Chapter Fourteen #3
Charlie took one look at the approaching hordes and jerked his head toward the stairs. “I’m gonna go read a book or something. Let me know when they clear out?”
Phil was already on the phone with the nearest open Chinese restaurant, ordering what sounded like most of the menu. It fell to Ben to open the door and let everyone in.
“Hi,” he said. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“Coach!” Dmitriyev grinned. He wasn’t wearing his falsie, and thus, his tongue stuck out from the gap where his top right incisor used to be.
A few weeks ago, Ben noticed Dmitriyev putting in the fake tooth in the locker room, and Phil showed him the highlight reel of the shot on goal that had caused the gap.
Dmitriyev had taken a puck to the mouth during an informal practice when his cage had been off and, consequently, had been out with a concussion for four straight weeks.
But as he’d been taken off the ice, he was incandescent with joy at having blocked the shot.
Goalies.
God, Ben hoped Charlie didn’t turn out that way.
“Oh right,” Breezy said, big booming voice and big booming laugh unperturbed by the morning of talking at the shelter. “Coach is staying with East while his knee heals, y’know. And his nephew. Is Charlie here?”
“He’s hiding from you. I think he’s all peopled out.”
“Fair,” Luca said. He stood beside Breezy in the entranceway, looking for all the world as if he would prefer to be anywhere else.
They all filed in, leaving their shoes by the door, and immediately converged on the couch.
“Sorry,” Tom said hesitantly. “We always do Christmas at Phil’s. We all assumed…”
“You know what they say about assuming,” Phil said, stuffing his phone back into his pocket. “Makes an ass out of you and me.”
“Oh my God,” Jax groaned. “Tom was right. You are such a dad. You are the most dad person I have ever met.”
“Really?” Phil asked skeptically. “More than your own dad?”
“Way more than my dad.”
Ben swallowed heavily. Phil was dad material.
Good thing he hadn’t accepted Phil’s proposal.
Ben couldn’t rob him of the chance to be a dad.
He’d said he wouldn’t parent Charlie, but he couldn’t help himself.
He had already bonded with the kid, found common interests, made sure Charlie found friends.
Not marrying Phil might deprive Charlie of the connection they had made, but marrying him meant depriving Phil of the chance to find his own family.
“We can take this to my apartment,” Tom offered, eyeing the couch anxiously, where Nieminen and Gustafsson had put their feet up on the coffee table. Rosalia had cleaned it yesterday. Weren’t Europeans supposed to have good manners? Or did being a hockey player trump etiquette?
Phil waved him off. “I ordered food. It’s fine. Just slipped my mind this year. And with the knee, I kinda thought…”
“You’re not off the team yet,” Tom said fiercely. “C’mon, old man. You shouldn’t be standing.”
Jax watched them go fondly, which tugged at the unresolved déjà vu bothering Ben.
“So,” Jax said, turning to Ben. “I brought a lot of eggnog. Like, a ton. Will you be okay with us drinking it?”
Ben blinked. “You’re all of age, aren’t you?
” He craned to see who all sat on the couch.
Howie’s copper curls peeked out from the corner of the L.
“Keep the strong stuff away from Howard, and we’re fine.
” He knew Howie almost certainly drank with the team on road trips and when they went out, but with Charlie just upstairs, Ben had to act as if he cared about legal drinking ages.
“Seriously? It’s the literal opposite of the meal plan.”
“Oh.” Right. Ben vaguely recalled something about dairy in the team nutritionist’s emails. “I can make an exception for the holidays.”
“Sweet!” Jax bustled off to the kitchen, lugging a bag filled with several large plastic containers and what looked to be two handles of rum.
Things went downhill from there.
Mats and Luca got into a heated debate in Italian before the food got there, something to do with European politics no one could follow. Even Breezy bowed out, saying he knew none of the politicians and his Italian suffered when he drank.
No one could be bothered to wait for Ben to get plates and silverware, so they ate their food straight out of the takeout containers using chopsticks with varying degrees of skill.
Gustafsson got Szechuan sauce on the couch cushions; Jax managed to fling a wonton straight across the room when he got too excited about whether velvet was an appropriate fabric for a walk-in suit or not.
Breezy had brought his game console, and he didn’t appear to mind it getting covered in takeout leftovers as he hooked it up to Phil’s TV.
