Harrisburg Railers Box Set 1

by R J Scott

  He left then, closing the door behind him.

  As soon as the door shut, I could feel the tension in my body leach out a little at a time as I attempted to sort through the feelings inside me.

  Was it bad that once the fear subsided, in its place there was honest-to-goodness arousal? Was it wrong to feel a hundred kinds of confused about the man who’d just left?

  Thankfully, next up was this big Russian called Stanislav Lyamin.

  “Call Stan,” he said, and extended his big, meaty hand. I shook it, and he had a grip of iron. He also had a wide grin, soft dopey eyes, and a tattoo on his biceps of a yellow figure I could swear was a Pokémon. Interesting.

  “Do we need a translator?” I asked in English. Not that I could have asked that in Russian. He stared at me blankly, and I opened up my phone and searched for Google Translate. I typed in “Do you need a translator?” and it returned “Вам нужен переводчик?” Which I could show him, or maybe I could use the phonetic-type thing under it. “Vam nuzhen perevodchik?” I asked.

  He looked at me blankly again, and then just as I was considering phoning management and asking for a translator, he snorted a laugh.

  “English good,” he said, giving me a lot of doubt about exactly how good his English was.

  I cleared my throat, assumed Stan was what he wanted to be called, and played the delaying tactic of taking a long pull of my cooling coffee.

  “Caffeine bad,” Stan said, then picked up the Snickers on my desk. He wrinkled his nose at it, then stared at me. “Lunch?” he asked, and dropped the offending chocolate bar back onto my paperwork.

  Yep, a snickers and coffee was my lunch, but that was only because I didn’t have time to stop today. Chocolate plus caffeine equaled energy, which was what I needed.

  “Yes.”

  “Eat is shit, da?” he asked.

  “Da,” I said, then shrugged in that “What can I do?” kind of way.

  He frowned at me and leaned forward, and I braced myself for more Russian commentary. He said nothing.

  “Okay,” I said, readying what I wanted to say next and clearing words from Google Translate.

  “Okay,” Stan repeated cheerfully, stood up, and left the office, closing the door behind him.

  Oh. That went well. Guess I really did need a translator.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” I called, and the door opened. Yet another big hockey player stood there looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.

  Well, me too. I wasn’t sure I could handle another session in this small room with the door shut—not when the remnants of a tight anxiety refused to leave me.

  I’m a professional. I can do this.

  “Hi.” I extended a hand.

  The player shook it but sat down quickly. “Dieter Lehmann,” he began, and moved from foot to foot like he was nervous. “My jersey number is 56, I play left wing,” He stopped and seemed to gather his thoughts, because the nerves slipped away and abruptly he was all confidence, “I’m kind of an all-around sex god.”

  I loved the way hockey players identified themselves by name, position and number. The sex god part was a bit worrying, though. I looked at him steadily, but he didn’t retract the sex god thing. Great. He looked a little pale, and tired, but knowing a jock he’d probably been up all night partying. I really had my job cut out here.

  “Have a seat, Dieter.”

  Dieter sat, and wriggled in the chair like he wasn’t comfortable. Finally he looked up at me, and I saw that confidence hadn't slipped.

  “Before we start,” he began, “I have the number 56 now, but if your records show me having 69 on my jersey in college, then you know it was only a joke. Right?”

  I nodded but inwardly groaned. This was going to be a long day.

  Four

  Adler

  The fucker didn’t believe me.

  That bounced around inside my head all during morning skate. How could he not believe me? I mean, come on, right? I tell the guy I’m gay and he looks at me like I’m the biggest liar in the world, then throws me out like a burger teeming with botulism. It wasn’t like I told people I was gay all the time. Apollo knew, but he was my brother from another mother… and father. Just Cole and Karrie Anne knew, and now Layton Foxx. None of them, aside from Apollo, had given two shits. How can you not give a damn about something as important as that?

  “Is there a reason you’re standing there?”

