Page 9 of Man Advantage

Ford held his eyes for a second, and there it was again, the same stupid jolt of hope from the booth. For a moment, Cole would have sworn it ran both ways. Ford looked away first, which he never did, said something about an early skate, and took himself off down the hall to check on a kid who wasn’t in the house.

Cole stood in the kitchen a while after Ford went upstairs and his door clicked shut. Then he pulled up Russ’s message, the landlord’s number sitting right there, and made himself think about the apartment over the hardware store, a quiet place with nobody in it, nobody to ask if he’d be there when she got back. It was the goal, the one he’d been trying to find since Grand Rapids. Tonight it just looked empty.

He put the phone face-down and didn’t call.

Later, in the spare room, he lay on top of the covers with the light off and listened to Ford move around down the hall. Water ran and shut off. A door pulled closed. A floorboard gave under his stilted steps, and Cole caught himself, knowing which board it was before the next step came. Getting a place of his own wasn’t going to fix what was wrong with him.

He could have lived with wanting Ford. He’d lived through worse and kept his wits about him. What he couldn’t shoulder was the rest of it stacked on top: the kid’s hope shoved against a phone screen and the whole warm weight of a house he’d walked into swearing he was only passing through.

He wasn’t passing through. He hadn’t been in a long time, and no apartment was going to fix that. What he couldn’t work out was whether Ford wanted him to go or stay. Ford was good at paying attention to everybody’s feelings but his own. Cole lay in the dark with no idea how you got a man like that to admit to what he wanted.

FOUR

Ford had been playing hurt long enough he wasn’t even sure he knew how to play healthy anymore. Tonight was worse than usual, and the game was tied at two. Every time he shoved across the crease, the outside of his hip caught and dragged, a half-beat of lag between what he asked the leg to do and what it gave him. At this level, a split second could be the difference between a save and a red light behind him.

If it wasn’t for his mask, he was sure his teammates would be able to see how much pain he was in.

Cole coasted in behind the net on the whistle and dropped his voice. “They’re running the umbrella. Kessler keeps sneaking the back door. I’ve got that covered. You stay with the shooter.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Cole should have been at the dot already. He lingered an extra second anyway, close, and that second had nothing to do with discussing coverage.

Cole had started quietly shifting plays to Ford’s good side a few games back, which let Ford go on pretending nobody had noticed. Ford needed to keep the worst of his issues a secret as long as he could. The last thing he needed was Deluca finding out and benching him for one of the younger goalies. At thirty-four, that was as good as being put out to pasture.

The Forum was almost filled to capacity, which was damned impressive for a Tuesday night game. Blue and silver ran up every row, and the sound system thumped something tinny under the ad reads. He’d bounced through four towns before this one, and this was the first rink he’d ever skated into and wanted to stay in until they made him leave.

Both Cedar Rapids goals had come in the first, both to the same side. The first was one he’d have had on a healthy night. But the leg answered late, and he’d stayed down in his crease after it, jaw tight, hating himself. Cole had skated over on his way back to the line and knocked his stick against Ford’s pads, a silent shake-it-off. It was more than anyone else out there thought to do.

With the game still tied late, Cedar Rapids came down three-on-two. The puck went low to high for a one-timer on Ford’s weak side, the shot he had no business reaching tonight, and he was already bracing for a lunge that could easily take him out when Cole stepped into the lane and ate the puck off the flat of his knee. It dropped dead.

They won the game in the final seconds. Novo tipped a Riggs point shot through a screen, and the bench emptied over the boards. They mobbed Ford in his crease, and somewhere in the middle of it, he got a hand on the back of Cole’s neck and pulled him in. For one second, in all that noise, it was only the two of them. And Ford realized that everything he’d spent a year telling himself he’d imagined was written on Cole’s face was actually real.

The pile buried them before anyone noticed his mind was wandering to a dangerous place. For thirty seconds, Ford forgot his hip, what playing through the pain was costing him, and how little time he had left to play the game he loved.

The hair on the back of Ford’s neck stood on end as soon as Riggs slapped him on the shoulder. “Englund reads your mind out there. It’s not natural. My own wife doesn’t cover for me like that, and I pay the mortgage.”

Ford’s stomach roiled as he tried to figure out if there’d been a look that lingered a second too long or a hand that drifted a bit too low. Luckily, no one else seemed to notice his distress.

“That’s because she’s smarter than you,” Vargas said.

“That’s love,” Riggs said to nobody. “Cally and Englund. Look at ’em.”

Cole didn’t look up from his laces. Ford laughed it off and reached over to shove Riggs away because Riggs had no idea how close his joke had gotten to the truth. Or at least to the fantasy of what would never be.

His phone buzzed. Nadine had let Charlotte watch on the league stream.

Nadine

She made it to the third and then face-planted into the couch. woke up long enough to hear you won and mumbled ANTLER UP with her eyes shut.

that’s my girl!

He put the phone in his pocket. His attention wandered down the row to where Cole had stripped out of his jersey and breezers. He looked so damned good in his compression shirt, sweat-soaked hair plastered to his head.

He needed to encourage Cole to take the apartment over the hardware store. Russ had it lined up, and the price was right. Ford had been telling himself it was for Charlotte’s sake, so his six-year-old didn’t build her whole winter around a man who’d said from his first week that he was only passing through. But it wasn’t only for Charlotte. Now that Cole moving out was becoming more real, Ford didn’t want to think about how empty the house would feel without the younger man’s presence. Sure, he’d miss walking out of his bedroom in the morning to see Cole doting on his daughter, but he’d also miss having someone to talk to after she went to bed at night.

Theo crouched in front of him, quiet, not buying the tape-check act for a second. “You’ve been favoring that hip for a month. I want you on my table tomorrow morning, first thing. It’s not an offer this time.”