Chapter Fifteen
“[…] Honestly, even if it were possible as a gay man, dating life among Mormons always seemed incredibly depressing to me.
Not every family was as strict as mine and not every LDS member will agree, but the way I was taught about dating made it seem like the least fun activity on the planet.
Beyond the fearmongering about sex before marriage, beyond the dreaded specter of teen pregnancy (fairly low in Utah, I would argue, because teens are terrified, along with a few boring demographic factors), dating is always a means to an end.
Due to this, dating young is a no-no. And then when you’re sixteen and allowed to date, you’re never allowed to be alone with your date.
Your date isn’t your boyfriend or girlfriend.
They’re just a friend until you reach college age at least. As long as you aren’t dating with the clear intent to marry, it’s all pointless anyway.
My question is, if you enter into dating with the end always a given, where’s the room for spontaneity? For the unexpected? For love?
It’s a trick question. Love is not a prerequisite to marriage or family life among Mormons. […]”
(From “Confessions of a Gay Ex-Mormon,” by Ben Sinclair, published in The Salt Lake City Star, 01/22/2007)
The New Year’s shindig was the Sea Lions PR team’s wet dream.
As a whole, hockey players did not exactly make scintillating media personalities.
There were exceptions, like Jax, who managed to be magnetically charismatic despite frequently saying the first dumbshit thing he thought of.
With some luck, teams got one or two of those guys.
On a roster of twenty players who suited up for each game, plus anyone on injured reserve or sitting in the box as a healthy scratch, that came nowhere near covering the necessary media availability.
The New Year’s Eve party, or “gala” as the invitation called it, meant an excuse to get everyone in their least boring suit and in front of a camera.
They always had stages set for photo booth pictures, and Phil remembered from his married days how the WAGs stayed there for chunks of time, taking group shots in various configurations to post on Instagram.
Vanderbilt and Hayes posed there with their partners, being shuffled between different positions and told to make different faces as the shutter went off over and over.
To get through the experience, Vanderbilt clutched a Scotch tightly in his fist. Both he and Hayes had the telltale glazed expressions of the coked-up.
Phil supposed he understood the appeal of drugs to get through being paraded around like a prize racehorse, although he’d never partaken.
He’d been too afraid it would get out when he was younger and his career was fragile.
And later on, he’d seen enough to be scared of addiction.
But any job that courted the kind of glamour hockey did, with its bespoke walk-ins and multimillion-dollar contracts, inevitably attracted access to and dependence on drugs.
It was another aspect Phil wished he could change.
He’d known more than a few players who struggled, and he was willing to bet Vanderbilt would be one of them sooner or later.
As for the photoshoots, they might be annoying, but they meant free advertisement for the team, and Hayes and Vanderbilt were lucky to have partners who wanted to do the labor for them.
Phil certainly didn’t put anything on Instagram he wasn’t contractually obligated to.
He’d been happy for Camille to take care of that, and he knew Kayleigh missed her updating his social media.
When he was still married, he’d never had to do so many features to “humanize” him.
He’d had someone else to take care of his personal sponsorship content, and it had been easy to forget that, ultimately, the team was a product.
The rights belonged to an old white guy, and he wanted their market value to go up.
By any means, if the conspiracy Ben was investigating turned out to be true.
What a sobering thought.
Michelle Horowitz had given him homework at their first appointment to devise a pro-con list about retirement. He wondered how she’d react to “illegal gambling” as a bullet point. She probably couldn’t tell anyone what he said during therapy, right?
But Ben didn’t want anyone knowing until he had proof, which might be a good call.
Phil scanned the crowd until he spotted Ben in his suit (plain, sober black), tie already loosened.
He was making nice with Trout and said old white guy, the team’s owner, one Maxwell Van Giesing.
Watching Ben chat with management reminded Phil of looking through one of those mirrors that distorted reality.
Phil now knew this wasn’t Ben’s natural habitat, but he looked as though he belonged in the suit with a glass of whiskey in one hand.
Ben had finagled his way into a sphere Phil had no access to.
He was perfectly happy standing with Tom and Jax by the refreshments table, snacking on crudités, the occasional pig in a blanket, and Phil’s personal favorite, perfectly seared steak strips on toothpicks.
