Chapter 35
Rhys — Past
What I didn't understand yet — couldn't, because I was dumb and in love for the first time and apparently incapable of seeing what was right in front of me — was the difference between someone who isn't ready and someone who was never going to be ready.
Whose fear was eventually going to turn you into the problem.
I didn't live in fear, but maybe I should have.
Marcus went silent for a week.
A full week of nothing after months of every day. No texts. No waiting at my car. No finding me in the hallway or sliding into the seat next to mine at film sessions. Just — gone. Like someone unplugged him and put him somewhere else.
Do you know what happens to you when you're used to talking to someone every single day and they just disappear?
It's withdrawal. It's actual withdrawal.
Your body doesn't know the difference. You reach for your phone and there's nothing there and your chest does this panicked tightening — like you can't get enough air in.
Like something essential has been removed, something your body needed to survive, and your system hasn't figured out how to compensate without it yet.
I went to practice every day and looked for him and he was there and also unreachable and that was somehow worse than if he'd just been gone. He was avoiding me. Avoiding the whole situation.
Pain is the only word for it. Just pain, everywhere, all the time, with no place to put it but back inside.
He found me on a Thursday after practice. Parking lot. Waiting by my car the way he used to — except everything about it was wrong. Hands in his pockets. Eyes doing something I'd never seen in them before.
Shifty.
Scared.
Nervous.
I felt the distance between us before he even opened his mouth. Felt the ringing start in my ears. Felt my body understanding what my brain was still trying to catch up to.
"They talked," he said, rushed.
"Okay." I kept my voice even. "So we talk to them together. We tell them—"
"I can't."
Just that.
Two words.
I stared at him and felt something inside of me die.
Two words.
I never knew two words could do that.
Could take everything I'd been holding onto and rip it out by the root.
And I knew. Right then, before he said anything else, I knew. I could see exactly where this was going and I couldn't stop it and I couldn't look away from it either. It was over.
I thought that was the worst part.
It wasn’t.
Not even close.
"What did you tell them?"
He looked at his shoes.
"Marcus." I did my best to keep my voice level, even when everything inside was falling apart. Some survival instinct that knew if I broke right now I would break completely and irreversibly and I couldn't afford that. Not here. Not in front of him.
Hold it together for a little longer.
"What did you tell them?"
"I panicked—"
"What did you tell them?"
He finally looked at me. And I saw it. The apology that wasn't big enough to undo anything. The guilt that wasn't enough to make him do the right thing. Both of those things living in his face at the same time and neither of them changing a single thing about what he was about to say.
"I told them you'd been making me uncomfortable.
" Quiet. Like saying it quietly made it smaller than it was.
Like being honest about it meant anything.
"That it had been going on for a while. That I didn't want to make it a big thing but you kept — that you kept cornering me.
" He exhaled. "Rhys, I know these guys, they wouldn’t understand, I couldn't just — I'm sorry.
I'm so fucking sorry, I just panicked and it came out and I didn't know how to—"
I stopped listening. Not because I couldn't hear him.
Because there was nothing left to hear. Nothing he could say mattered anymore.
The rushing in my head went up to ten. The tears I'd been holding back since the door opened at that party — all week, every minute, every shower, every empty night staring at my phone — just sitting right there at the back of my eyes threatening to take everything with them.
I didn't let them.
I learned later that he also told them I'd been after him for a long time. Coming onto him. Touching him. Wouldn't take the hint. That what Tommy saw at that party was me not knowing how to keep my hands to myself.
He didn't say he was gay. He didn't say any of the true things.
He didn't mention the blue room or the blankets on the floor or I love you or I think we can make this work.
He didn't say any of the things that were more true than anything else.
He just made me the story. And then he stepped back and let the story do the rest, let the story get out of control. It worked.
Of course it worked.
Marcus Hale was the star captain they’ve known for years, and I was just a loner with an attitude problem and no one in my corner and the math was extremely simple. Everyone did it fast.
I'm gay. I'm the problem. I was pushing myself on Marcus.
It started with Tommy. Locker room. Monday morning.
Almost friendly, if you didn’t know any better.
There he is. Watch yourselves, boys.
Laughed after. Like it was nothing. Like it was funny.
Some guys laughed too.
Wednesday there were more.
Don't drop the soap around Callahan.
You sure you wanna be in here, sweetheart?
Careful, he's been staring at you.
Every single day. Some variation of the same joke, delivered with a smile, technically harmless if you wrote it down.
The kind of thing that can't be reported because individually it's nothing.
Collectively it's everything. It's the very air in the room.
It's the thing you breathe every day until you can't remember what the air used to feel like.
Then my gear started going missing. First time it turned up on the shower floor. Soaking wet, soap everywhere, every single piece of it. Second time it was piled in the equipment closet. Someone had written homo all over my uniform in permanent marker.
I reported it to the trainer and he said he'd look into it.
Nothing happened.
He never did.
More of the same. More days. More variations of the same joke. More missing things. More mornings walking in and feeling the room shift when I entered it. And then the last incident.
I started waiting for everyone to finish showering after practice. Easier that way. One less thing to get through.
They waited too.
Waited until I was alone.
I don't know how many there were.
Two. Three. It stopped mattering fast. Too many.
The first hit came from behind — hands grabbing my shoulders and driving me forward into the tile wall hard enough that the impact cracked through my teeth.
My cheek split against the corner of the soap shelf.
