Across the Pond

by R. J. Scott

I hurried to cross myself. God willing, she would be with us for many more years, talking about needing grandchildren and fretting over Juan, who was totally not gay at all, just loving his single life. If she only knew that she was stewing over the wrong son’s sexuality.

  “Such a smarty mouth. I have to go.” I crossed myself again as my mother was undoubtedly doing as well. “Drive safely, mijo.”

  “Sí, siempre lo hago, mamá. Nos vemos ahora.”

  “Adios, Alejandro.”

  When the call ended, I sat there mulling over the upcoming week. I was so happy to be going home, and yet there was that big dark ball of guilt and worry over my secret coming out. I’d been keeping my gayness well-hidden since college. All it had taken had been one kiss from Eddie Milkovich during a frat party to change my life forever.

  For years I’d been sure that my lack of interest in girls had been due to hockey or that I was a late bloomer as my mother liked to say, even though I was well over six feet tall by the time I was fifteen. Sure, I’d dated, taken girls to dances, even made out a few times during my senior year of high school, but there had never been any real fire. Maybe, I’d reasoned, I was just one of those people who needed a commitment before I got hot and horny over a chick. Nope. It had nothing to do with a ring or hockey or my studies. I’d just never kissed another man before. Yes, I’d thought about them, picked out features on certain men that appealed to me like Chris Hemsworth’s arms or Robert Pattinson’s eyes, but I’d never fantasized about fucking a dude. Maybe kissing one or touching them to see if they felt different than a girl…

  Looking back on it, I could see how drawn I was to men, but it took that drunken kiss behind a frat house to flip the switch. And now, three years later, that secret sat smack-dab in the middle of my chest like a boulder. Going home would, in that instance, make things so much harder. Living with Ryker had opened my eyes to how it could be, maybe, in some alternate universe where Alex Santos-Garcia wasn’t a devout Catholic Mexican-American. Maybe, in that other world, Alex could find a man he loved and be open about it. Maybe in that strange upside-down land, his parents would be as cool as Ryker’s parents—his stepdad/dad and his mom/stepdad—who welcomed this other Alex plus his man into their homes, hearts, and parish.

  “And maybe hockey pucks will fly out of my ass,” I groaned, cranked over the engine, turned up Shakira, and shoved everything down just a little deeper.

  Two

  Sebastian

  Money can make you into any kind of man you want to be.

  The cash pouring into my accounts paid for this first-class seat to the US, crossing the pond from London, England, in style. Subtly attentive staff tended to my every comfort, and champagne flowed as I sat in my cozy pod in my bespoke Jasper Littman suit, Ferragamo shoes, and with my Porsche safely in Heathrow’s VIP parking. I was polished, urbane, and Melanie the attendant, who told me with a soft smile and eyes full of promise she could get me anything I wanted, would see nothing but a successful, rich man heading to the US.

  “Can I get you anything else, sir?” she asked and touched my shoulder to emphasize the question.

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  The spark of interest in her expression was something I’d seen before. I didn’t think I was particularly handsome, just well put together in my own unique way, but what I did have was the trappings of money and a confident swagger to match. The money was real, the swagger fake, but it was enough to pull whoever I wanted. If only she knew that I was more interested in Robert, the attendant who dealt with the row in front of me, then maybe she’d begin to look closer and find the clues that would give me away. Quite possibly, she’d notice that I sprawled in my seat rather than sat upright, or she’d hear vowels that weren’t quite as clipped as she expected. Would she care who she found under the fake as long as I had the money to back up the image I wanted to project?

  Maybe she’d like the fact that there was nothing civilized about this Brit in his expensive clothes, paying thousands for the privilege of all this luxury at the front of the plane.

  “Shall I clear your things, sir?” she asked and leaned over until I got a faceful of boob, which I ignored.

