Chapter 12 #2
Shane lay on the couch after she hung up and did not sleep.
In the morning he heard, through the channels a hockey market runs on, that Theo Lindgren had walked into Mercer’s office and told the coach the truth about his shoulder and pulled his own name out of the call-up.
Shane sat up so fast he knocked the stranger’s beer off the table, and he was in his financed car before he’d found both shoes.
* * *
The drive was eight minutes and Shane made it last forever.
He knew this road. He’d driven it home behind the Volvo’s taillights all season, the patient car that followed him home like they were a thing that went home together, and he drove it now alone with both hands strangling the wheel and one shoe on.
Somewhere around the third light he caught himself doing the thing.
Planning the exit. Already rehearsing how he’d make it okay for Theo when Theo came to his senses, already packing a bag in his head, because that was the move, that had always been the move, you left before you got left, you carried your own bags out the door so nobody got to watch you be the one who couldn’t keep anything.
His father had taught him that without ever once saying it.
You learned it from a man who packed a car in the dark and didn’t take you.
And Shane heard his mother’s voice say he’s not your father, he is not going to leave you for needing him, and for the first time in his life, Shane looked at the running and recognized it as running, named it flat and exact: this is the move that loses him.
He had spent a season learning to defend a lead.
He knew, finally, what it cost to stop drifting up-ice on the gamble and just hold.
So he held. He drove to the apartment instead of away from it.
It was the bravest thing he’d ever done. It was just driving home.
He came in Shane-furious: loud and wet and barely holding together.
“You told Mercer about the shoulder.” He didn’t even take his coat off, standing in the entryway where it had all started.
“You told him it’s recurrent. You took yourself out.
For me. That’s your visa, Theo, no NHL look means no contract means they put you on a plane, and you walked in there and torched the one thing that could’ve kept you in the country, you absolute—” His voice broke.
“I won’t take it. You hear me? Chicago calls, I tell them no. I’ll turn it down, I’ll—”
“You will not.”
“Watch me—”
“Shane.” Theo crossed the room. He was done with the wall; he’d left the wall in Mercer’s office.
“Listen to me. For once in your stubborn life, do not talk, and listen. You think I did this for you. I did not do this for you.” He took Shane’s face in his hands, the good arm and the braced one both, careful, as careful as he was about everything that mattered.
“I did it for me. Do you understand the difference? My whole life I have given things to people so they would keep me. The money to your mother, I made it small so you would take it. I needed you to need me, and I called it love, and it was not.” His thumbs moved over Shane’s cheekbones.
“This is the first thing I have ever given that I did not disguise. I am not making it small. I am not pretending it costs nothing. It costs me everything, and I am telling you the price out loud, and I am giving it to you anyway, not so you will keep me, you might not keep me, I might be in Sweden by summer, but because I want you to have it. Your mother. The show. All of it. I want it for you more than I want it for myself, and wanting something for someone else more than for yourself, with nothing disguised and nothing owed—” his voice finally went, the iceberg gone “—that is the only un-fake thing I have ever done. So let me. Let me want you to have this. Not because I owe you. Because I love you, and this is what it looks like when I am not hiding it.”
Shane was crying and didn’t try to stop, didn’t narrate it, didn’t make a joke to take the curse off it.
New. His hands came up and gripped Theo’s wrists, not to pull them away, just to hold on, to confirm they were real.
Every instinct he had was screaming the old screams: fix it, even it, give back right now so the ledger’s clean, so you’re not the one who owes.
He’d spent his whole life keeping the ledger clean.
You didn’t get left if nobody could say you took more than you gave.
And here was a man who had torn the ledger up.
Who’d emptied his only account and pulled his own name out of the show and stood in a cold entryway telling Shane the price out loud and handing it over anyway, with nothing owed, nothing to pay back, no way to make it even.
There was no evening this. Nothing to carry back.
No way to owe his way out of it. Shane could not provide his way out of being loved.
“I don’t know how to be carried,” Shane whispered. “I’ve never. My whole life I’m the one who—”
“I know,” Theo said. “Your mother told me. In the kitchen, when you were at the sink. She said you would rather die than be carried.” He pressed his forehead to Shane’s.
“Do not die, Shane. Be carried. Just this once. Take the call. Save her. Let me give you the only real thing I have. And then,” he swallowed, “and then we figure out the rest. The ninety miles. The visa. Tripp. All of it. Together, this time. You do not carry it alone and I do not give it away alone. We figure it out like married people. Badly. Together. Yes?”
And Shane Novak, who had carried everything his whole life, who had run from a motel with two duffels and not looked back, stood in his own entryway with his hands on Theo’s wrists and let himself be held.
“Yeah,” he said, wrecked, into Theo’s neck. “Yeah. Okay. Together.” And then, because he was Shane: “But for the record, you’re an idiot, and we are absolutely figuring out the shoulder, you’re getting the surgery, I don’t care what it does to your numbers, your numbers, I’m gonna kill you—”
“You are talking again.”
“I’m gonna talk forever, you signed up for it, it’s in the folder—”
And Theo laughed, the real one, the one that hurt his face, and held his husband in the cold apartment while the season clock ran down, and somewhere in Chicago a hole in the blue line waited, and for the first time the two of them stood on the same side of it.
* * *
The apartment was sixty-three degrees because the thermostat had two settings, off and a temperature Theo refused to pay for, and Shane was still in his coat, and Theo was the one who started taking it off him.
That was new too. All season the order had run the other direction: Shane stripping the layers off Theo’s tired body, careful at the right side, easing each one over the brace, learning it by feel.
Now Theo’s hands worked the zipper down with the deliberateness he gave a roster, taking inventory of Shane, item by item, and the coat came off the shoulders and Shane let it, and the scarf, and Shane let that too, and then they were standing in the entryway where it had all started with nothing between them but the cold and the fact of it, and Theo said, “I am not making this small either,” and kissed him.
It was not a careful kiss. He’d spent four days being careful, careful in Mercer’s office, careful in the lot with Marek, careful with a thing he had already decided to lose, and now he had decided not to lose it and the carefulness had nowhere to go, so it went into his mouth, into the hand that came up and gripped the back of Shane’s neck, into walking Shane backward two steps until Shane’s spine met the door he’d come through, and Shane made a sound against his teeth that was relief and grief and a season of wanting all at once, and grabbed two fistfuls of Theo’s shirt and pulled instead of pushed.
For once. Pulled him in. He’d run with two duffels and a head start and he was done running, and his body knew it before the rest of him did, the play first, always the play first.
“Your hands are freezing,” Theo said against his mouth.
“They’re always freezing, it’s a circulation thing, you’ve known me a—”
“I have a method.” And Theo took both of Shane’s bad cold hands and pushed them up under his own shirt, flat against his stomach, against the heat of him, holding them there with his good hand while the cold of Shane’s palms made him hiss and not move away, warming the hands that had carried everything all season the only way he knew, by giving them somewhere to be.
Shane’s breath went ragged. He spread his fingers on the muscle there and Theo’s stomach jumped under them and he thought, dazed, that he was being warmed, that someone was warming him, that this was a thing that could be done to him and he was letting it.
“Four days,” Shane said into his jaw, hands sliding lower under the shirt, finding the waistband, the heat above it.
“Four days on Wozniak’s couch with you in my head, four days of getting hard at two in the morning thinking about your hands and hating myself for it, and you’re standing here warming me up like I never ran.
God. I want you so bad I can’t see straight, I want your mouth and your hands and I want you to fuck the four days right out of me, is that, can I—”
“Yes,” Theo said. “All of it. Yes.”