  I gave Coach Madsen a confused look.

  “Offensive drills are done. This is a defensive meeting.”

  I looked around and saw only defensive players staring at me.

  “Oh right, yeah, I knew that. I was just wondering if anyone had seen that movie with the guy and that girl? No? Pity. It’s really good. Things blow up. I’ll just go now.”

  Adler, you are a moron.

  One of the equipment managers slid some guards onto my blades, and I thumped off, face red, stomach all sorts of knotted up, my goal the dressing room. Honestly. It had been my plan to shower and go home to talk to Apollo. Then I’d eat, come back to the barn, and go out there and beat the sass out of Philadelphia. But then I saw Layton Foxx in that tiny room, and all my plans went left of center. I stopped on a dime, took a step in reverse, and walked into the press room. His head came up and his eyes—they were incredible stormy gray eyes with thick, dark lashes—flared when he saw me. He grabbed the stapler.

  “Okay, see here’s the thing…” I used my stick to shut the door. “I don’t think you get how hard it was for me to tell you that I’m gay.”

  “I really wish you’d open the door.” He held on to that stapler like it was a Ruger or something. “We’re done for the day.”

  “Yeah, I thought so too, but how you treated me is stuck in my chest.” I thumped on my breastbone with a gloved hand.

  Layton eyed me nervously. He was so damn enticing in an uptight, corporate way. He needed me to peel him out of that spiffy suit, lay him over that ugly desk, and make love to him until he was loose as a damn goose. I bet he bottomed. I hoped he did. Also, he needed to let go of that stapler.

  “Are you going to shoot me in the eye with a staple or something?”

  “What? No.” He put the stapler down but left a well-manicured hand resting on it. He had nice fingers. Soft looking, like he never did dirty work or tinkered with engines. Not that I tinkered with engines either, but my hands looked like hockey player hands. Scarred up from fights and being slashed by opposing players. “You need to go, though.”

  No, what I need to do is reach down and adjust my cock, Foxx. Christ, but your surname fits you.

  “I think you should at least acknowledge how tough it was for me to tell you my sexual orientation.”

  He studied me for a long moment, his fingers slipping from the stapler to rest on his piles of papers and forms.

  “So can you cough something out, or not?”

  “I understand how hard that must have been for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I turned, opened the door, and went to the dressing room more confused than I had been before I’d intimidated Foxx into saying what I wanted. Shit. Now I felt like a dick. A dick with a boner. A double dick. I couldn’t shower until the fucking thing went down. The morning was officially a train wreck for the newest addition to the Railers team. I snorted at my own joke, then sat down to will my erection away.

  “See, this is why I don’t allow you on Twitter,” Apollo huffed as he flung a plate of broiled chicken, asparagus and wild rice in front of me. “You have no filter. You just feel and talk. I blame it on Cole and Karrie Anne. If they’d actually spent some quality time with you when you were a kid, you wouldn’t feel this need to be rude and loud just to get attention.”

  “I’m not rude,” I muttered, then began cutting my chicken breast into strips.

  “Oh yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are. Cut that into smaller bites. I know my mother raised you better
,” he sniffed before sitting down beside me at the island in my kitchen.

  “I just wanted some fucking validation—is that so bad?”

  “No, it’s not, but you need that from your parents and not some stranger.” He poured me some water, then gently put the glass by my plate.

  “I’ll have better luck getting it from a stranger.”

  “Oh Adler, shit, man.” He draped an arm around my shoulders as I chewed on his perfectly prepared chicken. It was tender and delicious and I’d yet again fucked everything up. Swallowing was hard for a moment.

  “So how do I fix it?” I asked after getting the ball of chicken to go down. “The man looked terrified of me.”

  “You are pretty intimidating with all your pads on and waving a stick around.”

