by RJ Scott
“No, I mean, thank you, but I can’t.”
My heart sank. “Can’t or won’t?” I asked jokily, as if the fate of my entire day didn’t rest on his answer.
He shook his head sadly. “Both.”
I watched him go into Gamble & James, but I couldn’t stand there staring through the window like a fucking idiot. So I called a cab from the next road up and headed home.
And I could hear my brother’s laughing voice in my head, “Crashed and burned, bro, crashed and burned.”
Five
Benoit
What had my life become? Hiding inside a book store, gaze glued to Ethan as he made his way to a cab. I closed my eyes, inhaled through my nose to ease the thunderous pounding of my heart, and exhaled slowly through pursed lips. How was it possible for the man to get any more gorgeous? That scruffy mountain man appearance had really done him a disservice because now, with his cheeks bare, his strong jaw really stood out. I drew another calming breath, trying to find focus amid a tornado of uncertainty. Maybe he should have kept working that ZZ Top look, even if it had done nothing for him. The new Ethan Girard had tangled me up like a fishing line. How had I not known him at first? Those eyes should have given him away. He was a damn legend here in Owatonna, hell, in all of hockey land, and I’d never made the connection. That stupid beard. It had hidden his face from me. Wish he had it back.
I spun from the window, back resting on a yellow brick wall, and stared at the spines of books directly in front of me.
The Randy Duke of Dillington
Capture Me with Your Heart
Ride ‘em Hard, Cowboy!
Great. I was hiding from my crush in the romance section. I pulled one of the books from the shelf, flipped it over, and was shocked to see two men on the cover. I glanced around, opened the book, read the interior and the blurb, and grabbed all seven of the novels in the gay cowboy series.
The lady at the register said nothing when I checked out. I shoved the books into my backpack and jogged home, the cooler air refreshing as it touched my overheated cheeks.
I paused at my front door as a thought hit me smack dab in the face. “I never got the book I needed for class!” I shouted to the heavens, pissed as hell that fucking Ethan Girard had rattled me so badly. That way he made me feel upside-down was getting to be annoying. Avoiding him was almost impossible. He was on the ice all the time, or in the locker room, or dallying around in the halls of the barn. You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting Ethan Girard. And then he finds me in town and asks me to have coffee with him. Did he not get how fundamentally wrong that would be? How getting to know him better would make me want him more?
Ugh. This attraction to a coach—excuse me, advisor—was not part of the senior year plan. Hockey and academics. That was all I was supposed to be thinking about. He was outgoing and easy to talk to. Not that I did much talking to him, but others did. He laughed with ease, as I’d guessed, and seemed willing to spend as much time as was needed with any player who sought him out.
Everyone on the team raved about him. And I felt myself slipping in my resolve not to associate with him. The other day I had skated over to listen to him tell a story about some crazy Russian winger and a trip to Vegas that had ended with butcher hogs running amok on the Las Vegas Strip. Everyone laughed, including me, and our eyes had met and held way longer than they should have. I was now fantasizing about him at night as well as during classes.
Now I’d daydream about the small scar on his chin that was easily seen and could be touched with a finger pad if someone had the urge to know what it felt like. A small bit of soft amid an ocean of short stubble. Would he close his eyes as I stroked it? Maybe his breath would hitch, and I—
“No,” I told my plump dick and stalked into the house, the smell of fried onions rich on the air. “Just no,” I whispered, heading for the stairs as the sound of Hayne humming in the kitchen filled the first floor. It was a homey sound that reminded me of my mother when she cooked. Twisting my head from the steady litany of Ethan thoughts, I began to ponder on my father and how he was doing. School work beckoned, but since I hadn’t gotten the required reading, I couldn’t begin work on the paper we’d been given to write.
Maybe after dinner, I’d walk back into town and go buy the right book. For now, I snuck into my room, toed off my sneakers, and flopped onto the bed, my backpack at my side.
