Chapter 5
His truck was already in the lot when I arrived.
The locker room door was unlocked. I pushed through it and stopped.
Red was lying on the bench, one arm thrown over his face, a gear bag shoved under his head like a pillow.
His hair was dark with sweat. He was still in street clothes, jeans and a faded t-shirt that had ridden up to show a strip of pale stomach, and he was so still that for one horrible second I thought he was dead.
Then he made a sound, something between a groan and a snore. I let out a breath before rolling my eyes. Then I walked over and dropped my bag on the bench across from him. Hard.
He didn't move.
I unzipped it, pulled out my skates, and set them down with a loud thunk.
Nothing.
"Hey." My voice bounced off the tile. "Wake up."
The arm shifted. He groaned, and this time it sounded like he meant it. The arm came down. He squinted up at the lights, then at me. His eyes were bloodshot, the green of them clouded, and for a second he just stared at me like I was a math problem he couldn't solve.
"Shit," he said. He sat up too fast and grabbed his head with both hands. "What time is it?"
"Six minutes to five." I sat down on the opposite bench and started unlacing my shoes. "You smell like a dive bar."
He laughed, rough and wet. "That's generous. Dive bar's probably an upgrade."
I kept my eyes on my laces.
"I'm Red, by the way." He cleared his throat. "Don't think I got a chance to introduce myself yesterday."
"You didn't. I cut you off."
He just stood there, and I realized he was waiting for me to tell him my name.
I considered not telling him, but that felt petty, even for me.
"Joel," I said. "Joel Coffey."
The hungover haze burned off, and he sat up straighter, staring at me like I'd just told him I was the president. "Joel Coffey," he repeated. "Holy shit. You're the quad guy."
I hated that. The quad guy. Like that was all I was.
"My sister-in-law is obsessed with figure skating," he said. "You're like... you're famous."
"I'm not really."
"Dude, you're on cereal boxes."
"One cereal box. Once. And it was granola."
He laughed, and it was warmer than before. "What the hell are you doing in New Mexico?"
"I live here."
"Yeah, but why?"
Because no one knows me here. Because I can skate at five in the morning without someone recognizing my face. Because I got tired of being the quad guy and the gay guy and my father's son.
"I like the weather," I said.
He snorted. "Okay, man. Keep your secrets." He stood up, swayed once, and caught himself on the locker behind him. "I'm gonna go shower before I make you puke. Give me five minutes." He grabbed his gear bag and headed for the showers.
"You can’t tell anyone," I blurted. "About me, I mean. I train here because no one knows who I am. I'd like to keep it that way."
He studied me. "Sure. Our secret."
Then he was gone, and I sat there staring at the empty doorway like an idiot.
Our secret. He'd just handed me his silence like it cost him nothing. Like privacy was something people just gave each other without expecting anything back.
The shower ran for exactly three minutes. He came out with wet hair and fresh clothes, still looking like death, but at least death that had been recently rinsed. The curls were darker when wet, dripping onto the collar of his clean t-shirt.
"Ready?" he asked, like we'd planned this.
"Stay on your end."
"Yes, sir." He gave me a lazy salute that shouldn't have been charming.
It was, though. That was the problem.
I grabbed my bag and headed for the rink before my face could do something stupid.
The ice was fresh, Zamboni marks still visible under the lights. I stepped on first and pushed into a few warm-up laps. Behind me, the heavier sound of hockey skates cut across the ice.
I glanced back.
Even hungover and half-dead, there was something about the way he moved. His body knew what to do when his brain was barely online.
I looked away and focused on my edges.
We skated in silence for a few minutes. Him on his end, me on mine. Same as yesterday. The arrangement that had worked until I'd started watching him instead of my feet.
"So, what's the plan?" His voice carried across the ice. "You do your spinny jumps, I do my sad little rehab laps, we pretend we're strangers?"
"That was the plan, yes."
"Boring." He skated toward the center line and stopped, hands on his hips. "What if we made it interesting?"
"Interesting how?"
"Race me."
I arched an eyebrow. "You're joking."
"Ten laps. Full speed. Loser buys coffee."
"You can barely stand upright."
"And yet." He spread his arms, that crooked grin back on his face. "I'm still gonna beat you."
"Ten laps," I said.
His grin got wider. "Try to keep up, quad guy."
We lined up at center ice, shoulder to shoulder. He was shorter than me by a good six inches, which meant his center of gravity was lower. The bad hip would slow him on corners. The hangover would catch up by lap five.
I gave him three laps before he started flagging.
"On three," he said. "One. Two—"
He took off on two, the cheater, and I was half a second behind before my legs caught up.
He was fast. Even injured, even wrecked, he exploded off the line like he'd been shot out of a cannon, eating up the ice in short, powerful strides.
I let him have the first straightaway. Let him think he'd already won.
Then we hit the corner.
Figure skating was about edges. Understanding that the ice wasn’t flat, that every blade had two sides. Hockey players took corners wide, scrubbing speed to stay in control. I took the corner tight, leaned into my edge until my hip nearly touched the ice, and came out three feet ahead.
He swore behind me.
Good.
The second straightaway, he caught up. His breathing was hard and close, the heat of him right behind my shoulder. On the third lap, he pulled ahead again, but every corner was mine. By lap four, we were dead even, close enough to touch.
