12. Maddox
MADDOX
Two weeks into a pro hockey season your nose stops registering it.
Right now, mine is telling me every single thing about it.
The cold of the concrete, the rubber mats, the sour tang of the hallway where the Zamboni lives.
Theo is somewhere in this building putting on pads.
I'm going to be on the ice with him in forty minutes.
I feel fucking great.
I slept. I ate. I jerked off in the shower this morning with his voice in my head saying my dad is downstairs and came harder than I've come to my own hand in a decade.
The video is still on my phone. I watched it four times last night.
Woke up once at two in the morning and watched it again. Then I set an alarm so I would stop.
I walk into the locker room whistling.
Phoenix looks up from his stall.
“No.”
I spread my hands.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were going to.”
I sit down across from him. Drop my bag.
“Fine.”
I sit. I pull my tape. I lace.
Paul's in the office at the end of the hall.
I can see his silhouette through the frosted glass.
He likely came in twenty minutes ago and hasn't come out.
That's a pregame ritual of his. Film, silence, the same two slides he always pulls up, whatever mantra he whispers at himself before walking a group of grown men into a building.
I have no respect for any of it and tonight that is going to show.
Theo comes in on the far side of the room at 7:22.
He doesn't look at me. He moves like someone balancing a glass of water on his head.
I watch him through my lashes while I tape my shin.
His neck is flushed red the second he sees me and then it isn't, because he's practiced, because his father has been training the flush out of him since he was six.
But I caught it. One second of pink under the jaw.
I lace my other skate.
We don't speak in the tunnel.
First period, first shift, I can tell the other team came to play ugly.
Blackford. Bottom-of-the-division bullshit.
Their coach is a retired defenseman who believes in two-handed slashes and a lot of talking.
Their left winger, big guy, number 44, cross-checks Phoenix in the small of the back thirty seconds in and the ref doesn't call it.
Phoenix goes down, gets back up, doesn't look at the ref because Phoenix doesn't bitch.
I look at the ref. I smile at him. I want him to remember my teeth.
Second shift. Number 44 takes a run at our rookie d-man and nearly puts his head through the glass.
No call.
Third shift. I'm on.
I go find him.
I don't have to look hard. A guy built like that in a rink this size is impossible to lose.
He's parked at the top of the circle waiting for a pass and I come in from his blind side and take him clean off the puck with a shoulder and two inches of the top of my stick tucked up exactly where the ref can't see.
He goes into the boards. He comes up with blood in his mouth.
I skate past him, very slow, and I say the word that's going to be in his head for the rest of his career every time he thinks about playing a Frosthaven game.
He comes at me. Of course he does. I let him get a glove in my face before I drop mine.
The ref whistles so fast I almost laugh.
Four and four.
From the penalty box I watch Paul watch me. He doesn't move his head. He doesn't move anything. He already knows this game is gone. He already knows what I'm going to do next.
I do it.
Second period. Power play. Fourteen seconds left on a penalty I drew by running at 44 one more time. I'm supposed to set up at the blue line and feed Phoenix on the half-wall and let the system work.
I skate off the line.
I cut across the slot with the puck on my backhand, take the defender's stick out with my shin (you can do it if you're willing to go to the box for it), and I put the puck top-shelf over the goalie's blocker from an angle that was not supposed to exist.
Arena goes.
I don't celebrate. I skate back to the bench looking at Paul.
Paul doesn't look at me.
He doesn't have to.
“Creed.”
I skate in slow.
“Coach.”
“Sit.”
I swing a leg over the boards.
“Sitting.”
He puts me on the bench next to Theo.
I clock it the second the lines are called.
Theo's line is the defensive unit, the one Paul keeps off the power play, the one he rotates through the middle of each period.
They're coming off a shift right now. Theo is already sitting.
The seat next to him is empty because Marcus got called up to the first line two minutes ago and Paul hasn't backfilled.
Paul knows what he's doing.
Paul wants me inside Theo's elbow for the next twenty minutes of game time as punishment. He thinks it'll embarrass me. He thinks sitting a scoring veteran next to the green center whose line I just disrespected will shame me into remembering who the coach is.
He's a smart man and he is about to lose this one so badly.
I sit.
The bench is cold through my pants. Theo is in his gear. His helmet is in his lap. His hair is stuck to his forehead with sweat. He doesn't turn his head. He's looking at the ice like it's going to be on a test.
