The casita was the one door I’d left a woman the key to on purpose, because I wanted her to have a room that locked, and I’d never once thought about which way a door that locked could also open.

Delaney had started counting to the eleventh around the time the standings turned our way. I didn’t have proof. I had how quiet she got when the broadcast said playoff push, the half-second too long she stood looking at the schedule magnet on the fridge, how she’d started saying when the season’s over as if it were a stop she was riding toward and not a date with no number on it. I told myself she was planning hours. I was good at telling myself what I wanted. I’d had years of practice telling my daughter the freezer was thunder, and some of that practice turned inward whether I wanted it to or not.

We clinched on a Sunday in Nashville with me on the ice for the last two minutes, which Calloway did on purpose, because he wasn’t a sentimental man and it was the most sentimental move he ever made on me.

We were up one with the goalie pulled against us, six skaters coming, and he put my pair out to close a game that would send us to the playoffs or not, with a lot of people’s season in it. It was the job nobody wrote about. I didn’t score. I almost never did. I stood in the lane their best passer wanted and made him look elsewhere, and I dropped and ate a shot high on the shoulder that would have caught me in the face if I’d been slower, and I got a stick on a puck at the side of the net with a second and a half left and chipped it into the corner where it couldn’t hurt us, and the horn went. There was no highlight of any of it. Calloway knew there wouldn’t be, and he sent me out anyway, because he figured a man should get to clinch a playoff spot doing the invisible work he’d given his career to, with one person in the rink who understood it was everything.

The horn went and the bench emptied and Kasperi got to me first and tried to climb me. The phone was going before I had my skates off.

Cole: We’re in. We’re in!! I’m not crying you’re crying

Kasperi: You’re crying. I’m beside you. I can see it

Cole: New business. Round one home ice. Motion to make the building so loud Griffin can’t hear his own glove

Theo: On a encore du travail. Mais oui — ce soir on sourit.