Chapter 12 #3
They got down the short hall in stages, because Shane kept stopping to put his mouth on Theo’s jaw, his throat, the cord of his neck, kept talking into the skin, half words, you, missed, four days, and Theo kept letting him, kept catching the doorframes one-handed to steady them, and at the bedroom Shane pulled the rest of Theo’s shirt up and off and then stopped, because there it was.
The brace. The right shoulder strapped in black neoprene and Velcro, the joint that had failed against the rival and would fail again, the truth Theo had told out loud at last. Shane put his cold mouth to the top of it, the bare skin above the strap, gentle where the rest of him was not.
“We’re getting that fixed,” he said.
“Later.”
“I mean it, I don’t care about your numbers—”
“Shane.” Theo took his face in the good hand.
“Later. Right now you are going to lie down, and you are going to stop fixing things, and you are going to let me.” He undid Shane’s belt as he said it, the buckle Shane’s frozen fingers would have fumbled, dragged the zipper down, pushed his hand inside and took hold of Shane’s dick through the cotton, blunt, no preamble, a man picking up a thing that belonged to him, and Shane’s whole body jolted into his palm.
The deliberateness was back, the counting. “Yes?”
“Yeah.” It came out cracked. “God, yeah. Yes. Whatever you want.”
“You are hard already.”
“I’ve been hard since the entryway, you said I am not making this small and my dick heard you, that’s where I’m at, that’s the whole—” and Theo squeezed, slow, and the sentence died.
The bed was the one bed, the all-his-side bed Theo had slept wrong in for four nights, and they fell into it half-dressed and got the rest off in a tangle, jeans and socks kicked to the cold floor, Shane’s underwear hooked off one ankle with a foot because his hands were busy, and then it was skin and the sixty-three degrees raised gooseflesh everywhere their bodies weren’t touching so they touched everywhere, Shane pulling Theo down on top of him, taking the weight, wanting the weight, the press of another whole person who had decided to stay.
Theo braced on his good arm. The right he kept tucked, the elbow in, and Shane caught the adjustment and rolled them without being asked, smooth, reading it as a play developing, so the bad shoulder came down into the pillow and the good arm was free, so Theo didn’t have to ask, so nobody had to say the word careful.
“There,” Shane said, settling over him, knees bracketing his hips, and looked down at the man who’d given everything away with nothing disguised. Hard against Theo’s hip, flushed down his chest, grinning and wet-eyed at once. “Now you can’t reach the folder.”
“You are talking.”
“Make me stop.”
Theo’s hand was already moving, the good one, wrapping them both together where they were both hard between their stomachs, dicks pressed in one slick fist, and Shane’s smart mouth shut on a groan and his head went back and his hips went, helpless, fucking into the grip, into the friction, into the drag of Theo against him, and Theo watched him as he watched everything that mattered, taking it in, filing it.
The flush spreading down Shane’s chest, the cords standing in his throat, the cold hands now planted on Theo’s good shoulder and the pillow by his ear, the small punched-out uh he made on every downstroke and would have died to know he made.
“Harder,” Theo said.
“You. Okay. Yeah.”
“Harder, Shane. I am not careful tonight. You will not break me.” He tightened his fist and twisted at the top and Shane swore, broke, ran, the old run-on rhythm turned clean around into want: “fuck, fuck, okay, you’re gonna make me come in four minutes and I refuse, I have plans, I had four days to make plans, don’t stop, that, do that, your thumb, right there, fuck, I’ve got you, don’t worry about the shoulder, shoulder’s under, I’ve got the weight, I’ve got you,” meaning he had the position, the bad side safe in the pillow, meaning he could do this part, this he could carry, and Theo let him carry it, let himself be braced over and rocked into and held, let Shane grind down into his fist until they were both leaking and the slide of it went easy and obscene and loud in the quiet cold room.
He’d wanted this so long he’d filed it under things that cost too much. He stopped filing.
