13. Theo
THEO
Shanley's is three blocks from the arena and hockey players don't go there after a win. That's why we're here.
Maddox walks ahead of me on the sidewalk with his hood up and his bag over his shoulder and I walk two steps behind him, while my body is still on the bench next to him, still in the storage closet, still in his hand.
My hair is wet from the rushed shower. My mouth tastes like him and like the mint of a travel toothbrush I keep in my kit for media days.
The cold is biting into my neck where the hair is wet.
He opens the door of the bar without looking back to see if I'm still behind him. He knows I am.
Inside it's dim and close and the air smells of beer and frying oil.
A TV over the bar's playing the last two minutes of our game.
Our score. Our logo. The chyron going WOLVES 4 BLACKFORD 2 · FINAL.
Nobody's watching it. Four old men at the counter.
A woman with a paperback at the far end.
A bartender who looks up and goes back to drying a glass.
Maddox walks to a booth in the back, the one where the cracked vinyl is patched with duct tape and the overhead bulb has been replaced with something dimmer than the rest. He sits with his back to the wall. He tips his chin at the seat across from him.
I sit.
He doesn't say anything right away. He just looks at me. Across the table, in the half-dark, his eyes are almost black.
“You okay,” he says.
Not a question. A check.
I think about the answer before I give it.
I'm sitting across from the man who put his hand on my cock on a bench in front of five thousand people an hour ago.
Who made me come in my gear. Who used my helmet as a handle and came in my mouth in a storage closet while my father was six rooms away.
My body's still thrumming with it. My skin's still hot from the shower. My jaw still aches.
“Yeah,” I say. And I mean it. “I'm okay.”
He nods once.
“What do you drink?”
“I don't know.” I don't. Paul doesn't let me. “Beer?”
“Beer.”
He gets up and goes to the bar and I watch him go.
He is still in his team sweatshirt over jeans.
His hair is wet under the hood. He has a scrape on the back of his neck from the fight.
The bartender pulls two pints without being asked a second thing and Maddox pays cash and brings them back and sets one down in front of me.
“Drink.”
I drink. It is cold and bitter and I don't hate it.
He watches me over his own glass.
“Your father is going to notice you're gone,” he says.
“He won't.”
He tips his glass at me. Try again.
“He will.”
I set my beer down. Turn the glass a quarter-turn on the wet ring. “He has press. Then a debrief with the assistants. Then he writes his notes. He doesn't look up from his notes until the notes are done.”
Maddox runs a knuckle along the rim of his pint.
“And when they're done?”
“Then he goes home and watches the tape a second time.”
Maddox is watching my mouth while I list it. He nods, slow.
“And then.”
“Then he sleeps.”
Maddox takes a pull of his beer. Sets the glass down. Runs his tongue along his lower lip. The scrape on his neck moves when he swallows.
“So I've got a few hours.”
I don't know what to do with my hands. I put them around the pint glass. I look at the scratched surface of the table. There is a heart scratched into it with someone's keys and the initials are rubbed out. I can't meet his eyes.
“Theo.”
I look up.
“What?” he says. “You got shy?”
“No.”
“Then look at me when I'm talking to you.”
I look at him.
He leans forward. His forearms on the table. His forearms are huge. I've seen them a thousand times now and they still stop me.
“Let's talk about some things,” he says.
What we talk about, in no order, over the next hour and two more beers each:
Where he grew up. A town in northern Michigan I have never been to.
A mother who left. A father who drank. A neighbor who put him on skates at four because the neighbor couldn't stand the noise of a kid in a thin-walled duplex.
An older brother in prison for something he won't say out loud.
The fact that he hasn't been home in six years and doesn't plan to go back.
Where I grew up. Everywhere. Wherever Paul was coaching.
The longest we ever lived in one place was a year and a half in Sault Ste.
Marie when I was nine and I still dream about that house sometimes.
The fact that I don't have a friend I've kept since I was twelve because you can't keep friends when you leave every ten months.
The fact that I used to think that was normal.
Hockey. He thinks Paul's system's too rigid and will break the team by Christmas.
I think Paul's system's rigid because Paul's system has always been how Paul keeps a team alive.
He laughs at me a little when I say that.
Not cruel. He drinks his beer and says fair, and I feel something in my chest do a small thing it's never done before.
