10. Maddox
MADDOX
Isleep like I haven't slept since I was maybe twenty-four.
I sleep face-down in my own bed with the window cracked and the cold air coming across the back of my neck and my phone on silent on the floor where I dropped it.
I sleep for ten hours. I wake up at nine on a Saturday morning feeling like a man who got away with a thing, and that's not true.
I haven't got away with anything yet, but the body doesn't know that.
The body just knows it came in a mouth last night and the mouth belonged to the one it wanted.
I'm morning-hard. Twenty-eight-and-came-last-night hard. My body has a memory now of what it's coming back for. I put a hand under the sheet. I stop. I don't finish in bed this morning. The next time I come, I'm coming on or in Theo Laurent, and the body can wait until Monday.
Monday is practice.
Monday is a locker room. Paul on the bench.
A team around us. Eight stalls of men between the shower stalls and the door.
A twenty-year-old with green eyes whose jaw I've had my cock in, who's going to walk into that rink with a secret living under his skin.
I get up. I'm smiling. I don't catch myself. There's nobody here to catch.
It’s a Saturday without a game, so I do nothing.
I lift. I eat. I watch a game on mute. I text Lila to tell her I'm out of town for a month, which is a lie she'll accept.
I do the same to Cody. I don't text Miranda because Miranda is a woman who will read the silence as respect.
I clean the jacket. I air out the loft. I don't go by Harbor Arms. I don't go by the rink.
I don't drive past Paul's building. I tell myself this is discipline. I know it's something else.
Saturday night I text Theo: Monday. After practice. Stay on ice last for stretches. Follow my lead in the shower. M
He replies inside ninety seconds: Yes
That's the whole text. Yes. No punctuation. No hesitation. Yes. I look at the word for a minute. I put the phone face-down on the counter. I go to bed early. I sleep eight hours.
Sunday, the same.
Monday morning I'm at the rink by seven. Practice is at eight. I lace my skates in a locker room half-full of men I like well enough and a couple I don't. I don't look toward the door. I know the door is what my body is watching for. I'm not giving my body that yet.
I hear him come in.
I hear the door, I hear the greeting Phoenix gives him, Laurent, and the silent greeting Theo gives Phoenix, which I know is a small nod.
I hear Theo's bag hit the bench at his stall.
I don't look up. I tie my laces. I'm very good at tying my laces.
Phoenix, across the room, clocks my non-looking and goes back to taping his stick.
I wait a full minute.
Then I look up.
Theo is pulling his base layer over his head.
His back is to me. His spine is a line I spent Saturday thinking about.
The shoulder blades I had against a brick wall.
The small mole on the back of his ribs I noticed Friday when he was on his back in the queen.
He's thinner than most of the guys in this room.
He's a center. He's built for the thing he does.
His hair is still damp from his shower at his father's apartment, which is a thing I know because Theo showers before practice because Paul trained him to.
He doesn't turn around.
He doesn't have to. He knows I'm looking. His shoulders know. The muscle between his shoulder blades goes tight and stays tight. He starts pulling the pads out of his bag one at a time, slower than he needs to.
I stand up.
I walk past his stall on my way to the ice.
I don't touch him. I don't have to touch him. I pass close enough that he can feel the air move around me, and I say, very low, as my shoulder passes his shoulder, “Morning, sweetheart.”
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't need to.
The color comes up his neck in a line a man could track with a ruler.
Paul runs practice the way Paul always runs practice.
Drills. No nonsense. No warm-up jokes. The guys fall into it.
I fall into it. I'm a very good hockey player and I've been a very good hockey player since I was fifteen.
I can do Paul's system in my sleep, which is one of two reasons he hates me.
The other reason is standing twenty feet to my left right now pretending to be invisible.
Here are the legal touches.
A lift, in the corner on a one-on-one drill.
I come up behind Theo as he goes for the puck.
I put my stick across his hips to lift him off the puck.
My forearm brushes his lower back. Skin to glove, glove to jersey, jersey to skin.
He doesn't flinch. He adjusts his weight because he's been trained to adjust his weight.
Paul, twenty feet away, writes something on his tablet.
A shoulder, neutral zone, on a pass drill.
I read him. I come in at the angle I'd come at a bigger man.
I let my shoulder catch his and bounce off.
