2. First Shift
FIRST SHIFT
He forgot to do his devotions Thursday morning.
After waking up, Caleb had just lain there thinking about his first practice later that night, about Connor, about the cold of the parking lot after a good scrimmage.
He wondered whether he had the right gloves for it. Maya had helped him pick up some used equipment, most of it past its prime. He’d find out tonight, he guessed.
Mostly, though, the cabin by the lake stayed with him.
There were aspects of those memories he wasn’t sure how to handle, so he tried to focus on the ones he did.
His body remembered the ache in his shoulders from being hauled through broken ice.
The raw place at the side of his throat where his wet collar had rubbed before Connor cut it away from his skin.
The dull soreness in his thighs from shivering so hard he had woken in the night with the muscles still tight.
When he lifted his arm, he caught the faint smell of smoke in his hair, even though he had washed up twice.
The smell put him back in the cabin before he was ready: the stove ticking, the blankets heavy over him, Connor’s voice close to his ear, his breath on his neck.
Breathe slowly, he reminded himself.
Desire, fear, and shame: Caleb knew the old instructions for all three. Connor checking his hands at the door, the concern in his voice, the fact that he had stayed until Caleb’s breathing steadied: those belonged to no lesson he had been taught.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a while, elbows on his knees, listening to Maya move around in the kitchen in the bar downstairs.
Then he stood because sitting there was not helping, and because the smell of smoke was still in his hair, and because his skin had begun remembering those moments, the touches.
He realized he had not reached for his Bible only after the shower was running.
The guilt never came. It was usually fast, a reflex formed by conditioning.
It had been that way since he was small, the mechanism of those expectations so well-oiled he’d stopped hearing it as guilt and started hearing it as conscience, as the voice of God.
But that morning it didn’t come.
Instead, he stood beneath the shower and let the hot water run over his shoulders, down his chest and stomach, tracing the lines of muscle still tight from the cold.
Steam filled the small bathroom. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, letting the spray beat against his face and throat.
Water streamed through his hair and over his skin in steady sheets.
He let his hands move slowly, not quite washing.
He followed the water’s path across his chest, thumbs brushing over his nipples, then lower over the flat plane of his stomach.
The touch felt different now. Deliberate.
He traced the trail of hair below his navel, palm sliding down the front of one thigh, then the other.
His cock was thickening from the heat and attention and memories of the night before.
He let his hand brush against himself, fingers grazing the length of it, feeling it grow under his touch.
A low pulse of want moved through him, warm and unmistakable.
He waited for the old reflex, the quick pang of shame, the voice that told him this was dangerous, that lingering here was the first step toward ruin.
It stirred faintly, a distant echo, but it didn’t take hold.
He stood there and kept touching, palm flat against his stomach, then lower again, wrapping loosely around his cock, just to feel the weight and heat of it.
The sensation was sharp and good. He breathed through it, letting the water beat against his back.
Memory flickered unbidden: Connor behind him under the blanket, the scrape of stubble against his neck, a hand planted on his chest while the lake tried to take the air from him.
Caleb tightened his grip. He was fully hard now.
The old sequence should have followed: cold water, prayer, apology. He kept his hand where it was.
The water kept falling. Caleb looked down at his hand and the body he had spent years treating like evidence against himself. It had carried him out of the lake. It had not become dangerous because it wanted. He wrapped his hand around himself again.
He stroked with more purpose. Water ran over his knuckles and made his grip uneven; he adjusted and kept going. No prayer formed. He did not supply one.
His hips struck his fist once, then again. He bit down on his lower lip and came over his knuckles, water carrying it away before he had decided whether to look.
He stayed under the spray until the water cooled, then shut it off. When he stepped out, the mirror was fogged and his skin was pink from the heat. He wiped a clear patch with his palm and looked at himself. For once, he did not apologize.
Caleb dressed quickly, his hand lingering on his Bible as he walked past. Then he let it stay where it was, neither forgotten nor rejected, simply in its place for now. After a quick bowl of cereal, he headed for the door.
