Thrown Off the Ice

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  “Sorry,” Mike says, when the silence starts getting to him more than apologizing would.

  “For what?” Liam asks.

  “Making you drive,” Mike says. “Plus we’re probably going to be stuck in the waiting room for hours.” He’d tell Liam not to bother sticking around, but he knows Liam would ignore him.

  “Oh fuck off,” Liam snaps, and Mike guesses that is probably the least of their worries right now, yeah. Still, he’s not going to apologize for anything else, so if Liam’s waiting for that, he’ll be waiting awhile.

  The emergency room’s not the worst Mike’s seen it, but it’s busier than he’d like, and they give him some gauze for his thumb before leaving the two of them to settle in for a long wait. Probably the only good thing about that wait is that it gives them time to fill out the forms, which take fucking forever, and even longer because Mike can’t do it himself right now.

  Mike resents dictating his extensive medical history to Liam, but it’s his right thumb he cut, so he doesn’t have much of a choice. Resents it more when Liam’s handwriting has to get smaller and smaller, cramped and almost illegible, as Mike lists the medications he’s on. The pen stops a few times as Mike’s rattling the meds off — his memory’s still okay, though the docs keep warning him that won’t last, fuck ‘em — and stops entirely at one point.

  “Jesus, Mike,” Liam says, almost a whisper.

  Liam’s probably seen him take them all at one point or another: the pills he takes when he wakes up, the pills he takes with meals, the pills he takes when he goes to bed. The pills he only takes when he feels a migraine coming on, and the pills he doesn’t take unless the migraine’s reached unbearable because the side-effects are so fucking bad, and the brand new set of pills he got after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

  Liam’s seen Mike take his pills probably hundreds of times, and he knows what each of them do, makes Mike explain each new drug when it’s prescribed to him, but Mike knows there’s got to be a difference between seeing Mike taking them and seeing how goddamn many there are scrawled in stark blue ink.

  “What’s the date?” Liam asks finally, because of course he doesn’t know, doesn’t seem to classify days beyond ‘game day’ and ‘not game day’ and occasionally ‘holiday!’, and when Mike tells him he writes it down, hand enviably steady on the page.

  It doesn’t take them long to stitch Mike up, and they’re a lot better at it than the guys who’d do it quick and messy during a game, the stitches just needing to hold long enough to get him back into the crush of it. Mike’s dealt with a shit-ton worse, and so has Liam, but Liam looks pale and washed out in a way Mike’s never seen him, eyes unwaveringly on where they’re stitching Mike back together again.

  He doesn’t look any better in the car, so white it looks like he’s the one with the blood loss, not Mike. He keeps the radio off, which is unusual, keeps his eyes on the road like if he looks away for even a second they’ll get lost, won’t be able to find their way back home.

  “I’m fine,” Mike says. “Liam, I’m fine.”

  Liam doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t look like he believes him.

  *

  When they get home Liam’s quiet, helpful. He cleans up the detritus of dinner prep, heats up leftovers Mike was hoping would be lunch tomorrow, even puts toothpaste on Mike’s toothbrush when they’re heading to bed.

  Mike knows that won’t last, not the quiet, not the helpful. It was good to have him there, but Mike has a feeling he’s going to wish Liam was on the road tonight, wish he could have taken a cab and gotten it done and downplayed how bad it looked before they’d stitched him up, pretended he’d been on the phone with his mom or some shit, blame it on distraction instead of his useless fucking hands.

  It doesn’t take long for that regret to rear its head. Liam sleeps curled around him that night, and Mike tolerates it, because it seems to calm him, and at least it means Mike isn’t going to knock his hand or anything. Liam goes through one cup of coffee and half of breakfast bleary eyed and quiet, and Mike almost has it in him to hope things aren’t going to change before Liam puts his fork down.

  “So,” he says.

  Mike takes a wary sip of tea.

  “We need to talk about last night,” Liam says. He sounds fairly calm so far, and Mike would usually take that as a good sign, maybe relax his guard. Right now, though, it makes him ever warier.

  “Do we?” Mike asks. “I was clumsy, I cut myself. End of story.”

