5. Theo #2
He takes his hand off me.
He does it slowly. He does it like a man putting down a loaded gun on a table, a man who's aware that he's the one who loaded it. His eyes track down my body and back up and when they get to my face again, he isn't angry, exactly, but he isn't not angry.
“Go,” he says.
I don't move.
“Theo.”
I move.
The bar is smaller when I come back in.
That's not true. The bar is the same size. I'm smaller.
My eyes find Paul before I want them to.
He's at the front, by the stools. He has his coat on. His hands are in his coat pockets. His face is the face he does when a player has done something that can't be fixed in this practice and will have to be fixed in a meeting behind a closed door. His jaw is set. His eyes are on me.
I'm sure he knows.
I'm sure he knows because my hair is off and my shirt is off and my face is wet and I've come out of a back door he didn't see me go into. The fact that I can walk at all is a function of muscle memory, not of any conscious decision I'm making.
Of course he knows.
Of course he doesn't.
Paul doesn't imagine his son being pressed to a brick wall by a man. Paul doesn't imagine his son being a man who wants to be pressed to a brick wall by a man. Paul has run his imagination on tracks for forty-eight years. The tracks don't go through this alley.
I cross the bar.
Phoenix doesn't look at me as I pass. He is studying his beer. Magnus studies me openly and then does the laugh that isn't a laugh. Grayson has slid past me and is back in some other part of the bar, pretending to be interested in a television. Jax might be gone.
“Theo.”
“Yes, sir.”
My voice is level.
I don't know where the level voice came from. I didn't ask my voice for a level voice. I asked my voice for any voice. The voice gave me this one.
“Car.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paul looks past me at the rest of the team. His mouth moves as if he's about to say something to them, then he decides something else.
“The rest of you,” he says. “This is not how professional athletes behave.
I don't want to hear about this again. I don't want to read about this again. I am not your father. I will not behave like one. But I am going to behave like your coach, and tomorrow morning we will have a conversation about what your coach does when his players embarrass the organization. Six AM. Rink.”
Somebody groans quietly.
Paul doesn't acknowledge the groan.
He turns. He walks to the door. I follow.
I don't look back at the bar. I don't look back at the door to the alley.
I don't look for Maddox. I can still feel Maddox's hand on my chest. If I look for Maddox in the room my face will do something my face can't do in front of my father, so I look at the floor and I follow my father out.
The car is the family car. The car he drove from our old city to this one, with me in the passenger seat and a U-Haul trailing.
I get in.
He shuts his door.
He doesn't start the engine.
The silence goes for a minute that feels longer. I've been counting my breaths. In four, hold seven, out eight. I've done the cycle three times. He hasn't spoken.
“Theo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
His face isn't angry. His face is disappointed, which is worse. Disappointed is the face he has trained me with for twenty years. Disappointed is the face I will die to avoid.
“What was that?”
“I'm sorry, Dad.”
He doesn't blink. He waits.
“I asked what it was.”
I swallow. My throat clicks.
“The team wanted to have a drink. I didn't know there was going to be a—”
I stop because my mouth almost said a fight. I almost said the word fight. If I say fight, he'll ask whose fight, and that leads to the rest of it, and the rest of it is a thing I can't give him tonight or ever.
“A what,” he says.
“An incident. Between the players. I didn't know there would be one.”
He watches me.
I watch the steering wheel.
He starts the engine.
He doesn't talk on the drive. He doesn't need to.
The quiet is the lecture. The quiet is worse than the lecture. The quiet is him letting me hear every word I didn't say on the sidewalk outside the bar, every word I'm not saying in the car, every version of the truth I'm keeping from him and that he's trained to detect even when I'm not speaking.
I watch the streetlights go by. I count them. I get to forty and stop.
My jeans are tight.
I'm furious about my jeans.
I'm furious that my body won't stand down.
Maddox's hand is still on me. I can feel where it was on my chest. I can feel where it moved. I can feel where it stopped, right above the line, right before the belt. I can feel the breath on my ear. Your coach can come looking. My coach did come looking.
I don't cry.
I won't cry in this car.
I don't cry.
The apartment is on the seventh floor of a building Paul picked because it was close to the rink and because it had a doorman.
The doorman is Denis. Denis has an excellent memory for faces.
Denis nods at Paul. Denis nods at me. Denis looks at me for half a second too long.
Denis, I think, knows I'm not okay. Denis won't mention this to anyone. That's Denis's job.
In the elevator Paul stares at the door.
I stare at the door.
The elevator goes up.
In the kitchen he puts his keys on the counter.
He puts his coat on the back of a chair.
He turns.
“Sit down.”
I sit down.
He doesn't sit.
“I am going to say this once. You are a professional athlete. You are not at college. You are not on a gap year. You are not in a fraternity. You are a rookie on a team that thinks you are here because of me. They are not wrong. They are here because they are good. You are here because you are good and because I am your coach, and the second fact is the one they see. You do not need to confirm it for them by being the kid who goes out with the team and sits in the middle of whatever tonight was.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Look at me when I'm speaking.”
