12. Cameron
Chapter Twelve
CAMERON
The puzzle was nothing like the one I’d had as a teen, which made it infinitely better.
I was enthralled with putting it together.
Riley and I spent countless silent hours working on it for the next several weeks.
The festivities thundered around us and the few days of privacy we had, we spent wisely.
Well, maybe not wisely, per se, but we definitely didn’t waste any.
It was only when the house was full of hockey players who had been treated to a few too many homemade meals and needed extra training and conditioning that Riley and I retreated to the privacy of my room for puzzle assembly.
The luckiest thing of all was the lack of interest on Caden’s part.
He never asked, as far as I knew, where Riley was in those hours between ten in the evening and two in the morning.
And we never made a sound. Riley was well familiar with the feel of my pillow between his teeth.
So, time was passing. And though everyone said this winter was dragging, to me it was all just snippets in a fever dream.
Flashes of joy and lust, followed by deep, immovable loneliness.
It’s you, I thought once while we were working on the corner of the puzzle that featured the Millennium Falcon.
I glanced at Riley who was so lost in his work that he wasn’t even aware of my gaze.
You’re the piece I was missing. The loneliness that had haunted me for three years in California had come out of nowhere.
It had crawled into my bed and into my heart within weeks of arriving there.
I’d thought, foolishly, that it was just a reaction to a big change.
I had never traveled far and for so long before.
I had never been that alone. But, as I met people and formed so-called friendships, my sense of isolation had only deepened.
It had run so deep that when Coach Murray reached out with an offer, I accepted it without thinking. To return to my home state and be near something familiar was all that kept me from going crazy in the final few months.
And I had known, all that time, that returning to visit my parents was not something I would do any time soon. Worse still, I had known that facing Riley after leaving for three years would be painful.
What had never crossed my mind was this. The longing for home was satisfied when we sprawled out on my floor like those school boys we had once been. When we found the missing pieces and finished each other’s threads, revealing more of Han or Leia.
When Riley and I had first gotten together, Fallen Order had been the newest game on the market and every gamer geek, myself included, had gone crazy for it.
The friendship that had, for years, existed between Riley and me only deepened and reformed when we began playing the game together.
Then, when we stopped playing as much with his console and discovered there were some interesting activities we could be doing instead, it had been akin to forging two souls together in the deepest core of our Sun.
It confused me to my core how I ever thought that leaving that behind was a bargain. Especially now, when I found myself looking at Riley and leaning in to kiss him.
Day after day, week after week, Riley captained the Titans and Coach Murray grew bigger with pride. “My best boys,” he started calling the entire team.
Winter gave way to spring at the very end of February when oddly warm winds swept most of the snow away.
The team toured the state and won all the crucial battles against everyone who was foolish enough to think they stood a chance against us.
The Breakers occasionally played against us in a friendly match and we won as many as we lost to them.
But nothing could hinder our joint determination to win the state cup and get the championship Riley deserved.
To watch him come into his own was like growing up all over again. Riley Brooks, the true captain, and the natural-born leader. But then, at night, he would knock meekly and enter my den. He would shrug away all the responsibility of his daily life and I would take over.
“You are mine,” I told him one night. “Don’t you ever forget that.” After that, he left with an odd air of sadness. I marked it and filed it away to ask him about it later. But, the truth was, I didn’t need to ask much.
We had been doing this crazy, risky thing for a long time now, and we had never spoken about its meaning. What would we do in a few months, when the clock neared midnight, and the ball had to end?
I knew I deserved an NHL contract. I had been born with a stick in my hands and a puck in the center of my vision.
Chasing it was all I knew how to do. I was good at it, and even better when I played shoulder to shoulder with Riley.
I could follow well when I believed in the leader and I knew, deep in my heart, that spending my life on the ice was not something to negotiate.
And as scouts swarmed the benches in the coming weeks, and as Coach Murray kept motivating us with the tales of the NHL searching for young talent in generations before ours, it grew larger.