  “You weren’t clumsy,” Liam says. “You’re not clumsy.”

  And Mike guesses he isn’t. That it isn’t the same thing as clumsiness, though it’s just stupid fucking semantics if he cut his thumb because he was clumsy, or distracted, or because his goddamn hands don’t do what he needs them to do anymore.

  “What if I had been on the road?” Liam asks.

  “I don’t need both thumbs to call a cab,” Mike says. “Pretty sure I could have gotten to the hospital just fine without you. Fuck knows I’ve spent enough time in them by myself.”

  That was the wrong thing to say, brings up an argument that’s been going on since before Liam even moved to Minnesota, Liam offering to come with Mike, Liam asking to come with Mike, Liam begging to come with Mike, until Mike finally cracked and let Liam come to an appointment with his neurologist, half horrified and half amused when Liam peppered rapidfire questions at the guy until he looked like he wanted to hide under his desk.

  “And then what?” Liam asks. “The second I got home you would have pretended it was fucking nothing, all, ‘no big deal, not like I almost cut my thumb off’.”

  “It was a vertical cut, not horizontal,” Mike says, the only retort he has, because Liam’s not wrong about the rest of it.

  “Oh, sorry,” Liam says. “Not like I almost bled to death, then!”

  “You’re overreacting,” Mike says.

  “And you don’t take your own fucking health seriously!” Liam says.

  “No?” Mike says. “I take a dozen fucking pills a day and I go to a half dozen fucking specialists for my goddamn health and I don’t take my health seriously? You’re going to go with that, Liam?”

  “Your safety, then,” Liam says. “You can’t go around using sharp objects right now, not with Parkinson’s, and you know it.”

  “And what the fuck else can I do then?” Mike asks without entirely meaning to.

  Can’t play hockey — that one came early, and would have been true by now anyway, Mike too old, not good enough. Hard to swallow at the time, but he’s mostly made his peace with it. Can’t read unless shit’s got big print, and not for long even if it does. Can’t watch hockey, or anything with a lot of movement. Can’t really exercise, unless you count a leisurely walk exercise, which Mike doesn’t.

  All his damn hobbies before, they’re gone, and Mike started cooking more, elevated it from something he did just to feed himself to something he did to impress himself, and now what, he can’t do that too? The fuck does he have left? How long before it’s even short drives, or walking more than a block or two, or having sex with Liam, or basic fucking functioning?

  “Let me help you cook,” Liam says.

  “No,” Mike says.

  “You obviously can’t—” Liam says, then seems to rethink whatever he’s about to say, which Mike thinks is a good fucking plan. “Knives aren’t safe for you,” he goes with finally, which still makes Mike tense. “Let me help you for once, Mike.”

  “So I guess we’re just going to starve, then, because there’s no fucking way I’m eating your cooking,” Mike says.

  “I can chop up stuff,” Liam says. “You can still do the like, magic part.”

  It’s not really a bad idea, honestly, ‘magic part’ aside, and it’s something Liam’s done before, though not often. Mike resents the idea he needs help, but it’s — it’s not wrong, exactly. When he’s home, if Mike’s making food, Liam’s usually right there with him, and while the idea of him actually being
helpful rather than underfoot is, well, nothing short of miraculous, it won’t fundamentally change anything.

  “Fine,” Mike says. “But I’m drawing the line at chopping. Anything else, shit’s probably going to be inedible.”

  “Rude,” Liam says, but he doesn’t argue.

  *

  Liam’s fucking terrible at prep.

  That’s something Mike’s known forever, but shit needs to get chopped, and he still flat out refuses to be one of those assholes who buys pre-cut vegetables or fruit that costs five times as fucking much as the normal stuff. Liam sighs all dramatically when Mike shuns it at the grocery store, an unspoken ‘I’m a fucking millionaire and so are you’, but it’s the principle of the thing. They could be goddamn billionaires and Mike wouldn’t buy the pre-cut shit.

