Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Leo drove like a bat out of hell down the windy county road, both hands on the wheel, the Audi eating the curves like it remembered them.
Four miles back to town. Four miles of blacktop with no streetlights, no shoulders, and cornfields on both sides stripped down to stubble.
His jaw ached. He unclenched it. Clenched it again.
Leo cracked the window. Cold air knifed in, and he breathed through his mouth until he could take a full breath.
No matter how hard he tried thinking about anything else, his mind kept going back to how spectacularly everything had gone to shit at Dawson’s. What had started out as a leap forward in their relationship had turned into rubble.
The moment Ethan’s headlights flashed across the bedroom wall, he’d known what was coming.
Well, he was smart enough to anticipate Dawson building the walls again and scrambling to conceal any evidence of what they’d just done.
But nowhere in his imagination could he have anticipated Dawson shoving him.
To make matters worse, he was almost certain Dawson was doing the same as him, and beating himself up for how he’d acted.
Leo wanted to reach out to him and ask if they could talk, but he wasn’t prepared to be rejected for a second time in one night.
When push came to shove—no pun intended—Dawson had reverted to his life in hiding and felt that getting Leo out of sight was the best course of action.
Leo gripped the wheel tight enough it squeaked.
A deer sign flashed in the headlights. He blew past it doing sixty in a forty-five zone and didn’t ease off until the road curved and the tires caught a patch of gravel on the shoulder.
He corrected, slowed, and his pulse hammered in his ears for a different reason.
Getting himself killed on the same stretch of county road that had taken out his bumper in September would be a kind of symmetry he didn’t need.
The first snowflakes hit the windshield as he reached the edge of town. Small, dry, the kind that wouldn’t stick. Leo watched them streak across the headlights and turned onto the main road without signaling. There was no one on the streets to alert of his next move.
He’d been out since he was nineteen. Nine years of being the guy who didn’t flinch, who didn’t dodge questions in interviews, who let reporters write what they wanted and gave answers that were honest without being rehearsed.
It didn’t take long before they got bored and moved onto something more salacious.
He knew what it cost. He every endorsement that didn’t come, the front offices that passed on him, the teammates in Miami who were fine with his sexuality right up until they weren’t.
He’d paid that price because the alternative was what he’d just watched happen to Dawson.
A grown man scrambling to erase the evidence of his own want from a room before his brother could see it.
And Leo had let it happen. Had pulled his jeans on, walked into the living room, and lied for him.
Just hanging out. Three words, easy, the voice he used for postgame interviews when the real answer would burn the room down.
He’d covered for Dawson out of instinct and loyalty, his body moving before his brain caught up.
But he’d felt it. Standing in that hallway in his T-shirt and boxers with a mark on his collarbone and Dawson refusing to look at him.
The cost of being someone’s secret. Not a hypothetical.
Not something he’d thought about in the abstract.
The actual, physical weight of being a person someone was ashamed to be seen with.
He pulled into his parking lot and sat in the car with the engine running.
He let his mind wander to Milwaukee. Had that really only been three weeks ago?
Dawson had so easily walked down the sidewalk in Bay View with people passing in both directions and the afternoon sun making everything flat and ordinary and perfect.
No matter who saw them, Dawson had acted for one day like it was normal for two men to hold hands walking down the street.
That was the detail Leo kept circling back to.
Not the hand-holding itself but the refusal to drop it whenever someone approached.
Dawson choosing contact over the presented exit.
That was the best day they’d had. And it could only exist because no one there knew Dawson’s name or recognized his truck or could carry the information back to those he’d convinced himself wouldn’t accept him.
The contradiction felt like a punch in the gut.
The same man. The same hands holding his on a Milwaukee sidewalk had shoved him into a doorframe.
The gap between those two versions of Dawson was the distance between a city where he was anonymous and the house he shared with his brother.
Leo didn’t know how to close it. Didn’t know if it was his job to.
He cut the engine. The snow was picking up, still light, dusting the parking lot in a thin layer that would be gone by morning. He pressed his forehead to the steering wheel and sat there until the cold started to creep into the car.
He could name it now, what made this different from every other time someone had hurt him.
