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The handshake line took forty-three seconds. Connor counted without meaning to, which was a habit or maybe just the way his brain had learned to get through things that required his body to keep moving while the rest of him was already elsewhere. Forty-three seconds of squeezing gloves and saying the words and looking at Anaheim players who were smiling just slightly too wide, and then it was done. He was the last one off the ice, which he always was, not for any reason he could have explained to himself or anyone else, but simply because he stayed until there was nothing left to stay for.
In the locker room, everyone was waiting for someone else to go first. Dropping equipment somewhere, the ventilation going, one of the younger guys sitting with his head in his hands. Connor registered it from across the room, and felt something about it. He couldn't do anything with that, though, so he sat down in his stall and started pulling his gloves off. This routine had developed over years of doing this after a loss, and he looked at the floor.
Across the room, Leon was still fully dressed. He was just sitting there in all of it, elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on something that wasn't in the room. He was already sorting through the rubble with his forward momentum that refused to stay in the wreckage of another elimination any longer than strictly necessary. Usually, Connor found it grounding, but right now it just made him feel like the only person in the room.
He looked away.
Connor wasn't sure when he'd started cataloguing Leon the way he did, storing specifics of him somewhere outside the rest of his brain, but at one point he'd memorized Leon's face. He couldn't help but constantly ponder over the set of his jaw, the way his eyes went dark when he was genuinely angry versus the lighter flicker when something caught him off guard, the crease between his eyebrows when he was thinking through something. He knew all of it the way he knew where the tape was in his bag.
Someone down the row said something, and got some obligatory noise back. Connor knew he should be speaking (he was their captain, for fuck's sake), but he didn't contribute. He just took his skates off, then his pads, then sat in his base layer staring at the gray rubber floor.
The flatness inside him bothered him the most. He'd wanted the Cup for so long that the wanting had become the base for which his identity was built upon, and losing in the first round to Anaheim—to fucking Anaheim!—should have felt like an earthquake. Mostly, though, it just felt like closing a door on this portion of his life. He understood, sitting in the locker room of the Honda Center with his equipment in a pile, that he'd been wanting to leave Edmonton for much longer than he'd admitted to himself, and the seventh straight playoff elimination was finally making him look at it directly.
That was a dangerous thing to understand about yourself in a locker room 2,800 kilometers from home.
"Hey," Leon said, close, and Connor looked up. Leon, whose gear was somehow completely off now, was there with two water bottles, handing one over and sitting down in the stall next to Connor's. He took the bottle. Neither of them said anything for a while, and the silence was fine, because they'd done this routine so many times that the silence between them had no friction.
"Flight's at twelve-thirty," Leon told him, though they both understood Connor already knew that.
"I know."
"We should eat something first."
"Okay."
"I know a place near the airport."
"Sure."
Leon looked at him for just a second, deciding whether to push, and then looked away. They sat there until there was nothing left to sit there for.
They ate at a diner two blocks from the hotel in a back booth with a server who gave no indication of recognizing either of them. Leon ordered eggs and decaf coffee and something with avocado. Connor ordered toast, wondered what that said about him, and added scrambled eggs.
"Next year," Leon said, when they were halfway through their plates.
"Yeah."
"The penalty kill first, that was the whole series."
"I know."
"And if management actually moves on—"
"Leon. Can we please do this tomorrow?"
There was a pause, then Leon nodded curtly and picked up his fork and said "yeah, okay, sorry," and looked back down at his food. "I just need it to be something I can fix. You know."
Connor did know. And that was, he was realizing, a significant part of the problem.
—
There wasn't much talking on the flight back to Edmonton, partially because there was nothing to say and partially because it was one in the morning and half of the guys were asleep. Connor should've probably been looking down in shame of another failed season, but he couldn't help but observe the guys around him, because he wasn't sure how many more planes he'd be sharing with them. Zach was two rows up, his headphones on and his right cheek pressed against the window. Nuge was out before they hit altitude, his head lulling like he'd already made his peace and moved on. Connor had always privately envied his lack of bargaining.
Leon didn't sleep, and neither did Connor. They sat adjacent to each other, and at some point over the Pacific Northwest Leon shifted in his seat and then went still. Connor could tell from his breathing that he was awake. He'd learned to tell that somewhere over the years, which was either simply evidence of platonic closeness or a telling habit he should have examined sooner.
Edmonton in the early morning was gray and cold (so nothing out of the ordinary). Media sat at the perimeter of their terminal, their cameras and microphones at the ready, their usual questions already reframing the series as a question about Connor's future with the organization. He gave them neutral sentences that communicated absolutely nothing and walked through.
