Page 119 of Puck the Coach's Son
I'm not going to last. I can feel it building. Not the hot spike of the clearing. Not the desperate slam of the first night. Something deeper. Something that starts behind my navel and spreads up through my chest until my throat is full of it. He's moving slow. He's watching me. He knows exactly what he's doing.
“I want you to come for me,” he says. “Just like this. Look at me.”
“I'm looking.”
“Come.”
I do. I come with his name in my mouth, not Mad Dog,Maddox,because this isn't that, and he watches me through it, every second, holding himself inside me, and then he lets go too, shaking into me with his face pressed to my neck, quiet, the quietest he's ever been. His arms tighten around me. His breath comes out warm and ragged against my throat. He says my name once, low, like a prayer he didn't know he knew the words to.
He doesn't pull out right away. He stays. Holds me. Kisses the side of my face, my jaw, my mouth. His hand is in my hair,slowly combs through it, the same motion over and over, and I realize at some point that he is soothing me like a thing he plans to keep. Eventually he moves, slow, careful, and gets a cloth from the bathroom and cleans us up without making it a thing. He wipes my stomach. My thighs. Himself. He drops the cloth in the hamper. He doesn't narrate any of it. He just does it. It's the most quietly domestic set of actions I have ever witnessed, and my throat is thick watching him.
Then he comes back to bed.
Pulls the duvet over us.
Arranges me against his chest like I belong there.
I do. That's the surprise. I belong there. Not in a borrowed way. Not in a lucky way. Like the shape of his ribs and the shape of my cheek were designed to fit and no one told me until tonight.
“Sleep,” he says, low, into my hair. “I've got you.”
I tilt my face up so my mouth is near his throat.
“Maddox?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for coming to the bench.”
His arms tighten.
“Always,” he says.
And I believe him.
I close my eyes on the gray sheets, on the low hum of the city, on the warm solid fact of his body under mine, and I fall asleep with his heartbeat under my ear like a metronome set tosafe.
18
MADDOX
Game at home against the Providence Bruins. Season on the line by minute sixty or we're staring at a wild-card chase for the rest of the year. The crowd comes in two hours early and they come in loud. Somebody in the upper bowl has a cowbell and I want to find them after and buy them a beer.
Paul gives the pre-game speech like a man reading his own eulogy. Tight jaw. Flat eyes. He doesn't look at me once. He doesn't look at Theo either. He talks about discipline. He talks about structure. He talks about playing the right way. He saysthe right wayfour times in ninety seconds and the rookies nod along like they know what it means. Phoenix and I and the other vets know it meansdon't do what Maddox does.
We sit three stalls apart in the locker room and do the warm-up taping and act like we haven't been sharing a bed for six nights. Theo is white-faced and focused, and I watch him tape the same spot on his stick three times before he sets it down. Park walks past me, claps my shoulder, says nothing. Phoenix catches my eye across the room and lifts his chin a quarter inch. That's the whole pre-game for me. Nod from Reyes. A claimfrom Theo's leg pressing mine under the bench for two seconds before we stand to go.
We go.
First period. Bruins score inside four. Clean breakaway, our D caught flat-footed, nothing to be done. We pull even on a power play at eleven when Phoenix wires one from the point through a screen. Paul double-shifts Theo on the third line because our second-line center took a high stick in warm-ups and pulled himself. Theo doesn't flinch. He skates. He skates like a man who has been told his whole life he doesn't belong on this ice and has decided, quietly, to disagree.
He wins his first face-off against a guy who has taken thousands of face-offs in his professional career. I watch from my bench and my teeth come down hard on my mouthguard.That's mine. That's my boy.I don't say it. I don't have to. Phoenix looks at me and shakes his head like he's watching a man drown in public.
He's good. I've been telling him he's good for weeks and he didn't believe me and tonight he's making believers out of twelve other guys and a building of ten thousand.
Second period. Bruins go up two to one on a bounce off the post that had no business going in. I take a run at their winger on the next shift, legal, hard. Shoulder to chest, feet planted—a hit that used to get me on highlight reels before the league decided I was a problem. The whole bench stands up on it. Paul benches me anyway for two minutes. Fine. I sit. I watch. I breathe through my nose. The vein in my temple is doing something. Park slides down the bench and hands me a water bottle withoutlooking at me.Drink, man.I drink. Park is not my friend but he is, tonight, not my enemy, and that counts for something.
Theo gets a look shorthanded and misses the net by a finger. The crowd groans and then cheers him anyway because the crowd has decided, apparently, that Theo Laurent is one of theirs now. I whispernext time, sweetheartunder my breath. He is fifty feet away, but I like to think he hears me.
