"I said nothing."
"Your eyebrow said it. Your eyebrow is very judgmental."
"My eyebrow is concerned about your nutrition."
"Frosted Flakes have vitamins. It says so on the box."
"The box is lying to you."
He grinned and stepped aside and I walked into the apartment that had become, without either of us formally acknowledging it, a second home. My jacket went on the hook by the door. The hook had not existed a month ago. Cole had installed it after the third time I draped my jacket over a chair, because he understood that I needed a place for things and had made one without being asked.
We ate dinner. Real dinner. I cooked. Chicken and rice and roasted vegetables, because someone had to feed this man actual food or he would perish of scurvy by January. Cole sat at the counter and talked while I cooked, which had become our rhythm. He talked. I cooked. The words and the food filled the apartment with warmth, and it struck me, not for the first time, that this was the opposite of my own apartment with its single plates and its permanent silence.
After dinner we moved to the couch. A game was on. Carolina at Boston. We watched with half-attention, the way people watch sports when the sport is secondary to the company. Cole's arm was along the back of the couch behind my shoulders, not quite touching, existing in the space between intention and contact.
"Mik."
"Yes."
"Can I ask you something?"
"You are the second person today who has started a conversation with that question."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is an observation. But yes."
He shifted so he was facing me. His eyes were serious in a way that Cole's eyes rarely were, because Cole used humor and motion to keep seriousness at a distance, and when he let it arrive, it meant something.
"The scar," he said. "On your eyebrow. You told me it was from a fight. But I've seen a lot of hockey scars and that one doesn't look like a stick or a puck."
My hand went to the scar involuntarily. A reflex. The same reflex that made me flinch when someone moved too quickly in my peripheral vision, which was a response I had mostly trained out of myself but which surfaced sometimes in unguarded moments.
"It is not from hockey," I said.
Cole waited. He did not push. He simply waited with the patience of a man who had learned that my truths arrived on their own schedule and could not be rushed.
"My father," I said.
Two words. A complete sentence in the grammar of damage. Cole's face did not change. Not visibly. But something behind his eyes went very still, the way the air goes still before a storm.
"I was sixteen. He found a letter I had written to a teammate. A boy named Alexei. The letter was... it was clear in its intentions." I paused. The words were difficult not because they were painful but because I had never assembled them in this order for another person. "My father was a hard man. Not cruel in general. But this was different. This was shame, and shame made him violent."
"The scar."
"His ring. He wore a wedding band with a raised edge. The first hit split the skin. My mother stopped him before the second."
Cole's jaw was tight. I could see the muscles working. His hand, which had been resting on the back of the couch, moved to my face. Slowly. Giving me time to pull away if I needed to. His thumb traced the line of the scar with a gentleness that was almost unbearable, because gentleness applied to a wound that was made in violence creates a kind of contrast that the body does not know how to process.
"What happened to Alexei?" Cole asked.
"He married a woman. He has three children. We do not speak."
"And your father?"
"He left my mother two years later. He lives in Volgograd. I do not speak to him either."
"Good."