"Ornery."
"That's seven."
"Then I don't care."
Jonah filled in the answer without me and I looked out the window at the clouds. Below us, the Southeast was a quilt of green and brown, and somewhere down there, people were living lives that didn't revolve around puck possession and defensive zone starts. Must be nice.
"You've been weird lately," Jonah said without looking up from his puzzle.
"I'm always weird."
"Weirder than usual. You've been quiet. You, Cole Briggs, have been quiet. Do you understand how alarming that is? The last time you were quiet was when you had food poisoning in Buffalo and you were literally unable to speak."
"I'm fine. Just focused."
"On what?"
"Hockey."
"Liar."
I didn't respond because he was right and we both knew it. I had been weird. I'd been distracted in a way I couldn't fully explain, or more accurately, in a way I could explain but didn't want to. Because the explanation involved a Russian defenseman who read Dostoevsky on the team bus and made jokes about moths and had grey eyes with flecks of something lighter in them that I kept trying to identify from across the locker room like some kind of unhinged birdwatcher.
It had been two weeks since Coach paired us. Two weeks of daily drills and film sessions and the occasional conversation that lasted longer than either of us planned. Two weeks of Volkov being quietly, infuriatingly interesting in a way that contradicted everything I'd assumed about him.
He wasn't cold. He was careful. There's a difference, and I was only just starting to understand it. Cold people don't make jokes about vodka. Cold people don't stay late in the film room to help a rookie understand defensive positioning. Cold people don't nod at you across the locker room with the faintest suggestion of acknowledgment, as if to say I see you, which shouldn't have meant anything but somehow meant everything.
"Earth to Briggs." Jonah was staring at me. "You just zoned out for a full minute. Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"You were looking at Volkov."
My head snapped toward him. "I was looking out the window."
"The window is to your left. You were looking right. Volkov is three rows back and to the right." Jonah's expression was annoyingly neutral. "I'm just saying."
"You're saying nothing. There's nothing to say."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"Okay." He went back to his crossword and I went back to the window, and the conversation died the way conversations die when both people know the truth is sitting between them and neither wants to pick it up.
We landed in Nashville and bused to the hotel. I loved Nashville. The music, the food, the energy. It was a city that understood the concept of a good time, and normally I'd be first in line for a team dinner on Broadway. But that night, after webeat the Predators 3-1 in a game where Volkov and I combined for a plus-three, something else happened.
The team went out. I went out with them. We hit a bar on Broadway with live music and overpriced beer, and it was loud and fun and exactly what a road win should feel like. Jonah was doing karaoke with two of the rookies, which was a war crime against music but great for team bonding. Wes Chen was sitting in a corner booth looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, which was his default setting. Everyone was accounted for except one person.
Volkov hadn't come.
This was not surprising. Volkov never came to team outings. He was probably in his room reading or studying film or doing whatever deeply solitary thing he did to fill the hours that normal people filled with human connection. It shouldn't have bothered me. It wasn't my business.
I stayed at the bar for an hour. Had two beers. Sang backup on Jonah's deeply criminal rendition of "Friends in Low Places." And then, for reasons I didn't fully interrogate, I said goodnight and walked back to the hotel.
The hallway on our floor was quiet. That particular hotel quiet where you can hear the ice machine humming from thirty yards away. I was heading to my room, keycard in hand, when I saw him.
Volkov was standing at the ice machine in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants, filling a bucket. His hair was damp, like he'd just showered, and it fell across his forehead in a way that made him look younger. Less guarded. The scar through his eyebrow was more visible without the game-day intensity framing his face, and for a second he just looked like a guy. A regular guy getting ice in a hotel hallway, and not the six-foot-three fortress of Russian stoicism that I'd been building him into in my head.