He could hear Leon talking behind him. We didn't execute, we'll look at what needs fixing, it's a process. Connor didn't turn around. He kept walking to his car and sat in the parking garage for ten minutes without starting the engine.
—
He called Leon forty-five minutes after getting home, which he hadn't really planned to do. He'd been standing in his condo looking at the living room and the living room had been looking back at him, and calling Leon was just the natural conclusion that arrived.
Leon picked up on the second ring, and said, before Connor could start anything: "I want to go to your lake house."
"You should go home," Connor rebutted. "It's the offseason. Your parents are there."
"I know. But I want to go to your lake house."
Leon's condo in Germany was fine. Was perfect, really. Was exactly what it was supposed to be, filled with modern furniture and untouched guest space and nobody waiting for him there, and Connor couldn't understand why Leon wouldn't want to spend the summer at home.
"You sure?" Connor asked.
"Yeah."
There were worse fates, Connor supposed.
—
The lake house was four hours north of Montreal, in the middle of nowhere, which was what Connor had wanted when he bought it three years ago one the advice of his agent, who'd said that he needed a place that was not Edmonton, not the building, not the noise of it, not the pressure of being that city's north star. He'd been here thrice since, both times alone, both times less than a week.
Leon arrived Sunday morning with two duffel bags and a guitar he'd found at a junk shop on the drive up. It was cracked along the body, and had at least two strings with serious intonation problems, but Leon carried it inside like it was a perfectly sensible thing to have brought. He leaned it against the living room wall, looked around the house, and said "nice" in a tone that was both genuine and slightly proprietary.
"It's a house," Connor said.
"It's a good house," Leon responded, and opened a living room window.
By the end of the first week the kitchen had been slightly rearranged. Leon had moved the dish rack, restacked things, put a specific yogurt brand in the fridge that Connor didn't recognize. There was German bread in the cupboard, now, and the dish towels were now in the drawer to the left of where Connor had always kept them, and it was, undeniably, a much better position for the dish towels. This was also the most irritating outcome.
They trained at a rink forty minutes away in an arena that smelled like every other arena, and were back at the house by early afternoon. Leon swam in the lake, and Connor opted for running the hardly-used road. They made dinner most evenings in the loose way they'd developed over years of shared apartments, Leon handling anything requiring actual skill, Connor chopping and opening things and handing them over. It worked fine.
Connor woke before Leon most mornings and stood on the dock with coffee and looked at the water. He'd forgotten how quiet the mornings could be; the only interruptions here were the occasional mourning dove and the rustling of leaves. He'd think about the rink session, about what he wanted to work on that day, and sometimes about the media cycle, which was already speculating his future, and then he'd try to think about something else, and the lake would be there doing its slow morning thing regardless, indifferent to Connor's woes.
If this keeps being—
Shut up.
If Edmonton doesn't—
He turned around and went back inside.
—
Leon had decided he was going to learn how to play his shitty guitar that summer. He'd never explicitly stated it, but it was evident from the way he'd started picking it up every evening and playing it on the dock like he truly believed the distance between his current ability and desired ability were bridgeable by just a single summer of effort. His first attempt was…interesting, and the most positive word Connor could think of to describe the second attempt was creative. But by the fifth or sixth evening, Connor had stopped qualifying and just started watching and listening from the open kitchen window while he washed up.
The sound floated up from the dock, trying to become music and not quite getting there. Leon played on anyway, earnest and still out of tune on two of the strings, the metal vibrating under his fingers. He's going to be doing this every evening all summer, Connor thought. He's not going to stop. There was something in the sheer unselfconsciousness persistence of Leon that both intrigued Connor and made him feel ashamed.
One evening Leon had been attempting something that Connor vaguely recognized as Muse. Connor was pretending to read. He'd been on the same page for an embarrassingly long time when Leon struck a chord so far from what it was supposed to be that something physically irked Connor and he had to put the book over his face to muffle his groan.
"I can hear you," Leon said.
"I'm reading," Connor mumbled into the book.
"You've been on the same page since before I started."
Connor lowered the book. Leon was gazing at him over his shoulder, trying for offended and landing closer to amused. "It's a process, Connor," Leon told him.
"Sure."
"All learning—"
"I know."
"—has a period of—"
"God, Leon, I know."
"You could be supportive."
"I am being supportive," Connor argued, though he knew he was being an asshole. "I'm sitting here."
