21. Nolan
NOLAN
Nara smooths the last strip of black tape over my shoulder and presses the end down with her thumb.
“Give it a minute before you put your shirt on.”
I roll my shoulder carefully. The tape pulls across my skin but nothing pinches. “Good?”
“For now. Tell me if it changes on the ice.”
She turns toward Anton, who’s waiting on the other table with one skate off and a complaint ready.
My stall is less than ten steps away, and pulling a tight base layer over fresh tape in the treatment room would be stupid.
I pick up the shirt and walk through the open door into the main locker room.
The room is loud enough that I hear Bobby before I see him.
He’s telling someone why the last goal in practice yesterday should count toward whatever competition he has invented for this week.
A couple of guys are dressed already. The rest are in various stages of gear, talking across the room while skate blades knock against the rubber floor.
Bobby stops talking.
He’s sitting at his stall in his compression shorts with one elbow pad on, staring at my right hip. The bite Pope left there sits just above the waistband of my compression pants, dark enough that the shape of his teeth is still obvious.
Tape or fabric hides the marks on my shoulder and thigh. At my hip, he found the strip my gear misses.
I saw it in the mirror this morning. It looked lower when I was wearing boxer briefs, mostly covered by the waistband. My compression pants ride closer to my hips, which is useful information I could’ve learned before walking in here.
“Jesus, Fraser,” Bobby says. “Did you fuck a vampire?”
I follow his stare to my hip. “Maybe.”
A shout goes up behind me. Sindre yells, “Hell yeah,” and someone pounds both fists against his stall like I scored.
I lift the hand holding my shirt and give them a wave.
Bobby gets to his feet and claps over his head while a second whistle comes from the goalies’ side.
Even Caleb looks up from taping his stick, shaking his head without hiding his grin.
“Do I need to see it?” Nara calls from the treatment room.
“No.”
“Then everybody leave him alone and get dressed.”
Bobby waits until she turns back to Anton before coming over.
I hold my shirt in front of the mark and say, “I don’t kiss and tell.”
“The hell you don’t!” Bobby holds out a fist.
I bump it with my knuckles, and he immediately tries to look around the shirt. We make a slow circle between our stalls before I catch his forearm when he reaches toward my waist.
“I’m not touching you,” he says.
“The bite’s higher.”
Bobby looks down and jerks his hand back when he realizes how close he got to my dick. The room gets loud again. He points at me while he laughs, but whatever defense he tries disappears under everyone else.
Sindre starts laughing. Bobby gives up on getting behind me and goes back to his stall, still grinning.
Anton leans farther through the treatment-room door. “That looks like it hurt.”
It did, and I liked it.
Nobody asks whether it was a woman or a man. Sindre only wants to know if that’s the only mark. I tell him he’s getting as bad as Bobby, and he raises both hands before I can throw my balled-up shirt at him.
Bobby is already trying to claim a point in whatever competition he was arguing about because he spotted the bite first. Sindre tells him that isn’t a hockey play. Bobby says it shows awareness, and Caleb tells both of them they’re idiots.
If Bobby walked in with teeth marks, we’d be worse. Pope has played pro hockey long enough to know that.
I pull the compression top over my head before anyone gets a better look at me. The fabric catches on my taped shoulder, leaving my face covered while I work my arm carefully into the sleeve.
Another bite sits beneath the tape where my shoulder meets my neck. I can still feel Pope’s mouth there and his hand at my hip, holding me where he wanted me. My face gets even hotter under the shirt.
“Maybe I had fun,” I say through the fabric.
“Yeah, you fucking did,” Bobby says from somewhere in front of me.
Pope drops his skate.
The blade hits the rubber floor with a hard clack that carries across the room. I finish pulling the shirt down over my chest without looking his way.
I nearly turn toward him, but if I see Pope right now, I’ll probably laugh. Bobby might finally look at the right person.
God forbid the slightest suspicion fall on Straight Saint Pope. He couldn’t possibly know anything about the teeth in my hip.
Pope picks up the skate without saying anything.
Nobody else looks his way. Half the room is still arguing about Bobby’s imaginary point.
He wanted his marks all over me last night and made me promise there wouldn’t be anybody else. I’m still the one pretending a dropped skate is only a dropped skate, and I’m getting tired of doing it for him.
