Chapter 11
Theo
Our forwards, Conner, Landon, and Xavier Gagne, are setting up for a face-off because the ref called offside.
I take my position. Landon lines up near Ryder Finch, a winger for the Comets…
who, for some reason, is glaring at me. I lock eyes with him, and he glares harder.
As the ref gets ready to drop the puck, I flip through the muddled memories in my brain to try to remember any conflict I might have had with Finch in previous seasons.
I don’t remember one. In fact… wasn’t he the guy I went barhopping with at my first All-Star game?
The puck drops. Conner doesn’t win the face-off, so I go to work, skating off to defend our zone.
Finch has the puck, and I come at him with a hard but clean hit.
It sandwiches him into the boards and gets him off the puck, which Gagne scoops up and skates away with.
I’m about to follow when my head snaps forward.
I turn and catch a second of Finch’s glove before it connects with my chin.
The impact has me tumbling and I almost hit the ground, but manage to stay on my skates. “Fuck off, asshole.”
He’s dropped his stick, and his gloves go next.
With one hand, he reaches up and yanks off his helmet.
With the other, he grabs a fistful of my jersey and yanks.
Skates are the worst for holding your position.
He yanks me forward, and I slide shakily into Finch’s chest. “Fight me, you fucking homophobe!”
I lock eyes with him again. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
He responds with a punch. I’m still in my helmet, so I don’t feel it much, and he winces. “Don’t break your hand, dude.”
I hear the whistle as the refs finally notices we’re not in the game anymore.
He shakes me by the jersey again. “Can’t fight anymore? Fucking coward.”
“Sure, let’s go with that.” I shrug, and he swears at me again.
“What the fuck, you two!” the linesman grumbles and starts to pull us apart. Finch won’t let go of my jersey, though, and his glare is trying to incinerate me. “You’ve got two Finch and if you don’t want more get to the box now, for fucks sake.”
“Sorry,” I say, even though I’m not a hundred percent sure of what I did.
“Fight me next time, asshole, and there will be a next time,” Finch yells as he finally lets go and skates toward the penalty box.
Callan skates over to me as I head to the bench. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What use is a defenseman who can’t drop his fucking gloves?” Gagne barks at me, and it makes both my eyebrows and Callan’s eyebrows shoot up. Isn’t he supposed to be on our side?
“What the fuck, Gagne?!” Callan glares at him but continues to skate with me to the bench. “What the fuck’s that about?”
“Xavier has barely said two words to me since I got here, so… no idea.”
“Back out there, boys,” Coach says as soon as we get to the bench. “And Richard, thanks for the power play, but you have fists. Feel free to use them.”
I nod and skate out to help the power play.
I refocus, ignoring Gagne and Finch, and whatever the hell all that was, and focus on the game.
It takes a minute and a half of the two-minute penalty for anything to open up.
Callan and I manage to keep the puck in the zone the whole time, and then, one of the Comets gets frustrated with Conner being parked in front of their goalie.
When Landon takes a shot, the Comets’ player pushes Conner to stop the tip Conner is trying to make happen.
The push is too hard. Conner falls, and the player goes down with him, leaving the zone wide open.
The puck bounces off the goalie and right to me.
I haul off with the perfect snapshot, which careens past the goalie’s shoulder and into the net.
The horn sounds, and I punch the air. Callan skates over and hugs me. “Fucking beauty, T!”
“Thanks.” I get a lot of the same reaction as I skate down the bench for my fist bumps, and Coach gives me an approving nod.
I feel good about tying it up and even better when, on my next shift, I feed a perfect pass to Landon, and he scores the go-ahead goal with two minutes left, and we hold the lead and win the game.
Kendra grabs me in the tunnel and asks me to do an interview.
I’ve been purposely left off the media rotation until now.
I was fine with it. Coach wanted me to establish myself on the team first, hoping it would quell the inevitable personal questions.
“Only if you’re ready. I can grab Cal instead.
He was on the ice for all the goals this game, too. ”
“I gotta rip the Band-Aid off at some point,” I say because I feel ready.
