5. Nolan
NOLAN
Ben Pope is going to drive me fucking insane.
Not tonight, though. This is the first night in more than a week that belongs to me. No game. No flight. No dinner with sponsors or video session that should’ve been an email. Practice tomorrow, but that is tomorrow’s problem.
Tonight I have beer, trivia, and two friends who don’t care whether I know how to enter the offensive zone as long as I know the capital of Slovenia. Tessa texted TRIVIA. NO EXCUSES. before I had even left the rink. Micah followed it with six question marks and a picture of the fries at Marlowe’s.
I was never going to say no.
“Ljubljana,” I say.
Tessa writes it on the paper answer sheet in the middle of our table without bothering to question me. Every team in the bar has the same sheet and the same cheap pen. At the front of Marlowe’s, the host finishes asking for Slovenia’s capital and starts the thirty-second timer.
Micah looks up from the basket of fries he’s been steadily emptying. “There’s something wrong with your brain.”
“Because I know things?”
“Because that’s one of the things you know.”
Tessa puts a hand over our answer sheet before either of us can touch it. Trivia brings out something ugly in her. “Shut up. Both of you.”
The host calls time and moves to the next question. Around us, two dozen teams are bent over their own paper sheets, arguing in voices loud enough for the tables beside them to steal answers.
Marlowe’s is narrow, loud, and dark enough that everybody looks good after nine.
The booths have been repaired so many times none of the vinyl matches.
Flyers for drag shows, rec leagues, and a queer book club cover the wall outside the bathrooms. The bartender had my usual beer open before I got my jacket off.
I’ve been coming here for years. So have Tessa and Micah.
Micah started our three-person team and takes it more seriously than some guys take the playoffs.
He tracks our scores, changes our team name whenever he thinks of a better one, and complains if either of us misses a week.
Tessa gets the pen because her handwriting is the only one the host can read.
People know who I am. A few watch the Leviathans.
A few more watch because I do. One guy told me good game when I walked in, then went back to arguing with his boyfriend about soup.
The faded team photo somebody made me sign after my rookie season still hangs crooked behind the bar, but nobody has asked for a picture tonight.
I needed Marlowe’s tonight.
The host starts the next question. Micah steals another fry, so I steal one from his basket before he can stop me.
The next question is the chemical element represented by the letter W.
“Tungsten,” I say.
“Why isn’t it T?” Micah asks.
“Because chemistry hates you.”
Tessa writes TUNGSTEN in block letters. “He’s right.”
“I know he’s right. I want to know why.”
“Then look it up after the round.”
Micah looks offended that she thinks he needs the reminder, but his phone stays facedown.
We’ve been tearing through the questions all night.
Tessa answers music and anything involving television made after I was drafted.
Micah knows politics, celebrity disasters, and the entire history of Eurovision.
I get science, geography, books, and a disturbing number of questions about eighties music that neither of them believes I should know.
By the time I identify Hieronymus Bosch from a badly cropped section of The Garden of Earthly Delights, we’ve filled every line on the first-round sheet. The host calls pens down. Micah takes the paper to the scoring table while Tessa drops the pen.
“Ugh. You need to quit your job, and you’d clean up here.”
“Yes, because queer trivia nights pay so much better than the NHL.”
The woman at the table behind us laughs. She has a rainbow painted across one cheek and a Leviathans cap on backward. When I glance over, she raises her glass. I raise mine back.
Micah returns with a ten circled in red at the top of our sheet. He puts it in the middle of the table where Tessa and I can appreciate it, then checks his phone. “Your job is doing okay for you tonight.”
“We aren’t playing tonight.”
“That’s not what Instagram thinks.”
He turns the screen around. The video is paused on Pope in front of his locker after our last game, his hair still wet and a team towel around his neck. My shoulder is visible at the edge.
I know the clip. I was there.
Micah doesn’t watch hockey, but apparently he’ll watch an eight-second locker-room interview six times.
“No,” I say.
Micah hits play anyway.
The reporter behind the camera asks Pope what finally clicked between us. Pope says, “Fraser was where I expected him to be.”
My voice comes from offscreen. “You could try saying thank you.”
Pope turns toward me. In person, it had felt like his usual stare. On the video, his eyes drag over me before coming back to my face.
“Thank you, Fraser.”
I walk far enough into frame for the camera to catch my grin. “I like Nolan better.”
Pope looks at me for a long second. “I’m sure you do.”
The clip starts again. Micah pauses it on Pope looking at me.
“That has been reposted everywhere,” he says.
“People are bored.”
Tessa leans across the table to see. “Why is he looking at you like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like that,” Micah says, which is useless because the screen is right there and Pope is only looking at me.
I reach for it. Micah pulls it away.
“Honestly, you two just need to kiss.” He holds the screen against his chest.
I hold out my hand. “Honestly, you need to give me your phone.”
“That’s not a no.” Micah keeps it pressed to his chest.
“Pope is straight.” I keep my hand out.
Tessa picks up her pen again. “Still not a no.”
The host calls the next category, saving me from having to answer. Not that there’s anything to answer. I have no intention of kissing Ben Pope.
