7. Home Ice
HOME ICE
He was waiting in the kitchen when Maya got home. Without a word, she tossed her keys on the counter and headed for the cupboard, pulling down two glasses. She opened a bottle of wine from the counter, poured without ceremony, handed one to Caleb, and leaned against the cabinets.
“So,” she said.
“So,” he said.
“Connor.”
“Yeah.”
She nodded slowly, processing. She picked up her glass and held it without drinking and fixed her gaze on the middle distance between them. “How long have you…?”
“How long? I’ve always been…” He stopped, almost incredulous.
“How long with him?” she said with a roll of her eyes.
“Oh. Since I found the lake. The first week I was here.”
Her eyebrows moved. “Oh my! You have been busy.”
“Maya!” Caleb felt the heat in his face.
Her smile lasted only a second. Caleb let her work through it. He should have told her sooner. The unforgiving benefit of hindsight.
“Is he good to you?” she asked finally.
The cabin came back to Caleb. Connor’s arm across his chest. The way he had checked with him every step of the way.
Maya had not asked whether he was confused. Not whether it was wise. Not whether he should slow down and make sure he was still the person he was expected to be. She had gone straight to the only thing that mattered, and that question settled warmly in his chest.
“Yeah,” he said. “He is.”
Maya sipped her wine and nodded, setting her glass down. “And you’re okay? Generally.”
“Of course.”
“Of course? Bullshit!” she replied. “Your entire life’s been overturned since you got here. You left everything you knew, everything you believed in. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good, but that’s a hell of a lot all at once. So answer the question. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “More than I expected to be.”
She watched him, nodding again in satisfaction. Then she grabbed her glass again and raised it high, a cheeky grin crossing her face.
“Well, here’s to you and your hockey stud!” Caleb laughed, clinked his glass to hers, and joined her for a long drink. He felt his body relax slowly.
“Can I tell you something?” she said.
“If it takes the attention off me, please.”
She swirled her glass shyly. “There’s someone. That I keep thinking about.” She said it tentatively, like she was testing the words for the very first time. “Riley.”
The name took a moment to connect. Then Caleb’s mind jumped to the afternoon deliveries and Maya’s studied neutrality whenever her attention lingered. “Wow. How long?” he asked.
“Long enough.”
“And?”
“And nothing,” she said, the embarrassed grimace colouring into a blush.
“Riley is… I don’t know what Riley is. I don’t know what I am.
I grew up being told what I was and then I left and I’ve spent four years figuring out what that means and apparently I’m not done.
” She focused on her wine. “Which is annoying, frankly.”
“Deeply annoying,” Caleb agreed.
She looked up, saw his expression, and lost the fight with her laughter again. Caleb laughed too. The wine sat between them while the kitchen clock passed midnight and neither of them could stop.
“Mom and Dad…” Maya said when the laughing settled.
“I know.”
“They love us… in their way.”
“I know.”
“It’s not going to be…” She stopped. Started again. “It’s not going to be easy. If they find out. When they find out.”
“I know,” Caleb said for the third time.
Maya refilled both glasses. She faced him across the kitchen with no bar between them, no order sheet or towel in her hands. Without a task to shield her, she looked younger.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. The words came without her usual practical edge. She sounded like his sister, and more than that.
“Me too,” he said. Then he gave her the answer he hadn’t known how to say before: “I don’t think I knew how alone I was until… well, until I stopped being alone.”
Maya lowered her gaze to the wine.
“Riley comes in on Thursdays,” she said finally, not quite a non-sequitur. “Deliveries. Saturdays sometimes, when she has the Thunder Bay route.”
“Oh, I know,” Caleb said, grinning.
“You noticed?”
“You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
She threw a dish towel at him. He caught it. They finished the wine.
He went to the lake Sunday morning before Maya was awake. He knew Connor had a shift at the mine, so the lake was his own.
The light had shifted with the season. Not spring yet, not close, but its angle suggested winter was having second thoughts. The ice was still solid and would be for weeks. The shadows had moved, and the pines caught the morning differently than they had the week before.
Caleb laced up at the bank, stepped onto the ice, and pushed off. Cold travelled through the blades and into his legs. His knees bent, his edges caught, and his body remembered.
Caleb ignored Connor’s drills and skated for himself. He went fast, the full length of the bay and back, until his body found its own pace and then exceeded it.
