"Maybe he wants to help with the kids."
"Maybe." I looked down the hallway where Mars had disappeared. "Or maybe the goalie who spends his entire life alone in the crease just found a reason to skate at 5 AM."
I didn't think much of it then. I had my own story to attend to, my own happiness to navigate, my own rink to fill. But the memory of Mars Santos saying "a figure skater" with theparticular intonation of a man encountering new data that did not fit his existing model would surface later, and when it did, I would understand that the Power Play series was not finished.
It was just beginning a new chapter.
JONAH
Iscored a hat trick. My first in the NHL. And the thing I remember most about it is not the goals.
The first goal was a redirect in the slot. Cole's pass. The pass was significant because Cole had been feeding me all game with the targeted, intentional generosity of a man making a statement. We're good. I'm here. Take the shot. The redirect went top shelf and the arena erupted and the goal horn blared and I heard Ren's voice in my head saying "your board work is elite" and "you own the spaces between the highlights" and I thought: this goal is not mine. This goal belongs to a man in a press box who saw something in me that I didn't see in myself.
The second goal was a power play one-timer from the left circle. The scouting report, which Ren had prepared, said the opponent would cheat to the right to cover Cole. They cheated right. I was left. The puck hit the back of the net and the bench erupted and I could see Luca in the tunnel, screaming with an enthusiasm that was completely disproportionate to his job title and completely proportionate to his personality.
The third goal was a breakaway. Third period, game tied. I stripped the puck at center ice from a defenseman who had gotten lazy with his gap, and suddenly it was just me and theopen ice and the goalie. The arena went quiet with the held-breath hush of eighteen thousand people sensing something historic. I went forehand, backhand, roof. The puck hit the net and the hats rained down and the sound was not just cheering. It was communal. Celebratory. The sound of a city that loved its team and a team that had just given it something worth celebrating.
In the locker room, Cole pulled me into a hug that lasted long enough to exceed post-game protocol by four full seconds, which in Cole Briggs hugging math was an epoch.
"Hell of a game, Park."
"Thanks, Briggs."
He pulled back and looked at me and the look was the old look. The Cole look. The one that said you're my person and the twenty years between us are intact and the new shape includes Ren and the inclusion makes us stronger.
"We're good?" I asked.
"We've been good since Wednesday. I just needed you to sweat a little."
"You're a sadist."
"I'm your best friend. Same thing."
That night, all three couples were at The Crease.
The bar was small and loud and smelled like wings and spilled beer and the specific, irreplaceable atmosphere of a place where people who love each other come to be together after something good has happened.
Cole and Mik in the corner booth. Mik's hand on Cole's thigh under the table. The quiet gravity of two men who had survived everything the world had thrown at them and had emerged fused together at the molecular level. Cole was telling a story and Mik was listening with the expression of a man who found his partner's voice more essential than oxygen.
Wes and Luca at the bar. Wes holding a beer with his scarred, steady hands, the hands that baked bread and held Luca and had once shaken with the cost of violence and now were still. Luca was talking to everyone within earshot, which was everyone in the building, because Luca's acoustic radius was unlimited. He had brought sourdough. Of course he had. Wes's bread, wrapped in cloth, sitting on the bar like a Eucharist. Wes ate a piece with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose hands had made something good.
Ren and me at a table in the center. Because the center was where I lived, except now the center was not a performance. It was a position I shared.
Mars Santos was at the end of the bar. Water with lime. Headphones draped around his neck. Alone, as always. Present, as always. The goalie's paradox.
Luca, who could not resist the gravitational pull of an unengaged human, slid toward Mars with the inevitability of warm air filling a cold room.
"Mars, my man. Can I interest you in bread? A conversation? An emotion of any kind?"
"I'm fine, Moretti. Thank you."
"You know what, I believe you. You look different tonight. Less... fortressed."
Mars did not respond to this observation. But Luca, whose emotional radar could detect a shift in atmospheric pressure at three hundred yards, was not finished.
"Hey, have you checked out the Decatur rink? Ren's youth program is there. And there's a figure skater who trains early morning. Theo Kimura. He's incredible. You should see him."
"I have."