Chapter 46
Jamie
I wake up at five AM in a room that isn't mine. Rhys is asleep beside me. Face turned toward me with one hand open on the pillow between us. Breathing slow and unaware, his hair everywhere, like always. The room smelling like him and the record player silent in the corner.
I've been awake for forty minutes. I know because I've been watching the ceiling and running through every method I have for shutting things down — redirect, suppress, find the box, close the box — and none of it is working.
That has never happened before.
The thing in my chest just sits there. Immovable.
Like it put down roots while I was sleeping, against my will.
Like it's been there for months and I just didn't look at it long enough to see how deep it went and now its weighing me down rapidly, too fast, I’m sinking and I can’t stop.
I press my hand flat to my sternum. It doesn't move.
I know exactly when it happened.
The way he said you're allowed more than one like the answer was obvious and he was waiting for me to find it.
Him.
The way I pressed my lips to his hair. Without deciding to. Just did it. Like he was already the thing I reached for without thinking. That's the part. I've been lying here since trying to find the version of this that isn't catastrophic and I keep hitting the same wall.
I'm falling in love with Rhys Callahan.
I let the thought exist for one second. Then I sit up. My shoulders hurt. Not real pain. The phantom ache between my shoulder blades that never fully goes away. I've had it so long I forget it's there until a morning like this when everything else is stripped back and there it is.
I was fourteen. Hockey camp. Three weeks upstate. My father shook my hand at the car before I got on the bus — not a hug, never a hug, a handshake like business associates — and told me to come back better.
There was a boy there. That's all it was. A boy. Fifteen. Left wing for a school three towns over. We skated on the same line for a week and I was aware of him and I managed it fine at first. Said nothing. Showed nothing. Did everything right.
Except one night after dinner he found me alone behind the equipment shed and kissed me. And I let him. For maybe thirty seconds I let him and it was the first time anything had ever felt like relief and then I heard footsteps and pulled back and that was it. Except someone saw.
Word moved fast the way it does in closed places. By morning it had been turned into something louder and cruder than it was, the kind of story that travels fast because it has sharp edges, and by afternoon it reached a phone and a call home.
My father's voice went very quiet. That was always the sign. Not the yelling — he rarely yelled. The quiet. The specific quiet of a man deciding how best to fix something broken.
I'm hearing things, he said.
It wasn't true, I told him.
I don't care what it was, he said. I care what it looked like.
He drove up that night.
Four hours.
Didn't speak the whole drive back.
When we got home he sent my mother upstairs. I heard her footsteps on the landing and then nothing. I stood in the kitchen and waited and I knew — the way you know before it happens — exactly what was coming.
He put me on the ice. Ten at night. Just us. He lined up pucks at center and stood at the boards with his stick and told me to skate. I skated. When I slowed down the stick came across my shoulders.
Again.
When I fell he grabbed my jersey and put me back on my feet.
Again.
When I cried — and I did cry, I was fourteen and I had just had my first kiss and I was scared and I cried — he got on the ice and got very close to my face and said: You do not get to be this. Do you understand me. You do not get to be this.
I said yes.
He stepped back. Again, he repeated.
I skated until I couldn't feel my arms, again.
You think I would have gotten used to it at some point.
When it was over he drove me home and locked my bedroom door from the outside and that was where I stayed for a week.
Nothing else except for hockey. He drove me to the rink and watched every session from the boards and drove me home and locked the door again.
A week of that.
No explanation given to anyone. My mother left food under the door and I could hear her breathing on the other side and she never said a word and I never said a word and we just — existed on either side of that door in the same silence of people who understand that saying something will only make it worse.
When the week was over he unlocked the door and didn't mention it again.
Not once.
Not ever.
He put it somewhere and sealed it and the message was very clear.
The message was clear, every time.
My shoulders ache.
I stand up and pace.
Find my shirt on the floor. My jeans. My phone. I don't turn the lamp on. I don't look at Rhys again because if I look at him again I'll lay back down and I cannot get back down.
I’m too close to breaking.
I move through the dark and I get to the door and I open it. Blake is in the kitchen. He looks up when I come out of Rhys's room. Takes one look at my face and I know, I just know, he sees the fracture. He sees the point where I’m about to tear in two.
"Morning," he says. Cautiously.
I don't say anything.
Four steps to the front door. I count them. I hold myself together and hold my breath and move toward them and if this person says one more word to me I'm going to lose whatever is left of the tiny thread I'm hanging onto.
"Jamie." Just my name. Low. Laced with concern.
I shake my head, get to the door, and open it. Walk out into the cold and don't look back.
――――――――
Campus is grey and empty and silent and I move through it fast and the cold doesn't help and the movement doesn't help because the problem isn't in my body.
It’s in my fucking head. I can’t think, I can’t breathe. I’m about to claw these memories out of me.
So I end up at the rink.
No skates.
I just stand at the boards and look at the empty ice and feel the humiliation of a person who has run out of places to go and keeps ending up at the same one.
The place I love and hate at the same time.
I put my forearms on the boards and drop my head forward.
I know how to be good at things. How to work.
How to want something and aim everything at it without stopping.
How to show up so consistently that people don't think to question whether I'm okay because I have never given anyone a reason to question it.
What I don't know how to do is this.
This thing where someone looks at me the way Rhys looked at me last night and I don't immediately make it smaller. Where I let it matter. Where I lie in someone's room and feel safe and don't wake up at five in the morning needing to run.
My father's voice in my head.
You do not get to be this.
Fourteen years old on the ice at ten at night and the stick across my shoulders and again and again and again until being that thing — wanting that thing — became so tightly associated with pain that I can't separate them anymore.
Can't feel one without bracing for the other.
