36
I Didn’t Touch Him
Nash
Greeley didn’t dress Saturday. He was a minus-two Friday with two bad changes and a turnover at the blue line that ended up in the back of our net, and Berwyn scratched him and put Layous’s line together instead.
That’s hockey. It happens to everybody, and it’ll happen to me.
He took it standing in the tunnel in a suit, watching warmups with that face on.
All weekend he’s been at the hotel, at the meals, four feet from me on the PK he didn’t get to play, and not one word about it.
He smiled at me on the bus Thursday, and he smiled at me in the lobby Saturday night.
I haven’t given him one single thing to work with in four days, and my jaw’s been locked since we crossed the state line. He’s planning something.
We hit the interstate. The sign says forty-two miles to go, and I go back to my phone, where the actual problem is.
Kylie’s been sending things all weekend, and I flick through them.
The football field, her and Paige, her roommate, the library, and a few selfies I stare at longer than I’d like to admit.
I check the ETA. Twenty minutes later, I check it again.
We get in at six-forty. The truck’s already back, so the gear goes straight off it into the hallway outside the room. I do what they need from me, and then I’m across the lot with my bag over my shoulder. Koda yells something behind me that I don’t listen to.
I take the stairs at Corvin three at a time, drop my bag outside my door, and walk straight to Kylie’s. I knock twice.
She opens it in leggings and a T-shirt with her hair up. She gets as far as “Hi—” and I’ve got my hand on her throat and my mouth on hers.
I walk her backward into her room. The door swings and hits the wall.
She’s laughing into my mouth for about a second and a half, and then her hands go into my hair, and she comes up on her toes and kisses me like she’s been waiting days for this.
So have I. My hands go down her back and around her waist, and I pick her up off the floor.
Her roommate is at her desk. She turns around in her chair, and I look right at her over Kylie’s shoulder, and I don’t stop, because I have not touched my girlfriend in four days.
“I’m leaving,” Tessa says.
Kylie breaks off about an inch. “Sorry.”
“You’re not sorry.” Tessa’s already got her laptop under her arm and her shoes in her hand. “Nobody in this room is sorry.”
The door shuts behind her.
“Finally,” I say, and Kylie laughs so hard she has to put her forehead on my shoulder.
I tip her flushed face up and get a good look at her.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
I get her onto the bed, and my shirt’s off before I’m all the way down after her.
She gets her hands on my chest immediately and drags them down, her nails going in a little at the bottom, over everything.
I’ve had four days of a bus, a hotel, a room with Layous and a phone.
And now she’s underneath me with her shirt pushed up, her hands in my hair, her leg hooked over the back of mine, and I can’t get close enough to her.
I keep coming back to her mouth. Every time I move, every time she moves, I find her face again, and she makes this sound against my lips every time I do.
“I missed you,” she says.
I get her leggings down and off one ankle. She kicks them the rest of the way and pulls me back down by the neck.
“I missed you,” she says again.
“I know.”
“Asshole—”
“Baby, this is a two-way street,” I say into her mouth.
She goes quiet, and her hands go into my sweatpants and pull me out.
“Yeah?” she whispers, pulling my dick to her entrance.
I press into her. “Yes.”
She moans the whole way, and I’m pounding into her like she might disappear if I don’t.
Her hands come up around my shoulders and hold on.
After that, there’s no talking. She’s loud, and she doesn’t care that it’s seven on a Sunday with the whole floor home.
When she gets close, she says my name into the side of my neck, and I’ve been thinking about that exact sound all fucking weekend.
Afterward, she’s on my chest under her blanket with her leg thrown over both of mine, and I’m so tired I can feel it behind my eyes.
She’s playing with my fingers, holding my hand up in front of her face and bending each one back and letting it go.
She’s telling me about Saturday, which I already heard all of at one in the morning from a hotel room.
“Tessa got drunk,” she says.
“You told me.”
“She got drunk, Nash.”
“I heard you the first six times.”
“She yelled at a referee.”
“You said.”
She belly-laughs. “So unbelievable.”
I take my hand back and put it on her back instead, and she settles and goes quiet for a second. Outside her window, somebody’s car alarm goes off in the lot and then stops. I’ve got nowhere to be until skate tomorrow, so I lean into her and close my eyes.
My phone buzzes on the floor by the bed. I ignore it. It stops for maybe five seconds and starts again. I let that go too. Then twice more.
“Somebody really wants you,” Kylie says into my chest.
It keeps going. I reach down blind and find it under my sweatpants.
Koda.
