Part of it.
When I fell asleep, I did not dream. The locked room in my chest was open and empty and swept clean, and there was nothing left inside it that needed guarding.
For the first time in eleven years, I slept without a single wall between me and the world.
COLE
Iwoke up on the couch with a dead arm and a stiff neck and Mikhail Volkov's head on my chest and it was the best morning of my life.
The light coming through the living room windows was grey and soft, early enough that the sun hadn't fully committed. My left arm was pinned under Mik's shoulder and had gone completely numb from the elbow down, which was a problem I was absolutely not going to solve by moving, because moving would mean disturbing the man who was sleeping on me with an expression of complete peace that I had never seen on his face before.
Awake, Mik's face was a controlled environment. Every expression vetted, every micro-movement authorized. Asleep, the controls were off. His forehead was smooth. His mouth was slightly open. The scar through his eyebrow was just a line, not a story, not a wound, just a detail on the face of a man who was dreaming about something that didn't hurt.
I lay there and memorized him. Not because I was afraid of forgetting. Because I wanted to be greedy about it. I wanted to take this moment and hold it in both hands and know that it was real, that the man who had stood on my doorstep at 2 AMand said "you make me tired of the wall" was still here in the morning. That he hadn't evaporated into the disciplined ghost who treated me like furniture at the facility.
He was here. He stayed.
My phone said 7:14. No practice today. Recovery day. The hockey gods had granted us a mercy, and I was going to use every minute of it to exist in this new version of us that had been built last night on this couch out of Russian phrases and tears and the simple, radical act of not letting go.
Mik stirred. His breathing changed. I felt the moment he surfaced, the slight tension that entered his shoulders as consciousness returned and his brain ran through its morning checklist. Location: not my apartment. Position: horizontal. Situation: I am lying on top of Cole Briggs.
He didn't bolt. He didn't stiffen and pull away and start rebuilding the wall. He just lay there for a moment, and then his hand, which had been resting on my stomach, moved slightly. A small, deliberate motion. His thumb tracing a slow line across my ribs.
"Good morning," I said.
"Your arm is dead."
"Completely. I think it might actually be gone."
"You should have woken me."
"And miss the only time Mikhail Volkov isn't controlling his face? Not a chance."
He lifted his head and looked at me, and the expression on his face was something I'd never seen in the daylight. Unguarded. Warm. Still carrying the residue of sleep and last night's confession, and underneath it all, a tentative softness that looked like hope.
"I look terrible in the morning," he said.
"You look like you."
"That is not the compliment you think it is."
"It's the biggest compliment I know how to give."
He put his head back on my chest. We lay there for another ten minutes, and the silence was the new kind. Not hostile. Not cautious. Not even the charged version that hummed with unspoken tension. This was a silence that had nothing left to hide. A silence that had been emptied of secrets and filled with presence.
Eventually my arm started tingling with the specific agony of blood returning to places it had abandoned, and I had to move. Mik rolled off me and sat up, and I shook my arm until the feeling came back, which involved a lot of undignified flapping.
"You look like a bird," Mik said.
"A majestic bird."
"A bird that has been hit by a car."
"Your pillow talk needs work."
He almost smiled. Then he did smile. A real one. Not the almost-version I'd been collecting since September, not the ghost or the suggestion or the twitch at the corner of his mouth. A full, real, uncontrolled smile that transformed his entire face and made him look like a completely different person. A person who had been in there the whole time, behind the granite, waiting.
I stared at him. He noticed me staring and the smile started to retreat, the old reflex pulling it back behind the curtain.