“You gonna fuck me now, or you want to talk about French some more?” Liam asks, and Mike’s not too stubborn to take him up on the offer.
*
During the days Mike goes to his trainer and Liam heads to a camp full of genuine talents. It’s the kind of camp that would laugh in Mike’s fucking face if he asked if he could participate. They took Liam last minute. Mike thinks that says everything.
He’s grateful Liam’s talent has been noted, at least, grateful the kid has a chance to play with the sorts of guys he has the potential to be just as good as, if not better than, a few years down the line.
In the meantime, Mike hopefully gets better at punching people in the face. Some of it isn’t quite transferable — balance is paramount whether you’re on the ice or on a mat, but one of them is sure as shit harder to keep said balance on — but, despite being told he had the basics down, he feels like he’s learning something. It’s not a wasted trip. Not just an excuse.
“The basics,” Liam scoffs. “You’re one of the most hated guys in the league.”
“Thanks,” Mike says.
“For good reason,” Liam says. “It was a compliment! The basics.”
“I’ll show you the basics,” Mike says.
“Oh, by all means,” Liam says, and laughs when Mike hauls him down onto the bed.
Mike is honestly fine spending the time he isn’t training in the bubble of their hotel suite, but Liam drags him out most nights, running through restaurants that have been highly rated on some website, trendy bars, tourist trap shit — Mike fucking refuses to go to the Hockey Hall of Fame, but he reluctantly cedes to the aquarium, because sharks are cool.
Their final weekend in Toronto, Liam brandishes two tickets to a Blue Jays game, so Mike guesses that’s the tourist-y shit of the day. Mike’s never cared one way or the other about baseball, and Liam calls himself a Blue Jays fan, but it’s more ‘I have a hat with their logo on it, and maybe I’ll watch them play if nothing interesting is on’ and not ‘I actually enjoy the sport of baseball, and the Blue Jays in particular’. Both of them would take football any day, but it’s not football season, and even if it was, it’s not like the Canadian Football League is actual football, whatever Liam says.
Liam’s intent on going, though, and Mike doesn’t feel strongly enough about it to make an excuse. It’s a nice day at least, the kind of hot Mike doesn’t usually like much, but it’s fine in the dome, a beer sweating in his hand. In the second inning Liam knocks his bare knee against Mike’s, the warm press of skin a deniable touch, and Mike doesn’t pull away until he has to get up to grab them both another overpriced beer.
The Blue Jays win it, which makes Liam happy, and a happy Liam is better than a sulking one.
“I’m hungry,” Liam announces after, like that’s ever news with the black hole that he calls his stomach. “Steak?”
“Don’t you ever get tired of steak?” Mike asks, but it’s mostly rhetorical, because Liam doesn’t, and honestly, neither does Mike.
They head to a steakhouse almost as overpriced as the stadium, but unlike at the game, Mike can eat a steak the size of his head and have a nice glass of scotch, so he’s more inclined to forgive them for it.
Liam’s a little tipsy when they head back to the room, more, Mike thinks, from the sun than anything. He’s cheerfully narrating the game like Mike hadn’t just watched it with him, his knuckles nudging Mike’s every few steps, a coy play at something he knows isn’t going to happen.
Neither of them have anywhere to be until noon tomorrow, so Mike takes his time with him in bed, eases them into it, up to it, less a fuck than a slow, leisurely grind. There’s no space between them anywhere, the two of them sharing breath and heat, Liam’s wrists a coiled live wire under Mike’s hands, flexing every time Mike switches it up, pushes in deep.
“That was a nice date,” Liam says to the ceiling after.
Mike resists the urge to groan. “That was not a date,” he says.
“Baseball,” Liam says, starting to tick off his fingers. “Drinks. Dinner. Getting epically laid. Sounds like a date.”
“Sounds like most of the times we hang out with the addition of baseball,” Mike says.
Liam gives him a triumphant look, and Mike realizes, too late, he got played.
“Fuck off,” Mike mutters.
“Did you have a nice date, Michael?” Liam asks, rolling over to dig his pointy chin into Mike’s sternum.
“My day was fine,” Mike says.
