Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dawson dropped the magnetic tray for the second time that morning.
It hit the concrete and bolts scattered under the lift, under the rolling cart, one of them pinging off the drain grate and disappearing.
He stood there with the C-clamp in his hand, looked at the bolts on the floor, and didn’t move.
From the next bay, Ethan glanced over but didn’t say anything. He walked over, crouched, and started picking them up.
“I got it,” Dawson said.
“Cool.” Ethan dropped the bolts back in the tray and set it on the cart instead of the fender. Went back to his bay.
Dawson finished the brake job. He pulled the truck out, parked it in the lot, and wrote up the ticket. None of it required him to think, which was the only reason it got done.
The bay smelled like brake cleaner and cold air.
November had settled into the county like something permanent, the mornings gray before the sun came up, the wind off the lake carrying a bite that found every gap in his jacket.
Dawson stood in the open bay door and drank coffee that had gone cold while watching the road.
He checked his phone. The screen was blank. There’d been no new messages since three nights ago, Leo’s words sitting in the thread like a line drawn in the dirt.
I’m not going anywhere. But I need a few days.
Dawson had read it so many times that the words had gone flat, drained of whatever they’d meant when Leo typed them.
The first night, he’d stared at the screen until it dimmed, then lit it again, then set the phone on the nightstand and lay in the dark, listening to Ethan go to bed and the house ticking around him.
He’d typed responses and deleted them. I’m sorry was too small.
I’ll never do that again was a promise he didn’t know whether he could keep, not because he wanted to shove Leo away but because he didn’t know what he’d do the next time he was confronted with someone finding out about them.
You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me sat in the text field for two full minutes before he deleted it.
It was true, but sending it now felt like using the truth to make Leo forgive him faster.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
Dawson didn’t get a damned thing done the rest of the morning.
Ethan covered for him. Took the calls, ran the front counter, didn’t ask again if Dawson was feeling okay.
Dawson kept trying to work because it was what was expected of him, but he kept stopping.
He’d be tightening something and his grip would go slack, and he’d stand there staring at the wrench like he’d forgotten what it was for.
Ethan would appear in his peripheral vision, take whatever Dawson was holding, and finish the job without a word. It happened three times before lunch.
Dawson washed up in the utility sink. The orange soap cut through the grease, the water ran gray, and he scrubbed until his knuckles were raw because scrubbing was something to do with his hands that wasn’t checking his phone.
He dried off and stood at the sink with the towel in his fists and his head down and thought about how he’d hurt the man he loved.
And wasn’t it a load of shit that he was finally in love but no one knew, not even Leo…
Leo had stayed. That was the thing Dawson kept circling back to, the fact that made everything worse.
The man who’d been traded against his will and dropped into a town he’d never heard of and spent his first month looking for the exit, had stopped looking for an out.
And the reason was Dawson. He wasn’t conceited enough to think he was the only reason Leo’d stopped talking about getting traded, but he was pretty sure that was part of it.
Leo had stayed, and Dawson had shoved him into a hallway like a secret that needed to be cleaned up before they were found out.
If Leo left now, Dawson would have no one to blame but himself.
Three days. Leo had said a few days, and it had been three, and Dawson didn’t know if three was a few or if a few meant more. He didn’t know if the silence was Leo processing or Leo deciding he couldn’t go back into the closet for a guy too scared to be honest with his own brothers.
He hung the towel on the hook. Went back to the bay. Looked at the board for the next job.
Justin’s truck was already in front of the barn when Dawson pulled up early that evening, parked at an angle with the tailgate down and a toolbox open on it. The big doors were cracked, light spilling out onto the gravel in a narrow stripe.
Dawson needed this. He didn’t want to go home and have Ethan watching his every move, trying to figure out why he was so out of sorts. He needed to get his hands dirty and maybe drink a couple beers.
Justin was at the workbench with the injector manifold spread out in front of him, cleaning jets with a wire brush. The radio was off. The overhead fluorescents buzzed. The rig sat in the middle of the floor with the engine pulled, the bay where the block lived an open cavity of brackets and hoses.
“Hey,” Justin said without looking up.
Dawson walked to the bench. Picked up a wrench. Set it down. Picked up a different wrench. Set that one down too. He stood there with his hands at his sides and stared at the manifold as if it were written in a language he used to speak.
Justin kept cleaning. The wire brush scraped against aluminum, a small, precise sound. He worked one jet, then another, lining them up on the bench in order.
“You gonna tell me what happened,” Justin said, “or did you come over to make sure I didn’t steal any tools from your box?”
Dawson opened his mouth but no words came out.
“All right,” Justin said. He reached over and turned the radio on. A country station out of Green Bay, somebody singing about a highway.
They worked. Justin went back to the injector jets.
Dawson’s hands found a fuel line that needed checking, a fitting that was due for replacement, and he picked up the line wrench that fit.
The radio played, the fluorescents hummed, and the barn was warm enough as long as he kept moving.
Outside, the light drained from the sky in stages—gray to charcoal to the deep, flat dark that came early this time of year.
Justin handed him a beer at some point. Dawson drank half of it before setting it on the bench and forgetting about it.
Justin didn’t comment. He was pulling the throttle linkage now, giving Dawson the same thing he always gave him.
The barn, the work, the quiet. No questions.
No timeline. Just the two of them, the rig, and the radio filling in the parts where talking should go.
At six-thirty, Dawson set his tools down. Justin was wiping off on a shop rag, the manifold reassembled, the jets back in place.
“Same time Thursday?” Justin said.
Dawson nodded. He was halfway to the door when Justin spoke again, voice easy, no weight on it.
