He tells you that you smell like home, even though the places you were born lie 5,000km apart. He likes that you use kilometres instead of miles, judging distances by rinks instead of football fields. He says you taste like the cold and you believe him, because he tastes like summer and scuffed leather and every night you laid out watching the light fading, waiting for the stars to blink awake.

His hands are rough with calluses, but they still fit around the neck of a stick, and you like the way they feel on your body. You know every scar and bump of that multi-million dollar right hand, how his fingers line up on your ribs, the weight of his palm on the back of your head. He sat down once and went through every pitch for you, the changeup, the breaking ball, that wicked fastball that can't be clocked on some radar guns, his fingers sliding easily from one position to the next, muscle-memory so deep that it overrides everything else. Once, in his sleep, he cupped the knob of your shoulder in his palm, and his fingers fell straight down your bicep. The next time you watched him start he threw that pitch for the out and you thought about where those hands had been the night before, you wondered who he'd been facing down in his dream when he held you so carefully.

You'd be embarrassed by your obsession with his body, but he seems just as fascinated with you. He likes your scars; he likes hearing the stories behind them, kissing the thin white line under your chin as you tell him about crashing the snowmobile when you were 10 (and the whipping that ensued once your mother realized you were all right). When you kiss he runs his thumb along the uneven ridge of your collarbone, feeling out the dip where it cracked in Juniors when some guy sent you face-first into the boards. You missed a month, and the next time you played that team you skated up to the guy and threw your gloves down the way you'd seen a thousand other players do it. It was the first time you ever got your ass kicked. You were 16.

You talk about hockey a lot, because it's common ground. You give him shit for being a Canucks fan even though he makes his home year-round in Oakland now; he makes fun of you for growing up a Sharks fan even though you were born in the opposite corner of the continent. You don't talk about baseball much unless you're out with his teammates, in which case the conversation can range from baseball, to music, to the merits of the In-N-Out in Oakland versus the one in Union City. Barry Zito gives you his number to give to Scott Thornton to arrange a time to do yoga together; as he scrawls it on your hand you think dazedly, I'm touching a major league pitcher for the team I grew up watching. Then it hits you that you're fucking a major league pitcher for the same team, and you find his eyes across the room and smile.

Mostly, though, you don't go out that much, and there are times you don't talk that much, either. He likes your silence almost as much as he likes your voice; they both sound like home to him. You, on the other hand, like the ways he's Americanized: the swagger in his walk, the smirk in his eyes. The way he turns the heat on when it's 18 degrees inside, the rainouts which take place once in a blue moon that he likes to complain about. When you point out that he should be used to rain he reminds you that there's a reason he left Victoria. You don't ask him why then he keeps the reminder of you around.

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