26. Everett
The season ended four months after Sam arrived.
Conference final, game six, on the road.
Brody had rejoined the team by then — I made him go; a man can only pace a nursery so many times before he needs to hit something at speed for a living — and they took it as far as anyone honestly expected, and then a better-rested team with a deeper bench turned the lights out.
He came home the next morning on the first flight, and I braced for the mood I remembered, the one that used to slam gym doors and rattle plates.
What I got instead was a man who dropped his bag in the hall, showered off the airport, and spent forty minutes on the sofa with his son on his chest watching cartoons with the sound off.
“Next year,” was his entire post-mortem.
So that’s where we are. Summer. The arena dark, the group chat unbearable, and my son five months old and already conducting his life at full volume, which he gets from his father, along with the hair.
Today he’s strapped to my chest in the carrier, asleep, while I take the executive elevator up to a meeting I called myself.
Priya is already in the boardroom with Belanger, papers squared, and I watch them both make the adjustment they always make now — eyes to me, eyes to the small snoring cargo, back to me, professionally unmoved.
Belanger’s mouth twitches. He’s a grandfather four times over and it costs him visible effort not to say something.
“So,” Priya says. “The two-year mark is next spring. If we’re going out to buyers, the bankers want to start this summer. I’ve had three unsolicited approaches since the conference final — serious ones. I need instructions.”
This is the meeting where I sell my father’s team. I’ve had it circled for two years.
My father left me a franchise and one line of handwriting. Learn the game before you judge it, Ev. I hated that note. It was so exactly him — an instruction instead of an apology. It was homework from beyond the grave. He couldn’t say sorry, so he assigned me a sport.
Here’s the thing, though. I did it. Not for him.
And I’ve judged it. Some of it I will never love. I watched it eat my father alive, and there are nights it frightens me what it asks of the man I live with.
But I don’t take the game personally any more. Not for me. It’s something that the love of my life loves and I can love that.
“I’m not going to sell.”
Priya doesn’t move for a second. Then she draws one line through an entire page of her notes, with a ruler, which is the most emotion she’ll be showing today. “I’ll draft the announcement,” she says. “Ownership is not for sale but I’d like it minuted that I’ve earned a raise.”
“Minuted,” I say.
Belanger leans back and looks at me the whole length of the table. “Gordie used to say this club would outlive everybody who deserved it.” He taps the table twice. “Glad it’s staying in the family, Mr. Rourke.”
“Everett,” I say. “If you’re going to be running my team for the foreseeable, it’s Everett.”
“Then we’re agreed, Everett.” Two pumps and the squeeze. Sam sleeps through his first board decision, which shows excellent instincts. Half of governance is knowing when not to react.
Before I lose her to the announcement, Priya slides one more folder across. “And this arrived from the league’s counsel yesterday. You’ll want the short version.”
The short version: Cade Dorn is done. He went into the playoffs and in round one he left his feet and put a Kestrels winger into the stanchion.
This time there was no discretion left in the building to spend.
Indefinite suspension, upheld on appeal.
His club has terminated the contract. No one is picking him up — not with the disciplinary file, and not with two years of my lawyers’ letters stapled to the back of it.
“They were very keen to emphasize the decision was theirs alone,” Priya says, dryly.
“Of course it was. Send counsel something nice.”
“I already have. I paid their bill. It was big enough.”
I think about Linus, who spent a spring in a neck brace learning to fall asleep sitting up, and who has spent this one teaching my son to high-five.
On the way out, the elevator opens on the wrong floor, and it’s Sacco.
He’s in a polo shirt with the crest on it, holding a coffee. Then his eyes drop to the carrier.
Whatever the man’s face does next, he’d deny it.
“That him?”
“This is Sam.”
He bends down and studies my son with the expression I’ve seen him aim at game film. Sam, asleep, gives him nothing, because Sam is a professional.
“He’s got Gordie’s chin,” Sacco says at last.
“That’s not necessarily a compliment.”
“No,” he agrees. “Good chin, though.” He straightens up, and I watch him decide to say the rest. “I called you some things last year. In rooms you weren’t in. I was wrong about most of them.”
“Most.”
“I’m a work in progress.” He steps back into the elevator with his coffee.
“Keep the team,” he says, as the doors start to close.
“Whatever they’re telling you upstairs. This thing goes right the next few years, and it’ll be because of that idiot captain of yours and that Swedish kid, and Gordie’s grandson should be in the building for it. ”
The doors close on him before I can answer, which I suspect was the plan.
The announcement goes out at six. By seven the group chat has, I’m told, produced eleven variations of a joke about job security and one long voice note from Marchetti that no one has been brave enough to play.
*
Brody cooks that night. He does it with Sam parked in the bouncer on the counter, receiving a full tactical briefing of how the games are going.
I watch them from the doorway for longer than I’ll admit.
My alpha. My son.
The window over the sink is open to the summer evening and the whole room is woodsmoke and that new third scent that took up residence five months ago.
