The Linemate's Secret

Black tape, three layers, tight enough to sing when you flick it. Finn Callaghan works the roll from heel to toe the way he has ten thousand times before, and two stalls over Leo Tremblay will not let the subject go: it is the same stick as last game, it has a dent three inches above the blade, and Finn checked it for cracks after the second period. *I'll get a new one.* *You won't.* Then the coach comes out of his office with a clipboard and says there is a scout from Bridgeport in the stands tonight, and that the scout is here for Callaghan, and fifteen guys in various states of dress turn around to look at him. Some with congratulations. One, from the far end of the room, with something closer to hunger. Finn has been working toward this since he was eighteen. He is also the kid who stood at a kitchen window in Port Sterling with his palm flat on the cold glass and watched his mother get into an idling car and not look back, and who was told by his father that men handle things and do not fall apart. Leo has been his linemate for six years. Leo has a grin left over from a bike crash when he was twelve and a scar on his upper lip that pulls sideways with it, and Finn has never known what to do with either. What Finn notices this season, between the shouting and the missed passes and a two-minutes-left tie game that ends badly, is that Leo's left hand does not want to close all the way, and that Leo has been hiding it. What he finds later is a letter Leo never sent. Darian Cross, their own defenseman, notices something too, and Darian has a phone, and Darian has never once been in a hurry to use a winning hand. His sister Nadia sees the rest of it from a barstool and says it out loud, which is worse. An MM hockey romance about two linemates, a call-up that only one of them can take, an injury nobody has reported, and a video somebody is saving. The romance is closed-door.