Leon didn't say anything, just turned back to the guitar and played something worse than the sounds that had preceded it. Connor pressed his lips together, and turned the page of his book.
—
Zach called midway through the second week, coming through the kitchen speaker while Connor was brewing coffee and Leon was somewhere in the house arguing with the thermostat. The call was a good reminder that they'd been eliminated from the playoffs together, and their relationship predated the outcome or the one before that. Zach sounded like himself. He asked after a while if Leon was around.
"He's here," Connor said. "He's staying in Quebec with me."
Hyman chuckled for reasons Connor couldn't fully understand, and said "of course he did". Connor didn't ask what he meant by that.
—
One night he woke at two in the morning to some sound from the lake, and subsequently lay in the dark listening to the quiet house. Leon's door was closed, and through it Connor could hear nothing, which meant he was sleeping rather than reading. He did that sometimes late, Connor picking up on the faint sound of turning pages.
Connor would stay here forever if he could just keep doing this. Whatever this even was, two guys in a house near a lake, training and eating and listening to god-awful guitar. Connor wondered what here was, whether it entailed the lake house or something else.
He went back to sleep.
—
Leon's parents called him one evening while Connor was scrolling on his phone in the other room. He'd slipped into German almost immediately, and Connor sat in the next room listening to the shape of his voice without understanding any of it. He couldn't help but get lost in the rhythm of Leon's voice. It was so easy and quick and warm, because Leon was warm with the people he loved, and Connor still couldn't understand why Leon Draisaitl would possibly want to spend the summer with him.
He set his phone down.
Leon came back into the room still carrying the warmth of the call and said his mother had 'strong opinions' about the guitar.
"What kind of opinions?"
"She thinks I should take lessons."
"That's a reasonable opinion."
Leon pointed at him. "I don't need lessons. I just need time. You'll see." He winked at Connor before leaving the room.
Connor made a sound that was not a word, and watched from the window as Leon sat down on the patio and picked up the guitar.
—
It was a Tuesday in July when Connor understood what he was actually dealing with. They were driving back from the rink, windows down because Leon refused to use air conditioning at temperatures below thirty, and Leon had been in the middle of a detailed breakdown of what the team needed to do differently next season. He droned on about specifics regarding the power play and the penalty kill structure and a couple observations about particular organizational decisions that Connor privately agreed with completely (though he would never have said it out loud to anyone else).
Leon believed all of it, and Connor ruminated over that in the passenger seat, watching the county road and the trees. Leon had complete operational trust in the future. The correct adjustments applied to the correct problems would, simply, produce the correct result. He talked about bringing the Cup to Edmonton as a logistics problem, and Connor could practically feel the gleam in his eyes when he talked about the city specifically, about winning it in that building, about how the fans would feel.
He actually loves it, Connor thought. Leon belonged to Edmonton; he'd grown into that belonging over years of showing up and meaning it. He'd become something in that city and it had become something in him in return. There was no seam between those two things; Edmonton was the life Leon needed all along.
Connor had spent eight years in Edmonton becoming one of the greatest hockey players of all time and had never once felt the city the way Leon had felt it. He'd known this somewhere for a long time and handled the shame by keeping it at a remove from the rest of his consciousness. Right now, watching Leon's face in profile against the summer light coming in at a low angle, Connor realized that Leon was the life Connor needed all along.
"You're quiet," Leon said.
"I'm listening."
"You're thinking."
"I'm doing both. Some people can do both."
Leon glared at him with the mild skepticism he reserved for Connor's more shifty remarks and asked: "What do you think about the power play?"
Connor said he thought Leon was right about the second unit, because he did.
"But?"
"There's no but." Connor turned the radio on and kept his eyes on the road.
That evening, they sat on the dock long after they'd meant to go inside and wind down for the night. The water had gone flat, and the light was doing the long orange and pink thing it did out here in the evenings. Leon had been playing the guitar for a while, working on some particular sequence of notes, circling the pattern he wanted from different angles, coming closer sometimes and then going sideways again. At some point, he'd set it down and sat on the dock beside Connor, watching the water as their knees bumped into each other.
"I called my parents earlier," Leon said.
"I know. I heard you."
"My dad wants to know if I'm coming home to visit before camp."
"Are you?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Probably. Would that be weird?"
"Why would it be weird?"
"I don't know. We're sort of mid—" He stopped.
"Mid what?"
"Summer," Leon said. Connor knew that was not the word he'd started toward, but let it alone and kept looking out at the water. The light went on doing what it was doing.
