Page 11

ELEVEN

EASTON

One terrible morning wasn’t all that fate had planned for me. Dad’s early arrival was an overture of the worst week of my life. The tension with Dad had been so palpable that I thought he could smell Jace in the apartment, even if he didn’t know what Jace smelled like. Jace had stormed off in anger, making me feel more alone than I had anticipated. In the short few days since his return, Jace had been crucial to my sense of security, yet I hadn’t fully understood that until he walked away.

He would be back, but if he would look out for me was a whole other question.

And then, there were the Steel Saints. I had already filled them with doubts by leading them from one disaster to another last year. The first week of drills had seen me clash with Kyle several times, displaying bruises and cuts on my body in the locker room, and getting called into Coach Webber’s office for a stern reminder that my duties to the team were crucial to my scholarship and the team’s performance this season.

Today, after my mind was scattered between Dad and Jace, I haunted the hallways of the rink at the Westmont U campus. The mood soured wherever I appeared. The locker room chatter died down when I entered.

Elio and Patrick were the only ones still expressing any happiness to see me, albeit Patrick was not the sort of person who expressed much of anything, least of all glee.

“Let’s get going, guys,” I said, pitching my voice low and making them listen. It was hopeless. I had been laser-focused the entire last year, and we’d only seen defeats in all the tristate matches that would have qualified us to move further up the ladder. What was I hoping to achieve when I couldn’t get my head out of the messes that surrounded me?

I led the team out on the ice. Coach Webber wasn’t present today, but assistant coaches were more than capable of tuning our strategies based on the performance. Coaches O’Brien and Garner had their favorites on the team and often disagreed, leaving it to Coach Hurst to break any tie unless all three were directly instructed by Coach Webber. Trent Garner favored me, but Darrel O’Brien pushed for Kyle to have a more prominent role on the team, even if it was unofficial.

Today, all three assistant coaches agreed on the drills. Kyle led a small subgroup of players to practice defense on the far side of the rink while I led my little group in offense. We switched back and forth with the rest of the offense subgroup, rotating every few minutes as each subgroup tried to perform some of the tactics Coach Webber wanted us to perfect.

As sweat covered my face and the bruises on my torso throbbed with every moment of exertion, I could hear Coach O’Brien praising Kyle’s leadership of the defense subgroup. It felt like a stab between my ribs, almost kicking the air out of my lungs.

We worked hard for a long time. Mixing and matching, running little duels between the offense and defense subgroups to give each other hell. My small team was comprised of Aiden and Lennox, both wingers, as I led the center. Sending the puck furiously between the three of us, I signaled for Lennox to try a bait and switch with me, but Bobby, playing defense on Kyle’s subgroup, was swift as lightning, and the normally simple maneuver turned into a blunder.

“Christ, Lennox, can’t you read a sign?” I snapped, the game coming to a halt. The silence in the rink made my face burst into flames of embarrassment. Lennox shook his head, feeling bad for messing up, no doubt, and turned away from me.

“Harper, out,” Coach Garner called. “Castelli, take over. Wingers, stay in place.”

I stared at the coach as Elio skated out to join Aiden and Lennox. Elio ogled me, shaking his head and shrugging, and I skated away with building frustration. Watching Elio play along with my wingers hurt even more when they executed a seamless bait and switch. Not that Bobby was a hard man to fool; he was just slippery like an eel when he played, but not much else was going on inside that head of his.

After the drills, I stayed in the shower for a long while. Fewer and fewer guys remained in the locker room while I showered, and I only left when just a handful had remained. After changing into my clothes, I picked up my duffel.

“Captain,” said Elio from the hallway as I headed in his direction. “Not sure what happened today.”

I said nothing. If he wasn’t sure what that had been, then he wasn’t ready to take over. As a captain, I understood the team politics a little better. Today had been a disaster and a shameless attempt to display someone else’s leadership skill outshining mine. And I couldn’t even fight it.

Elio walked alongside me toward the exit. “Wanna grab a drink?”

“I’m not in the mood,” I said. “I better go home.”

We walked in silence, my pace increasing as I left Elio slightly behind.

“Easton,” he called.

I stopped in my tracks and reluctantly turned around. The hallway was well-lit with white neon lights, but all the office doors were shut. One door was still open, but that was the storage room, where the maintenance guy rummaged through the shelves.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Elio said.

“I know that,” I replied, my voice too much like a growl to soothe any tensions.

Elio’s hair was wild and wavy, freshly washed and dried after practice, and he wore clothes that fit him like they had all been custom-made. He crossed his muscled arms on his chest. “You’re acting strange, Easton.”

I clenched my teeth and stared into his eyes. Did I have to hear it from one of the only two guys I considered friends? Wasn’t he supposed to be loyal to me?

“The guys can feel it,” Elio said. “You’re not talking to anyone. You’re not commenting on the performance review. You stay in the shower until the locker room is basically empty. Something’s going on, and we can see it.”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” I said tightly.

“I worry about it,” Elio said simply. “And believe it or not, we all do.”