“I want,” Theo said, and stopped, because the sentence was hard, because for thirty years his sentences had ended in what other people needed.
He started again. “You. Inside me.” Flat, plain, no disguise on it.
“I have wanted it the whole season. I am telling you the price out loud — your hands and then your dick, tonight, now, while I am still brave. I want you to fuck me.”
Shane went still over him. All of him, even the mouth.
“Say words,” Theo said.
“You said fuck,” Shane said, voice dropped to almost nothing.
“Okay. Okay, yeah, words, here’s words: yes, God, yes, I’ve thought about it since November, you on your back saying my name, I used to lie there listening to you breathe and want it so bad my teeth hurt, tell me if anything’s wrong, tell me about the shoulder, tell me everything, I want to hear all of it,” and he was already reaching blind to the drawer they both knew, the one on Theo’s side, knocking the lube against the lamp, catching it.
His cold hands warmed fast against the heat of the work.
He slicked his fingers and opened Theo with a patience that cost his loud body everything, one finger first, slow, watching Theo’s face for the verdict, getting it, “good, more,” then two, curling, finding the spot that made Theo’s hips come up off the mattress and his good hand fist in the sheet and his bad arm stay tucked, safe, and a sound come out of him that no opponent and no coach and no team in two countries had ever heard.
Shane talked him through all of it because Shane could not have shut up under anesthesia: “that’s it, there it is, look at you, you take it so good, you’re so tight and you’re letting me, you’re letting me, tell me when, tell me you want it, I want to hear you say it again. ”
“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“Now. I am ready. Now.”
“Yeah,” Shane breathed, “yeah, okay,” and slicked himself with a shaking hand and lined up and pushed in slow, watching his face the whole time, sinking in by degrees, the heat and the grip of him, and Theo’s breath left him in a long unspooling sound, the last of the wall going out with it.
Shane bottomed out and held there, forehead dropped to Theo’s, both of them shaking, and said, reverent and filthy in the same breath, “I’m inside you.
Fuck, Theo. Fuck. Say you’re good. Say it—”
“I am good.” A beat, the accent intact even now: “You are not moving.”
“Bossy,” Shane said, wrecked and grinning, and moved.
They found it the hard way, the good way: Shane braced on both arms above him keeping his weight off the bad shoulder without being told, hips working in long deep strokes that made Theo’s catalogued body forget the inventory, made him arch up off the mattress with his good hand clutching Shane’s back, fingers digging in hard enough to mark, the brace pressed harmless into the pillow, made him say things in two languages he would never say in the locker room, would never say flat, fortare and there and yes and once, low, unmistakable, fuck, and Shane moaned at that and drove in harder because Theo’s heels were pulling him in, because Theo’s body was demanding it, because for once neither of them was defending anything.
The cold room steamed at the window. The headboard knocked the wall in the rhythm of it and neither of them cared.
Shane’s frozen hands had gone hot, and he got one between them and stripped Theo’s dick in time with his hips, fast and slick and merciless, talking through all of it, “come on, come for me, let me see it, you don’t have to hold anything anymore, you don’t have to hold anything ever again. ”
Theo came first. Came hard, with his eyes open and on Shane’s, with nothing held back and nothing hidden and nothing owed, shooting between their stomachs in long pulses while he said Shane’s name as if it were the only word he’d ever meant, and the clench of it, the sight of it, the un-faked total surrender of the most careful man he’d ever known, dragged Shane over the edge right behind him, three more strokes and gone, buried deep, shaking, mouth open against Theo’s jaw, coming inside him with everything he had, into the one person who’d decided to keep him anyway.
After, Shane eased out careful and didn’t move off, just shifted his weight to the side of the bad shoulder, the wrong side, so Theo wouldn’t have to hold himself up, and pulled the blanket over them both against the sixty-three degrees.
They were a mess and neither of them moved to fix it.
