I was avoiding the fact that my ankle still felt warm where his fingers had been. That the sticky note was still in my pocket, transferred from yesterday's jeans to today's with a deliberateness I was pretending was accidental. That I had eaten three more biscotti over the past week, each one consumed alone in my stall like contraband, and that the taste of almonds had become associated in my nervous system with a specific smile on a specific face.
None of this meant anything. I was not attracted to Luca Moretti. I was experiencing a series of unrelated physiological responses to a colleague's proximity, which was a perfectly normal occurrence in a professional environment where physical contact was routine and personal space was limited.
This was my position. This was my analysis. This was the conclusion of a man who baked bread at midnight because his hands wouldn't stop shaking and who kept a sticky note in his pocket that said "For Grumpy" and who had memorized the location of a tattoo on a shoulder he'd seen for less than three seconds.
The analysis was airtight.
The analysis was complete bullshit.
I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed and lay in the dark and pressed my thumb against the inside of my own ankle, right where his fingers had been, and felt nothing.
Which was the problem. When I touched it, I felt nothing. When he touched it, I felt everything.
I pulled my hand away and stared at the ceiling and added this to the growing list of things I was not thinking about.
The list was getting long. The ceiling didn't care.
Neither did the bread, rising in the dark kitchen, expanding slowly into the space I had given it, the way all living things do when the conditions are right.
-e
LUCA
Ihad seen a lot of hockey fights. Four years as a college player. Three years working in equipment rooms at various levels. Hundreds of fights, maybe thousands, the choreographed violence that the sport treats as both a necessary evil and a crowd-pleasing spectacle. I understood fighting in hockey the way I understood checking and boarding and all the other ways the game allowed men to hurt each other within a framework of rules. It was part of the sport. It was part of the culture. It was, for certain players, part of the job description.
Knowing all of this did not prepare me for watching Wes Chen get hurt.
It was a Tuesday night game against Carolina. Second period. The Reapers were up 2-1 and the game had been chippy all night, the kind of low-grade hostility that builds when two physical teams play each other and neither is willing to concede an inch. Carolina's enforcer was a guy named Decker, six-foot-four, two-thirty, with a reputation for targeting smaller players on the opposing team's skill lines.
Decker ran Jonah Park into the boards from behind in the neutral zone. It was borderline dirty, the kind of hit that livedin the grey area between legal and suspendable, and the arena erupted. Jonah got up slowly. He was fine, but the intent was clear, and the intent was what Wes Chen responded to.
Wes didn't wait for a signal from the bench. He didn't check with Coach Callahan or look for permission. He simply skated to center ice on his next shift and found Decker and the conversation that followed lasted approximately four seconds before the gloves came off.
I was standing in the tunnel, which was my position during games. Close enough to see, far enough to be out of the way. I had a clear view of the fight, and the fight was efficient and brutal and over in thirty seconds. Wes got inside Decker's reach, landed three shots to the body, took a shot to the helmet that snapped his head back, and then landed a right hand to Decker's jaw that dropped the bigger man to the ice.
The crowd roared. Wes's teammates banged their sticks on the boards. The refs escorted both men to the penalty box. Standard procedure. The enforcer had done his job. Order was restored. The system worked.
I watched Wes skate to the penalty box and I watched his hands and I watched his face.
His hands were shaking. The fine tremor that I had noticed before, the one that started after every fight and persisted for hours. His right hand was gripping his left side, just below the ribs, in a way that was not casual. And his face, visible for a moment through the penalty box glass, was blank in the specific way that meant everything underneath was in chaos.
Something was wrong.
He came out of the penalty box and played the rest of the second period. I watched him on every shift. His skating was slightly off. Favoring his left side. Not dramatically, not enough for the casual observer, but enough for someone who had spent three weeks memorizing the way Wes Chen moved on ice.
Between the second and third period, I went to the training room. The team doctors were there, attending to the usual collection of minor injuries that accumulate during a hockey game. I found Dr. Okafor, the team physician, and asked if anyone had looked at Chen.
"He hasn't come in," she said.
"He's favoring his left side. Took an elbow to the ribs during the fight."
"I'll check him at intermission."
"He won't come voluntarily."
Dr. Okafor looked at me with the particular expression of a woman who had been managing professional athletes for fifteen years and understood their relationship with medical attention. "Then I'll go to him."
She went to him. He resisted. She insisted. The exam took three minutes and the diagnosis was bruised ribs, left side, which was not serious in the way that broken ribs were serious but was painful in the way that breathing and skating and existing were painful when every inhale reminded you that your body had been used as a weapon and the weapon had taken damage.