10. Gideon
Gideon
We won in Buffalo.
Two-one. It wasn’t pretty, but road wins didn’t need to be pretty.
Arnaud stood on his head for most of the third and Walker scored the winner with less than four minutes left.
I’d picked up an assist, Bob picked up six penalty minutes, and Arnaud spent the whole walk back to the locker room complaining that Bob couldn’t stay out of the box.
Bob told him to fuck off. Arnaud told him to fuck off in French. A successful night, all in all.
We were staying over before the next game, which meant breakfast in the hotel restaurant instead of everyone stumbling onto the bus half-awake with coffee and whatever they grabbed on the way out.
On these trips, I always ended up with the same people—Walker, Bob, Arnaud, Chip, and Sable, of course, stretched under the table with her head on Chip’s shoe.
Somewhere along the way we’d become a friend group outside hockey.
The art therapy did that, except nobody called it therapy anymore.
Finn still turned up with paint and canvases and brushes, and we still met when schedules allowed, but there was no more talk about expressing emotions through color.
Mostly, it was Walker convincing everyone he was an undiscovered artistic genius, which he wasn’t, Arnaud painting everything like the cover of an obscure French-Canadian folk album, and Bob working through some deeply held rage against canvas.
Chip wasn’t bad, actually. It worked for us.
Breakfast did too, once you knew the one rule—Bob at one end, Arnaud at the other, so the rest of us could eat in peace.
This morning, Bob was at the end near me, working through enough scrambled eggs to feed a family of six, while Arnaud sat at the far end with yogurt, fruit, seeds, and something that looked suspiciously like lawn clippings.
“What the fuck is that?” Bob asked.
I ignored them as they bickered, concentrating on my oatmeal.
Across from me, Chip scratched Sable behind one ear while he drank coffee and scrolled his phone one-handed. Walker had been missing for ten minutes since announcing he needed more bacon, apparently lost somewhere between our table and the buffet.
I glanced toward the entrance. Not because I was looking for anyone.
I’d already seen Ryan last night, just for a minute while the equipment staff packed up, still wearing my hoodie with the sleeves shoved up his forearms. I nearly asked for it back.
Then I decided I liked seeing him in it, which probably meant I was never getting it back.
“You keep looking over there,” Chip said.
“I don’t.”
He lifted his eyes from his phone just long enough to make the point then went back to it. Observant asshole.
“Look who I found.” Walker came through the restaurant with one hand wrapped around Ryan’s arm, steering him between tables while Ryan carried a plate of toast and eggs in one hand and coffee in the other, looking thoroughly bewildered that the captain of the Rochester Copperheads had abducted him on his way to breakfast. He was still wearing my hoodie too, and it made me feel happy.
“Morning,” Walker announced.
“Help,” Ryan said.
Walker ignored him. Ryan’s gaze found mine. I smiled, and he smiled back, and the warm thing spread a little farther.
“I found him hiding,” Walker said.
“I wasn’t hiding,” Ryan protested.
“You were sitting behind a plant.”
“The table was behind the plant.”
“Come sit with us,” Walker said, then let him go. Ryan checked his arm as if he were expecting fingerprints. “Shuffle up, Bob.”
Bob was confused. “I’m eating.”
“You can eat six inches to the left.”
Bob stared him down for a solid five seconds, then grumbled and gathered his plate, coffee, silverware, phone, and orange juice, and then dragged his chair down the table, opening up the seat right beside me. I looked at Walker. Walker’s face gave nothing away.
“Sit,” he told Ryan.
Ryan glanced at the chair, then at me.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“I know.” He sat anyway.
Walker dropped into the seat across from us, trying to act innocent but instead looking smug. Ryan set his plate down carefully.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
His hair was still damp from the shower, red curling at the ends, no makeup around his eyes this morning. Tired, but the good kind—warm and soft and sleepy. I liked it. I liked him, and that was becoming alarmingly easy to admit to myself.
“So,” Chip said, rescuing the table. “How’d everyone sleep?”
“Badly,” Bob said.
“Like an angel,” Arnaud said.
Bob told him he snored loud enough to hear from three rooms away, and Arnaud called it jealousy. Chip announced he hated road trips, then Sable lifted her head at the word hate until Chip clarified it wasn’t about her, and she settled again.
Ryan ate his eggs and let the conversation move around him.
He’d come in stiff, elbows tucked close, as if he was trying not to take up too much room at a table full of players, but by the time Walker started in about ketchup belonging on scrambled eggs, Ryan was arguing back as if he’d been doing it for years.
