Chapter 21
THEO
Rowan insisted it wasn’t a date. He’d been doing that recently, since he came home from the East Coast and they’d had a fucking wild conversation that blew Theo’s mind right open. He would make a plan for just the two of them, insist it was just friends, and then obviously try to woo Theo.
It was cute. And even though Theo could be the bigger person and admit Rowan wasn’t the only one at fault when it came to the collapse of their relationship, Rowan was the most at fault.
Theo was pretty sure their jobs were harder than someone’s nine-to-five, but Theo liked the schedule.
It meant they had random bits of time off.
If he had a wife and kids, it would probably be a struggle.
But now, on a Tuesday afternoon at the beginning of spring, he was sitting in a Paint it Yourself!
franchise, looking at shelves and shelves of white, unpainted ceramic objects.
“I think I want this little guy,” Rowan said, picking up a stegosaurus.
“What are you going to do with that?” Theo asked. He didn’t know the last time he had done a craft project. He took drawing in high school for his art credit, and the most serious art supply he touched in that class was charcoal. Rowan was the artsy one. If photos counted.
“I’ll put him on my shelf and he’ll guard my Switch.”
“Bulletproof plan,” Theo said. Nothing was standing out to him. He never would have picked this place, but he was trying to have fun. Rowan was trying so hard to reconnect with him. He could paint a mug or something.
“Oh, do this one,” Rowan said, pointing to a snake coiled up in a little pile. The head and top layer of the snake’s body came off like a lid, revealing the hollow inside of a jar.
“Go Serpents,” Theo joked, picking up his snake. They got aprons and got set up at a table to work on their masterpieces.
“I don’t want to say I’m a genius, but coming while kids are supposed to be in school was a pretty stellar idea,” Rowan said.
“How did you come up with this idea, anyway?” He was plotting out how to paint his new little guy, and decided on forest green and white. If he was going to paint a little snake, he might as well be a dork and really go all in on Serpents colors.
“Just googled for it,” he said vaguely.
“What did you put in the search term? ‘Best kids’ birthday party spots’?”
“‘Best fun date activities San Jose.’” Rowan didn’t meet his eyes. He was focused on mixing up enough teal paint to cover his dinosaur.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to make fun.”
Rowan smiled at him. “I am trying to not be awkward about this, but we have eight years to catch up on before we’re really on solid footing, and I’m just trying my best here.
I thought having something to do would take our minds off of trying to force ourselves back to the place we were when we were teenagers. ”
“That’s sweet, Ro. Were you this sweet when you were seventeen?”
“I was a self-absorbed asshole when I was seventeen, and that was the biggest problem our relationship had.”
“I think everyone is selfish at seventeen. When you moved to Texas and you were struggling, I couldn’t see past my own disappointment in my career to see what you were going through.
If you’re going to meet the person you love that young, you better hope you don’t hit any difficult circumstances until you’re emotionally mature enough to deal with your shit without hurting your partner. ”
“One thing I regret that I remember being weird about back then was the fact that we were never official.”
“I thought you didn’t want a boyfriend.” Something about not being official back then had made sense, somehow. Even if it did kind of hurt.
“I didn’t. I think…you know, internalized homophobia and stuff. If we didn’t stick a label on it, it could still be straight-person behavior.”
Theo laughed.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Rowan said, pressing a hand to his heart. His teal fingerprints joined a rainbow of other paint smudges on his borrowed hunter-green apron. “I’m cutting myself open here for you.”
“No, no, I’m laughing because my little bisexual teenage brain had the same thoughts. Like, I like girls, of course I’m straight . But Rowan and I are in love because hockey transcends all feelings .”
It was Rowan’s turn to laugh. “I’m straight, but here’s my hockey boyfriend.”
“Hey, enough guys were trading handies back then for dumb teenage reasons. It didn’t seem too far beyond that.”
“It’s ridiculous because it didn’t. No fucking wonder we blew ourselves up.”
“You think we would have survived that if we had just put a label on it?”
Rowan looked up from his dinosaur. “No.”
