Ifought because Decker came back.
The same guy. Same team. Carolina again. He ran Jonah into the boards in the first period and this time Jonah didn't get up right away. He stayed down for four seconds, which in hockey is an eternity, and when he stood up he was holding his wrist and his face was wrong and the arena went quiet the way arenas go quiet when they know something bad has happened to someone they care about.
Jonah skated to the bench. Dr. Okafor took him to the tunnel. The team looked at me. Coach looked at me. The expectation was a physical force, a wave of collective will that said do your job, and my job was violence, and I did it.
I found Decker on my next shift. He saw me coming. He dropped his gloves before I dropped mine, which meant he wanted it too, and we met at center ice and I hit him with everything I had. Three rights to the body. A left that caught his helmet. An uppercut that connected with his chin and sent a jolt up my arm that I felt in my shoulder. He grabbed my jersey and swung wild and missed and I pulled him down and the refs piled on and it was over.
Five minutes for fighting. Penalty box. The crowd chanting my name.
I sat in the box and looked at my hands.
They were shaking. The tremor was back. Worse than usual. Not just the fine vibration that I could suppress with concentration. This was a full-body event, my hands bouncing on my thighs with a force that was visible through my gloves, and I pressed them flat against my legs and willed them to stop and they did not stop.
The game continued. We won. Jonah's wrist was sprained, not broken, which was good news delivered with the relative optimism of a sport that considers a sprain to be a positive outcome. The locker room was muted. Wins that come with injuries don't feel like wins. They feel like invoices.
I sat at my stall. The team filtered out. The trainers left. The coaches left. The lights were still on but the room had the hollow quality of a space that had recently been full and was now empty, and the emptiness amplified everything I was trying not to feel.
My hands were still shaking. I held them under the counter so nobody would see, except there was nobody to see, and the hiding was automatic and pointless and I hated myself for it.
I went to the equipment room because there was a utility sink and cold water and the ritual of putting my hands under cold water after a fight was the closest thing I had to a coping mechanism that didn't involve flour. The water was freezing. I held my hands under the stream and watched them tremble against the porcelain and thought about Decker's chin and the jolt up my arm and the specific, terrible satisfaction of hurting someone who had hurt my teammate.
I was good at this. That was the worst part. I was good at violence. My body was calibrated for it. My fists were weapons and my weapons worked and the satisfaction of a clean hit was real and immediate and undeniable. I did not want to enjoyit. I did not want the adrenaline or the crowd or the surge of something primal that came from standing over a man I had put on the ice. But the enjoyment was there, underneath the shaking, and the coexistence of pleasure and revulsion was a moral crisis I had been having since I was nineteen and had never resolved.
The door opened. I did not look up. I knew who it was by the footsteps. By the absence of hesitation. By the specific warmth that entered a room when Luca Moretti walked into it.
He didn't speak. He came to the sink and stood next to me and looked at my hands under the water. The shaking was obvious. There was no hiding it.
He reached into the stream. His hands closed around mine. Both of them. His fingers wrapping around my fists, which were clenched even though I hadn't told them to clench, and the pressure of his grip was steady and firm and warm even against the cold water.
"How long has this been happening?" he asked.
"Always."
"Always?"
"After every fight. For years. The shaking starts and it doesn't stop for hours. Sometimes until morning. That's why I bake. The kneading helps. The pressure. Something about the repetitive motion resets the circuits."
"Have you told anyone?"
"I'm telling you."
He turned off the water. My hands were red and cold and still trembling inside his grip. He lifted them out of the sink and held them between us, water dripping onto the floor, and he looked at them the way he looked at everything about me. With attention. With the specific focus of a man whose job was to notice things and whose heart had decided that the things worth noticing most were the things about Wes Chen that nobody else saw.
He raised my right hand to his mouth and kissed the knuckle of my index finger.
The contact was soft. Barely a touch. His lips against the ridge of scar tissue that had formed and reformed over eleven years of fighting, the specific topography of a fist that had been used as a weapon so many times that the skin had given up trying to heal smoothly and had instead built its own armor of calluses and white lines.
He kissed the second knuckle. Then the third. Then the fourth. Each one a separate, deliberate act. His mouth moving across my hand like he was reading Braille, learning the story written in the damage.
He turned my hand over and kissed the palm. The center of it. Where the skin was softer and the calluses were thinner and the nerve endings were dense enough that I felt the warmth of his mouth spread through my whole hand and up my arm and into the center of my chest, where it met the tremor and dissolved it.
My hand stopped shaking.
He moved to the left hand. Same thing. Knuckle by knuckle. The deliberateness of it undid me more than speed or urgency would have. This was not passion. This was something more dangerous than passion. This was a man performing an act of consecration on the parts of my body that I hated most.
"Your hands are worth more than a roster spot," he said against my palm. "They are worth more than every fight you've ever won. These hands bake bread. These hands are gentle. These hands just held mine under cold water and trembled, and the trembling is not weakness. The trembling is the cost, and the cost is too high, and you deserve to stop paying it."
I was not going to cry. I was Wes Chen. I was an enforcer. I was the man who did not flinch and did not break and did not show the room anything it could use against me.