Phil was pretty picky about his grilled meats, and the caterers had outdone themselves.
Usually, he and Tom stuck it out for a socially acceptable amount of time and then peeled off to watch game tape in some unoccupied corner.
But Phil couldn’t deny his curiosity about Ben’s conversation. He couldn’t deny a desire to be part of it, to stop Van Giesing and Trout from taking advantage of other players.
“Looking sharp, Mooney,” Jax said with a wolf whistle as Mooney passed him in his dark green number with silver pinstripes. The sharp sound pulled Phil’s attention away from the conspiracy happening before his eyes.
Mooney grinned. “Likewise, man.”
Jax wore purple. Not even a dark plum, but a bright, shining purple. He pulled it off, of course, but it was certainly a look.
“No date tonight?” Jax asked.
Mooney poured himself a glass of nonalcoholic, sugar-free punch. The glamour of professional sports astonished. “Nah. I’m holding out for someone special.”
“Oh?” Jax’s eyebrows shot up. “Tell me more.”
“Don’t wanna jinx it. Anyway, what is this? The sad singles corner?”
“Hey,” Tom, Jax, and Phil all said in varying degrees of affront.
Mooney looked between them. “Just calling it how I see it.”
“Get some better glasses,” Jax muttered.
Phil peeked at Tom, who looked both apprehensive and hopeful.
He hadn’t asked if they planned to come out anytime soon.
Maybe that was an oversight on Phil’s part, because if they did, it would affect the whole team.
If they did it right now, it would affect Phil’s enjoyment of his pig in a blanket.
Thankfully, Breezy bounded up to them. The woman on his arm had hair so blonde it shone silver under the strobe lights PR had installed for the event. “Guys! Happy last day of the year! This is Amélie.”
“Nice to meet you,” Phil said, wondering what had happened to the last one. Was it Chloe?
Gamely, Jax asked, “So how did you two meet?”
Breezy beamed. “Luca introduced us.” He waved over at Luca, who was dancing with an absolutely stunning brunette while still managing to glower about something.
“Of course he knows how to ballroom dance,” Mooney muttered.
“He would,” Tom agreed. “Makes the rest of us look bad.”
“The whole core together!” cried Kayleigh from PR, coming up from behind them like a sneaky pig on a hunt for truffles (if, in this case, truffles were content to feed the algorithm). “Group photo time!”
They arranged themselves in a semicircle, Amélie tucked between Breezy and Jax, which made her look even tinier. The new position allowed Phil to get a clear look at Ben again.
He was making an expression Phil had never seen before, his upper lip pulled tight in a sneer.
Trout clapped Ben on the shoulder in approval, and Ben loosened his tie further.
All at once, the absurdity of the situation struck Phil.
It was so easy to forget, with Ben living in his house, taking care of his knee, and complaining about hockey, that what Ben actually wanted was to save their organization.
In Phil’s opinion, there were better methods than running an undercover operation.
But Ben had good intentions, even if he was putting himself and the team’s success at risk.
He wanted to help Phil and the Sea Lions, despite the fact that he couldn’t care less about hockey, all for some distant relative who treated him like garbage.
And to do so, he compromised his own morals by lying to everyone.
Phil ached, watching him. Physically, from his knee up to his hip, and then settling deep in his heart.
He didn’t want Ben to have to do this. It might not be dangerous, not yet, but it could eventually become so. And if anyone caught wind of his plan, well, maiming a man for life happened all the time during hockey games, and there were plenty of sticks around.
A fierce desire welled up in Phil to go over there and stop whatever was happening.
He wanted to tell Trout off himself. He wanted to turn to Kayleigh and tell her to stop putting bullshit feel-good crap on Instagram and, instead, tell the world their organization was rotting from the inside out.
He wanted to spare Ben from having to do this.
Only the knowledge that Ben neither needed his help nor would appreciate him ruining months of work kept his feet firmly rooted to the spot.
Phil thought about sitting on the couch with Ben at the end of a long day of rehabbing his knee and helping Ben pretend to coach the team.
Ben wiping down the kitchen counters because it made him feel better to finish the day with a clean kitchen.
Ben’s acerbic commentary on the team, his tipsy countdown of the silliest things about hockey.