Every other time, his exit was already planned.
In juniors, when his billet family’s son had called him a slur over dinner, he’d had his bag packed before breakfast. In Orlando, when a relationship went sideways, he’d been on a plane to Miami before the voicemail finished playing.
Leo Vargas didn’t sit in rooms where he wasn’t welcome.
He smiled his way out the door, and by the time anyone noticed he was gone, he’d already stopped thinking about why he left.
But Dawson hadn’t made him feel unwanted.
That was the part that wrecked him. Dawson had made him feel wanted and then hidden it, and those were two different injuries.
The second one was worse because it meant the desire was real and the hiding was also real, and Leo was in love with someone who couldn’t hold both of those things at the same time.
He sat up, wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and got out of the car.
Upstairs, the apartment was dark except for the blue glow of a laptop screen on the couch.
Cole was asleep with his headphones in, the laptop balanced on his stomach, a blanket pulled up to his chin.
Twenty-seven years old, traded from a team he’d played for since the draft, sleeping on a stranger’s couch.
Leo stood in the doorway and looked at him, and the parallel settled into his ribs.
He closed the door without a sound. Took his shoes off. Went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and drank it standing at the counter with the lights off.
His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. Leo pulled it out. The screen lit up the kitchen.
Dawson
I’m sorry. Can we talk?
He stared at the message. Read it twice. Three times. The apology was right. It was what Dawson should’ve sent, and the fact that he’d sent it mattered, but Leo was still too upset to think about what he’d say in return.
Because he knew what “can we talk” meant in Dawson’s vocabulary.
It meant let me explain. Let me give you the version of this that makes it okay.
Let me find the words that smooth the edges so we can go back to the way it was an hour ago, with your hand on my chest and my mouth on your neck and neither of us thinking about what happens when a truck pulls into the driveway.
But for how long? What about the next time someone from Dawson’s life got too close to the truth?
Leo decided he wasn’t ready to talk about tonight. He wanted Dawson to sit in what he’d done the same way Leo was sitting in what had been done to him. If they talked now, Leo would say things that couldn’t be taken back. He knew himself well enough to know that.
He set the glass down.
I’m not going anywhere. But I need a few days. I know why you did what you did, but it hurt. I need to think about whether I can keep doing this, and I think you do, too.
He read it back. It was the truest thing he’d said all night.
He wasn’t going to break up with Dawson, if they were even at a point where there was anything to break up, but he did need to think.
Leo had watched enough relationships blow apart in the aftermath—the screaming match at two a.m., the things said in pain that became permanent—to know that the bravest thing he could do right now was not have this conversation yet.
He sent it. Put the phone face-down on the counter.
In the living room, Cole shifted on the couch.
The laptop slid off his stomach and hit the carpet with a soft thud.
Cole didn’t wake up. Leo walked over, picked it up, closed it, and set it on the coffee table.
Pulled the blanket back up over Cole’s shoulder and stood there for a second.
The tenderness of the gesture surprised him.
Three months ago, he’d have called Phil. Late night, bad situation, get me out. Phil would’ve had options by morning. And Leo would’ve said yes without thinking about it because that’s what he did when things got hard.
The reflex was there. He could feel it in his fingers, the muscle memory of reaching for the phone and dialing the number that made the uncomfortable situations disappear.
But it was a reflex, not a decision, and the difference was that he recognized it now.
The old Leo was on a plane before the hurt had time to settle into anything that required staying.
He wasn’t calling Phil. He wasn’t calling his mother. He wasn’t going to fix this by running because the thing about Port Haven—the thing he hadn’t expected and still couldn’t fully articulate—was that leaving would hurt worse than staying, and that had never been true before.
Leo turned off the kitchen light and walked down the hall to his bedroom.
His grandmother’s blanket was folded at the foot of the bed, shipped from Orlando in a box his mother had packed without being asked.
Three months ago, there’d been nothing in this room that was his.
Now, it was starting to feel like home in a way Florida never had.
Leo lay on his back, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling. He thought about what a few days sounded like to a man who’d never had anything more than casual, and he almost picked up the phone to take it back. Almost.