“Hi,” I say, low.
“Hi,” he says, lower.
“I was watching your video,” I say. “On the way over.”
His whole body jumps, not visibly, not if you're not touching him, but I feel it through the bench.
“I watched it four times last night.”
He doesn't answer. His jaw works once.
“Watched it once while I was eating.”
His eyes flick. Just the eyes, not the head.
“Mad.”
“Yeah.”
His glove comes up an inch on his knee like he means to stop me and thinks better of it.
“Don't.”
“Don't what?”
He swallows. He's watching the ice. His adam's apple moves once.
“Don't do this here.”
I lean back and fold my gloves on my lap like a man watching his team kill a penalty.
“I'm not doing anything.”
“You are.”
“I'm sitting next to a teammate on a bench.”
The play comes down our end. Phoenix takes a hit from 44, digs the puck out, chips it off the glass. The crowd hums. I lean back. I let the heat come off Theo and radiate up into my shoulder for about thirty seconds.
Then I do it again.
“That sound you made at the end,” I say, very soft. “I've been thinking about it all day.”
“Stop.”
The play shifts on a turnover, bench-wide groan, and I use the noise to move an inch closer.
“I can hear it right now.”
“Maddox.”
“I can hear exactly what you sound like when you come.”
He drops his chin toward his chest. He's breathing too fast for a guy who's been sitting for a minute.
I check the bench. Paul is six bodies down, standing, locked on the ice, clipboard against his thigh. His assistant is calling lines behind him. The trainer is further down reading something on his tablet. Two guys to our left are watching their own hands. Everyone else is watching the ice.
I reach behind Theo's back like I'm bracing on the bench.
I drop my glove.
“Put your helmet in your lap,” I tell him.
“What.”
“Do it.”
He does it. Slowly. Hands shaking around the earholes.
He sets it on his thigh, visor forward, like any guy getting ready for the next shift.
I reach around his back with my ungloved hand and find the top of his pants under the jersey.
“Wait.”
My hand is already moving.
“You want me to stop? Nah, you don’t.”
“I don't know.”
“Wrong answer.”
I get my hand inside.
Hockey pants are armor over a jock over a cup over compression shorts over skin.
You can't actually get to a man's cock through a pair of hockey pants during a game.
What you can do, if you know what you're doing, if you have the angle right and you have fifteen years of locker room architecture in your hands, is palm the outside of the cup and rub your thumb along the seam where the cup meets his thigh.
I do it.
He chokes on nothing.
I grind the heel of my hand into the base of his cup where the plastic rides up against him through compression shorts.
It's not pressure on his dick. It's pressure on the base of him, on the shaft above his balls, the part that's already responding to the fact that I told him I watched his video four times.
“Can you feel that?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I keep going. The crowd is a wall of sound around us.
Somebody on our bench cheers a save. Somebody else bangs a stick against the boards.
I don't rush. I'm talking about his video under my breath.
Where my hand was, what his face did at the end, what I said back at him in my head the first time I watched it.
His breath gets tighter and tighter and I can feel him harden against the inside of the cup.
“Do you think you're going to come in your gear?” I say.
“No.”
I grind my thumb up under the cup one notch harder.
“Yeah you are.”
“Mad, please.”
“Please what?”
His eyes go to the cameras above the away bench.
“Th-there's cameras—”
“Pointed at the ice.”
“My dad—”
I tilt my head toward the far boards without moving my hand.
“Is watching his center on the far boards. Not his bench.”
His mouth opens. He closes it. He's breathing through his nose like a man about to cross a finish line.
“You want to know what I'm going to do after this game?” I say.
“Yes.”
“I'm going to take you somewhere.”
His breath comes in tight.
“Where?”
“A bar.”
“Okay.”
I work the heel of my hand in a slow circle.
“Then I'm going to use that mouth of yours.”
He makes a sound that isn't a word and he shudders under my hand and I feel it through the pants, through the cup, through everything, the exact rhythm of him coming. His thighs lock. His whole body goes rigid for maybe four seconds. His hand on his helmet goes white at the knuckles.
I don't move my hand.
I keep it there while he comes down. I keep it there another full ten seconds past that. I want him to know I could do it again if I decided to.
When I pull back, it's slow. I re-glove.
Theo doesn't look at me.