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Oh. That would make sense. Gavin wouldn’t know that he’d quit the NHL after six years. Wouldn’t know he’d given up. Gone back to school. Tried to make something out of the mess his life had become.

Zach swallowed hard. “No,” he said.

Gavin actually had the nerve to look pissed now. More pissed. “Why the fuck did you stop playing?”

“You’re assuming I chose to stop playing,” Zach said, even though that was true. He could’ve kept going, for another contract and maybe even another. At least his agent had thought so.

“Don’t be stupid, you were too good for nobody to pick you up,” Gavin said.

Had he been good? Zach tried to think back to a time when he’d believed that was true, before the machinery of pro hockey had worn him and his confidence down.

“I went back to school. Got my degree. Working on my masters, now,” Zach said, looking anywhere but at Gavin’s face.

He didn’t want to see the disappointment in his eyes.

The resignation. You gave up , he could imagine his old coach saying.

You couldn’t hack it . Somehow those words would hurt even more coming from him than they did coming from his own fucking brain.

“What about hockey ?” Gavin demanded.

That was fucking rich, considering that Gavin had buried himself out here without hockey .

“Yeah, what about hockey ?” Zach retorted, his temper shredding under the pressure. He wasn’t proud, but he was kind of a mess here.

Gavin’s mouth compressed together. “Fair,” he said flatly. “So you’re here to recruit me?”

Zach shrugged. Suddenly he wanted to leave very badly. It had been a mistake to come here. To see the ruins of his life reflected back at him in the eyes of the one person he’d admired more than anyone else. The one person whose approval he’d always craved.

“I thought you were going to give me some big speech?” Gavin continued. He started to pace back and forth on the screen porch.

Zach absolutely did not check out his ass in those shorts. He was a grownup, and grownups didn’t do that shit.

“Would it matter if I did?”

Gavin made a face. “Nobody’s ever gotten this far before, and I feel . . .”

“I wasn’t going to go away and you weren’t going to shoot me,” Zach said, suddenly very sure about that. “Though, if they knew you at all, you weren’t ever going to shoot anybody.”

Gavin choked out a laugh. “How do you know that?”

“Come the fuck on,” Zach said. “I bet there aren’t even shells in that.”

Gavin’s hip collapsed against the pole again and he was almost smiling.

Much later tonight, Zach imagined he’d get himself off to that half-smile and in the morning he’d have to text Hayes and tell him, I fucked up .

“I’m not interested in coming back,” Gavin said primly, his tone at odds with the sly curl of his lips.

Yeah, Zach wasn’t imagining that mouth doing anything at all.

Fuck.

It had been bad enough when Gavin was married to Noelle, his high school sweetheart, who Zach had genuinely liked , and now it was worse, because Noelle was dead and Gavin’s grief had transformed him into this man that Zach both knew as well as the back of his hand and not at all, anymore.

“What, you’re gonna stay out here in the middle of nowhere and rot ?” Zach demanded. Because it was such a fucking waste, and suddenly the destruction of it actually really pissed him off.

Nobody would ever see that half-smile again. He’d be the last. He’d be the last one to wonder, what if .

Gavin would never organize another power play, never make anyone bag skate until they were throwing up all over the ice.

Never stand implacably behind the bench, or lean in and cajole his players to get their shit together.

Never once inspire one of his players to make goals—even if they were goals bigger than they could bite off and chew.

That was such a fucking crime Zach could barely take it.

Gavin didn’t say anything for a very long time. Zach almost worried that he’d not heard him but then he’d practically bellowed it so how was that even possible?

“Sure,” Gavin finally said quietly. With resignation.

The joke was on Zach though, because despite the dark circles under his eyes and the scruff and the too-long hair that looked like he was chopping it off with a hunting knife or something equally ridiculous, Gavin looked so fucking alive.

He wasn’t rotting.

Not dead. Not by a long shot.

“Why?”

Gavin shot him a hard look and fell silent.

And okay, yeah, he didn’t want to talk about it. Well, Zach didn’t want to talk about it either.

The day he’d found out, he’d crawled under the covers and cried until he’d felt like a dried husk of a human being. For Noelle, of course, who’d been so kind and sweet to him, practically a second mother when he’d been on the team, and for Gavin, who’d lost his touchstone, his soulmate.

Hayes had held him for hours, until he’d been all cried out.

Maybe that had been the beginning of the end for Zach.

He’d gotten over it—how could he do anything else?

—but that driving hunger inside him had never felt the same.

Noelle’s death had been a rude reminder that hockey wasn’t everything, that once it was over, once Zach was done, he’d have a whole life stretched out in front of him, empty and blank.

Waiting for him to fill it with something.

But even if he didn’t want to talk about it, Zach was here to talk about it.

“So, that’s it?” Gavin finally spoke up. “You come all the way out here, and that’s all you’re gonna say? That I’m ‘rotting’ out here? Come on, Wheeler, you can do better than that.”

Gavin didn’t remind him again that he’d actually let him onto the porch, and nobody else had ever gotten that far, but then he didn’t have to. Zach could feel the pressure of it. Wanted to rise up and meet it.

Where should he even start?

At the beginning, of course. But not Gavin’s beginning. At Zach’s beginning.

“I didn’t know I wanted to coach, at first,” Zach said. “But I went back to school, and some guy in my econ class figured out I’d played in the NHL. It didn’t take long for him to start trying to persuade me to join their beer league.”

Gavin chuckled. “You didn’t.”