It's a legal hit. It's a clean hit. It looks like nothing.
It puts my whole body along his whole body for maybe half a second.
His breath comes out of him in a sound I'll hear in my sleep.
A tap on the pads, at the blue line, after a clean play.
I skate past him and my gloved hand comes down on his shoulder pad as I go.
Nice pass. Any defenseman would do it. It's a normal thing.
I do it because I want to do it and because I can do it, and because Paul is watching and he can see a hand on a pad and call it a hand on a pad and nothing more.
I do this for an hour and a half.
Nobody on the team says anything.
Magnus doesn't chirp today. Magnus has learned.
Between drills I get close enough to say a sentence in his ear.
“You eat this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He doesn't look at me. He looks at the ice. He stays lined up with the rest of the drill waiting their turn.
Two drills later, I get another sentence.
“You slept?”
“Some.”
His jaw is set.
“More than Friday?”
“Yes.”
“Good boy.”
He does something then that I'll think about during warm-ups for the rest of this week. His eyes flick sideways toward me for a half-second, then back to the ice. In that half-second I see the whole thing on his face. He's been running on my track since Friday night, and he knows it.
Second-to-last drill of practice I line up behind him in the faceoff lane and I put my mouth near his ear, and I say, quiet, so quiet my voice is barely in the air, “Stretches last. Shower last. You know what I'm doing to you.”
He doesn't answer.
His stick tightens in his glove.
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
His stick tightens again.
“Yes, I know.”
“Good.”
Paul blows the whistle. The drill starts. Theo wins the draw clean. I swing up the boards. Nobody on the team has heard a word.
End of practice Paul keeps everyone on the ice for five minutes of stretches.
Theo does his stretches. I do mine. I'm on the ice longer than I need to be. I tie and retie a skate. I go to the bench and come back. I tell Grayson a joke I don't remember in the middle of telling it. Grayson laughs anyway because Grayson's a good teammate.
The team heads in.
I wait.
Theo waits.
Paul is the last off. He passes Theo at center and doesn't look at him. I'm pretending to stretch at the far boards. Paul doesn't look at me either. Paul goes through the gate. The Zamboni guy is leaning on his machine on the far side of the glass waiting to come out and resurface.
Theo skates toward the gate.
I skate behind him.
Nobody is watching.
“Shower,” I say, low, as I pass. “Last stall, far wall. Give it fifteen minutes.”
“Yes.”
The locker room is a slow clear-out.
Jax lingers because Jax is always last. Magnus lingers because Magnus can't leave a room until he's said whatever he's just thought of.
Grayson is showering fast and loud in a stall in the middle of the row.
Phoenix is at his stall, stick in hand, stripping tape from it with a knife.
He doesn't look at me. He knows what I'm doing. He's decided he isn't my mother.
I take my time.
I pull pads off one at a time. I drink from my water bottle. I sit on the bench in my base layer and pretend to check my phone. Theo is at his stall across the room doing the same thing. He doesn't meet my eye. He doesn't need to.
Jax leaves.
Magnus leaves. Magnus says good work, boys to the room in general and nobody answers him, and he leaves anyway.
Grayson finishes his shower. Grayson dresses and leaves.
Phoenix folds the stick tape into a ball, drops it in the bin, puts his jacket on. He walks past me without speaking. At the door he stops. He doesn't turn.
“Creed.”
“Cap.”
A pause while his hand rests on the doorframe.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
That's the whole of the warning. He goes.
The door closes.
The room is us.
Theo is at his stall in a towel. His towel is tucked at the hip. His hair is wet at the temples from sweat. He's shaking at the hands and not shaking at the mouth. His eyes come up to me for the first time since he walked in this morning. They hold.
“Stall,” I say. “Far wall. Go.”
He goes.
I give it a minute.
Then I go.
The last shower stall is tiled floor to ceiling in white and has a half-wall instead of a curtain, and the water comes on hot. The rink has good water pressure. The steam starts fast.
He's naked under the water when I come in.
His back is to me. His shoulder blades are the same shoulder blades I had against a wall.
The water is running down the line of his spine, over his lower back, over the place the towel was hiding.
He's pale. He has a swimmer's tan line that says his father let him out of the house sometimes last summer in shorts.
I close the half-wall behind me.