The Sin Bin Sports Bar had been a railway pub before it was Maya’s.
Actually, before it was Maya’s it had been three other things, but the railway was the “decor” that stuck to the walls.
There were framed timetables behind the bar, sun-bleached and warped at the corners, and a row of old signal lanterns on the high shelf that Maya had wired for electricity because she liked the amber light they threw at night.
The mirror behind the bottles had a crack running diagonally from the top left that everyone assumed was original and no one had ever confirmed.
The barstools were mismatched, replaced one at a time over decades, the floor worn smooth by boots, booze, and people who came here to stop.
Maya had added two things when she took it over: a mounted jersey from the ’73 Veil Lake Miners, the town’s once-famed men’s hockey team, long defunct but not forgotten, and a small printed card above the till that said, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone being a jackass.” She’d told Caleb she’d only had to invoke it twice, which he believed, because Maya herself was a more effective deterrent than any sign.
He came in at four, before the dinner crowd, and sat at his end of the bar.
Maya slid him a Coke without being asked.
She was twenty-five, though she moved like someone who had compressed a decade of experience into the last four years and carried it well, if not lightly.
She had their mother’s curly hair, the auburn-brown of it pulled back for efficiency more than style.
She had their father’s jaw, but the set of her shoulders was entirely her own, the authority of a woman who had built a life in a town that hadn’t owed her anything.
She was restocking the well, her back partly to him, when she asked, “Practice tonight?”
“Seven,” he said.
“You eat?”
“I’ll eat after.”
She turned and fixed him with an expression so like their mother’s that she would have been mortified to be told as much. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a plate of fries and pub-style chicken strips and set it in front of him without comment.
He ate while she worked, the two of them chatting now and then about nothing. They were learning that language again, past the silence of their years of separation but not quite ready for the necessary conversations that would have to happen sooner or later. For now, it was comfortable.
The delivery came at quarter past four. He heard the back door, heard Maya’s voice, and then another voice, lower, a little rough, with an ease to it that carried through the wall.
He didn’t think much of it until the door from the back swung open and the woman came through with a crate of bottles and set it on the far end of the bar.
She was maybe thirty, compact and solidly built.
Her hair was cropped close under a backwards cap, black and straight, and her arms below the rolled sleeves of her jacket were tattooed from wrist to elbow, dense ink that looked accumulated rather than planned.
She had a strong face, light-brown skin, and dark eyes that moved across the room like she already knew where everything was.
She looked around the Sin Bin with proprietary ease, like she’d been coming here long before any of them had shown up.
“Usual order,” she said to Maya. “Plus two cases of the lager, Hendricks said you called about it.”
“I did.” Maya was already checking the crate. “Riley, this is my brother Caleb. Caleb, Riley Foss. She does the Thursday liquor run from Thunder Bay and overcharges me for the privilege.”
“I charge a fair rate for superior service,” Riley said with a crooked grin, already heading back for the second crate. She glanced at Caleb on the way past with a look that was friendly and assessing in equal measure. “You just get here?”
“Two weeks ago,” Caleb said.
At the door, Riley added, “Give it another week. This town grows on you, like a fungus, but a good one.”
Maya snorted. With a cheeky wink, Riley disappeared into the back.
Maya’s attention lingered there for half a second before she caught Caleb noticing and returned to neutral, the way she did most things.
“How long have you known her?” Caleb asked.
“A few years,” Maya said. “Since I took over the bar.”
He nodded, ate a fry, and left it there. There was a version of this conversation that went somewhere else. For now, he let it go.
Riley came back through with the second crate and set it down. Maya signed the delivery receipt on a tablet, and they talked briefly about next week’s order. Riley chatted amiably, and Maya wore a smile Caleb rarely saw, open and unguarded.
“Nice to meet you,” Riley said to Caleb on the way out. “Enjoy the hockey. If you like hitting people, you’ll fit right in.”
“How do you know I like hockey?” Caleb asked.