Chapter 8
JAKE
One positive aspect of my mixed-up psyche was that, after I dropped, I usually bounced back hard and fast. It felt like being on a trampoline, with deep lows followed by exuberant highs.
It was almost like what I understood bipolar disorder to be like, except my depression wasn’t considered clinical and I tended to stay level for long periods of time before careening in one direction or the other.
Right now, though, I was on an upswing and enjoying every moment of it.
“Take this seriously, dude,” Carson said with a pretend-frown on his face as he jabbed at mine. “You’re not supposed to smile in the middle of a fight.”
“Why don’t you knock it off my face then?” I dodged his flurry of punches and grinned harder. “Or can you not reach?”
“Motherfucker—” He surprised me by turning into a spinning kick that was completely atypical for him and would have taken my head off if I’d been six inches closer… and six inches shorter.
“So close,” I said. “Maybe if you throw a jump in next time.” I knew as soon as I said it that he would try it—Carson had good judgement for the most part, but he could never resist a dare.
Sure enough, he came off a combo and spun into a jumping shin kick that could have been really bad for me if I wasn’t in the middle of covering and hip-checking him hard enough to knock him on his ass.
Carson hit the mat with a loud slam, and for a second I wondered if I’d gone too far. Then he started to laugh and looked over at me with a huge grin. “Dude! That’s more like it!”
I breathed a sigh of relief as I extended my hand to help him up. “More like what?”
“More like the way it should be. I’m not fragile,” Carson insisted. “Just because I’m not a pro anymore doesn’t mean you have to treat me like I’m made of glass.”
“I don’t!”
Carson gave me a look, and… fine, I deserved that. “I’m trying to get better,” I said.
“I know, and you are, but this is the first time since you came here that you’ve really gone for the soft spots.” He clapped me on the arm. “You needed that break, huh?”
“I did.” I’d ended up taking a full four days off from the gym, and that coupled with two more sessions with my therapist and a lot of sleep had been good for me.
“I feel bad about canceling on Ethan, though.” Apart from his reply to my last text, he hadn’t been in touch all week.
Before this, we’d gotten into the habit of daily texts—not many, mostly memes or clips from fights, hockey and otherwise, but it had been nice.
And then I’d gone and thrown a wrench in the works, and I hadn’t fixed it yet. I’d try today, though. Ethan would be here for his lesson in ten minutes or so. “Help me clean the mat.”
“It’s your turn.”
“It’s your gross bodily secretions messing it up, you didn’t even make me break a sweat.”
“I hate you.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, I know. Now grab the spray bottle.”
By the time Ethan walked in through the door, the mats were almost dry and Carson was back in his day clothes.
“Hey, man.” He met Ethan at the door on his way out and they did the manly “pat-slap” hug that I was a little too tall to easily pull off with another person.
“This guy is being an asshole today, so go hard on him, okay?”
“Vile calumny,” I said. “Utter mendacity. Cruel—”
“Put your ten cent words away, nobody cares that you read dictionaries for fun.” Carson waved and walked out, and then…
Then Ethan and I were alone, and for some reason the awkwardness factor seemed to jump up a hundred percent. He wouldn’t quite meet my eyes and shuffled his feet on the carpet, like he wasn’t sure whether he should stay or go.
Weird. And a little hurtful. I didn’t realize how much I valued the easy friendship I’d thought I had with Ethan before it became—well, this.
“I’m sorry again for canceling last time,” I said, feeling out the strangeness between us. “It had nothing to do with you—I was just having a bad couple of days.”
“That’s—you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Ethan said. More like mumbled; I could barely hear him.
I frowned. “I think I do. It’s clear it’s bugging you, but I swear I wasn’t blowing you off. I have… ” Did I want to tell him this? I think I did. “I have some mental health challenges that rear up every now and then, and that was one of those times.”
“Oh, shit.” Now he met my eyes, all his hesitation replaced with concern. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I am,” I assured him. “It’s something I’ve got strategies in place to help me with. I’ve actually been a lot better since I moved here; this was the first time I really struggled, and it used to happen almost weekly. So… ” I gave myself a thumbs up. “Yay for me.”
“Seriously, yay for you, Jake.”
The earnest way he said it was almost enough to make me blush.
There was something about Ethan, something disarming about the way he committed to what he was feeling.
He wasn’t a good liar; I’d been around him enough by now to know that.
When he thought something, when he felt it, he felt it all the way through, honestly.
Which was how I knew he was still holding something back from me right now. At least we’d cracked through the awkwardness, though. Maybe I’d find out more later. “Get your shoes off, we’re going to try some hockey-style defense today.”
He brightened up as he slipped his shoes and socks off. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of,” I amended. “Obviously we’re not on skates, but I want to talk about slipping today. Foot bath,” I added, and he backtracked and stepped in the bucket of soapy Dawn water and dried his feet on the towel next to it before stepping on the math. “No ringworm for us. Okay, so… ”
Hockey fights were almost always pure aggression, from what I’d seen so far.
They were two-man (or sometimes more) brawls, and the bigger the punch, the better.