—
The first article dropped on Friday. One of the national outlets reporting that Connor McDavid has privately expressed uncertainty about his long-term future with the Edmonton organization. Connor read it once all the way through, put his phone face-down on the kitchen counter, groaned, then turned the coffee maker on and started making eggs.
Leon came downstairs twenty minutes later and stood in the doorway of the kitchen, looking at Connor. Connor moved eggs around the pan.
"I saw it," Leon said.
"It's just noise," Connor said. "There's always noise in July. Nothing else to talk about?"
"Is there something you haven't told me?"
"I haven't decided anything."
"That's not what I asked, Connor."
Connor set the spatula down with a bit more force than necessary and turned around. Leon was leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed. He didn't seem angry, per se, but he clearly had no intentions of looking away.
"There's nothing decided," Connor repeated himself. "I don't have an answer."
"The article says—"
"I know what the fucking article says."
"Does it have any basis?"
"Leon. I don't know what my future looks like. That's true, okay? That's not—" He searched for the right word, but couldn't find it. "I'm not keeping anything from you."
"Okay," Leon said. He stood there a moment longer before he came in, poured himself a coffee, stood at the counter with it, and didn't say anything else. Connor turned back to the eggs.
—
They'd been on the dock after dinner, Connor with a new book because he'd lost interest in the last one, Leon with his guitar, the lake doing its evening routine.
Sometime around eight, Leon set the guitar down and said, without preamble: "I'm not fragile."
Connor lowered his book. Asimov would have to wait, he supposed.
"I don't need to be protected from information by having it not told to me." Leon was looking at the water. "I know you think you're being careful. But I've known you for eight years and you're my best friend and I know the difference between you not knowing something and you deciding I don't need to know it yet." He paused, looking up at the darkening sky. "I'm telling you now that the second one doesn't work for me."
"I'm not protecting you."
"Then what are you doing?"
"I genuinely don't—"
"Connor." Leon was looking at him now. "Say the actual thing."
Connor was quiet.
The lake was quiet.
He thought about the diner in Anaheim, the drive to his house in Edmonton (God, when did he stop thinking of his house in Edmonton as home?), sitting on the team plane feeling like a tourist in his own life. He thought about the dock in the mornings with his coffee. He thought about how much energy it took to keep not-knowing the fate he already knew. "I don't know if I'm staying," he admitted. "I don't know what I want next year to look like. I don't know if what I want and what makes sense are going to end up being the same thing." He exhaled. "That's all I've got right now."
Leon kept looking at him. "Say that it scares you. I know it scares you. Don't get detached again."
There was a long pause, then Connor rasped: "I don't know what's gonna happen. And it scares me." The relief of it was humiliating, how much lighter it felt just to have verbally acknowledged a basic human emotion.
Leon exhaled slowly through his nose. "Okay. Thank you." Before Connor could respond to being thanked for that, Leon told him: "Eat a real breakfast tomorrow. You had a single piece of toast this morning."
"I had eggs."
"You had two bites of eggs."
"They were substantial bites."
"I'm making breakfast tomorrow," Leon said, and Connor knew he wouldn't be taking any questions about it. Despite him wanting to protest, because Connor didn't like Leon's eggs, he looked at the water and wished the air could always feel like this.
He sat on the edge of bed for a long while that night, staring at his dark phone and thinking about calling his parents. He wondered if his dad would be able to tell from his voice that something was happening, but he decided not to find out tonight, and put his phone away, sitting there a little while longer. Connor would say I love you to his parents, knew it was the right thing to do, but saying it out loud was hard, so he didn't say it at all.
Connor lay back and went to sleep.
—
The heat arrived in the third week of July. Thirty-four degrees and then thirty-six, the lake warming from the surface. Connor always ran hot, so he found the whole thing uncomfortable but not unbearable. Leon, though, seemed to run at some temperature above what the average human body required and was absolutely ecstatic about it.
Their training sessions got shorter, just ninety hard minutes, and then back to the house where the heat would have gotten worse while they were gone. By noon, the options were shade, water, or inside. Leon chose water with a decisiveness suggesting the correct choice was obvious. Connor watched Leon choose water every day, and then he went in too, and the lake was cold enough a few feet down to matter.
There was an afternoon where it hit thirty-eight and they swam for a long time, not with any particular purpose, just moving about in the hot water, and Connor floated on his back and looked up at the cloudless azure. He had, for the first time in what felt like months, absolutely no thoughts. The sky just did whatever it was doing, and the water held him, and his brain was quiet for once. It was so startling that he almost ruined it by thinking about it.
