I stared at the message. The photo was gone. The evidence erased. Problem solved. Everything back to normal.
Except nothing was normal. The photo was gone but the fear that produced the reaction was still there, alive and enormous, and no cease and desist letter in the world could take that down.
I drove home. I cooked dinner for one. I sat on the couch where Mik's feet usually rested in my lap and watched the empty space and thought about what he'd said.
If I'm never ready.
Four words that contained an entire possible future. One where I loved a man who loved me back but could never say it in a room with the lights on. Where we grew old in the shadows, always careful, always calibrated, always one blurry photograph away from catastrophe.
I couldn't live in that future. I knew this with the same certainty that I knew my skating stride and my shot release and the sound of a puck hitting twine. Some things you know in your body before your brain catches up.
But I also couldn't leave. Because the alternative to that shadowed future was a future without Mik in it, and that was worse. That was the option that felt like dying.
So I sat on the couch and I didn't text him and I didn't drive to his apartment and I didn't do anything except exist in the impossible space between loving someone fully and being loved in half-light.
It was, without question, the loneliest I had felt since the day my father stopped talking to me.
The blue toothbrush was still in the cup by the sink.
I checked.
MIK
Iplayed the worst game of my career on a Friday night in front of seventeen thousand people who paid money to watch me fail.
The statistics will show a minus-three, two giveaways, and a penalty for interference that led to a power play goal. The statistics will not show the way my brain refused to synchronize with my body, the half-second delay between seeing a play and reacting to it, as if the signal between my eyes and my feet was traveling through water instead of air. I was slow. I was late. I was everywhere I should not have been and nowhere I should have.
Coach benched me in the third period. He did not announce it. He simply stopped tapping my shoulder when it was time for a shift, and I sat on the bench and watched my teammates play the final twenty minutes without me, and the shame of it was so complete that it felt almost peaceful. Like hitting the bottom of a well and discovering that at least you've stopped falling.
We lost 5-2. The locker room was quiet in the way that losing locker rooms are quiet. Not silent. Guys still talked, still moved through their postgame routines. But the volume was lower andthe energy was flat and nobody made eye contact with the man who'd been benched.
I sat at my stall and stared at my hands. They were steady. No shaking, no tremor. Just hands. Large, scarred, competent hands that had played professional hockey for nine years and had never let me down until I let everything else get inside my head.
Wes Chen appeared. He set a Gatorade on the bench next to me and sat down one stall over. He did not speak. He just sat there, unwinding his own tape, existing in the same space at the same volume of silence.
After a while he said, "Bad nights happen."
"This was more than a bad night."
"Maybe. You'll have a better one tomorrow."
"I was benched, Chen."
"Yeah. And tomorrow you won't be. That's how this works. You have a bad one, you eat it, you show up the next day. The alternative is sitting in the dark feeling sorry for yourself, and that doesn't win hockey games."
He stood up, picked up his bag, and walked out. At the door he paused without turning around.
"The Gatorade is fruit punch. It's the best flavor. This is not up for debate."
He left. I looked at the Gatorade. It was, in fact, fruit punch. I opened it and drank the whole thing and it tasted like sugar and artificial flavor and something that might have been kindness.
I showered and changed and left the arena. The Atlanta night was warm and damp, the air thick with the kind of humidity that clung to your skin and made breathing feel like work. I got in my car. I did not drive home.
I drove to the Beltline.
It was late, almost midnight, and the trail was mostly empty. A few joggers, a couple walking a dog, a man on a bench staringat his phone. The murals along the path were lit by streetlamps and the colors looked different at night. Softer. Less insistent. During the day the Beltline was a performance, everyone showing their best version of themselves. At night it was just a path.
I walked. No destination. No pace. Just forward motion, which was the only thing I could manage when the inside of my head felt like a room where someone had turned off all the lights and rearranged the furniture.