  I waited until the table was clear, made the appropriate amount of small talk with Melanie, carefully avoiding the aforementioned boobs, and then settled down to the matter at hand, pulling out my current notebook. I didn’t work on screens. I sourced information, printed everything out, collated it, and read it as a hard copy journal. As I read, I drew up plays I could make, and only then did I commit decisions to a format others could see. My playbook on the Arizona Raptors was thick and unwieldy, and I took out the felt-tips I relied on. Green was action, blue was for further investigation, and red was for urgent attention, and I laid them next to me on the small table.

  Where to start?

  The Arizona Raptors. NHL team. Pretty shit by the looks of the overall stats. I ran some quick calculations in my head, going back over a few years, and it wasn’t difficult to see that they were as shit as I was assuming. I didn’t have to know hockey to see that, up until the end of the last season, they had been struggling at the very basic thing they should be doing—playing the damn game. At least this season, which was half over, they had some points on the board and were actually twenty-fourth in the league. Which was a sad thing to be pleased with, considering that was still in the bottom third.

  The old management had little loyalty, the new ones were floundering in unfamiliar waters, and from the articles I’d read, most people expected the Raptors to fail. When I dug deeper, I would probably find that star performers expected constant pampering, investors were impatient, demanding quick results, and that media scrutinized and second-guessed their every move. It would be a pressure-cooker situation at the root. Then there were the three things that had fucked the team over—the change in management and ownership, the new coach, and the elephant in the room that was a criminal case against one of their big names, one Aarni Lankinen.

  Other, lesser, businesses wouldn’t have been able to ride out this kind of tsunami of chaos, but to give him credit, the new coach, Rowen Carmichael, had taken the bull by the horns. He’d had some tough conversations, most of which I had transcript of. Those exchanges, detailed for me to read, also gave me a basis for making an honest evaluation of every player. It would be all too easy to come to the struggling Raptors and make blanket judgments about everybody, assuming everyone was failing.

  And that wasn’t true. There had been some new blood this season. Three new guys who’d put up some impressive stats between them. I made a note in blue to check all three of them out and listed a whole load of questions I wanted to ask them. Looking around at some of the other teams, and how hockey worked in general, which was mostly new to me, there was an influx of new blood from something called the draft each year. The best of the best fought for NHL places, a lot of them ending up in what was called feeder teams, where they practiced until they were ready for the big teams. Then there were other newbies from colleges, and along with the draft guys and transfers up from the feeder team, there was a whole group of younger guys.

  Jason had emailed an information sheet on each player, and I worked my way through them, sliding the biggest arsehole known to man, Aarni Lankinen, to the bottom of the pile because, last I’d heard, he was heading for prison.

  Ryker Madsen was first on the list, the brightest star. He was all Instagram’d up, Twitter as well, and had a healthy following because of someone called Tennant Rowe? Seemed like Tennant was a big thing, and I added that to my list for further investigation. Ryker was a pretty boy, all sharp edges and curly hair, and his smile was infectious. The mean and moody team shots were all spoiled by that smile, which hinted at someone who was comfortable in their own skin. He was the flashy goal-scoring type, and he was the perfect poster boy for the Raptors. If we could get more people following him, loving him, then we’d have a whole new audience to pick through. But he was just a little too perfect, we
ll, apart from the gay thing, which appeared to be causing some issues.

  Henry Greenaway, he’d been one of the new ones, but he was out for the rest of the season with a head injury. Looking at the situation cynically, which always made me feel dirty, I could build a campaign about his recovery, but I’d seen abusive relationships for myself, and the last thing the kid needed was to have cameras in his face the entire time.

  Cameras? Oh, interesting, I should make a note about that.

  A documentary, behind the scenes, that kind of thing, showing a happy, united team who pranked each other and weren’t all old-school assholes.

  “Can I get you something, sir?” I looked up to see Robert, not Melanie, checking me out. “Or is there anything I can help you with?”

  “Is Melanie on a break?” I asked and deliberately dropped my gaze to crotch level, which wasn’t hard, considering Robert was right there.

  “Yes, sir,” Robert replied and raised a single eyebrow. Much as he fitted my type, short, slim, blue eyes, short blond hair, tending toward the effeminate, I was head deep in research, and rich guys did not take flight attendants into cramped plane bathrooms to get blow jobs.

