Hockey Holidays

by Toni Aleo

  We watched people hitting those jumps, pulling off some amazing flips and grabbing huge air.

  “I want to do that someday,” Allison murmured, her gaze on one boarder who was shredding the jumps. The way he moved was familiar as was the unique way he did this funky double-tap nose grab to the front of his bright yellow board. Shaun. He was the only one who did that nose grab/tap with that kind of flair. He raced down the trail, pulling off tricks that I knew and several I didn’t. He was flawless until he flew past us, our eyes met, and he kind of lost his concentration as a grin broke free.

  He missed the last jump, turning into it too late and rolling ass over hat. We all gasped. He waved a hand and started freeing his boots from his board and my heart resumed beating.

  “Look at what you did! I was going to bone out my legs coming out of that nose tap until I saw you.” Shaun threw his arms around me, and I inhaled deeply as we pounded each other on the back. He smelled exactly as I had remembered. A sexy-ass mixture of sweat, male, Verb Ghost shampoo and conditioner from Sephora that he swore by, and Shaun.

  We pulled back a bit, still clasping each other, smiles as bright as the sun on all that crystal white snow. It’ll sound stupid, but I got lost in his dark brown eyes. Standing there inhaling his minty exhalations, I felt hot and cold and skittish, as if I were staring over the side of a cliff deciding if I had the balls to jump into the crashing surf below. If not for Allison jerking on my coat and the fifty or so guys milling around I just might have kissed him again.

  “It’s been too long,” I coughed out as we broke apart, my arms falling to my sides dully. “I wasn’t sure if you’d even remember me, big gold medal star and all that.”

  I winked. Shaun cuffed my arm with the side of his gloved fist.

  “Right, like I’m the big star. Two weeks after the games people were like, ‘Who’s that goofy-footed biracial dude jibbing the box rail?’ but they all know you’re playing your ass off in Cayuga.”

  “Not likely. They’re all saying, “Mitch Adams? Didn’t he give up hockey to live on a sheep farm in Minnesota?’ because no one in America follows minor league hockey.”

  “I do,” Shaun replied, gave me a long look that I couldn’t read, and then dropped down to a crouch to talk with Allison. I was stunned into stupid for a second. Did he really follow my career like I had followed his? What did that mean exactly? Did he watch me in the crease and dream of kissing me like I did when I saw him competing? And why would him watching a livestream game mean he wanted anything from me? Man alive, I needed to get myself in check here.

  “…them intimidate you. We all were beginners at one time. I’ll get you set up, and we’ll work the snow a bit over on the training hill, okay?” Shaun was saying to Allison, who was all kinds of star-struck.

  Shaun smiled up at me then stood, his height roughly the same as mine at an inch over six foot. It was easy to look into his eyes again. Which I did, for way too long to be considered even remotely acceptable.

  “You need to work the beginner’s slopes too, Mr. Ice Skates Are My Secondary Feet man?”

  That made me laugh. “Just to warm up. I remember all those tricks you taught me back in high school.”

  “We’ll see,” Shaun snickered, took Allison by the hand, shoved his famed yellow board under his arm, and headed off to the beginner’s slopes, which were tucked away from the rest of the insanity. “Your ears look redder and bigger than I remember.”

  He led Allison off. I dug my knitted cap out of my coat pocket and pulled it down over the hair I’d worked so hard to sculpt to ensure my dumb, big, red ears were covered.

  “Man, she was really mad.” Shaun said as he and I stood in the parking lot of the snow park, tiny little flakes of white drifting from the clouds that had blown in, watching my sister Rhonda loading her eldest into her car.

  “Yeah. Guess two solid hours of falling on her face wasn’t enough.” I waved as they backed out and left to go pick up Craig, Rhonda’s husband, and my two other brothers-in-law at the train station a few counties over.

  “She’s determined to learn. I knew a couple dudes who were just like that.”

  I glanced over at him as the sun peeked through a sliver of cloud, making the highlights in his thick black hair glow deepest blue. He’d cut it back since we’d last seen each other. It was short on the sides with a mass of soft ebony curls on top. His beard was coming in, his cocoa eyes were brilliant, and his mouth was curling up into the smile that stole hearts all over the world.

