by RJ Scott
Aarni hadn’t played with the Raptors tonight; he’d been a healthy scratch. Whether that was team punishment or not, I didn’t know. Both Canadian and US papers were headlining the hit in their sports pages, and I know that if we had been up there now, reporters would be camped out at the hotel. Ten was the new generation of players, and he had star potential. It seemed as though everyone was invested in his recovery, even outside the close community of hockey.
But there was peace here, and I was glad of it.
Jared stood and stretched tall, then screwed up the wrappers and the bag and tossed them into the trash.
“Thank you,” he said as he reached the door. “I needed this.”
“No worries,” I offered as Gatlin took my hand and laced our fingers. “Food is always a good thing.”
Jared huffed a soft laugh. “I’m not thanking you just for the food, Bryan. Never just for the food.”
We were in Washington, with a game in less than eight hours, when the news came down from on high that Aarni had been given a league suspension of five games. When the announcement from the National Hockey League’s Player Safety Department hit after morning practice, with Coach Benning reading from the press release, the mood in the locker room went from tired and pissed to furious.
“Five,” Adler repeated and threw his gloves into his cubby. “Jesus, did they not see what he did?”
“There’s more,” Coach continued, holding up his hand to quiet us and continued reading the NHL missive. “Lankinen has added his own release.”
“Fucking asshole,” Connor snapped.
“I’m kill,” Stan shouted as he stood with clenched fists. I wanted to stand next to him and pledge my allegiance to any killing. Five games were nothing.
Coach waited for us to quiet again. “This was more than a careless and reckless action on my part. It was senseless. Tennant Rowe was openly vulnerable, and the situation was one in which I realize I let my emotions get the better of me. I am in contact with the Rowe family. I have decided to accept the NHL’s decision and will not be appealing it. I have no further comment regarding this matter.”
The noise was deafening, a cacophony of cursing and threats and for the longest time Coach let us vent.
Erik stood in front of Stan, a hand on his chest, talking to him, and Stan’s expression was fierce and determined. I watched Connor stand silently in the middle of the room, his hands clenched into fists. And me? The guilt was there, Ten and I should have said something before about the roof. Then maybe we could have stopped this? One by one we fell quiet until finally every single one of us was back in our allotted cubby space and all eyes were on Coach. Now what?
“The game tonight,” he began. “If Brady and Jamie Rowe can be back today playing for their teams, we can pull our shit together for Ten. All of us. Ten does not define our team, we have a whole room of talent here, and we need to shake this shit off, whether we like it or not. If Ten were here, he’d be saying this, and you know it.”
Skaters murmured their assent and then went silent.
“Okay then. Washington is a strong, determined team, and they will bring their A game. Go home, get you pregame nap, get your carbs, find your lucky whatever the hell it is, do your rituals, and come back with the intention of playing Railers hockey the right way.”
He didn’t wait for agreement. He just left, the other coaches slipping out after him and closing the door. We were alone, and all eyes went to Connor.
He turned his gaze to the ceiling briefly and then sighed. “I want to hurt that man for what he did to Ten. I felt as if our team was destroyed that night. I thought it was all over. What was the point.” He paused, but no one interjected. He couldn’t be standing there just telling us that he thought we were done. He crossed his arms over his chest. “The point is we’re still a team, and losing Ten hurts, but we can close ranks here. Charlie, I know you’re in a shit position of centering Ten’s line, but it’s not his line while he’s not here; it’s yours.”
“Yes, boss,” Martin ”Charlie” Brown said. He’d centered the fourth line for so long that going up to first against the best D-men that other teams had, was always going to be hard.
“D’s we need to tighten up in front of the net. Wings, we have gaps on all four lines that we need to fill, and Gids?”
Gideon “Gids” Levesque looked up, startled. Poor guy had been called up from the Rush to cover the hole in our fourth line with everyone else being moved around. No one wanted to fill that space when the reason for it was so shit. He had the expression of a permanently frightened rabbit, but his play, at least, had been more consistent in the last game than the rest of us.
