Chapter Twenty-Three
Elliot
Good morning
Are you there?
How are you today?
Hello?
“Rodriguez! Get out here.”
Elliot looked up and had to remind himself where he was: on the bench at the practice rink.
It was nine AM; the air was cold and faintly sweet with the smell of Zamboni exhaust, and the ice was fresh.
He wasn’t supposed to be on his phone, but it had been twelve hours since he’d texted Dustin I miss you, and Dustin hadn’t sent anything back.
“Rodriguez! Get off the goddamn phone and get on the goddamn ice!”
Five other off-season players were already out there, coasting around the outside, doing crossovers at center.
Ten more were split between the benches.
He didn’t know any of them – guys from surrounding areas, came in to do a three-on-three.
Elliot didn’t want to do it. He was confused and worried and angry that Dustin hadn’t texted him back and he wasn’t in the mood to play hockey today.
But sometimes that was how things went. And what would the Great Bendito do if he was confused and worried and angry?
He would skate.
He put the phone in his bag behind the bench and vaulted over the dashers.
Three on three was fucking brutal.
The ice was like a desert. There was nowhere to hide. Twice the territory to cover, no time to stop skating even for a second, and no one to back you up if you got stripped or pickpocketed. Everything you did mattered and everything you fucked up was magnified a hundred times.
And Elliot was seriously fucking things up.
“Jesus Christ, Rodriguez! What are you doing?! Climb out of your asshole and get your head in the fucking game!”
Some beast of a guy from Bumfuck, Oregon had just steered Elliot into the boards as he was coming down the wing with the puck.
Elliot slammed his stick on the ice as the guy skated away on a breakaway and buried it.
His legs were on fire and his lungs were burning because he’d stayed out ten seconds past the end of his shift instead of going back to the bench, and this was what you got when you did that.
You got rubbed out and humiliated like a fucking rookie.
He didn’t want to go back to the bench. On the bench was his phone, and there was either a text from Dustin on it or there wasn’t. As long as he was on the ice, either one was possible. Once he looked at the phone, only one of them was, and he was afraid it was going to be the wrong one.
This was probably why you were supposed to leave your phone in the locker room.
He came off the ice at the period and collapsed onto the bench.
He reached behind him without looking, and dug around in his bag for his water, pretending he’d forgotten the phone was in there.
There were too many people around to check it, anyway.
He’d just been eaten up out there; if these guys caught him looking at his phone after that, they’d tear him a new one so wide he’d need stitches.
And as long as he wasn’t checking the phone, there was a chance the message from Dustin was on it.
So he left it where it was, hauled on his water, and waited for the next period.
Less than a minute left, and Elliot was ready for this to be over.
He stripped the puck from the opposing defenseman and sprinted full-out for the net with his legs screaming.
Passing was the sensible thing to do, given how exhausted he was, but if he put this one away he could at least hold onto some scrap of dignity after spending the last thirty minutes smearing dogshit all over the ice.
He could feel the guy coming up behind him and had about half a second to make a call. There wasn’t time to cut him off. He dropped his weight and leaned on the inside edge for a snap shot. Ten more seconds and the game would be over, and he’d be on the bench finding out whether Dustin–
The edge of his skate went into the ice like an axe.
His legs stopped instantly while his top half kept going, and suddenly Elliot was on his face, on the ice, stick clattering out of his hands as he skidded toward the net.
He hit the post at what felt like a thousand miles an hour, heard it pop out of the ice with a hollow clack, and then he was slamming into the wall behind the goal with the net tangled around his helmet and the whistle shrieking.
He got his forearm up just in time to take the impact as he piled up on the end boards like a marionette with the strings cut. He felt the wind go out of him, and rolled onto his back, gasping.
Dios mío. Dios mío. Dios bendito, me cago en la madre.
He immediately thought about Dustin as his mind careened through the list of injuries he could have just sustained. Head, spine, knee, ribs, forearm, wrist, shoulder, hip…
Not that. Please God, not that, because if I don’t have hockey I don’t have anything and I can’t go through what Bennet is going through. Not yet. Even Bennet got to play until he was twenty-nine.
He moved his fingers. Then his toes. His head and neck. Shoulders. Wrists. He put a hand on his ribs and breathed into it and didn’t feel anything.
He was fine, gracias a Dios, puneta. He put a thumb in the air to let everyone know.
No one came to help him as he lay there with his ears ringing, staring up at the lights. Understandably. He was unhurt, and what just happened was fuckin embarrassing and deserved no sympathy.
