WES
The thing about being an enforcer is that everyone sees the fights and nobody sees the cost.
They see the moment. The gloves hitting the ice. The crowd surging to its feet. Two men gripping each other's jerseys and swinging with the kind of violence that would get you arrested in any other building. They see the blood and the adrenaline and the primal theater of it, and they cheer or they wince or they look away, and then the penalty box doors close and the game moves on and the enforcer becomes a statistic. A line on a sheet. PIM: 5. Fighting major. Done.
What they don't see is the locker room after. The way my hands refuse to close around a water bottle because the tendons are screaming. The ice bags that become so routine the trainers have them ready before I sit down. The particular silence that surrounds me in the postgame, a bubble of space that the team maintains without being asked, because nobody wants to be near the violence once the entertainment value has expired.
What they don't see is the drive home, when the adrenaline drains and leaves behind something flat and grey, and my apartment is dark and my hands are swollen and I stand inthe kitchen and bake bread because kneading dough is the only thing I've found that resets the wiring in my brain.
My name is Wes Chen. I'm twenty-eight years old. I play right wing for the Atlanta Reapers, though "play" is generous because my primary contribution to the team is hitting people. I am six-foot-one and two hundred and ten pounds and I have been told by multiple sources that I am intimidating, which is useful in hockey and useless in every other area of human existence.
I was also, as of this morning, staring at a plate of biscotti that someone had left in my equipment stall.
The note was handwritten on a piece of yellow paper torn from a legal pad. The handwriting was round and slanted and so aggressively cheerful that it practically bounced off the page: Thought you might want some. You looked like you could use a cookie yesterday. — L
L.
Luca Moretti. Equipment manager. Three weeks on the job. Italian-American. Loud. Aggressively friendly. Completely unbothered by the fact that I had responded to his first attempt at conversation with a monosyllabic grunt and his second attempt with silence and his third attempt with what I've been told is my "murder face," which is apparently a real thing that I do and which has been known to make rookies physically relocate to different parts of the locker room.
Luca Moretti had not relocated. Luca Moretti had come back with biscotti.
I picked one up. It was golden brown and perfectly shaped and dusted with powdered sugar that left white fingerprints on my scarred knuckles. His grandmother's recipe, he'd told anyone who would listen, which was everyone, because everyone listened to Luca. He had the kind of warmth that made peoplelean in. A gravity. Not the cold, dense gravity of a planet, which was my kind. The warm gravity of a sun.
I did not want the biscotti. I did not need the biscotti. I was a professional athlete with a nutritionist and a meal plan and zero interest in unsolicited baked goods from a man who smiled too much and talked too much and had a jawline that I had noticed exactly once and was not going to notice again.
I ate the biscotti. For quality assessment purposes only.
It was, predictably, outstanding. The almond flavor was subtle and the texture was the precise balance of crisp and tender that separates an excellent biscotto from a mediocre one. The ratio of butter to flour. The restraint with the sugar. This was not casual baking. This was someone who cared about the details, and I respected details because details were the only thing I trusted.
I ate a second one. For comparative analysis.
"Good morning, sunshine."
I looked up. Luca Moretti was standing in the doorway of the equipment room, holding a cup of coffee in each hand, wearing a Reapers staff polo that was slightly too big for him. It hung off one shoulder in a way that exposed the line of his collarbone and the start of a tattoo that disappeared under the fabric. I had not noticed the tattoo before. I was not noticing it now. I was looking at the coffee.
"I don't drink coffee," I said.
"This one's mine." He held up the left cup. "This one's yours." He held up the right. "It's tea. Earl Grey. I noticed you drink it in the mornings but the stuff in the break room is terrible, so I brought some from home."
I stared at him. He had noticed what I drank. He had noticed, and he had done something about it. The tea felt different from replacing skate blades or retaping sticks. The tea felt personal.
"Why?" I said.
"Why what?"
"Why do you keep doing this."
"Doing what? Being nice?" He sat down two stalls over, which was closer than most people chose to sit near me, and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee with the boneless ease of a person who was comfortable in every room he entered. "It's not a strategy, Chen. Some people are just nice. I know that's a foreign concept for a guy whose primary social skill is punching, but I promise it's a real thing that exists in the world."
"My primary social skill is not punching."
"What is it, then?"
"Silence."
"Silence isn't a skill. Silence is the absence of a skill. It's what happens when the skill should be."
He said this with a grin. Not a mocking grin. A warm one. The kind of grin that invited you to laugh at yourself without malice, and I understood in that moment why everyone on this team had adopted Luca Moretti within three weeks. He made people feel like they were in on a joke instead of the subject of one.