“Captain?”
“It’s shit why you’re here, but you deserve the place, and last game you were solid. Keep it up.”
Gids sat upright, his shoulders back, “Yes, Cap.”
“Stan, Bryan, you're our last defense here, you stop those pucks if they get through. Stan, you need to rein it in for me, buddy.”
Stan muttered in Russian and then sighed noisily. “I’m catch all pucks. I’m show true grit,” he said, and there was absolute focus and determination mixed into his angry expression.
“What Stan said,” I offered after him. A few of the guys laughed at that, which lightened the tone a little and allowed Connor to uncross his arms and relax a little.
“Okay,” Connor said and rubbed his hands, “Sleep, carb, rituals, lucky shit, back here to take down Washington. Agreed?”
I was backup in the Washington game, able to watch the division matchup with a dispassionate eye. We played well, focused, not temper-driven, not listless and wrecked. There were some signs held up at the glass, but not one of them spouted hate. What there was made absolute sense to me. The fans were closing ranks around us, holding us near and helping us in ways they would never understand, and there were more than a few people in Railers blue jerseys in the seats.
I knew precisely where Gatlin was sitting, and I skated right up to the glass and caught his eye, tapping the glass with my stick and blowing him a kiss. He caught the kiss in a comically exaggerated fashion and pretended to place it into his pocket.
I was so in love with that man it was ridiculous.
The game was hard, but we were tied after two periods, one goal apiece. Gids got his first NHL goal only a few seconds into the last period, off a beautiful face-off win at the Washington end. It was poetry to watch, and when Gids passed me and bumped fists, he was whooping in joy. We held that lead by the skin of our teeth, and when the buzzer sounded, we were done. We’d won.
I think we needed that.
For the forward guys stepping up. For Gids with his first NHL goal. For Jared and his D-men. For the coaches who had watched us begin to implode and prayed we got out of it, and for the fans who deserved the win.
But mostly for Ten.
Sixteen
Gatlin
Bryan and I did this half-assed job of decorating my space above the shop for Christmas. He hung some tinsel, and we grabbed a fake tree, already decorated with gold candy canes, tiny plastic golden balls and really gross gold glitter-encrusted gingerbread men. Neither of us felt much like celebrating Christmas, which was two weeks away. Tennant lingered on our minds continually, as he did with all the Railers, I was sure.
He’d been released from the hospital, which was great news, but he hadn’t gone home. The brain specialists had been adamant about him spending time in a traumatic brain injury rehab facility in Hershey. Tennant had not been happy about it, but between his mother who was staying with Tennant indefinitely so that Jared could go back to work, and his boyfriend, the surly young man was convinced to give the facility a chance. Two weeks. Just fourteen days and then, if his therapists and doctors agreed, he could go home and have therapy on an out-patient basis. There would be no hockey for Tennant Rowe for the remainder of the season, obviously. So now we were all praying that he’d recover enough to play next year.
Plans t
o visit Ten at the rehab center had been made for tomorrow. Bryan was still working through the tremendous guilt he felt, which was part of the reason I’d made plans for a dinner party. His billet parents and my parents. Coming here, to eat, for an early holiday meet and greet that had me as nervous as a tick on dip day.
“This tree is sad,” Jess commented as I walked around my dingy table touching all the silverware to make sure they were straight. “Why do people even buy fake trees? Why not live ones? And why would you buy one someone with no design taste had decorated for you?” She plucked a glittery-gold gingerbread man off a bent limb and held it up by one arm. “This is truly hideous.”
Garrett followed me around the table, pushing the silverware a tad to the left.
“Would you stop doing that?” I barked at my brother. He lifted an eyebrow. I blew out a long breath. “Sorry, sorry. The closer it gets to them walking through the door, the antsier I become.”
