I played well. Not my best, not my worst. Two assists, solid defensive play, the kind of steady performance that wouldn't make highlights but would make a coach nod with quiet approval. Mik was brilliant. A plus-three, two blocked shots, and a stretch pass in the second period that set up our go-ahead goal and made the broadcast analyst use the word "elite" three times in forty seconds.
I found myself playing for my father. Not consciously. Not in the way I used to as a kid, when every goal was a bid for his attention and every mistake was a failure measured against his expectations. This was different. I was playing as the man I'd become in his absence. A man who was good at hockey and honest about himself and in love with someone extraordinary. I wanted him to see that. I wanted him to see that the thing he'd been silent about hadn't broken me. That it had, in fact, been the making of me.
We won 3-2. The locker room was happy but not euphoric. A regular season win against a beatable team. Guys showered and changed and headed for the family area, which was a loungenear the arena exit where players met their wives and girlfriends and kids after games.
I walked in and my father was standing by the window.
He looked older. That was the first thing I noticed. Two years of not seeing someone in person rewrites your mental image of them, and the man standing by the window was greyer and thinner than the man I'd been carrying in my head. He was wearing a Reapers polo that looked brand new, still creased from the package, and the effort of it nearly broke me. He had bought a shirt. For my team. In my city.
"Cole." His voice was the same. Low, careful, the voice of a man who measured his words because he'd been taught that words were expensive and you didn't waste them.
"Hey, Dad."
We stood there. Four feet apart in a room full of families reuniting, kids running to their dads, wives kissing husbands, the normal happy chaos of postgame life. My mother was somewhere behind him, giving us space. She was good at that. She'd spent thirty years managing the distance between the men in her family.
"Good game," he said.
"Thanks."
"That Russian kid. The defenseman. He's something else."
"His name is Mik."
"Mik. Right. You two play well together."
"We do."
A silence. Not the cold silence of the past two years. A different kind. An effortful silence. The silence of a man standing at the edge of something he wanted to say and not knowing how to jump.
"Your mother says you're happy here," he said.
"I am."
"She says you're seeing someone."
The room got very quiet inside my head. My mother wouldn't have told him the details without my permission, which meant she'd said just enough to open the door and was waiting to see if my father would walk through it.
"Yeah," I said. "I am."
My father looked at me. Really looked. And I saw something in his face that I had been waiting two years to see, something I'd almost given up on. It was not acceptance. Not yet. Acceptance is a destination, and he was still very much in transit. What I saw was effort. The visible, uncomfortable, sweating-through-his-new-polo effort of a man trying to be something he had never been taught to be.
"You look at him different," he said.
My heart stopped. Not metaphorically. I felt it pause, skip, restart.
"What?"
"The defenseman. I watched you after the game, walking to the locker room. You look at him different than you look at the other guys." He cleared his throat. "I'm not... I'm trying, Cole. I'm trying to understand."
I'm trying to understand. Four words that were not "I love you" and were not "I accept you" and were not even close to enough. Four words that were, by the standards of emotional expression my father had set across my entire lifetime, the equivalent of a symphony.
"Thank you," I said.
"I don't need thanks. I need time."
"I know."
"And I need you to know that I..." He stopped. His jaw worked. The same jaw I'd inherited, the one that Jonah said clicked when I was angry. My father's jaw was clicking now. Not from anger. From the strain of forcing words past a lifetime of silence.