6. Maddox #2
I don't send the text to Cody.
I don't send the text to Miranda.
I don't text the number I have for the woman at the gym who isn't one of my regular three but who told me at a party once that I could call her whenever.
I don't text Theo. I don't have Theo's number. Theo's phone is probably on a counter in an apartment whose address I don't know. If I had Theo's number, his address, and his permission, I'd be in Theo's bedroom inside an hour. The rest of my career would be a thing I was remembering.
I sit on a bench in a park at night in the cold.
I undo my belt.
I've never done this in public in my life.
I've done a lot of things in my life. I've fought men in alleys who were bigger than me and walked out with their wallets.
I've fucked women on the kitchen counters of men who paid my way through juniors.
I've drunk things I shouldn't have drunk, with people I shouldn't have known, in rooms I shouldn't have been in. I haven't masturbated on a park bench.
I have a reason.
The reason is I can't go home yet. If I go home, I’ll call Lila.
I’ll let her come over. I’ll use her body to put the thing in me somewhere.
Tomorrow I’ll have to look at my face in the bathroom mirror and know that I used a woman who was kind to me as a dumpster for a feeling I had about a man.
The reason is I can’t go home yet. The reason is the body will do what the body does.
The body will do it tonight. I’m going to choose where.
I choose a bench.
I pick one that has enough dark between the streetlights.
I sit with my back to the path, facing the river.
My jacket is long. I can make this unreadable from any distance over three feet.
Anyone walking up is going to see a man sitting on a bench.
If they see more than that, they’re looking for it.
If they’re looking for it, they have bigger problems than me.
I close my eyes.
I don’t think about Lila.
I don’t think about Cody.
I don’t think about a single one of the bodies I know how to use.
I think about him.
I think about his shoulder blades against the brick.
His pulse under my fingers. The shake. The sound he made that wasn’t a word.
How his face opened when I said I’m gonna do it in this alley, like a man who’s found religion against his will.
I think about the heat of him through the shirt.
His hips tilting up toward my hand before my hand got anywhere near them.
He was going to come in his jeans. He was going to come in his jeans if I’d left my hand on his stomach another thirty seconds.
I know this the way I know how to read a rink.
He was there. He was there and he didn’t know he was there, and that’s the purest version of wanting a person I’ve ever seen in my life.
I think about his mouth.
I think about Coach.
I think about the word Coach coming out of him in the bar as the first word he said to me, because in his own head that’s the name for authority, and I took authority from him tonight. I took it for free. He said the word Coach to the wrong man and didn’t even know he was doing it.
I think about him locked in a car with his father driving home.
I think about the jeans he had on. Dark. Tight through the thigh.
I think about him in a bedroom I’ve never seen.
I think about him in a bedroom I’ve never seen with a door he’s locked for the first time in his life.
What he’s doing behind that door. I know.
I know it like the rhythm of a song I’ve been hearing all my life.
He’s lying on his back on his bed. He’s doing what I was going to help him do against that wall.
He’s thinking about me. He’s crying quietly because he’s Theo.
He’s coming. He’s saying my name in his head because he can’t say it out loud.
I come.
I come hard.
I come hard into the inside of my jacket because I thought ahead enough to do that and I didn’t think ahead enough to bring anything else.
I’m going to have to go home in a come-lined jacket.
I couldn’t care less. Then the wave is over.
The bench is still cold. The river is still black.
The streetlight is still orange. I’m still on a bench in a park alone at eleven forty on a Thursday night having jerked myself off thinking about a coach’s son I met on Monday.
I sit until a second jogger passes and doesn't look at me either.
I'm waiting for the thing that usually comes—relief. The body unwinds. The anger drains. You stand up lighter. That's the trade. That's what the body has been doing for me for twelve years.
The thing doesn't come.
The relief isn't there.
I'm sitting on a bench with my jeans half-open and my jacket wet.
My body has come. My body isn't relieved; it isn't lighter.