I've spent years convincing myself that's strength.
Standing at these boards right now it feels like something else entirely.
Weakness.
Every good thing comes with the expectation of punishment.
Every person who gets too close feels dangerous.
And somehow I stood in front of Rhys and promised him tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Like I was the kind of person who could make promises like that.
Like I’m not fucking broken and dead inside.
Locked in a cage that my father started to build, but I’m the one who finished it and started calling it discipline.
It feels like a locked door.
It feels like food slid under a gap by someone who wanted to help and didn't know how and said nothing.
It feels like seven days alone in a room at fourteen being taught that who I was needed to be beaten out of me before it ruined everything.
It feels like Danny.
It feels like Jonah.
It feels like Rhys.
Like everything I’ve never let myself have.
And the cruelest part — the part I've never let myself look at directly — is that it worked.
It worked completely.
I am the thing my father made. Controlled. Contained. A version of myself with all the wrong parts removed so neatly I almost forgot they were ever there.
Almost.
Until Rhys Callahan.
Until someone waltzed into my locker room and took up every inch of space in my head like he had a right to it and made me furious and made me laugh and made me show up to parties I hated and sleep in rooms that weren't mine and press my mouth to his hair without deciding to.
Until someone made me remember what I gave up and made me feel everything I had been holding back unconsciously.
My fist comes down on the boards.
Not hard. Just enough to feel something.
I close my eyes.
I could go back.
That's the thing. I could go back right now. His room. Lie back down beside him and let this be the thing it's clearly trying to be and stop doing the thing my father taught me to do and just —
Let myself have it.
And then what.
The season ends. The year ends. The draft comes.
I go wherever hockey takes me and it takes me somewhere and what does that mean for this.
What does it mean to let someone in this far and then have to choose.
What does it mean to be a gay man in a professional locker room in a sport that has made very clear, for my entire life, what it thinks of that. What my father thinks of that.
My father knew.
That's what he was doing. Not cruelty for cruelty's sake — he would never have called it that. He was protecting me the only way he knew how. Cutting off the thing that would cost me everything before I was old enough to understand the price.
The stick across my shoulders.
You do not get to be this.
He wasn't wrong about the cost.
But he was wrong about a lot of things.
Standing at these boards I can't find it in me to say he was wrong about this.
Rhys is going to get hurt.
Because he’s everything and I’ve always been nothing.
He’s the sun, trying so desperately to blanket me in its warmth and safety, and I’m the black hole snuffing out the light. Because I’m ugly and empty inside. Because not even my own father could love me.
So I will hurt him. Not because I want to.
Not because he deserves it. But because I am made of walls and he is made of open fields and trust and eventually the walls win.
They always win. I've built them too well and for too long and one morning in his room and one record and one hand open on a pillow isn't enough to take them down and I know that, even if right now in this grey morning it feels like it could be.
It feels like it could be.
That's the worst part.
No, the worst part is I’m doing exactly what Rhys expects.
Just like Marcus did.
I push off the boards.
Walk out.
Get to my room. I sit on the edge of my bed and stare at the floor.
My phone lights up.
Rhys:
you left?
I stare at it.
I don't respond.
Then—
His name on my screen.
Calling.
I watch it ring.
Let it go to voicemail.
Put the phone face down on the bed.
Put my hands over my eyes.
It’s too loud in here.
He’s shy and armored and afraid but still — still — himself. Never stopped being himself even when it cost him everything. Even when it cost him Eldridge. Marcus. Everything he knew.
Exactly himself. I don't know how to do that.
I've been performing a version of myself for so long I'm not sure I know what's underneath it anymore.
I'm not sure there's anything underneath it.
I'm not sure my father left anything underneath it.
I can’t do this.
I can’t.
Please don’t make me do this.
I’m crying for the first time in who knows how long.
I’m weak.
Just a broken toy that no one wanted to play with, that you can’t fix.
My phone again.
I let it ring.
It stops.
Then:
Rhys:
okay
One word.
And that's the one that does it.
The way I can hear him in it — stepping back, giving me room, not making me explain. Because he knows. He's always known the difference between when to push and when to just put it down. Because he knows me.
But I hurt him.
Every time I get like this I hurt him and I don’t know how to stop.
Make it stop.
Please.
The crack in my chest opens up and I press the heel of my hand against it and I lie back on my bed and I stare at the ceiling and I think about a locked door at fourteen.
About my mother breathing on the other side and saying nothing, always nothing.
About a boy who smiled at me across a yard and how for thirty seconds I felt like a person who got to want things.
About how I got that beaten out of me.
About how I've been grateful for it ever since because it made me safe. Made me this. Made me someone who could survive the locker room and the draft and the career and the life I've been building toward since before I knew what building was.
I've been grateful. I lie there and feel how grateful I've been and it tastes like the worst thing I've ever fucking swallowed.
Rhys said okay and stepped back and gave me room and he's lying in his bed feeling like shit and I'm lying here and I'm choosing this. I'm choosing the wall. I'm choosing the version of myself my father helped build because it's the only version I trust to survive what's coming.
Being around Rhys feels like standing too close to the edge of something dangerous and wanting to jump anyway. I know that. I am choosing not to jump, with full awareness, and I hate myself for it in a way that feels completely irreversible and I do it anyway.
I don’t trust myself around him anymore.
Because I am my father's son.
Because the stick worked.
Because somewhere between a locked door and an empty rink and twenty-one years of being exactly what I was made to be, I forgot that I was allowed to want something different.
Or maybe I never knew.
Maybe I never knew.
The ceiling is very white. The room is very quiet.
My phone screen stays dark.
It doesn't feel like strength. It just feels like the door locking again.
From the outside.