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I take him back in my fist and I don’t stop. Fast now, tight, the wet sound of it loud in the room. I watch his face the whole way. When he tries to close his eyes, I say his name and he keeps them open. When he goes, it’s with my name, his hand crushing my shoulder, his eyes locked on mine.

He comes in thick pulses over my fist and up the front of my coat, and I keep stroking him through it, slower and slower, until he flinches and makes a sound that means enough.

I hold him up. For the first time since I’ve known him, he gives me his full weight. His forehead drops to my shoulder, both hands on my back. I sit on the end of a bed in a rented apartment with forty thousand dollars of my own money in his accounts, holding a naked man who’s heavier than me until his legs come back.

He doesn’t offer to do anything for me.

I think that’s the first time he’s ever simply taken.

He sleeps in my bed. I drape the coat over the chair and lie on top of the covers in my clothes. After two, his breathing deepens. His hand crosses the sheet, stops an inch from mine, stays.

The phone rings at twenty to five.

I take it into the hall and shut the door.

“You’re awake,” Vera says.

“I am now.”

“Friday. Bring him to the office. Eleven o’clock, and tell him to park on the north side.”

A straddle carrier is already running under lights at the yard. I stand at my window in the dark, watching, saying nothing for slightly too long.

“He plays Minnesota tonight and Ottawa on Saturday.”

“Friday’s his day off. He’s out by 11:30, so he has time for his nap.” A pause. Glasses folding, four miles away. “Marek. I haven’t been in a room with him since you set the terms. Four months. Think about what it means that I want to be now. Wear a clean shirt on Friday.”

She hangs up first. She always does.

Behind the door, he’s still asleep. He’s taken the whole middle of the bed. He’s never had to share one.

11

Iwake up in a bed that’s not mine at ten past six.

Gray room. Gray light off a container yard. A chair with my suit on it, folded over the back by somebody who didn’t fold it the way I would have. He’s not in the bed and the covers on his side haven’t been pulled back, because he slept on top of them in his clothes.

He’s in the kitchen in the same shirt as last night, kettle on, reading glasses in place, laptop open. A coffee is already poured. He doesn’t push it toward me or mention it.

“You’ve got practice at eight,” he says.

“Yeah.”

I drink the coffee standing up. My hip has locked solid overnight, the way it does in any unfamiliar bed. I put my weight on the counter and work it out in small movements while he pretends to read.

“Kieran.”

“It’s fine.”

“I didn’t ask.”

He puts the glasses down and looks at me with his hair flat at the back, yesterday’s shirt on. I have to turn around to rinse the cup.

I get my jacket off the chair on the way out. He watches me do it. I don’t think anything of that at all.

I get to the rink an hour and a half early, because I always do.

The ice has been cut. The paint under it is white and hard. The whole place smells like ammonia, rubber, and old popcorn oil. The only other person is a man on a scissor lift changing a bulb over section 108.