  Mike’s always figured Liam’s ineptitude was him trying to get out of cooking or just not giving a shit, because it’s not like there’s some innate skill to chopping things into vaguely similar shapes. Apparently he’s wrong about that though, because Liam goes slow now, tongue sticking out of his mouth a little like he’s concentrating the best he can, and he still can’t get the damn vegetables chopped properly. Kid can sink a puck through a goalie’s legs from thirty feet away but can’t cut a tomato without carnage ensuing. It makes no fucking sense.

  The first dinner Liam makes without any help from Mike — Mike was at the doctor’s, or he sure as shit would have stepped in — is, to put it politely, disgusting.

  “That’s not polite,” Liam says.

  “I didn’t say fucking disgusting,” Mike says.

  “You just did!” Liam says.

  Mike pokes suspiciously at his plate. Honestly, fucking disgusting is polite.

  Liam grabs Mike’s plate and his own, walks them straight to the trash. Mike would complain about wasting food, but better that than eating it.

  “I did try,” Liam says while he’s rinsing the dishes off. “I followed the recipe and everything.”

  He sounds genuinely upset, so Mike pulls his phone out before going over to him, wrapping an arm around his waist. “What do you feel like ordering?” he asks, mouth against Liam’s temple, and orders Thai at Liam’s request, even though he isn’t feeling it himself, most of his former favorites too spicy — even when he asks for mild — for the fragile bitch his stomach is now.

  Mike tries to train Liam after that in the hopes of promoting him from inexpert line cook to inexpert sous chef, but it’s a losing effort. It doesn’t matter how much guidance Mike gives him, if Mike doesn’t do it himself, it’s not done right. And he’s not just being picky here — even Liam looks forlornly at his attempts, pushes them around on his plate before asking whether Mike wants Chinese or pizza delivered. It’s a damn good thing that he gets fed on the road, fed by Mike when he’s home, or he’d be living on delivery all the damn time, and fuck knows what that’d do to his sodium levels.

  They get more food delivered in a month than they did the entire previous year, and Mike hates it, but there’s not much he can do about it. The first few weeks his thumb was less than useless, and the pills they put him on when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s don’t seem to be doing shit for the tremors.

  And it’s not just his hands: his energy’s starting to flag, so sometimes when it comes around time to start dinner, Mike can’t even be bothered to assemble the ingredients, let alone offer an impromptu cooking lesson. When Liam’s home, he does his best to feed them well, make sure Liam’s following his nutrition plan, but he finds that when Liam’s out of town, he isn’t bothering with anything more complicated than a sandwich, maybe some pasta if he can be bothered to turn the stove on.

  He’s so fucking tired. He’s not even forty yet, and he’s so fucking tired all the time, and he’s pretty sure that it isn’t going to get better.

  *

  It doesn’t get better.

  What a fucking surprise.

  Mike wakes up groggy and disoriented, and it takes him a few seconds to realize he’s on the couch and the footsteps must be Liam coming home from practice. Mike sat down for a fucking minute after Liam left, and at least three hours have passed. He was supposed to have lunch made.

  Mike doesn’t even have time to get vertical, pretend he was doing anything other than sleeping, before Liam gets to the living room.

  “You feeling okay?” is the first thing Liam says.

  “It’s not a migraine,” Mike says, because that’s what Liam was getting at, and it’s a better answer than ‘no’. He says ‘no’, Liam worries, and he already worries too much as it is.

  “You want some lunch?” Liam asks.

  “Not if you’re making it,” Mike says, closing his eyes again. “Give me a sec, I’ll get up and make us something.”

  “I picked us up a couple of salads on the way home,” Liam says, and Mike should be annoyed — buying salads is the biggest waste of money when you consider the cost of the ingredients and how little labor is involved — but instead, he’s just relieved he doesn’t have to do anything.

  Even with his eyes shut he feels Liam moving long before Liam bends over, kisses him on the forehead. “Go back to sleep,” he says, and that’s almost enough to make Mike resist the pull of it, but not quite. “I’ll leave yours in the fridge.”

  Mike’s not sure if he says anything in response.