I look at him.
“If you give me any reason to think you are distracted, Theo, I will pull you. Not from a game. From the team. I will call my contact at the Rapids and I will send you home. Do you understand me.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sets his hands flat on the counter.
“I do not want to have to say that again.”
“You won't.”
The fridge hums behind him. The kitchen light is too bright.
“I will not.”
“No, sir.”
He watches me another second. His face starts to soften. Then it resets before the softening lands.
“Go to bed.”
“Yes, sir.”
I stand up. My legs take a second to understand what standing up is. I get them to understand it. I walk past him to the hall.
“Theo.”
I stop.
I don't turn.
“Whatever happened in that bar,” he says, quieter, “don't make me hear about it again.”
I nod at the wall.
I go down the hall to my room.
My room has a bed and a desk and a window and a bag I haven't unpacked. I close the door. I lean against the door. I slide down the door until I'm sitting against it with my knees up.
I put my face in my hands.
I don't cry.
The shake is in my thighs. The shake has been in my thighs for an hour. It can't keep being in my thighs because my thighs are a place you can put shaking only for so long before the shaking moves.
I get up off the floor.
I lock the door.
I've never locked this door. Paul has never asked me to lock this door.
Paul has never given me a reason to lock this door.
I lock it tonight because if I don't lock it, I won't be able to do what I'm about to do.
If I don't do what I'm about to do, I won't sleep.
If I don't sleep, tomorrow morning Paul will see it on my face, and the seeing will be worse than the locking.
I go to my bed.
I sit on the edge.
I'm shaking.
I take my jeans off.
My hand is not his hand.
That's the first thing I notice. My hand is small. My hand is mine. My hand is a hand I've used to eat breakfast and tie skates and sign a contract Paul put in front of me. It isn't a hand that knows anything about this.
I close my eyes.
I put my hand around myself.
I remember the brick against my shoulder blades.
I remember his palm over my heart.
I remember his breath. I'm gonna do it in this alley.
I remember his mouth moving near my ear when he said sweetheart.
The heat of it. The certainty. The animal level of want underneath the word.
I'm gonna take you apart against this wall.
I remember my body trying to climb his hand.
I remember his fingers at my pulse. I remember his knuckles with blood on them and my stomach going warm at the sight of the blood, and I remember being ashamed of that and wanting more of it anyway.
My hand moves.
It's clumsy. I'm clumsy. I've done this before.
Hundreds of times. Quickly, quietly, efficiently, a thing I do in four minutes with the shower on.
This isn't that. This is slow because I'm not in a rush.
Because I want to stay inside the thing I'm remembering.
Because the thing I'm remembering is the closest I've ever been to being kissed.
He didn't kiss me.
The fact that he didn't kiss me and I'm thinking about kissing anyway is a piece of information I'm going to have to deal with tomorrow or the day after or never.
My hand moves faster.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek to keep quiet. The apartment is old. The walls aren't thin, but they aren't thick. Paul is at the end of the hall. Paul is at the end of the hall.
I remember good boy.
He didn't say it tonight. He said it on the ice two nights ago.
After he hit me. After he put a hand under my arm and lifted me off the ice in front of the whole team and murmured it into my ear where only I could hear.
Good boy. Like I'd done something right by being knocked down.
Like I'd done something right by being the thing he could knock down.
I remember good boy and I come.
I come hard enough that my teeth close on the inside of my cheek and I taste blood and I don't care. I don't care that I'm twenty years old in a locked bedroom in my father's apartment and I just came thinking about a man who has bloody knuckles from a fight he started over me, and I don't care.
For a second, for a second only, I'm not afraid of my father.
For a second only, I'm not afraid of anything.
Then the second ends.
I clean up.
I put my jeans back on. I unlock the door. I don't want Paul to find a locked door in the morning. I leave the door how he knows it.
I lie on the bed in my clothes.
The ceiling has a crack I've been learning. It's in the shape of the letter Y with an extra branch. I stare at the Y.
My face is wet again.
I'm not sure when that started.
I wipe my face with the back of my wrist. I wipe it again. I do the breathing. In four, hold seven, out eight. The breathing does nothing. I do it anyway because my body still thinks the breathing is an option.
My phone is on the nightstand. Dark. No message.
No notification. I don't know what I expected.
A text from Maddox that says sleep, sweetheart?
A text from Maddox that says tomorrow? Maddox doesn't have my number.
Maddox has my name. My team. My father. My mouth on his body tomorrow or the day after because I know—I know in the place my body keeps knowing—that the alley was not the end.
The alley was the part before the part.
I lie on the bed in my clothes and I watch the Y on the ceiling.
I think about what a man who wants to take me apart against a brick wall does next.
Under the thinking there is a small bright thing that hasn't been in me before tonight.
The small bright thing is not fear. The small bright thing is not shame.
I don't have a word for the small bright thing.
I lie very still. I let it be there. I watch the Y. I wait for sleep.
It doesn't come until the heater has clicked off three times.