Chapter 3. Mads
Huh.
That’s all I’ve got. One syllable, dead in the air between us, and now the silence is taking up all the space in this compartment.
Rodriguez sits across from me on his bunk, wearing my hoodie, looking like he already regrets every word that came out of his mouth.
“So yeah,” he says finally, clearly trying very hard to sound normal. “That was the reason I ignored you at first. And then apparently you noticed I was ignoring you and started looking at me with that death stare, so it all kind of spiraled.”
I hear the words. I register them the way you register a weather report playing in the background when you’re not really paying attention.
But my brain is stuck on used to.
Used to have a crush on you.
The past tense hits like a sucker punch. It shouldn’t matter that Christopher Rodriguez, the guy who’s been driving me insane for the past three months, used to be attracted to me and isn’t anymore. That’s good. That’s a problem solved. I should be relieved.
But I am not relieved.
I am disappointed.
So disappointed it takes me a second to even recognize the feeling, because it makes no sense. Ten minutes ago, I thought the problem between us was hockey. Miscommunication. Bad reads. Three months of him looking through me like I was part of the wall while I got more and more pissed off about it.
Now he’s sitting there in my hoodie, flushed and embarrassed, telling me he used to want me, and apparently my first reaction is not relief or awkwardness or even surprise.
It’s disappointment.
Which is inconvenient, because Rodriguez is still sitting there, waiting for me to react like a normal person, and I have no idea what my face is doing.
So I just stay where I am, on my bunk, trying to look like someone who isn’t having a minor emotional crisis and some kind of sexual awakening on an overnight train from Oslo to Copenhagen.
“…So we can agree to try to communicate better from now on,” Rodriguez continues, his voice almost weak, like he’s talking just to fill the space. “I’ll stop avoiding you. You can stop glaring at me like I murdered your entire family. Very mature of us.”
I should answer. Say yes, fine, good plan. Say something that gets us both out of this conversation with the last scraps of dignity intact.
The problem is, if I do that, this thing—the honest, vulnerable thing Rodriguez just dragged out of himself—gets shoved under the rug, and neither of us will ever touch it again.
I’m gay.
And I sort of used to have a crush on you.
“The hockey part, yes,” I say, stalling because I need a second to figure out how to turn the conversation back without making it worse. “Fine. I agree. We should communicate better. Obviously.”
“Yeah,” Rodriguez says. “Cool.”
Except it doesn’t sound cool. It sounds like the door closing.
Before I can decide how to stop that from happening, the overhead light goes out with a soft click.
Bedtime. The train’s automatic system, cutting the lights in every compartment at once. Darkness drops over us, leaving only the moonlight spilling through the window.
For one second, neither of us moves.
“Okay,” Rodriguez says into the dark. “This is getting awkward by the minute.”
“It’s not,” I say, too quickly.
It absolutely is.
He doesn’t answer. I hear him shift on his bunk, the mattress creaking under his weight.
“Alright,” he says after a moment, his voice flat. “I’m going to get some sleep.”
He lies down without waiting for me to reply, his feet toward the broken vent, probably so the cold air isn’t blowing straight at his face. Then he pulls the blanket up over his shoulders, turns onto his side, facing the wall, and goes perfectly still.
Just like that.
I sit on my bunk and watch him in the dark, kind of stunned that this conversation ended so quickly, before I could even process it.
One minute he’s telling me something that completely rearranges the last three months in my head, and the next he’s turned away from me like we’ve finished some team-building exercise and should now get some rest.
I get why he does it. I’m not completely clueless. He told me something personal and embarrassing, something he clearly hated saying, and I answered with a huh like a concussed idiot. Of course he wants to disappear into the mattress and pretend none of this happened.
The problem is, I can’t.
The disappointment is still lodged in my throat like something I swallowed wrong. Okay, he doesn’t want to talk about it. I get that. He wants to move on.
I just can’t seem to move with him.
I want to know why he stopped having a crush on me.
I want to know what changed—whether I did something, or said something, or whether three months of me being an asshole wore it out of him, or whether he got close enough to realize I wasn’t as interesting as whatever version of me he’d built in his head.
Basically, I want to know why I missed my chance before I even knew I wanted one.
And the fact that I’m thinking of it as a chance at all should probably concern me.
