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“I hate the house rules.”

“You love the house rules.”

I had the sweater up and off her and my mouth on her neck, and there was nothing between us now. There hadn’t been since the decision we’d made on Christmas night and never reopened, and I had her out of the rest of it and up off her feet with her legs around me and her back on my door, and that was where she started telling me, in a whisper, in bureaucratic order, everything she’d been keeping in her mouth since August.

“One.” Her forehead was down against mine and her voice had gone to almost nothing. “I looked you up the first night and closed the tab because the math scared me.”

“I know you did.” I held her there, both of us still, giving her the floor, as I’d given it to her for the contract and the book and everything else that ever came out of her sideways. “Two.”

“Two, I started getting up at four to write in August and it wasn’t because of the book.” Her breath caught when I pushed in, slow, the first of me taking the rest of the list apart in her mouth. “Three. Oh. Three, I moved every glass in your kitchen in September and told myself it was for Iris.”

“It wasn’t for Iris.” I held still, the first beat, same as always, because she needed it and so did I. “Keep going.”

“I can’t,” she said. “You took the numbers out of my head.”

“Then give me the last one.” I pressed my mouth under her ear, where only she could have it. “The one you’ve been sitting on since August.”

“The last one is that I love you.” She said it into my jaw in the same flat clerk’s whisper she’d used for one through three, a line item, and then it cracked clean down the middle. “I’ve been running the math on a way out of it for months and there isn’t one. There’s no way out of you.”

“There isn’t one.” I carried her to the bed without coming out of her and set her down and came over her, and I started to move, slow, because fast was for another night and this was the one I’d waited out the series for. “You’re not getting out of it. I built a thing a team can’t trade so I’d never have to go anywhere, and now you’re in the sentence with me. Say my name.”

She said it, low and gone.

“Again.” I had her under me and the quiet house around us, and every time she started to climb up past careful I slowed until she caught herself, which she hated, which was the point. “Iris is right down the hall. Quiet-loud. The one that’s only mine.”

“I hate the house rules,” she breathed, which out of her mouth meant the opposite.

“I know exactly what you mean.” I changed the angle and she clenched around me and the sound that came out of her had no words left in it at all. “There it is. That’s the one nobody in that building ever gets. That’s mine.”

I took her up to it like that, slow and deep and not letting up, until everything in her pulled tight at once, her heels crossed at the base of my spine and her nails set into the back of my neck, and when it took her it didn’t break fast, it rolled through her in long hard pulls that gripped me and wouldn’t quit, and she turned her open mouth into my shoulder to keep the sound off the hall and said my name into the skin there, again and again, muffled and sure, and I held her through all of it and gave her nowhere to go.

I wasn’t far behind. She pulled me in with both hands and her legs and the wrung-out want of her, and I went over buried as deep as she’d take me, with her name in my mouth, and she held my face to her throat and kept it there, which was the only place I’d asked to be put down since August.

The morning was coming up gray through the blinds, and the off-season sat out in front of us for the first time, no plane, no plan, no date out past the end of anybody’s eyesight, and I brought my mouth to her ear and made her say it one more time.

“Partner,” she said, against my shoulder, with her hand in my hair.

Then I kept her there. Nobody had warned me about the after. I laid a hand flat on her back. Her breath went long. For the first time since August, the weight of her wasn’t braced to leave. Since August I’d run this house and said the one true thing only to my daughter, a dragon, and the dark, and since September I’d set a cup out every night without expecting anybody to answer it. I’d stopped believing I’d get to hear the woman who was loud for everybody go quiet-loud for me, on purpose, with every wall she’d built down. She said the word into my shoulder with nobody to say it for but me and no part of her left on duty, and I held her down through the quiet after and didn’t move her, because it was the only aftercare a man like me had. I stayed. I kept her weight. I let her land.

She stayed.

CHAPTER 36

Delaney

I came to the arena on cleanout day to help Iris empty a locker that belonged to a dragon.

Gerald had a stall, and nobody was exaggerating for effect. Around the middle of March, after a run of games Kasperi had decided Gerald was responsible for, the team had given the dragon an actual stall at the end of the row by the equipment room, a real one, with a nameplate, GERALD, in white tape and black marker, same as every rookie got, and a hook he kept a spare paper crown on. Kasperi took it more seriously than anyone. He was twenty-two and Finnish and had never in his life understood why any question wasn’t askable, and he’d told me with grave sincerity that a locker room needed a mascot with “no fear and no contract,” and that Gerald met both criteria, and I had laughed so hard I had to sit down on the bench in the family room. I only ever seemed to laugh that loud and that helplessly in that building.

So on cleanout day, while grown men who’d lost a seven-game series packed a season of their lives into cardboard, Iris and I cleaned out Gerald’s stall. We did it properly. We took down the crown and folded the spare one. We found a granola bar wrapper, a hair clip I’d been missing since January, a drawing of the team as whales, and a single dried-out orange slice that had, Iris informed me, “been there on purpose.”

“For emergencies,” she said.

“A dragon’s got to plan ahead,” I agreed, and wrapped the orange slice in a napkin and threw it away when she wasn’t watching, because some emergencies deserved a quiet retirement.

The room was different in May.

I’d only ever seen it full and loud, with a sold-out building overhead and the players stepping off the ice carrying all of it. On cleanout day it was half-lit and gutted, the stalls going bare one by one, every man’s season going into boxes that the equipment staff would ship wherever he spent his summer. Somebody had a speaker going low. Nobody had much to say. Nobody in a room built around winning knew what to do with May, so they packed, quietly, and left.