Page 16 of Offensive Edge
Abandoned? “What are you talking about?”
“Honey, you left him behind. I know you didn’t do that on purpose, but it hurt his feelings. It sounds like he’s made that pretty clear.”
“He’s made the fact that he hates me clear. He hasn’t made the reasoning behind it clear.”
“Have you ever thought about how he might have been feeling at that point in your lives? He had the same big dreams for his career that you did, except he had to have his dream in your shadow. You flew right out the gates. He stayed put. Were you there for him then?”
Rowan shrugged. “I didn’t know he was having a hard time with it. My team was losing every night. His team was top of the league.”
“You know the two things are different. Your team might have been losing, but everyone was still talking about how good you were, all across the league. And no one was talking about Theo at all.”
“He wasn’t there for me, either. He stopped answering my calls.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.” What was this, therapy? He assumed he would spend this time getting updated on one of his seven cousins, who were now all graduated from high school and always had a huge list of real-life updates. Instead, he was getting the third degree. “This isn’t my fault.”
“Maybe it’s not, sweetheart. But if you haven’t tried apologizing and talking about it, you might want to think about it. If you play this well together when you aren’t even talking off the ice, think about what the Serpents could be when you click. And more importantly, it’s pretty clear you need a friend out there. Try.”
The most painful thing that Rowan had ever experienced was realizing that at some point, Theo had gone from the person he texted every thought in his head to, every funny meme, every stupid, silly thing he came across, every worry and fear, to being the person he had to dig through his texts to even find their thread. Their messages dwindled to congratulations on good games, or trophies. And then they stopped completely. And Rowan was so in his own head about everything that was happening in his own life that he didn’t know how to hold on.
He hadn’t considered that everything he was texting Theo—how hard the NHL was, how much he missed home, how he was sick of invasive interviews—might hurt him. And he didn’t know what to do about that now.
* * *
Rowan’s childhood bedroom was a fossilized version of his teenaged self. After he started playing junior hockey, he didn’t change anything because coming back home to it was familiar and comforting. He spent his first couple NHL off-seasons here too, a redecoration feeling like too much work to put into a space he spent little time in.
He bought a condo in Calgary when he was twenty, and he off-seasoned there now. It was just the occasional Victory at Calgary (or San Jose at Calgary, now) game where he spent the night with his parents.
Getting involved in sports was a great way to accumulate a lot of ephemera. His walls, desk, and dresser had scattered trophies, medals, pucks, mini-sticks, tournament programs, ribbons, and photos.
God, the photos. His mom bought him a digital camera when he went off to play in the OHL, demanding to see a little of his life if he was going to move away when he was sixteen. He spent years taking thousands of photos. He had piles of them printed out, and dozens of them on his walls.
There were a lot of landscapes. A lot of shots out of a bus window on the way to or from games. Lots of photos of the boys kicking around at school or in hotel rooms.
But mostly, there were a million photos of Theo.
Rowan had never tired of looking at his face. No matter how many photos he took, he always wanted more. Theo had smile lines at the corners of his lips, and cheeks that were so round and kissable when he laughed. Later photos featured his missing tooth, which Rowan had been unhealthily fixated on. His eyes were steel gray, and Rowan had never seen another person with the same color. The best part of looking at Theo’s face was knowing that Theo was his person. Despite never assigning an official label to what they were doing, Rowan’s teenage heart had never had any doubt that Theo was his.
The section of his wall by his bed was a shrine to Theo that he’d put up their first summer break apart, after the draft when Theo already felt so far away from him. Rowan had been shocked at all of the events he was expected to attend that summer, before he was even in the league. The photo shrine helped when he was lonely. There were photos of the two of them, and photos of just Theo, cheesing for the camera, or completely unaware of Rowan’s presence. Sleepy Theo and happy Theo and shirtless Theo.
He remembered what it felt like to love this boy with his entire heart. He’d carried an ache proportional to that love around with him for years. Rowan, however unconscious of what he was doing, had chosen his career over his love for this boy.
The jury was out on whether that choice was going to pan out, but either way, he couldn’t fall asleep with so many little Theos staring at him. Carefully, he pulled each photo off his wall, the loops of Scotch tape he’d adhered them with leaving a little residue behind. He’d pay to have his room painted at some point.
He sat back on his bed against the wall, a stack of photos of Theo in his hands. He knew he should do something normal, like put them in a drawer, or even throw them out. But he didn’t. He tucked them carefully into his duffel bag, in his laptop case where they wouldn’t get bent.
It was weird to think that one day, he’d put his camera down and never picked it back up. He’d felt like a tourist when he’d dragged it around his first few months in the NHL, and eventually, it had ended up back at his parents’ house.
Before he went to bed, he opened his closet to see if his camera was on the shelf where he’d left it, and there it was, in a camera bag covered in a light layer of dust.
By now, he was sure it was a laughable number of pixels, a mostly fried battery, an SD card with forgotten photos on it. Rowan wasn’t satisfied with every part of his life, but he had no qualms about the money he was making. He could buy himself a new, beautiful, expensive camera.
He took the camera out of the bag and felt its weight in his hands. It still had the same chunky starter zoom lens that the camera body came with. Sure, he could buy a new one. But this one was familiar.
There was just enough space in his duffel for him to bring it back to San Jose with him.
VOICEMAILS FROM ROWAN TO THEO