“‘Antsy’ isn’t the word that I’d use,” my brother commented, then moved all the glasses a few inches to the right. The urge to swat the man in the neatly pressed three-piece suit was overwhelming. “More like neurotic.”
I glanced at Jess. She nodded at her father’s assessment of my behavior and then threw the glittery gingerbread man to Voodoo, named in homage to the Black Sabbath song of the same title, the black alley cat Bryan had invited in a few days ago. The cat had made himself at home and had taken to sleeping with us. We’d bathed him twice in flea shampoo the day he had moved in. Both of us had battle scars from that little endeavor. Voodoo swatted the decoration under the sofa, then walked off as if bored with the game, skinny black tail in the air.
“Okay, yes. I’m nervous. And when I get nervous, I get stressed. And when I get stressed, I get—”
“Neurotic,” Garrett and Jess said at the same time.
I had a good comeback ready to fire when I heard feet coming up the stairs. Smacking Garrett’s hand from the glass by my plate, I rushed to the door, my stomach filled with acid from my neurotic behavior no doubt. Bryan smiled at me when I flung the door open, inviting in snowflakes that were falling from the dark afternoon sky.
“We ran into your folks outside the shop. They were parked behind us,” Bryan informed me, sneaking in a quick kiss, then stepping inside to allow the people with him to come in out of the cold.
There was this disconnect from me and the rest of the world for several long seconds when my mother and father hustled into my little place. Mom shook off the scarf she’d tied around her head, sending snow crystals flying to the floor. Then, her eyes touched mine.
In all the possible scenarios I’d ever imagined since we’d lost Gina, seeing my mother and father in this apartment had never dared to be envisioned. Yet here they were. Looking at me with tears in their eyes.
I vaguely heard Garrett clearing his throat. Mom bit down on her bottom lip, gaze full of sorrow. I went to her, hugged her, held her, and wept on her while she cried on me. Garrett and Jess stepped up. I released my mother so she could see her eldest son and hug the grandchild she had never met before. Dad shook my hand, his lips set and his eyes dewy. As Garrett had said, we’d never been demonstrative, and all the weeping and wailing my mother was doing now was probably enough to last my father for the next twenty years.
“We missed you boys,” Dad said roughly, his grip tightening for a moment before he moved back to allow Bryan’s billet parents to wiggle in for a warm greeting. Daisy and George were amazing people, outgoing and prone to smiling with ease. I could see why Bryan loved them as he did.
The meal was weird. Weird the way something feels surreal and yet you’re living it, so you know it’s happening because you can taste the meatloaf, smell the garlic potatoes, touch the heavy meat platter as you pass it to your niece, and see your family sitting across from you. Jess made up for the lack of conversation coming from Garrett and me. I did jump in from time to time, but the years spent apart, being hated, hung heavily over my head and would for some time to come. Garrett, well, he was Garrett. Dry as the Sahara but not rude. Bryan kept smiling awkwardly at me, his knee beside mine under the table. Overall, it was the first rough sketch of what, I hoped, would resemble a family again in the future.
After dessert, which was a red-and-white-marble cake Jess had baked, my parents left, citing an early morning flight out to Arizona to visit my mother’s sister over the holidays. Bryan, Garrett and I got handshakes from my Dad and a peck on the cheek from my mother. Jess was hugged and had her cheeks pinched by her grandmother. Grandpa just gave her a quick hug and then led my mother back out into the cold.
Bryan’s parents, I refused to think of them as “just his billet parents” because they were all the good things parents should be for him, stayed for coffee and chitchat until midnight when Bryan ran them to their hotel room. They were staying over for the game tomorrow night and would be flying back home at five in the morning the following day.
When it was just Voodoo and me, Garrett and Jess had stayed to help clean up, then left as well, I sat on the sofa, mentally spent but feeling a peaceful sort of sensation in my breast.