"Don't fall asleep," Leon told him, somewhere to his left.
"I'm not."
"You look like you're falling asleep."
Connor opened his eyes to prove he wasn't. "I'm thinking."
"About what?"
"Nothing," Connor said. "That's the point."
"Oh," Leon responded, like the concept was interesting and he wasn't sure it would ever apply to him. "I don't really know how to do that."
"I know." Connor closed his eyes again.
—
The guitar was not getting better. If anything, it had gotten much more confident while remaining exactly as accurate as before. Connor found this specific combination, against all reason, oddly and deeply endearing. Leon had been working on some recurring thing, a few notes and chords, like he was trying to find his way to the song from the outside in. Connor had heard it enough times that he could have hummed it. He wouldn't have done that, but he could have.
One evening he was washing up after dinner, standing at the sink with the window open to the dock, and Leon was down there playing, the sound coming up through the screen. Connor left his hands in the warm water and listened to the strings buzz and thought about nothing in particular and everything at once, which was a bad combination, and dried his hands and went out to join him.
They sat on the dock for a long time that evening. Leon played. Connor read his Asimov, or didn't read, or sat and let the reading be an excuse for sitting in the same place as Leon and watching the water go dark.
At some point, Leon had set the guitar down and stared out at the water for a while. He said, not quite casually: "I'm gonna miss this place. When the summer's over."
Connor looked at him.
"The dock," Leon clarified, backtracking slightly. "The quiet."
"Yeah."
Leon nodded, like that settled all of their troubles, and looked back at the water, and Connor looked back at his book, and they just sat there. This is what Connor would miss, the specific unrepeatable feeling of sitting on a dock in the failing light next to a perfect man who was entirely comfortable with the world as it was, who was also very bad at the guitar, and who Connor had been watching all summer. And who had, Connor now understood by the glint in Leon's eyes in this moment, been watching him back.
He turned a page.
—
That night, Leon fell asleep on the couch. They'd been watching something, though Connor couldn't have said what, just some dumb YouTube video Leon had put on, and by ten-fifteen Leon's breathing had slowed and he was out. Connor reached over Leon's torso for the remote, considered resting his head on Leon's warm chest, but decided that was pathetic and turned the volume down. He sat in the quiet with the lamp on and thought about—it was embarrassing as hell to think about, but he was alone in his own head, whatever—how Leon had slept on his couch in January of Connor's rookie year, a night when they'd stayed up far too late and neither of them wanted to move, and Leon had just said I'll sleep here, I feel very safe on your couch. He'd said it like Connor's shitty couch had just been determined to meet some comfort standard and Leon was reporting the results. And Connor had just said good because what else could he say, and had stood there for a second before going upstairs to his bedroom.
He got the heavy blanket from the hall closet, brought it back, and laid it over Leon without waking him. Stood there an unnecessary extra moment, then felt pathetic and went to bed.
He lay in the dark and listened to the house and thought about things he couldn't realistically do anything with.
—
The next night, neither of them could sleep. Connor came downstairs at some time past midnight to find Leon at the kitchen counter with crackers, looking at the dark window. They took the car without really deciding to, Leon driving because Leon liked driving and Connor was a terrible driver, the county road empty and dark. Connor looked at the stars in the clear sky, immediately found it too much, and looked back at the road.
They drove for a while without going anywhere. Leon had the radio on at the lowest possible useful volume, tuned to some shitty country music. He drove with one hand and asked, after a while: "Does it get easier for you?"
"Losing?"
"Yeah."
"I think I've gotten better at the part after," Connor said. "I'm not sure the thing itself changes."
Leon turned this over.
"First time we got eliminated," Connor admitted, "I drove and sat in a Wendy's parking lot for two and a half hours."
Leon looked at him. "Why Wendy's?"
"I don't know. It was just where I ended up."
"That's—" Leon started laughing, though it was gone as fast as it came. "That's the most human thing you've ever told me."
"I'm very human."
"You're not," Leon rebutted, though not unkindly. "Most of the time you're not." He looked back at the road. "But that's pretty human."
They ended up at a small graveled pullout where the road opened to the water. They stood at the old wooden railing and looked at the lake, which was very dark, and the heat was still there in the middle of the night. Connor stood at the railing and looked at the water, and refused to think about his future with Edmonton.
He didn't say anything, and neither did Leon. They stood there for a while, and then they went home.
