Page 29 of Take Two

His brow furrows and I point toward the far face-off circle before he can ask.

“Your body follows your eyes. Every hockey player learns this young, usually the hard way. The moment you start looking down at your feet or the blade or the ice directly beneath you, you are already a second behind the play. You have to look ahead of yourself. Your body will follow if you trust it.”

He absorbs it without argument. No deflection, no ego stepping in to complicate the correction. He simply takes it in and tries again, quietly and without ceremony.

Five minutes later the turn is cleaner, the edge held through the curve without the scramble at the end. I bring my stick down against the ice once, a sharp approving crack that carries well in an empty building.

“Better,” I tell him.

The grin that crosses his face is immediate, bright and entirely too pleased with itself, and before I can think about it clearly I hear myself say, “You really do like being told you did something right,” with a warmth in my voice that I had not exactly planned for.

“Everybody likes being told they did a good job,” he replies, passing me with an easy, deliberate look that communicates more than the words do.

“Not that much,” I say, unrepentant. Let us talk about the amount of sex we had without actually talking about it. I’m down.

“That felt judgmental.” He tilts his head with a look I recognize as theatrical suspicion.

“Observational.” I raise my eyebrows once with what I will charitably describe as complete innocence.

He shakes his head and pushes away from me. “You know, your public image is entirely wrong.”

I blink. The shift in subject is so abrupt that I take a second to follow it. “My what?”

“Your public image,” he says, gliding backward a comfortable distance before turning cleanly onto his forehand with a fluency that has noticeably improved over the last hour. “Every interview I have ever come across describes you as quiet.” He says it with the particular careful tone of someone who has, in fact, come across more than a few such interviews, and is choosing not to draw attention to that detail.

“I am quiet,” I say honestly.

“You’re sarcastic,” he replies, with the measured certainty of a man updating a file.

I consider this. “Those things are not mutually exclusive.”

His smile widens and it moves across his face so freely that I feel that damn pull again.

“My, my, my, Mr. Reed,” I say, pointing my stick at him. “You want to be careful. You’re getting comfortable.”

“I’ve been comfortable,” he says with a shrug and a small pursing of his lips that I recognize as a lie.

The transparency of it makes me laugh before I can manage not to, and Cyaire points at me the second it happens.

“There. That. Right there.”

“What?” I ask, assembling an expression of perfect innocence.

“Your laugh,” he says in wonder.

I look at him. He looks back at me. Neither of us says anything for a moment.

The silence stretches longer than it should. Long enough for something to shift in the quality of it. Long enough for the particular stillness of an empty arena to become noticeable in a way it was not a moment ago. Long enough for the image of another version of this man to surface, younger and uncertain and looking at me across the rim of a whiskey glass in a bar.

I clear my throat, the sound coming out slightly rougher than I intended.

“Let’s grab a puck.”

Cyaire lets me have the redirect without comment, the understanding behind his eyes quiet and entirely unhelpful. He simply nods and follows me toward the bench, and I tell myself that I am grateful for the generosity of that and nothing else.

We spend the next half hour with a stick and puck. His hands are rusty, the control inconsistent, the weight transfer still finding its way toward the reliable side of things. His determination is steady and completely relentless. Every time the puck gets away from him, he retrieves it without comment and starts again from where things went wrong. When a drill doesn’t work the way it was meant to, he doesn’t wait for me to notice. He asks why, immediately, with the direct and unglamorous honesty of someone who cares more about understanding than appearance.

The more time passes, the more I understand why the medical school path was ever on the table for him. The same qualities are present in both vocations if you know what to look for. The focus, the willingness to sit inside difficulty without performing impatience, the refusal to move forward until the thing in front of him is genuinely understood. Those are not acting skills. Those were there before the camera was.