3. Theo
THEO
Idon't sleep well.
Dad and I eat breakfast in the same kitchen in the same order we always have.
He reads the morning brief on his tablet.
I eat a bowl of oatmeal I can't taste. He asks me what time I'm going to the rink.
I tell him. He nods. He does not ask me how I'm doing because how I'm doing was not in the day's briefing.
I drive in early because driving in early is what I do. I do four in, seven hold, eight out at every red light between the house and the facility. It doesn't fix anything. It marks time. A breathing exercise is a metronome, not a cure.
I change in a locker room that has gotten louder overnight.
The Wolves’ room is three days old to me and I can already feel the shape of it, the stalls that are safe to pass close to and the stalls that aren't, the conversations I'm invited into and the ones I'm not.
I'm not invited into any of them. That's fine. That's day three.
“Virgin,” says Jax, cheerful, as I pull my jersey on. “Morning.”
“Morning.”
He waits to see if I'll chirp back. I don't.
“That's gonna stick, by the way,” he says. “I hope you know that. We've been workshopping.”
He taps the side of his head, mock-thoughtful.
“Virgin. Two syllables. Easy in a chirp. Rhymes with surgeon, which nobody's used yet but I've got plans.”
Grayson's stall is across the room, and I hear the sigh before I hear the line.
“Jax, Jesus, it's seven-thirty. Leave the kid alone.”
“I am welcoming him. This is warmth.”
“This is nothing.”
Jax shrugs, throws a tape roll in my direction, and then actually hands me another one when he sees I didn't catch the first.
“For your shin guards. Welcome, Virgin.”
“Thanks.”
He goes back to his stall. The room moves on. I finish taping. I haven't looked toward Maddox's stall once. I don't know if he's in yet. I have made my peripheral vision into a blind spot shaped like his side of the room and I have been holding the blind spot in place since I parked the car.
I finish dressing. I go out.
Practice is the same drills as yesterday.
Dad wants the system on repeat until it's muscle and I have the system in my muscles already, which means I run clean on every rep and get nothing for it.
Running clean is the floor. If you want notice, you have to run clean plus something, and I don't have a plus something. I never have.
The chirping rides underneath. Not loud. Never loud enough to be a problem. Just there.
Virgin. Good boy. Daddy's center. Careful with him, Cap, he bruises.
It's background. I carry background well. Dad trained me to carry background well.
Maddox is on my line today, which is either Dad making a point or Dad testing Maddox or testing me. I don't try to work it out. I take my faceoffs, I hit my routes, I play my game. Maddox on my left wing skates a little closer than he has to. I notice it. I don't say anything. I don't look at him.
Third drill in, we're running a rush up the ice against the second unit, and I'm carrying the puck across the blue line with Maddox trailing, which is the system, and I drop him the pass at the trail, which is the system, and I skate into the slot to take the return pass, which is the system, and I never get it, because the trail pass never happens, and what I do get instead is Maddox's shoulder in my chest at full speed against the grain of the play.
I am in the air for half a second. Then I am not.
The ice is very cold against my back and the lights are the too-white lights.
My ears ring for a second. I breathe out.
I check my body the way I've been trained to check my body, part by part.
Fingers first, then wrists, then forearms, then shoulders, then the hinge of my jaw, then hips and knees and ankles.
Nothing's broken. Nothing's torn. My helmet rode up and the strap is digging into my cheekbone. I'm just down.
Dad's whistle cuts the practice.
“Creed.”
Maddox is already standing over me. He doesn't hear Dad. Or he's pretending not to. He bends at the waist and reaches a hand down.
“Up you get, sweetheart.”
I take the hand because he put the hand out and because not taking it would be the worse choice for a room full of men who are already watching.
His grip is hot through my glove. He pulls.
I come up fast, faster than I thought I would, and I am close enough to his face that his breath touches my cheek, and he leans in, and he says under the whistle in a voice only I am meant to hear, “Good boy. Up you come.”
A current goes through me I have no language for.
It isn't pain. It is the absolute opposite of pain.
It is the sensation of being told good boy by a man who has just put me flat on my back, and the sensation of my body preferring the flat-on-my-back part.
The sensation of preferring it enough that my knees don't want to take my weight back. I make them. He watches me make them.
