A longer pause this time. Thirty seconds. A minute. I watched those three dots appear and disappear and appear again, and I could picture him on the other side of the wall or the flooror wherever his room was, choosing his words with the same care he used to choose his positioning on the ice. Every word deliberate. Nothing wasted.
Don't push your luck.
I laughed out loud in my empty hotel room. Then I typed back:
Too late. I'm a luck pusher. It's basically my whole personality.
Another pause. Shorter this time.
Yes. I have noticed this about you.
Was that an insult or an observation?
In Russian, these are often the same thing.
I was grinning. Lying on a hotel bed in Tampa, Florida, grinning at my phone because a man who communicated primarily through silences and hockey was texting me back with something that approximated warmth, and it felt like the best conversation I'd had in months.
I should've stopped there. Said goodnight. Put the phone down. But I didn't, because I am exactly the kind of person who pushes his luck.
Seriously though. That goal was beautiful.
The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. I held my breath, which was ridiculous, because it was a text message, not a bomb.
Thank you for the pass. It was... perfect.
I stared at the word "perfect" for a very long time. There was something about seeing it in Mik's voice, in the careful syntax of a man who chose every word like he was spending currency he couldn't afford to waste. He didn't say "great" or "nice" or any of the throwaway compliments that athletes exchange like loose change. He said perfect. And the ellipsis before it suggested he'd considered other words and rejected them in favor of this one.
Perfect.
I typed six different responses and deleted all of them. Too casual. Too serious. Too much. Not enough. I finally settled on:
See you tomorrow, Volkov.
Goodnight, Briggs.
I put the phone on the nightstand and turned off the lights and lay there in the dark.
The ceiling in Tampa looked exactly like the ceiling in Charlotte, which looked exactly like the ceiling in Nashville, which was the ceiling I'd stared at after the hallway conversation about his sister. Hotel ceilings are all the same. Flat, white, blank. Good for projecting thoughts onto when your brain won't shut off.
Here is what my brain was doing:
It was replaying the wrist grab. The two or three seconds of contact. The way his grip felt through the glove, firm but not forceful, like he was anchoring himself to something. Like I was the fixed point and he was the one in danger of drifting.
It was replaying the text. The ellipsis. The word "perfect."
It was doing math. The kind of math I'd been refusing to do for weeks, where you add up all the small moments and see what they total. The almost-smiles. The hallway in Nashville. The sister. The shared bed. The wrist. The text. Each one individually meant nothing. Together, they meant everything.
I knew what this was. I'd been here before, with other people, in other cities. The gravitational pull toward someone specific. The way one person starts to take up more space in your thoughts than they should, until thinking about them isn't a choice anymore but a condition.
The difference was that those other times, the person on the receiving end was available. Open. Possible.
Mikhail Volkov was none of those things. He was closeted and terrified and Russian and my teammate, and any one ofthose things alone would have been reason enough to stop. All four together should have been a concrete wall.
But my wrist was still warm where he'd held it, and the word "perfect" was glowing on my phone three feet away, and concrete walls, it turns out, are not as solid as advertised.
I fell asleep thinking about his hand on my arm. About the way he'd held on for one beat longer than necessary, which in the language of Mikhail Volkov was the equivalent of a love letter.
A grip. An ellipsis. A word.