Page 40 of Offensive Edge
As Rowan melded more seamlessly into Theo’s life, Theo started making sure he was included in more casual team stuff. Video games on the road, lunch after morning skate. Aaron and Mateo chirped him and chased him around the ice before practice started. Link added him to the ping-pong bracket. Drew and Tommy got the locker room to call him RoRo. Nothing like a dumb nickname to assimilate a hockey player into the group.
Once Theo got over his own bullshit, it changed the atmosphere in the locker room. Theo thought he was putting his feelings aside for hockey, and that’s why he and Rowan were so good together on the ice. That wasn’t true. They were that good on the ice when there was tension throughout the entire team. They were amazing on the ice when the team was integrated, all on the same page, and overall, loving. When Rowan melted away Theo’s hostility, hockey became fun again. And not just because they were winning, but because everyone on their team loved being on the ice with each other.
Winning never hurt, though. Theo was experiencing the best season of hockey he ever had.
And on the side, Rowan was still trying hard to make things right between them.
They had a night off as they were hurtling toward playoffs, when Rowan decided to cook for Theo.
“I’m making pork chops,” he said as he bustled around the kitchen, emptying the Whole Foods bag he got between leaving the rink after practice and coming home.
“Do you have a Rolodex of everything I loved when I was a teenager?”
Rowan paused, a plastic bag of broccoli in his hand. “Do you not like pork chops anymore?”
“Oh, I do. This is really sweet of you. Can I help?”
“No, this is something I want to do for you,” he said. In the eight years since they had last spent every waking hour together, he was sure Rowan would have needed to cook something. He just couldn’t really imagine it.
“Go sit down in the living room. Play some video games or something. Give me an hour.”
“Alright. Call me if you need me.”
“And it’s just my brain.”
“What is?”
“The Rolodex of all the things you liked when we were kids. It’s all just in my brain.”
Theo wanted to kiss him so badly in that moment. Rowan’s weird, earnest, enduring feelings for him. Theo’s heart thumped their echo. When Rowan was on the ice, everything looked effortless. Like he didn’t even have to try. The work that he was doing right now to repair their friendship looked incredibly labor intensive. This didn’t come naturally to him, Theo knew. And for some reason, Rowan thought he was deserving of the effort.
It took an hour and a half, and Theo played through more rounds of Overwatch than he could count, before Rowan brought the plated meal to the dining table. There was a bottle of wine and a couple candles on the table, and Theo walked in on Rowan taking photos.
“I love that you still do that,” Theo said, sitting at the place Rowan set for him. They were sitting across from each other the short way.
“I didn’t really in Texas,” Rowan said. He flipped through photos on the LCD screen, evaluating. “Can I take one of you?”
Theo nodded and smiled, a little embarrassed that this nice dinner would be remembered with Theo wearing an old workout t-shirt.
“Why not in Texas?”
“I was self-conscious. Some of the older guys called me ‘the tourist’ whenever I had my camera in my hands. So I stopped taking it places, and just got out of the habit of it. And I know I have a camera in my pocket every second of every day, but without the real camera in my hands, I just forget to take photos. I don’t use this guy because it takes such better photos. My phone is just out of sight, out of mind.”
“Do you still have that Instagram you used to do?”
“Not the same one. I shouldn’t have shared that during draft week. I didn’t realize how having an audience of hundreds of thousands of followers would make me so uncomfortable, but it sure did.”
“I unfollowed it the summer after your rookie year.”
“That was the worst summer.”
“Yeah,” Theo said. The pain of their dissolving relationship was acute then.
“You should follow my new one.”
“How many followers do you have on that?”
“Just my mom. My dad still doesn’t have any social media.”
