Chapter 235 235

Chapter 235 235
Alejandro's POV:

Davis came through the room before the media got let in and stopped in the middle of it with the paper in his hand and did not read anything out.

"Chen, Martinez. Second unit for now," he said, and then he said something to Parsons about his stick, and then he was gone.

That kill unit had been Connor and Reiner since the first week of the season.

That was the entire announcement. A few words on his way to somewhere else, and two of those words were "for now," and every man in that room heard it and nobody looked up. That is how things got said in that organization. You found out you had been given something at the same moment you found out it could be taken back, and then you went and took your skates off.

I sat down and started on my laces and did not manage to hide my face at all, because I had never hidden my face in my life.

Reiner came past our stalls before Connor did. He stopped in front of Chen, who was already halfway changed, and waited until Chen looked up.

"Good hands," he said.

"Thanks," Chen said.

And then Reiner went on toward the showers, and about four feet past us, to nobody in particular, he said, "One of you had to have them."

The room got it immediately. Parsons made a noise into his towel. Somebody down by the door said "oh," and drew it out.

I laughed. Out loud, first and loudest, because I had made that exact joke about myself in my own head about an hour earlier, sitting on that bench watching Chen read the ice like a book while I hit things and hoped. Between the two of us we made one whole defenseman. That was true, it was funny, and it was mine. Reiner had just said it out loud in a room, and a man with eleven hundred and six games got to say things like that to rookies, and the correct response was to laugh, so I laughed.

But Chen did not laugh.

He went back to his skate laces with his face doing absolutely nothing, and about ten seconds later he closed his eyes for exactly one second and opened them again.

I saw him do it. I had seen him do it maybe forty times in four years and I knew what it meant, which was that something had landed on him and he was putting it somewhere. And I did not think about it, because I was busy being nine feet tall.

Connor came over a minute later, while I was still fighting a knot. He looked down at the two of us, me a disaster and Chen already halfway changed with those steady hands he had.

"You stole my penalty kill." He let that sit. "Don't get comfortable."

And then he almost smiled, which for Connor was basically a marching band. He knocked his fist against my shoulder and went back to his stall. Connor didn't hand out approval, when you got it you knew.



The drive home was loud. I had the music up and I was replaying every second of the kill and telling Chen about it like he hadn't been standing right there, which was a thing I did: I narrated the lives of people who had lived them next to me. He let me, the way he let me most things, sitting there with his knee up on the dash and his head against the window and the smallest real smile I'd seen on him in a while.

At a red light I reached over and took the back of his neck in my hand.

He went rigid. Not a flinch, nothing anybody watching would have caught, just every muscle from his shoulder to his jaw arriving somewhere at once, and my hand was already there so I felt the whole thing happen.

And then it went out of him. All of it, in about two seconds, and his head came back the smallest amount into my palm, maybe a quarter of an inch, and stayed.

I held on. Just three seconds, hard enough to feel the knot he carried there that nobody else on earth would know about, because nobody else put a hand there. He didn't pull away. His neck was warm and his hair was still damp from the shower. I squeezed once and let go when the light changed, while Bizarrap was going.

I didn't think about it. You don't think about breathing.

We walked up to the apartment and I had my arm across his shoulders, because that was where my arm went after good games. It had gone there since sophomore year, and he was shorter under it by about an inch. I could feel him breathing, and I didn't take it back until we were through the door and I had to reach for the light.

Inside, I dropped onto the couch and called my mom.

"It's eleven thirty," Chen said from the kitchen.

"She'd want to know."

She picked up on the first ring, because she always picked up on the first ring, and I told her, fast, all of it: the penalty kill and Davis and the shin block and the two extra shifts. My Spanish was getting sloppy the way it did when I got excited, and she made all the right sounds and told me she was proud and then, of course, because it was the law in my house, she asked about Chen.

"He's right here. Chen. My mom wants you."

And something in him changed. He came over from the kitchen and took the phone, and his whole face opened. He said, "Hi, Mrs. Martinez," and then he was talking to her, actually talking, more words in a row than I'd gotten out of him since Friday, about the game and about whether he was sleeping and about her garden, and he laughed at something she said, a real one, the first I had heard out of him since he moved chairs.

I sat on the couch and watched my best friend and my mother love each other over the phone and felt so full I could have burst.

It was my mother. She had been doing that to him since the first summer he came to the house, and I had never once found it strange, and I did not find it strange that night either.

I had met his family exactly once. At our graduation, back in May, the two of them had been in the third row while my entire enormous family had been two seats down and my mom had already been crying into a program she had folded into quarters.

Kent Chen had shaken my hand and said it was good to meet me and that had been the entire speech. He had looked like Chen if you aged him thirty years and removed the part that found things funny. Kurt had looked like Chen with a meaner mouth. Nobody had hugged anybody, until my mother had hugged all of them anyway, because she had never in her life accepted information about other people's customs, and Chen's father had stood inside it with his arms out at his sides like a man being frisked at an airport.

I remembered thinking: that is a fucking cold family. I remembered feeling sorry for Chen about it, which I never said out loud, and going home and letting my mother hold my face in both hands, and telling myself I'd gotten lucky.

Except his father had taken pictures for two hours. Two hours, no expression on the man at all, working his way around the outside of the crowd to get a better angle on his son, and then he had driven up that morning and driven back the same night because he had work on Monday.

Maybe they were not cold, but weird as fuck.

I had asked Chen about the names once, on a bus outside Hartford.

"Kevin, Kurt, just like Kent," I had said. "Was that on purpose?"

"My mother liked the initial letter of my father's name."

"That's the reason? That's the whole reason?"

"That's the whole reason," he had said.

"Your family is INSANE, dude."

"We're the quietest people you've ever met."

"Exactly!"

I didn't remember falling asleep. I remembered the sound of Chen's voice, low and easy, saying something about tomatoes.

I surfaced once around three, found a blanket over me that I had not put there, and got my jeans off because I was not sleeping in jeans for anybody. Then went back under stupidly, uselessly happy, and did not once ask myself why.