"Both of us. She wants to cook for you. Katya wants to interrogate you. These are separate activities but they may overlap."
"I would love that."
"You say that now. You have not experienced my mother's interrogation techniques. She was a nurse for thirty years. She can extract information from the unwilling."
"I'm not unwilling. I'm an open book."
"You are the most open book I have ever encountered. It is both your greatest strength and a constant source of anxiety for me."
"You love it."
"I do." He said this without hesitation. Without the careful, measured parsing that used to accompany any statement of emotion. Just a simple, direct acknowledgment. I do. Two words that contained a universe.
Donna brought us another round. Jonah was telling Wes about a fishing trip he wanted to take in the offseason, and Wes was listening with the particular intensity of a man who had never fished but was willing to learn, and Luca was making Mik try a brownie, which Mik was examining with the suspicion of a food critic at a state fair.
"This is excellent," Mik said, with genuine surprise.
Wes, without looking up from his conversation with Jonah: "I know."
"The cocoa ratio is precise."
"I know."
"You should consider a career in baking."
"I have considered it. I chose violence instead. But thank you."
I laughed. Mik almost laughed. Luca actually laughed, the kind of big, full, Italian laugh that filled a room and made everyone in it happier by proximity.
This was the scene. This was the picture. Not the arena or the cameras or the forty-seven million views. This. A sticky bar in Atlanta with bad lighting and incredible wings, where three couples sat in their respective booths and existed in each other's company without performance or pretense, and the thing they had in common was not hockey but the specific, hard-won courage it took to love someone in a world that didn't always make it easy.
Mik leaned into me. A small movement. His shoulder against mine. The same lean from the locker room after the clinching game, the same contact that had started as a risk and become a habit and was now just the way we sat. Together. Touching. Not because we were making a statement but because the distance between us had closed permanently and the idea of reopening it was as absurd as the idea of unscoring a goal.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For knocking."
I didn't need to ask what he meant. I knew. He meant the hallway in Nashville and the rooftop in Miami and the couch at 2 AM and every other moment where I had shown up at his door, literal or metaphorical, and waited for him to open it. The knocking. The patience. The willingness to stand on the other side of a wall and believe that the man behind it was worth waiting for.
"You opened the door," I said. "That was the hard part."
"Perhaps. But no one had knocked in a very long time."
I put my arm around his shoulders. In a bar. In public. In front of our teammates and Donna the bartender and a couple of guys playing pool who didn't look up because two men sitting together in an Atlanta bar was not news, and the normalcy of that was its own kind of miracle.
"Hey Mik?"
"Yes?"
"In hockey, a power play is when you have the advantage."
"I am aware of what a power play is."