Chapter 2 #2
His family knew he was gay. Had known since his early twenties, when he brought a boyfriend home for Thanksgiving and his mother had pressed both hands over her mouth and cried the kind of tears that meant she’d been waiting, and his father had shaken the guy’s hand with the measured grip of a man who was trying very hard to do this right and had no practice at it.
That was supposed to be the hard part. Coming out, being known, letting people see you.
But his house was empty, and his sister Claire was the only person who called on Sundays just to ask how are you, and standing in this room right now, the faucet dripping, the refrigerator humming, Evan could hear every room in this house, and none of them had anything to say to him.
David had been right. The house was beautiful and emotionally unavailable, and he wasn’t sure he was talking about the house.
Finn had walked into his office today and offered him something no one had offered him in all that time. Not sex, not flirtation, not the guarded dance of two men circling each other in institutional spaces. Just: I see you. I’ve been seeing you. Stop pretending I haven’t.
And Evan’s hands had shaken so hard he’d dropped a pen.
* * *
Evan pulled up emails, scheduling conflicts, and travel logistics for the first away series. His fingers found a rhythm, his shoulders loosened a half inch, and for stretches of minutes at a time, he could almost convince himself the day had been ordinary.
Then his brain would serve up another image, unprompted and perfectly timed.
Last Tuesday: Finn in the hallway outside the training room, in his practice jersey, telling a freshman something about defensive positioning.
His hands drawing the play in the air. The freshman nodded, actually listening, because Finn had that.
People listened to him. Evan had stopped walking and stood there for four seconds too long before his legs remembered what hallways were for.
Two days before that: Finn at the booster event, drink in hand, making a donor twice his age laugh about something.
Completely at ease. Evan had been across the room doing his job, and every time he turned around, Finn was there in his peripheral vision, not looking at him, not performing anything, just being himself with a comfort that made Evan’s ribs ache because he could not remember the last time he’d been that unguarded in a room full of people.
Evan had been out for fifteen years. He checked the room before mentioning an ex-boyfriend.
Heard his father’s tone go flat and neutral when the subject came up.
Did the math, every room, every conversation, on how much of himself was safe to show.
It had become so automatic he’d stopped noticing he was doing it, the way you stopped noticing a limp after long enough.
Finn didn’t do the math. Finn just walked in.
Evan’s hand tightened around his coffee mug, the ceramic cool against his palm, and he stared at the screen without reading a word on it.
His phone rang. His father’s name. Evan’s shoulders squared before he answered, the reflex so deep it happened before the third ring.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You left early.” A statement, not a question.
“Had work to catch up on. Schedule’s a mess with the arena renovations.”
A grunt. “Get it sorted. I don’t want any surprises this season.”
“You won’t.”
“Good.” The line went dead. Evan set the phone on the counter and looked at the ceiling, the plaster cracked in one corner where the house had settled over the years.
Twelve seconds. That was the whole call.
His father could run a Division I hockey program, manage a staff of forty, and reduce a conversation with his only son to the length of a TV commercial.
* * *
Evan didn’t stay home. He ended up at a bar off Main Street, a townie place where the bartender poured without asking, and the TV above the bar was always tuned to whatever Detroit team was losing.
Evan ordered a whiskey neat and sat in a corner booth with his back to the wall, the vinyl cracked and cool beneath him, the overhead lamp throwing a circle of yellow light that didn’t reach the edges of the wood.
Three innings gone before he noticed his whiskey was done.
He’d finished it without tasting a drop.
The condensation ring from the water beside it had dried to nothing.
Evan sat with the empty tumbler and did nothing about it.
The bar noise washed around him: someone’s laughter cutting through the play-by-play, the crack of pool balls from the back room, the bartender rinsing a pint with water that smelled like rust. Same streets since childhood.
Same last name in the office as on the rink.
He was thirty-eight years old, sitting alone on a weeknight because going home meant sitting alone in a room where every surface was clean, and the faucet counted seconds like a metronome.
His phone buzzed against the wood. Unknown number, local area code.
You’re thinking about me right now.
Evan’s thumb stopped on the screen. The bar noise dropped to a frequency below hearing, the TV and the pool cues and the laughter all going distant, and his pulse picked up in his throat.
You’re thinking about me, and you’re telling yourself all the reasons it’s a bad idea. The age gap. The job. What people would say.
Then: Here’s the thing, Evan. I don’t give a fuck what people would say. And I don’t think you do either. I think you’re just scared.
Evan should ignore this. Block the number and pretend it never happened.
That was the disciplined response, the response of a man who had spent his entire adult life on the principle that restraint was indistinguishable from character.
Evan set the phone face down on the wood.
Pressed his thumb into a groove in the grain and held it there.
Picked the phone up again. Set it down. The Tigers were losing, the bartender was wiping a pint with a towel that had seen better decades, and Evan had no good reason to respond to a text from a twenty-one-year-old hockey player who had somehow gotten his personal number.
He picked it up.
How did you get this number?
I’m the captain. I have access to the emergency contact list. Of course he did. Evan could picture him typing it, sprawled on that disaster of a couch, the grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.
This is inappropriate.
Is it? I’m an adult. You’re an adult. Neither of us is breaking any rules.
You’re on my father’s team. Evan typed it with both thumbs, his jaw tight, the operations voice assembling itself even in text.
Your father’s team. Not yours. You don’t coach me. You don’t recruit me. You handle logistics. That’s not a conflict of interest. That’s barely adjacent.
Evan stared at the screen. The blue light of it caught the whiskey tumbler, threw a bright rectangle across the wood. Section 7.3 was open on his laptop at home. Any student enrolled at the University. Not barely adjacent. Prohibited, full stop.
He typed Why me? and sent it before the guarded part of his brain could catch up to his thumbs.
The pause stretched. Evan looked up at the game, looked back down, and ran his thumbnail along the edge of the booth until the vinyl bit into skin. On the TV, a Tigers outfielder dropped an easy fly ball, and the bar groaned in unison, and Evan’s phone sat in his hand and said nothing.
Then: Because you see me. Not the captain, not the guy everyone wants a piece of. You look at me like I’m a problem you can’t solve, and I’ve never been that for anyone before.
A pause. Then: I’ve wanted you since sophomore year, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.
Evan set it face down. He reached for his whiskey, and his fingers closed around an empty tumbler. The booth pressed in around him, the yellow light and the bar noise and the smell of fryer oil, and Finn Holloway’s words glowed on a screen he couldn’t stop turning over.
He was in so much trouble.
Evan left a twenty on the wood and didn’t check his phone again until he was in his car, the engine running, the lot empty around him, his hands on the wheel in the exact position they’d been in that morning when he’d told himself today would be ordinary.
It had not been an ordinary day.