I felt that before I felt anything else — the sting of broken skin, the feel of the blood running down the side of my face mixing with the shower water.
Then I was on the floor.
I don't remember going down. Just the tile against my hands and then my knees and then my face and then the first kick landing in my ribs and driving the air out of me completely.
I curled in. Arms over my head. Knees pulled up.
Made myself as small as possible because that was the only thing that made sense — the less I gave them the less there was to take.
It didn't stop them.
The ribs again. My back. The flat of a shoe against my shoulder that sent me into the base of the wall.
My ears were ringing from the first hit and everything had that hollow quality that comes after impact — sounds arriving slightly after they should, muffled in my ears, the world taking a second to catch up with itself.
The water was still running. Cold now. Running over everything. Over my hands braced against the tile. Over the back of my neck. Over the places on my ribs that were going to be dark purple by morning.
I kept my face down.
Counted the grout lines.
Breathed when I could.
Watched the blood slowly spiral over the drain before disappearing.
Waited for it to be over.
When the door finally shut the silence was everywhere.
I stayed down for a long time.
Just the water running cold over everything.
Just the sound of my own breathing — shallow, careful, testing what hurt and how much.
My ribs answered that question immediately.
My back answered it too. The side of my face where the shelf caught me was still going, hot and insistent, blood pinking the water on the tile beneath me.
I got my hands flat and managed to push myself up. Sat there. I wanted to completely fall apart right there on that floor.
But crying felt like giving them something.
So I sat under the cold water until I could stand.
Then I stood.
Got dressed.
Looked in the mirror.
Decided what I could explain and what I couldn't.
I went to Coach.
Sat across from his desk and said what happened clearly and specifically because I wasn't going to let myself be dismissed for being vague.
I told him everything. All of it. He listened.
He nodded. He said he'd address it, but that I never told him anything before so there was no history of anything to report.
What he addressed was calling me back in the following week to gently suggest that maybe I was having some trouble adjusting socially and had I considered speaking to someone in student services or maybe a counselor or maybe finding a different sport.
I walked out of his office and sat in a stairwell for twenty minutes.
Just sat there. One morning I came in and there was something written on my locker.
Black marker. Big. Not trying to be subtle.
I stood there and looked at it for a moment.
Then I went to the bathroom and got paper towels and came back and cleaned it off myself.
Slowly. While guys filtered in around me.
Some of them saw it before I got to it. Some of them saw me cleaning it. Marcus did.
Nobody said anything.
Not to me. Not to each other. Not to anyone.
I scrubbed until it was gone. Got dressed. Went to practice.
Scored twice.
Marcus never said anything. Never did anything.
Just looked down and avoided me. That's the part I couldn't move past. That's the part I still can't move past when I let myself think about it.
I could suffocate with how angry that part makes me.
He was in that locker room every single day.
He heard Tommy. He heard Porter. He saw everything. He knew about the shower too.
The person who moved his furniture and set up a projector and said I love you and I think we can make this work.
Watching all of it happen and choosing silence.
Every single day.
Choosing silence.
Not me.
Not once did he choose me.
I confronted him later.
Parking lot. Just us.
"You know what they've been doing and you said nothing. You lied. And did nothing."
He looked at his keys. He couldn’t even look at me. "Rhys—"
"You told me you loved me." I said it flat.
Not to hurt him. Just because it needed to exist somewhere outside of my own head.
Because I'd spent too many nights wondering if I'd imagined the whole thing.
If maybe they were right about me. If maybe I had made him uncomfortable.
If maybe this was somehow, some way, my fault.
"You said it and you meant it and then you let this happen. "
He closed his eyes. "I know," he said, defeated.
"So what was that? What was any of it? Because I need you to tell me, Marcus.
I need you to say it out loud." My voice cracked on the last word and I hated myself for it.
"Did I mean nothing to you? Because them — I get it.
I don't give a fuck what any of them think of me.
But you? You were everything. You were the whole reason any of this was okay.
And now it's like none of it happened. Like I made it up. Like I didn’t fucking matter. "
He didn't say anything.
"You chose yourself." I said it without anger. "I get it. But don't stand there like you didn't make a choice and I’m the only one suffering for it."
"I'm sorry," he pleaded. "I am. I’m so sorry. I really do love you. I don’t know what to do here. Maybe one day you'll understand. This is hard for me too, this impossible fucking position I’m in. I wish things were different, but I can’t."
Those words again.
I can’t.
Something finished dying in my chest with them.
"Fuck you, Marcus." Still quiet. Still level. "You left me alone in all of this. You did that. So fuck you."
He reached out for me and I walked away.
He didn't call after me.
That was the last thing we ever said to each other.
I played every game.
Every single one. I showed up to every practice, every film session, every game, and I played like my life depended on it.
Because in some ways it did. The ice was the one place none of it could reach me.
The one place where I was just a hockey player and they needed me whether they liked it or not.
Where my value was visible and undeniable and nobody could take it away from me.
Fourteen goals that season.
Twenty-two assists.
I came every single day and I took the comments and the locker room and the missing gear and the marker and all the rest of it and I put every single piece of it directly into my game.
But I was exhausted.
And the worst part was that some mornings, before my alarm went off, there'd be three or four seconds where I'd forget.
Three or four perfect seconds where Marcus still loved me.
Then I'd wake up.
And I hated him for what he'd done to me.
But some part of me still missed him.
After everything, some part of me still wanted him.
That was the part I couldn't forgive myself for.
It was fucking pathetic.