The doors closed.
I pressed my back against the elevator wall and covered my face with both hands and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way they teach you to manage panic, because this was panic, but it was also something else.Something underneath the panic that felt like standing on the edge of a very high place and realizing you were not afraid of the height. You were afraid of the part of you that wanted to jump.
I had kissed Cole Briggs.
I had kissed him on a rooftop in Miami and his mouth was warm and his hand was steady and he called me Mik and I was going to have to live with the knowledge that I now knew what that felt like, which meant I also knew what it felt like to not have it, and the distance between those two things was going to kill me.
My phone buzzed.
Cole: For the record. That was perfect too.
I read the message seven times. Then I put my phone face down on the nightstand next to Saint Nicholas and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that what had happened on the rooftop was a mistake.
The ceiling did not believe me.
Neither did I.
COLE
The flight home from Miami was the longest three hours of my life.
Volkov sat in his usual row, four seats behind me and across the aisle, and he did not look at me once. I know because I checked. Not constantly. Not obsessively. Just once when I got up to use the bathroom, and once when the flight attendant came through with snacks, and once when we hit turbulence and I instinctively turned to see if he was okay, which is a thing I apparently do now.
Three checks. Three times I found him staring at his book or his phone or the seat back in front of him with the focused intensity of a man pretending the rest of the airplane did not exist.
He was pretending I did not exist.
I understood this. I did. On an intellectual level, I understood that Mikhail Volkov had kissed me on a rooftop in Miami and then spent the remaining hours of the night constructing an entirely new wall to replace the one that had cracked, and that the new wall was taller and thicker than the original because he'd built it in a panic. I understood that his brain was doing the thing brains do when you cross a line you've spent your entirelife behind, which is to scream at you until you retreat back to the safe side and pretend the line was never crossed at all.
I understood it. Understanding it didn't make it hurt any less.
We landed in Atlanta and filed off the plane and collected our bags and went to our cars and at no point during any of this did Volkov acknowledge my presence. Not a look. Not a nod. Not even the faint suggestion of eye contact that I'd been collecting like currency for the past three weeks. Nothing.
I sat in my truck in the airport parking garage and stared at the steering wheel.
His mouth had been warm. That was the detail I kept coming back to. Warm and careful and then, for one stunned second, not careful at all. The sound he'd made when I kissed him back, a small, involuntary thing from somewhere in the back of his throat. The weight of his hand on my chest when he pulled away.
I drove home. The Atlanta highways were empty at midnight. My apartment was exactly how I'd left it five days ago, which was moderately messy in a way that felt like personality rather than negligence. I dropped my bag in the hallway and went straight to the fridge and ate leftover Thai food standing at the counter in the dark and thought about nothing productive.
My phone was quiet. No texts from Volkov. No texts about Volkov. The "perfect too" message sat in our thread like a grenade with no pin, and I didn't know whether to text again or wait or set my phone on fire.
I waited.
Day one. Nothing.
Day two. Nothing.
Day three. Nothing.
By the third day I'd gone through all five stages of grief and was firmly settled in a sixth stage that I call "aggressively productive anger," which manifested as cleaning my entireapartment, reorganizing my equipment closet, calling my mom, calling my brother, cooking a meal that involved actual vegetables, and running six miles on the Beltline in weather that was too warm for running.
On the ice, it was worse. Whatever magic we'd found in Carolina and Tampa was gone. Not diminished. Gone. Like someone had flipped a switch and disconnected whatever frequency we'd been operating on. Our passes were off. Our timing was wrong. I'd anticipate Mik going left and he'd go right, or I'd look for him in a spot he should have been and find empty ice instead. We were two players again instead of one unit, and the whole team felt it.
Coach Callahan pulled us aside after a particularly bad practice where Mik and I had botched three breakouts and nearly collided in our own zone.
"What happened?" Coach said. He was not asking rhetorically.
"Nothing, Coach. Just an off day."