Liam digs his chin in more, and Mike flicks his temple until he pulls back a bit, settles himself more comfortably, cheek against Mike’s chest. He’s quiet then, still, and Mike rewards him for dropping it by dragging his fingers through his hair, watching him go lax and sleepy.
“I had a good date,” Liam murmurs, just when Mike’s finally started to relax, and Mike rolls him off his chest. The only thing that saves Liam from landing on the floor is the way he grabs at Mike as an anchor, fingers digging viciously into his skin.
“You can’t bully me into not being your boyfriend!” Liam says, as Mike pries his fingers off one by one, and he looks all too smug, in the end, for someone who just landed ass first on the floor.
*
Mike doesn’t regret coming to Toronto. Not — it’s not about Liam, except in the way it is. The training was important. The training was helpful. Liam got something out of his training too, so no one was wasting their time.
He doesn’t regret it, but it’s hard to remember that when they’re about to part ways. Liam, of course, wants to turn it into some distraught lengthy goodbye, like they’re in the middle of a romance movie. Kid’s never learned that sometimes it’s just easier to rip the band-aid off.
But then, he likes to hurt, and as much as he insists that’s only in the context of sex, Mike doesn’t really believe him. Everything with Liam has to be over the top dramatic, and Mike thinks he likes the pain almost as much as anything else, has fashioned them into some kind of star-crossed lovers bullshit in his head, something bigger than it really is.
“I could come to Duluth, maybe, or—” Liam says.
“Liam,” Mike says, before Liam can start spinning scenarios that they both know aren’t going to happen.
“I’ll come back to Edmonton early, then,” Liam says. “I’m not asking you to or anything, before you get all snippy—”
Mike does not get snippy.
“Just, you know,” Liam says, “letting you know if you do, I’ll be there.”
“I’ll think about it,” Mike says.
“Whenever you say that it means no,” Liam says with a scowl.
“No,” Mike says. “It means I’ll think about it. And sometimes, after I think about it, the answer is no.”
“Don’t say no this time,” Liam says.
“I’ll think about it,” Mike repeats, but when Liam texts him to let him know he’s heading to Edmonton three weeks earlier than they need to be there, Mike packs up his place and follows.
Chapter 15
The last fight of Mike’s career, he wins. Definitively. It’s not a boxing match, there’s no countdown or total knock-out in hockey fights, at least not unless someone hits his head on the ice, but there’s no doubt Mike managed to beat the shit out of the little upstart from Minnesota, of all fucking places.
Mike doesn’t know it’s his last fight, not when he’s idly checking his mouth for blood in the box, or when he’s back on the bench. His heart’s only just stopped pounding, because he’s getting too old for this shit, maybe. He doesn’t realize he’s not tracking until he gets a gentle nudge toward the locker room, then a stronger one when he doesn’t immediately comply, goes through the concussion protocol like a routine, which it is, near enough.
The bitch of it is that it isn’t a serious concussion. He wasn’t knocked out, he wasn’t brought down, he just got his bell rung a little. Even the docs don’t look all that concerned. They’ve seen it before, from others and from him. It isn’t even his fir
st concussion this season.
Mike deals with the symptoms in waves: the headaches, the nausea, the inability to focus. He’s dealt with them before to varying degrees, knows how to wait them out. He tunes out of media and lets Liam deal with plumping up his pillows or whatever the fuck he needs to do to play nursemaid, waits for it to pass.
Except it doesn’t pass, and it doesn’t pass, and it doesn’t pass.
It never fucking ends.
For the first couple weeks the doctors tell him to be patient, tell him he’s not as resilient as before, practically come out and say, “You’re getting too old for this, Brouwer.” They get quieter when the first month passes and Mike’s still prone to ending up hunched over a toilet bowl if he tries to do anything more demanding than stare at his ceiling. It’s a month he spends sleeping more than awake, wringing himself dry every time Liam comes over, just trying to stay out of bed. The next road trip the Oilers go on, Mike’s in Edmonton getting hustled to neurologist after neurologist, facing MRIs and CAT scans and evaluating looks.
