Chapter 6
They lost Saturday because of Shane, and everyone in the building knew it, and worst of all Shane knew it.
The loss had been in his legs since the buzzer.
Third period, tie game, a chance to climb out of the wild-card scrum into safer ground, and Shane had jumped up into the play on a read that wasn’t there, the gambler’s read, the one that made him special on the power play and a liability everywhere else, and the puck had gone the other way and there’d been nobody home because the one time Shane needed the house, he’d built the gamble on a night the house couldn’t get back, Theo a half-step slow on a shoulder he was hiding, two-on-one and then a goal and then the dagger and then the buzzer, and then thirty-eight minutes of sitting in full gear pretending he was fine.
Mercer didn’t even yell. That was the worst part. He just looked at Shane in the room after, a long flat look, and said, “We’ll talk Monday” (I am too tired to tell you what you cost us), and left, and the room emptied out in the grim shuffle of a team that needed a drink.
The dive bar near the rink was called the Blue Line, because of course it was, the place the Blaze went to be sad in private, and Shane sat at the end of the bar nursing a club soda because even now, even sick with it, he wouldn’t break the diet, and he stewed.
The team filtered in around him, in twos and threes, the postgame ritual.
Wozniak and a couple of the kids took the pool table and pretended the loss hadn’t happened, which was how the young ones coped.
Marek sat with the older guys near the door, nursing one beer, holding court as captains did, and at one point he looked down the bar at Shane sitting alone and his face softened, and Shane braced for him to come over and say the captain thing, the shake it off, kid, it’s one game thing, and Marek didn’t.
He just lifted his beer an inch, a small acknowledgment, I see you sitting down there flagellating yourself, and left Shane to it. Somehow worse and kinder both.
Tripp Vandenberg was at the pool table being loud about a shot, twenty-one and untouched by the loss, and Shane watched him and the gap between the AHL and the show had never been wider, a canyon you could spend your whole career failing to clear.
He turned back to his club soda. He thought about his mother, three hundred miles away, asleep or not asleep, her legs a little worse than last month.
He thought about a number that wasn’t his problem anymore because a Swedish iceberg had made it his own problem instead, paid in full, up front, and how that should have been rescue and was drowning in a different ocean.
Theo found him there an hour in. Sat down one stool over. Ordered a beer he wouldn’t finish, because Theo Lindgren didn’t drink so much as hold a drink as a social prop, and for a while neither of them said anything.
“Say it,” Shane said.
“Say what.”
“That it was my fault. The goal. Get it over with.”
“It was your fault,” Theo said, agreeably, and Shane’s head whipped around, and Theo took a slow sip and added, “and I was slow on the back side, because my shoulder is bad, which you know, which you helped me hide, so it is also my fault, and we will both think it is entirely our own fault all night, separately. It is stupid. It was a bad shift. It happens. Eat something.”
“Stop telling me to eat.”
“Then stop bonking and turning the puck over in the third.”
“That is not why I—” Shane was on his feet without deciding to be, the stool scraping. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to be reasonable about it. I cost us the game. Say I cost us the game and be a dick about it like a normal person.”
Theo looked up at him, unbothered, infuriating, the calm a wall Shane wanted to put his fist through.
“You want me to be cruel,” Theo said, “so you can stop hating yourself and hate me instead. I know this trick. I invented this trick.” He set down the beer.
“I will not do it. Go home. You are exhausted and you did not eat and standing here makes it worse.”
“Don’t tell me what I—”
“Go home, Shane.”
And Shane went, because the alternative was crying in the Blue Line in front of Marek and the boys, and he slammed out into the four-degree dark and got in his financed car and drove the eight minutes home with his jaw clenched so tight it ached, and Theo’s headlights were in his mirror the whole way, the patient Volvo, following him home as it always did now, as though they were a thing that went home together, and that was the part that finally cracked him.
* * *
The fight came inside with them.
“You followed me,” Shane said, throwing his keys at the counter, missing, not caring. “You couldn’t just let me—”
“We live in the same apartment,” Theo said, shutting the door. “I was also driving here. This is not a romantic gesture, it is geography.”
“See, that, right there—” Shane rounded on him in the cold dark of the entryway, both of them still in their coats, the apartment sixty-three degrees and somehow the air between them not cold at all.
