Chapter 8 Adam
EIGHT
ADAM
Now that Tanner was back in action and Willa had been asking for more hours—that Adam couldn’t afford to give her, but he had a hard time saying no to—Adam didn’t have a reason to hang out in the bar at night, which was when Skylar usually came to see him.
His employees (and Grace, who was his equal, if not his boss) had caught on to him, and sitting in the bar after a Stars game, transparently waiting around for Skylar, drew comments he didn’t want to field.
He talked himself out of going back down to the bar after the Stars game that night. He’d watched it, and he had a hard time imagining Skylar being okay after it. Usually, Skylar played emotionally after something bad happened on the ice. This game, it seemed like he started off that way.
Skylar wasn’t going to show up to his bar if he was that upset, Adam reasoned. He’d go home with Beck, who he had a real relationship with. Someone who had known him for years, and not just Adam, some old guy running a dying bar.
He was still arguing with himself about it when he got a call from Tanner.
“Hey, man, are you available? Can you come down to the bar?”
“Yeah, I’m home. What’s wrong?”
“Your hockey player is here.” Tanner lowered his voice as he said the next part. “He looks…rough.”
“Okay, I’ll be right down.”
Adam threw shoes on and headed down to the bar. It was cold out, but he didn’t need a jacket for the split second he’d be outside. He headed inside through the back door and saw Skylar sitting in the booth they usually split, a drink in his hand.
Adam slid into the booth across from him.
“Wow, what the fuck? Were you in the back room? That was fast. Or I disassociated.”
“Are you okay?” Adam asked instead.
Skylar tipped back his drink, swallowing the clear liquid in his glass in one gulp. “No.” He laughed.
“What happened?”
“I almost got called up today,” he said, avoiding Adam’s eyes. Skylar was a master of eye contact. He could make you feel like the world around you disappeared when his focus was on you. The avoidance he was practicing made him feel far away.
“And then they picked someone else?”
“One of the Northern Lights’ D-men was supposed to have the night off to watch his wife have a baby. Scheduled C-section. And then she had it yesterday, and you don’t get the day off in the NHL if your wife had a baby yesterday. So I stayed here and just…fucked everything up tonight.”
When he finally looked up at Adam, his eyes were glassy, and he wiped angrily at his tears.
The bar wasn’t the right place for this.
“Hey, come with me,” Adam said, sliding out of the booth and tilting his head toward the back door. Skylar looked confused, but he followed Adam out the back door. Adam headed up the covered stairs that led to his apartment, and Skylar closed the bar door behind them before following him.
“Whoa,” Skylar said, pausing at the threshold into Adam’s apartment. “Is this…yours?”
Adam nodded as he slipped his shoes off. Skylar copied him, setting his shoes down on the tray in the entryway, to contain whatever dirty snow sludge they were tracking in with them.
“You didn’t fuck everything up tonight,” Adam said, picking up the thread of the conversation he’d interrupted with a change of scenery.
And in a moment of boldness, he pulled Skylar into his arms. Skylar was bulky, taller and broader than Adam, built like an athlete, while Adam was wirier and leaner.
Despite his build, Skylar folded himself into Adam’s embrace easily, tucking his face against Adam’s neck. He couldn’t tell if Skylar was crying again, but his breathing was shaky.
“Hey, let’s take some deep breaths. In for six,” Adam said, counting the breath as Skylar followed his instructions. “Out for eight.”
He led him through a few more rounds of breathing until Skylar’s body grew still in his arms.
Skylar pulled him in closer, and the millimeters that closed between them emphasized how intimately they were standing.
Adam had his arms around Skylar’s shoulders, one hand flat on his back, his thumb rubbing the crest of one of his shoulder blades.
Skylar’s arms were wrapped around his waist, pulling their bodies flush.
“I never feel calm like this after a bad game,” he whispered, his breath hot on Adam’s neck. He nuzzled up behind Adam’s ear, and alarm bells started going off. Adam took a step back, putting some distance between the two of them.
“I’m glad I could help. Can I make you some food or something? You’re always starving after games.”
Skylar nodded. He was shyer when he was upset, and Adam wondered what it would be like to have the Labrador puppy version of Skylar in his space.
He would probably never find out.
“Come sit in the kitchen,” he said, directing Skylar to the tiny table tucked into the corner. He fished a couple of cans of Sprite out of his fridge and set one down in front of Skylar. “It’s not ginger ale but it’s free,” he joked.
