"Then the kitchen person needs to win. Permanently. Not just at home. On the ice too."
I understood what he was saying. The enforcer role was not a job anymore. It was a cage, and I was pacing inside it, and the pacing was getting more violent as the cage got smaller.
"I'm talking to Coach," I said.
"About transitioning the role."
"About ending the role. Not reducing it. Ending it. I want to play hockey. I want to use my hands for hockey. I want to come home after a game and not need to bake bread to stop the shaking, and I want to look at you and know that the person you're looking back at is the person in the kitchen and not the person in the penalty box."
He slid off the counter. Crossed the room. Stood in front of me.
"That's the bravest thing you've ever said to me," he said.
"Braver than the biscotti confession?"
"Much braver. The biscotti was about taste. This is about identity."
He put his hands on my face. The equipment room. Fluorescent lights. The smell of rubber and tape. And Luca Moretti, holding my face the way he held everything, with warmth and care and the specific intensity of a man who was asking me to choose a version of myself and was willing to love whichever version I chose, as long as I chose it honestly.
"I'm proud of you for what you did tonight," he said. "Protecting Mik and Cole. Standing up. That matters."
"But?"
"But I need you to come home to me in one piece. And I don't just mean your body. I mean your soul, or your spirit, or whatever the thing is that lives behind the murder face. Thething that bakes bread. The thing that cried in the equipment room. That thing is what I love, and I need it intact."
"You said love."
"I said love."
"Twice."
"I meant it twice."
I pulled him against me. In the equipment room, with hockey sticks on the wall and tape on the floor and the distant sound of the arena cleaning crew running the Zamboni, I held the man who had just said love twice and meant it twice and I felt the void begin to fill.
Not with violence or satisfaction or the adrenaline rush of a clean hit. With something quieter. Something that lived in the kitchen at 3 AM and in the space between two people on a couch and in the particular frequency of a man who was loud enough to fill every room he entered and gentle enough to fill the rooms inside a man who had been empty for a very long time.
"I love you too," I said.
The words came out rough and unpracticed and I was certain I'd said them wrong, the way I said everything wrong when it mattered, but Luca's face broke open and he kissed me hard and the wrongness became rightness and the equipment room became a cathedral again.
"Come home with me," he said. "I'll make you pasta. The real kind. Not your version."
"My version was fine."
"Your version was a crime against Italian culture. Come home."
I went home with him. He made pasta. The real kind. We ate at his table, which had become our table, and the violence of the evening receded into the background and what remained was carbohydrates and candlelight and a man across the table who had said love and meant it.
The switch was off.
I was going to keep it off.
-e
LUCA
Wes walked into Coach Callahan's office on a Monday morning and I stood in the hallway pretending to organize laces and praying to every saint my grandmother had ever invoked, which was all of them.