Chapter 32
Ilooked around the Wardens locker room.
I took a deep breath.
Cleared my throat.
"I have a boyfriend," I announced.
Jenkins kept talking.
Knox didn't look up from his phone.
Dylan taped his stick.
I looked around the room again. Twenty-three people. Nobody had reacted. Nobody had even glanced over.
There was a new guy at the end of the room.
Not new like Foster was new, Foster had been new in the way that meant unknown quantity, unknown energy, unknown whether Knox was going to adopt him or eat him. This was different.
This was Dr. Paulson, who had been the Wardens team physician for a couple weeks now, who had a clipboard and good credentials and had done nothing wrong, and who was not Nathan.
Nobody had said anything about it. Not officially. Not in the locker room. The team had collectively absorbed the change the way teams absorbed things they didn't want to examine directly.
Dr. Paulson did his job. The team let him do it. Knox had been slightly more aggressive in every interaction, which Knox would deny and which everyone had noticed.
I looked at Dr. Paulson at the end of the room.
He was fine. He was perfectly fine.
He was not Nathan.
I climbed up on the bench.
"I have a boyfriend," I said again. Louder.
Jenkins paused his story briefly and then resumed it.
"I'm in a relationship," I said. "A serious one. I, Wesley Alexander Morrison, who you may know from such events as previous games this season, have a significant other. A partner. A lov—"
"Cross finally manned up, huh," Knox said, without looking up from his food.
The room kept going.
“I never said—"
“No, but we know," Jenkins said, still mid-story to Searcy, who was nodding along.
"Since when?" I asked.
"Toronto," several people said, at slightly different times, in the tone of people confirming a meeting time.
"I didn't know," Searcy said.
"Shocker," Knox muttered.
"I knew since the breakfast," Foster said, to his phone. "You weren't eating your eggs."
"That's—" I stopped. "How is that—"
Foster shrugged. "It was very obvious.”
I looked at Dylan.
Dylan was still taping his stick.
"Dylan," I said.
"Don't," Dylan said.
"Did you know, too?"
"I said don't."
"Dylan."
"Everyone knew, Wes," Dylan said. To the stick tape. "It was not subtle."
"Knox," I said. "When did you know?"
"Toronto," Knox said.
"And you didn't say anything?"
"You didn't ask."
"I—" I looked around the room. Jenkins had finished his story and was now eating again.
Chappy was doing something with his gear.
"I just want to be clear," I said, "that I am announcing something significant right now.
This is a significant personal announcement.
I am in a relationship with Nathan Cross who is—"
"Too good for you," someone muttered. I was fairly certain it was Knox.
"Did I hear someone say ‘extremely handsome’? Yes, yes he is. Thank you. I would appreciate—"
Knox looked up. "What do you want, Morrison, a fucking parade?"
"No. But I deserve some kind of reaction, don’t I?" I asked. "I want people to seem surprised. I want—"
"He came over the boards before the whistle finished," Knox said. "In Toronto. For you. What did you think that was?"
The locker room kept going around me.
The boards. Nathan's hands on them. The crowd roaring and Nathan not noticing or not caring.
"Right," I said.
"Damn right," Knox said, and went back to his phone.
"Be jealous," I said, to the room, to all of them, to the complete lack of reaction I was receiving. "He's incredibly handsome. He has very nice eyes. He—"
Knox threw a skate at me.
I caught it.
"Thank you," I said. "Finally. A reaction."
"Get the hell out of my locker room," Knox said.
"It's everyone's locker room—"
"Morrison."
"Leaving," I said.
In the corridor I took out my phone.
I told the team, I texted Nathan.
He responded while I was still walking.
Nathan: How did that go?
Me: Knox threw a skate @ me.
A pause.
Nathan: Is that good or bad?
Me: good. Def good
Nathan: I see.
Me: and plus also everyone knew since Toronto!!!!
Nathan: Yes.
I stared at my phone.
Me: u knew that they knew?
Nathan: It seemed likely.
A pause.
Nathan: Come over. After.