His hands were warm. He noticed that first. His hands were warm and the weight under his sternum was gone.
“That wasn’t even,” Shane said into the dark, the old reflex, the ledger, but his voice had no fight in it. “I’ll never get this even. You gave away your whole life. I can’t pay this back.”
“No,” Theo agreed. He was tracing something on Shane’s spine with the cold-warmed fingers of his good hand, lazy, certain. “You cannot. There is no ledger anymore. I tore it up.” He pressed his mouth to Shane’s hair. “Stop counting. Come to bed.”
“I am in bed.”
“Then stay in it.”
And Shane, who had carried everything his whole life, stayed.
* * *
And so the call, when it came two days later, came for Shane.
Mercer told him in the office, the same beige office where he’d once said the day you learn to defend a lead is the day I can send your name down the road.
He didn’t make a speech. He said, “Bauer called. Chicago wants you up. Tomorrow.” Mercer almost smiled.
“She said you were the easy phone call, clean paperwork, young, upside. She also said, off the record, that she watched the Milwaukee tape three times and she’d never seen a defenseman try harder to lose his own audition.
She liked you anyway. You earned it. You defend a lead now, which I did not think I’d live to see.
” And then, gruffer, looking at his computer instead of at Shane: “For what it’s worth, and it isn’t nothing — Lindgren took himself out of it.
Came in here and told me the truth about that shoulder, then told me to give Bauer the honest read on you.
The pick was hers. She made it off the tape, not off him.
But he got out of your way on purpose, and a man doesn’t do that for a teammate he doesn’t—” Mercer stopped.
Cleared his throat. “Anyway. Pack a bag. Don’t embarrass me. ”
The room found out. They lost their minds, banging sticks on the floor, Wozniak whooping, guys pounding Shane’s shoulders hard enough to bruise.
Marek hugged him, hard, and said into his ear, “Go be great. And figure out the other thing, the ninety-miles thing, don’t let it die on the highway,” and Shane couldn’t answer because his throat had closed.
And across the room, at his stall, Theo was banging his stick with the rest of them, applauding the call-up he’d given away, his face doing the flat stone thing it did over the biggest feelings, and only Shane knew what it cost him, only Shane could read the grief under the celebration, and for one second across a loud locker room their eyes met and held: you did this for me, I know, I’d do it again, I love you, don’t you dare make this a goodbye.
Then Tripp Vandenberg stuck his hand out for Shane to shake, and the moment closed, and Shane shook the kid’s hand, and the kid said, low, just for Shane, “Earned it. Both of you. Go,” and let go.
Tripp Vandenberg, at the brink, did not make his phone call.
Theo saw the reason for himself, or part of it, two days before the call came up.
He’d gone back for a forgotten glove and found Marek and the kid in the tunnel outside the video room, Marek’s voice never once rising, one forearm laid flat against the cinderblock beside Tripp’s head, and Theo caught only the end of it: “—doesn’t get to keep a room.
Not here, not in Chicago, not anywhere the story follows him.
And it follows.” And Tripp’s face, the easy entitled face that had never in Theo’s memory been anything but sure of itself, went still, the particular stillness of a young man being shown, for the first time, the real price of a thing he’d been about to buy on credit.
Marek clapped his shoulder, friendly, which was somehow worse than a threat, and walked off whistling.
Whether it was that, or a conscience under the entitlement, or just that pulling the trigger played different up close than it had in the lot, the call to the league office never came.
The records stayed buried, and Tripp got sent the message every prospect gets sooner or later, that the spot comes when it comes and not before, and went back to being twenty-one and excellent and waiting, which is the whole job at twenty-one.
He nodded at Shane in the room the day the call came up. Just once. It was almost respect.
* * *
Shane packed his two duffels again, eleven minutes, the sum of him, but this time Theo packed the car, one-handed, stubborn, and this time it wasn’t leaving. It was just ninety miles.