Chapter 8
The locker room was where it almost ended, two days before the marquee game, and Tripp Vandenberg was the one who nearly ended it, though he didn’t know it, then.
It was a nothing moment. They were horsing around after a good practice, the room loose, and Shane had chirped, a nothing chirp, and Theo, without thinking, without the careful vigilance he’d maintained for months, had reached over and tugged the back of Shane’s hair where it had grown too long, a small proprietary gesture, the kind of touch you only give a person whose body you consider partly your own.
His hand knew its mistake the instant it moved.
Saw Shane go still. And across the room, Tripp Vandenberg looked up from his phone.
Just looked. His clever eyes went to Theo’s hand, still half-raised, and to Shane’s face, and a small line appeared between his brows, the look of a person filing something away that didn’t fit.
“Married life suits you, Lindgren,” Tripp said, lightly.
A joke: the married meaning roommates, the joke the room made about any two guys who lived together.
But he was watching when he said it, and Theo made himself laugh, made himself say, “He is a terrible roommate, he soaks the dishes,” and the room laughed and moved on, and Tripp went back to his phone, and the moment closed over.
But Theo had seen the line between Tripp’s brows. And in the parking lot after, he said to Shane, low, “We are getting careless. The hair. In the room. I did not think.”
“It was nothing. Guys touch each other all the time, it’s a hockey room, half these idiots slap each other’s—”
“It was not a slap.” Theo’s voice was flat with the fear he wouldn’t show.
“It was the touch. There is a touch you give a teammate and a touch you give someone who is yours, and they are not the same, and I used the second one, in the room, in front of Vandenberg, who is not stupid and who wants the call-up I might be standing in front of.” He scrubbed a hand over his face.
“I keep forgetting to be afraid. That is the danger. You make me forget to be afraid. And forgetting to be afraid is how this ends: not with a kiss someone walks in on, with a hand in your hair that lasts half a second too long.”
Shane was quiet. The lot was cold. “So what do we do,” he said.
“Go back to hating each other in the room? I don’t think I can.
I tried, the other day, I tried to chirp you mean like I used to and it came out—” he stopped, shook his head, “—flirting. I’ve lost the ability to be mean to you. It’s a real problem.”
And Theo, despite everything, despite the line between Tripp’s brows and the call-up and the season clock, his mouth did the almost-smile. “You have lost the ability to be mean to me,” he repeated. “This is the saddest thing you have ever said. You were so good at it.”
“I was elite at it.”
“You were top of the league.” Theo let himself have one second of it, the warmth, before he put it away.
“We be careful. In the room, we are roommates. Cold. Normal. And the hair,” he reached out, one more time, deliberate now, and tucked the long strand back where his careless hand had pulled it, in the privacy of the dark lot where no one could see, “the hair I touch at home. Only at home. Yes?”
“Yeah,” Shane said, and his voice had gone soft and wrecked. “Only at home.”
They drove home in two cars, the small ridiculous parade, and were careful, and it lasted exactly until the marquee game, when Theo’s body failed in front of a sellout crowd and being careful stopped mattering at all.
* * *
It was a marquee game, the kind the AHL didn’t get often: a Saturday, a sellout, scouts in the building, a divisional rival they hated honestly, and the kind of energy that had the barn humming like a live wire.
Theo loved games like this. They were the only times he still played like the player he’d been at twenty, before the ice narrowed and the math changed, when hockey had been a game he played for joy and not survival.
The warning came in the second period.
The shoulder had been talking to him all week, low and steady, the way a bad joint does when the weather turns or when he’d slept wrong, and he’d been managing it as he always did: taping it himself, keeping the arm tight in his battles, letting Pete believe it was the same chronic nothing it had always been.
He’d hidden it from everyone. Everyone except Shane, who knew, who watched, who had started (Theo had noticed, had filed it, had gone hollow with it) taking the right-side battles when he could, quietly, on the ice, so that Theo’s bad shoulder ate fewer hits.
It was against everything they were as a pairing.
Shane was the one who pinched, who gambled, who needed Theo behind him.
