Page 39 of Offensive Edge
Rowan smiled at him. “I am trying to not be awkward about this, but we have eight years to catch up on before we’re really on solid footing, and I’m just trying my best here. I thought having something to do would take our minds off of trying to force ourselves back to the place we were when we were teenagers.”
“That’s sweet, Ro. Were you this sweet when you were seventeen?”
“I was a self-absorbed asshole when I was seventeen, and that was the biggest problem our relationship had.”
“I think everyone is selfish at seventeen. When you moved to Texas and you were struggling, I couldn’t see past my own disappointment in my career to see what you were going through. If you’re going to meet the person you love that young, you better hope you don’t hit any difficult circumstances until you’re emotionally mature enough to deal with your shit without hurting your partner.”
“One thing I regret that I remember being weird about back then was the fact that we were never official.”
“I thought you didn’t want a boyfriend.” Something about not being official back then had made sense, somehow. Even if it did kind of hurt.
“I didn’t. I think…you know, internalized homophobia and stuff. If we didn’t stick a label on it, it could still be straight-person behavior.”
Theo laughed.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Rowan said, pressing a hand to his heart. His teal fingerprints joined a rainbow of other paint smudges on his borrowed hunter-green apron. “I’m cutting myself open here for you.”
“No, no, I’m laughing because my little bisexual teenage brain had the same thoughts. Like,I like girls, of course I’m straight.But Rowan and I are in love because hockey transcends all feelings.”
It was Rowan’s turn to laugh. “I’m straight, but here’s my hockey boyfriend.”
“Hey, enough guys were trading handies back then for dumb teenage reasons. It didn’t seem too far beyond that.”
“It’s ridiculous because it didn’t. No fucking wonder we blew ourselves up.”
“You think we would have survived that if we had just put a label on it?”
Rowan looked up from his dinosaur. “No.”
“Yeah, me either. Do you ever wonder what it would have been like if we had been drafted to the same team? If you were, like, one notch worse at hockey, and I was one notch better, and we’d been picked back-to-back by Vancouver?”
“I thought about that every day for the first couple of years.”
“What made you stop?”
“When you were traded from Carolina to Ottawa, and you stopped looking so sad in all the media you did, and photos you were in. When you started getting minutes on the ice, and people saw how good you are. That’s when I realized that you needed to shine without me. Then you came here and started really blowing up. Watching you thrive in San Jose has been one of the joys of my life.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Theo said, deflecting the earnestness of Rowan’s words. Rowan wasn’t always great at picking out the intricacies of emotional situations, but sometimes he was shockingly good at saying exactly what was in his heart. Occasionally it made Theo uncomfortable, but mostly, it made him trust what Rowan told him in moments like these. Rowan was a bad liar.
“And now that everyone knows you’re great without me, we can show them how incredible we are together.”
“I still can’t believe how good we are together.” Theo had turned his snake jar around in order to paint his jersey number on the back. If he was going to make this objectively embarrassing thing, he might as well go whole hog about it, giant 27 on the back and everything.
“You don’t believe it?”
“I haven’t always been on a line that had two of the top scorers in the league on it,” Theo said. “Not everyone is Rowan-and-Felix.”
“No. We’re Theo-and-Rowan.” Theo knew Rowan put his name first on purpose. Rowan truly believed that his own hype was overblown, which had always been hilarious to Theo.
Theo-and-Rowan. He liked the way that sounded coming out of Rowan’s mouth, even if he wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. But part of his heart was starting to believe that this could work. They were together now. Why not betogether?
“Dude, what is going on with that dinosaur?” Theo asked. Rowan had tried to paint the spikes going down the dinosaur’s back and tail a mustardy yellow, but things were looking pretty muddy over there as the yellow paint mixed with the teal covering the dinosaur’s body.
“Maybe I should start over.”
“No,” Theo said, taking a bit of paper towel off the roll and wiping up the paint where it had been globbed on. He marveled at how bad Rowan could be at things. He was brilliant on the ice, no matter what the situation. Off the ice, however, was another story. “Just touch the paint up a little now. You can still fix it.”
* * *
