Chapter 5
FINN
Evan had stayed. And he looked like he’d meant to.
Finn lay on his side and watched him. In sleep, Evan looked younger.
The lines at the corners of his eyes had softened, the set of his jaw loosened, his chest rising and falling with a steadiness that had nothing to do with discipline.
His hand curled near his face, palm up, fingers open.
The silver at his temples caught the thin morning light, darker now, sleep-warm and disheveled on the pillow.
His lashes were long at his cheekbones, and the angle of his shoulder where the sheet had slipped was enough to make Finn’s throat tighten.
Then Evan’s eyes opened. Not gradually. All at once, his frame going rigid for a half-second before the room registered.
Evan looked at the ceiling first. Then the window. Then Finn. His gaze flicked to the nightstand, the entrance, then back to Finn, his jaw already tightening, the masks reassembling themselves in real time.
“Stop thinking so loud.”
“I’m not—”
“You have this face. Like you’re doing long division.” Finn reached over and pressed two fingers to Evan’s jaw, where the muscle had gone taut. Evan went motionless under his touch. “There. That.”
Evan exhaled. The tension loosened a fraction.
Evan sat up. The sheet pooled at his waist, and he looked at the window, the low autumn light coming through the blinds, and his fingers found the edge of the mattress and pressed white into the fabric.
Already gathering himself to stand. Already running the calculations: where his clothes were, how long the drive home would take, whether anyone would see his car in the lot.
“You should get coffee first. I have the good kind. Not the pods.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.” Finn stood and found his sweatpants on the floor where they’d landed sometime around midnight. “Sit. You’re getting coffee.”
Finn heard Evan stand behind him. The rustle of sheets, the small sounds of a man reorienting himself in an unfamiliar room.
Finn padded out to the kitchen without looking back, because if he looked back he was going to see Evan in his bed with his hair wrecked and his chest bare, and he was going to do something that would make the math worse.
The kitchen was small and cool, the heat not having kicked on yet.
Protein shake bottles he kept meaning to throw away colonized the counter.
Finn filled the kettle and got the coffee down from the cabinet and stood there waiting for the water to boil, thinking about all the versions of himself this apartment had seen.
Coming out to the team had been its own education.
Hayes had handled it first and best, the earnest “cool, man” that set the tone for everyone else.
But not everyone had followed Hayes’s lead with the same grace.
Decker, their six-foot-four defenseman who ate protein bars the way other people breathed oxygen, had asked if bisexual meant Finn was “half-straight,” grinning like it was a joke but waiting for the answer with genuine confusion in his eyes.
Miller, a winger from Minnesota who kept a rosary in his locker and never swore on the ice, had nodded and said “So you’re just, open to whatever,” in a tone that suggested Finn had announced he was open to robbing banks.
The worst had been the ones who’d done research, who used the right words but kept their eyes on Finn’s forehead instead of his face, as though being into guys and girls meant he was performing some advanced-level queerness they needed to study before they could look him in the eye again.
They’d all gotten there eventually. Decker had been the one to buy Finn a drink at the end-of-season party and say, unprompted, “I was an asshole about the half-straight thing.” Miller never quite managed eye contact during locker room conversations about hookups, but he’d started passing Finn the puck on the power play without hesitating, which was its own kind of acceptance.
Last spring, Finn had brought a guy home for the first time.
Not a hookup. A guy from his Kinesiology lecture, someone he’d been seeing for a few weeks.
The first time Finn had had someone here, in his space, overnight.
The guy had looked around at the hockey photos on the wall, the jersey hanging in the closet, and asked if Finn’s teammates knew.
When Finn said yes, the guy’s shoulders had dropped two inches: he uncrossed his arms, let his spine touch the couch, stopped glancing at the front entrance.
Like some part of him had been calculating exit strategies until that moment, and Finn’s answer had given him permission to stop.
It had been a good night. They’d watched a movie and made out on the couch and the guy had stayed until morning and left with a kiss and a promise to text.
He’d texted. They’d gone out twice more before it fizzled, the natural death of something where neither person was willing to be the one who cared more.
