Chapter Eleven #3
Damir took a breath. He nodded, the sweat-damp tendrils of his hair brushing Kilian’s cheek. “Ketchup!”
Ketchup appeared beside them, half-undressed and concerned. “What do we do, boss?”
“We get him showered and dressed, and we get the fuck out of here.”
Between the two of them, they maneuvered Kilian to his stall.
He would have done it himself, but his legs and feet seemed to have detached from whatever process in his brain moved them around.
Lissy’s usual post-win playlist of Bad Bunny interspersed with a French-Canadian rapper had been replaced by nothing but the rustle of people changing and rooting through their bags.
“Howie?” someone asked.
Kilian kept moving, but the voice asked again, and then a third time, and then he remembered he was Howie, and they were talking to him.
“Huh?”
“Is it true? Are you—”
“Not now,” Damir said gruffly. “Kilian, get your gear off. Where’s your shower stuff?”
Huh. Weird. When Damir told them what to do, Kilian’s hands obeyed. Was he the boss of Kilian’s brain now? That would be so much easier.
Damir’s fingers snapped in Kilian’s line of vision. “Your shower stuff?”
“In my bag. It’s fine. I can use whatever’s here.”
“Then your curls will get frizzy, and you will hate it.”
True.
“Fine, in the inside pocket.”
Damir bent down, searching through Kilian’s bag. Ordinarily, he’d hate someone else going through his things. The inside of his bag might look like a landfill, but he knew where everything was, and he didn’t need anyone else messing with it. Damir wasn’t anyone. He could do whatever he wanted.
Ketchup pressed a towel into Kilian’s hand, and between the three of them, they made it through the process of getting cleaned up and putting their suits on.
Kilian heard the rush of the showers in his ears long after they left the arena.
Philadelphia mostly sucked, but they had good water pressure.
It was only when the engine roar of the plane taking the team back to Chicago started up that Kilian realized how quiet it had been.
No one was talking.
No one, not Fulls and Matheson fighting over the music on the headphones they shared, not the perennial game of poker Lissy, Rocky, and the goalies played, not the coaches strategizing at the front of the plane. Nothing.
His breathing started to speed up, air leaving his lungs too fast for him to fill them properly. He was a punctured balloon, wheezing for breath but doomed to shrink and shrink into a pinprick of nothing at all. He was—
“Kilian.”
Damir’s hand was big and steady on his thigh.
“Follow my lead. Breathe in…hold…now breathe out. That’s good—there you go.”
Sound returned first. The engines, yes, but also the clanging of the trays from the back where the flight attendants prepared drinks and snacks.
The rustle of Ketchup in the seat across the aisle, setting up his complex system of blankets and pillows in order to maximize comfort for the nap he took on every flight, even ones as short as the hop from Philly to Chicago.
Next came sight. The brown-gray fake leather seatbacks with raised white stitching, the deep red carpeting, the no-smoking lights lining the seats.
Kilian drew in a shaky breath in a rhythm of his very own, no help needed.
“What article were they talking about?” he asked.
Beside him, Damir tensed.
He’d been a bulwark since it happened, shielding Kilian from reality. Kilian turned to look at him properly.
Damir’s hair was a mess, clearly not blow-dried to perfection the way he usually did it after games. He’d stuffed his tie into the breast pocket of his shirt, causing an awkward bulge. A frown line drew tight between his eyes.
“Damir?”
Damir heaved a sigh and pulled out his phone. He pressed his thumb to the side, and the screen unlocked with the browser already open on the San Francisco Chronicle’s webpage.
There was Kilian’s name, splashed all across the headline. Sea Lions Trade Kilian Howard Over Rumors About Sexuality. Was LGBTQIA+ Charity Work a Smokescreen?
And right below the title, a series of images lined up of Kilian in the stupid pink crop top, dancing under strobe lights, some random guy’s hands all over him.
He hadn’t even fucked the guy.
He’d gone to the bathroom and recorded a filthy message for Damir.
He skimmed the article. There wasn’t much by way of actual fact in it; Kilian’s presence at a gay-friendly club in the Castro, dancing with a man, constituted Starling’s only scoop. It was barely news. The remaining text was pure conjecture.
At the very bottom, she’d added, “Howard couldn’t be reached for comment.”
“Fuck,” he muttered. So she’d been calling for a reason.
He dug out his phone to check, but he had over three hundred notifications. The sight of them all blinking at him from his message app and Insta and TikTok and Twitter and the missed calls widget made his breathing go haywire again.
Damir snatched the phone out of his hand.
“You haven’t confirmed anything,” he said in his deep, solemn voice. “It’s not too late.”
Kilian had to laugh.