Page 27 of Puck the Coach's Son
That's a thing I should sit with.
I don't sit with it.
I go to the bar.
“Whiskey,” I tell the bartender. “Round for the guys.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Celebration,” I say.
“Celebrating what.”
“Winning the game, Miles.”
Miles looks at me a second longer than he needs to. He pours. He pours four more. He calls them over. The team comes to the bar and picks up the drinks without making eye contact with me, except Magnus, who grins at me like we just got away with something.
Phoenix doesn't come over.
Phoenix drinks the beer he already has.
I down the whiskey.
It doesn't fix anything.
Here's what I know about my own body.
When I'm angry, the anger has two places it can go. It can go into my fists, which is what happens on the ice, which is what the team pays me for, which is what got me on the Wolves in the first place. Or it can go into sex, which is what happens everywhere else. Those are the two exits. My body doesn't have a third exit. I've been in this body for twenty-eight years and I've checked.
My fists aren't available. I used them on Jax an hour ago. I could use them again but there's nobody left to use them on who'd make it back from it, and I'm on thin enough ice with the owner as it is.
Sex is the other exit.
Sex is always the other exit. Since I was sixteen, since the first time I got a girl on her back in the bathroom of a party in a house owned by somebody's divorced father, sex is what I've used to put the anger away. It works. It's always worked. It's reliable. You find a body, you put the anger into the body, the body takes it, you walk out lighter.
I have three numbers in my phone for this.
I pull the phone out.
I scroll.
Lila in the 403. Cody in the west end. Miranda at the gallery. All three of them have been texted by me before. All three of them text back fast. I open Lila first because she's closest, because she doesn't talk much after, because she has a nice mouth.
I typeyou up.
I don't send it.
My thumb hovers.
I look at thesend.
I think about Lila's apartment. The blue rug. The cat. How she takes her hair down in the kitchen before she walks me to the bedroom. The place on her throat I like to bite. All of it is in my head, accessible, available, and all of it is flat. All of it is gray. All of it is a thing I'd do because doing it is what I do, not because anything in me wants it.
I know what I want.
I want a twenty-year-old I've known three days.
His shoulder blades against brick. His mouth opening when he can't make it work. Him crying quietly in an alley because of me. I want to know what his hand looks like wrapped around himself, thinking about me.