“You always have to be — you’re so calm, you’re so above it, you sit there being a glacier while I’m — I cost us the game, Theo, I cost us two points we can’t get back, and you just, eat something, go home, treating me like a kid having a tantrum—”
“You are having a tantrum.”
“Because you make me—!”
“I make you nothing,” Theo said, his voice dropping low and rough, pale eyes lit, not calm at all, maybe never calm, maybe holding very, very still over heat he’d never let out.
“You think I am above it. I am not above it. I am holding it. There is a difference, and you do not know the difference because you let everything out of your mouth the second you feel it, and I let nothing, ever, and tonight I am very tired, Shane, and you are standing in my entryway begging me to be cruel to you, and I am trying very hard not to give you what you want.”
Shane went still. “And what do I want.”
The question landed wrong, landed real, and they both heard it, and the silence went dense the way it does the half-second before a hit you can’t avoid.
“You know what you want,” Theo said.
“Say it.”
“No.”
“Coward,” Shane said, and grabbed two fistfuls of Theo’s coat and hauled him down and kissed him, hard, furious, teeth and no finesse, a kiss that was the argument continued by other means, and for one terrible suspended second Theo didn’t move, went stone, and Shane thought I have ruined everything, the deal, the money, my mother, everything, and then Theo made a low broken sound against his mouth and kissed him back, desperate, Shane the only air there was.
It was not gentle. Neither of them had it in them to be gentle, not tonight, wired and bruised and sleepless and sick of holding it.
Theo got Shane’s coat off his shoulders and walked him into the counter with the whole patient mass of him, and Shane bit his lower lip and got bitten back, harder, and made a sound into Theo’s mouth that he would have denied under oath, and got his hands up under Theo’s shirt, his palms on the slabs of muscle, the deep tired heat of him, dragging blunt nails down, and Theo shuddered, actual shudder, the iceberg shuddering, and Theo turned so Shane’s grip never landed on the bad shoulder, even now, even fucking now, the body’s old vigilance; and that, the helpless competence of the man even falling apart, made Shane’s chest go hollow as no fight ever had.
“This means nothing,” Shane said against his jaw, his mouth, his throat, walking them backward toward the bedroom, the only bed, his bed now by the terms of the agreement, the agreement that said nothing else, the agreement being shredded.
“You hear me? This is — adrenaline. Blowing off steam. It’s nothing.
It’s you being a smug Swedish wall all season and me wanting to climb the wall, that’s all this is, this is me climbing the wall, this is, fuck, do that again. ”
Theo had put his mouth on the hinge of Shane’s jaw, under the ear, teeth and then tongue, and he did it again.
“You talk through everything,” Theo said into his neck.
“Yeah, you’re gonna learn that about me, I talk during, I talk a lot during, ask anybody. No. Don’t ask anybody. Don’t ask anybody anything ever. Bed. Now. Yes?”
“Yes,” Theo said.
“Nothing,” Shane reminded him, reminded himself, hauling Theo’s shirt up.
“Nothing,” Theo agreed, hoarse, and pulled Shane’s shirt over his head and stood there for one second in the dark looking at him, bare-chested and bruised, breathing hard, and the look on his face was not a man surveying nothing.
His hands: Shane knew those hands, had watched them tie his shoes, hold his shoulder, do everything with the same unhurried sureness.
Those hands skated down Shane’s bruised ribs and Shane hissed, and Theo went still. “Where,” he said.
“What?”
“You are hurt. Where.”
“I blocked a shot in the second, it’s nothing, don’t—”
But Theo had already found it, the deep purple bloom over the floating rib, and instead of being careful around it, Theo bent his head and pressed his mouth to it, soft, deliberate, a tenderness so total in the middle of all the fury that Shane’s knees actually went, and he sat down hard on the edge of the bed and Theo followed him down, came over him, huge and warm and finally, finally not calm at all.
“You block shots like you are trying to die,” Theo said, low, against Shane’s sternum, working down.
“Every game. I watch you. I have watched you all season give your body away for a team that did not draft you, a coach who yells at you, a city that does not know your name, and I think, who taught this man he was only worth what he gives,” and Shane’s eyes stung, blurred, because nobody had ever (nobody saw that, nobody was supposed to see that) and Theo looked up the line of him and said, “tonight you give nothing. Tonight someone does for you. Let me.”