With my phone lying beside me on my pillow, I opened the first of the gay cowboy books, snickering at myself for being so damn lame that I’d bought a romance novel. I mean, really? Tamara read romances, young adult things that made her weep and wail. I’d never quite gotten into the whole Degrassi phenomenon, preferring to watch more substantial shows. And as for romance books? No, not my thing. Stupid really. Romance books. Gay romance books.
I chortled, gave the gay dark-haired man on the cover another look, and discovered that he resembled Ethan a great deal, right down to the stunning azure eyes.
“Huh,” I muttered, cracked the spine loudly as I opened the book wide, and settled in to spend the next hour snickering and poking fun at the book.
A sharp rap on the doorframe startled me. I lowered my book just enough to see Scott lounging in the doorway, jeans and ratty T-shirt, smiling in at me.
“I’m reading,” I snapped and buried my nose back into the paperback. I had to find out if Drew and Mike would ever stop this fucking dancing around each other bit they were engaged in. It was obvious to me and everyone else in Windy Willows, Texas, that they belonged together. I mean, that kiss behind the horse barn should have been proof enough for Mike, but no, he was being all stoic and alpha male, pushing Drew away because he was afraid and—
“… me? I said dinner’s ready. Been calling you for, like, ten minutes.” Scott tugged the book from my hand. I growled like a dog who’d just had his bone stolen. I made a lunge for it, but Scott danced in reverse, checking out the cover, then giving me a waggle of an eyebrow. “Wow, gay cowboys. Never knew you were into spurs and saddles.”
“Fuck. Off.” I pounced on him, using the bed as a springboard. After a short round of playful pushing and shoving, Scott tossed my novel to me, his eyes dancing with devilment. “Go serve the food. I’ll be right down.”
“Got to find a bookmark?”
“I got your bookmark,” I countered, flipped him a big bird, and then bent the corner of my current page over. Shouts of outrage from all the women in my mother’s book club echoed through space and time. We thundered down the stairs, filing into the small kitchen where Hayne was dishing up some fried burgers topped with onions and mushrooms, a big tossed salad, and some raspberry iced tea in an icy pitcher filled with ice cubes. “No Ryker tonight?”
“Nope, he’s got that late class,” Hayne replied, taking a seat beside Scott after he forked a burger from the platter. “He won’t be home until eight thirty, so he said to eat and he’d just grab something at the chicken joint in town.”
“Oh right, man, I’d hate a two-hour class that late. I’m wiped by four,” I said and slapped a skinny, kind-of burnt burger onto a fat sesame seed bun.
Scott fixed a bowl of salad for Hayne and then one for himself. Hayne poked at his food generally or didn’t eat at all when he was in a creative mood, but Scott seemed to tend to his man well, making sure he ate, even if he wasn’t really into it. I never had any problem eating. I was always hungry. I’d heard Ethan explaining to one of the rookies the other day that it takes a lot of fuel to run a high-performance machine.
Damn it, there he is again, Ethan Girard, pushing into my thoughts.
The meal was good—nothing fancy as none of us could really cook—but it was filling and relatively healthy. Hayne took his salad up to the attic after Scott insisted that he and I clean up.
“He’s not going to eat that.” Scott sighed after Hayne pattered off, the back of his thin arms coated with green and yellow paint. “I’ll have to make him a shake for a treat later.”
“I have
some bulk builder in the cupboard. Toss some of that in there with the ice cream and milk. Tons of protein.” I flexed my arms, then kissed each thick bicep. “Give him guns like mine. You can use it too, start getting in shape for hockey when you come back.”
I stacked the plates and carried them to Scott at the sink. The dishwasher still wasn’t working, and the repairman had never come. Ryker’s dad was not happy and had vowed to come out over the weekend to fix it himself. Ryker had expressed some concern over that, saying that his father didn’t know a socket wrench from a soybean.
“I’m not coming back,” Scott said as he cranked on the taps.
“Yeah, right.” I snorted while passing over the dirty dishes.
Scott looked at me, his expression placid, the aroma of lemon wafting up from the hot water filling the sink.
“I’m serious, Ben, I’m not going back to hockey.”