And he’d been rearranging his game by inches to put his body between Theo’s shoulder and the boards, and saying nothing about it, and Theo had let him, and that was its own kind of falling, the kind you don’t survive.
So when the play came: third period, tie game, the rival’s big winger walking the puck down the half-wall with his head down, and a lane to the net opening, and the shot loading up.
Theo did what he had done ten thousand times.
His entire value. He dropped. He got his body in the lane. He took the shot to block it.
It caught him high. Higher than he meant, the puck rising off the blade, and he turned to take it on the back and the shoulder, and the winger’s momentum carried him in too, a collision, and Theo’s arm got pinned wrong between his own body and the boards as he went down, and the joint gave. The old, tired, decade-bolted joint.
It came out.
All the way out. The complete one, the one he’d spent a decade making sure would never happen again.
Theo heard it more than registered it for the first half-second, a wet deep pop that landed in his teeth, and then the pain arrived, white and total, a pain that erased language, and Theo Lindgren lay on the ice at the bottom of the boards with his arm at an angle arms did not go and did not make a sound.
Nobody ever understood this. He didn’t scream. He’d trained the scream out of himself in a billet house at sixteen and it had never come back. He lay there, silent, gray, every muscle locked, and the building went quiet, and the first face over him was Shane’s.
“Theo. Hey. Hey, look at me—” Shane was down on his knees on the ice, glove off, his bare hand finding the side of Theo’s helmet, his voice stripped down to almost nothing, low and certain.
“Don’t move. Don’t try to — it’s out, okay, I can see it’s out, the trainers are coming, just—” His eyes were huge and wet, and Theo wanted to tell him it was fine, it was an old friend, he knew this pain, but his mouth wouldn’t make Swedish or English, so he just held Shane’s eyes, and Shane held his, and the two of them stayed locked together like that on the cold ice while the world rushed in.
* * *
The trainers got the arm immobilized. They did not reduce it on the ice (you didn’t, not a full dislocation, not without imaging) and so Theo got helped up to enormous applause, the good-soldier applause, the he’s moving, thank God applause, and got walked down the tunnel with his arm strapped to his chest and his face a mask, and the last image before the tunnel swallowed him was Shane standing at the boards watching him go, white as the ice, having to stay, having to finish the game, having to be a teammate and not what he actually was.
The hospital was a blur of fluorescent light and a young doctor and a flood of relief when they put the joint back where it lived, a relief so total it made Theo’s eyes water, which he blamed on the procedure.
The films were not as bad as they could have been.
No fracture. The old repair had held, mostly.
But the labrum was angry and the capsule was stretched and the doctor used the word recurrent and the word surgical consult and the word rest, and Theo lay on the table and did the math he always did, fast and cold, and the math said: six to eight weeks, maybe.
The season has fourteen left. You will be back for the end, if you are careful, if you hide how bad it is.
If the org learns the shoulder is recurrent, you are not a call-up, you are a liability, you are a man they do not re-sign, you are a flight to Gothenburg.
It stays in the room. It has to stay in the room.
And underneath that, quieter, the other column: a man with a recurrent shoulder gets no call-up and earns no new contract, which means the visa expires in spring regardless, which means the marriage is no longer a hedge. It is the only line item left.
Shane was in the waiting room.
He shouldn’t have been. The game had gone to overtime; Theo found out later they’d won it, that Shane had played twenty-six minutes after watching Theo get carried off, had played the best defensive game of his life, had blocked four shots himself, absorbing the hits that would have found Theo’s shoulder.
And then he’d driven straight to the hospital in his suit and lied to a nurse that he was family, I’m his husband, which was the truest lie in the world, and he was sitting in a plastic chair at one in the morning with his tie shoved in his pocket and his face gray and when he saw Theo come out in the sling he stood up so fast the chair scraped.
“Don’t,” Theo said, before Shane could say anything. “Don’t make it a thing. It is out, it is back in, it is an old injury, I have done this before.”
“You’ve—” Shane’s voice cracked. “Theo, your arm was pointing the wrong way.”
“And now it points the right way. Take me home.”
* * *