Chapter 17 Perry
PERRY
I suppose at the end of the discussion, there was no real question. We all accepted, because hello. Olympic dreams.
The next six months of our lives were bananas.
Since all I needed for my job was my computer and a stable internet connection, my company set me up with the needed tech so I could travel.
They called it supporting the cause. I called it reluctance to let go of the best draftsman they’d had in years.
Evan had to take a leave of absence from his job, but they also had a built-in subsidy for anyone training to pursue a spot on the Canadian Olympic team. Who knew? It wasn’t as much as he would have made working but it wasn’t nothing either.
Robbie quit his retail job but as it turned out, his roommate didn’t need roommates for financial reasons.
He didn’t need anything for financial reasons because his family was independently wealthy.
He opted to pay both their shares of the rent so their third roommate could keep the apartment while he was still in med school and he followed Robbie on the road whenever we had to travel somewhere for a tournament.
No one was going to convince me that man did not have a thing for Robbie.
Since the team budget paid for four players and a coach, Robbie’s ride-or-die was paying Robbie’s and his own way, and after the first month, he applied to Curling Canada to take over our team finances.
When they saw the list of sponsors he could bring to the sport, they gave him the go-ahead, and after that, he was a permanent fixture with an actual role to play.
Also, he had a sweet ride and all the time in the world to make coffee and lunch runs.
He did all manner of errands Robbie asked of him without ever batting an eye about it.
If he was straight, he had some hard life choices ahead of him.
When we weren’t at a tournament, we spent so much time in one rink or another, practicing and building our team rapport, that there was hardly any time in those first months to even contemplate how we felt about Alan.
Or maybe it was that we didn’t find time to talk about it, and by that I meant I, at least, didn’t take the time to really think about how I felt.
That wasn’t to say the tension of it wasn’t there, because it was.
Endless amounts of it, digging between my shoulder blades and rippling under Evan’s skin.
The harder I fucked him, the harder he wanted it.
The more it escalated, the more I realized it was a sliding scale I was never going to keep up with.
That fact lived down in my bones, an ache that kept me constantly distracted from the job I was there to do.
While I was watching him, one random Wednesday at practice, as he slid backwards, listening to something Alan was saying to him that I couldn’t focus on, the ache throbbed.
“Evan! Watch where you’re going!” I shouted.
There was a stone behind him. He may or may not have remembered it was there. If he didn’t remember, and he didn’t see it because he was acting like a love-struck nimrod, he’d trip over it and maybe hurt himself bad enough he wouldn’t be able to train effectively.
He scowled at me, but he did look behind him and avoided the stone without issue, sliding off to the hack without looking back.
I took up my position to broom for him, and still, he didn’t look at me. Once he’d delivered and was yelling down the ice for us to curl, my disappointment curdled to annoyance as I strained to hear Alan’s calls over Evan’s.
The stone, thrown with a bit too little weight, curled too far, so it peeked from behind its guard, making it an easy target for a takeout.
In a game, that could catapult us into a blank end and the opposite team keeping the hammer, if they had it, or any number of ways opponents could take advantage of the mistake.
“Should have laid off brooming sooner, like I called,” Alan said as I passed him. “I have perspective from here you don’t when you’re following the stone down the ice. You know this.”
“I couldn’t hear you over Evan.” I didn’t wait for his reply as I slid back to take my turn.
“Almost,” Evan said. “Maybe broomed a bit too long.”
“Would have been perfect, if I could have heard our Skip, but you were too loud. Try and not do that during a game. It’s his job to call the shot, not yours.” Again, I didn’t wait for a response. I was annoyed at being the one called out for the error by both of them.
To prove my point, I shot my rocks in near silence, only acknowledging Alan’s suggested strategies, and delivering where he told me to.
When I was done and it was his turn to deliver, he stopped as we passed each other on the way to change ends. “You don’t have to take my play just because. If you have a better shot, speak up. That last one might have been easier if we’d done a peel and stick.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But I couldn’t see it from down here.”
“Then come up and talk to me. We’re a team.”
“You’re the Skip.”
“But you’re a Skip too. You know how to do this. We picked you for what you can do out here, in all your capacities. Don’t play half your game. We won’t stay on top that way.”
“Sure.”
