Chapter Six
Okay, maybe that last one isn’t how they’d couch it.
Instead, they’d talk about how nice it is that there’s no donation plate passed around, and the church isn’t begging for money. Nobody is forced to pay the tithe after all. At least not officially. The pressure to do it is all informal, for plausible deniability’s sake.
Of course, if, like me, you happen to be nonconforming in another very unsanctioned way, the pressure gets a lot more formal. […]
This was unfortunate for several reasons.
First, it was late, and Ben was old. Second, Charlotte was presumably unaccompanied and traveling this far for the first time.
She must be nervous, and delays wouldn’t help.
And third, standing alone at a bus stop with nothing to do meant Ben couldn’t stop thinking about kissing Phil.
It had only been two days since, but Ben had done very little besides overthink the entire interaction.
Neither of them had mentioned the kiss or Phil’s entirely legitimate question about what the fuck Ben was doing coaching a hockey team.
They hadn’t talked about it the day after, when Ben had joined Phil on the large, cozy, L-shaped couch to watch the East Coast games and ask all the stupid hockey questions he’d been wondering about.
To his credit, Phil hadn’t asked Ben any questions in return, only answered to the best of his ability.
It turned out Phil also couldn’t explain all the ass-grabbing that went on in the sport, but he had a much better definition for goalie interference than the rulebook Ben had been consulting.
The couch was big enough for them to sit on either end with ample space between them, but they’d both sat on the right so Phil could keep his leg stretched out in front of him on the long end, and Ben could still reach the popcorn bowl.
Their hands and thighs had brushed together all evening.
They hadn’t talked about it today either, not during the half-hour drive through San Francisco to the rink. Phil had been busy outlining an improved training regimen for Luca Mazetti, something more adept than what his AHL coaches had provided for building strength while not sacrificing speed.
Phil had sat in on practice, surreptitiously texting Ben, letting him know which drills to run.
Occasionally, he’d added notes like: Tell Breezy to go lower or Does Jax know there are people besides Tom on the team?
Ben had read those out verbatim, and they appeared to have had the desired effect.
Phil had sent a few inscrutable looks his way, but he hadn’t renewed his questions about Ben’s coaching acumen.
Later, when Ben had wrapped up video review for the day and checked in on Phil, he’d been midway through a workout, and the sight of him lying under the bench press in the world’s tiniest athletic shorts, sweat beading down his forehead, had forced Ben to make a tactical retreat rather than mention the time they’d kissed.
They hadn’t driven back together. Ben had a staff meeting with all the coaches and trainers, in which Trout, once again, hadn’t let anything incriminating slip and, once again, had been impervious to Ben’s attempts at friendship.
And when Ben had gotten home, he’d been too chickenshit to confront Phil.
The sequence of events left Ben standing at a bus stop, worrying about when a bus with a teen he didn’t know would arrive as a distraction from everything else he was worried about: his job uncovering whatever Coach Trout was doing to the Sea Lions, his other job coaching the Sea Lions himself, his living situation at Phil’s house, bringing someone else into his living situation at Phil’s house, and how electrifying it had felt to kiss Phil.
Ben opened his emails on his phone and started drafting a progress report for Pulvermacher. Maybe he would miraculously be satisfied with Ben’s lack of results, and Ben could quit.
He was engrossed in attaching all of the screenshots he’d taken when the bus pulled up. Greyhounds all looked alike. Ben had taken a lot of them early in his career, when he had the energy to go from city to city and story to story at the drop of a hat. They didn’t seem to have changed much.
Ben hit send on the email just as the bus brakes popped and hissed, and it came to a full halt in front of him.
The doors slid open, and one by one, people emerged.
A Black man with earbuds in. A woman with two small children.
A skinny, scrawny boy, aged maybe twelve, in a flannel shirt that swallowed him whole.
Two Latino men, chatting and laughing in Spanish before parting ways. Another family. A—
“Uncle Ben?”
The boy in the flannel shirt was looking up at him.
Ben blinked. “Uh. Charlotte?”
He scowled so instantly and so thoroughly Ben felt an immediate urge to apologize.
“It’s Charlie.”
Only lamplight and the ever-present ambient light of high rises and headlights illuminated the parking lot.
