by R J Scott
“You love it and you know it. Just look at your backside moving.” I lapped at his shoulder where it joined his neck.
“You’re doing that.” I removed my hands from his hips and his ass kept moving. “Shit, you’ve infected me with Rick Astley.”
“The love of the 80s is strong in this one,” I chuckled beside his ear. He turned in my arms, his eyes light and playful. He kissed me long and deep. I gathered him close as his tongue slipped and curled around mine.
“The love of Adler Lockhart is strong in this one,” he whispered when the kiss ended.
“You literally just killed me a thousand times right there. God, I adore you.” I covered his mouth with mine until the smoke alarm went off.
We ate out and held hands. On the table where everyone could see. That was my idea, as was the two plates heaped high with French toast and vaguely burned eggs. Eating was hard. I kept getting lost in pewter eyes and those tender smiles across the table.
“I love you,” I told him as he buttered his stack of toast. “I love you and I want to come out.”
He laid his knife and fork down beside his plate and pinned me with a look. “Ad, are you sure? That’s a huge decision.”
“I’m sure. I want to tell the world I love you. I want to take you out and hold your hand and fill you up with French toast.”
“You can do that and not make a big public display of things.” Our server came back with more coffee. We got our cups topped off without ever looking away from each other.
“Don’t you want me to come out? Are you worried about how it will impact you? Is it freaking you out? I won't come out if it’s ticking bad boxes for you,” I said after he went off to fill other empty mugs.
“Adler, it’s not that. I’m fine with whatever you want to do. I want you to be out if you want to be out, but I think you might be swept up in the feelings we have for each other.” His gaze darted to an older couple passing our booth. The pancake house was hopping. “You do tend to do that.”
“I don’t,” I argued. He gave me a stony look. “Okay, maybe I do let my emotions carry me along at times, but this isn’t one of those times.”
Ah, there was that smile. It was so pretty. “Tell you what. Take this week away to think about it. Don’t be hasty.”
“I don’t ever do hasty things and I will prove it to you. Don’t make that face.”
“Adler, your picture is next to the word ‘impulsive’ in the dictionary.”
“No, it is not.” Okay, it totally was, but I wasn’t backing down on this. “I’ll think about it while I’m on the road with the team. When I come back I’ll still feel the same way.”
“That’s fair. Now eat your breakfast.” He waved his fork at my food as if the discussion was over. “We have to get you to the arena in thirty minutes or you’ll be late for morning skate.”
“I’m not impulsive all that much,” I mumbled, and sawed at my pile of French toast.
Layton said something under his breath that had the words “setter” and “impetuous” in it. The rest was lost because I opted out of listening. I’d show him. Just you watch. I’d be Mr. Not Impulsive. I could do that for a week.
I burst into Layton’s office as soon as we got back from Pittsburgh. His gray eyes shone with pleasure when he looked up and saw me taking up all his office space.
“Hey babe, look at this!” I wrenched off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, removed my tie, and tugged my shirt down off my shoulder to show him the tattoo I’d got while in Boston. “It’s a Pokémon because I joined the Railers Pokémon group.” I wiggled my shoulder to get him to say something and to make Arcanine dance.
“Uh,” he said, then laid his pen—the one I’d bought him—down on his blotter. “Since when do you play Pokémon?”
“Well, I don’t yet, but I’m going to. And all the other guys in the group have inkwork and they said if I was part of the group then I needed a tat. Sweet, huh?”
He was fighting back a smile. “So let me get this right. You got this tattoo on a whim because someone said you should, even though you’ve never played this game in your life?”
I tugged my shirt up to cover the yellow creature sitting high on my left biceps. “Mostly.”
“And you still maintain that you’re not impulsive at all?”
I shoved my tie into the front pocket of my pants. “When you say it like that, it sounds a little rash.”
The laugh broke free. I loved making him happy. If a tattoo did that, I’d be inked from asshole to ears within a year. “I really missed all your spur-of-the-moment Adlerness.”
I bumped the door shut with my ass. The sassy smirk never left his mouth. The mouth that badly needed to be kissed. By me.
“You should get one that matches mine. Oh, here’s an idea. We both get Arcanine on our arms, then we just parade around town with our biceps out. People see it, do the two and two makes four, and we’re out.”
“First off, I am not getting a tattoo. You can forget that idea. Secondly, it’s late January in Pennsylvania. Your new cat ink would get frostbitten.”
“I don’t think he’s a cat. I’m not sure what he is. A dog, I think.” I peeked into my shirt at the tattoo. “He’s cute, though. And I’m not Tennant Rowe. I can handle the cold. Can I kiss you here in your office, or is that not professional?”
“I think you and I left professional in the dust.”
I leaned on the closed door, scooted down a few inches, and waited. My man rose from his seat behind his desk, slowly made his way around all the furniture, and was finally pressed tight against my chest, his hands raking through my hair.
“You’re so ginger.”
“You so missed me.”
His fingers moved softly over my scalp. “Yeah, I so did.”
He kissed me in a way that was so unprofessional but incredibly hot.