  “I can’t make myself smaller,” I mumbled, and ate in silence while Apollo tossed out about forty ideas of how to make things better with Layton Foxx. None of them would work in practical application. Could you see me giving the man a nice pen set as an apology? Really? Would that work? Hmm. Maybe… He seemed like the kind of guy who’d get into pens. And staplers. Oh yeah, a new stapler. That would be good, yes? Sure it would. Well, maybe not. Maybe office products that could double as weapons were something I shouldn’t give him. I’d buy him a new pen on the way to the barn and present it to him tomorrow after skate when I was being made into a more politically correct hockey player. And he thought I couldn’t be sensitive. Pfft.

  “Did you know that everyone on your team hates you?” I asked the Philly winger who was nudging me around. “Seriously, they do. I heard them.”

  “Whatever, Lockhart. How are things at Hogwarts?”

  “Ah, I see what you did there. No one has ever commented about my last name and Gilderoy Lockhart before.” I rolled my eyes and leaned in to him as the centers lined up for a faceoff. “See, that’s why your teammates hate you. It’s because of bad chirps like that.”

  The puck hit the ice. My center shoved it to me, and I flipped it over to one of our defensemen, who took off like a shot but ended up being knocked off his skates by one of the aggressive Philly wingers. That prompted a rebuttal from one of the Railers, who got a penalty call for roughing.

  I skated off to catch my breath and wait for the first penalty kill unit to do their thing. Arvy sat next to me, flapping his gums about Philly and how they always worked the boards so damn well, did I have anything cooking after the game, and had I started my Christmas shopping, because he’d seen the bag from the office supply shop and wondered if his mother would like something similar.

  “Yeah, they’re tough on the boards. No, it’s not a Christmas gift. Everyone likes pens.”

  There, that should shut him up.

  “You bought someone pens? Like a bag of Bics?”

  Or not…

  “No, man, not a bag of Bics. I got him a Montblanc set,” I told him as I tried to stay focused on the game.

  “Him? Oh, you got pens for your father?”

  “I got—what?” That brought me back to Arvy. I tugged off my helmet and waved at an equipment manager for a towel. “Sure, yeah, for my dad.”

  I’d better pay closer attention to what was being said to me on the bench. I’d already gotten my ass chewed by Coach for showing up late. It wasn’t my fault that the dinky office supply store here didn’t have a Cartier boutique. I’d had to linger around while the dude in the dinky store called around to locate the nearest Cartier boutique—which was out in King of Prussia—and have them deliver it by hand to the Harrisburg store. That had tacked on another couple of hundred bucks to the sum, but so what? When you’re paying close to six hundred dollars for a pen and a leather business card holder, what’s another two hundred and fifty? It was a drop in the cash bucket for a Lockhart. Waiting had set me back over two hours, and I’d arrived at the game with just enough time to tape up and lace up. Hence the chewing out from the head coach. Foxxy man had better appreciate the gift.

  “Let’s roll,” the associate coach barked over my head. I scrubbed my face, then threw the towel onto the bench. Slapping my helmet on, I tossed a leg over the boards and waited for the first penalty kill unit to come back. As soon as one man was off, I hit the ice, skating up to one of the Philly wingers and lifting his stick to steal the puck.

  Someone shouted at me. I glanced across the neutral zone to see Tennant Rowe, who should have gone off, wide open. I shuttled the puck to him and we made a beeline for the Philadelphia end of the ice. The goalie dropped down, his dark eyes flicking back and forth as Rowe and I raced at him. The crowd was up and on its feet. Tennant passed to me, I passed back to Ten, and the Philadelphia goalie knew he was in trouble.

  The pass from Rowe was a perfect tape-to-tape right in front of the Philly net. The goalie tried his best. He stretched out as the puck sailed in front of him, trying to poke check the puck away, but Rowe was demonically good at passing. The puck bounced off my skate right to my waiting stick, and I flicked it up and over the goalie as he scrambled to get back into his crease. Shaking twine. Red light. Thunderously happy Railers' fans. Now that was sweet. A shorthanded goal as my first point as a Railer. Hoped my old team back in Columbus saw that on the highlight reels and maybe had second thoughts about trading me.