“This better not be about Paige,” I say, and Kylie laughs beside me.
Koda: Answer your fucking phone.
Koda: NASH!
Koda: Pick up.
Koda: Greeley posted it.
I sit up.
The link’s under it. It’s an account I don’t recognize with a number in the handle, reposted by somebody on Greek row, reposted again by a page that’s just Woodbury students posting about Woodbury students. The caption says WOODBURY HOCKEY. NHL PROSPECT. AT A PARTY LAST MONTH.
It starts with me already moving. I’m coming across the kitchen at him with my hands up and Greeley backing away, and the whole rest of it is me.
Me getting him down, me on top of him, somebody screaming behind the camera, Rafe’s arm around my chest from behind and me coming out of it and going back in, and four guys on me.
My shirt’s up my back the entire time, so half the video is that too, on the fucking internet, in front of the whole world.
There’s no stick in it. It looks like I’ve lost my goddamn mind.
Kylie’s sitting up beside me with the blanket around her, watching over my arm. It’s twenty-two seconds long. I watch it once, and then my hands are shaking.
He doesn’t live far, in the gray house with the sagging porch, fourth one down from the corner.
Seven minutes from Corvin if I cut across the lot and behind the science building.
He’ll be on the first floor, because their bedrooms are upstairs and nobody sits upstairs at seven on a Sunday, and there’s a screen door.
I know exactly how hard I can hit somebody.
I clench my fists, trying to hold it in, because Kylie is right behind me, and this isn’t the fucking place. She puts a hand on my shoulder, skin to skin, and it takes everything in me to let her have that. She can think she’s comforting me. I already know what I’m going to do.
I stand and get my clothes back on.
“Nash,” she says.
I get my sweats on. I find my shirt inside out on the floor by her desk and pull it over my head.
“Nash. Hey.”
She’s out of the bed, pulling her shirt on fast, going for her leggings, hopping on one foot at the end of her bed. “Where are you going?”
“Greeley’s.”
“Okay.” She’s still dressing. “Then I’m coming.”
“Stay here.”
“I’m not staying here—”
“Kylie.” I’ve got my shoes on and my hand on her door. “You’re not coming.”
She stops with her leggings half up. She’s not scared of me. She’s never once been scared of me, not the first night, not in that house, not ever, and she isn’t now. She stands in the middle of her room and looks at me with her jaw working.
“Don’t hurt him, Nash.”
I look at her. She’s serious. And that breaks the sequence I had going in my head, because of everything in this room right now, everything I’m about to walk across campus and do, that’s the outcome he’s after.
That’s what this whole thing has been. Seven weeks of him standing exactly close enough.
He hit me with a stick in his kitchen, and then he kept the twenty-two seconds after it.
He sat on it, he waited, and the only way any of it works for him is if I keep doing the part that’s on video.
“I’m not going to hurt him,” I say.
I don’t know if it’s true. I’ve got no idea whether it’s true. Then I’m out the door.
Koda comes through the stairwell door as I get to it, still in his travel pants with a hoodie on and his phone in his hand. Rafe’s two steps behind him. Neither of them asks where I’m going. They stop, and I walk around them, and they follow.
We step out of Corvin into the cold, and I head the quickest way to Greeley’s. We’re halfway there when Koda says, “It’s got nine hundred views on the one I saw. There’s three now. Somebody put it on the Woodbury page.”
Nobody says anything after that.
Then my phone goes off in my hand.
Coach Berwyn.
I let it ring. It starts again before the screen’s even gone dark.
“Answer it,” Rafe says.
“No.”
“He’s seen it,” Koda says. “Everybody’s seen it. Answer your phone, Nash.”
Fuck. I answer. “Yeah.”
“Where are you?” Berwyn’s voice comes out very quiet and very even.
“Walking.”
“Walking where?”
I don’t say anything fast enough.
“Kennebeck. You do not go near Greeley.”
“Bit late.”
“Nash.”
He’s never used my first name. Not once since I’ve known him, not on the ice, not in the room, not in his office.
“My office,” he says. “Now. That wasn’t a suggestion.”
We’re at the corner of Greeley’s street. A car with a mattress strapped to the roof goes past, somebody’s music comes through a window, and the gray house is fourth down on the left with the porch light on.
“I’ll be there,” I say, and hang up on my coach.
Mathers answers the door, because Mathers lives here. He’s in sweats with a bowl of cereal in his hand, and he looks at me and then at Koda and Rafe behind me. He doesn’t say anything stupid like what are you doing here.
He says, “He’s inside,” and steps back.