Then his stick moved through a sequence he’d been working on for two weeks, and suddenly he had it.
The puck moved with him. The edges weren’t clean and he knew it.
But the puck went where he told it. He pulled up near the far bank, turned, and looked back over the ice he had crossed.
Cold air filled his lungs. His laugh came out sharp and startled.
Connor. The cabin. The word beloved, surfacing and dissolving. The shame that he’d waited for but hadn’t come.
And then he stopped thinking and skated.
He sprinted the bay again at a speed he hadn’t known he had, arms pumping and edges cutting while the cold air burned in his lungs and felt like the opposite of damage.
He lifted his arms and, just for a second, let both of them go wide, stick in one hand, cold hitting his chest through his jacket.
He was going too fast and had no idea what was going to happen next, but the ice held.
He brought his arms back in, leaned into the next turn, and came out clean. The bay was bright around him. On the far bank, smoke rose from Connor’s chimney.
He let himself take in the whole distance of it: the place where he had fallen through the ice, the cabin waiting through the trees, the road back to town, the bar above which Maya was probably still sleeping.
None of it had disappeared. None of it had become simple.
But it had become part of a new and familiar map, and he was still moving through it.
Caleb was here, on the ice, moving at a speed and with a freedom he had not had last month.
She caught him coming in from the lake.
Still in his coat, cold coming off him, skates over one shoulder. She was at the kitchen table with her coffee and her laptop and looked up once, said, “Sit down,” and he sat.
She closed the laptop.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“Me too.”
She held her coffee. When she spoke, her face had the quality it got when she’d decided to say the true thing.
“I held everything at arm’s length for the first two years I was here.
The bar, the people, all of it. I thought that was how I would stay safe.
It wasn’t. It was just loneliness with better lighting. ”
Caleb watched her.
“That’s all,” she said. “That’s the thing I wanted to say.”
Caleb stayed where he was. “Okay,” he said.
“Call Mom,” she said, opening her laptop. “Leave all of this out. Call her.”
“Maya.”
“She won’t ask the right questions, but she’ll be glad to hear your voice.” She was already reading the screen. “Dad too, probably. In his own way.”
“That’ll go over great.”
“Exactly.” She nodded. “Go shower. You smell like the lake.”
He got up. At the kitchen door he stopped. “Maya.”
She raised her chin.
He didn’t have a sentence for it. Maya watched him, then went back to her laptop.
“I know,” she said. “Me too.”
He went to shower.
Caleb had been picking up shifts at the Sin Bin for a few weeks now, mostly to stop feeling like a guest in his own sister’s apartment.
Nothing that needed serious training (yet), nothing behind the bar.
Just bussing tables, restocking the coolers, hauling cases up from the storeroom, and taking out more trash than a place that small had any business generating.
Maya paid him in cash despite his objections.
After all, the work he did would barely cover rent, let alone all the food, but she insisted. He needed cash in his pocket.
That afternoon she found him on the porch, phone in one hand, the other wrapped around a mug gone cold. “You’re on at five,” she said. “Storeroom’s a mess and Kowalski’s bringing half the mine in for the game.”
He came down a little before five. He started by flipping the chairs off the tables, then got to work on the storeroom, breaking down empty cases and restocking the cooler shelves in the order Maya liked them, which had stopped making sense to him around week two and now just was how it was done.
When the doors opened proper, he was set up for the rush, though calling it a rush was only accurate by Veil Lake standards.
Kowalski showed up first, then two guys from the mine so fresh out of their coveralls that they had smudges on their cheeks.
Caleb took their orders, almost practiced enough to remember without writing things down. Almost.
By eight the crowd had settled into its usual noise, and Caleb worked the room, cleaning and chatting with ease.
Connor came in a little after nine, still in his work jacket, and didn’t sit down. He stood near the end of the bar with his hands in his pockets. When they made eye contact, Connor raised his brows in a question, tilting his head toward the door.
Caleb was in the middle of bussing tables, a tray of empties balanced on one arm. He set it behind the bar and looked over at Maya. A grin touched her lips then disappeared.
“Take off, eh,” she said. “I’ve got this.”
As Caleb approached, Connor simply asked:
“My place?”
Connor unlocked the door and held it for Caleb. He left the lights off beyond the hallway; the streetlamp above the sink laid a pale rectangle across the kitchen floor.
