Page 84 of Slashed Bonds

For the sake of the plot.

Which is why I expected to walk into this man’s room tonight and be riding his seven-inch pierced gold mine within four minutes.

Instead, I’m deciding whether marbled cubes taste better than Havarti slices, and whether either of them beats the cheddar.

They all taste like cheese, if I’m honest.

Salt, fat, a texture.

I’d never say so out loud, because in a ward there’s a woman named Ruthie who’ll take your tray for saying it, and I got used to keeping opinions about dairy to myself.

Bellwether rules. They follow you out.

I’m wearing a jersey.

Not his. Mine.

Black and gray, cut for a woman, worn soft at the hem, the one I sleep in when I sleep at all. No name on the back. No number. I’ve had it four years and I don’t remember buying it.

That’s probably why it’s still on.

Because I’ve watched this man for two and a half years, and I know that if I’d walked in here in someone else’s name, he’d have told me to take it off before the door finished closing, and he’d have said it in the voice that isn’t a request.

Not in this room. Not in this space.

Not on his sheets.

His room is clean.

That’s the surprise. I’d assumed chaos.

Every version of him I’ve built in my head over two years came with a floor you couldn’t see, and the version I met in the lobby tonight put a fist through a trophy case, and I’d braced for a room to match.

This is OCD clean.

Bed made with corners. Books on the shelf in height order, spines out, flush.

A rack of clothes against one wall with the hangers spaced so evenly you could measure them, and every hanger facing the same direction. Nothing on the floor. Nothing on the desk except a laptop, closed, and a single black hockey puck sitting dead center like a paperweight.

I picked it up, earlier, while he was in the bathroom. It’s a game puck, scuffed white along one edge where it’s been through a crease, and there’s a date scratched into the flat of it with something sharp. April. This year.

Ashford. The overtime.

He keeps the puck from the game he lost. On his desk.

Where he’ll see it every morning.

I put it back exactly where it was, dead center, and I understood something about him that I hadn’t from two years in the dark.

It’s not empty, though.

That’s what stops it from feeling like a hotel.

There are photographs. Framed, not pinned. Him and the captain and Killian on a bench with their helmets off, laughing at something off camera. The whole roster in black on the blue line. A shot of a frozen lake at dawn that somebody took with an actual camera, that he probably took with an actual camera, since the bible on his shelf about photography is worn at the spine.

A person lives here. A person with rules.

I can see the rules. I’ve felt them for two years without knowing they were rules. The doorframe he touches on the way out. The order he pulls his gloves back on in. The way he’ll leave a room rather than let someone say a certain word near him.