“Creed.”
“I'm up, Coach. I'm up. Sorry, Coach. Lost an edge.”
He says sorry, Coach the way he said sorry, Coach yesterday. Pleasant. Plausible. His hand lets go of mine a second after it should. His eyes are on me the whole time they let go.
Dad skates over.
“You good?” he asks me.
“Yes, Coach.”
He looks me over like any other player on his ice, with more attention to my posture than my face.
“Walk it off. Stay in.”
“Yes, Coach.”
Dad turns to Maddox and starts talking to him in a voice the bench can't hear and I can't either, because I have drifted three feet away and am pretending to adjust my shin guard while my pulse tries to exit my body through my sternum.
Phoenix skates past me on the way to the faceoff dot and says, low, “You okay, kid?”
“Yes.”
He slows just enough for his edges to scrape, not enough to stop.
“You sure?”
“Yes, Cap.”
“Cool.”
He taps my pad and moves on. Phoenix is a good captain. He does not linger on a check. He does not give the room a chance to watch him tending to me.
I take my spot. The drill resumes. Maddox skates past me as he lines up and does not say a word and does not have to, because the line of his shoulder when he passes says it; so does the quarter-beat he holds his head turned in my direction before he faces the faceoff dot.
The rest of practice I cannot tell you about. I ran the drills. I hit the routes. I did not look at him.
But my body knew where he was at every moment, and that has never been a thing my body has done before.
If he was in the neutral zone, I knew he was in the neutral zone.
If he was on the bench, I knew which spot on the bench.
When he skated past me in a drill, I did not see him skate past me but knew anyway because the air moved a different way and because the part of my spine that used to belong to me had decided to belong to a radar instead.
I cataloged it along with everything else my body was doing that I did not have language for, and I filed it somewhere I was going to have to come back to.
The locker room after practice is louder than it was yesterday because today the first-line forwards all got their systems clean and so everybody's in a good mood, everybody except me, who is in a state I have no word for.
I sit down at my stall. I start to unhook my gear. I go slowly, piece by piece, the way I always do, because if I do it the way I always do I can trust myself to keep doing it even if my hands are not quite my hands right now.
Someone sits down in the stall next to mine and starts pulling his own gear off.
I don't look.
I know who it is. Everyone in this room knows whose stall is whose.
He's sitting in a stall that isn't his. He has moved two down from his own assigned stall to sit beside me, and he has done it with enough casualness that no one has called it out, but I can feel the attention of the room come to a soft simmer over my shoulder and stay there.
“Nice shift,” he says, conversationally, because we ran a couple of shifts after the hit and I scored on one of them. “Clean finish.”
“Thanks.”
I get my jersey off. I fold it.
“You fold your jersey,” he says. It isn't a chirp. It's an observation. That's worse.
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
He has his gear off faster than I have mine off because I am going slowly and he is not. He stands up with his towel over his shoulder. He doesn't move toward the showers yet. He stands there, in my peripheral, facing his own emptied stall, not moving.
I get my own pads off. I get the base layer off. I get my own towel and I do not look at him.
“After you, sweetheart.”
I don't answer. I walk. He walks behind me.
The showers are the same showers I was in two days ago. The tile is the same. The stall at the far end is open and I go to it because it seems like mine. I step in. I turn the water on. I face the tile.
He steps into the stall next to mine. He does not turn on his water.
I hear the other showers start up one by one around us. I hear Jax say something about Maddox's bench speech from yesterday and somebody laughs. I hear the hiss of hot water and the slap of feet on tile and the rising background roar of a room that is mostly done for the day.
Behind it all I hear what isn't happening. He hasn't turned his water on. He is standing in a stall with no water running and the room is starting to notice the dropped beat, the thinning of a song when a guitar in a band stops playing.
Then I hear him lean on the partition between us.
“Sweetheart.”
I do not answer.
“Look at me.”
I do not.
“Theo.”
My name in his mouth is the thing I should not have let him have.
I let him have it two days ago when he said it like a joke and I let him have it again yesterday when he said it into my ear at the bench and I am letting him have it now.
I did not give it to him. He took it. I did nothing about the taking.
I keep my face in the water.
“Here's what you're going to do, sweetheart.”