Page 80 of Puck the Coach's Son
At the end of the tunnel Paul is standing outside the office with his arms crossed talking to the assistant. He doesn't look up.
I walk past him like I own the building.
I pretty much do tonight.
I hear Theo's skates on the concrete ten seconds behind me, heading the other way to the showers.
I'm smiling.
I shouldn't be.
I am.
13
THEO
Shanley's is three blocks from the arena and hockey players don't go there after a win. That's why we're here.
Maddox walks ahead of me on the sidewalk with his hood up and his bag over his shoulder and I walk two steps behind him, while my body is still on the bench next to him, still in the storage closet, still in his hand. My hair is wet from the rushed shower. My mouth tastes like him and like the mint of a travel toothbrush I keep in my kit for media days. The cold is biting into my neck where the hair is wet.
He opens the door of the bar without looking back to see if I'm still behind him. He knows I am.
Inside it's dim and close and the air smells of beer and frying oil. A TV over the bar's playing the last two minutes of our game. Our score. Our logo. The chyron goingWOLVES 4 BLACKFORD 2 · FINAL. Nobody's watching it. Four old men at the counter. A woman with a paperback at the far end. A bartender who looks up and goes back to drying a glass.
Maddox walks to a booth in the back, the one where the cracked vinyl is patched with duct tape and the overhead bulb has been replaced with something dimmer than the rest. He sitswith his back to the wall. He tips his chin at the seat across from him.
I sit.
He doesn't say anything right away. He just looks at me. Across the table, in the half-dark, his eyes are almost black.
“You okay,” he says.
Not a question. A check.
I think about the answer before I give it. I'm sitting across from the man who put his hand on my cock on a bench in front of five thousand people an hour ago. Who made me come in my gear. Who used my helmet as a handle and came in my mouth in a storage closet while my father was six rooms away. My body's still thrumming with it. My skin's still hot from the shower. My jaw still aches.
“Yeah,” I say. And I mean it. “I'm okay.”
He nods once.
“What do you drink?”
“I don't know.” I don't. Paul doesn't let me. “Beer?”
“Beer.”
He gets up and goes to the bar and I watch him go. He is still in his team sweatshirt over jeans. His hair is wet under the hood. He has a scrape on the back of his neck from the fight. The bartender pulls two pints without being asked a second thing and Maddox pays cash and brings them back and sets one down in front of me.
“Drink.”
I drink. It is cold and bitter and I don't hate it.
He watches me over his own glass.
“Your father is going to notice you're gone,” he says.
“He won't.”
