Chapter 17 Andrei
SEVENTEEN
Andrei
Like walking through a dream, the days that followed were a slideshow of images, hazy with warmth, dimly lit, blurry, filled with lens glares and that tender, natural light. It was a collage of moments that hardly made sense, both individually and as a complete composition.
From the moment we embraced in bed, laughing at a joke, our friendship healed entirely.
There was no more artificial distance between us.
There was no silence that needed to be shattered.
But it was also as if the universe itself had moved an inch out of place, shifted a little to the left, shook up just enough that someone perceptive would notice, but not so much that we were all walking upside down.
And it was the entire universe, I could have sworn.
It wasn’t just in our room that things were ever so slightly different.
The same filter I looked at him through applied to all other things.
Gym sessions required a little less motivation.
Hockey drills were a little more gratifying.
Playing a game in front of a large crowd against the Eagles was a little easier.
Stepping into the view of the lenses from NextPlay Media was a little more fun.
Nothing was truly different in all these places. Nobody knew the unholy things Griffin did to me in the dark. Nobody knew that my last trip to the library involved being pinned against the bookshelf and kissed so slowly and thoroughly that I nearly knocked over the shelf.
Griffin and I played all the same, though Coach Neilsen said we were getting better at synchronizing our moves.
Perhaps we were. Perhaps that hair’s width of difference would get us to score big next time we faced off against the Steel Saints from Chicago.
That game was coming up, and it was in their home city, so the sense that everyone around me was on edge was becoming more and more present.
When I hurried from the last lecture of the day to the rink for our evening drills, Griffin was already there, and we were the first ones in the locker room.
Jen was with Coach Neilsen, giving a friendly wave as I passed Coach’s office.
I’d seen Phoenix hurrying in the other direction on my way here, so he was still minutes away.
When I spotted Griffin shirtless, facing away from the door of the locker room, my heart hammered faster against my rib cage.
I let out a wolf whistle that made him laugh. “Is that you, Sokolov?” he called back before turning his head and looking at me over his shoulder. His gaze swept the locker room. “We alone?”
“Looks like it,” I said, letting my duffel slide off my shoulder as I stepped closer to him.
“Get over here,” he said, tossing his shirt on the bench and extending his arm to me.
I came closer, sliding into his reach so he could catch me and pull me in. Our bodies pressed together, his torso bare and muscular, and he planted a heated kiss on my lips.
“That’s a hello I could get used to,” I said.
“Better do,” Griffin said. His hand cupped the back of my head, and he kissed me again. Under my hand resting on his chest, his heart beat a little faster.
I adored the way he gave himself to this thing of ours.
He gave all of himself to me whenever we were alone, even for a minute.
He kissed me freely, touched me where he wanted, never worried about being misunderstood.
It was the kind of confidence that was so typically Griffin that it amazed me that I even noticed it.
It was his entire personality, his entire being, to be honest and open and exactly what he said he was.
Griffin’s hand slid around my head and pinched my chin. “If we keep kissing even a little longer, I won’t fit into my gear.”
“Won’t need that stick out there,” I said.
He choked on laughter and punched my shoulder, then pulled me away by my jacket and kissed me again. “I’ve changed my mind. Let’s just keep making out,” he said after a moment’s pause.
I smiled hard against his lips, unable to contain this flickering happiness.
Being alone with Griffin reminded me of being seven years old and getting onto a colorful carousel while my mom held my cotton candy for me. We had just played whack-a-mole, and I’d won a stuffed toy, and Mom took me to the carousel next as an extra treat.
This was it. Kissing Griffin was that extra treat, the unexpected one when you’d already had something good. Our friendship had been the focus of my world, the center of my universe, the source of gravity that tethered me to life. And kissing him was the unexpected, undeserved bonus.
“You’re smiling,” Griffin murmured against my lips.
I pulled back and looked at him. “I’m happy.”
“You’re pretty when you’re happy,” he said. “I want to photograph it.”