“I’ve known you since tenth grade. You’ve never been this wrecked over something you didn’t care about.” A beat of the wire brush against the bench. “Whatever you did, sitting here with me isn’t gonna fix it.”
Dawson stopped. His hand was on the barn door, the cold coming through the gap, and Justin was right.
“You need to fix it,” Justin said. “Or don’t. But don’t come out here and pretend you’re fine. I’ve got eyes, Dawson.”
Dawson didn’t turn around. He pushed through the door, got in his truck, and sat there with the engine running and his hands on the wheel.
Fix it.
Like his life was a seized bearing or a blown gasket. Like Dawson could crawl under it, find the part that failed, swap it out, and tighten everything back down.
The Penalty Box had the game on. The Stags were in Rockford tonight, down two to one in the second period. It was funny how Dawson used to tune out the livestream on the TVs over the bar, but now he couldn’t keep from listening no matter how he tried.
He took his usual stool and ordered a beer. The book was in his jacket pocket — the same paperback he'd been pretending to read for weeks. He pulled it out and set it face-down on the bar. He didn't open it. The TV was right there, and once he looked up at it, he couldn't look away.
Number twelve was on the ice. Dawson found him before he was ready, and his hand stopped around the cold glass without lifting it to his mouth.
Leo was skating fast, cutting across the ice with the puck. Dawson didn't understand the play, but he understood Leo. He'd been learning the way Leo moved for weeks now. He knew the difference between Leo playing because he had to and Leo playing because something was driving him.
He was looking for proof that what he'd done was still in Leo's body. He needed to know whether Leo had shaken it off or whether some part of him was still carrying it, and he wasn't sure which answer he was hoping for.
Leo looked fine. He was fast and steady, taking up space on the ice like it belonged to him. Dawson watched Leo take a hit along the wall and skate away from it. The relief that came with it was uglier than Dawson wanted it to be.
He's fine, Dawson thought. He's going to be fine without you.
Then Leo missed a pass. The puck went past him, and Leo just stood there for a half-second too long before reacting, and Dawson’s hands tightened on his glass. He didn’t know if that half-second was a sign that he was distracted, too.
Maybe Leo wasn’t fine. Leo was just better at working through the pain.
“Didn’t know you watched hockey.”
Dawson looked up. Wes was leaning against the bar with a towel over his shoulder, his voice easy, his eyes not.
“I don’t,” Dawson lied.
Wes didn’t push it. He put his hand on Dawson’s forearm, firm and brief, and went back to work.
But halfway down the bar, he stopped and said, without turning around, “Did you know you both check your phones every time the other one’s in here.
And you leave within five minutes of each other.
Every time.” A beat. “You’re not as subtle as you think. ”
Dawson stared at his beer. He’d thought they’d been careful.
“Wes.”
Wes stopped. Turned around.
Dawson didn’t know what he was going to say until he said it. “Did I—” He stopped. Tried again. “Does everyone know?”
“No,” Wes said. He came back down the bar, close enough that nobody else could hear.
“Gunnar and I know because we know what it looks like to want someone you think you can’t have.
Most people aren’t paying that kind of attention.
” He leaned against the back counter. “But you’re sitting in this bar watching a game you claim to not like, and your book’s been on the same page for a week, and you look like someone died.
So it’s getting less subtle by the day.”
Dawson’s jaw worked. The bar noise felt far away.
“I messed it up,” he said. His voice was low, rough, and he didn’t recognize it.
Wes didn’t flinch. Didn’t soften. “Then un-mess it.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yeah, you do.” Wes held his gaze. “You’re just scared of what comes after. And I get that. But what you’re doing right now is hurting yourself for no good reason.”
Dawson looked at the TV. Leo was on the bench, helmet off, water bottle in his hand. Wes followed his gaze, and for a second, they both watched, and then Wes put his hand on Dawson’s forearm again and went back to work without another word.
Gunnar put a second beer in front of him.
He stood there for a moment, his hand flat on the bar, not saying anything.
Then he moved on. Gunnar and Wes had built a life together in a town this size without apology.
He’d wanted what they had, but until Leo, he’d never let himself believe he could have it.
The third period started. Dawson watched every shift.
Midway through, Leo shot the puck and it went in.
The bar erupted. Dawson sat there with his beer in his hand.
On the screen, Leo's teammates piled on him after a goal, and Leo was grinning — the real one, the kind that took over his whole face.
Dawson hadn't been the reason for that smile in a week.
He wasn't sure if he ever would be again.
Dawson paid his tab and walked out, leaving the book on the bar.
The cold hit him as soon as he hit the sidewalk.
His truck was under the streetlight, frost already on the windshield.
He sat in the cab and pulled out his phone.
The thread was still there. Leo’s last message, three days old. The cursor blinked in the text field.
I’m here when you’re ready.
Looked at it. Five words. They didn’t carry half of what sat behind them, but he hoped it was enough to let Leo know he wanted to fix what he’d broken.
He hit send and put the phone face-down in the cupholder. He drove home with the radio off.
The house was dark. Dawson sat on the edge of his bed and didn't take off his boots.
Wes had been right. Justin had been right.
Keeping Leo was going to cost him the one piece of armor he'd been hoarding his whole life — the freedom to walk into a room and not be known.
He'd have to come out to Ethan first, then Wyatt, then his parents, then everyone else he encountered.
He didn’t know if he could stand in front of his family and tell the truth after so long hiding it.
But the alternative — losing Leo, losing every version of himself he wanted to be — was worse. He’d been picking the wrong fear his whole life. It was time to quit being a coward.