Chapter 7 Steam
STEAM
I time my arrival so that I’m never the first one there, never the last, always exactly on schedule.
I tell myself it’s for discipline, but really it’s so I can slide through the door and clock Darius before he has time to notice me noticing him.
Today, he’s already at the racks, plates on the bar, headphones wedged over his ears like earmuffs against the world.
He wears the same old team-issued t-shirt every time, but this morning he’s cut the sleeves higher, so every motion of his arms is a flex, a threat, a statement I’m not supposed to read.
His shorts are the mesh kind that make his thighs look engineered for violence. He’s already got a sheen of sweat and a laser focus on the rep, as if every deadlift is an enemy and every set is the final round.
I dump my bag, yank on my knee sleeve, and start with a warmup lap.
My leg throbs, a good pain, the kind that tells me I’m not dead yet.
When I circle back, Darius has moved to squats, and the smell of rubber, chalk, and fresh sweat has already made itself at home in the air.
We don't say good morning. We never do.
Instead, he nods at the rack, an invitation or a challenge, and I slide under the bar like it’s the only thing holding up the building. I unrack, go deep, push up, set it down.
Darius stands behind me, hands just outside my hips, not touching but close, so close I can feel the heat of him through the polyester and the infinitesimal hairs on the backs of my arms stand up like they’ve been drafted for service.
“You’re shallow,” he says. “Two more inches.”
I bite back the obvious joke and do as told. The second set, he leans in, and his breath is right behind my ear, not warm or cold, just there.
His hand floats near the small of my back as I dip, and for one vertiginous second, I can’t tell if he’s actually making contact or if my nerves are inventing it out of spite.
By the third set, my legs are vibrating and my thoughts are a slurry of muscle fatigue and something else, something I don’t want to name.
“Rack it,” he says, voice low, and I do, even though my whole body wants to keep moving, keep burning.
We trade, and now I’m the one hovering behind, eyes fixed somewhere over his shoulder so I don’t have to stare directly at the line of sweat crawling down the side of his neck.
His form is perfect, textbook, and when he squats deep, his shirt pulls tight over the spread of his back.
I want to touch it, just to see if the muscle is as hard as it looks, but instead I keep my hands at the ready, performative, like an actor who’s researched the part too well.
Between sets, I towel off and pretend to stretch, but really I’m watching him through the bent glass of the wall mirror.
He’s never caught me before, not until today. He looks up, meets my eyes dead-on, and doesn’t look away. He just holds it, like a draw, like he’s waiting for me to blink first. My heart goes full-throttle.
After a second, he returns to his reps, but the space between us is now a live wire, humming at a frequency that makes my teeth itch.
We move to the bench press.
He loads the bar for me, doesn’t ask if the weight’s too much, just expects I’ll do it. When I slide onto the bench, he stands over my head, hands braced on the bar, ready to spot.
I wrap my fingers around the knurled steel and unhook, slow and steady.
The first three reps are fine. At four, my arms start to wobble. “Push,” Darius says, the word a command.
I lock out the fifth, but on the sixth my left arm fails and the bar dips. Instantly, he grabs it, guides it back into the hooks. His palm lands square in the middle of my chest, stabilizing me.
The pressure is firm, not rough, and it stays there for a beat too long. My skin remembers every second of it, like a bruise that knows it’s coming before it happens.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” he says, and the corners of his mouth flicker up, just for a flash.
He helps me sit up, hand on my shoulder blade, fingers splayed wide, and I swear he drags them along my spine as he lets go.
I keep a running ledger of these moments. Last Tuesday, his thumb grazed my collarbone when he said I was “getting soft up top.”
Thursday, his hand lingered on my shoulder a whole breath after he should have let go. Sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes I think he does it just to see if I’ll flinch. I never do.
Between sets, the banter is light, but charged. We talk hockey, food, sleep, the safe topics that teammates use to avoid emotional bleed.
He asks how my knee is holding up, and I make a joke about being held together with tape and spite.
He actually laughs, not the polite kind but the real thing, and it catches me off guard, because for a split second I think this is what it feels like to be seen, to matter.
I shut that down immediately. He has a girlfriend. A beautiful, brilliant, ex-D1-volleyball girlfriend. I’ve seen the couple photo on his phone when he was setting a timer.