The goalie he’d wiped out was swearing as he came for the net. It was still tangled around Elliot, and the guy shook it roughly loose without a word and dragged it back to the pegs.
By the time the net was back up and Elliot was on his feet, the clock had run out. Elliot kept his eyes down and said nothing to anyone as he skated off the ice and went to the bench.
Dustin hadn’t texted back. He stripped down in the locker room, jerked off furiously in the shower, and stomped outside to wait for his Uber.
That night, he called his mother.
He was in bed with a pizza and the Golden Girls on mute, nursing a bruised shoulder and his wounded pride. She didn’t pick up right away, and he put the phone on speaker, cracking open a Deschutes.
The line clicked and Mom’s voice came through warm and surprised. “?Dime, corazón!”
“Bendición, Mamá.”
“Dios te bendiga, Mijo. How are you?”
Elliot sighed. He sipped the beer and thought about lying. On the TV, Rose was talking about her diary. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Just okay?”
“Sí, Mamá. Just okay.”
They sat quietly for a moment while he collected his feelings and Sophia on the TV told everyone to go to hell because she wasn’t a 7-11. He wasn’t sure why he’d called. He wasn’t planning to tell his mom anything. Or maybe he was. Maybe he just wanted someone to tell him things would be okay.
So he told her. I’m gay. It just kind of…came out. It was easier than he’d thought it would be. Saying it to Drew first helped.
He didn’t tell her specifics about Dustin Bennet – she knew who that was, and he was afraid that learning her son was gay and sucking the cock of a guy nearly ten years older than him might give the poor woman a heart attack.
When he was done, she was quiet for so long that eventually, he said, “Mami?”
“Sí,” she said. “I’m here.”
“Okay. So… Okay, so what do you think?”
She took so long to answer that he began to worry he may not want to know. He began to worry she might say a lot about Dios and Jesús and not much about him. He might not ever go back to her house if she said anything like that. And that would make him sad.
She took a deep breath. “Ay, Mijo, I don’t know. It’s going to be very difficult for you.”
That wasn’t…quite what he’d expected. He said, “I’m not making it difficult on purpose.”
The line was quiet for a while. Then: “No. I know. But do you– Okay. So do you have to tell them? Your team and your agent and your publicist? What will they think?”
“No, I don’t have to tell them. So you’re not upset?”
“Of course I’m not upset, I just…I’m surprised. But I’m always surprised by you: I thought hockey was going to be a phase you grew out of, and now you’re…you. So…”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I don’t think this is a phase.”
“Mm.” She was quiet again. Then: “Well, is he a nice boy?”
Elliot laughed. No, he was a grown man and a fucking asshole, which was exactly why Elliot liked him.
“Yeah, he’s fine,” he said.
“He doesn’t play you around?”
“No, mom, he doesn’t play me around.”
“And he’s a hockey player? Is he any good?”
Elliot smiled. “He’s the best.”
“So what’s the problem?”
He sighed. “I fucked it up–”
“Elliot! Don’t swear!”
“Sorry.” Elliot laid the phone down and crossed himself automatically. When he lifted it again, he said, “I said something really bad and now he won’t answer any of my texts. I just want to apologize.”
“Mmm.”
He sat with the phone in his lap and watched Sophia try to convince Dorothy that her ex-mafia boyfriend was a perfectly decent guy, while he waited for some words of wisdom. Eventually, his mom said, “You know, before your uncle died I wished I said some things I didn’t.”
Elliot’s insides jolted. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d told him anything about Sal. Had she ever? Had he ever asked?
“I was angry, you know, very angry with him,” she said. “And I told him so the last time I saw him. And I don’t regret that – he needed to know. But I wish I would’ve told him that I loved him too.”
A lump stuck in Elliot’s throat. “You never told me that.”
“I know. I never told you a lot of things.”
“Why not?”
She sighed. “You know, Elliot, I don’t know. Maybe I thought I could shield you from what was happening if I just didn’t talk to you about it.”
“I knew what was happening.”
“Mhm.”
They sat quietly with the line humming between them. On the TV, it became apparent that Sophia’s ex-mafia boyfriend may have robbed a bank. Elliot said, “We still don’t talk about it.”
“Sí. Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
They seemed to come up against a wall then.
They sat a while longer with the line quiet between them, and then his mom said, “I think you should go and talk to your friend. Boy. Friend. Boyfriend. If you need to tell him something then tell him. Just go and make him listen, and then at least you know he heard you. Don’t let it… well. You know.”
Elliot nodded. They sat a while longer in silence. When they hung up he checked the time. Nine forty-five PM. Too late to go to Bennet’s. He turned off the TV and got dressed anyway.