Chapter 13 #3
The Fury’s longest-tenured defenseman was a thirty-three-year-old named Andre Mensah, eight hundred NHL games, a quiet steady veteran who’d appointed himself the room’s unofficial den mother, and in Shane’s third week he sat down at the stall next to Shane’s after practice and said, without preamble, “Who is she.”
Shane’s stomach dropped. “What?”
“Or he. Whoever.” Andre was unlacing his skates, not looking up, the deliberate not-looking Shane knew from a season of an enormous Swede doing exactly that.
“You call somebody every night. You go quiet at your phone and your face changes, and then you put it away and you’re sad for ten minutes and you think nobody clocks it.
I’ve been in this league since you were in juniors, kid. I clock it. So. Long distance?”
Shane opened his mouth to deflect, the reflex, the no, just my mom, just a friend, and then he looked at Andre Mensah’s tired kind face and he was so tired of hiding.
“My husband,” Shane said. It came out scraped and quiet, the first time he’d ever said it to a teammate, the first time he’d said it out loud to anyone in hockey who wasn’t married to him, and the room kept right on being a room, and the world did not end.
“He’s — he plays in the Blaze. Rockford.
We’re, uh. It’s new. It’s complicated. There’s a — we got married kind of fast and now I’m up here and he’s down there and it’s ninety miles and I’m losing my mind a little. ”
Andre nodded, like Shane had told him the weather.
“That’s hard. The distance.” He pulled off a skate.
“And hey. Congratulations. On the marriage. Nobody up here’s gonna make it weird.
We just want you to play D and not get scored on.
” A beat, the ghost of a grin. “You’re a little soft in your own zone, though. Work on that.”
“Everybody keeps telling me that,” Shane said, and his voice cracked on it, and Andre pretended not to notice, and walked off, and left Shane sitting at his stall having just said my husband out loud and survived it.
He texted Theo before he’d even finished dressing. told a guy. Andre. about us. he said congrats and that I’m soft in my own zone. insane. good. I’m tired of hiding you.
The reply came fast, first ring of the text equivalent. You are soft in your own zone. But I am proud of you. We will not hide much longer. I promise. Also Andre Mensah is correct about the defensive zone, I have watched tape.
Shane laughed in the empty room, wet-eyed, and thought, soon, and meant it.
* * *
They got three days at the same time at the end of April, the Blaze having clinched their playoff spot and earned a breather, the Fury with a soft patch in the schedule, and Shane drove the ninety miles back to Rockford on a Friday, and Theo was waiting in the apartment, and they stood in the entryway where everything had started and everything had broken, and for a second neither of them moved.
“The certificate’s still on the counter,” Shane said. “Squared up. You never moved it.”
“I could not.” He stopped. Tried again. “Three times. It is — it goes there. It is the only thing in this apartment that belongs to both of us.”
“Theo.” Shane crossed the room. He looked good, he looked NHL, a man whose mother’s legs were paid for and whose game had grown a second dimension, and underneath all of it he looked at Theo with Marek’s look, the one that had given them away in December, and he put his hands on Theo’s face the way Theo had put his hands on Shane’s, and he said, “I’m gonna say it now.
Out loud. In the apartment, which breaks the original rule, but the original rule’s garbage, we established that. Okay?”
“Okay,” Theo whispered.
“I love you,” Shane said it plain, no volume, no deflection, no joke.
“I have loved you since you tied my shoes in Cleveland and didn’t make it a thing.
I ran from a motel because being loved by you felt like the ice opening up under me, and I was wrong, it’s not the ice opening, it’s — it’s the only solid thing I’ve ever stood on.
I love you. I’m not gonna call it a folder or an amenity or steam.
It’s the realest thing in my life and I’m done lying about it to a napkin.
” His thumbs moved over Theo’s cheekbones, an echo.
“Stay. Not because of the deal. Not because of the money or the visa or the math. Stay because I’m asking you to, as your husband, the real kind.
Marry me. Again. For real. Mean it this time. ”
And Theo Lindgren, who had come to this country at twenty certain he was only ever useful, who had paid for everything and called it nothing, who had given away a call-up and a country and disguised it all as math.