He then lost three successive rounds of a racing game Ben was a decade too old to recognize before Jax insisted on playing something they all referred to as Chel.
It turned out to be hockey, but as a video game.
By then, Ben had drunk two glasses of Jax’s eggnog, and the battle for food had been so intense he’d eaten maybe half of three appetizers and no main courses. “You’ve gotta be kidding me” slipped out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
Luckily, Jax, Breezy, Mats, and Nieminen were occupied squabbling over who got to play as the Sea Lions. Ben picked up the cover of the game. On it, a very serious picture of Tom with Phil next to him in profile stared back at him.
He giggled.
Phil snatched it out of his hands.
“I remember that photoshoot,” Tom said morosely. “It took all day. They made us record all these slice-of-life interview segments.”
“Sounds like scintillating content,” Jax said, staring at the screen as he decided whether to play as the Carolina Twisters or the Toronto Huskies. “What did you even talk about? Twenty-four ways to beat up on yourself for not carrying a whole team on your shoulders?”
Tom elbowed him in the side. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“Eh.” Phil scrunched up his nose, and Ben wanted to kiss the bridge.
He didn’t because he and Phil weren’t doing that anymore.
Also, an entire hockey team sat right there beside them and would have some strong opinions about how cute Ben thought Phil was.
“It was pretty bad. I think we talked about our favorite sports drink flavors for about twenty minutes.”
“Right, I remember. Yours is yellow because you’re a psychopath.”
Phil reached across Jax to smack Tom on the upside of the head.
The ensuing jostling made Jax click save before he was ready, meaning he had to play the Ottawa Mounties, which in turn made him jostle both Phil and Tom, and then Ben had to get up off the couch.
Four rowdy hockey players turned it into unstable ground.
He watched as everyone with a controller settled into the game. They were in playoff mode, going for best of seven, and they took it so seriously.
When Nieminen, playing as the Sea Lions, lost in the first round, everyone else booed, including Phil and Tom.
“Wow,” Ben said. “Do you guys have any hobbies?” He took a long sip of his third eggnog—it was delicious; he’d have to ask Jax for the recipe—and missed the moment where Dmitriyev turned to eye him suspiciously.
Dmitriyev had already drunk four glasses, but as both a Russian and a goalie, he was stronger than alcohol.
“Oh-kay,” Phil said, drawing out the first syllable. “I’m going to need your help cleaning up the kitchen, Ben.”
He levered himself off the couch, unsteady not only from his knee, and moved to grab Ben by the elbow.
“But you have a cleaning service,” Ben said. “We fought about it this morning, remember?”
“They’re not coming till next week, and we don’t want to get ants.”
“Hm. That’s true.”
Phil shut the kitchen door tightly behind him.
“You are a lightweight,” he accused Ben.
“I’m not drunk,” Ben said. “Maybe a little tipsy.” Tipsy enough that the fluorescent lighting in the kitchen was uncomfortable, but not so much that he would have a headache in the morning.
“Well, you’ve gotta watch your mouth, or you’ll start letting on you’re not a real coach. You sound like you don’t even like hockey.”
Ben swayed closer to Phil, who leaned against the counters. “I like some hockey players.”
Phil tensed. “But not the game?”
“I don’t hate it.”
He couldn’t read the look on Phil’s face, which was far removed from his usual expression.
Phil always seemed just a breath away from smiling, with warm, dark eyes.
Seeing him now, eyebrows drawn together and forehead lined, made Ben want to take everything back.
But Phil deserved the truth for once. He tried to explain.
“Gives me a headache,” Ben admitted. “Stupid goal horns. I don’t hate hockey. I just think it’s a deeply silly sport.”
“Silly.”
“Veeery silly.”
“Okay, please tell me what’s silly about my life’s work.”
Ben had waited for this moment for months. “Number one. Your outfits.”
“Our gear.”
“Your uniform…things. The shoulder pads, the shorts over pants, all these giant guys wobbling around on teeny tiny little skate blades…that is an unserious look right there.”
Phil’s frown deepened, which was the opposite of what Ben wanted, but he’d started now, so he had to finish.