Motörhead’s Overkill album was spinning on the turntable, Voodoo had draped himself over my sock-covered feet resting on the coffee table, and I had a cup of hot coffee and a stack of mail, mine and the mess that Bryan always grabbed at home and threw in with mine, to sort while I waited for Bryan to get back. Of course, I had no fucking idea where my reading glasses were, and I hated to disturb the cat purring away contentedly on my feet. Holding the top envelope out as far as my arm would stretch, I could just make out that it appeared to be a handwritten address with Bryan as the addressee. I saw that the return address had been written in a looping way that matched the mailing address.
Setting it aside, I then began opening my mail until my eyes burned from squinting. Bryan ambled in with snow covering his hair about ten minutes later. I might have dozed off but would never admit to doing so if asked.
“Sleeping?” he asked, shucking off his coat and kicking off his shoes to join me on the sofa.
“Nope.”
“You’re a bad liar,” he said with a soft smile.
“Just checking my eyelids for holes.”
“Right.” He ran a hand over Voodoo, who purred loud enough to match Lemmy’s vocals and then fell back into the cushion. I rubbed at my eyes and yawned. “Where are your DILF glasses?”
“No clue.” I let my eyes close again because they were tired, and Bryan was warm and safely beside me. He shuffled around a bit. Then I heard the soft rip of paper, him tearing open an envelope. Sleep was creeping up on me when he made a sound like a wounded animal. I forced my weary eyes open and turned my head in his direction. His jaw was tight, his mouth in a frown. “Overcharged on your cable bill again?”
“It’s a letter from my parents.”
Sloppy and muddy with fatigue, I sat there wondering why his folks would have written to him when they’d been coming to see him. And who wrote letters anymore? Hell, the next generation wouldn’t know how to write in cursive because of the invention of texting.
“Oh,” I mumbled when the terse words sunk into my brain. “Your birth parents?”
It seemed odd to refer to them like that since Bryan had never really been given up or officially adopted by Daisy and George, but honestly, did legal stamps and court papers designate who we loved as family? Nope, they did not.
A hundred questions rested on my tongue, but I let him read in silence. Well, as silent as it could be with the Kilmister and his crew on the turntable.
“Shit,” he finally said, the word an explosion of feeling on a shaky whisper. “They’re not doing this to me, not again.” He tore the letter in half, then in quarters, and then into smaller and smaller bits, until all that was left was a mound of confetti on the coffee table that Voodoo’s thin tail stirred up as it lazily swept back and forth.
“Doing what?” I placed a hand to the back of his neck, the short
hair on his nape as soft as a kitten’s belly. I worked my fingers into the tense muscles.
“Anything. Just—”
“Hey, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I totally get how hard it is to rehash family stuff.” God, did I ever.
“No, Mitch says in therapy that we need to talk about bad stuff.” He lifted the cat from my feet, cuddled him under his chin, and then fell backward into the sofa, Voodoo limp as a wet rag in Bryan’s big hands. “Talking about it gets it out and makes you deal with it all.”
Ugh. Dealing with all my stuff would take years. I stared at my lover nuzzling an old alley cat and had to confess that he'd been doing a stellar job with his sessions. Maybe there was something to this whole ‘talk it out with a professional’ thing that I'd not seen or refused to recognize, before.
I ran my hand up into his hair. He liked that and responded as Voodoo would to a scratch on the chin. The stress lines around his mouth eased as I massaged his scalp.
“They kind of burn through cash,” he said softly, his voice low. I turned on the sofa to face him, my fingertips working away the tension. “Since I turned pro, they’ve been hitting me up on occasion for money. I think they’re spending it on scam preachers…maybe. I don’t know. They say not, but yeah, it’s been a thing for a year or two. I feel guilty for not helping them when they ask, but I know I shouldn’t. They’re using me, right?”
Well shit. “Yeah, maybe they are, babe.” I cupped his head gently, easing him to me. I placed a kiss to the side of his head, inhaling the scent of his shampoo, wishing I had pretty words to comfort him better. “That shitty behavior of theirs is not on you though.”