“Not all of you,” I said softly, more to myself than to Elio.

“Kyle’s jealous,” Elio said. “Don’t think we didn’t notice. He thought he was gonna be the captain when Coach Webber named you. He had faith in you, Easton. And I don’t understand why you’re trying to prove him wrong.”

I bit back the first fiery words that came to me. Cooling off, I exhaled. “I’m doing my best. And if that’s not good enough, there’s plenty of choices.”

Elio averted his gaze. He knew that he had become my competition today. And at the end of the day, I was too busy to care. But again, Elio took a step toward me. “I don’t want it.”

“Then let Kyle have it,” I said. “He’s drooling even thinking about it.”

“And what’s he gonna do? He’ll lead us to disaster,” Elio said.

I snorted and turned away from my friend. “Is that any worse than what I’ve done so far?” But I didn’t wait to hear an answer. We both knew that all I had achieved so far were mounting failures and deteriorating morale.

By Friday evening, all the drills were the same. Coach Garner pushed Elio’s subgroup harder than mine, swapped him to lead Lennox and Aiden almost as many times as he’d let me lead, and switched Aiden to the top of my subgroup to lead the offense, making me follow.

I was obedient enough. He gave me chances to lead, but I squandered them as many times as I’d made them worth the effort. It was a coin flip.

Coach Webber attended Thursday practice and never questioned the choices his assistants had made. Maybe he’d directed them to do this, or maybe he just agreed that I was the weak link. Whatever the case, I watched the captaincy slip away from me with each minute I spent in my skates.

Kyle seemed to grow taller and broader every day. The size of his ego was such that his body couldn’t contain it, so it expanded with bulging muscles. Once a handsome, daring, mischievous guy, Kyle seemed like he was aging a year a day, his skin roughening, his hair thinning, his neck thickening. I knew that a huge part of this was my twisting perception of him. How could I look at him after all that had happened and face the truth that he was still the same handsome Kyle I’d been dying to touch? The very thought of touching him filled me with revulsion now.

But then, every night, I returned to my apartment. Most nights, Jace was there, cooking something simple yet stunning, offering it to me as if he couldn’t care less if I ate or starved, and looking at me like he could see through my clothes.

Each night, I found a new reminder of the truth that I hadn’t been able to face for years. Everything I saw in Kyle that had made me want him had come from Jace. The flat eyebrows, the intense eyes, the unruly hair, and trendy haircuts. It had been the case before Kyle, too. All the guys I’d ever wanted looked at me with the same mixture of disdain and amusement.

After Kyle had moved out, the sad summer of sex had helped me waste my hours. I’d hooked up with random guys off the dating apps, almost exclusively picking the ones that wouldn’t show their faces and demanded discretion in their first text messages. I left my door unlocked and waited for them in my bed, letting them toy with me in desperate hopes that it would bring me some kind of distraction from just how empty my life was. The ones I felt an inkling of attraction to, a spark of hope that things could go beyond sex, were the very same ones that reminded me of Jace.

I hated how tempting it was. My own actions were as transparent as cellophane. Whenever I passed through the apartment with a towel tied around my waist and Jace was nowhere near me, I felt like a lovesick dumbass. Or worse, like a hormone-crazed teenager. He didn’t give me any grace or mercy when I was so see-through. He called it as he saw it. “You tease,” he would say in a husky, low voice. “You little flirt.”

And guess what? My heart would leap miles. Provoking him in these small ways gave me more pleasure than I ever would have admitted aloud.

At the end of the day, Jace was my fantasy. He was the person in all my sweaty, upsetting dreams. He was the thought I had in the moment of every orgasm since he had returned. He was my type.

I could love it or hate it, but Jace’s tormenting was the only time in the day when I wasn’t miserable. Now that he’d unashamedly admitted that he was gay, had always been gay, things had changed.

He wasn’t just dragging the truth out of me for the sake of mocking me. Oh, he still mocked me for plenty of other things, but that was one area in which I could trust him. The truth ran deeper and more painfully than that. Way back when we were teenagers, still stupid and dazed by our growing, changing emotions, Jace hadn’t been such a villain. Sure, he’d made my life hell, and I’d returned the favor, but he hadn’t been provoking me just to out me. He’d hoped, perhaps, that I would admit I felt the same.

Even now, he hoped I would admit it, but I simply couldn’t form those words on my lips. We understood the reality as well as if it had been written down for us. We understood that we were both gay and that the smoldering attraction between us was a terrible certainty.

But I seemed to be the only one who understood that nothing could ever come out of it. The only time in our lives when we had known each other, we had been, for lack of any other word, brothers. The same two people had adopted us, fed us, raised us in their own misguided ways, and invested in us. Turning my back on that and acting on the basest impulses with Jace would have been a betrayal not just of my parents but the entire world.

You just didn’t do a thing like that.

And still, as I dragged my miserable ass out of the rink on Friday evening, coming face to face with Jace, seeing the way he lifted one side of his lips, seeing that thin edge mustache twitch upward and the broken heart tattoo under the corner of his eye, made me feel a little better.