This knowledge that Riley and I were skating together now because the race track was heading in the same direction.
But we wouldn’t do so forever. To expect that would be to expect an easy way of capturing lightning in a bottle.
Odds were stacked against us as more and more games took place. The better we played, the more likely the outcome was. We’d get drafted, each to his own, and life would take over once again.
Perhaps, someday, we might face off on opposing sides of the ice. And even that would be lucky. At least I’d get to see him.
The reality truly crashed one Monday evening in early March.
We had just showered after drills because the Breakers had discovered a small weakness in our defense maneuvers which the wingers could assist but never before had.
Drills were productive and even my blazing ass managed to play along and assume a brief defensive position to subvert the enemy's expectations.
Riley glanced at me guilelessly, not hinting at anything at all, but it was enough to increase my temperature and make me thirst after him. He’d pulled his hoodie over his bare torso and pretended to ignore me before he filed out with most of the team. He would come tonight, I knew it.
To my surprise, Coach Murray walked into our locker room and called for me. “I need to talk to you privately,” he said.
Beckett made a mock horrified expression signaling I was in trouble.
Sawyer was pouting in his corner, probably hating his life because he was still struggling with physics despite getting tutored according to the last report we had from him.
Caden didn’t pry, so if he assumed anything, he didn’t engage.
Avery was on his way out and received an approving tap from Coach Murray for today’s drills.
He wasn’t an active player that often, but he was a good backup and today was one of the moments he got to shine.
“I’ll be right there, Coach,” I said and finished dressing, then followed Coach Murray to his office down the long hall. In there was a man I had seen in passing at a few of our games.
I slowed down abruptly as I entered. The man wore an iron-pressed shirt and elegant pants together with a larger-than-life smile on his face. “Ah, you must be Cameron Martinez.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” I said suspiciously. “What’s all this about?”
Coach Murray gestured for me to sit. I walked up to the chair in front of Coach’s desk and waited a moment, then sat when Coach and the man sat down, too. “I’m sorry if this caught you by surprise. We didn’t mean to gang up on you. My name is Jason Manning.”
The realization clicked in the back of my mind half a second before Mr. Manning finished introducing himself.
Of course. I knew his face. I knew his name.
He was among the top ten agents in the country.
Jason Manning was almost legendary among aspiring hockey players and I really should have recognized him right away.
I wanted to slap my forehead.
“You know me,” Mr. Manning said with a pleased smile.
His salt and pepper hair was slowly receding from his forehead and his eyebrows were bushy, but kindly.
There was something deeply knowing in his green eyes, which combined well with the stark lines on his face that gave him a somewhat hardened look.
I couldn’t exactly pinpoint his age, but he was definitely still short of fifty, and in the years of work, he had acquired a high status among the NHL teams and aspiring players alike. “That’s good to see.”
“I…I do, I know you. I don’t know why it took me so long,” I blurted, trying to force my brain to work through all the reasons Jason Manning would be meeting with me. There was only one reason I could think of, but it was too surreal to believe in it.
“It’s the beard,” Mr. Manning said.
That was when my brain made the other connection. I had never seen him without his short, elegant beard until now. We shared a brief laugh and Coach Murray cleared his throat. “Martinez, Jason has been keeping an eye on your progress.”
“Erm…” I lifted my eyebrows. “That’s good. Right?”
Another short laugh passed between us and Mr. Manning leaned a little closer.
“It’s too soon to speak of things like interest among coaches, you see.
Whatever little whispers are flying around are too faint and distilled to give any credence.
However, I was surprised to discover that you haven’t signed on with an agent already. ”
I held my breath for a moment, then decided admitting the truth was my safest bet. “I’ve spent three years playing at SBU in California. We didn’t exactly make waves.”
Coach Murray snorted. “You can say that again. I happened to watch a game by chance, then stayed for another by design. That team didn’t deserve your talent, Martinez.”