Chapter 2
DENNY
I dig my skate into the ice and propel myself forward. The cold air bites against my cheeks. I relish the feeling. I like the burn, not just the cold air on my skin, but the burn in my lungs. The burn in my muscles as I push harder.
The one thing I haven’t let suffer as my stress mounts higher and higher is my game. If anything, it’s my escape. I’m throwing all my energy into hockey because that’s the only thing that brings me peace. It allows me to shut down everything else and focus.
I’d like to say that during hockey, I don’t feel guilty because all I can feel is hockey. Among all the things that hockey is, it’s also a feeling. At least to me. It’s vibrancy. Action. Excitement. Adrenaline. Strategy. Muscle memory. Mental.
During the last few months, as Sally’s due date slowly approaches like a ticking bomb, I’ve thrown myself into hockey more and more in an attempt to avoid my reality outside of hockey.
I've seen the progression of my skills. I’ve scored more goals.
I’ve accomplished more assists. I’ve upped my game.
I’ve become a better hockey player.
That’s why I feel more guilt. While I should be supporting Sally, I’m getting better at hockey. Like my escape from responsibilities manifests in a better athlete.
Carson’s words linger in my head. Everything he’s said. Giving me permission not to be a parent, even if I face backlash at every turn because of it. The revelation of his childhood. Remembering mine.
I don’t have a good relationship with my parents.
Either parent. In fact, I haven’t spoken to either in more than two years.
While I’ve never truly put it into words, I don’t like my parents.
I don’t forgive them for the feeling of unwant that never left me as a kid.
The predominant memory I have from childhood is my parents yelling at each other.
The animosity. The frustration. The way their misery focused on us in the form of indifference.
The absence of affection. The absence of pride in anything we did.
Their complete dissociation in our lives and toward us.
Do they think they did well by us? Do they think we lived a good childhood, a healthy childhood, when that’s what we grew up with? Do they consider themselves good parents because they did as was expected of them and stayed married ‘for the children’?
My momentum carries me around Felton’s net. I’m going fast enough that I nearly lose control of my trajectory and slam into the boards. It’s luck more than skill that keeps me upright as I come out of the turn.
My stick connects with a puck as I add more speed and fly down the length of the rink toward Marion Arivitis, our second goalie.
His eyes are on me. Maybe because I’m moving so quickly.
His glove moves to catch Nason Jordan’s shot.
I’m impressed that he stops it even though his attention is fully on me.
I can hear Felton praise him from the other end of the rink.
I keep the puck as I slingshot myself around his net.
When I come out the other side, there’s not as much force behind my shot as there could have been.
Not what is expected of the aggressive way I’m skating around the rink.
That might be why he nearly misses it. He doesn’t miss.
He stops it with the pad of his knee when he drops to the ice.
He flashes me a smile, and I do my best to return it, but I’m already halfway down the ice again. I grab another puck and lazily send it toward Felton when I’m far too far away to make an accurate shot around everyone in my path. It doesn’t make it to the crease. Willits Hopland intercepts.
Coach Shively blows his whistle. It’s a loud, short burst that has me standing upright and allowing friction to slow me down as I adjust the angle of my blades toward the bench. The team converges. I lean over the half wall to reach for my water bottle.
Ren’s gloved hand comes down on my back as I straighten.
I meet his dark eyes as I squirt a stream of water into my mouth.
We haven’t spoken since the other day at Zenia’s.
Admittedly, I’ve been lost in my head as I work through the storm of events playing out in my life.
I’m a wrecking ball that nothing can stop as I rush toward the enormous glass window. Ready to shatter everything around me.
Except maybe I’m made of glass too. There are already too many cracks in my exterior to rush through the glass and come out whole on the other side.
“Everything good?” Coach asks. His eyes are on me.
I incline my head. “Enjoying some speed. Sorry, Coach.”
He shakes his head. “No need to apologize, Willow.”
“Flying around like a bulldozer,” Jackson Troy, one of our centers, says. “I feel like I’m going to be steamrolled if I get in your path.”
“Sorry,” I repeat.