Lap five, I decided to show off. He was on my inside coming out of the turn, ready to blow past me on the straight.
Instead of pushing forward, I transitioned into backward crossovers, facing him as I skated.
His eyes went wide. I held the position for three beats, matching his speed while skating in reverse, and then spun forward and accelerated.
"What the fuck," he panted behind me.
"Keep up, Red."
By lap seven, my thighs were burning. He was still right there, refusing to drop back. Stubborn bastard.
Then, on lap eight, he did something I didn't expect.
He'd been taking corners wide the whole race, but this time he dropped his inside shoulder and carved the turn tight, so tight his knee nearly scraped the ice, and came out ahead of me.
The fury hit like a fist to the chest. This AHL nobody had just taken my move.
I dug deeper and caught him on the straight. We were shoulder to shoulder going into lap nine. His breathing was ragged, almost gasping. Mine wasn't much better.
He glanced over at me, face flushed, hair dark with sweat, lips parted around each harsh breath. He was grinning like this was the best thing that had happened to him all week.
And so was I.
Final lap. We hit the last straightaway neck and neck. He was digging for something extra. So was I. I'd been training for quads, for programs that demanded three and a half minutes of peak performance.
I pushed harder. He pushed even harder. The finish line was the center mark.
We crossed at the same time.
I coasted to a stop, hands on my knees, chest heaving. The race was supposed to put him in his place, make him small enough to ignore.
Instead, we'd spent ten laps breathing the same air. I knew how he moved now. The exact rhythm of his breathing when he pushed past his limits.
"Tie," he managed between gasps.
"I was ahead."
"Bullshit. I had you by a blade."
"You cheated at the start."
"That's just hockey." He straightened up, still breathing hard, grinning so wide it was obscene. "Rematch tomorrow?"
I should say no and cut this off before it became something I couldn't control.
"Same terms," I said. "Loser buys coffee."
"Deal."
He skated toward the bench, moving gingerly now that the adrenaline was fading. I followed him.
The cold seeped through my leggings when I sat down. Red dropped onto the bench beside me, closer than he needed to be, and tipped his head back against the boards.
"Fuck," he said to the ceiling. "I'm going to feel that tomorrow."
"You're going to feel it in an hour."
"Probably." He didn't sound upset about it. He sounded satisfied, like pain was just the price of something worth doing.
I grabbed my water bottle and drank. Didn't look at him. Didn't look at the strip of stomach where his shirt had ridden up, or the way his chest was still heaving, or the flush spreading down his neck.
"The hip," I said. "What happened?"
"Bad check. Last season." He stretched the leg out, wincing. "Guy twice my size decided I looked like a good target. I went into the boards wrong."
"And you're still playing."
"Still playing." His hand went to his hip, fingers pressing into the muscle through his shorts.
I watched his hands. I couldn't help it.
He caught me looking, and for a second neither of us moved. His eyes tracked from my face to my hands, which had gone white-knuckled on my water bottle.
"Can I ask you something?" he asked carefully. "My sister-in-law. She told me you're out. Publicly."
My jaw tightened. "Is that a problem?"
"No. No, I just—" He rubbed the back of his neck. "I think it's cool. What you did."
Cool. Like I'd done a skateboard trick. "It's not cool. It's exhausting." I let the edge into my voice. "Every interview, every profile. It's the first thing they want to talk about. Like it's more interesting than anything else I've ever done."
“That sucks. But… maybe they’d ask other questions if you were a little more…personable.”
“Personable?” I repeated.
He reached for his own water bottle and took a long drink. When he lowered it, that easy smile was back. "You've got that whole hedgehog thing going on," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"Prickly. On the outside." He was grinning again, like I amused him. "But you know… hedgehogs are kinda cute."
I went back out on the ice, skated two strides toward him, fast, and stopped hard enough that ice sprayed toward the bench. He didn't move.
"Do I look cute to you?"
Red let his gaze travel down my body. He took his time with it, lingering on my thighs, my chest, my mouth. By the time he dragged his eyes back up to mine, my pulse was pounding so hard I could hear it.
"Cute isn’t the word I would use," he said quietly.
I didn't know what to do with my hands. With my face. With any part of me.
I turned and skated back to the bench, grabbed my water bottle, and started unlacing my skates.
"You're done?" Red sounded surprised. "It's barely six."
"I got what I needed."
"You didn't run your program."
"I'll run it tomorrow." I shoved my skates into my bag. His attention was still on me. I could feel it like a hand on the back of my neck.
“See you later, then, Sparkles.”
I stared at him. "What did you just call me?"
"Sparkles." He was grinning again. "You know. The rhinestones. The—"
"I wear black. Exclusively black."
"Uh huh." He pushed off from the boards and skated toward the exit, still grinning over his shoulder. "See you tomorrow, Sparkles."
I should have said something cutting. Something that would put him in his place.
Instead, I just stood there, watching him go, with that stupid nickname ringing in my ears.
Nobody had ever given me a nickname that wasn't meant to hurt.
I stayed on the bench longer than I should have, listening to the silence, trying to figure out how everything had gone so wrong so fast.
Or maybe not wrong. Maybe that was the problem.