I looked at him. His face was in profile, lit by the glow of the skyline. He was not smiling. The absence of his smile was more notable than anyone else's absence of anything.
"The bisexuality thing," he continued. "I told my parents. My mom was great. She cried and hugged me and said she loved me no matter what. Textbook perfect. My dad just... left the room. And he's been leaving the room ever since. Not physically. He still shows up. Christmas, birthdays, whatever. But the talking stopped. The real talking. The hockey conversations, the calls after games, the stuff that made us us. Gone."
"I'm sorry," I said, and I meant it with a weight that the English phrase could not fully carry. In Russian there are different words for different kinds of sorrow. There is a sorrow that is sympathetic and a sorrow that is shared, and what I felt for Cole Briggs was the second kind. A sorrow I recognized because I had lived inside it.
"It's fine," he said, in the way that people say "it's fine" when it is the exact opposite of fine. "I just think about it sometimes. How you can do the right thing and still lose something. Like, I don't regret coming out. Not even a little. But I miss my dad. I miss who we were before he knew."
"You did not change. He did."
"I know. That doesn't make it easier."
"No. It doesn't."
He turned to me. His eyes were wet but he was not crying. He was just present. Fully, terrifyingly present, with noperformance and no defense and no smile to hide behind. This was Cole Briggs without the armor, and he was devastating.
"You don't have to be alone, you know," he said. "On the road trips. In the hallways. In general. You don't have to do everything by yourself."
"I am used to it."
"Being used to something isn't the same as wanting it."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
The distance between us was approximately two feet. Two lounge chairs on a rooftop in Miami with the Atlantic behind us and the skyline in front of us and no one else in the world except us. Two feet. It had been shrinking for weeks, through drills and film sessions and hallway conversations and a hotel bed and a wrist grip and a text message that said "perfect," and now it was two feet and I was out of retreat.
I did not plan what happened next. I want that to be clear. I did not think about it. I did not weigh the consequences or calculate the risk or run it through the analytical framework that governed every other decision in my life. For the first time in eleven years, I acted without thinking.
I leaned forward and I kissed him.
His mouth was warm. He tasted like whiskey and surprise, and for one suspended second he didn't move at all, and I thought I had made the worst mistake of my life. Then his hand came up and cupped the back of my neck and he kissed me back, and the world went very quiet.
It lasted maybe five seconds. Maybe ten. I lost the ability to measure time, which for me is like losing the ability to breathe. His lips were soft and his hand on my neck was steady and warm and he kissed the way he played hockey, with instinct and generosity and a total commitment that left nothing in reserve.
I pulled back first. The distance returned. Two feet. My heart was slamming against my ribs with a force that should have been audible.
"I should not have done that."
"Don't." His voice was rough. His hand was still on the back of my neck. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
"I wasn't going to apologize. I was going to say I should not have done it here. Where someone could see."
"There's no one here, Mik."
My name. Not Volkov. Mik. The shortened version that only Katya used, the intimate version, and hearing it in his voice with his hand still on my skin was too much. The locked room in my chest was shaking. The door was rattling on its hinges.
I stood up. He stood up. We were close. Closer than two feet now. I could feel his breath.
"I need to go," I said.
"Mik."
"Please."
He dropped his hand. I saw the cost of it on his face. The effort it took to let go when every line of his body was leaning toward me. He stepped back and gave me the space I was asking for, even though we both knew the space was the wrong thing to ask for.
"Goodnight, Volkov," he said quietly.
I walked to the elevator. I pressed the button. I waited. The doors opened and I stepped inside and turned around, and he was still standing at the edge of the rooftop, silhouetted against the Miami skyline, watching me go.