6. Maddox
MADDOX
Igo back in.
Phoenix told me to go home. I'm not going home.
I stood in that alley for I don't know how long after Theo walked back inside.
I counted to a number I wasn't reaching.
My hand on the brick wall was the hand that a minute ago had been on his chest. When I took the hand off the wall it was shaking.
I watched it shake. Then I laughed, because I haven't in the adult portion of my life stood in an alley and watched my own hand shake.
I'm going back in.
Paul is gone. I saw him take Theo out the front.
I waited long enough to make sure the car was gone.
Then I pushed open the back door of Vigil and walked through the stock corridor past a guy stacking crates who didn't look at me.
I came out behind the bar like I worked there.
The bartender clocked me and nodded and didn't care because I tip him in twenties.
The team is still here.
Phoenix is at the rail of the bar with a beer in his hand and a face that says I told you to go home. He sees me. He doesn't say anything. He lifts the beer a half-inch and puts it back down. That's the captain saying I noted that you disobeyed me and I'm filing it.
I nod at him.
He nods back.
That's how it is with Phoenix. We have a grammar.
Grayson isn't here. Grayson, I assume, left with Paul's car in his rearview, probably home to whatever dog he owns.
Magnus is at the jukebox punching in something loud.
Jax isn't here. Jax is in an urgent care somewhere with a nurse explaining what a fracture is, or he's at home with a frozen bag of peas on his face, or he's in a parking lot crying.
I don't care which. I hit a teammate in front of his team and I don't care what happened to him after.
That's a thing I should sit with.
I don't sit with it.
I go to the bar.
“Whiskey,” I tell the bartender. “Round for the guys.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Celebration,” I say.
“Celebrating what.”
“Winning the game, Miles.”
Miles looks at me a second longer than he needs to. He pours. He pours four more. He calls them over. The team comes to the bar and picks up the drinks without making eye contact with me, except Magnus, who grins at me like we just got away with something.
Phoenix doesn't come over.
Phoenix drinks the beer he already has.
I down the whiskey.
It doesn't fix anything.
Here's what I know about my own body.
When I'm angry, the anger has two places it can go.
It can go into my fists, which is what happens on the ice, which is what the team pays me for, which is what got me on the Wolves in the first place.
Or it can go into sex, which is what happens everywhere else.
Those are the two exits. My body doesn't have a third exit.
I've been in this body for twenty-eight years and I've checked.
My fists aren't available. I used them on Jax an hour ago. I could use them again but there's nobody left to use them on who'd make it back from it, and I'm on thin enough ice with the owner as it is.
Sex is the other exit.
Sex is always the other exit. Since I was sixteen, since the first time I got a girl on her back in the bathroom of a party in a house owned by somebody's divorced father, sex is what I've used to put the anger away.
It works. It's always worked. It's reliable.
You find a body, you put the anger into the body, the body takes it, you walk out lighter.
I have three numbers in my phone for this.
I pull the phone out.
I scroll.
Lila in the 403. Cody in the west end. Miranda at the gallery. All three of them have been texted by me before. All three of them text back fast. I open Lila first because she's closest, because she doesn't talk much after, because she has a nice mouth.
I type you up.
I don't send it.
My thumb hovers.
I look at the send.
I think about Lila's apartment. The blue rug.
The cat. How she takes her hair down in the kitchen before she walks me to the bedroom.
The place on her throat I like to bite. All of it is in my head, accessible, available, and all of it is flat.
All of it is gray. All of it is a thing I'd do because doing it is what I do, not because anything in me wants it.
I know what I want.
I want a twenty-year-old I've known three days.
His shoulder blades against brick. His mouth opening when he can't make it work. Him crying quietly in an alley because of me. I want to know what his hand looks like wrapped around himself, thinking about me.
I want things I don't want to want.
I put the phone down face-up on the bar.
I pick up another whiskey.
“Creed.”
Phoenix. Behind me.
I don't turn.
“Don't,” I say.
“Don't what?”
“Whatever you came over here to say.”
He sets his empty beer on the bar next to my hand. He doesn't sit on the stool beside me. He stays standing. I know what this is. He's standing so he's taller than me. Captain move. I let him have it because if I stand up, he'll sit down and we can do this for an hour.
“You came back in.”
“Observant.”