Any more than I’ve already thought about it.
Which isn’t much. It happened behind the potted trees when he stared at my fingers on his tie and made that sound low in his throat.
Maybe again after the game, when he caught me against him and his mouth was close to my ear.
And on the plane, when he sat under that jacket acting like I had personally ruined sleep for him.
I don’t think about soft, romantic shit.
I think about crowding him against a wall and catching his tie in my fist again.
Putting my mouth on his just to find out how long he would stay frozen.
Whether that growl would end up in my mouth.
Whether he would shove me away or grab my hips and pull me in harder.
Mostly the last one.
No. Fuck that.
Pope walks around with his mouth set like smiling would cost him money. Anybody might wonder what it would take to wreck that control. I happen to wonder often enough that it has become a problem.
The dude is under my skin. That’s the problem.
He has been there since he walked onto our practice ice in a Seattle jersey and told me a cheap hit looked clean.
Then he defended me at poker. Then we spent one game moving like we’d played together for years while he also found a way to piss me off every time we sat down.
I need to get over him before I make this weird.
That should be easy. I’ve spent my whole adult life around hockey players.
Dressing rooms are full of extremely fit men taking their clothes off with no sense of privacy.
I’ve thought some of them were hot. I have eyes.
Once or twice, I’ve considered what somebody might be like in bed, then forgotten about it by the time I finished tying my shoes.
I’ve never been attracted to one seriously. Never a teammate. Never anybody I had to see at practice, sit beside on a plane, and trust with the puck while wondering what his hands would feel like on me.
“Earth to Nolan.” Tessa snaps her fingers in front of my face. “We need an answer.”
I look toward the screen. The question is already gone. “What was it?”
Micah makes a delighted noise. “Holy shit. You really are thinking about kissing him.”
“I was thinking about hockey.”
“Of course you were.”
Tessa taps the answer sheet. “Which planet has the shortest day?”
“Jupiter.”
She closes her eyes.
Micah looks down at the answer she already wrote. “Mercury is close to the sun. You can see why we got there.”
“No, I can’t.”
The cowbell rings before Tessa can change the answer. Pens down means pens down, so she glares at me while Micah takes the sheet to the scoring table.
When all the sheets are in, the host starts reading the answers. “Jupiter,” he says, and half the room cheers.
Tessa stares at the scoring table. “I hate both of you.”
“Why me?” Micah asks. “I’m the one who stayed mentally present.”
“You agreed with Mercury.”
“It has a short year. That feels relevant.”
I laugh despite myself. Tessa throws the pen at me, and I catch it before it hits my beer.
We don’t recover the point. The final question is worth two, and Tessa gets it right, but so do the teams ahead of us. The host announces us in third place behind a table of drag queens called Quiz in My Pants and four women who have been silently destroying everyone since round one.
Our prize is a round of shots and a gift card worth less than our bar tab.
“We could’ve won,” Tessa says as the bartender sets down three glasses.
“We came third out of twenty-four teams.”
“First and second get their picture on the wall.”
Micah lifts his shot. “There’s already a picture of Nolan on the wall.”
“That isn’t the point.”
We drink. The tequila burns all the way down. When I set the glass back on the table, Pope’s face is still frozen on Micah’s screen.
“Delete that.” I point at it.
“From Instagram?”
“From the planet.”
Micah pockets it. “You could kiss him instead.”
Tessa raises one finger. “Tomorrow. No more Pope tonight.”
“Thank you.”
“I was talking to Micah. You’ve lost speaking privileges over Jupiter.”
Trivia teams start breaking apart. Some people move toward the bar, and somebody feeds enough money into the jukebox to replace the host’s playlist. I finish my beer slowly because practice starts early tomorrow and Gunderson has no sympathy for queer trivia.
Tessa and Micah are arguing over whether third place requires celebration when a man stops beside my chair.
He’s attractive. Close to my age, maybe a little younger, with a neat beard and a green shirt stretched across a good chest. I’ve seen him here before. We have never spoken.
“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.
I look at the empty bottle in front of me, then back at him.
This should be easy. He’s hot, interested, and I won’t have to sit beside him at practice tomorrow. The best way to get over one person is to get under another. It isn’t great life advice, but it has worked for plenty of people.
Behind him, Tessa and Micah have gone quiet. They aren’t going to tease me. If I leave with this guy, they’ll probably high-five as soon as my back is turned.
I should say yes.
Then I think about tomorrow’s practice. I think about arriving tired, skating beside Pope, and knowing I took a stranger home because I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ve got an early morning.”
The guy takes it well. “Another night?”
“Maybe.”
He smiles and heads back toward the bar.
Micah waits until he’s out of hearing range. “He was hot.”
“I noticed.”
“And?” He waits for an answer I don’t have.
“I have practice.”
Micah gives me a look but lets it go.
Tessa slides the gift card into her bag. “Come on. Our hockey genius needs his sleep.”
I say goodnight to the bartender and wave at the couple still arguing about soup. Outside, the air is cold enough to bite through my jacket. Tessa and Micah head toward the bus stop, and I call a car in the opposite direction.
I go home alone.