Cole stood at the same time. We were suddenly very close in the narrow row between chairs, and I realized I had miscalculated the geometry of the exit. His face was perhaps eighteen inches from mine. I could count the freckles across the bridge of his nose if I wanted to, which I did not want to do, and there were seven.
"Walk you to the parking lot?" he said.
This was a strange offer. We were both going to the parking lot. It was the only exit. Walking together was not a choice but a geographical inevitability.
"It is a shared hallway," I said. "You do not need to ask permission to walk in it."
"I'm not asking for permission. I'm asking for company."
The word sat between us. Company. Such a small word for such a large request. He was asking me to be near him voluntarily. To exist in his space without obligation or assignment.
"Fine," I said.
We walked. He talked. About the film session, about the power play adjustment he wanted to suggest to Coach, about a restaurant his friend Jonah had recommended in a neighborhood called Virginia-Highland. He talked the way he played hockey, with energy and instinct and a total absence of self-consciousness. I listened. This was what I did. I listened, and I filed things away, and I built a picture of the person speaking that was probably more detailed than they would be comfortable with.
Cole Briggs liked his coffee with too much cream. He referenced movies I had never seen with the confidence of someone who assumed everyone had seen them. He gestured with his hands when he was making a point, which was often, and his left hand came close to touching my arm twice. He did not notice. I noticed both times.
We reached the parking lot. The Atlanta evening was warm and humid in a way that still surprised me. Chelyabinsk in October was already approaching freezing. Here, people were wearing shorts.
"This is me," Cole said, stopping next to a black truck that was excessively large in the way that American vehicles were excessively everything. "See you tomorrow?"
This was also a strange thing to say. We had practice tomorrow. We would see each other regardless. But he said it like it was a question, like my presence was something he wanted confirmed rather than assumed.
Something shifted inside my chest. A small tectonic movement, barely detectable, but enough to crack the foundation of a structure I had spent years building.
"I have to go," I said.
His face changed. Just slightly. The openness dimming by a degree.
"Yeah, sure, man. See you tomorrow."
I walked to my car. I did not look back. I sat in the driver's seat with my hands on the steering wheel and stared at the dashboard for a long time.
Cole Briggs knocked like he had all the time in the world.
I sat in my car for twelve minutes before driving home. The apartment was dark. The icon of Saint Nicholas watched me from the nightstand. I made dinner, ate it standing at the counter, and washed the single plate and the single fork and put them back in the cabinet next to all the other single plates and single forks.
Before bed, I opened the spreadsheet on Colorado's penalty kill. Below the data, in a cell that had no business containing this information, I typed four words and then deleted them.
The four words were: He has seven freckles.
I deleted them because they served no analytical purpose. But I knew the number now, and I would not forget it, and that was the most dangerous thing that had happened to me since I came to this country.
COLE
Road trips in the NHL are their own universe. You spend half your life in airports and hotel lobbies and team buses, eating the same catered chicken and rice, sleeping in beds that are never quite the right firmness, and existing in a bubble with thirty guys who are simultaneously your brothers and your coworkers and occasionally the people you want to strangle most in the world.
I loved every second of it.
Four games in seven days. Nashville, Carolina, Tampa, Miami. The schedule was brutal but the team was buzzing. We were 6-3-1 through our first ten games, which was better than anyone outside the locker room expected, and the vibes were immaculate. That's not a word I use lightly. But when a team is clicking, when guys are excited to show up and compete, there's a frequency to it that you can feel in your chest. We had that frequency.
The charter flight to Nashville was loud. Music playing from someone's speaker, card games in the back, rookies trying to look casual while secretly being thrilled that they were on an actual NHL road trip. I was in my usual seat, window side, four rows from the front, with Jonah next to me doing a crosswordpuzzle on his phone like the seventy-year-old man he was on the inside.
"Six letters," he said. "Stubborn and unyielding."
"Volkov."
"It starts with an O."