They look incredible together, like a commercial for designer water. There’s no universe where he wants this, whatever this is.
There’s only the fucked-up little world inside my own head, and the empty spaces I keep trying to fill with gym routines and late-night memes.
The rest of the circuit is a blur.
We do deadlifts, then kettlebell swings, then some god-awful ab exercise he insists is “good for goalie core.” I’m so winded I can barely speak, but every time he says “one more,” I do it, because I can’t stand the idea of letting him down.
Every so often, he’ll nudge me in the ribs, or tap my shoulder, little reminders that we’re here, together, alive.
I pretend I don’t notice, but my body keeps a tally, every microtouch scored like a game I’m destined to lose.
After, we sit on the mats, stretching.
Darius props himself up with his elbows, head back, eyes closed, sweat darkening the collar of his shirt.
His chest rises and falls, slow and heavy. I risk a look, really look, and for a second I want nothing more than to crawl over and lay my head in his lap, just to see if I could fall asleep like that, safe for once, not haunted.
Instead, I clear my throat and say, “Weird question: you ever get lightheaded after squats?”
He opens his eyes, meets mine. “Yeah. All the time. It’s normal.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then, “You want to hit the steam room?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say, too fast.
We towel off, collect our shit, and walk to the locker room.
The corridor is lined with motivational posters, some featuring guys we actually know.
One of them, the former Steelhawks captain, is dead now. The poster is still up. Neither of us comments on it.
In the locker room, we each claim a bench and undress.
I try not to look, but it’s like telling a dog not to eat food dropped on the floor. I let myself glance, quick and surgical, memorize the curve of his back, the constellation of scars on his left hip.
He catches me, just for a second, but doesn’t say anything. His body is all function, no wasted ornament.
I want to see what it looks like when it isn’t braced for violence.
We wrap towels around our waists, pad down the hall to the steam room. Inside, the air is thick enough to drink, and the heat slams into my face like a palm.
We sit on opposite tiers, not touching, but the small space makes every breath shared, every movement amplified.
For the first five minutes, neither of us talks.
I close my eyes, try to let the steam strip away the ache in my muscles and the static in my brain. It almost works.
Darius is the first to break the silence. “You ever talk to anyone about it?”
It. The shooting. The dead teammates. The way the world went sideways and never righted itself.
“Therapist,” I say. “She’s nice. Good at pretending I’m the most interesting case she’s ever had.”
He snorts. “Mine just tells me to meditate.”
“Does it work?”
“No,” he says, and laughs. It’s soft, and it cracks open something in me.
We let the silence settle. After a while, he says, “You want to get food after this?”
“Yeah,” I say, even though my stomach is still a knot from the last set of Russian twists.
We leave the steam, shower, and get dressed in parallel, like two lines destined to never intersect.
He waits by the door for me, hands in pockets, casual, but I can tell from the way he rocks on his heels that he wants to say something.
Instead, he walks me to my bike, even though his car is parked the other way.
At the rack, I fumble with my lock, fingers too shaky from fatigue or something else.
Darius stands with his hands braced on the handlebars, looking at me with an intensity that makes my skin buzz.
“See you tomorrow?” he asks.
I want to say, See you tonight, or, Stay, or, Please don’t go back to a life that has no room for me. Instead, I just nod.
He reaches out, squeezes my arm, and walks away.
I watch his back until he turns the corner.
Then I climb on my bike, legs rubber, and pedal home in the gray dawn, cataloguing every second, every touch, every word, and trying to convince myself it’s just a workout, just a friend, just nothing.
Just nothing.
———
The showers at the Ballard gym are an abomination, a biohazard, a violation of every code that’s ever existed about hygiene or privacy.
Half the ceiling lights are out, so the room is dappled with shadows like a horror movie set.
The grout between the tiles is the color of licorice left in a gutter, and the steam is so thick it beads on your eyebrows and clings to your lungs.
There’s no such thing as a “private” stall, the walls stop at shoulder height, and the ancient showerheads blast water in every direction but down.
I take the farthest stall, my usual, crank the water so hot it raises goosebumps, and plant my hands against the tile, willing my brain to go blank.
Focus on the mechanics, shampoo, scrub, rinse, repeat. Don’t think about the workout. Don’t think about the next day.