And then I get to the interview, which is in the hall between the locker room and the tunnel. I’m still in gear as the boys funnel by, and I lean on my stick as the guy from NBC asks me, “You were one punch from the coveted Gordie Howe Hat Trick tonight. Why did you refuse to fight Finch?”
Shit. He’s right. A goal, an assist, and a fight make up a Gordie Howe Hat Trick, but I refused to fight Finch. I blink and shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I like to have a reason to fight, and I have no idea what was up with Finch.”
“Do you and him have bad blood from when you played with Vegas?”
“Not that I know of,” I reply. “And besides, if I had fought him, I’d have been in the box too, and then, no goal.”
“You seem to have really fit in with the Riptide. Was it difficult to find your role here?”
“Not at all. The team was really welcoming, and I knew if I just worked hard, it would fall into place,” I say, which is utter bullshit. The team has mostly accepted me, except for maybe Gagne, but I wasn’t sure that would be the case. I’m working my ass off, though, that part is true.
“You seem fully recovered from your injuries that occurred last season. Is that true?”
“Thankfully, yes,” I say as my shoulder throbs in pain.
“And were you surprised Casco and Grady Garrison have been so welcoming? Did any of you carry resentment about those moments, your video, into the locker room?”
So much for time and performance will quell the questions.
I clench my jaw, swallow, and scramble to find appropriate words that don’t show how pissed off I am about this never fucking dying.
“Grady and Landon are two of the best men I’ve ever known, on and off the ice.
I’m lucky to play with them and luckier to have been granted their forgiveness.
I hope we can continue to do great things together for this team. Thanks.”
I give him a curt nod and tight smile to show that this interview is over. He blinks but nods and turns to the camera to send it back to the studio. He yells cut as I’m walking toward the dressing room, and then he calls out after me, “Sorry, Theo. Had to go there.”
“Yep. Fine,” I call back, refusing to let him see my scowl.
Callan sees it, though, as I plop down next to him at my cubby. He’s almost totally out of his equipment and shoving his feet into slides to head to the bikes for cool-down. “Didn’t go great?”
I shake my head. “You know I could have waited to do interviews again until the last game of the season, but all they would still want to do is talk about that fucking Instagram video.”
“If you answered it once, you don’t have to answer it again,” Grady tells me as he unfastens his pads.
He shoots me a consoling smile, and his sweaty red hair sticks to his forehead.
“If they bring it up to me, or bring up anything about my sexuality or relationship with Landon, my standard response is now ‘I’ve addressed that before and don’t need to do it again. ’”
“Noted. Thanks,” I say with a nod.
“Fucking hell of a game out there tonight, T,” Conner interrupts as he walks in from his own interview.
He yanks off his helmet and grabs the rubber lobster out of his cubby.
It’s a tradition that whoever had the best game on the team gets the lobster afterward.
“Everyone congratulate the dude who could have had a Gordie Howe but got us a goal instead.”
Everyone claps or hoots for me except Xavier Gagne, who keeps his scowl on his skates as he aggressively tugs the laces loose and yanks his feet out one after the other. Conner tosses the lobster at me, and I catch it. “Thanks, everyone! Let’s do it again on the road trip.”
We head out for a quick four-day road trip tomorrow, hitting Boston and my first NHL team in Quebec before flying back home the day before Thanksgiving for a quick couple days off.
For the first time since the season began, I let myself enjoy the moment and look forward to the trip with more optimism than anxiety.
It feels good, if unknown. I peel out of my gear and toss the jersey in the laundry bin.
I purposely take a bike in the cool-down room next to Xavier.
“Super jeu,” I say, since Xavier is from Montreal and his native tongue is French.
He frowns. “Don’t do that.”
“Parles francais ? Je suis à moitié francais, mec.”
“Stop,” he barks and finally turns to look at me, and I immediately wish he hadn’t. His legs slow on the bike. “Look, Landon and Grady might be fine with what you did, but that still doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know that,” I reply. “I don’t excuse it even if they did.”
He keeps glaring. I pedal harder. “Is that why you’re pissed? Because I was a drunk idiot?”