Me: I love you, too.
I put my phone in my pocket.
We had a game in two hours.
We lost.
Not terribly. It was a tight game. Nobody said much. I said less than usual, which Jenkins clocked and didn't comment on.
I played fine. Not well, not badly. Fine, which for me was its own kind of bad, the kind that didn't show up in the stats but that I could feel in the way you felt things when you were playing with half your brain somewhere else entirely.
The other half was at Nathan's apartment.
I showered. Got dressed. Was almost at the door when Dylan appeared at my elbow.
I felt my whole body do the brace. Because this was how it went, this was the system. After a loss Dylan found me and he had observations and he had been holding them for the appropriate amount of time and that time was now.
The third period. The gap in coverage. The moments I hadn't read, the moments I'd been slow, the general Wesley Morrison inventory of tonight's failures delivered in a flat voice to somewhere slightly past my left ear.
I was ready for it.
I had been through this enough times to know the shape of it.
I squared my shoulders. I thought about the third period.
I ran through my defensive zone decisions and identified the three that were going to come up and prepared my arguments for all three, which were as follows: I'd read the play correctly, I'd read the play incorrectly but for defensible reasons, and that one wasn't my fault and I had witnesses.
Dylan looked at me for a moment.
"I know what he did," Dylan said.
I had prepared the wrong arguments.
I stopped. "What?"
"Cross." Dylan said it like the name was information. "I know what he did. The job. What he left."
I didn't say anything.
"That's not a small thing," Dylan said. "Leaving a job like that."
"He didn't leave medicine," I said. "He left one position."
"I know what he left," Dylan said. The jaw again. "It means he chose you.”
The locker room was mostly empty now. Just us and the overhead lights and the hum of the facility doing whatever the facility did at eleven p.m. when everyone had gone home.
"So don't you dare fuck it up," Dylan said.
"I'm not going to fuck it up."
"I know," Dylan said. "I'm saying it anyway."
I looked at him.
Dylan was looking at the middle distance, which was where Dylan looked when he was saying things that cost him something to say.
He had Dad’s jaw and Dad’s hands, and he had been doing everything right since before I arrived at the Morrison house and disrupted the whole system.
And now he was standing in a locker room after a loss telling me not to mess up the thing with Nathan.
"Dylan," I said. “I’m—"
"I'm not done," he said.
I waited.
"Decker said the thing," Dylan said. "In Toronto. About cleaning up after you."
"Yeah."
"I've thought that," Dylan said. To the middle distance.
Flat and even, the way Dylan said things he'd been sitting with for a long time.
"A hundred times. A thousand. That it's exhausting.
That I do everything right and you show up and it doesn't matter what I've done because you just—" He stopped.
His hand moved. The gesture covering something he wasn't going to say directly.
"Dylan—"
"I've thought it," Dylan said. "And then Decker said it. And I thought—" His jaw set. "I thought: you don't get to say that. That's mine. That's between me and him. Some fourth-line pest from Chicago doesn't get to say that."
I didn't say anything.
"That's the thing about it," Dylan said. Quieter. "I can think it. I've been thinking it for years and that's allowed. That's me and you. But it doesn't—" He stopped. "It doesn't mean what he meant by it."
The facility hummed around us.
“And you're my brother. And doc left a good job to stay with you. And you should know that I know that. And you should not fuck it up."
I waited, to see if there was more. When there wasn’t, I nodded.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said.
We stood there.
Dylan was still looking at the middle distance. Something in his face that was tired and real and had been under everything else for a long time.
"You're a good player," Dylan said. To the wall.
"So are you," I said.
"I know," he said. "We both had to be."
I held that. All of it.
"Hey, Dylan?”
He looked at me. One second.
"You're a good brother," I said.
Something moved through his expression. Fast and then gone, but there.
"Don't push it," he said.
He picked up his bag.
He walked out.
I stood in the empty locker room for a moment.
Dylan Morrison had just said two true things to me in the same conversation.
I took out my phone.
Nathan: I meant it. Come over.
I went.