That said, the brawlers—or enforcers, I guess, in hockey terms—who did the best also managed the environment the best. They were the ones who found a spot to latch onto on their opponent and didn’t let go, the ones who managed to back them into the wall to keep them from slipping away while they wailed on them.
If you could move your feet or slip your head, you were harder to hit.
Ethan wasn’t built to brawl with the best of them, but he could definitely make himself hard to hit. We’d already talked about framing, but I wanted to revisit it with footwork and more active defense today.
“First things first.” I reached out and wound my hand into the collar of his T-shirt. “I hope you don’t care that this is going to get stretched all to hell.”
“Um. No.” Ethan was steadily getting redder, though. Eh, he would tell me when he told me.
“Good.” I dropped the fabric. “Grab me like that.”
“Um… ” He stared at my shoulder like it was going to bite him, but eventually got a decent grip. “What now?”
“Now—” I reached down, around, and over, clasping his arm tight against my side so that he was craning backward a bit. “We make things uncomfortable for you.”
Ethan frowned. “I can still punch with this hand, though.” He waggled the fingers of his free hand at me.”
“Okay, do it.” The second he raised his hand, I twisted away. With my grip on his arm giving me leverage over his torso, Ethan couldn’t give me more than a little tap with his fist. He was grinning after a few more attempts.
“Let me try that.”
We worked through basic escapes and grabs, and then I showed him the very first little baby steps when it came to slipping punches.
That wasn’t the sort of thing a person could learn in a single day, and it was better for him not to start having delusions of golden-glove grandeur out there in the ring, but there were some simple ways he could reposition his head that would give him a better chance, especially since hockey players weren’t allowed to knee each other in the face.
Close to the end, I put Ethan on defense and myself on offense, then pushed harder than I had before with him.
I swung him around, shook him, gave him some open-handed smacks that were more sound than fury, and he worked hard to keep me off and get his own where he could.
I actually had to stop and block one very decent shot to the face, and by the time I had him pressed up against the wall we were both breathing hard.
“It’s bad to be pinned,” I pointed out between heavy breaths as I pinned my forearm across his chest. “Figure a way out, slide to the side, you need to do something.”
“Uh, I don’t think I can—”
“You have to do something.”
“I found your profile on Tinder!” Ethan suddenly shouted.
I… had no idea what to say to that. “Um… ”
“I swear to God, I didn’t mean to invade your privacy,” he went on, the words coming so fast that it was hard to make them all out.
“I feel so fucking dumb about this but I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw your profile, and I wasn’t going to say anything about it to you because I didn’t want to make things awkward, but wow, I did anyway. ”
He had, but I found myself more relieved than anything. I let go of him and stepped back so he could regain his composure… and maybe so I could get mine back too. “It’s okay,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. “I put my name and photo out there, so I get what I get.”
“Yeah, but it still felt weird,” Ethan said a little miserably. “Especially since… ” He ran a hand through his hair, then took a deep breath. “Look, you know I’m gay, right?”
“Carson might have mentioned it once or twice.” Or a dozen times.
“And I’m not saying this to make you uncomfortable, I swear, but you are really my type.”
I had to laugh. “Guys who don’t realize they’re bi until they’re in their twenties are your type?”
“Please, you must get a ton of interest on that site,” Ethan replied.
Well… he wasn’t wrong. “That’s actually why I stopped using it,” I admitted.
“I got so many people asking me about hooking up that it was kind of intimidating, especially since some of them were clearly only in it so they could ‘be my first.’” I added the air quotes.
“Like having sex with a woman doesn’t count. ”
“Like virginity isn’t a weird, fucked-up social construct anyway,” Ethan added.
I pointed at him. “Exactly. Yes.”
He chuckled, then said, “So anyway, yeah. I found your profile and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I promise it doesn’t have to get in the way of our lessons.
I really appreciate getting the chance to learn from you,” he said, and shit, there was that earnestness that I both admired and was intimidated by.
“But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also want to take you on a date. ”
A… date? “You’re interested in dating?”
He frowned. “Yeah. That’s why I was on a dating app.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an offer for an actual date on that app,” I pointed out. “It’s been all hookups or one-night-stands.”
“Well yeah, a lot of people suck.” He smirked. “Especially guys. But I’m sure there are lots of people who would like to go on an actual date with you out there.”
Huh, maybe he was right. Maybe I should give it another try. I wasn’t sure what I was ready for—it had been over a year since the last time I’d gone out on a date—but I didn’t want to be a shut-in forever, either.
And Ethan was interested in me. It wasn’t just Carson putting that out there; he’d confirmed it.
I didn’t know if I wanted to date Ethan. I liked him, and he was damn cute, but I didn’t know him all that well outside of our classes. I tended to need to know someone for a while before taking that next step. Why I’d ever thought a dating app was a good idea…
“I’m not really a hookup kind of guy, and I don’t know if I want to date right now,” I said honestly, and Ethan’s face fell. “But I would like to go to a hockey game sometime without having to be a third wheel for Carson and Marek, if you’re interested.”
“Only if you want to sit with someone who won’t shut up about the plays during the game,” he said, and…
“Sounds perfect.”