Fifteen
Layton
I’d begun to dread the messages that I saw when I went into the office, despite the fact that managing that crap was my job. Twitter flared up every hour or so, and some of the comments out there about the Railers were just plain nasty. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, but still, I couldn’t help but feel like some of what was thrown was directed at me personally. That morning, though, I didn’t even have to make it into the damn arena to see the vitriol being thrown about.
I’d handled things like this before, but that was before we added the very real fear that being with Adler would cause everything to go sideways. I’d managed situations before where hate was commonplace, but never where it had touched me in such a visceral, personal way.
And I didn’t think I was coping. In fact there was no thinking about it. I knew I wasn’t coping. What the Railers were doing here was a million steps forward for equality in pro sports, but on a personal level would the Railers be the ones who had to pay the ultimate sacrifice? Would they survive? Would Jared and Ten make it through this?
Hell. Was Adler going to be hurt?
And why in fuck’s name was I feeling so dramatic this morning?
I saw the group standing outside the security gate, some in security uniforms, a couple of players; I recognized Arvy and Stan straight away. There was a commotion, some shoving and pushing, and I pulled over, willing to at least try to do part of my job even if this was a hockey issue.
I jogged over and made some sense of what I was seeing. Stan was holding Arvy back, two of the security guards bickering and forming a brick wall between them and a third security guy.
Arvy was shouting, “He was here. If he says he didn’t see anything—”
Stan pulled Arvy a little further back, and I slid between them and the security guys. I immediately looked to Bill, the same guy I saw in uniform every morning, the one whose kids were in college, the same man who always said good morning. He looked gray.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and held up a hand to stop Arvy talking even as he let out a loud curse word. I spun to face him. “Go in,” I snapped.
“Cameras.” I waved behind them, where sometimes we had groups of people waiting for the players, taking photos, and getting autographs. There were only two that morning, some way back, and neither of them seemed to be pointing phones our way.
Arvy subsided and shook off Stan, stalking past security and deliberately hip-checking the new guard at the back, who flinched and moved aside. Stan followed, stopping to talk to the guard in a low voice. What he said, I couldn’t hear, but it was enough for the young man to pull himself tall and nod.
Funny how Stan, with the least grip on English in the team, had the best things to say.
“Tell me,” I said again.
The two guards in front of me, Bill and one I didn’t know, maybe a night guy, looked at each other. Then, with a sigh, Bill moved to one side, and I saw it.
The most unoriginal gay slur of all time. “Fags play here.”
I sighed and looked at the third guard, who seemed to be close to losing his shit in a ‘falling to the ground crying’ kind of way.
“Let’s get this removed,” I said. “Get a maintenance guy out here.”
“On it,” Bill said, and went into the small security hut.
I shrugged off my jacket, the biting cold of an early Pennsylvania morning not enough to deter me. I covered over the graffiti and stood there, but I needed something—anything—to hold it in place.
“Here,” Adler said in a soft voice, and leaned over me with a roll of hockey tape. He taped the jacket, and we stood back looking at it critically. We could still see the “e” of here, but that could be anything. Adler passed me his coat, and I opened my mouth to argue until he raised an eyebrow and it reminded me of what he’d said about the cold. Also, if I made a fuss, then someone could say something, as if they knew that Adler was kissing me, sleeping with me, and that we’d used both our cars just as a cover up. Abruptly, I didn’t want that to be a thing when we were standing there in that shitty situation.
“How did this happen?” I asked the new guy, who couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said, and I stared long enough that he finally looked at me. Then he hung his head. “I’m sorry. I needed the restroom, and Ed was on rounds.”
Maintenance was there in minutes and it made me think there was paint on standby for cases like this. Had it happened before Ten had come out?
I closed my eyes briefly as my cell vibrated and I saw Cote’s name on the screen. The owner couldn’t have heard about this already, could he?”
“Foxx?” he said. “Are you dealing with this?”
I nodded mutely, then realized what I was doing. “Yes, sir,” I said. He hung up before asking any questions.
We’d been doing so well, managing the hate, community events to raise the profile of the Railers, and the day before I could have walked into the arena confident that the Railers would make it through this.
Now, this morning, I was shaken.
By the time I reached my office I was a mess of concern, and felt sick when I booted up my PC and waited for the notifications.
Ironically, last night had been quiet on the ’net. There were a couple of new memes about Ten and Jared—nothing I couldn’t handle by tweeting an infographic the marketing team had given me about the recent successes on the road. I had a picture putting Ten’s stats into perspective against his brothers’. But if I used that, then all I was doing was drawing attention to his ‘brothers’ teams, and the management of each of them were already a little edgy about certain things going down at the Railers, and how they might be affected before I’d properly begun my work with them.
Like at the game last week when some kid behind the bench had somehow managed to throw a cup of lukewarm coffee at Jared, soaking him when it hit his shoulder.
Which had led to TV time, where the incident had been played on repeat, and everything circled back to the concept that it was the gay issue. How could I even begin to spin the fact that the cameras had caught gay slurs?