“Yeah, me either. Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if we had been drafted to the same team? If you were, like, one notch worse at hockey, and I was one notch better, and we’d been picked back-to-back by Vancouver?”
“I thought about that every day for the first couple of years.”
“What made you stop?”
“When you were traded from Carolina to Ottawa, and you stopped looking so sad in all the media you did, and photos you were in. When you started getting minutes on the ice, and people saw how good you are. That’s when I realized that you needed to shine without me.
Then you came here and started really blowing up.
Watching you thrive in San Jose has been one of the joys of my life. ”
“Thanks, Mom,” Theo said, deflecting the earnestness of Rowan’s words.
Rowan wasn’t always great at picking out the intricacies of emotional situations, but sometimes he was shockingly good at saying exactly what was in his heart.
Occasionally it made Theo uncomfortable, but mostly, it made him trust what Rowan told him in moments like these. Rowan was a bad liar.
“And now that everyone knows you’re great without me, we can show them how incredible we are together.”
“I still can’t believe how good we are together.” Theo had turned his snake jar around in order to paint his jersey number on the back. If he was going to make this objectively embarrassing thing, he might as well go whole hog about it, giant 27 on the back and everything.
“You don’t believe it?”
“I haven’t always been on a line that had two of the top scorers in the league on it,” Theo said. “Not everyone is Rowan-and-Felix.”
“No. We’re Theo-and-Rowan.” Theo knew Rowan put his name first on purpose. Rowan truly believed that his own hype was overblown, which had always been hilarious to Theo.
Theo-and-Rowan. He liked the way that sounded coming out of Rowan’s mouth, even if he wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. But part of his heart was starting to believe that this could work. They were together now. Why not be together ?
“Dude, what is going on with that dinosaur?” Theo asked. Rowan had tried to paint the spikes going down the dinosaur’s back and tail a mustardy yellow, but things were looking pretty muddy over there as the yellow paint mixed with the teal covering the dinosaur’s body.
“Maybe I should start over.”
“No,” Theo said, taking a bit of paper towel off the roll and wiping up the paint where it had been globbed on.
He marveled at how bad Rowan could be at things.
He was brilliant on the ice, no matter what the situation.
Off the ice, however, was another story.
“Just touch the paint up a little now. You can still fix it.”
* * *
As Rowan melded more seamlessly into Theo’s life, Theo started making sure he was included in more casual team stuff.
Video games on the road, lunch after morning skate.
Aaron and Mateo chirped him and chased him around the ice before practice started.
Link added him to the ping-pong bracket.
Drew and Tommy got the locker room to call him RoRo.
Nothing like a dumb nickname to assimilate a hockey player into the group.
Once Theo got over his own bullshit, it changed the atmosphere in the locker room.
Theo thought he was putting his feelings aside for hockey, and that’s why he and Rowan were so good together on the ice.
That wasn’t true. They were that good on the ice when there was tension throughout the entire team.
They were amazing on the ice when the team was integrated, all on the same page, and overall, loving.
When Rowan melted away Theo’s hostility, hockey became fun again.
And not just because they were winning, but because everyone on their team loved being on the ice with each other.
Winning never hurt, though. Theo was experiencing the best season of hockey he ever had.
And on the side, Rowan was still trying hard to make things right between them.
They had a night off as they were hurtling toward playoffs, when Rowan decided to cook for Theo.
“I’m making pork chops,” he said as he bustled around the kitchen, emptying the Whole Foods bag he got between leaving the rink after practice and coming home.
“Do you have a Rolodex of everything I loved when I was a teenager?”
Rowan paused, a plastic bag of broccoli in his hand. “Do you not like pork chops anymore?”
“Oh, I do. This is really sweet of you. Can I help?”
“No, this is something I want to do for you,” he said. In the eight years since they had last spent every waking hour together, he was sure Rowan would have needed to cook something. He just couldn’t really imagine it.
“Go sit down in the living room. Play some video games or something. Give me an hour.”
“Alright. Call me if you need me.”
“And it’s just my brain.”
“What is?”
“The Rolodex of all the things you liked when we were kids. It’s all just in my brain.”