Chapter 22
Thayer
None of it felt good.
Denying Ash, arguing with him, hearing how hurt he was–but neither did watching him get hurt.
Watching his head bounce on that ice–I wanted to throw up.
That trainer could have told me he was in perfect health, and I still would have put Tommy in.
Loving Ash–caring for him–made it hard to do my job. I wanted to keep my promise and trust him, but what if he was actually hurt?
What if he didn't even realize that he was hurt and got hit in the head again?
I'd rather he be mad at me than brain-damaged.
The rest of the game dragged on. Tommy hardly cared and all but handed the game to Notre Dame–I wasn’t hired for Tommy or Jordy. I was hired for the man who stormed out here because I couldn’t do the one thing I was asking of him.
Be mature enough to separate our personal relationship from our professional one.
This wasn’t news–I knew all this going in. I saw our messiness, our power imbalance, and how inappropriate this was, but I thought it would be him.
I thought it would be Ash who couldn’t separate us, but it was me. It was me on that bench, and it was me again, reaching for him in that hallway because he wasn't listening to me.
Once the game was over, I stupidly thought Ash might have gone home and was waiting for me. I thought maybe he'd want to fight this out with me in a private area, but my apartment was cold and empty when I got there–his bag wasn't even there.
He hadn’t come home at all.
Maybe half an hour passed before I went to his dorm, but all I found was Carp. I'd asked him if he'd seen Ash, lying that I was just worried after his hit and wanted to check on him, but he just shrugged and told me he hadn’t heard from him–his stuff wasn't there either.
Wherever he'd gone, he'd gone straight there after he left the rink.
The later it got, the worse I felt. I couldn’t settle at all–I had my phone glued to my hand, praying it would ring or that Ash would just walk right in with the key I gave him.
At around one–three hours later–I got a text from Carp. It was sloppy and jumbled up, but it translated to he’d found Ash, and that he seemed fine.
I should have been the mature one and just let Ash come to me, but I texted Carp back, asking where Ash was, and went straight there.
A bar off campus.
When I got there, I found out why it was never one Reed and I might have frequented–it was closer to a club than a bar. It was loud, and there were flashing lights, but I found Ash quickly, drinking alone at the bar.
Part of me expected to find him acting out–partying and doing something to hurt me–but that was just one more time I’d assumed he was too immature for our relationship to work.
“Ash,” I said as calmly as I could while trying to be louder than the music. I rested a hand on his back, but only to get his attention–I removed it right after.
His leaving with me needed to be his choice right now, albeit a drunken one.
“Fuck off,” he mumbled, his eyes focused on his fingertips, tracing the condensation from his beer on the bar top.
I settled more into his view, but all it did was make his face buckle and his eyes rim red.
“Ash,” I said again, my hand on the bar top moving closer to him, but not touching him. “Why don’t we go home–we can talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he mumbled, clumsily rubbing his eyes to clear them.
That stung.
I swallowed it down like it didn’t, but only because these were his feelings–he was allowed to be mad at me. I couldn’t be upset with him for being honest about how he was feeling.
“Okay,” I said as solidly as I could, swallowing down the lump in my throat. “Then we don’t have to talk, but can you please come home with me? I know you won't drive, but I don’t want you irritating your leg or trusting Carp not to drink and drive.”
Ash almost seemed to ignore me for a second, chewing on his nail and staring off at the beer bottle before finally, reluctantly, nodding his head. I wasn’t looking at it as a win because it hardly felt like one–he’d agreed to come home, but not talk to me.
And he held strong on that.
He didn’t talk the whole way home, and even ignored me when I tried asking him if he was hungry or wanted anything when we got home. He just stared listlessly out the window, biting his nail and ignoring me.
It felt awful.
Silence was somehow so much louder than yelling.
All I wanted was to hear him argue with me–I never thought I'd actually be hoping he’d argue, but I would have even settled for a fuck off or something when I took his jacket when we walked in the door.
Anything was better than acting like I was invisible.
“Ash,” I tried one more time, stopping him from dragging himself to our bathroom to brush his teeth before bed. “Can we just–”
“Breaking that promise, too?” he asked quietly, blinking lifelessly at me until I let his arm go.
He brushed by me again, shutting our bathroom door calmly.
He wasn’t angry anymore.
He was just hurt now.