“Number two. The rules. The rules are so silly. No one knows what counts as goaltender interference. You have twelve different penalties for smacking a guy with your big sticks, and sometimes, you fuck up by putting too many people on the ice. But also, you’ve got fifteen guys squished on the bench at all times. What’s the point of that?”
“It’s so—”
“No, I’m not done,” Ben said. “The silliness continues. Number three. The cellies. I have never seen a marginally dignified goal celebration. And number four. The positions. What even are they?”
Phil blinked. “I feel like Hockey For Dummies—or whatever you read to prepare for this job—should have covered those.”
“I did lots of reading, thanks. But now, people are saying, ‘oh, but this guy is an offensive defenseman,’ which is different from a normal defenseman. And Edwards keeps talking about the third line backcheck and how their offensive defensive abilities need work, and I have no clue what he means. And I’m making you all look bad, and now I feel bad because you’re so great. ”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you took this job, huh?”
“It wasn’t my idea!”
“You are forty fucking two years old! You took a job pretending to be a hockey coach, something you know nothing about when your stepbrother’s uncle—”
“Uncle’s brother-in-law.”
“When some guy you’re barely related to called in a favor, and now you’re taking in your nephew on no warning as a favor to your mom? How often does she call you otherwise?”
Ben swallowed. “Usually once a year, around my birthday.”
“Not even on it?”
Ben shook his head.
“And how often do you call her?”
“I stopped a couple years ago.”
“Why?”
“She never answered.”
Phil nodded sharply. “So you left your family and the church on your terms, wrote a whole bunch of articles about it even, but almost two decades on, you still jump when they say jump.”
Ben sucked in a breath. Phil had looked him up. Ben wasn’t ashamed of his old articles, not even the ones he’d written at twenty-five, bitter and angry and hurting, but he’d never had a partner read them either. Not that Phil counted as a partner. “Leaving isn’t easy.”
“Yeah, well, neither is rehabbing an ACL tear I might never have gotten if you’d just gone to the police with Pulvermacher’s insane theory like a normal person!”
The bright light in the kitchen made Ben’s eyes gritty, as if he’d woken up in the wrong part of his sleep cycle. He could hear the video game from the living room and the muffled laughter of eight other men he’d let down without their knowledge.
“I didn’t give you your Christmas present,” Ben said eventually.
He pulled the sticky note out of his pocket and stuck it to Phil’s chest. “There you go.”
Phil blinked down at it. “What’s this?”
“‘S Pulvermacher’s private phone number and email address.”
“And what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Apply for head coach.”
Phil reared back, eyes wide. “What?”
“You’re retiring, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’ve gotta do something after. You’re a great coach.
Way better than me, which is a low bar. But also way better than Trout and, honestly, Edwards.
You’re the only person who knows my job will be up for grabs.
You’ve got the in—use it. I’d put in a good word for you, but Pulvermacher doesn’t like me. ”
“Oh.” Phil stared down at the sticky note.
“You should do it,” Ben insisted. “You’re the best man for the job.”
Taking a deep breath, Phil reached into his own pocket. “If we’re doing gifts now, here’s yours.”
He handed Ben a jewelry box. With a sinking feeling, Ben popped it open.
“You can’t be with me because you need a real marriage?” Phil asked. “What’s stopping us from having that?”
“You’re straight,” Ben said, dumbfounded and unable to look away from the two gold rings nestled together in the soft bed of the box.
Phil snorted, a sad facsimile of his real laugh. “Of course I’m not fucking straight, Ben. I may not have every answer you’re looking for right at this moment, but I wouldn’t want this with you if I didn’t want you.”
Phil stalked past Ben toward the door, then paused.
He turned on his heel to press a single, devastating, rum-scented kiss to Ben’s cheek.
“Someday, I hope you find the guts to stop hiding behind people who never deserved to call you family. I’m right here, and I can show you what that word really means, you and Charlie. But you’ve got to let me.”
The kitchen door swung open, and Phil exited, leaving Ben alone with the rings still in his hand.
A roar of laughter swamped the still air of the kitchen. Through the open door, Ben saw Jax with his arms in the air, clutching his controller in victory, and Tom Crowler watching him with unmistakable fondness. At last, Ben remembered what had been in the back of his mind all day.
Jax Grant, standing outside Tom Crowler’s hotel room door in Los Angeles and letting himself inside with the spare key like a man going to see his lover.