I've never been taken seriously by a grown man about hockey.
Paul doesn't take me seriously. Paul tells me what I've done wrong.
Sex.
We get to sex because he decides we're getting to sex. He sets his glass down and he looks at me across the table and he says, “Here's the part where I tell you what I want.”
My stomach drops. Not in a bad way. Like the first pull of a rollercoaster.
“Okay.”
“I want to fuck you.”
I know this. I've known this since the first practice.
He's said it to me fifteen different ways in fifteen different hallways and a storage closet and a bench.
But he's never said it straight, no theater, no whispering under a stadium roar.
He's never said it sitting across a table in a booth with his hands flat and his eyes level.
I swallow.
“Okay.”
“I don't mean my hand. I don't mean your mouth. Those are warm-up. I mean I want to be inside you. Tonight.”
My cock is already hard. It was hard three minutes into the walk from the arena. The pint glass is sweating in my palm.
“I've never,” I say.
“I know.”
My thumb goes to the rim of my glass. Runs it. “I don't know how to...”
He leans back against the vinyl. Waits.
“I do.”
I look at the scratched table. At the rubbed-out initials. “I'm...”
I don't know how to say it. I'm scared. I'm so turned on I can't sit still.
I've been thinking about this, literally about this, since the second practice, and every time I've thought about it I've also thought, I'll never actually get to do it because I had no idea he'd ever actually do it.
I thought it was a joke, I thought I was a joke, and now he's saying it to me at a table in a bar and the only thing I can do is nod.
“Nervous,” he says.
“Yes.”
The corner of his mouth twitches up. Not quite a smile.
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Nervous means you're paying attention.” He takes a pull of beer. “Scared?”
I think about it. I could say yes. Scared of hurting. Scared of doing it wrong. Scared of wanting it as much as I want it. But the thing I'm scared of isn't him.
“No,” I say.
Something moves across his face. I don't know what it is. He looks at his beer a second. Then back at me.
“Good answer.”
He slides a hand across the table. Not to take my hand. He puts his fingers on the back of my wrist where the skin is thin. He doesn't grip. Just puts his fingers there. His fingers are warm.
“Come home with me.”
“Yeah.”
His thumb stays where it is on my wrist.
“Right now.”
“Yeah.”
He drops a twenty on the table and he stands and he's pulling me out of the booth before I've got my coat on straight.
He lives in a building the team owns. I know this because one of the equipment guys mentioned it in a van ride, off-hand, yeah that's a Wolves place, and I filed it under “things Paul would hate.” Third floor.
Corner unit. The elevator is slow and stale.
He doesn't touch me in the elevator. He stands against the opposite wall with his arms crossed and he watches my throat work when I swallow.
The hallway is carpeted in that low gray industrial stuff. His door is 304. He gets the key out. The key shakes a little in his hand. I see it. He sees me see it. He shoots me a look that says don't you dare.
Inside it's an open-plan space with concrete walls and a low gray couch and almost no furniture and one lamp on in the corner.
There's a balcony behind a sliding door.
The city is a blur of lights beyond the glass.
The place smells like him. Like his soap, like the gym bag he keeps by the door, like the cold coffee in a mug on the kitchen island.
He locks the door behind me.
He drops his bag.
He turns.
And the look on his face is the same look he had on the bench. The same look he had in the storage closet. Only now there is no one in the building but us and no whistle coming and no game clock running down and nothing to stop him.
“Come here,” he says.
I go.
He kisses me at the kitchen island. He cups my jaw in one big hand and kisses me, and it's slower than anything he's done to me yet.
He isn't rushing. He's tasting. He runs his tongue along my lower lip and waits for me to open, and he goes in slow and deep when I do, and when he pulls back my mouth follows him.
I make a sound I didn't give permission for.
“Easy,” he says. “We've got time.”
We don't have all night. We have some hours. But in his mouth, we've got time sounds like a promise and I believe him.
He walks me backward without taking his mouth off mine.
My calves hit the couch. He turns me and sits me down and kneels between my knees.
He pulls my hoodie up over my head and tosses it before running his hands up my sides like he's memorizing the ribs.
His thumbs find my nipples and I jolt. He presses the heel of his hand to the front of my jeans.
“Already hard.”
“Yeah.”
He presses the heel harder. Slow. Watching my face.