I tightened my arm around him and pressed my mouth to the top of his head and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would fix the fear underneath his words. That was old fear. Bone-deep fear. The kind that didn't respond to reassurance because it had been installed by someone who was supposed to love him and didn't.
So I just held him. And he let me. And outside, the Atlanta night was warm and full of sounds that had nothing to do with us, and for a little while longer, the secret held.
But I could feel it straining. Like a seam under pressure, thread by thread. Invisible to anyone who wasn't looking.
I was looking.
MIK
Wes Chen found me in the film room on a Tuesday afternoon.
This was unusual. Wes did not seek people out. He existed in the spaces between conversations, large and silent and radiating the particular energy of a man who would prefer to communicate exclusively through acts of controlled violence. We had an understanding, Wes and I. We occupied the same frequency of solitude. We nodded at each other. We did not talk.
So when he appeared in the doorway and stood there for a full ten seconds before speaking, I knew something was wrong.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
He came in and sat down two seats away, which was close for Wes. He stared at the blank projector screen for a moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on the words before letting them out.
"How do you deal with it? Being the outsider."
I considered the question. "You are going to have to be more specific."
"The team. The guys. They're good guys. I'm not saying they're not. But I look around the room and nobody looks likeme. Nobody has my last name. Nobody's mom packed the same lunch I grew up eating." He flexed his hands on his knees. The knuckles were swollen and bruised. They were always swollen and bruised. "I'm the fighter. That's my role. The Asian kid who hits. Like that's all I am."
I understood this more than he knew. The reduction of a person to a single function. The way a team could value you for what you did and remain entirely uninterested in who you were.
"You are more than that," I said.
"Easy to say."
"It is not easy to say. It is simply true." I paused. "When I came to this league, I was the Russian. The stoic one. The one who does not smile. They did not see me, and I did not help them see me, because invisibility felt safer than exposure."
Wes looked at me. Actually looked. "Did that change?"
"It is changing."
"How?"
I thought about Cole. About the way he had knocked on my door, literal and metaphorical, until I opened it. About the terrifying, liberating act of letting one person see the real thing.
"I found someone who looked past the function and saw the person," I said. "It is possible that you will find this too. But you may have to let them look."
Wes was quiet for a long time. Then he nodded once, stood up, and walked out without another word. At the door he stopped.
"Thanks, Volkov."
"You are welcome, Chen."
He left. I sat in the empty film room and thought about the conversation and about the strange, recursive nature of advice. I had told Wes to let people see him. To stop hiding behind the role. And the hypocrisy of this was not lost on me, because I was hiding behind a role of my own, a bigger and more fortifiedrole, and the only person I had let see past it was currently at his apartment in Virginia-Highland probably eating cereal for dinner because Cole Briggs believed that Frosted Flakes constituted a meal.
That evening I went to Cole's apartment after practice. This was a Thursday, which had become one of our nights, though we did not call them that because naming the routine felt like admitting it was a relationship, and the word "relationship" was one I had not yet spoken aloud.
He opened the door and he was, as predicted, holding a bowl of cereal.
"Don't," he said, seeing my face.