“You took away their right to…” He stops talking, and his mouth snaps shut. He shakes his head and stops pedaling. “Fuck it. Just know we aren’t friends, and we won’t be. I can work with you, fine. But don’t try to make it something more like fucking friendship. It won’t be.”
He storms off, his massive hand wrapped so tightly around his water bottle, I’m shocked the bottle isn’t crumbling.
Fucking hell. I wish I could go back to him ignoring my existence.
I watch him march right out of the locker room.
He doesn’t even head to the showers. I finish my cool-down, then give in and ice my shoulder before showering.
It’s the worst it’s ever been tonight, and I don’t feel like waiting until I get home.
I walk into the hall and head to the medical rooms. We have two treatment rooms, the physio office, the doctor’s office, and a supply room with a standing freezer filled with ice and ice packs.
The lights are off as I open the door, so I step into the room and reach back to flip the light on.
As the room illuminates, my eyes lock on the two bodies pressed together in the small space between the freezer and the wall.
Ryder Finch and Xavier Gagne.
Xavier steps back with lightning speed, turning a violent stare on me.
Ryder covers his mouth, wiping at it in a panic, and turns his wide eyes to anything but my face.
“Richard! I heard—” Coach’s voice snags.
I spin and see him standing in the open door. His gaze darting from me to Xavier to Ryder, who definitely should not be in one of our training spaces as an opposing player. They have their own room near the visitors’ locker room on the other side of the arena.
“Finch, what are you doing here?” Coach asks.
“I wanted a private moment to talk things out, so I brought him here,” I volunteer without a second thought. “Asked Gagne to join as a mediator.”
Coach folds his arms across his chest. I keep piling on layers to my lie because I feel the awkwardness in the room, like it’s a whole other person, and Coach is perceptive as fuck. “We were talking elsewhere, but I offered him ice for his hand.”
I stride over to the freezer, which looks normal because I was heading that way anyway.
I open it, pull out one of our smaller ice packs, and pass it to Finch.
He blinks like a deer in headlights, but he takes the pack.
I turn to Xavier, who is looking only slightly less apoplectic than Ryder. “Xavier said this wasn’t a good idea.”
“Yeah. Maybe not,” Coach agrees. “But is it working? I don’t think either of you needs some bullshit clogging up your game going forward. So yeah, hash it out. In the hallway. Witnesses are a good thing.”
We all nod, and he turns to leave but glances back at me. “Was coming to congratulate you on the lobster. And now this. Keep it up.”
I nod, and he leaves. The door falls closed behind him, and the room goes silent. “I gotta go.”
Ryder starts toward the door. As he passes me, I ask, “So you’re mad because I outed two other gay players?”
I use the word other on purpose. Because I know what I walked in on. Ryder almost trips over his own feet, and his shoulders pinch. “There are good reasons to stay closeted, and no one should have that taken from them. No matter how drunk you were. And now I have to worry about it.”
I don’t want to get into the nuances of Grady and Landon’s situation —who knew and who didn’t—because it’s irrelevant. “You’re right, and there is absolutely no way for me to go back and change that. But I can be an ally, and I am. For everyone. And I’m sober and this… never happened.”
“Yeah. Okay.” Ryder continues to the door.
“Ry…” Xavier says softly. Ryder just shakes his head and keeps walking.
When he’s gone, it’s like Xavier’s spirit is gone too, and I’m looking at a shell of a man. He blinks, like he’s trying to get the light back in his eyes. “My father is the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada.”
Oh. Okay. I didn’t really pay much attention to Canadian politics, living in Quebec, but I know their version of conservative is the same as ours, and that’s not a good thing for a queer man. I nod when Xavier’s gaze finally finds mine. “Ryder’s dad is a pastor in Georgia.”
“And hockey is homophobic as fuck,” I add. “That’s three strikes.”
“Yeah. See? There are reasons to stay quiet.” Xavier stands taller, pushing his shoulders back. “And now we both have to trust the guy who fucked that up for other people like us.”
“You can trust me. I promise you.”
“No choice but to find out.”
Xavier walks out of the room, leaving me with nothing but the hum of the freezer and a whole lot of guilt.