“Don’t be sorry,” Zenia says. “If Troy’s too slow to get out of your way, he needs to work on his reflexes.” He shoves Troy.
Troy snorts.
“We’re going to switch to three on three, half ice,” Coach says. “Even versus odd numbers. Same rules as half-court basketball—bring the puck to the middle when you recover from your opponents. Six-minute bursts. Lowest six numbers at Felton’s net. The next six at Marion’s. Go.”
“What is this called?” Dasan Ukiah asks, amused as he heads for Felton’s net. “A Coach Shiv drill?”
Coach acts as if he doesn’t hear Dasan while he watches everyone looking at each other’s numbers and splitting up as assigned. I’m on the bench. Ren drops beside me. I hate sitting still, even as I catch my breath from racing around.
The six minutes feel like they drag. There’s no big clock overhead counting down our minutes, though I wish there were. It isn’t until Ren’s hand lands on my leg that I realize it’s bouncing. Nervous energy.
With a deep breath, I stop my incessant fidgeting. My eyes flicker to his, and I give him a smile. His attention is mostly on Felton, as it always is. For just a minute, I let his very obvious affection for our giant of a goalie make me truly smile.
It hasn’t been long since the two of them have been together. Not that Ren has actually told us they’re together. He rarely offers up anything personal that takes place in his life, so I’m entirely unsurprised that he’s kept whatever is between them to himself.
However, he has let us in, though in very unconventional ways.
For the past couple years, my friends and I have found ourselves exploring what we call group activities, which actually translates to gang bangs. We pick up a girl and bring her back to a hotel room as we take turns with her.
Always a willing and completely sober participant. Always someone who doesn’t recognize us, which means no hockey fans.
Once, we accidentally brought home a guy. We’d been startled when he undressed and challenged us with, “What, you’ve never seen a femboy before?”
It was awkward at first. Even as he promised us that his hole was better than any other we’d ever had before. I think we only continued with the gang bang out of curiosity. Perhaps some challenge because we wanted to prove him wrong.
As it turns out, I think he was right.
Since that incident, I’m positive that we’ve all questioned a whole lot about ourselves. But not out loud. We never repeated the incident. I believe we made sure that the person we picked up after that was a girl. This was never something we talked about. Nothing we agreed on.
That is, right up until Ren approached us and asked us to consider gang banging Felton while he was blindfolded and had no idea who was there fucking him. We’ve done so twice now. There was a very distinct difference between the first and second times.
The first was the very first time that we fucked the same person, and Ren didn’t join us.
We’ve always had this unwritten rule that group activities only happened when all five of us were involved.
While Ren was obviously turned on, he maintained that he wasn’t going to be involved.
He wasn’t fucking Felton. He was there to make sure Felton felt safe.
That was the beginning of all of us truly facing the eggplant in the room.
We weren’t straight. None of us. Some struggled with that more than others—such as Zenia.
I think he still struggles. My questions became loud, and I experimented on my own, needing to answer the new ideas in my head with solid proof of what I suspected about myself.
But the second time we all fucked Felton?
There was a very distinct shift in Ren and how he treated Felton.
He took Felton last and was the only one who didn’t use a condom.
I think we all formed crushes on Ren that day.
The hottest damn thing I’ve ever seen. While I teasingly said I wanted to be kissed in the way he kissed Felton, that is probably the most potent memory I took away from the gang bang.
My point is that Ren is aware of me. His hand on my leg is his silent show of support, knowing this isn’t the place for a conversation. But his attention is still almost solely on Felton. Felton is in a better place because of it.
Then again, something went down recently and Felton…
well, he fell into a dark hole. Remembering this, I stare at Felton.
He’s focused on the puck, on his teammates.
I can see the stress in his form, though.
It makes him slower to respond. His movements are stiff.
But it’s the first time he’s been on the ice in a couple weeks where he’s remained for all of practice so far.
I lean into Ren for a second, and he glances at me. “He good?” I ask.
Ren tilts his head to the side and faces Felton again. “Eh,” he answers.
“He need anything?”