And the kid really had been a kid. No more than thirteen, egged on by his mom, of all people.
I scrubbed my eyes and pulled a notepad toward me, making a note of what I needed to do today. First off, I had to get my head around creating an assessment of everything that was happening. When I finished, it felt to me like we were still winning. The community was behind us, the fans for the most part were accepting, only a few people had canceled season tickets since the presser, and the original heavy influx of hate emails had trickled down to a few in among well-thought-out and considered reactions. The tone of the reactions to Ten coming out had changed subtly, particularly when it was Ten who’d put up two goals against Pittsburgh in an emphatic win.
The game tonight was a home game, and I didn’t know much about the team we were facing, only that they were rivals in a way that meant the fans were big on chanting at each other and holding up signs, some of them probably designed to put our team on the back foot.
I wrote down some notes about what to say to Coach Benning and went off to find him, locating him in his office with its open door policy and its wall of pictures of players, teams, and a couple with the Stanley Cup, which I knew meant a lot to hockey players. Benning was old guard, and I’d expected that he’d be the most reluctant in this entire process, but he’d been surprisingly affable.
I knocked on the doorjamb. “May I speak to you?”
He gestured me in. “You want to shut the door?”
I didn’t think he was asking me—he sounded resigned—and I shut the door and leaned against it.
“Some tweets, posts, they talk about tonight’s game, and I want to reassure you that management takes any and all threats to player safety very seriously.” I stopped, because that sounded a lot like management-speak, and I despised that. Also, Coach Benning was shaking his head.
“You take care of security; I’ll stop my players from killing anyone if they get all riled up.”
That was exactly what I wanted to hear. I needed to know that the players were safe, and that they’d taken my talks to heart. Only Coach would be able to paint it black and white enough for the team to take the words to heart.
Not to rise to the words thrown at them. Not to get angry.
When I left his office, leaving the door open, I deliberately walked the long way back to my tiny office, just to avoid the chance of meeting any players. I wasn’t ready to look any of them in the eye and tell them to relax and not to worry.
Because I would be telling them the opposite of what I felt.
When I reached my office, I reported the latest batch of threatening tweets to the authorities, who logged everything because that was all they could do.
Then I shut myself in my office and dealt with the things I could handle; the connection between our team and Boston’s and the reaching-out from two Canadian teams. Things I could control.
And I didn’t worry about what would happen tonight, or if Ten had a target painted on his back.
But most of all I had to forget Adler and his naive assertion that he was happy to come out to everyone, like it wasn’t the hardest thing for a pro athlete to do. He said he trusted me to change people’s perceptions, one team at a time. I wished I felt as positive.
I watched the warmups from the press box, distracted more by watching the crowd than the team. There was a healthy swathe of the opposing team’s colors, but I hadn’t spotted any posters from them or the home fans when the camera panned the crowd. Everything appeared calm, just two groups of fans, one bigger than the other, there to watch a hockey game.
Tonight was the Railers’ night; the battle wasn’t easy, but the win, a shutout, was hard fought, and I knew enough about hockey now to get the impression that we’d played well. Apart from some chanting, which was directed more at poor Stan in goal than the rest of the team, the crowd was good-natured.
The opposing team left the ice, and the Railers were head-bumping Stan and offering half hugs. Stan took a little longer to leave
the ice, but he had this complicated patting that he did to his net, which Adler had explained was Stan’s way of thanking the net for its help. He was last off the ice, winding his way slowly toward the bench, his helmet pushed up on his head. He’d squirted water on his face and was grinning. I saw Ten waiting for him by the tunnel, pulling him into a hug. There were quick movements where they stood, but I was used to seeing Stan and Ten’s complicated handshake thing, which involved too much ass-slapping to be completely straight. I was smiling at that even as the press room went deadly quiet. Stan was on the ice, Ten hunched over him, and security was at the tunnel.
I didn’t think. I just ran.
I’d never seen so much blood on the ice, but Adler was right by me, still in his uniform, reassuring me that head wounds bled like fuck, and it was likely just a cut.
Ten had tossed a puck up to a kid in the stands by the tunnel, and the kid’s dad had thrown it back in temper. Stan, with his goalie reflexes, had moved between the puck and Ten, the puck smashing into him. Stan hit the ice hard.
So much blood, added to the fact that the medics took Stan off the ice on a stretcher.
Security hustled the dad and the crying kid away from the remaining crowd, and the players, who all wanted a piece of whoever had hurt their goalie. Nowhere had I ever seen the “protect the goalie” mentality more than in the locker room of irate skaters. I hovered at the back of the room. What was I going to say? What could I have done? That poor kid, no more than seven or eight, had heard his dad spewing hate and watched the violence right there.
Ten was quiet, Jared sitting next to him, their knees pressed together. Ten was pale and Jared looked ready to kill someone. All I could think was that I’d lost control of the situation. Words weren’t going to stop the hate.
What had the team been thinking, hiring me to fix this problem? All I wanted to do was shove everyone back into the closet and hide in there with them where it was safe.
The door opened and Stan ambled in, his face bruised and swollen, stitches over his eye.