And fear, I thought, was the beginning of something. Because you can only be afraid of losing a thing that you have already, secretly, decided you want.
MIK
Iread his text forty-three times.
I know the exact number because I am the kind of person who counts things, and because each reading was a separate act of self-destruction that I committed voluntarily and with full knowledge that it was making everything worse.
I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen. But I'll wait until you're ready to stop pretending too.
Forty-three times. On the bus to practice. In the film room before the lights went down. In bed at 2 AM with Saint Nicholas watching from the nightstand like a silent, judgmental witness to my unraveling.
The pretending was not going well.
I had tried. For five days I had tried to reconstruct the architecture of my former life. The routine. The discipline. The clean, efficient loneliness that had served me for eleven years. Wake at 4:47. Coffee, black. Weights. Film. Practice. Home. Single plate, single fork. Dostoevsky. Sleep. Repeat.
The routine was intact. The man performing it was not.
I kept reaching for my phone. Not to text him. Just to look at the thread. To see his name on my screen. To reread the word"perfect" and the phrase "perfect too" and feel the ghost of his mouth against mine, which had taken up permanent residence in my nervous system like a virus I could not cure and was not certain I wanted to.
On the ice, I was a disaster. Not by anyone else's standards, perhaps. I was still playing my minutes, still killing penalties, still doing the job. But by my standards, I was failing. My gap control was a half-step slow. My breakout passes were landing flat. The instinctive connection with Cole that had made us extraordinary was gone, and its absence was a hole in the middle of every shift.
Coach had noticed. The team had noticed. Wes Chen had brought me a Gatorade after a bad period and said nothing, which was his version of concern, and I appreciated the Gatorade and the silence in equal measure.
On the fifth night, I called Katya.
It was morning in Moscow. I could hear traffic in the background and the particular sound of Katya walking quickly, which she always did, because my sister moved through the world like she was late for something more interesting than wherever she currently was.
"Misha." She sounded pleased. She always sounded pleased to hear from me, which was one of the great unearned gifts of my life. "How is America?"
"America is fine."
"You sound terrible."
"I sound normal."
"You sound like you sound when you are trying to sound normal, which is how I know something is wrong. What happened?"
I closed my eyes. The apartment was dark around me. I was sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets,which was not a normal place to make a phone call, but the floor felt solid and I needed solid things.
"I kissed someone," I said.
Silence. Then, very quietly: "Oh, Misha."
"It was a mistake."
"Was it?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you sitting on the floor? You only sit on the floor when the world has shifted and you're trying to find your balance. You did it when Papa left. You did it when you got drafted. You're doing it now."
I did not ask how she knew I was on the floor. Katya knew things. She had always known things. She was the only person in my life who had ever looked at the fortress I built and seen it not as a strength but as a symptom.
"Tell me about him," she said.
So I did. Not everything. But enough. The pairing. The drills. The film room. Nashville. Carolina. The texts. Miami. The rooftop and the skyline and the way his hand felt on the back of my neck, warm and steady, like something I could rest against.
Katya listened without interrupting, which was unusual for her. When I finished, the silence stretched for a long time.