  I reached up to pull my hat back down over my left ear. “Yeah, we were pretty intense.”

  “Pretty, yeah.” He looked around me to my mother’s car. “Think you can give me a lift home? Drew dropped me off on his way to town.”

  “Sure.”

  We tossed our snowy boards into the back and crawled into the car. It turned right over and blew some cold air for a minute or two. The wipers knocked the fluffy flakes off the windshield, and I pulled out into the road leading down the mountain. Off to the left a ski lift was running, but most of the seats were empty. That would change after the holiday tomorrow. Skiers would flock into Liberty, filling the small hotels and lone motel, bringing in all that lovely tourism cash.

  “It’s really good to see you, Mitch. I mean that.”

  I threw Shaun a standard smile. It fell as soon as I saw he wasn’t just making small talk. There was pain in his eyes, a soft kind of strain set into his brow.

  “It’s good to see you too. I’ve missed you.” If only he knew how he had filled my thoughts since that summer two years ago. How the memories and fantasies of him had grown little by little to become a living, breathing ball of want. That kiss in the basement had changed me. I hadn’t known it then, not really. Or, I suppose it would be more factual to say that I refused to think on what kissing my best friend and liking it really meant to my sexuality.

  “Is that why you never got in contact with me after we kissed? Because you missed me?”

  My foot slipped off the gas. We slowed and then pulled over to the side of the road because driving when in shock was not recommended. Two kids ran past, both with boards and bouncy hats with tassels like Shaun had made so popular. Like he had been wearing earlier.

  “I wasn’t sure what to say to you after that.”

  He stared at me, his forehead furrowed, as my mother’s radio station played something by some band called Earth, Wind & Fire. It was too jazzy and disco. My heart was hammering into my breastbone, and my hearing was super sensitive.

  “That’s fair.” He pursed his lips then flattened them. “Were you mad that it had happened? That I had led you into that kind of intimacy?”

  “Mad? No. Not at all. I uh…well, I guess I was just…confused,” I said, draping my hands over the chilly steering wheel, my sight locked on him, on those full lips and wide nose. On the damp ringlets resting on his light brown brow.

  “All right, that’s also fair. I mean, it’s not every day that your best friend plants a wet one on you.”

  The humor was forced.

  “You don’t have to do that, Shaun.” He looked at me with confusion. “You don’t have to try to make it a joke or anything, because it really wasn’t funny.”

  “Yeah, I guess it wasn’t funny at all. You must have been freaked out. I’m sorry for that.”

  “It’s okay.” He snorted. The car idled quietly. “No, I mean it’s okay. It was unexpected. It changed everything.”

  “It did, and not for the better. I shouldn’t have acted on my feelings. It was just…” He ripped his gaze from mine to look out at the snowy road. “It was this crazy time for me. I was just really getting to know myself as a gay man. I mean, I had known for years.”

  “You never told me.”

  “No, I didn’t tell anyone.” His sad gaze returned to me. “Scratch that. I told one person: Mr. Perry, our old gym teacher.”

  I mulled on that. It hurt that Shaun hadn’t come to me, but I guess I got it, in a way.
Maybe he was scared I’d turn away from him or something.

  “He always seemed like an okay guy.”

  “Mm, yeah, he was okay. Not the best pick to come out to, but I was terrified he’d see me checking out cock in the locker room or something, not that I spent that much time doing that in the showers.”

  “I know.”

  “I doubt that you do, but thanks for the backing.” His smile was flimsy. “Anyway, so I told Mr. Perry. He was okay with it; I mean he didn’t freak out. He advised me to talk to my parents and then told me that he thought the best thing to do was to hide it and just try to fit in. ‘Being a part of society or a team is all about conforming’ he said in his best coach way. And I bought it. I mean I swallowed that shit like a bass gulping down a cricket.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My struggles had been different and had only surfaced after that kiss. Before that, I assumed I was straight. Even now, after talking with Sander and working on eradicating my need for labels, I was confused about this. This need to touch Shaun, to hold him and feel his mouth on mine. Yet I had no urge for that kind of tenderness from any other man.