  “Not at the moment,” I hedged.

  He pouted, then winked at me. “Come find me if you need anything.”

  I watched him sashay away, wondering if just for a moment I could let the veneer of responsible-businessman-me fade away and pull out the old Seb, who would demand Robert get on his knees right the hell now. The feeling passed, and even though my cock disapproved of my decision, my brain was right back on the issue in hand.

  Which was when I turned the page and saw him. With a waning erection and thoughts of nasty bathroom sex in my head, I went straight to the details of one Alejandro Ricardo Santos-Garcia, or Alex, as he was known to his friends.

  Fuck me. Alex was a long way past young and malleable for my purposes, and right onto sexy, fuckable, and fitting into all kinds of other thoughts I’d had.

  I turned back to Henry’s page and then flicked to Alex, just to see if the visceral reaction I’d had was a fluke.

  It wasn’t.

  I like blue eyes. But Alex had deep brown eyes, so dark that I couldn’t make out the pupil in this team shot. With dark hair and a rangy figure, he was the very opposite of the blond thing I had going on with Robert the alternate attendant. Add in that Alex was taller than my five ten and that his sharp focus was intimidating, and it hit me that maybe I’d been fucking the wrong guys my entire life.

  Alex had Instagram, and I was driven to see more photos of this sexy hockey player, but his posts were mostly of food and one of him at the beach with friends. One of him with his rugged good looks to his warm sun-kissed skin to the dinners he shared with Spanish-sounding names. I couldn’t talk the talk, sucked at most languages, but for him, I could learn the words for all manner of sexual requests.

  Down, boy. This is a job. We do not fuck the hired help. We are above that.

  I flicked past Alex’s page, after making a note that he had the potential to be the poster boy for the Raptors. After burying myself in the profiles of the rest of the team, there was no one who stood out to me, not in the same way Alex did. So I checked him out on Wikipedia to start with the dry facts.

  He’d been drafted in the third round, which was apparently an okay thing, then spent four years playing collegiate hockey at Arizona State University. He came from a big, extended family from a town not far from the Arizona Raptors arena. He had two sisters, one older and one younger, and an older brother, and clicking on a few links revealed his dad managed ten of something called Magic Mart, in the San Luis area. Alex was a Mexican-American and a practicing Catholic. Good clean boy with no history of anger issues or wild parties or sleeping around or getting girls pregnant. In fact, there was no hint of scandal attached to him or his hardworking family. I widened the search and found a couple of hockey forums that mentioned his name. I read comments about his stats, his performance on ice, his position, on joining the Raptors.

  What I didn’t expect to see was the animosity thrown at him. The racial slurs, the threats that he should be sent home, and worst, the terrorization against anyone connected to him. That would have to be handled if I thought that Alex was the best person to make the face of the team.

  I couldn’t understand the strength of the vitriol, though. Being a Brit didn’t make me immune to seeing racial tension. As a nation, we were very good at forming groups and excluding others. But these were genuine fans of the actual Raptors calling out the young man who might well be one of the saviors of their shitty team. None of it computed.

  “Sir, we’re coming in to land at Tucson International shortly.” Melanie nodded at the papers and electrical items spread around me. I packed it all away, closing down the iPad, storing my journal, and staring out the window at the night sky. Tucson was right there, just on the horizon, a brilliantly lit city in the middle of what I knew was a desert. I could see the faint shape of mountains, but it was too dark to make out most of what we were passing over.

  Getting through customs at LaGuardia had been time-consuming, but I’d not been able to secure a direct flight to Tucson. Although on the plus side, that delay in New York sped things up when I arrived in Arizona a great deal, but I still had a small wait at baggage claims, and then it was a waiting game.

  “Seb! Seb!” I turned to see my friend, Jason Westman-Reid, part-owner of the Raptors, jogging toward me, reaching me, and pulling me into a close hug. “So good to see you, man,” he said.