And he would, later. He would photograph me so often and so much that we were running out of developing supplies more often than not.
We stepped away from one another when the footsteps and laughter reached us from down the hall. It made my heart sink a little. Locker rooms and hockey rinks had been our shared home for much longer than the dorm room at the team house. Kissing him here felt more appropriate.
I could feel the rush of heat in my face as I stepped away from Griffin. He quickly changed his pants and sat down, busy with the protective gear.
In the space of minutes, the locker room was full, and the regular friendly banter filled the air.
Damon was the latest victim of gay jokes, but only because he took it in stride.
After Mason had caught on to it, there was little Damon could do that wasn’t interpreted as a little gay.
Though not particularly clever or funny, the jokes took the heat off Griffin and me.
Phoenix was beginning to relax. Last night, he’d had another eye-roll moment when he received an email from Jen outlining the idea for his boyfriend, Jaxon, to come around to cheer him on. “Because of course they want my boyfriend and not Erick’s girlfriend.”
Griffin had slapped his shoulder and told him to snap out of it. If he wanted to change the narrative, he had to do something about it. “And if they put Jaxon on-screen, it’ll help his profile, too.”
Jaxon was part of a troupe of ice skaters who performed some incredibly challenging ballets on ice across the tristate area.
His latest was the starring role in The Nutcracker, which, aside from giving the guys an endless inspiration for jokes at Phoenix’s expense, was gaining mainstream prominence.
“Get them to interview you both,” Griffin said. “Or propose a deep dive into the team’s past players. I bet they’d love to get a chance to slide some big names into the show. Just think about it. Call up Jones and Partridge and have them do a sit-down with Jen’s crew.”
“You’re right,” Phoenix said reluctantly. “But the problem is that they never even thought of it. Instead, they put me front and center as this sole gay guy, like I’m there to meet a quota.”
“Use it,” Griffin said. “Nobody says it’s right, but it’s a chance to have a conversation.”
Later, when Griffin and I were alone and still glowing after forty minutes of privacy behind the “DO NOT ENTER” sign on my door, I mused that we were a little cowardly, too.
“I know,” Griffin said. “Leaving the guy out to dry when we’re banging each other’s brains out in here.”
“But it’s too soon,” I said firmly so that he couldn’t misunderstand my thoughts as a desire to be out and public about our…thing.
We played staged skirmishes today for two solid hours until both the players and the camera crews were exhausted.
Toby slipped on the ice ten feet away from the nearest player, doing an accidental spread eagle, his stick flying away, head banging against the ice just hard enough to stop the game.
Two cameras raced to him for reactions while Mason hurried across the ice to see if Toby was okay.
“Fuck,” Toby snapped, getting up and trying to get away from the cameras. “There goes my star power.”
Mason laughed it off and clapped his friend on the shoulder, then tossed him his stick.
And so our days came and went. We prepared for the big game in Chicago, and Griffin had already made a shortlist of places we could visit in our time off.
Not that it would be our first time. We’d always gone away on our own when we played in other cities.
Every time, Griffin would find some weird, niche museum or a really colorful bar.
It was just more difficult this time with the fact that we were being recognized on the streets.
It was always the younger girls who called our names, and almost always, the interactions were nice.
There were a few moments in the last five or six weeks when I wished I hadn’t taken part in the series.
Once, a girl my age relentlessly kept asking if I’d ever seen Griffin naked and wouldn’t believe me when I’d told her that I hadn’t.
At that time, it was even true. I would have blushed like crazy if she had asked me now.
Griffin and I joined the team for drinks after the game, and the last two camera crews came along to shoot some moments of camaraderie that seemed to resonate with the viewers. It was a common thing in the middle of each episode to have a bit of friendship and fun.
With all the weeks we’d spent in front of cameras and with those damned microphones taped to our bodies, it was almost starting to feel natural.
We had a round of drinks, ribbing Toby for flattening himself on the ice, then realizing some of the jokes had pushed him a little too close to the edge. When he got up to get another beer, a camera followed him.