—
Connor and Leon were doing the dishes. Leon was drying in the intermittent, distracted way he did everything domestic—setting a plate down to look at his phone, picking it back up, setting it down—and Connor was washing and handing things over in the same rhythm they'd been doing all summer. Leon said "hey" and Connor said "yeah" and Leon said—
"It's been a long, long time since I felt like there wasn't anywhere else to be. Y'know? Like I didn't need to be anywhere but where I was." Leon didn't take his eyes off the plate he was holding. "And I want to know if it's—" He didn't finish his sentence.
Connor turned off the water. "If it's what?"
Leon didn't answer. He set the plate on the counter without drying it. His jaw was doing the thing it always did when he was deciding how honest to be. Then he picked up the plate again, but not before going still for a moment, and dried it and handed it back to Connor for the stack.
Connor took it. He could feel his own heartbeat in a way that was not appropriate for someone who was supposed to be casually doing the dishes.
Leon's unfinished sentence lingered uncomfortably in the space between them. Both of them knew what it was and both of them were declining to acknowledge it, and some things survived only because you never put language on it, and maybe this was that thing. Maybe naming it would change what it was or make it impossible to keep or make it necessary to act on. Neither of them were ready for any of those outcomes.
Connor handed Leon a bowl. Leon dried it.
Afterward they sat on the couch and Leon put something on and ordered a frankly unreasonably quantity of Chinese food. It arrived an hour later and they ate it and the unfinished sentence lost some of its weight.
When Connor got up to run the county road, Leon walked him to the door, which was not something they usually did. Corner turned in the doorway. Leon was standing in the hall in the low lamp-light, his arms folded, looking at Connor.
"Don't disappear on me," Leon said.
"I'm just going for a run."
"You know what I mean. Don't disappear on me."
"I'm not going anywhere."
They held each other's gaze for a second too long.
"Okay," Leon said.
The county road was dark, the lake a dark shape through the trees to his right, and he ran and tried not to think about anything in particular, which was the point of running, and which only worked for about twenty minutes. Somewhere in the back half of the road, with his lungs doing their thing, he understood that he'd known for a while, probably, he'd been knowing it all summer, that he loved Leon too much.
He ran for a while longer, and came back the long way, hoping Leon would have gone to bed by now so Connor wouldn't have to look him in the eye. When he got back, Leon's door was shut, but his light was still on, a thin line under the door. Connor stood in the dark hallway for a long moment and looked at it. Then he went to his own room and sat on the edge of the bed and pressed his thumb against his lower lip, staring at the floor.
Leon was going to stay in Edmonton, was always going to stay in Edmonton. And Connor was sitting in the dark feeling sorry for himself about loving someone he had no business loving, someone who had built his entire life around a city Connor was already planning to leave. He'd known all summer and came back every morning anyway, back to the dock and the kitchen and the terrible guitar and God, he was fucking pathetic.
He went to bed and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Down the hall, at some point, Leon's light went out.
—
They'd trained hard the first week of August, harder than most of the summer, the product of something restless and competitive in both of them as September got closer and the suspension of the summer started to thin out. On Friday, the drills had gotten edgier than drills usually got between them. That old competitive static that was usually productive in the colder months had an additional charge today. Leon had won more puck battles than Connor. Connor knew it, and Leon knew that Connor knew it. They'd driven back mostly quiet.
On the deck after dinner, still plenty warm at nine, Leon began talking. "You've never actually loved Edmonton the way it loves you, have you?"
Connor thought about deflecting with the neutral sentence, his press conference answer, the technically true statement that communicated nothing. Then he was tired. "No," he admitted. "I don't think I have."
Leon went quiet, then eventually asked, "How long?"
"I don't know. A while. I don't know when it started."
"What does that mean."
"It means the loss against Anaheim didn't start it. It's been there for a while."
Leon looked at the lake for a long moment. "I understand that. I think I've known that about you for a long time. I don't agree with it, and it kind of pisses me off sometimes, but I understand it."
"Okay."
"What I don't understand—" Leon turned to look at him, his voice going flat, "—is this summer. All of this." He did a small hand gesture between them. "If you already knew, if the door was already open, was any of this you being here? Or were you just deciding?"
"Both," Connor said. "That's the honest answer."
"That's not fair."
"I know."
"You don't get to be in something and leaving it at the same time and call it honesty." Leon exhaled sharply. "I could feel it, all summer. Every time you looked at something, it was like you were just trying to memorize it. Like you were already writing it down as a thing that happened to you once upon a time."
Connor said nothing because this was accurate, and he had nothing to refute it with.