My brain kind of hit a brick wall. I stared at him for a full thirty-seconds, the sound of water and the smell of dish soap telling me that yes, this was all real. I stuck my finger into the rinse water. It was hot. Right. So, I hadn’t just hallucinated his reply.
“You’re kidding, right?”
He gave me a soft shake of his head, then began rubbing a yellow sponge around the outside of a glass. “No, I’m serious. I’m not going back to the team. I have to work on myself. It’s only since I was suspended that I’ve begun to understand real happiness.”
Even though he was telling me this in a tone that said he was deadly serious, I still couldn’t force myself to absorb the reality of his words.
“But how? I mean, you’ve given so much to hockey. Trained for years; it was your dream.”
“It was my father’s dream and my brother’s, but not so much mine. I can see that, now that I’m clean. I want to work with kids, love and take care of Hayne, and discover who I really am. For close to twenty-two years, I was the Scott everyone else wanted, and it nearly killed me. Now, I need to touch base with me for me. That make sense?”
A small cluster of bubbles floated up from the sink, popping midway between the water and the ceiling.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. But, man, I can’t imagine walking away from hockey,” I replied, my gaze returning to one of my closest friends.
“Someday you will. Hockey’s not the be-all and end-all, my man. It’s a game.” I gasped and got a gruff chuckle. “I know, hard to hear, eh? But yeah, in the end, it’s a game, and it’ll leave you alongside the road like an unwanted dog. Ask any player over thirty-five, and they’ll tell you how cruel a mistress hockey is, even for goalies. The real things, the things that matter the most, are being at peace and loving someone unconditionally.”
I had no reply for him, so I merely nodded, stunned yet, and dried the wet glasses and plates he handed me. We didn’t talk about it anymore after that. What was there to say, really? We chatted about classes, our shared enjoyment of some video game, and a new superhero movie we both wanted to see when it released. After the dishes were done, the counters and table wiped off, and the floor swept, I climbed the stairs to my room, classical music playing overhead. I fell onto the bed, belly to the mattress, and laid my cheek onto my crossed forearms.
The stairs to the attic groaned as Scott climbed them, and I heard low voices. Then the music was all I could pick up. It was soft music, kind of sad, and it led me to a weird place mentally. I’d never known a guy who’d willingly walked away from hockey. Sure, lots of older guys like Jared Madsen retired due to health reasons, or when their bodies just gave out. But someone like Scott, who had a real talent and would probably go far, just saying “Nope, I’d rather be with my boyfriend and teach kids how to skate” was a totally unknown entity in my world. All my friends lived and breathed the sport. We had to. It was the only way to succeed in a highly competitive field. We’d all spent hours and hours daily on the ice, going to summer camps, leaving our family to billet with some other hockey family in a faraway state, chosen our schools based not on the curriculum but on the prestige of the hockey program and which pros had graduated from that chosen college. Hockey required total commitment. It ate up men and marriages, stole minds and wrecked bodies, yet we loved it with all our hearts.
“Wow,” I whispered to the night that was slowly falling over Minnesota.
I rolled onto my back to study the ceiling, trying to make some sense of Scott’s decision. After ten minutes, I decided that I’d never be able to do what my friend had done, just walk away and be able to smile about it. Either Scott was a far weaker man than me or a far stronger one. Listening to him and Hayne laughing over some silly thing as lovers do, as I lay in my bed alone, I was hard-pressed to say which one of us was the weak one and which the strong. Right then, I would’ve given up just about anything to share a soft laugh with someone special who possessed warm blue eyes and a sprinkling of laugh lines.
Anything but hockey, of course.
One of the coolest things that we at Owatonna U did every fall was a campus-wide game of zombies versus humans on Halloween eve. It was a tradition that dated way back into the sixties as an homage to the George Romero’s classic zombie flick Night of the Living Dead. No one’s sure who came up with the idea, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude. It’s not often that you can shoot a professor with a Nerf gun and suffer no repercussions. Not all the faculty took part, mostly the younger educators and several athletic coaches. I was surprised to see Ethan Girard’s name on the sign-up sheet inside The Aviary. He struck me as the type to get into running around campus yelling and shooting foam darts at people. The man had a love of life and enjoyed doing things that most people his age shied away from. But was he able to do this with his injured leg?
