Chapter Ten #4
Lily slept on her father’s shoulder again.
If he was her father.
Luca took a seat next to Mooney and Mara, who had come as Spider-Man and Mary Jane, costume choices so tame they baffled Luca. He’d expected something more shocking. Then again, they didn’t know that half the team was queer. Maybe they wanted to play it safe.
A good call on their parts—one Luca ought to emulate.
The way they sat, sprawled out next to each other instead of with Mara perched decorously on Mooney’s lap or posing for photos, was outrageous enough for most hockey crowds. It took all of one glance to pinpoint Mara as no one’s trophy.
Raging, violent jealousy overtook Luca. He’d spent the last four years denying his identity as a bisexual man, and there Mara was, denying no aspect of herself and all the happier for it.
Putting aside his feelings for Chris, locking them away and ignoring them, gave him the same sense of numb detachment, the same lonely, angry sadness.
But now, knowing himself all the better for the experience, he couldn’t fool himself into a facsimile of contentment.
Chris would want him to do better than stew in his own anger.
On the other side of the couch, Ben held a wine glass between two fingers and talked a mile a minute. Phil, beside him, looked both long-suffering and amused.
“…and I try to follow along, I promise, but there are things I do not and will never understand about this game. Like, when you were in Chicago, right? That hit against Howie—whatshisface, the tall Russian guy?”
“Denisov is Tatar,” Dmitriyev said with a scowl. Whether Denisov caused his displeasure or he was moping about his lover, Luca could only guess.
“Sure.” Ben waved a hand. “I read four different Reddit threads about that hit, and no one could agree whether or not it was dirty. How is anyone supposed to know?”
“It was dirty,” Phil said. Luca and Tom agreed.
Mooney winced.
“You don’t think so?” Luca asked.
Mooney made a weighing motion with his hands. “Howie had his head down. If he’d seen it coming…”
“I did not have my head down!” Howie sat on the floor, leaning against the couch. Luca could see the glitter on his neck. “I was looking straight ahead, and he came from the side. I looked at the ice for a second—”
“Yeah, you looked down, bro!”
“Denisov had it out for him, not the puck,” Luca argued. “In the third period—”
“Yeah, but the hit wasn’t in the third period,” Mooney said smugly. His hand rested on Mara’s thigh, playing with her fingers.
Luca’s blood boiled. Anger at himself for wanting things he couldn’t have already heated him up; disappointment at giving them up and frustration with the whole situation compounded his irritation. An argument was precisely what he needed.
“My point exactly,” Ben interjected before Luca could start. “You guys are professionals, you’re on Howie’s team, and it’s still a matter of opinion. And the journalists on the sports beat make it worse. This is why I spent so long avoiding jobs where you stay in the same place.”
“Why?” Tom asked. Far from being insulted by his sport being maligned, he seemed amused.
Luca could grant it was funny to see buttoned-up, grumpy Coach Morris a little inebriated.
“American media has this weird insistence on always showing both sides of an issue.”
Frowning, Luca asked, “But that is good, no? Otherwise, you are reading propaganda.”
“It’s fine when both sides are legitimate, but American media isn’t interested in quality control.
Look at the hit on Howie! You’ve got sports broadcasters discussing whether Denisov should have gotten a major penalty or even a game misconduct.
But then they also have to hear from some old guy in Muskoka who thinks hockey is a sport for real men, and back in his day, everyone could take their hits and like it. ”
Luca snorted around his sip of the gin and tonic Howie had pressed into his hands. It wasn’t an inaccurate picture of sports media.
“Watch it,” Howie said mildly. “The old guy in Muskoka is my grampa.”
Heedless of the interruption, Ben took another big gulp from his wine glass, after which Phil pried it out of his hand.
“And that’s sports! It’s so much worse in politics!
It’s like, here, let’s get an opinion from this one old white guy who thinks maybe it’s okay for gay people to have equal rights as long he doesn’t have to talk to any.
But our news segment is not complete without also hearing from Arty McFartface, octogenarian owner of a private gun range in Florida, who thinks all gay people have AIDS, and women shouldn’t have the right to vote. ”
Beside Luca, Mara shook with poorly suppressed laughter, and he had to admit to being amused as well, some of his grouchiness dissipating.
“Okay,” Phil said. “I mean, you’re not wrong, but maybe go easy on the wine, babe. No one here disagrees with you. Except about the hit on Howie, maybe.”
From the corner of his eye, Luca spotted Hayes looking up from his phone and mouthing, Babe?
Luca’s entire body clenched up.
He was not ready for this team fight. He’d barely come around to the idea that he ought to make an effort to get along with the team.
If Hayes continued to be a bigoted shithead, Luca wouldn’t be able to keep it up, not when he now knew that he had to stop suppressing half his identity and pretending it was enough.
How could he get along with the team when the team wouldn’t get along with him?
No wonder Chris worried so much about fights.
Thankfully, or perhaps not thankfully, Howie chose that moment to say, “Lighten up, man. The media might suck here, but at least we’re not in Russia.”