All we agreed to was just us, so I don’t expect him to announce anything in the locker room. Still, Pope almost gives himself away over one bite mark and I’m the one making sure nobody follows the noise back to him.
Bobby gets this excited about everybody’s sex life. Finding out it was Pope would make him louder for ten minutes, and then Gunderson would open the door and he’d care about practice.
Pope gets to decide what he tells them. I still hate that dropped skate.
Bobby hooks a thumb toward the bite. “I could take that.”
“You’d be asking Nara for ice,” Sindre says.
Bobby turns on him, and I let Sindre take the argument.
The room moves on for all of ten seconds. I start pulling on my gear, but the hem of my compression top has caught above the bite and Bobby keeps grinning at it like he had anything to do with it.
Fine. He can yell about something else.
I stand and pull my compression top back up, exposing my stomach and both sides. “All right. Since everybody’s so interested, where should I get the next tattoo?”
Half the room has an answer before I’ve finished pulling up my shirt.
“Other thigh,” Anton says.
“Ass,” Bobby says, which starts an argument among three guys over whether I already have one there. He tries twice to drag me into it, and I ignore him.
Caleb warns me off anything under the edge of my shoulder pads until the season is over, as if I’m planning to leave practice and drive straight to a tattoo shop. A defenseman votes for my chest before Anton points out there isn’t enough blank skin left to make the trouble worthwhile.
I turn toward the mirror and let them look. Black-and-gray ink covers most of my left arm and continues over my shoulder, chest, and ribs. My right side has always looked unfinished beside it.
The first few tattoos were easier because I knew what I wanted before the appointments and kept adding to the same lines whenever the skin beside them started looking too blank.
Nothing I’ve considered for the right side looks right yet.
By the time I run a hand over my ribs, Bobby is arguing with Anton about chest tattoos instead of staring at my hip.
Sindre studies me in the mirror, then points to the blank stretch along my right side. “There. Under your ribs. It would balance the other side.”
There’s enough room for something narrow from my ribs toward my hip. I run my palm over the spot. “Maybe.”
“Aren’t you ticklish there?” Pope asks.
The skin below my ribs prickles. Pope found that spot with his mouth and went back to it every time I twisted away. He knows exactly how hard I have to clamp my teeth together when his fingers drag over it.
His voice is casual, like he has asked whether my skate needs sharpening. Anton stops talking in the treatment-room doorway. In the mirror, Bobby’s head turns toward Pope while a strip of tape hangs loose from Caleb’s stick.
I still don’t look at him. Bobby’s question is aimed at Pope, and for one second I want to leave it there and make him explain how he learned it.
The guys know I’m bi. Letting them wonder who has touched me wouldn’t tell them anything I haven’t already told them about myself.
Pope hasn’t told them he’s into men. I can’t do it for him because I’m pissed.
Bobby turns slowly toward him. “What?”
Pope’s fingers stop on the lace. I give him half a second, long enough to see that he doesn’t have an answer.
“He got me there during the battle drill yesterday,” I say before Pope can answer. “I almost put my elbow through his face.”
Pope gives the lace a hard pull. “You tried.”
Bobby has seen me try to elbow Pope plenty of times, so he turns back to my side and says I’d never sit still long enough to finish the tattoo anyway.
After I remind him about the one covering most of my thigh, he asks whether I was sober. Anton starts explaining that tattoo artists won’t work on someone who’s drunk, and the room turns on Bobby for the terrible tattoo he almost got when he was nineteen.
I pull my compression top down over the tape and the bite, then put on the rest of my gear while Bobby’s almost-tattoo gets worse with every person who claims to remember it. By the time I’m tying the drawstring on my hockey pants, nobody is looking at me anymore.
Pope finishes first and waits with his stick in one hand while the rest of the line gets ready, checking the doorway before he looks at me. His shoulders ease when he sees nobody else watching.
I want to tell him he’s welcome.
Bobby bangs his stick against my shin pad on his way past. I shove him toward the hall and follow, leaving Pope behind us.
The tattoo argument follows us out, with Sindre still voting for the side and Bobby insisting I get something around the bite itself. Caleb tells both of them to stop planning permanent changes to somebody else’s body before practice.
Pope catches up before we reach the ice. When I glance over, he’s watching me, waiting for the grin I usually give him after one of us nearly fucks up.
I face the rink and keep walking.