Chapter 7
THEO
Of all the challenges that Theo had in his career, this took the cake.
“How much time can you two spare me today?” Lydia asked, her ever-present phone in her hand, fancy camera over her shoulder. She had the determined look of an NHL social media manager trying to drum up content in her eye.
“Twelve minutes,” Rowan said, his face looking as pinched and grumpy as Theo’s felt. It was twelve minutes more than Theo wanted to give.
“Alright, that is...fine,” she said.
“Unless you want us to dance, in which case I have zero minutes,” Theo added, trying for a joke. Lydia smiled. She had a hard job. Theo wouldn’t want to try to convince hockey players to make TikToks all day.
“It’s just a few trivia questions, boys. You’ll survive.”
She sat them down next to each other in the locker room that the rest of the team had vacated already. Theo knew Vic was waiting in the car for them.
“I have a list of questions. You’re both going to answer them with what you think the other guy would say. We know you two have that long history. Let’s see what that gets us today.”
Theo was hoping it would get him a lobotomy, personally.
The questions were simple. What was Rowan’s McDonald’s order? Number two, orange Hi-C. What’s Rowan’s shoe size? Ten. What’s Rowan’s middle name? Adam.
Rowan fired off the correct answers for Theo as well, and for a moment, it felt like they were on the ice together. In sync. Like they were two hockey players playing with one brain.
Lydia finished with “favorite movie,” and Rowan looked at Theo like he had him.
“My favorite movie came out four years ago,” he said, challenging Theo.
Four years ago, their text message thread had been empty from disuse.
Theo, however, had always monitored Rowan’s life.
His media. The Victory’s social media. It was good to keep his head up, since reporters would often ask Theo questions about Rowan (though Rowan never got questions about Theo), and it was good to never be blindsided.
At least that’s what he told himself.
“ Into the Spiderverse ,” Theo said, and Rowan’s jaw dropped.
* * *
“You should have seen his face. He couldn’t believe I got all the questions right,” Theo said, putting his feet up on Laurel’s thighs. She raised an eyebrow at him and pushed them away.
“Your dick might be nice, but your feet are disgusting,” she said. They were fully dressed, hanging out on her couch in her impeccably clean apartment for much longer than Theo usually stayed after they hooked up.
He just didn’t want to go home. Rowan was there.
“The amount that I have heard about this man is alarming,” she said. She was braiding her long brown hair over one shoulder. She conspicuously checked her watch. Theo loved that about her. She didn’t want anything from him. She had her own life, and didn’t want to be a hockey wife.
“Everybody has heard too much about Rowan Foley,” Theo said, making his name sound like a swear word.
“Yeah, bud, because you don’t shut up about him.”
Theo couldn’t possibly have talked about Rowan that much. He and Laurel weren’t exactly on each other’s newsletters. Their text thread was for logistics, not for any real thoughts they wanted to pass back and forth between each other.
Theo sighed and took the hint, standing up from the couch and grabbing his shoes.
“If you want to fuck him, you can. We’re not exclusive,” Laurel reminded him. Theo never asked who else she was fucking, but she reminded him they weren’t exclusive enough for him to understand she was absolutely taking advantage of the lack of exclusivity.
“It’s not like that,” Theo said. At one point, it had been like that. He wasn’t about to tell Laurel, though. She didn’t give a shit about him, which was great on a lot of fronts, but he didn’t expect her to keep his bisexuality under wraps.
Plus, Theo didn’t want to fuck Rowan. He wanted to punch him.
Laurel gave him a pat on the butt on the way out that made him feel like he was in the locker room.
“You need a hobby that isn’t thinking about Rowan,” she said, closing the door behind him.
Maybe she was right.
* * *
He spent his time on the way home thinking about Rowan. Maybe it proved Laurel’s point. But it had been too many years to hold a grudge about the dissolution of their friendship.
The truth was that Theo had never dealt with these feelings.
He had packed them deep down inside of him into a little ball, and thought everything would be fine if he was allowed to ignore them.
They felt just as raw today as they had in the first months and years after the draft, when Rowan kept pulling away until he was dust in the wind.
Rowan’s car was parked in the third stall of the garage when Theo pulled into the second.
His heart hammered. He didn’t want to act like this all these years later, but Rowan triggered something inside of him that was alive, and mean, and impossible for Theo to tamp down.
He knew that he couldn’t do anything to make Rowan feel the hurt that he caused Theo all those years ago, but he could make it as hard as possible for Rowan to feel comfortable here.
The living room was occupied when he came in, Vic and Rowan on the couch with each other. Vic had two TVs set up so he and Theo could play Call of Duty online together, and Theo could already see that Rowan had unplugged his Xbox from the second TV.
“You better put my shit back how you found it,” Theo greeted, not even bothering to pause before heading upstairs to his room.
He could hear Vic apologizing for him again.
Theo felt out-of-body with his pettiness, but while Rowan had always been able to put on a mask to be whoever he needed to be in any situation, Theo had always been the opposite of that. He wore his heart on his sleeve.
And right now, his heart was an asshole.