Skylar cracked the can and took a sip. “Not as good without grenadine.”
“No reason for me to have any up here. But if it’s critical, I can go get some from the bar.”
“No, no.” Skylar shook his head. “This is perfect.”
Adam pulled a clearance chicken breast out of the fridge and a store-brand box of pasta out of the cupboard.
“Do you like garlic?”
“Are we going to be kissing?” Skylar asked, more life in his eyes.
“No,” Adam said, shutting him down the way it came naturally now.
“Then garlic is great.”
Adam chopped up the chicken as the water boiled for the pasta, and he thought about kissing Skylar.
He’d been thinking about it for a while.
Skylar clearly wanted to. He wasn’t deluding himself into thinking some young hottie was into him.
Skylar showed up on his doorstep when he was happy and when he was sad.
He’d brought his best friend to meet him, even if that went… less than well.
Adam thought about kissing him. And then he thought about how Skylar could get a phone call letting him know they needed him in Minnesota mid-kiss, and it felt less appealing.
“How did you learn how to do all the bar stuff?”
“Making drinks or running a business?”
“Both, I guess.”
Adam used tongs to flip the little pieces of chicken so he could season all sides, then turned the burner under his sauté pan on. “I took a class for the drinks. That was the easy part.”
“There’s a class for that?”
“Bartending school. I knew a lot of people who did it after high school. I was never interested.” He laughed at the hubris of his younger self.
To think it mattered what he wanted from his life.
He took what it gave him. “The bar was closed for a few months after Heath—my brother—died. I don’t know how much Grace has told you. ”
“Not a lot.”
“My brother, Heath, was nine years older than me. He was my half brother, actually. Same dad, different moms. We weren’t terribly close growing up, but he made an effort to get to know me when he was a teenager.
Stayed in touch when he went to school. He came down here, got a girl pregnant, and then never left.
I’ve never wanted kids of my own, but Grace has always been an exceptionally cool kid, so I’d come stay weekends with Heath and hang out with them.
“When you have a business and a kid, you have to have a will, and he’d asked me years before, when Grace was tiny, if I would be the adult intermediary until she turned eighteen and could make a decision about the bar. I said yes because what else would I say? I didn’t think he would ever die.”
“Seems like she could run it herself now.”
“She could,” Adam acknowledged. “But every time we tiptoe toward making that decision, we both back off.”
“Change is scary.”
“Yeah,” Adam agreed. He scraped the chicken from his cutting board into his hot pan. It was hard for him to open up to people, but Skylar had strong-armed his way past Adam’s walls, and now here he was in Adam’s kitchen, listening to him talk about his feelings.
“Where are you from?”
“Edmonton.”
“That’s pretty far north, right?”
“Yeah, northwest. I usually have to show Americans a map.”
“I would benefit from the map,” Adam admitted.
“Big hockey city,” Skylar said as he pulled up a map of Canada and pointed out his hometown.
“Are you sad you didn’t get drafted to your home team?”
“No, I am not.” Skylar laughed. “Playing for any Canadian team has more…pressure…than playing for an American team. And I don’t need people following me around yelling at me right now.”
“People do that?”
“I know you’re not a sports guy, but hockey is very serious to a lot of people.”
“Including you.”
“I guess so.” He sighed so loudly it felt like a stage direction.
“It’s worth the grief.”
“Is it? I mean, I know it is. I’m not going to quit. I just…hate feeling inadequate.”
“I understand that. My only goal for the last nearly ten years has been to keep this bar alive for Grace. And the number of times we’ve nearly had to close is not something I’m proud of.”
“It doesn’t seem like the bar makes you happy. I’m sorry if that’s an asshole thing to say.”
“It’s not. It doesn’t. But you don’t always get to pick what happens to you in your life.”
“You could pick now, though. After your brother died, you had to go and be Super Uncle. Grace is an adult now.”
“I’m not handing over a failing bar.” Adam could hear the frustration in his own voice. Skylar sat back in his chair. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
Adam got a jar of garlic, a stick of butter, and some heavy cream out of the fridge.
“I’m not fancy,” he said, defending his jarlic.
“I don’t currently own a pan, so you’re leaps and bounds ahead of me.”
Creamy garlic chicken pasta was a mainstay in his weekly rotation, and he hadn’t had to look at the recipe for it since the first ten-ish times he made it.
He dished up, giving Skylar the larger portion.