Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
The igniter had a trick to it. You had to hold the dial past the click, count to three, then back off and let the gas catch.
Leo had figured it out during his second week here, but the timing still pissed him off.
He was holding the dial and counting when his phone lit up on the counter, and he grabbed it with his free hand without checking the screen because he already knew.
“Mijo.” Carmen’s voice came through brisk and focused, the way it did when she was annoyed with him. “I tried you yesterday.”
“A team thing. What kind of team thing?”
“Dinner. At a teammate’s place. Ford, the starting goalie.”
“Is that the one with the daughter?”
Leo paused. He hadn’t told her about Charlotte. Which meant she’d been doing her own research, scrolling through the Stags’ social media or calling someone who could give her the roster breakdown she wanted. “Yeah. That’s him.”
“Good. Good that you’re making friends.” A beat. “Have you talked to Phil this week?”
And there it was. Three questions in, right on schedule. Carmen never led with the agent. She warmed up first, circled the perimeter, asked about food and teammates and whether he was sleeping enough, and then the real question landed, like she’d just thought of it.
“Not this week.”
“Leo.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. The season just started. Nobody’s making moves right now.”
“You don’t know that. Things happen. I was reading this morning that Tampa just lost a winger to a torn MCL, and I thought—”
“Mom.” He pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I can’t call my agent every time someone in the league tweaks a knee. That’s not how it works.”
“I’m just saying you should stay on his radar. You don’t want him forgetting about you up there.”
A pause. Then, quieter, the brisk efficiency stripped out of her voice for a beat.
“Mijo. The average career is five and a half years. Five and a half. You are already twenty-eight. The window does not stay open forever, and we have watched too many of your dad’s old teammates end up selling insurance because they didn’t make the most of the time they had in the league. ”
Her concern hit him in the chest. Logically, he knew there was part of her actions that were fueled by fear.
She didn’t want Leo to feel like he’d squandered his time on the ice, wanted him to have something to show for it when he could no longer play.
But he was starting to resent her open disdain for the Stags.
He was starting to realize they had something special up here, something you couldn’t scout for.
The atmosphere in the locker room overflowed to when they weren’t playing, and Leo was starting to fit in. But she’d never accept that.
Then she breathed in, and the management voice came back. “So you call Phil. Tell him you can’t stay up there forever. That’s all I’m asking.”
Up there. Like Wisconsin was a holding cell.
Like Port Haven was a place that happened to you while you waited for your real life to resume.
A month ago, Leo would have agreed. He wasn’t sure when things had changed, and he wasn’t ready to examine his changed perspective on the phone with his mother.
“I’m on his radar. I promise.”
“And the apartment? You said you were going to send me pictures.”
“I’ll send pictures.”
“Because your father and I were talking, and if you need furniture—”
“I have furniture.” He opened the fridge and pulled out the chicken thighs he’d bought that morning, setting them on the counter next to the cutting board he’d picked up at Second Period Thrift two weeks ago. “The guys helped me move in, remember? I told you.”
“You told me strangers brought you a used couch.”
“They’re not strangers. They’re my teammates.”
“That couch could have anything in it, Leo. Bedbugs, mold—”
“It doesn’t have bedbugs.”
“How would you know? You can’t see bedbugs. That’s what makes them dangerous.”
Leo closed his eyes and leaned against the counter.
He loved his mother. He did. And she loved him in the only way she knew how, which was to manage every aspect of his life until there was nothing left for him to handle himself.
She hated that he was in Wisconsin. She hated that she couldn’t fix it.
And the worst part was that six months ago, he would have let her try.
He would have waited for her to bully Phil into getting him a spot on a higher profile team, the way he’d been doing since he was sixteen and she’d called his junior coach to argue about his time on the ice.
Somewhere between the trade and tonight, he’d stopped wanting to be rescued.
“The couch is fine. The apartment’s fine. I have to go. I’m cooking.”
“Cooking what?”
“Chicken.”
“For who?”
“A friend.”
“Which friend?”
“Mom. I have to go.”
She let him off with the usual litany of demands: call Phil, send pictures, eat something green. Leo stood in his kitchen with the dead screen in his palm and the tiredness settling behind his eyes.
He set the phone face-down on the counter and got to work.