The past couple of weeks had been busy with classes and practice, gearing up for the first game of the season, and I’d done little outside of the rink or the library. I’d been good. Hockey and homework. That was Father Morin’s mantra, and it was paying off. My grades were excellent and my focus on the ice amazing. I was making saves that shocked even me, during our scrimmages.
With the zombie-human showdown a week away, I had to stock up on my gear, so I’d taken a bright October Saturday morning off from working on grading second grade vocabulary work—part of my pre-student teacher duties—and walked into town to search through the old thrift shop that sat across from a trendy little bakery where all the OU students flocked to when they left campus. I was hitting Caroline’s Cupcakes to buy one chocolate cupcake after I found some apocalypse gear. One. That was what I was allowing myself. Damn, but I was a devout monk. My body was my temple, after all.
Stepping into the secondhand shop, I paused to read the signs over the racks and racks of used clothing. Menswear was at the back next to a wall filled with shelves that held knickknacks, dishes, and old pots. The place had a smell; I couldn’t place. Musty clothes maybe? Mothballs as well.
I was deep into old jackets, pushing hangers aside to try to find something in an XXL that would fit but wasn’t in too good a shape. We were supposed to be taking part in an apocalypse, after all. Ratty and worn was the name of the game.
“Imagine bumping into you here.” I knew Ethan’s voice well by now. I heard it every damn time I jerked off, which was a lot, considering I was supposed to be emulating a monk or something.
I tried not to look to my left. I really did, but the lure of those laughing blue eyes was too strong. I was a weak monk. Someone should’ve taken away my pretend monk card.
There he stood, smiling at me, dimple and chin scar flashing, in a stupid old camouflage jacket with a missing pocket and a blue fedora resting on his head. I had a flashback to the damn Don Draper-Ethen Girard fantasy that I’d rubbed one off to again, just last night.
“That hat is stupid,” I stated as I yanked a well-washed denim jacket off the rack and began jamming my arm into a sleeve.
“Oh, I don’t know. I think it looks kind of dapper,” he replied, then reached into my jacket, his hand sliding over my
chest in a slow, provocative manner that sent sparks to my fingertips and toes. “Might want to remove the hanger first,” he whispered as he tugged a wire hanger free from the sleeve I was battling with.
“I knew that.”
He winked.
I seriously wanted to knock that stupid hat off his head. It made him far too sexy, as if he needed more damn sexy working for him. I hated how off-balance he made me feel. “Why are you here?”
“To get ready for the apocalypse,” he replied casually, leaning back to rest a hand on his crutch while checking me over. “That look works. Denim jackets were very big back in the day.”
“I knew that too.” Ugh, I was lame. Lame and chirpless and warm in the face. I needed something witty and fast. “You’re not going to last five minutes in the war game with that bum leg.”
He glanced down at the cast he now sported, then back at me. “I’m hoping they put me on team zombie. I got the shuffle down.” He spun around and began dragging his leg up and down the aisle while making some horrid zombie noises. I had to snicker at him. I mean, he was just too damn funny. An old lady browsing the dishes gave us both a dirty look, which made the whole undead dude in a fedora even funnier.
“See, I’ll be a good zombie,” he said after lurching back to me. “I like to bite people too.”
Flames raced through me, setting fire to the big bundle of tinder labeled desire that I’d shoved into a corner. I wet my lips. Those sapphire eyes of his lingered on my mouth. The thrift shop and the disapproving old lady fell away into white noise.
“Biting is against the rules.” I coughed up, caught in the fire that was now growing into something that might not be easily contained.
“Well, I’ll only bite people I know, then. Like you, maybe?” he asked, his voice a low purr that acted like an accelerant to the inferno already raging inside me. “Nothing says ‘I like you!’ quite like spreading the zombie plague.” I blinked, unable to reply for fear I’d utter something stupider than I already had. “Or we could go to the cupcake shop and bite some cupcakes.”