Because this is new. I don’t do this. I don’t sit around obsessing over whether my emotionally unavailable male teammate finds me attractive. I especially don’t do it while said teammate is lying three feet away from me, wearing my hoodie, with his back turned like I’ve personally offended him.
Which, fair.
I probably have, considering how much of an asshole I’ve been to him, especially tonight.
The cold air from the broken vent slides across my bare chest, raising goosebumps along my arms. I stand up and reach for my duffel in the dark, find it by touch, and dig through until my fingers close around a clean T-shirt and a Glacier Saints sweatshirt.
I pull the T-shirt over my head, then the sweatshirt, and the warmth settles over my skin.
I lie down the same way—feet toward the window—and stare up at the ceiling. Moonlight catches the metal shelf above me, turning it silver in patches. The train rocks beneath us with the low rhythm that usually puts me to sleep within minutes.
Not tonight.
Minutes pass. Ten. Twenty. Half an hour.
But my heart won’t calm down. My stomach keeps fluttering, and every time I close my eyes, I see Rodriguez’s face when he said it.
I’m gay.
And I sort of used to have a crush on you.
The words replay on a loop, and each time, the same stupid pang hits me in the chest.
Used to.
Past tense.
Over.
Done.
But why the fuck does that bother me so much?
I mean, fine. I know why. Tonight I realized I’m attracted to Rodriguez.
That should be the strange part, probably, but somehow it isn’t.
Maybe because the realization didn’t arrive like a lightning strike.
It didn’t come out of nowhere. It just put a name to a bunch of things I’d been refusing to look at directly.
The way my eyes kept finding him in every room before I could stop them.
The way it pissed me off when he laughed with Rami but barely said two words to me.
The way I kept telling myself he was arrogant because it was easier than admitting I cared that he didn’t seem interested.
That’s the part I should be losing my mind over. The fact that I can want a man. The fact that I can lie here in the dark and think about Rodriguez’s mouth and his hands and the way he looked at me earlier when I took off my shirt.
But instead of feeling wrong, it feels terrifyingly easy.
I’ve never been homophobic, but maybe that’s part of why this never occurred to me.
I never had some big dramatic thing to push against. I liked women, I dated women, I slept with women, and that was enough evidence, apparently, for me to file the whole question away and never look at it again.
Even when Roman came out, I didn’t suddenly start reevaluating myself.
I was proud of him, furious at every reporter, player, and random fan who thought his private life was suddenly theirs to dissect, and still completely convinced I already knew what I was.
Apparently, I did not.
Because now I’m lying here in the dark, wanting Chris Rodriguez like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The idea should probably knock me flat.
It doesn’t.
I try to question it, because after thirty years of being sure, I probably owe myself at least one honest second of doubt.
Maybe it’s the leftover adrenaline from tonight.
Maybe it’s because he admitted he used to want me, and now my ego is doing something stupid with that information.
Maybe that fantasy I had earlier got shoved into overdrive by his confession, and I’m confusing curiosity with attraction.
Except I’m not.
Now that I’m actually letting myself think about him, there’s nothing vague about it.
I want to kiss him. I want to touch him.
I want to know what he’d sound like if I got my mouth on his neck, if I got my hands under that hoodie.
I want to climb onto that narrow bunk and find out whether he still wants me too.
So no, apparently this isn’t confusion.
Rodriguez is hot. I want him. My brain has accepted both of those things with humiliating speed, and somehow that’s not the part turning my world upside down.
The part my brain can’t accept is that he wanted me before, and now he doesn’t.
Jesus.
A rustle comes from Rodriguez’s bunk. The sound of someone trying to shift position without being heard, which means he’s as awake as I am.
I keep my eyes on the ceiling.
For a second, I think about saying his name.
Just that. Rodriguez. Maybe Chris, if I’m really trying to make this night weirder.
I could ask him if he’s awake, even though I know he is.
I could tell him I’m not weirded out or angry.
I could tell him I’m only quiet because he just handed me a version of the world where he wanted me, and now I’m pissed off I somehow managed to fuck up the entire thing.
But he already retreated once. If I say the wrong thing now, he’ll probably disappear so far inside himself I’ll need a search party to get him back.
So I say nothing.