4. Maddox #2
I walk back into the bar with my hands in my pockets and the expression of a man who went for a piss and is coming back, which requires approximately one percent of my acting ability. Nobody looks up.
I do a slow arc of the room because I'm not going straight to him; I'm not that stupid. I get a new whiskey. I chirp Phoenix about his hair, which took a champagne shower and hasn't dried well. I let Jax pull me into a half-hug. I am doing the things I do.
I am doing them while my whole body points at the far end of the bar like a magnet pointed at a piece of iron.
The thing I see, when I finally let myself look, is Jax at the far end of the bar.
Jax is standing too close to Theo.
Jax has a hand on Theo's shoulder in the friendly-drunk way that is not actually friendly.
Jax has his chin ducked so he can say something into Theo's ear and Theo is leaning away from him with a politeness that is doing the work of a door.
Theo's drink is half-full. Theo's whole body is in the posture of a man who was raised to never make a scene and who is, therefore, in a scene.
I am across the room before I remember walking.
“Jax.”
Jax turns. He grins. He is very drunk. He is also my teammate and I have known him for three years and in a more ordinary life I would chirp him and extract him and drive him home.
“Mad Dog. Join us. I was just telling the Virgin here —”
“Don't.”
“Don't what.” He laughs. He looks at Theo, who is not looking at either of us, who is looking at his own beer like his beer has the answer. “Oh. Don't the chirp? Come on, bud, I'm welcoming him.”
I step between them. I put my hip into the bar so Jax has to step back to see around me.
“Jax. Back up.”
“Creed.”
I do not raise my voice. I put a hand flat on his chest.
“Back the fuck up.”
He blinks. He is too drunk for pattern recognition.
“Dude, what —”
I do not hit him hard.
I hit him hard enough that he sits down on the barstool behind him and his eyes go wide and he touches his lip with the back of his hand and looks at the red smear and says, “What the fuck, Creed,” in a voice that is genuinely hurt, and I feel like shit about it for a half-second and then I don't.
The bar has gone quiet. The team has clocked it. Phoenix is coming over at speed. Grayson is already on Jax.
I turn to face the room.
“Listen up.”
I don't have to say it loud. The room is already listening.
“The only person who fucks Theo is me.”
I do not look at Theo when I say it. I don't need to.
“Anyone else puts a hand on him in a bar, in a hallway, in a fucking elevator, you come through me. That goes for you.” I point at Jax. “That goes for every fucking one of you.”
Phoenix has reached me. He puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Mad Dog.”
“Captain.”
His fingers tighten a quarter-turn. That's his version of a warning.
“Outside.”
“Sure.”
I let him steer me. I do not look at Theo.
I pass him close enough that my shoulder almost touches his and I do not look at him, and I walk out of the bar with Phoenix's hand on my shoulder and the whole Wolves team watching me go, and Dominic somewhere at the back of the room with a raised eyebrow and a whiskey and exactly as much information as he needs.
The air outside is cold.
I breathe it in. My hand is starting to throb from where I hit Jax, which is a good feeling, the feeling of a punch the morning-after.
Phoenix lets me go. He turns and faces me square. His hands go to his hips, which is the gesture of a captain who has run out of captain moves.
“Bud. What the fuck.”
“Yeah.”
He looks up at the streetlight for a second like the streetlight will back him up.
“What the fuck.”
“I heard you.”
Phoenix puts his hands on his hips and then drops them and then puts them back. A captain running through captain gestures looking for the one that fits.
“You just called a claim on the coach's kid in front of the entire team.”
“Yeah.”
He exhales all the air in his lungs at once.
“In front of the assistant trainer, who is a minor, Creed.”
“He's nineteen.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“He is nineteen, yes, and he works for Paul Laurent, and you just called a claim on Paul Laurent's son in front of him.”
I don't say anything.
Phoenix holds the look until I look back. I have known him three years. He is looking at me like he has never met me.
“Is this real?”
“What?”
“Is it real, Mad Dog? Or is it you fucking with Paul?”
I want to say fucking with Paul.
I want to say it so badly I can feel the shape of it in my mouth.
The shape of it in my mouth doesn't fit right anymore.
“Phoenix.”
He waits. He is a good enough captain to let a man find the rest of the sentence. I can't find the rest of the sentence.
“Go home, Creed. Sleep it off. We'll talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
He goes back inside. I stand on the sidewalk outside the bar. The bouncer, who knows my face, nods at me and does not ask what happened, because bouncers who keep their jobs don't ask.
I start walking.
I don't call a car. I don't go home. I start walking, because the thing in my chest will not sit still, and I have never in my adult life had a thing in my chest that would not sit still.
I go three blocks. I go five. The street is a bar street and the bar street thins out as I get further from Vigil. At the corner of Eighth and something I don't catch, I stop and I stand on the curb and I do a thing I never do, which is I check in with my body.
My hand hurts. Good.
My jaw is set and my shoulders are up and my chest is doing the thing the chest does when you have run up a hill and the lungs haven't caught on yet. I wasn't running. I was walking. I'm not out of breath from a walk.
My dick is half-hard and has been since I said what I said in the bar.
The walk home is thirty-five minutes if I take the direct route. I take the direct route. I do not jerk off on a park bench, which is what a less disciplined version of me would do and what tomorrow-me is going to end up doing anyway if today-me doesn't make it to a bed.
I try the frame again.
This is about Paul, I tell the sidewalk.
The sidewalk passes along beneath me and says nothing, because the sidewalk lives in the world where I broke the cheek of a guy I've known three years over another guy I've known three days, and the sidewalk is not obligated to agree with the frame.
I keep walking.
I keep walking because there is a twenty-year-old somewhere in this city, in a kitchen with his father, or in a car driving home from a bar he didn't want to be at, or sitting on the edge of a bed with his shoes on, and he heard me say it.
He heard me say the only person who fucks Theo is me.
He heard it in front of every man who has ever chirped him.
He heard it from the mouth of the enforcer who told him in a shower stall twenty-four hours ago to get on his knees.
I want to know what his face did when I said it.
I want to know more than I've wanted to know anything since I learned to want things.
I keep walking.