  “I worked hard to bury it, to conform, to fit in, thinking that the best way to be gay was to not be out there shouting about it. Took me three years to realize that hiding who I was and trying to conform was rotting my soul. I told my parents that summer you came home, and then I went a little wild and kissed the man I’d spent the past five years dreaming about. Pity he was straight.”

  “I’m not though,” I rushed to say. One of his eyebrows raced up into those soft curls lying on his brow. “I mean…” I wrapped my fingers around the steering wheel and stared at my knuckles. “I think I might be bisexual or something. What do you call a dude who enjoys sex with women but can’t stop thinking about an amazing kiss he’s shared with his best friend and wants to do it again?”

  “Uh, well,” Shaun said then lapsed into silence for a long moment. I felt a rush of heat in my cheeks. “Okay, I was not expecting to hear that from you. Like ever!” He nervously laughed. I did the same. “Well, uh, do you like having sex with other guys?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. I’ve never wanted to even touch another guy but you.”

  I looked over at Shaun, and our gazes met. “Wow,” he stammered, his nose pink as a rose, a sure sign he was feeling as awkward as I was. “Uhm, well, I guess we’ll call it being Mitch.”

  I felt a smile tug on my lips. The snow on my coat began to melt, cold water running from the collar down my neck and into my sweatshirt.

  “Sometimes I wish…” Shaun said then faded off.

  “Sometimes you wish what?”

  Shaun softly shook his head as he stared into my eyes. “Sometimes I wish we’d been brave enough to explore it more deeply back then.”

  My mouth fell open, just an inch.

  “Yeah,” I sighed and left it at that. I did manage to make my hand work and change the station, finding something a little more modern. “I wish that too.”

  And there we sat, like two dimwitted toads on a log, looking into each other’s eyes. Someone pounded on the hood of my mother’s car, jarring us out of the staring longingly bit.

  A couple of guys, had no idea who they were, waved and shouted at Shaun. He lifted a hand as the guys ran past, snowboards in hand.

  “That was only slightly horrifyingly embarrassing.” Shaun laughed uncomfortably. “How about we head to my house and spend the day like we used to. Before things got so…”

  Confusing? Marvelous? Bewildering? Life altering?

  “I’d like that.”

  “Me too.”

  Chapter Three

  We kind of made small talk over the twenty minutes it took to get to our winding road. We touched on sports, politics, movies, video games, and how his brothers were doing. If the Adams house was the Kingdom of Estrogen, then the Sandbeck spread was the Empire of Testosterone. Shaun had three brothers. Drew, Kirk, and Adam. Kirk and Adam are still in high school and so live at home. Drew’s a highly successful architect with an office in Denver, Colorado. It was Drew who laid out Monarch Basin Snow Park and Mr. Sandbeck’s construction company that built it.

  As soon as we parked by the huge double-door garage and I got a look at the massive home, I felt like I was back in tenth grade. The Sandbeck house was a log cabin, but not one of those dinky mountain man things. It was this sprawling two-story home with porches that looked down over the rough terrain and steep slopes that living on the side of a mountain produced. The house was gorgeous, like something out of a magazine. The yard however; that wasn’t going to win any landscaping awards. See, Shaun had transformed his yard into a snow park years ago, back before the big one was built. I had helped him, as had Drew and his dad, Ron. His mom, Patrice, had grudgingly given in when it was obvious Shaun’s affair with snowboarding was more than the passing fancy of a ten-year-old.

  There were rails and jumps built into the yard. The rails were set in concrete, the jumps made from old picnic tables and then manicured after the snows fell and buried the tables. Exiting the Subaru, I smiled at the sight. Kirk and Adam were ripping around the yard on four-wheelers. Kirk, a senior at Liberty High—Go Liberty Lions! —was pulling Adam, a freshman, back up to the driveway on a snowboard. A long length of rope was the towline. It was crazy dangerous, and it was exactly what Shaun and I had done for years.