When his shoulder bumped mine, easy and unthinking, warmth spread out from the spot where we touched, down my arm, low in my stomach.
I shifted in my chair, grateful for the table hiding the rest of me.
I took a drink of coffee to give myself something to do with my hands and looked around the table.
Walker was on his phone, smiling at whatever he was reading, probably messaging Finn.
Bob was glaring at Arnaud across the length of the table, who was now explaining maple syrup production to anyone who’d listen.
Chip was cutting a muffin into equal-sized pieces and pairing each with a slice of apple, and Ryan was beside me.
He was someone who’d come into my life through hockey but was starting to feel separate from it.
I’d worked hard for this table. For years, it had been easier to keep to myself, to let hockey be hockey and nothing else, but I showed up to every one of Finn’s sessions anyway, tried to bring something with me each time, even on the days it took everything I had just to get out of bed.
Small things. A joke. Showing up at all.
It had taken years before showing up stopped feeling like work.
Now I was sitting here wishing Ryan could be part of it too.
Then the doubt crept in, the way it always did.
What would they think watching Ryan settle in next to me like this?
What would Bob say if given the chance? What would it look like if I let this become something everyone could see?
Walker was already suspicious. And underneath that, quieter, the thing the black dog liked to whisper on mornings like this one—that I’d find a way to ruin it. That I always did.
“Gids?” Ryan’s voice was close, low, just for me, and it took me a second to blink back into the room. I threw him a smile. He frowned briefly. “You’re quiet.”
“Sorry. Lost in thought.” I glanced toward the buffet, half expecting to see Ryan’s dad hovering, ready to ask why Walker had abducted his son. “Will your dad wonder where you’ve gone?”
Fuck. Did that sound like I didn’t want him sitting here?
If you want him to stay, keep smiling, and don’t be such an idiot.
If you want anyone to stay, try harder.
“Not that I want you to go,” I added too fast.
Ryan huffed a laugh. “He’s fine. Last I saw, he was deep in something with one of the trainers. He’ll survive without me for one breakfast.” He smiled at me and went back to his eggs. His knee bumped mine under the table and stayed there for the rest of breakfast. Neither of us moved away.
The conversation moved on to the casino night.
“I’m not wearing a tie,” Bob said.
“You should wear one,” Arnaud said. “It will distract from your face.”
“My face is fine.”
“For scaring bears.”
“You look like a fucking—”
“Enough!” Walker cut in before Bob could finish whatever insult he’d been building. He pointed his fork at both of them. “One breakfast. That’s all I ask. One meal where nobody threatens anyone.”
“He started it,” Bob muttered.
“I did not.”
Walker held up a hand, and somehow, they both stopped.
“Anyway,” he said, looking around the table. “Finn wants me in dark red.” Ryan glanced up. “But I was thinking black, and when I said that, he said I don’t understand color.”
“You don’t,” Chip said.
Walker pointed at him. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”
Chip raised an eyebrow. “I’m on Finn’s.”
“Everyone’s on Finn’s side,” Walker grumbled, but without heat. He never had a bad word to say about the man who’d changed his life.
“Because Finn is usually right,” Arnaud said.
“I agree with Finn,” Ryan said, putting his fork down and looking Walker over. “Black is safe. Dark red would be better. White shirt, black tie, if you want to keep it simple. Or charcoal instead of black.”
“Yeah?” Walker asked, looking pleased he’d got Ryan talking. I shot my captain a warning glare, but he wouldn’t meet my laser gaze. The last thing I wanted was for Ryan to be shoved forward as entertainment or barraged with questions by my idiot teammates.
Ryan, however, didn’t seem fazed at all. “It’s probably because he wants you to look hot.”
A small, unwelcome twist went through me. Did Ryan think Walker was hot? It didn’t matter. We were friends. We hadn’t even had a first date. This wasn’t real yet, and when he found out what I could be like—
Stop!
Walker considered that. “Dark red it is.”
“Gids is wearing oxblood,” Ryan said. “White shirt, matching tie, dark brown shoes.”
No one questioned why he knew this, but Ryan had gone pink.
“I needed help. I asked Ryan. He always looks good. And he’s my date for the event.” I tipped my chin, waiting for comments, but no one said anything for a beat.
Then Walker snorted a laugh. “So, Finn dresses me, and Ryan dresses you.”
“Not the same thing,” I said.
Then it was Ryan’s turn to huff. “It is the same thing,” he said, and it felt fucking amazing.