It took Ben a moment to see him properly.
His hair, chopped short unevenly, looked as if he’d done it himself.
He wore his baggy pants cuffed twice, and though the sleeves of his shirt almost covered them, Ben could see his fingers twisting together nervously.
“My bad,” Ben said. “Nice to meet you, Charlie. What are your pronouns?”
“He-him.”
“Cool. Me too. Um. How old are you?”
Charlie’s chin jutted out. “I’m fourteen.”
“Right.” Ben attempted to strangle the nervous laughter in his throat.
Fourteen. What had his mom said on the phone?
Give him a place to stay and help him find a job?
He ought to be in school. At the very least, Ben could find him a GED program.
Or a school. There were really good schools in this part of the country.
But Charlie couldn’t support himself while he finished school, nor should he have to.
Ben could barely swing rent in the Bay Area as a fully grown adult with (some) savings and a decent employment history.
Much better if Ben got them an apartment and covered expenses.
That meant he would have to stay here for at least four years while Charlie finished school.
How would he do his job? He’d have to get a regular gig at one of the local papers, but Ben hadn’t done beat reporting in years.
And then what? He didn’t have retirement savings for himself, much less a college fund for wayward nephews.
But fourteen-year-olds were supposed to be complaining about classes and watching too-loud video clips in the back of public transportation, not living by themselves and worrying about affording groceries.
Ben took a breath.
It didn’t help against the rising tide of panic, so he tried movement.
“Um, my car’s over this way.”
They walked to the lot in silence. This was probably the moment where Ben should ask what had happened and why Charlie had been sent here, but he didn’t want to do that to either of them.
He knew why Charlie couldn’t stay in Utah.
While Ben might not know every horrifying detail of how his family would treat a trans kid, he could imagine the highlights.
“It’s about a twenty-minute drive to where I’m staying,” Ben said once they’d loaded up Charlie’s suitcase and backpack. “I don’t know how long we’ll be there, to be honest. It’s kind of a weird situation.”
“You don’t have your own place?”
Right. Ben had forgotten how judgmental fourteen-year-olds could be. “Not right now, no.”
Charlie got into the front seat beside Ben. Was he even allowed? Didn’t the little warning label on the sun visor say something about children sitting in the back? Fourteen wasn’t a child, but Charlie looked so small. Ben took a deep breath and started driving.
“So what are you going to do with me?” Charlie asked, staring out the windshield, not looking at him.
“Well, have you had dinner yet?”
“No.”
“I guess we’ll start there.”
“No, I mean, like—” Charlie huffed out an enervated breath. “Grandma said you were going to help me get a job.”
It took Ben a moment too long to spot a red light, and he slammed into the brakes. “You’re fourteen.”
“Fourteen-year-olds work. I could be an emancipated minor.”
Oh fuck, could Ben even send Charlie to school without any sort of official documentation?
He’d have to figure out how to adopt Charlie or get legal guardianship or whatever piece of paper would let him keep the kid safe and in school.
That would be a headache and a half. He might have to go to court.
“You could also stay with me and go to school.”
Charlie remained silent for a moment. “Why?” he asked eventually. “What’s in it for you?”
“Absolutely nothing” was the honest answer, but not the only one.
“I know what it’s like for the family to decide you don’t belong,” Ben said. “But I was older than you, and I had finished college. I can’t imagine being brave enough to tell them about my sexuality earlier.”
Squishing himself into the farthest corner of the seat, Charlie muttered, “It’s not brave if you don’t do it on purpose.”
If he had known Charlie better, been in his life in any way up until now, Ben might have asked. As it was, he let the silence spread between them.
“I didn’t plan it or anything,” Charlie continued. “I just felt trapped in all the stupid dresses and blouses my mom made me wear. I was crawling out of my own skin, and I thought I might…hurt someone if I didn’t get the feeling out, so I cut my hair off.”
“And they noticed.”
“Yeah.”
For a moment, Ben concentrated on turning left without hitting oncoming traffic while he collected the right words to say. “I think being yourself is always brave, no matter why you do it.”
He couldn’t look over. San Francisco took third place on Ben’s personal list of worst American cities to drive in, right after Washington, DC and Boston, but he thought maybe Charlie smiled.