My body is, if anything, heavier, because it now has information it didn't have ten minutes ago.
The information is that the exit has closed.
The exit has closed on a Thursday in a park in a city I've lived in for three years.
The thing that has closed it is a twenty-year-old with green eyes who said Coach to me in a bar and didn't understand what he was saying.
I laugh again.
It isn't a laugh.
“Fuck,” I say to the bench.
The bench agrees this time. Or it doesn't. The bench is a bench.
I zip up.
I stand.
My legs are fine. My legs have always been fine. Legs aren't the problem. The problem is inside the jacket and inside the chest and inside the skull.
I walk back the way I came.
I don't take the direct route. I take the long one, past the back of Vigil, past the closed front of a dry cleaner, past a bakery that's already opening for the morning run, past a parking garage where a man is asleep on a mattress by the entrance and who doesn't stir as I pass.
I do it because I can't make myself go straight to the apartment yet.
I do it because walking is doing something and sitting isn't, and I can't sit in my own loft with a wet jacket thinking about a kid.
Halfway home I stop on a corner. I say it out loud.
“This is about Paul.”
It's the sentence I said to myself walking the first time tonight.
The sentence I said to the sidewalk. The sentence I've been saying since Sunday, when I heard Paul Laurent was the new coach and started mapping where a man like that has soft places.
It's the sentence I built this whole thing on.
This is about Paul. I do him through his son.
I ruin the son. Paul finds out. Paul can't do a thing about it because the damage is done and his control of the kid is a lie.
I walk out of Frosthaven at the end of the season with a wrecked relationship between a coach and the kid he raised, and a trophy case that says this is what you get for benching me in my first week.
That sentence.
I say it to a corner.
“This is about Paul.”
The corner doesn't agree with me.
Nothing on this street agrees with me.
I say it again, because you say a thing twice when it's stopped working, as if saying it twice is going to kick it back on. This is about Paul. The sentence is hollow in my mouth. A shape without meat in it.
I have a problem.
I have a clear, nameable problem. The problem is standing in a corner of a city at midnight saying a sentence out loud and the sentence isn't working.
When a sentence stops working a man has to put a new sentence in its place.
I don't have a new sentence. I refuse to put one there. I keep trying the old one.
My loft is on the fourth floor.
I get up there without seeing anyone in the hallway. I close the door. I lock it. I take off the jacket. I toss it across the back of the chair where the light won't hit the stain and I'll deal with it in the morning.
I go to the bathroom.
I look in the mirror.
My eyes are my father's eyes. That's a thing I've been trying not to notice since I turned twenty-five and my face settled into itself. I notice it tonight because tonight my face looks like my father's face looked when my father was about to do something bad.
I stare at it.
My father hit my mother. My father hit me. My father hit a lot of people. My father isn't the man I am. I know this the way I know where the blue line is.
I stare at the face.
“You are not him,” I say out loud, to the mirror.
The mirror is easier to talk to than the bench. The mirror can see me.
“You are not him. This isn't that.”
I watch my face as I say it.
I watch my face watch me say it.
The face doesn't look convinced.
I go to bed.
The bed is cold. The sheets are one set behind on the wash. The pillow smells like me. I lie on my back with my hands on my chest, a position I haven't slept in since I was a child, and I stare at the ceiling.
I try the frame one more time.
This is about Paul.
The frame is a pane of glass. The glass has a crack down the middle. Behind the glass there's a boy in an alley, a boy in a bar, a boy in a locked bedroom, a boy whose face opened under my hand. I can't put the glass back together tonight. I can't throw it out. I can't stand up and find a new one.
I close my eyes.
I see him.
I see him how I've been seeing him since I walked out of the alley. Behind my eyes, in the dark, close enough that if I reached, I'd touch his shoulder.
I open my eyes.
I keep them open.
I stare at the ceiling until morning.
I don't sleep.
I am more furious than I was before I came.