Connor hung his jacket on the hook, missed, and caught it before it fell. Caleb set both hands on the edge of the kitchen table.
“I meant it, by the way,” Caleb said. “What I said about Maya knowing.”
“It’s okay. I get it. We’re good.”
“I just—” Caleb stepped closer. “I want you to know.”
Connor crossed the rest of the kitchen. His hands came up slowly, one on either side of Caleb’s face. The first kiss was soft enough that Caleb felt the question in it. He answered by catching Connor’s shirt and pulling him closer.
Connor kissed him harder. He walked Caleb backward until Caleb’s hips met the table, then stopped with his mouth still against Caleb’s. His thumb moved once beneath Caleb’s ear. When Caleb leaned in again, Connor followed.
His hands travelled Caleb’s shoulders and ribs, firm in the familiar places. At Caleb’s side, one hand trembled. Connor drew it back and flexed his fingers as if the problem were cold. Caleb took the hand, pulled it under his shirt, and put it against his chest.
Connor watched his palm rise and fall with Caleb’s breathing. Then he bent his head and kissed him again.
He led Caleb down the hallway by the hand.
Connor’s room held the faint smell of cedar; the sheets were still turned down from the morning.
Their clothes came off between kisses. Connor guided Caleb onto the bed and followed, his weight settling over him, then worked his mouth lower, tracing collarbone, sternum, the flat plane of his stomach.
When he took Caleb into his mouth, he did it slowly.
Caleb threaded a hand into his hair and held on.
Halfway through, Connor’s rhythm faltered.
He let Caleb’s cock slip from his mouth and rested his forehead against Caleb’s stomach, breathing hard.
After two unsteady breaths, he lifted his head as if to continue, but shifted instead, his lips brushing Caleb’s hip.
This wasn’t teasing. Connor was struggling.
Caleb slipped his fingers into Connor’s hair and gently guided him upright.
Connor looked first at Caleb’s mouth. When he finally raised his eyes, the desire was still there, but beneath it was raw, startled fear.
He was letting go and, as much as he longed to, he was terrified by what it meant.
Caleb saw in Connor’s eyes both the fear and the pleading.
So Caleb softened his hold, stroking his thumb once behind Connor’s ear.
“Breathe,” Caleb said. “I’m right here.”
They moved together in the dark, Connor entering him slowly, their eyes fixed on each other. Connor kept one hand on Caleb’s chest, mirroring the way Caleb had once held him, palm flat over his heart. His breathing fractured as Caleb pulled him closer, their bodies finding a gentle rhythm.
When Connor came, a broken sound caught against Caleb’s skin, pleasure fraying at its edges into something perilously close to a sob. He held on tighter than either of them expected. Caleb wrapped both arms around him and held on too.
Afterward, Connor didn’t pull away. He stayed heavy and warm on top of Caleb, face tucked into the curve of his shoulder, one hand still resting over Caleb’s heart. His breathing slowed.
Caleb lay in the dark of Connor’s room, stroking his hair gently, and listened to the house.
The street outside was quiet the way Veil Lake always was at this hour: a dog barking somewhere, a truck two blocks over, the particular stillness of a small northern town that had finished its business for the day and gone to its rest, if not to its sleep.
Connor’s breathing had slowed beside him.
His hand was still at the back of Caleb’s shoulder, not holding, just resting.
Caleb thought about Maya’s face in the doorway and the way Connor had gone still afterward.
Not pulling away from Caleb, but looking past him toward the stairs and the street.
In Veil Lake, being seen by one person could become being known by everyone.
Connor had spent years keeping this part of himself separate from his family, the team, the town.
Maya was safe; Caleb believed that. But Connor had not chosen to test that safety tonight.
The realization would have brought Caleb’s old shame rushing back not long ago.
There was no disgust now, no urge to call what they had done a mistake.
He was worried for Connor, and sorry the choice had been taken from him, but he didn’t want less of what had happened between them.
Beneath the fear was a quiet certainty: Caleb would not become another person asking Connor to disappear.
He turned his head. Connor was looking at the ceiling, his mind seemingly far away from this place and time.
“Hey,” Caleb said.
Connor turned his head.
Caleb took Connor’s hand from the sheet and put it back over his heart. He asked the question without words.
“Yeah,” Connor replied, “I’m here. I’m good.”
The furnace shut off. In the sudden stillness, Caleb could feel his heart beating beneath Connor’s hand.