Finn was thinking about that when Evan appeared in the kitchen entrance wearing yesterday’s slacks and his shirt, buttoned wrong by one so the collar sat crooked.
Evan’s eyes tracked over the hockey gear by the front entrance, the stick leaning next to the wall, the textbooks stacked on the table by the couch.
“It’s cleaner than I expected.”
“What were you expecting?”
“You’re twenty-one.”
“I’m a twenty-one-year-old with a mother who made him do his own laundry since he was fourteen.” Finn set two mugs on the counter. “Sit down. You look like you’re about to make a speech.”
Evan sat at the kitchen table. He had not fixed the shirt.
Finn considered telling him and decided not to, because the crooked collar was the best evidence he’d ever seen that Evan Tremblay could fail to notice something about his own appearance, and Finn wanted to hold onto that for as long as possible.
Finn poured and set one mug in front of Evan, then took the chair across with his own. The autumn light came through the blinds at a low angle, catching the silver in Evan’s hair. Outside, a car drove by too fast, and then the street went still.
His mom had called recently and Finn had let it go to voicemail and texted back fine, which was not fine, and she’d responded with three heart emojis and a photo of the dog wearing a Michigan bandana. Her way of saying I know you’re lying but I love you anyway.
“This doesn’t change anything,” Evan said.
Finn wrapped both palms around his mug. “Okay.”
Evan looked up. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Finn took a sip. “Whatever you say.”
“I mean it. Last night was—” Evan stopped. Started again. “It can’t be a pattern.”
“Okay.”
“Stop saying okay like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re humoring me.”
Finn looked at him over the rim of the mug. “I’m not humoring you. You said it doesn’t change anything, I said okay. That’s a conversation.”
Evan’s expression tightened. “You’re not arguing.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re allowed to say what you need to say.” Finn set his mug down. “And I’m allowed to wait and see if you mean it.”
Evan tried to speak. Failed. His fingers tapped once against the side of his mug, then wrapped around it and held.
“You’re twenty-one,” Evan said again.
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
“You’re thirty-eight. You keep not saying that.”
Evan’s lips pressed flat.
“Then you know you’re old enough to stop pretending you don’t want things just because wanting them is inconvenient.” Finn picked his mug up. “Drink your coffee. It’s getting cold.”
Evan drank it.
They sat in the kitchen while the street outside woke up, Evan’s shirt buttoned wrong the whole time. Finn clocked it every time he looked and said nothing, because saying nothing was its own kind of patience, and patience was the only play Finn had that Evan didn’t see coming.
When Evan got up to leave, Finn walked him to the front entrance.
“I’ll see you at the facility.”
“Yeah.” Finn leaned into the frame. “You will.”
Evan left. Finn crossed to the window and watched.
Below, in the parking lot, Evan walked to his car at his usual pace, unhurried, coat pulled on, bag over his shoulder.
Evan reached the car and stopped. His head turned, a scan of the lot: the other vehicles, the building entrance, the sidewalk.
Automatic. The kind of check that had been trained into his body so long ago it didn’t register as a choice anymore.
Nobody was watching. Just Finn, from a third-floor window, with coffee going cold in his hand.
Evan got in and drove away.
Finn stayed at the window a moment longer.
The parking lot check. The coat pulled on before leaving the building.
The shirt buttoned wrong, which Evan hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared about.
Finn had come out to the whole program, done the media training, become the face they put in front of cameras when the athletic department wanted to talk about inclusivity.
And the person he wanted most wouldn’t walk to his car without scanning first.
Finn went and poured himself another cup and sat with that thought until it stopped burning and became something he could carry.
Days passed as they did during the season: practice, film, the hallway nods, the choreographed distance.
Finn let them. He was good at waiting when waiting was the right play, and he’d learned enough about Evan by now to know that pushing too hard after a night like that would send him further into the walls he’d spent fifteen years building.
So Finn played his hockey and aced his classes and nodded at Evan in the hallway like a professional, and if his gaze lingered a half-second longer than it should have, that was between him and Evan and nobody else.
The bruise on his throat had faded to yellow by the time Finn found his way to the equipment room.