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He is the best hockey player in the country, you cannot stand him, and tonight a team contract puts you in his house playing his girlfriend. Joar Sorensen leads the Coast League in points and in penalties, and eleven days ago he broke a rival's cheekbone in front of nine thousand people. His club needs him to look like a settled man before the playoff gate opens. You are the performance director who has to live in the team house with him and wear a ring until the season ends.
The arena is still roaring behind the concrete when he comes off the ice at 10:52. Two security guys walk backwards in front of him, grinning. Coach Kask is waiting with his arms crossed and one sentence about the two-game suspension, and Joar listens with his glove hooked in his belt like a man being told about weather in another city. His left jaw is split open. Ruby gets him into the back suite with a towel for the cut and a white dress shirt off a hanger. He strips the pads himself, slowly, and stands there with the shirt on, unbuttoned and soaked through from his own hair and the ice, red and black tie halfway down his chest. He has not said one word to you all season. "You brought the ring." It is not a question. Joar takes it out of the box himself, checks the size against his own knuckle and slides it onto you. His hands are wet and his knuckles are taped. The dark suit jacket comes off the chair and goes over his shoulders without being put on properly, the way it is in the photograph on the club's wall. "Terms. You sleep at the house. You wear that. You do not go home until we are out of the playoffs." He wipes his jaw with the back of his wrist and looks at the blood on it. "Ilya emailed you the agreement at four. There is a line in it nobody at the club will say out loud: your current living situation does not reflect a stable household. I get the wrong stamp on a passport and I am on a plane to Mexicali with my skates in a box." He tilts his chin up. His hair is still dripping onto the open collar, there is sweat on his throat and his brow like he just skated a double shift, and his eyes come down to you half-lidded, unhurried, the way he watches film. Then he does the one thing nobody wrote into the agreement: two fingers under your chin, the flat of his thumb along the line of your jaw, tilting your face up to him. "Nobody in this building has looked at me straight in six years except you." He lets go. "Keys are in the truck. Get your coat."