  “And you,” I answered truthfully. I’d formed a close friendship with the loud, somewhat annoying American in my first year at Cambridge, and it hadn’t waned all through business school. He’d decided to come to the UK to study to get away from his overbearing dad, and that had been my luck because he was more or less instantly my best friend. Now, with an ocean between us, we emailed, kept in touch through Facebook every so often, and exchanged Christmas cards. I’d sympathized when his dad died, sent flowers, but it took a personal cry for help to get me stateside. My work was in the UK, but I owed Jason big-time, and if I could clear my debt with this one thing, just three months, then I was happy to do it.

  “Are you sure you’re okay in the pool house?” he asked, among chatter about his family, kids, Lewis and Deborah, and his wife, Yvonne, all of whom were his entire life.

  He’d never struck me as the type to settle down, not after I’d spent a lot of time shadowing his whoring days at Cambridge, but somehow he’d found it all. Not that I envied him. We were in our early thirties, and I had a lot more living to do before finding that mythical one. Even then, I wasn’t sure that was even possible for me. My mum had thought she’d found the one, but he’d left her as soon as she’d announced she was pregnant. Not that we needed him. We’d done okay, the two of us, fought and worked hard, and when I’d bought her and my aunt Olivia a new house in the quiet countryside a few years back, we’d come full circle. She’d looked after me, and now it was my turn to care for her.

  “The pool house? Of course I am. I’ve seen the photos, and it’s bigger than a hotel room.”

  As soon as we left the airport, I launched into questions about the Raptors, and Jason seemed primed and ready to answer. He was going to be my link to the team, the intermediary to help me understand what was happening there.

  “Tell me about the Aarni situation.” I began by addressing the shitshow that had just occurred.

  “Bought out, sentenced, gone, thank fuck.”

  “Which leaves a hole on the team, I presume?”

  “Yeah, particularly with Henry out as well, but I think Rowen and Cam have it in hand.”

  Rowen being the coach, Cam, Jason’s older, quieter brother.

  “And the money situation?” I prompted when we slipped into silence.

  Jason shot me a quick look, then focused back on the road ahead. “We can pay you,” he defended.

  I thumped his arm as he pulled away from a set
of lights. “I owe you. This is free of charge. Call it a holiday of sorts.”

  “A vacation? This is one hell of a vacation, but thank you for coming over.”

  I shrugged as if it meant nothing when actually having Jason ask me to help meant everything. Being valued was the best part of the man I’d made myself into. “I’m looking forward to the challenge. I was between contracts.” That last bit was a lie, but I didn’t want anyone to know I’d spent an entire week rearranging contracts and delaying projects so I could come to the US. There was no way I was letting Jason know that because he had enough worries to be going on with, and my evasion must have worked, as he sent me a grateful smile.

  “Where do you want to start? Because if I know you, I won’t be able to persuade you to leave off starting this until the morning.”

  “I’d like to see the arena, get a sense of it, and also meet Coach Carmichael, hit the ground running, so to speak.”

  Jason pressed a button on the steering wheel and connected to COACH, which appeared on his display.

  “What now, Jason?” A voice echoed loudly in the car. “I thought we did all the talking and the arguing already today.”

  Jason rolled his eyes, “Fucks sake, Mark, why are you answering Rowen’s phone?”

  “Because Rowen is in the shower after we just spent all afternoon in bed and—”

  “I’m in the car,” Jason interrupted. “With Seb,” he added forcefully.

  “Oh, so no more embarrassing talk about sexing up my boyfriend, then,” Mark deadpanned.

  “Jeez, no.”

  Mark was the youngest of the Westman-Reid brothers, as far as I recalled. The black sheep, the one who’d fueled many a drunken, regretful discussion with Jason back in the day. He’d never forgiven himself for not standing up to his asshole dad and losing touch with Mark. Clearly, bridges had been mended, and everything was back on an even keel now.

  “Hi, Mark,” I said by way of introduction. “I know we haven’t met yet, but I’m here to work with the team.”