  Rowe and the other two Railers on the ice mobbed me. I skated to my bench and got twenty-something knuckle bumps and the puck for my collection. All in all, a damn fine play that led into a solid outing. Beating Philly always felt good.

  Coach Madsen slapped my shoulder, then Arvy patted my helmet. I scanned the crowd for Apollo. He’d be out there, leaping around while wearing one of my sweaters. At least someone was there to cheer for me…

  Five

  Layton

  I never meant to go to the game, even though being the professional I am meant that I should really learn more about the sport. I’d decided early on that after the ups and downs of the first two days, I should just go home and chill out.

  Then I got a text from David; my brother had this incredible way with words. “Mom said she’d call you tonight.”

  Great. A call from my mom would arrive at precisely eight p.m.; she was nothing if not a creature of habit. Why did we need to talk again so soon? We’d only spoken the night before, and I’d listened to her reel off the news about each of my siblings, their wives, and the assorted grandchildren. Had I done something wrong? I couldn’t imagine what it had been. Last time she’d got pissed at me was when I’d announced I wasn’t moving home, time before that it had been because I hadn’t told her I was gay as soon as I knew.

  Like that would have been an easy conversation. If I recall right, it was an announcement I made in between David telling us that his wife, Cindy, was pregnant again, and Louise starting a round-table fight about condoms.

  When I’d blurted out what I wanted to say to my family at the scarred kitchen table, I remember the smack upside my head from Mom. She said she’d known—as had all of my siblings, come to think of it—but then she proceeded to question me about why I’d made it into such a big thing.

  Well, fuck. Announcing I was gay had been a big thing that I’d angsted over for months.

  Which brought Adler Lockhart and his scary presence into my head, and that was another reason I wanted to avoid the game. That man shook me, and I don’t mean just because of the fact that he was a big guy, a jock, and he intimidated me. No, this was more than that.

  He’d slumped a little coming into the room—trying to make himself look smaller, I thought.

  And then he’d demanded that I acknowledge how hard it had been for him to admit he was gay, and what could I say?

  My family was far from judgmental, moving from shock to riding my ass about fashion and condoms every time we talked thereafter. In my heart I’d known they wouldn’t care, not about who I chose to sleep with, or fall in love with, but they would worry about the challenges I faced. That was just the way my family worked.

  I reassured them that I would get m
y degree and I could look after myself. David stared at me like I’d grown a second head, and Zach nudged him, and I’d tensed; I remember that.

  “You don’t need a degree, or to leave. You know you can always work with me,” David mumbled. “Electrician, it’s a good trade.”

  “Or with me—plumbing, family business,” Zach added.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  I had my entire college life mapped out, worked three jobs, saved every penny, had a scholarship to NYU, and I knew what I wanted to do when I finished. I wanted to have a career I could shape myself, get a good apartment, a boyfriend, live a different life to my siblings, who’d all settled in the same town they’d been born in.

  And I wanted to escape the shame I felt looking at my siblings, knowing what they knew about me, what they’d seen, how they’d helped to patch up the wounds scraped into my soul.

  “You’ll be alone, though,” Zach said, but he couldn’t quite meet my gaze, and I knew why. They all thought I was too damaged to ever get over what had happened. But what nobody in my family realized was that it didn’t matter whether I got over it—I would live my life and wouldn’t let fear stop me.

  And I really wanted out of this town, with the nightmares that chased me around every corner. People here knew about me, and I hated it. I craved the anonymity of a big city. Craved it like it was heroin and I was an addict.

  Mom summed up the feeling at the table. “We’re always here for you,” she murmured, and somehow in that simple sentence she made everything right in the world. Until she started to nag about dangers and not telling her and, yeah, it deteriorated after that, back to Mom thinking I should move back home after college and that cities weren’t safe.