  When he wakes up again, Liam’s already left for his game, and Mike eats his wilting, overpriced salad in front of the North Stars game, eyes on an e-reader so he doesn’t get dizzy watching it. He falls asleep between the second and the third and only wakes up to the roar of the crowd during a goal, turning the TV off and trudging to bed.

  The next morning Mike looks up the box score while Liam sleeps beside him, finds out the kid scored the game-winner, and he slept through it. Mike presses a kiss to his sleeping shoulder, and gets up to make him waffles, as exhausted as he is, because Liam loves them.

  “What’s this for?” Liam asks, halfway through destroying a stack of waffles.

  “Game winner,” Mike says, instead of ‘penance’.

  Chapter 26

  Mike doesn’t know why he thought Liam would let shit go. It’s not like he ever has before.

  His thumb’s just barely healed when he comes downstairs one morning to find Liam sitting at the kitchen table with so many pieces of paper surrounding him that Mike wonders if their printer has any ink remaining.

  “Contract shit?” Mike asks, because he knows Liam’s made it evident to the North Stars he wants to re-sign with them. They’re not talking about what happens if the North Stars don’t feel the same way.

  “Not yet,” Liam says. “Still talking things over right now.”

  Mike walks over and picks up one of the loose sheets. It’s a printout of some website, which is surprisingly old-fashioned for Liam. He skims, though the print is painfully small, catches a few recurring words, enough to put a picture together, one he doesn’t like.

  Mike obviously knew service dogs existed, and he knew there was more than one kind of service they could be trained for, unlike the fucker a few years back who started harassing this woman for bringing a service dog into the grocery store because ‘she clearly wasn’t blind so why the fuck did she think she was special’, kept on until she was near tears and Mike had to step in. Turns out whether or not you can throw a punch anymore, being 6’3” and 230 pounds of muscle that’s gone only slightly to seed is going to get someone to back the fuck off.

  So he knew it wasn’t just guide dogs, he just didn’t know they trained dogs, for, well. Him.

  “No,” Mike says.

  “You can’t say no after reading like two sentences,” Liam says.

  “I can, and I did,” Mike says. “I’m not doing this. I don’t need a fucking — I don’t need this.”

  “Because you aren’t disabled?” Liam asks. “Jesus Christ, Mike, you nearly cut your fucking thumb off making dinner.”

  “Fuck you,” Mike says.

&nbs
p; “You want to, what?” Liam asks. “Pretend you’re healthy—”

  “When have I ever said I’m goddamn healthy?” Mike says. “You think I don’t know my body’s fucking broken? You think I don’t know that better than goddamn anyone? You think I don’t know what I’m living with here, Liam?”

  “I have to live with it too,” Liam says.

  “No,” Mike says. “You fucking don’t.”

  Liam stares at him. “Go fuck yourself,” he says.

  Mike wants to say it right the fuck back, but he exhales instead. “You live around it,” Mike says. “You see it. Your head isn’t fucking broken.”

  Liam exhales, hard, like he’s also trying to avoid saying the first thing that comes into his head. Maybe this is what you call progress. “It isn’t going to get better,” he says, finally.

  “No shit,” Mike says. “That’s kind of the definition of degenerative.”

  “What if it’s worse next time?” Liam asks. “What if you fall down, or you hit your head, or you—”

  “Stop fucking making up shit scenarios,” Mike says.

  “Making up?” Liam says, voice rising. “Every single one of those things is something you’ve been told to watch out for!”

  “And they haven’t happened, so you’re just—”

  “I’m just trying to be fucking responsible, because you won’t be,” Liam yells, before stomping his way out of the kitchen like a fucking teenager.

  Mike gathers up every single fucking page and throws them in the trash. He should recycle them, but fuck it. The trash is where they belong.

  Mike sleeps in the guest room that night. It’s frankly a good fucking thing that the North Stars leave for a road trip the next morning, because Mike has a feeling that if Liam was underfoot Mike might be saying some things, ugly and hard shit he doesn’t mean, not really, even though he really wants to say it right now. Shit he wouldn’t be able to take back, and Liam’s — Liam’s more than fucking welcome to leave, Mike’s made that clear, but Mike’s not the one who’s going to drive him off. That’s up to the kid.