"Maybe it's finally breaking in."
Jonah Park, professional liar. The role I was born to play.
Practice was surreal. I was on the ice, doing the things I always did, running the drills, taking the face-offs, executing the breakouts, and the whole time my body was carrying a second layer of information that the first layer was trying to suppress. Every muscle remembered Ren's hands. Every nerve ending retained the map of where he had touched me. I was a palimpsest, a surface covered in new writing that the old writing was bleeding through.
Ren was in the press box. I could see him through the glass, a small figure at a laptop, headphones on, taking notes. He was doing his job. I was doing mine. The two jobs existed on separate planes and the planes were not supposed to intersect and the fact that they were intersecting in my nervous system was a problem that no amount of skating was going to solve.
During a breakout drill, Cole fed me a pass and I fumbled it. The puck went off my stick and into the corner and Cole skated up to me with the expression of a man who had just witnessed a miracle, because Jonah Park did not fumble breakout passes. Jonah Park was the most reliable breakout center in the Eastern Conference. Jonah Park's hands did not betray him.
"You okay?" Cole said.
"Fine. Stick malfunction."
"Your stick is brand new."
"Exactly. Breaking it in."
"You're breaking in your stick and your mattress on the same day?"
"It's a renewal period."
Cole looked at me for a beat longer than casual. The perceptive gaze of a best friend who has spent twenty years calibrating his read on my behavior and has noticed that the calibration is off. I held the look. My face was neutral. My pulse was not.
"Get it together, Park," he said, grinning, and skated away.
I got it together. I ran the next drill clean. I took the face-offs. I played the practice the way I played every practice, with the reliable, invisible competence that was my brand.
But underneath the competence, in the layer that only I could access, a man in a press box was taking notes, and the notes were about hockey but the man was about everything else, and the dissonance between the professional and the personal was the most exhilarating, terrifying, unsustainable thing I had ever experienced.
After practice, Luca cornered me near the stick rack. Luca's ability to detect romantic disturbance was supernatural. If there had been a draft for emotional intelligence, Luca Moretti would have gone first overall.
"You're different today," he said.
"I'm the same."
"You're the same but different. You're radiating something. Wes noticed and Wes doesn't notice things that aren't bread."
"Wes noticed what?"
"He said, and I quote, 'Park is less tense.' Which for Wes is the equivalent of a three-page emotional assessment."
"I stretched this morning. Flexibility work."
"Flexibility work." Luca repeated the words with the tone of a man who was not buying what was being sold but was willing to extend credit until the next payment was due. "Sure, Jonah. Flexibility work."
He walked away. I stood at the stick rack and breathed.
The drive home was silent for the first five minutes. Then Ren said: "How was it?"
"Excruciating."
"Specifically?"
"I fumbled a breakout pass because your hands were on my body twelve hours ago and my muscle memory got confused about which physical activity it was supposed to be performing."
"That's flattering."
"That's dangerous. Cole noticed. Luca noticed. Wes apparently noticed, and Wes is a man whose observational skills are primarily dedicated to the rising behavior of sourdough starter."