Chapter 245 245

Chapter 245 245
Alejandro's POV:

Davis had the pairs up on the whiteboard by four thirty, the way he did before every road game, and taped next to it was the ice-time sheet from Wednesday with everybody's minutes down the right side. I read the whole thing standing up with my helmet in my hand and got nothing out of it, because a whiteboard in a visitors' room is furniture. Our names were where they had been since Bergstrom went down. Holloway and Marsh, Reiner and Mitchell, Chen and Martinez, and the two penalty kill units underneath with ours on the second one.

Reiner's number on that sheet was fourteen. In October it had been eighteen.

I saw the fourteen. I did nothing with it.

Then we went out and got eleven minutes.

Eleven real ones, spread across three periods in a building where nobody had any reason to know our names, and not one of them was the last shift of a blowout where Davis emptied the bench to save somebody's legs. Chen was better than me out there in every way that never makes a highlight. He cut lanes before they opened. He put me where I needed to be by being where he was always going to be, which he had done since freshman year, except that now it was worth money.

Holloway scored the go-ahead in the third off a Chen clearance that started behind our own net and got to his tape at the far blue line without touching anybody. On the bench after, he reached across two guys and knocked his stick against Chen's shin pad and said nothing about it.

Chen's face started to do something and then did not do it.

I wanted to get both hands on his shoulders and shake him until it fell out of him. I always wanted that when he swallowed a good one.

We won four to two, which after Saturday's loss at home put us two points back with the whole winter still to play.

The room after went thick the way it went after a road win, Holloway and Marsh trading whatever it was alphas traded when a thing had gone right, and Chen and I sat in the middle of it and got nothing, which was what we always got.

Then Marsh turned his chair around.

He did not get up. He swung it on its legs until he was facing our end of the room and asked where we had played college hockey. We told him. He said he had been through Northbrook once for a camp and the ice was garbage. That was the entire conversation. Two sentences, and he swung the chair back.

He had turned it around to have it, though.

Dinner was at a place the veterans had been going to for years, long tables, too much bread, and a waiter who brought the checks already split because hockey players in a group could not do math. I sat in the middle with Chen on my left and Connor across from us, working a beer he had been holding for an hour, because Connor consumed things the way he played defense: without rushing, without waste, and never quite finishing.

Connor was happy. Not Connor-happy, where you needed four years of history to tell it apart from a Tuesday. Actually happy, and none of it was about him.

A couple of weeks earlier Davis had taken the second kill unit off him and handed it to us on his way out of a room, and Connor had come over to my stall while I was still fighting a knot in my laces and told me I had stolen his penalty kill and not to get comfortable. Then he had almost smiled. And from that night to this one he had not made one sound about it. Not a joke with an edge under it. Nothing.

And now he was making me tell the third period twice. He asked me a question he already knew the answer to, because he had been standing forty feet away with a helmet on when it happened, and I did not put it together until much later that he had done it on purpose.

"You should've seen the second block," I said. I had told this one four times. "The puck came in and I just—"

"You closed your eyes," Chen said.

"I did not."

"Both of them. Shut. I was standing right there."

"That's called courage."

"That's called luck," he replied.

My knee was against Chen's under the table. I had put it there and he had not moved it.

Connor read the standings out to nobody in particular until Marsh told him to stop. Somebody had written a piece that week about the club shopping for a defenseman, and Connor had read that too. Connor read everything.

Then he looked at us. Not at me: at the two of us, like we were one shape, the way he had at his aunt's table when I took the bread off Chen's plate. He caught my eye and did not smile, and it was not because there was nothing there to smile about. It was because a smile would have been too small for it.

It was the loudest thing he said all night and I had no idea what it meant.

Chen's room was 412. Mine was 414. I went to mine, showered so fast I missed most of my body, put on shorts and a T-shirt and my hoodie, and went to his.

He opened the door already changed, with his hair damp, in one of the plain gray shirts he bought four at a time and wore until they went thin at the collar. My hoodie was the blue one from freshman year, too small in the shoulders now and the left cuff coming apart, and I was going to wear it until it fell off my body. We made the same money. He put his somewhere and I could not have told you where mine went, and when I asked him in a parking lot after physicals about splitting rent to save money he said yes so fast that I never once stopped to ask whether he needed to save anything.

His room was small. One king bed, a desk with a chair nobody had ever sat in, and a window over a lot with two cabs in it and their lights off. His bag was zipped shut by the closet. Mine was open on the floor of 414 with a dress shoe on top of a wrinkled button-down.

I was talking before the door clicked behind me. The whole game came out of me in one pour, every shift, every read, the stick on the shin pad, Davis's nod, the way that building went quiet in the third when we cleared the zone.

"—and Davis SAW it, that's the thing, he was looking right at us, I watched him look, I watched him watch you make that read—"

"He was looking at the clock."

"He was looking at YOU," I said.

"The clock was above me."

"Oh my God." I put both hands on top of my head. "Do you know what your problem is? Do you want to know what your problem is?"

"No."

"Somebody could hand you the Norris and you'd ask if there was a receipt."

"I'd ask what it weighs."

"THAT." I pointed at him with my whole arm. "That right there is the entire—"

And I stopped, because I was looking at him.

He was against the desk with his arms crossed and his hair still wet, letting me go the way he always let me go. I had a thought about him then that I had been having since freshman year without ever once putting words around it, which was that Chen was the only room in my life where nothing was being asked of me.

Everywhere else I was the loud one, the guy who kept the bus laughing and filled every silence in the building and made sure nobody in it felt alone, and I liked being that, I picked it, I was not complaining. But being that was a job.

With Chen there was no job. I could talk for an hour or say nothing at all and he took both exactly the same way, and in four years I had never once had to check whether I was too much, because Chen had decided early that I was the right amount and never went back to look at the decision again.

That was my safe place: a guy leaning on a desk with his arms crossed, waiting for me to finish.

He had signed the same contract I had and moved in on the other side of my wall and made me better every day for four years by being a player I was never going to be, one who saw the whole sheet like a grid and filed every gap in it, and he was here, in a hotel in Detroit, with wet hair and his bag already zipped.

He was mine in the only way I knew how to have him, which was all of them at once: best friend, roommate, defense partner, and the person I would call first about anything until one of us died.

So something came loose in me.