His fingers were quick and precise. He worked the laces out with the practiced ease of a man who had done this a thousand times, and I sat there and watched his hands and told myself that the reason my throat was dry was because I hadn't had enough water during practice.
He pulled the first skate off and set it aside. His hand went to the second skate, and in the transition, his fingers brushed the inside of my ankle. Not deliberately. Just the incidental contact of a hand moving from one object to another, passing over skin on the way.
The contact lasted less than a second. A fraction of a fraction. His fingertips against the thin skin above my ankle bone, where the nerve endings are dense and the blood runs close to the surface.
My entire body went still.
Not tense. Not flinched. Still. The way a system goes still when it encounters input it doesn't have a protocol for. A full-body pause, every muscle suspended, my brain running through its database of responses and coming up empty.
Luca didn't notice. Or if he noticed, he didn't acknowledge it, which was either merciful or devastating depending on how you looked at it. He unlaced the second skate, pulled it off, and set it next to the first.
"There," he said. "I'll get these sharpened tonight. Same hollow as usual?"
"Yeah."
"Your left edge is wearing faster than your right. Probably a weight distribution thing. I'll do an extra pass on the left."
"Okay."
"Chen, are you good? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I'm fine."
"You say that a lot."
"Because it's true a lot."
He stood up. We were close. Closer than the stall geometry required, because he'd been kneeling at my feet and now he was standing and I was still sitting, which put his waist at my eye level, which was a piece of spatial information I had absolutely no use for.
"For what it's worth," he said, looking down at me with an expression that I couldn't read because reading Luca's expressions required a literacy I hadn't developed yet, "you don't have to be fine all the time. That's not a job requirement."
He left. He took my skates with him. I sat at my stall and stared at the place where his fingers had touched my ankle and felt the ghost of the contact like a burn mark that the skin remembers long after the heat is gone.
I drove home. I made dinner. Chicken and rice, the same meal I made four nights a week because it was efficient and nutritionally optimal and did not require the kind of creative engagement that my brain could not currently provide. I ate standing at the counter, which was how I always ate, because sitting at a table alone felt like an admission of something I wasn't willing to admit.
After dinner, I went to the kitchen and started a loaf. Not because I needed bread. Because I needed my hands to do something that wasn't replaying the feeling of Luca Moretti's fingers on my ankle.
The dough was cooperative tonight. Soft, elastic, responding to pressure with the appropriate give. I kneaded it in the rhythm that had become my meditation, push and fold and turn, push and fold and turn. The kitchen was quiet. The apartment was dark beyond the island of light where I worked.
I thought about the skate.
I thought about his hands. Precise and quick. The hands of a man who had been a hockey player and now used the same skills to take care of hockey players, and there was something in that transition that I understood. The body remembers what it was built for. Luca's hands remembered sticks and pucks and the particular geometry of athletic equipment, and they carried that knowledge into every task, and watching them work was likewatching a language being spoken by someone who had learned it as a child and would never fully lose the accent.
I thought about the brush of his fingertips on my ankle. The accidental quality of it. The way my body had responded as if the contact was not accidental at all but seismic, a tremor registering on a scale I didn't know I was calibrated to.
I pushed harder into the dough. The gluten tightened. I was overworking it again.
Here is what I knew about myself: I was twenty-eight years old. I had been attracted to women for the entirety of my adult life. I had dated women. I had slept with women. The sex had been fine. Functional. The relationships had been shorter than they should have been because every woman I dated eventually said some version of the same thing, which was "you're not really here," and they were right. I was not really there. I was in the rink or in the weight room or in my kitchen at 2 AM, and the women were secondary to the structure I had built to keep myself upright.
I had never looked at a man and felt anything other than the neutral assessment of a competitor. Bigger than me. Faster than me. Better hands. Worse skating. The clinical inventory of an athlete measuring himself against other athletes. This was normal. This was the way locker rooms worked. You evaluated bodies for what they could do, not for what they looked like, and the distinction was clear and uncomplicated and had never once been in question.
Until Luca Moretti knelt at my feet and touched my ankle and my brain forgot the distinction entirely.
I shaped the loaf and put it in the proofing bowl and covered it and washed my hands and stood at the sink and thought about nothing.
I was very good at thinking about nothing. It was a skill I had developed over years of sitting in penalty boxes and lockerrooms and dark apartments, the ability to empty my mind of content and exist in a state of functional blankness. Coaches called it focus. Teammates called it intensity. Therapists, the two I had seen briefly in my early twenties before deciding that therapy required a level of verbal self-expression I was not equipped for, called it avoidance.
I was avoiding.