He’s told to wait out the symptoms in the end, which he’s been told from the fucking start. Told it’s post-concussion syndrome, which they’ve known for fucking weeks. Handed a prescription for antidepressants, which he has to bite his tongue and take, because bawling out the doctors isn’t going to get him better any faster.
He’s not depressed, his head is broken, is all, but he fills the ‘scrip after they tell him it might alleviate the headaches, because Mike would probably kill a man if it alleviated the headaches. He’s got a constant low-grade throb in his temples, flare-ups that leave him helpless, so sensitive to sound and light and movement that hiding under the covers is the only place he can be, teeth clenched, a cold sweat breaking out on his skin no matter how many blankets are piled over him.
*
The Oilers come back to town. Mike’s lucky the team gets in late, delayed by a storm, because when Liam would probably have been swinging by uninvited — using the key Mike recently gave him for reasons of expediency — Mike is busy staying very still, as moving his head even an inch leads to pain spreading through his body like wildfire.
As it is, when Liam comes in Mike’s managed to get out of bed and migrate to the couch, though that took all his energy. Liam greets him with, “You look like shit,” which means he probably looks worse than shit.
Mike doesn’t dignify it with a response, and Liam comes over to the couch, rearranging Mike as it suits him so he can fit too.
“You get tests?” Liam asks, which means someone fucking snitched.
“Hm,” Mike says.
Liam’s quiet. “And?” he prods, after a whole three seconds of blissful silence.
“Told me to wait it out,” Mike says, and Liam hums, makes himself comfortable on Mike, which is a little too much to take, especially since Mike’s already aching everywhere, and Liam’s not exactly light, but Mike doesn’t say anything.
*
Mike gets more tests. Mike gets test after test after test, sees doctor after doctor after doctor, sick to fucking death of answering the same goddamn questions, getting the same goddamn responses.
"How many concussions have you had?" the doctor of the day asks. That’s a question Mike’s been asked plenty, and he’s learned that they think ‘I don’t remember’ is scary, not amusing, so he went back and counted the serious ones for them.
"Serious ones, or all?" Mike asks.
Dr. Barker's quiet for a moment. "All," he says.
Mike shrugs, because honestly, if it wasn’t enough to sideline him, he wasn’t keeping track. He’s pretty sure there were some he wasn’t even aware of, some the team docs didn’t catch, ones he dismissed after the fact as a bitch of a post-fight headache, treated with booze and OTCs and and then figured he was good to go for the next game.
Dr. Barker gives him a look. Mike may be concussed, but he's not an idiot, whatever this asshole thinks. He knows what it sounds like. He also knows it’s part and parcel of his fucking job.
“Have you ever had a concussion of this magnitude?” Barker asks. “Magnitude meaning—”
“I’m concussed, not stupid,” Mike snaps.
“I apologize,” Barker says.
“I mean, this is the longest one,” Mike says.
“But the severity of the symptoms?” Barker asks.
“I’ve had worse,” Mike says. “But unlike this one, they fucking ended.”
Barker gives him another look.
“Sorry,” Mike mutters, but he’s not the doctor, so he doesn’t see why he can’t swear. This is the kind of situation that swearing is fucking made for. When you’re standing knee deep in shit, it’s stupid to act like you’re in a field of fucking daisies.
“How was the doctor?” Liam asks when Mike gets home. He’s sitting on Mike’s couch, watching TV, drinking a Gatorade and eating a power bar. Mike’s favorite kind of power bar, in fact, which he fucking hid so Liam wouldn’t eat them. Unsuccessfully, apparently.
“Huh,” Mike says. “I could have sworn this was my house.”
“You gave me a key,” Liam says.
“Regret it every day,” Mike says, and goes to sit down beside Liam.
“Doctor?” Liam prompts.
Mike groans.
“So it went well then?” Liam asks.
“That guy was an ass,” Mike says. “Treated me like I was brain damaged.”
“To be fair,” Liam says. “That’s kind of exactly what a concussion is.”
“Fuck off,” Mike says. “You been researching concussions, kid?”
Liam shrugs. “Seemed like something I should know.”
“You ever had one?” Mike asks.