We put Sam down together. It goes to two verses of the tuneless nothing-song tonight; the moose supervises.
And then it’s just us on the landing in the half-dark, and my heart is going like I’ve climbed all six flights of a building I don’t live in anymore, because I’ve been carrying a decision all day and it’s time.
“Come here,” I say, and take his hand, and walk him to our room.
He comes easily. He always comes easily; it’s one of the first true things I learned about him — all that mass and menace, and he has never once used an ounce of it to take anything I didn’t offer.
He sits on the edge of the bed where I put him and looks up at me, and I stand between his knees and put my hands on his shoulders.
“I want you to claim me. Properly.”
He goes completely still. Under my palms, everything stops.
“Everett.”
“I’m sober,” I say. “I’m not in heat. I’m not postpartum-delirious, my hormones are as settled as they intend to be. I’ve thought about it for longer than I’ve thought about anything in my life.”
His hands come up and frame my face.
“You’re sure?”
“That’s the only time you get to ask.”
“Say it again anyway.”
“I’m sure. I want it. I have wanted it a long time.” I lean down until my mouth is at his ear. “And you’ll wear mine. That’s the condition. If I’m going around marked, so is the mighty Brody Callahan.”
The sound he makes is not a word. It travels straight down my spine anyway.
We undress each other slowly. I know his body as well as I know mine and it stops my breath a little regardless — the scarred knuckles, the shoulder I bit in a heat, the whole absurd enormous scale of him.
“Last chance to negotiate terms,” I tell him, as he lays me back.
“No negotiations.” His mouth moves down my throat and stops over the gland, which aches at the attention, a deep sweet pull I’ve stopped pretending isn’t there. “You. Me. Sam. Everything I’ve got. Sign here.”
“That’s a terrible contract.”
“Yeah. No exit clauses at all.”
He takes me apart with all the patience the first year never allowed us, and when he finally slides home we’re face to face, his forehead on mine, moving together slow and deep with the summer air coming through the window and both our scents rising, orange and woodsmoke braided so thick the room feels like one thing instead of two.
“Now,” I say, when I’m close, and tip my head back, and give him my throat.
“I love you,” he says — first, before anything else, so there’s no confusion about the order of it. “You maddening, beautiful — I love you.”
“I know. I love you. Now, Brody.”
His teeth close on the gland, and the world goes white.
Not pain. Or — pain the way stepping into winter air is cold: one violent, clarifying instant, and then warmth crashing in behind it, more warmth than one body can be expected to hold, and I understand halfway through the wave that it isn’t mine.
It’s his. It’s him — I can feel him — the awe blowing through him like weather off the river, the fierce blazing certainty, the steadiness under it all, that granite ledge of a man, and underneath everything else, ridiculous and enormous: gratitude.
He’s grateful. For me. I fall over the edge without a hand on me and take him with me, and somewhere in the middle of it I find the wet heat of his shoulder pulsing against my mouth.
I bite him back with everything I have.
The circuit closes. There’s no other way to say it. His pleasure floods into me and mine into him and back again, doubling, until neither of us can tell whose body is whose, and we ride it down wrapped so tightly together that afterward there are creases on my cheek from his collarbone.
For a long time the room is just breath.
“So that’s what all the fuss is about,” I manage, eventually.
His laugh moves through both of us — I feel it twice now, chest and chest — and he presses his mouth to the new mark with a tenderness that comes through the bond as clearly as the laugh did.
Mine, says everything in him, without a single alpha ounce of taking in it.
Mine, and I’m his, and both of us exactly where we chose to be.
“You realize the timing,” I say, into his chest, when speech seems worth attempting. “The will’s two years are up next spring. I could have sold the club, sold the flat’s replacement, been back in London by Christmas with a clean sheet and my old life.”
“And instead?” He knows the answer. Through the bond I can feel him wanting it out loud anyway, greedy as a rookie counting his first goal.
“Instead I own a hockey team, a truck-sized alpha, a moose painting, and the best thing I have ever produced, asleep down the hall.” I press my mouth once to the mark I made.
The baby monitor crackles. A snuffle. A complaint, pending.
“I’ll go,” I say, against his shoulder.
I pull on his T-shirt, which fits me like a marquee, and pad down the landing to the nursery, where Sam is babbling.
He settles the moment I pick him up and get his nose to my throat, one small hand splayed against the new mark.
“That’s your father,” I tell him quietly. “Permanent now. I checked the terms.”
Out the window, the summer dark, and somewhere across town the arena, ours.
Sam sighs against my neck and goes back to sleep.
We still have a lot to work out, Brody and I, but I’m confident that we will.
I can feel him even now, the love that he has for the both of us.
It’s everything that I didn’t know I was waiting for.
I slowly lower Sam back into his crib and watch his tiny sleeping face until I am sure that he is fast asleep and not about to wake again, then I go down the hall and slide into bed beside Brody.
He stirs slightly, then turns onto his side, sliding his big body alongside mine and holding me tight, as if he never intends to let go. And I know that neither of us will.