Zach shrugged. “One or two of them had played in juniors, it wasn’t that ridiculous.” But okay, it had been. He’d skated circles around everyone. Had multi-point nights basically every time he took the ice.

“I’m sure your ego was very stroked.” Gavin said it with a straight face, but everything inside Zach went hot and tight.

He pushed the feeling away. He’d never wanted to want Gavin Blackburn. He only had, helplessly. But back then he’d been eighteen. Now he was twenty-seven. He could control himself.

“But if I wanted to play the way I knew we could, with me on the roster, we couldn’t just go out there and push the puck around.

We needed—” Zach made a frustrated noise, remembering how after the first dozen or so games the casual attitude had begun to make him a little crazy. “We needed plays. Practices.”

“You started coaching ’cause you wanted to dominate your beer league?

” Gavin was laughing again, and it sounded rough, like he hadn’t done it in awhile.

Zach wondered, before he could stop himself, just how long it had been since he’d had anything to laugh about.

Since he’d had anything he wanted to laugh about.

“It sounds really stupid when you put it that way, but yeah.”

“So you started coaching your beer league, and then what?” Gavin might pretend disinterest in hockey, but Zach could see the light in his eyes. Whether it was because of hockey or Zach, he wanted to hear this story.

“A season. Then two. We won the city championship. But then I moved back to Portland for grad school, and I discovered I actually missed it—”

“Of course you did,” Gavin muttered.

Zach wasn’t going to touch that with a ten foot fucking pole.

“The scoring and the bullshit way everyone loved and hated and admired me, yeah, a little, but mostly just the coaching, actually. Coaxing the best out of those guys. Watching them bring that to the ice, every game we played? That I missed. More than scoring over fifty goals in twenty-five games.”

“Jesus,” Gavin said, scrubbing a hand over his face. “How many penalties did you draw?”

Zach laughed. “Enough. Never stopped me.”

“I bet.”

“But that’s the thing, right? I liked playing.

I love coaching.” Zach forced himself to meet Gavin’s dark eyes.

The way he almost never had, the way he almost never could, starting when he’d been eighteen and then nineteen and in thrall to the most persistent crush in the history of the world.

“Then I thought about what coach I’d want to learn from.

The coach I’d like to be most like, and .

. .” Zach shrugged, because he knew he didn’t need to say it.

Gavin didn’t say anything. Not for a long time.

Zach let him have his moment. He’d told the truth, yes, but he’d laid it on a little thick, once it had really sunk in that the reason Gavin was really interested was that this pitch wasn’t about him . It was about Zach.

That was probably the other thing nobody who’d come out here had ever realized.

“I thought I’d like that story more,” Gavin said flatly, finally.

But he had liked it. He hadn’t liked the ending.

“Lie to yourself if you want,” Zach said, standing up. Suddenly very tired of all this bullshit. The front that Gavin was so committed to. The front he didn’t quite believe. “But don’t lie to me.”

He didn’t look at Gavin as he walked by him.

Hayes had been right; this was a fool’s errand.

Gavin wasn’t rotting out here in the middle of fucking nowhere because he wanted to. He was rotting out here for something else, and until he figured out how to be honest? Well, he was just going to continue rotting and there was nothing Zach could do about it.

He was nearly to the screen door when Gavin’s voice stopped him. “Wait.”

Zach turned.

Gavin’s face was full of anger. Regret. Frustration. Resignation.

“Come inside. Let’s . . . we’ll talk.”

Some of Zach’s disbelief must have leaked out because Gavin just rolled his eyes. “I can dismiss everyone else easy, without breaking a sweat. I don’t give a shit about them. But you . . .” Gavin just shook his head and pushed off, heading towards the other door. The door into the house.

There’d been a time when hearing those words would’ve made Zach giddy for hours. For days. Even if he knew that Gavin only saw him as a player. One of his maybe, but still a player. Maybe, in some ways, a pseudo son.

Gavin held the door open and Zach took it, taking care, like he always did, not to touch him.

It took his eyes a second to adjust to the darkness once they were inside.

It was simple, but not as simple as he’d been initially expecting. After all, Gavin had been living here for years .

It was mostly one room, though Zach could see a doorway to another room, the corner of a bed with a dark green plaid coverlet visible. He looked away immediately, taking in the rest of the place.

There was a small kitchen on one side, with a big white ceramic sink sunk into the plain butcher block countertops. A living room on the other. A big comfortable-looking couch, opposite a surprisingly large TV setup.

Maybe it was neat, but it was clearly lived in. This was Gavin’s home . There was a half-drunk bottle of red wine on the counter, the cork shoved into the bottle crookedly. A worn book on the table next to the couch. A sweatshirt draped unceremoniously over a barstool.

“You want a beer?” Gavin asked, heading towards the refrigerator.

“I . . .uh . . .sure,” Zach said. He’d never been of-age when Gavin had been his coach and he was having to remind himself he was twenty-seven—not eighteen—the longer he spent in his presence.

Maybe because he suddenly felt just like he had back then, overwhelmed and shaky and very sure that none of it mattered at all.

Gavin pulled two bottles out of the fridge and popped the tops off easily. Slid one across the kitchen counter.

“So, uh, what did you want to talk about?” Zach asked stupidly. He picked up the beer and drank because he needed to do something with his hands.

Gavin shot him a look. “Did you really come all the way out here just to kind of make me an offer?”

“I’d make it official and everything. Contracts. Salary. About a dozen persuasive sub-points.” Zach shrugged. “You said you didn’t want to hear it.”

“I don’t.” Gavin drummed his fingers on the countertop. “Tell me anyway.”