“Thankfully just a minor one in Juniors,” Liam says, then leans forward and knocks on the coffee table like a superstitious dork. It isn’t even made of wood.
“Probably your hard head,” Mike says.
“If it was about hard-headedness, you would have never had a concussion in your life,” Liam retorts.
Mike will give him that one.
“How’s your head?” Liam asks, standing up and coming around behind the couch. He slides his fingers through Mike’s hair, and Mike would protest, but it feels good, so he just tips his head back into Liam’s touch.
“Damaged,” Mike says. “Apparently.”
Liam rubs slow circles into his temples, deliberate enough that Mike figures he must’ve learned it somewhere.
“You research scalp massage or some shit too?” Mike asks.
“Seemed like something I should know,” Liam repeats.
“Well,” Mike says. “You’re not terrible at it.”
“High praise from you,” Liam says.
“The highest,” Mike agrees, and closes his eyes.
*
It is really, really difficult to try to get back to game shape when your head’s a fucking mess. Shit he takes for granted, shit he needs to play, he doesn’t have that right now. Balance? Fucked. Vision? Fucked. Energy? What the fuck is that. And that’s not even getting into the fucking headaches.
Still, he’s so sick of his house he’s ready to trash the place, and if he goes another day without doing anything he’s going to lose it, so maybe it’s time to test the boundaries a bit, see if he can push past some of this shit, start to work towards getting back on the ice.
Mike’s sure as shit not going to the practice facility and dealing with a bunch of well-meaning questions about how he’s doing. It’s hard enough dealing with Liam always poking him for updates, he can’t deal with an entire team’s worth. There’s a gym walking distance from his place, which is good, because Mike’s not cleared to drive. He waits until mid-afternoon, when he knows it’ll be quiet, surveys the equipment, trying to decide what’ll be easiest. Treadmill, unfortunately. Mike hates cardio shit.
Mike manages five minutes of a fast jog before he has to stop, ends up dry heaving in the bathroom, eyes blurry, head screaming at him.
So that’s w
here he’s at. Knees on cold bathroom tile, involuntary tears in his eyes, over the sort of effort he’d expend in less than a minute on the ice.
The walk home is fucking miserable.
*
Mike goes to more doctors, a parade of grim face after grim face. There’s no point asking for a timeline for his return, since they won’t know any better than he does, except he’s asking anyway. That gets a doctor version of “who fucking knows” from some, and from others, “I wouldn’t recommend a return,” is the consensus, which sounds like pretty mild censure until you catch the look that always accompanies it, doctor for ‘don’t be an idiot’.
They all pussyfoot around things until Mike meets with yet another neurologist, who gives him a steady, solemn look, and throws out the bullshit fancy doctor phraseology and talks like a fucking human, which is a nice change.
“Mike,” she says, instead of ‘Mr. Brouwer’. “Can I be completely blunt with you right now?”
“Honestly, I’d prefer that,” Mike says. Honestly, he’s been fucking waiting for that.
“With the amount of concussions you’ve had, and how long the symptoms you’re experiencing have lasted, even if you become asymptomatic—”
“This isn’t being blunt,” Mike interrupts.
“Even if you recover from your symptoms, if you get another concussion, you may well be dead before you reach a hospital,” she says, and there. That’s blunt.
Mike swallows. “That’s kind of true of all of them, though,” he says. “Isn’t it? Taking a risk every time.”
“Yes,” she says, drawing it out. “But.”
“Difference between a calculated risk and throwing my life away?” Mike asks.
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” she says, but not like she’s disagreeing.
“So if I go back to playing—”
“What’s the likelihood of you getting another concussion if you play again?” she asks, but like she already knows the answer.
“Not insubstantial,” Mike says, instead of ‘almost certain’.
“I wouldn’t recommend a return,” she says, and something about the way she says it has it sink into him finally, that this is it for him, that he’s never going to get back on the ice. That even if the symptoms go away, even if he can start conditioning again, run a fucking mile without feeling like he’s going to die at the end of it, even if he gets into the best shape of his life, it won’t matter. He’s through.
Thrown Off the Ice Page 12