“Perry, this is a team sport. We all need to act like it.”
“I’m fine. Maybe talk to him and remind him what he’s supposed to be doing. He doesn’t seem to want to listen to me, but you? He eats up everything you say.”
“Perry.”
I pushed off and slid my way to the far end to pick a shot for him.
I knew what he was good at, and I knew what he needed to practice, so I found the shot I thought would be most difficult for him to make.
Since the lines I normally depended on were faint and flickering, I asked Robbie if he saw it too.
He studied the field, commented that it wasn’t an easy shot, but it was there, and so I called it.
Alan’s delivery was light, as Evan’s had been, because the ice was sticky so I called a hurry. “Hard clean, hard clean! No curl, no curl! Clean! Clean! Ev!”
Robbie tapped Evan’s shoulder to get his attention and adjust his brooming, but by then, it was too late and the stone over-curled, taking out the guard instead of peeling away the one behind it.
“Evan,” I called, but he’d already turned and distanced himself back down the ice.
“Never mind.” Robbie patted my shoulder. “I’m sure he knows.”
I had no idea if he did, though he stopped to talk to Alan on his way back and the two of them chatted, heads together, Alan’s hand on Evan’s forearm.
“Are we curling, or aren’t we?” Michael asked me while I was trying to decide if I should go over there and talk about what went wrong, or play Evan’s cold-shoulder game.
Michael’s tone came across calm as always, his hand on my shoulder firm, but gentle.
“Because it feels like you’re here to glare at your boyfriend and snarl at your Skip. ”
I nodded, lips clamped tight. I was doing both those things, and I hated it.
“Walk with me?” he asked.
I glanced to Robbie, who waved me off. “I got this,” he assured me. “Take a minute.”
“Sure.” I headed for the closest bumper and stepped off the ice.
We left the others practicing on our rented sheet and wandered over to a booth at the back of the bar area. This club had a much nicer off-ice space than my home club did and the booth offered us a pocket of privacy once the server had left a pitcher of water and two glasses for us.
“What are we talking about?” I asked.
“Your tension, for starters. I know we’ve talked about how you see the lines and decide on the shots. Frankly, Alan is pretty impressed with your shot calling. So am I.”
“Great. Now if we can only get the brooming right.”
“Your thing,” Michael said, ignoring my snide comment, “it comes and goes, so I’d like to understand it better, and how your mood affects it. If we know that, we can figure out how to make it more predictable and steady.”
I could only nod. He was right. It had never mattered before if it came and went. It was annoying if I got stressed in the middle of a game and lost it, but losing a house league game was a different thing than losing a tournament that may or may not affect our qualifying for the Olympic Trials.
The guys on the team we had joined had been dreaming their Olympic dreams a lot longer than Evan, Robbie, and I had. It would suck if I was the reason they didn’t come true this year.
“I don’t know how to stop the stress from affecting it,” I admitted. I didn’t want to confess I had become so used to Evan calming me down that I’d forgotten how to do it for myself. If I’d ever known. Life before Evan was a hazy mess of disjointed un-fun times in my memory.
“Then maybe the trick is to stop the stress, period. If you’re not stressed, it can’t break your concentration.”
Again, he wasn’t wrong.
“Want to talk about what’s stressing you?”
Before I could answer, we heard a burst of laughter from the sheets. There was no mistaking Evan’s clear, boisterous happiness. I looked over to see Alan grinning at him, dimples fully out, attention on my boyfriend intense and singular.
“Ah,” Michael said.
“Ah?” I spun back to him. “Ah, what?”
“Your face.” He wiggled his fingers at me. “All thunder right now.”
I clenched my jaw.
“So here’s a thing. When we first asked you guys if you wanted to do this, there was talk about a more personal connection between the three of you. Is that off the table?”
“We haven’t talked about it.”
“So you don’t know?”
“Are you relationship counselling right now?”
“If it will get a better curling game out of you, yes.”
“Don’t you need a degree for that or something?” Could I sound more sullen?
“As it happens, I have one. I’m a licenced therapist in my other life.”
“Oh.”
He chuckled. “Oh. Yes. So. I know you’re not all sleeping together, because we all live in the same house. But I can also see that at least some of you want to.”
“How much do you want to know about your Skip’s love and sex life?”