He turns his glass a quarter turn on the bar.
“I told you to go home.”
“I heard you.”
“And.”
I swirl the ice in my whiskey.
“And I came back in.”
He exhales through his nose. A quiet exhale. The kind a man makes when he isn't yelling at you on purpose.
“Maddox.”
I look at him. He doesn't call me Maddox. He calls me Creed or Mad Dog. Maddox is for my mother, who's dead, and for the old trainer at the Rapids who died last year, and for Phoenix when Phoenix is serious enough to step out of the nicknames.
“What.”
His jaw works. He looks at the bottles behind the bar and then at me.
“Coach came in that front door. Coach came in, walked past me, and took his son out that front door. Theo's face. Tell me you saw his face.”
“I saw his face.”
He nods once, slow.
“Then you know.”
I know.
I knew when I released his jaw in the alley and stepped back.
I knew when I watched him walk out the alley door on legs that weren't his.
I knew the second Grayson said coach and Theo made the noise he made, because it was the noise of a twenty-year-old who's been trained to fear his father like a dog trained not to bark. I knew.
I knew and I came back in.
“Phoenix.”
“Yeah.”
I set the glass down. It clicks against the wood.
“I hear you.”
“That isn't the same as agreeing.”
“No.”
He watches me.
He picks up his empty beer and sets it back down again, a thing he does when he's deciding how hard to push.
“I cannot protect you from this,” he says. “If the owner hears about that scene, I can't protect you. If Paul decides to make it a formal thing, I can't protect you. I'm telling you as a man who has tried. Please. Hear me when I tell you.”
“I hear you.”
“Okay.”
He picks up his beer for real this time.
“I'm leaving,” he says. “Leander is waiting up. Do me the favor of not ruining your life in the forty minutes after I'm out the door.”
“I make no promises.”
“I know you don't.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder briefly. The closest thing to tenderness I've gotten from a man in a year and a half. Then he's gone.
The team thins out.
Magnus yells something at the bartender I don't catch and leaves.
The two second-liners whose names I know and don't care about leave in a pair because they do everything in a pair.
A couple of the guys I've barely spoken to since I got to Frosthaven hang around at the back and stare at me because I'm the guy who beat up a teammate tonight. I stare back until they leave.
It's me and the bartender and the woman in the green cardigan, who still hasn't looked up from her phone.
I put twenties on the bar.
I go.
The air outside is cold. It's later than I thought. The streetlights are the kind that make everyone look blue. My hands are in my jacket pockets because I don't know what else to do with them.
I walk.
I have the apartment three-quarters of a mile away, a loft the team rents for me that I don't own because I don't own anything.
I have keys to it in my pocket. I don't want to be in it.
The loft has a bed and a couch and a kitchen I don't cook in.
If I go there right now I'll lie on the bed and think about Theo until I can't think anymore.
Then I'll do the thing. Then I'll lie in the mess of it and I'll still be thinking about Theo.
That's a worse version of the next hour than the one I'm about to pick.
I pick the park.
Riverside Park is four blocks west of Vigil.
At eleven on a Thursday, it's empty except for the occasional jogger and the rats.
A narrow strip of grass and path along a river I won't look at, because looking at dark water is a thing I refuse to do after midnight.
Benches at intervals. The old kind, iron and slats, bolted to concrete, cold through jeans.
I pick the third one from the entrance.
I sit.
I put my head in my hands.
I haven't put my head in my hands since I was nineteen.
I have a rule about it. The rule is you don't do it, because it's what men do when they're about to cry, and if you aren't about to cry you're training your body to cry at nothing.
I put my head in my hands anyway. I sit like that for a minute.
A jogger goes past and doesn't look at me, because in this city at this hour you don't look at men with their heads in their hands.
I take my head out of my hands.
I look at the sky.
The sky is the kind a city has, where the clouds are orange from the light below. No stars. I haven't seen a star since I moved out of my grandmother's house at seventeen.
“You're in trouble, Creed.”
I say it out loud to the bench.
The bench doesn't answer.
“You're in a lot of trouble.”
The bench continues not to answer.
I laugh. It isn't a laugh. It's the shape a laugh takes when there's nothing in it. I laugh at the bench. The bench is unmoved.
Here's what I do.
I don't send the text to Lila.