Dawson showed up at six with a six-pack of beer. Leo buzzed him in and left the door cracked while he went back to the stove. The chicken was in the oven and the rice was simmering. He was slicing a mango for the salsa when he heard the stairs creak and then the soft knock of knuckles on wood.
“It’s open.”
Dawson pushed through the door and stopped. He looked down at his boots, then at Leo’s floor. “Should I—”
“Yeah, by the door’s fine.”
Dawson toed them off and lined them against the wall.
Leo watched him from the kitchen, caught the way Dawson’s eyes found him first before they moved to anything else in the room.
Then the fridge, the magnets on it—the Stags logo, a bottle opener shaped like Wisconsin that Jonesy had left, the home game schedule card.
Dawson’s gaze held on the schedule card for a second before coming back to Leo.
“Smells good.”
“It’ll taste good, too. This is one of my grandma’s recipes.” Leo pointed the knife at him. “Sit down. Don’t touch anything.”
“Wasn’t going to.” Dawson pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table, four feet from where Leo was working.
“What are you making?” Dawson’s voice was easy.
Unhurried. He leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out, socked feet crossing at the ankle.
His eyes drifted to the bookshelf against the wall, and Leo saw him clock the detective series he’d lent Leo, lined up next to a few paperbacks from Second Period.
“Mojo chicken. Rice. Mango salsa.” Leo crushed a garlic clove with the flat of the knife and swept it off the cutting board. “Recipe I learned years ago. The rice is wrong, but I work with what I’ve got.”
“Your grandmother taught you?”
“Yeah, we spent a lot of time together in the kitchen whenever she visited.” He grabbed the next clove, pressed, peeled.
The rhythm was automatic, one of the few things that quieted his brain instead of revving it.
“My parents had a private chef growing up, so cooking wasn’t exactly encouraged.
But my dad’s mom was happy to teach me when I asked.
My mother took the whole thing as a personal attack. ”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t need the chef anymore. And if I didn’t need the chef, that was one less thing she was providing, and Carmen Vargas can not handle being unnecessary.” He flattened another clove. “So I kept doing it.”
“Out of spite.”
“Best motivator there is.”
Dawson’s mouth pulled at one corner. Not quite a smile, but close, and Leo loved seeing him relax.
Leo squeezed lime juice into a bowl and started dicing the mango, the knife moving in quick, even cuts.
He could feel Dawson watching. Not staring.
But there was a quality to his attention that Leo had learned to recognize, a stillness that settled over him when something held his focus.
Leo had seen it at the tractor pull when Dawson worked over the engine of Justin’s rig.
He’d seen it at Maria’s when Dawson listened without rushing to fill the pause.
Now it was aimed at Leo’s hands on the cutting board, and the back of Leo’s neck went warm.
“You can have a beer,” Leo said without turning around. “They’re yours.”
Dawson took the hint and grabbed two bottles out of the carton. He set one next to Leo, opting to lean against the counter rather than sit back down. The close proximity was distracting enough Leo nearly took off the tip of this finger.
“Thanks.”
Dawson drank and watched Leo work.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Leo said.
“I’m always quiet.”
“Quieter. You’re watching me like I’m going to burn the place down.
” Leo wanted Dawson to open up to him. They’d been texting back and forth non-stop since the night of the meat raffle, but every interaction left Leo feeling more confused.
This felt like more than friends, but Dawson gave zero indication on where he wanted things between them to go.
“Just watching.” Dawson took a pull of his beer. “You’re good at this.”
“I’m good at a lot of things.”
“There he is.” Dawson shook his head, but the corner of his mouth was twitching. “Was wondering how long you’d last before the ego showed up.”
Leo grinned. Most people either bought the cockiness or got annoyed by it. Something in Dawson’s voice made it sound like he found it endearing, and that did something to Leo he wasn’t ready to look at.
“Chicken’s got twenty minutes,” Leo said. His voice came out lower than he’d intended. “I need to check the rice in ten.”
“Okay.”
“You could sit back down.”
“I could.”
Dawson didn’t sit back down. Leo dried his fingers on the dish towel and turned, leaning against the counter opposite from him.
“Season started last week,” Dawson said. He picked at the label on his bottle, not making eye contact. Leo’s chest felt heavy and his head swam, trying to figure out where Dawson was going with this shift in the conversation.
“I know. I was there.”