"I'm not going to move," Leon continued. "I want you to know that clearly. I'm not going to move for you, not for anyone. Edmonton is where I am, it's where I'm gonna be, and that's not something I'm going to reconsider."
"I would never ask—"
"No, you'd just leave."
The deck was quiet. Connor looked at his hands on the railing and thought about eight years of standing in buildings with this man, and the summer, and the lake house kitchen in the early morning, and the evenings with the guitar, and said: "I think of you as my brother. Although that sounds dumb. It's not that, it's never been exactly that, and saying it like that would be me doing the thing you just said I do." He looked at the water. "I know what this is. I've known for a while what this is. I'm not going to pretend I don't, not anymore."
"Then say it."
"Leon. I can't."
"Why not."
"Because I—" Connor's voice cracked. "I don't know what it means for what comes after. I don't think it changes anything. I don't know how to want to stay somewhere and know I won't stay very long. I can't figure out how both of those things are true at the same time and I've been trying all fucking summer to make it work and I can't. I just can't."
Something in Leon's face shifted. He didn't respond.
They stood at the railing together for a while. At some point, Leon went inside without a word. Connor heard the screen door and then nothing. He stayed out there until it was fully dark, until the lake had disappeared into itself, then went inside too. Leon's door was closed.
In the morning, Leon had made coffee and left a cup on the counter. Connor came downstairs, found it, and stood at the window with it, looking out at the lake. Leon came down a few minutes later. Neither of them said anything about the night before. They just ate, went to the rink, and the day was a day.
—
The last week of August didn't announce itself as the last week. Time moved without courtesy notices, and Connor knew this, but his brain was never quite able to adjust from being in the middle of things to being at the end of them. The distinction, to him, was usually only available in retrospect.
Something in the air had changed. The days were still warm, and the lake was still there, and Leon still hadn't gotten any better at the guitar. The mornings had a different quality, though, a certain sharpness to them, and training camp was three weeks out. They both knew it and neither of them said so.
They skated early on a Tuesday morning. The arena was nearly empty, ice crew just wrapping up, one attendant in the corner with a clipboard. They ran drills they'd run ten thousand times before, Connor and Leon moving the way they'd always moved, without needing to look at each other, their bodies running on a shared dialect. Connor passed without looking because he knew where Leon would be. Leon shot the way he always shot, hard and a little reckless, angling for the top right corner on the theory that if he aimed there long enough he'd be right often enough for it to be worth it. He was right often enough that the theory held.
Afterward they sat in the corridor outside the shitty locker room, their backs against the wall, the way players always ended up on the floor of corridors eventually.
They got coffee from the gas station down the road because the arena coffee was remarkably awful. Connor looked at Leon beside him. It had been four hours since they'd left the house that morning, and he'd already spent some of it wandering through the lake house in his head—the kitchen with the morning light, the dock, the dish rack in its better position, the way the house sounded at night when everything was quiet and Leon was scrolling on his phone. He was running his hands along the memories knowing that he was already, in some way, leaving them.
"Are you gonna be okay?" Leon asked in the gas station parking lot.
Connor looked at him. He had no fucking clue. "Yeah."
He couldn't tell if Leon knew he was bluffing, but Leon just nodded and continued walking to the car.
—
Leon left on Saturday. Two duffel bags, same as he'd arrived, although a new loaf of German bread was still in the cupboard and the dish rack was still moved. Connor noticed and had no plans to correct either. Leon went back inside for the guitar and carried it out under his arm, setting it in the back seat of the Uber.
Connor was in the driveway. Leon said something to the driver, closed the car door and turned around. They stood there in the cool morning.
They hugged the way they'd hugged for eight years, Leon's hand on the back of his shoulder, brief and total. Connor had spent eight years becoming the best player in the world and had somehow, in the process, found the one person who made him want to be somewhere, and it was the wrong somewhere. Or maybe there was no right somewhere, maybe that was the whole thing. Connor wondered if he was leaving the life he needed.
"Have a safe flight," Connor told him.
"I will." Leon paused with his hand on the passenger side door. "Oh, and Connor?"
"Hm?"
"I love you. I always will."
He got in. Connor watched the car go down the gravel road and turn and disappear, then went inside and stood in the kitchen for a moment. He looked at the dish rack, because a part of Leon would always live in this stupid lake house now, and then he sat at the table and called his agent. "Start looking." He didn't elaborate, didn't need to.
After the call ended, Connor sat there with his phone on the table and looked at the slightly elegiac afternoon light and thought about the dock in the evening, and the guitar, earnest and out-of-tune, going on regardless.