He turns to look at me again and smiles. Ren’s smiles are always small. Quiet. Reserved. Reflecting his personality. “We’re working on it, but thanks.”
I incline my head.
I’m just getting to my feet for the swap out when our assistant coach, Reno Fernley, stops in front of me just beyond the half wall. “Go to the hospital,” he says, patting my chest. “She’s in labor.”
I’d like to say that the feeling that washes over my body is excitement.
Chills of adrenaline or maybe… happiness.
The way my gut twists isn’t just nerves.
It’s in dread. The edges of my vision darken, and for just a second, I stand perfectly still as I struggle to remember how to make my lungs function.
I’m sure there are noises around me as I skate toward the chute. It’s likely that Reno was overheard, and my team is saying something. I don’t hear anything but the whooshing of blood in my ears.
I’m not ready for this. I haven’t worked out how to talk to Sally. I haven’t come up with the words to begin a discussion on the raging storm that’s threatening to bury me.
Now it’s too late. Dread turns to dizziness as I drop to the bench in the locker room. I’ve never in my entire life had a panic attack, and yet I find myself leaning forward to try to get my head between my knees as I struggle not to come apart at the seams.
It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.
I try to convince myself over and over. I don’t know what to do right now. I’ve never felt like this. I’m going to be sick. I’m going to pass out. Oh my god, I’m going to pass out.
A hand on my head makes me jerk upright, and my head throbs. Ren stands over me. “Back down,” he says quietly, and I let my head drop. Eyes closed, I listen to the sound of him moving. His hand stays on my head as he kneels in front of me. “Listen to me and just breathe, Denny.”
I feel foolish listening to him literally instruct me when to inhale and when to exhale. We’re born doing this on our own, and I can’t find the control to make myself breathe like a normal human being right now.
Then again, my breathing is the least of my concerns. I need to get to the hospital. I need to drive there without passing out behind the wheel.
“You want me to drive you?” Ren asks after a minute like he’s read my mind.
“You can’t. What about Felton?”
“I’ll make sure Felton is taken care of, but sometimes our friends need to be taken care of too.”
I should just tell him I’m fine, but the idea of getting behind the wheel right now is terrifying. “Yeah,” I answer.
“You need to take a shower. You smell.”
His teasing—though likely truthful—makes me snort. It helps to take my mind off the feeling that my world is about to crash and burn.
Ren’s presence in the locker room is grounding. Maybe it’s his calm. His presence has always felt like a pillar. He feels like peace. I’m almost loath to get into the shower because he’ll be out of my sight, and I think I need to see him so I have someone to focus on.
You know you have a good friend when they’re willing to keep the curtains open in the shower stalls just so you can see them.
Then again, maybe it’s because we’re not at all unfamiliar with being naked together.
There’s a chance that it lends a lot of credence to the reason I feel so comfortable with our nudity.
As if he’s in my head, Ren doesn’t leave my sight.
Not as we shower. Not as we dry and dress.
He drives me to the hospital. He comes inside with me, joining me in the maternity ward.
We check in, and a nurse tells me that my son was just born.
Once Sally is cleaned up and the baby is all checked over, I can go in.
I barely hold myself together until the nurse turns away. Ren sits me down, and I once again try to channel my focus on him so I don’t collapse onto the floor and hyperventilate.
Minutes pass. Maybe a lot of minutes. When I blink back into existence, I’m standing in Sally’s room. A tiny, sleeping human is placed in my arms, and I stare down at him.
“His name is Tyler Dennison Willow,” Sally says quietly.
I’d like to say that something profound comes over me as I stare down at my newborn son. I’d love to say that suddenly everything comes into focus and I’m overcome with some monumental change that this is now the most important thing in my entire life.
That’s not what happens. I wait. As I stare at Tyler, I wait for it, but the only thing I feel are tears because yes, I do love this little boy—something that I’m slightly surprised about, if I’m being honest with myself.
But I also know I’m about to ruin his damn life if I can’t somehow talk to Sally like a fucking adult.
Dread is still the most predominant feeling inside me.