"Then what's the plan, Volkov?"
"The plan is that we are professional athletes and adults, and this is a bed large enough for four people, and we will sleep on our respective sides and it will not be an issue."
The words came out steady and reasonable. They were the words of a man who had the situation under control. I was not that man. I was a man who had spent two weeks cataloging the freckles on Cole Briggs's nose and deleting the evidence, and now I was going to lie next to him in the dark and somehow maintain the structural integrity of a persona I had spent eleven years building.
"Cool," Cole said. "I call left side."
"Fine."
"And I should warn you, I'm told I'm a restless sleeper."
"I am not surprised."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You are restless in all things. Why would sleep be different?"
He looked at me for a beat longer than was necessary, and I saw him decide not to pursue whatever thought had crossed his mind. "Fair point. Bathroom's mine first. I take long showers."
"Also not surprised."
"You're very judgmental for a man who gets up at four-thirty in the morning voluntarily."
He disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the shower turn on. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and had a conversation with myself that went approximately like this:
This is nothing. You have shared rooms before. In the KHL, we shared rooms on every road trip. Dmitri Kosolov snored like a freight train and Sasha Petrov talked in his sleep about his mother's borscht. This is no different. This is a bed. He is a teammate. You will sleep. Nothing will happen because nothing can happen because you are Mikhail Volkov and you do not let things happen.
The shower stopped. The bathroom door opened. Cole walked out in athletic shorts and no shirt, toweling his hair, and every word of the speech I had just given myself caught fire and burned to ash.
He was. I don't know how to say this in a way that captures it accurately. He was built the way hockey players are built, broad through the shoulders, thick through the core, with the kind of functional muscle that comes from years of skating and hitting and pushing your body past what it thinks it can do. There was a bruise on his left side from the Tampa game, already yellowing at the edges, and a small scar on his collarbone that I had never noticed before.
I looked away. Opened my book. The Brothers Karamazov. I had been reading the same page for three days.
"You ever get tired of that book?" he said, pulling back the covers on his side.
"No."
"What's it about?"
"Brothers. Faith. The question of whether a moral society can exist without God."
"Light reading."
"I find it comforting."
"You find a book about existential crisis comforting?"
"It is honest about suffering. I prefer honesty to comfort."
He climbed into bed and arranged his pillows, which involved removing most of the decorative ones and building a small wall between us. I did not know if the wall was for my benefit or his, and I did not ask.
"That's the most you've ever told me about yourself," he said.
"I told you about my sister."
"That was about your sister. The Dostoevsky thing is about you."
He was right, and the precision of the observation unsettled me. Most people did not listen closely enough to make that distinction. Cole Briggs listened like it mattered.