He got up. He started packing.
epilogue
Connor was in Columbus on a Tuesday in November, in the last year of his NHL career, when he turned the broadcast on.
He was forty-one years old now. He'd captained Minnesota to four Cups. It was his last season. He knew it and he was fine with it, or had at least gotten to be fine with it through his body gradually spending more and more time doing its accounting in the mornings, his knees and shoulder saying things he used to ignore and now factored into his routine. He had a matinee game, then a dinner meeting with his agent that ended early, then came back to his hotel room, sat on the edge of the bed with the remote and didn't do anything with it for a while. He hadn't been sure what he was going to watch, but he turned the TV on anyway.
The broadcast was from Edmonton (of course it was, the universe was evil, it was always going to be from Edmonton) and the Edmonton crowd was giving everything they had with a sincerity that was almost hard to look at directly. Connor watched the camera sweep the building. That ice, those boards, the press box here he'd looked up a thousand times without thinking about it. He'd played there only six months ago, but the place looked exactly the same, and it briefly startled him.
Leon was at center ice in a burgundy suit, holding a framed jersey, standing with some discomfort because he was great at being in motion, but had to now stand still to receive something. Leon had retired two years ago via a press conference after Edmonton got knocked out of the conference finals, the whole city turning out despite the fresh loss, Connor had seen the clips, and the number retirement now followed, #29 permanently going up to the rafters of Rogers Place. He'd said something to his wife without taking his eyes off the ice and she laughed.
Connor sat in the hotel room and watched the ceremony unfold. Leon's speech was short but specific. He thanked people by name, talked about Edmonton with the complete sincerity he'd always had for the city, the kind that occasionally made other people uncomfortable because they couldn't locate the media performance, and there wasn't one, there had never been one. Leon had meant every last thing he'd said about the city. The crowd was loud when he held up the framed jersey and louder when he set it back on its easel. Connor studied his face on the screen. It had been a long, long time since the lake house (which Connor had sold the following summer), and he'd memorized Leon's face so thoroughly and so early that the older version sat over the younger one like a double exposure. He'd played against Leon dozens of times in the 12-year-gap, caught up with him a few times, but if he wasn't careful, he saw both at once: the man at center ice and the man on a dock in Quebec in the evening light, playing a guitar that was terrible and never stopped. Connor was careful. He looked at the man at center ice. Connor had been done with the framings of I should've stayed and I made the right choice for a while, because they required their last summer together to have been a mistake or sacrifice, and it truthfully hadn't been either. It had simply been two men being exactly who they were, Leon who had always been going to stay and Connor who had always been going to leave, and one last summer when neither of them had to be right yet. The summer had been real, it was still real, it always would have been real.
He was genuinely, completely faithful to his wife, who he'd met ten years ago at a bar in Chicago. She'd seen what he was and hadn't needed him to be anything else, and was at home right now watching this broadcast and would ask him about it when he got back and would mean the asking. His daughter, who had turned six in August, had apparently done something funny at dinner. She'd texted him about it earlier and he'd smiled at his phone in the corridor outside the hotel restaurant, a helpless smile she'd been producing in him for years without apparent effort. None of that was consolation.
I love you, he thought, in the present tense in the direction of the television. It wasn't urgent anymore, had been absorbed into the whole of a life, had become texture instead of wound, but it remained true. It didn't require anything from him, but it was there. Connor had come to understand over the years that love could exist in the past tense in terms of its urgency while remaining in the present tense in terms of its truth. That this was not sad, or no sadder than anything else about time, which moved in only one direction and took things with it as it went but left their outlines, left the shape of them.
On the screen, Leon waved to the crowd a last time, his arm around his wife, and the camera followed him to the boards and then cut to the jumbotron. Connor turned the TV off.
Connor's phone lit up on the nightstand. His wife: she's asking where you are, I told her Columbus and she wanted to know why you were in Columbus and I said work and she said is that where the hockey is and I said yes and she said okay. He picked it up and smiled and wrote back How does she know what Columbus is? and set it down.
He looked at the blank television. Words were futile devices. They always were, and he'd known this for a long time, had spent a summer living inside the proof of it, and the knowing still hadn't changed anything. He'd kept reaching for the words anyway, everyone did, because the words were all they knew. The words were aimed at the people you meant them for, and some of it landed and some didn't and the landing wasn't really the point, or maybe the landing was the point but the failing to land was its own thing, was its own true record of what had been attempted.
He set an alarm for six. Morning skate. Last season. He turned the bedside lamp off. He went to sleep.