  I looked at Shaun as his brothers raced past, shouting obscenities.

  “How soon can we hit those pipes?” I asked.

  He opened the hatch on the car and handed me his famed yellow board. “Soon as you get a board under you.”

  “Dude, no. That’s your baby.”

  “I insist. She’ll do you good.” He shoved the safflower board into my chest, and we went inside to find some boots that fit me. Mrs. Sandbeck met us at the door with a hug for me and a warning for her two youngest boys to be delivered by Shaun.

  “Tell them that I do not want to see them towing without helmets,” she said to Shaun while patting my cold cheeks. She was so pretty and smart. She was also the first black woman to hold the title of Mayor of Liberty.

  “He can tell them, but they won’t listen,” Mr. Sandbeck tossed out as he passed by with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. “Good to see you, Mitch.”

  “You too, Mr. S.” I slid into the massive closet just inside the front door. It was packed with coats, boots, boxes of bindings, skates hanging off hooks, skis, a sled, several hockey sticks, and a baseball bat and several wet softballs making a puddle on the stone floor. There were cabinets packed with gloves, hats, and scarves.

  “Well, at least I’ll have done my motherly duty by warning them. This way when they end up concussed I can say ‘I told you so’. Seems all I do is tell these boys the same things over and over. ‘Please use Febreze in your room’ or ‘I dislike crusty socks in the hamper’ or ‘If you’re in the same room that I am there will be no hands down the front of your pants’. Take the blue ones, Mitch; they’re Shaun’s old ones and should fit you.”

  “Right, I’ll tell them,” Shaun said to his mother while I toed off my snow boots and wiggled my feet into Shaun’s old board boots. I was having major fuzzy feelings. The memories of doing this very thing for years ran over me like a warm summer rain.

  “You are coming over tomorrow afternoon, right?”

  I glanced up at Mrs. S while trying to get the liner in place so I could lace. “Oh, uh, sure, yeah. I’d love to.”

  “Good.” She smiled warmly at me, gave Shaun a look that I did not grasp, and then went off to do mayorly things, I guess.

  “She’s the best,” I told Shaun and bent over to lace up the heavy boots.

  “Yeah, she’s great. I’m glad you’re coming over. I have something for you.”

  “I have something for you too,” I whispered, feeling awkward and fat-fingered.

  “Cool but not necessary. Now hurry up and lace. I’m anxious to see if you remember how to spin a one-eighty.”
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br />   “Please. I knew how to spin a one-eighty when we were in third grade.”

  An hour later I was back in snowboarding 101. It was embarrassing how much I’d forgotten. I’d kind of bitched about Shaun lecturing me, but when I wiped out after a simple ollie, he’d put his boot down. We’d manage to work up through five or so simple tricks that I now had good control of. Muscle memory or something, maybe? Or maybe it was my awesome teacher.

  “Okay, so, now that you’re back to where you were when we were like four,” Shaun teased, giving me a hard shoulder bump, “I want you to try something easy but will grab you some short air.”

  Snow was falling at a steady but slow rate. Kirk and Adam had gone inside to eat lunch, leaving the yard for us to enjoy.

  “Your body awareness is good, so let me see you try an indy grab,” Shaun said.

  “Okay, yeah, I remember doing those.” I pulled my knit hat down over my ears. It kept moving up my head. Maybe my big, dumb ears were pushing it up

  “Good. Come into the jump with some speed, but not too much. They’re super straight forward, so when you get some air, bend your knees and reach your backhand down to grab the board.”

  “Right. Got it.” Shaun grinned and pounded on my back. Then he stood back and motioned me to head down the yard and hit that first jump. “If I nail this, and I will because I’m the boss of backyard boarding, you’ll owe me at least an hour on the ice before I go home.”

  “Mitch, if you hit this trick, I’ll give you two hours on the ice, and I won’t even wear skates.”

  I nodded and placed the board in my hand on the snow and fastened my boots to it. The blue boots kind of clashed and were a bit tight, but who cared?

  “Now remember about pressing and ollies, and keep your weight distributed on the board,” Shaun reminded me.