Page 20 of Man Advantage

“We’re having tacos,” Charlotte announced, like a verdict.

“Are we?” Ford started to get up.

“Sit.” Cole sent Charlotte off to put her backpack and shoes in her room. He unpacked the bag one-handed. “We’ve got dinner handled. You need to actually rest your leg.”

Ford hated to admit how much better he felt tonight than usual. With the help of a new prescription and a day off the ice, he almost felt his age instead of like a ninety-year-old man. But he wanted to help out. “There’s got to be something I can do.”

“Here.” Cole handed him a block of cheese and a grater.

The three of them wound up making dinner as a family, and Ford allowed himself to imagine more nights just like this one. It wasn’t the first time they’d done it, but tonight it felt different.

The entire time, Charlotte recounted the transgressions of a girl named Piper who’d been sent to the principal’s office that day. The reason kept changing. First it was gum. Then it was for telling the teacher a wrong answer on purpose. By the time the meat was done, Piper had allegedly let a frog loose in the coat room.

“That’s a lot of charges for one kid,” Cole said, sliding the pan off the burner.

“She’s very bad,” Charlotte said with the seriousness of an attorney. “She needs to learn how to be a good friend.”

Being careful was harder than Ford had led himself to believe it’d be. Over dinner, he wanted to reach for Cole’s hand as Charlotte finished giving them a play-by-play of her day. It was sweet to see how engaged Cole was, even though he didn’t have to be. When her taco broke and spilled down the front of her shirt, Cole hopped up to get a washcloth and quickly cleaned up the worst of the mess, telling her to change after dinner and take her shirt to the laundry room so he could pre-treat it.

The rest of the week was much the same. And with every passing day, Ford found it nearly impossible to keep their secret, both at home and at the rink.

It wasn’t the big things. Nobody was going to catch them. They weren’t stupid, and a locker room ran on a hundred years of men not looking too closely at each other. It was the small stuff that got him. Sitting there while Cole peeled out of his gear and having to remember, actively, that he didn’t get to look. Cole reading a play off him across the ice, the wordless back-and-forth they’d always had, and Ford now knowing exactly what it cost to keep his face from smiling whenever Cole made a good play. A week ago, not touching Cole had been the plain and natural order of the world. Now he had to hold it, all day, with both hands.

He got sloppy exactly once. Cole took a hit into the boards in a scrimmage, nothing hard, just a clean rub-out from one of the rookies who didn’t know his own weight yet. Ford came off his line two feet before he caught himself, before he remembered he was a goalie and this was practice and a man in his position did not skate out to check on a healthy defenseman who’d bounced off the glass and was already grinning about it. He stopped, covering it by scraping his crease like the ice had personally offended him, and hoped to God it read as habit.

“You’re staring, Cally,” Riggs said, midweek, and Ford’s stomach dropped clean through the floor before he clocked that Riggs was grinning, chin jerked at nothing in particular. “You’ve been looking at that wall for ten minutes. Lights on, nobody home. You good?”

“Woolgathering,” Ford said easily. He made himself laugh and not look at Cole three stalls down, who had gone very still and then very deliberately unbothered.

“You’ve been off all week,” Riggs went on, pulling a skate on, not about to let it drop. “Deluca ride you about the Duluth goal?”

“Deluca rides me about breathing. You know that.” Ford tied his own skate so he’d have somewhere to put his eyes. “I’m fine. Got some stuff going on at home.”

“The kid okay?”

“Charlotte’s great. It’s the twenty-year-old furnace that’s the problem. It could’ve waited until spring to take a shit.”

The lie came out smooth, a homeowner’s complaint, the most boring thing a man could say, and Riggs bought it and went off griping about his own furnace. Ford had ducked a hundred close calls just like it, handing over a small true-sounding thing to cover a big one.

Theo caught him after, in the tunnel, quiet and out of nowhere.

“You book the imaging?”

“On the calendar,” Ford said, which was true, and kept walking.

“And the hip?” Theo had watched the whole practice from the boards, the way he watched everything.

“Babying it. Doing the program you gave me.” Ford kept it light, kept moving, gave him exactly enough and not a scrap more. “You’ll get your report. I’m good to play.”

“You’re good to play,” Theo repeated, flat, handing Ford his own words back to look at. He didn’t push it. He never pushed it in the tunnel. He just filed it and waited. “Thursday, treatment room. Don’t skip it because you woke up feeling brave.”

“I’ll be there,” Ford agreed, and got out of there before Theo could hound him further. Theo had the medical version: the labrum, the plan, and the dates. He didn’t have how much the after scared him, or the fact that the only person who had the whole of it wasn’t the trainer whose job it was to know. That part Ford had told exactly one man, and he’d told him lying down, in the dark.

That night at home, with Charlotte at Nadine’s because the Stags were headed on the road before dawn, he backed Cole into the fridge before either of them had their coats off.

“You okay?”

“No,” Ford said honestly. “I came off my line for you Tuesday. You took a nothing hit into the boards, and I was two feet out of my net before I even knew I’d moved.” He got a hand fisted in Cole’s shirt. “Almost thirty years of being the guy nobody can read, and I can’t keep my own feet still when you go into the glass. One of these days I’m going to fuck up during a game, and people are going to start talking. And I still can’t make myself want to stop.”