Theo said the truest thing he had ever said, in English, on purpose, so there could be no mistaking it.
“I mean it,” he said. “I have meant it the whole time. I was only ever afraid to be kept.” His own hands came up, the good one and the braced one. “Keep me anyway.”
* * *
They came together slow, this time: every other time had been fast, fights and adrenaline and the dark and everything they couldn’t say, but this time there was no clock in the room for once, no loss to outrun, no folder to maintain.
Shane undressed him with a tenderness that took the brace into account without being careful in the pitying way, easing it off, setting it aside, testing the joint with two fingers the morning-rehab way, and the shoulder held, weeks of healing in it now, strong enough to take its own weight if not the world’s, and his hands moved over the long pale seam of the scar he’d kissed in the dark months ago, the scar that had been Theo’s most secret broken place and was now just a part of him that Shane knew.
“Does it hurt,” Shane murmured against it. “Right now. Tell me the truth, not the hockey answer.”
“A little,” Theo said. The truth, the actual truth, given freely. “Always a little. It is better when you—” He stopped, the old reflex, do not ask, do not need.
“When I what.”
“When you are here,” Theo said. “It is better when you are here. I do not know why. The body is stupid.” And Shane made a sound that was half a laugh and half something breaking open, and laid him down on the bed they’d shared and fought over and torn the rules to pieces in, and was careful of the shoulder as they’d both been from the very first night without ever discussing it, an instinct older than the love, settling the arm against the pillow where it lived now, building the same geometry around the injury he built every morning, only this was not the morning and there was no clock.
He undressed the rest of him slow, narrating it, because four weeks apart had not made Shane Novak quieter.
“Missed this. Missed all of it. You know what I did up there, in that stupid furnished apartment? I jerked off to the memory of your voice. Not even your body, your voice, the bossy treatment-room voice, faster, slower, ask for it right, that voice. Four weeks of my own hand and your voice in my head and now I’ve got the real thing under me and I’m gonna take my time, I want you to know that going in, I am taking my time, file a complaint.
” He got Theo’s belt open, peeled him out of everything, and knelt back and looked.
Theo let himself be looked at, the vertigo of it, no camera and no officer and no folder, just Shane’s eyes going down him slow, his dick hard and curving against his stomach, flushed dark, four weeks of want with nowhere to go.
“Look at you.” The joke was gone. “Hardest I’ve ever seen you. That for me?”
“You know it is for you.”
“Say it anyway. I drove ninety miles. I get to hear things.”
“It is for you,” Theo said. “It has been for you since December. I did not always know what to call it.”
Shane bent and kissed the scar, the long pale seam, and then his mouth tracked lower, and his hand wrapped warm around Theo’s dick, learning the weight of him again after weeks of ninety miles, stroking him slow and loose, no destination yet, watching his face.
He thumbed the wet head and Theo’s hips lifted and Shane smiled against his hip and did it again.
“Tell me what you want,” Shane said, the way he’d asked in March, the question he put to Theo every time now. “Anything. We’ve got all night and no game tomorrow and I’ll do anything you say, that’s the husband package, but you gotta say it.”
And Theo, who had spent his whole life refusing to want out loud, said it plain into the late light: “You. Inside me. I have wanted it the whole drive here. The month before that. I had four weeks to practice saying it, so. There it is. Tell me you brought—”
“Yeah,” Shane said, already reaching for the drawer, “yeah, I brought, I bought a fresh bottle in a gas station outside Belvidere, a man on a mission, the cashier knows my life story.” The cap clicked.
He slicked his fingers and warmed them, rubbing them together, the small considerate gesture undoing Theo more than the filth had, and settled between his thighs and pressed Theo’s knees apart with the flat of his palm.
“Open up for me. There you go. God, look at you.”
He worked Theo open with the same patience he’d once mapped a torn shoulder with.
One finger first, circling, then in to the knuckle, slow, and Theo breathed out long through his nose and Shane watched his face the entire time, reading it, the wince that meant more carefully and the breath that meant don’t stop. “Talk to me,” Shane said. “Good?”
“Good. More.”