Page 19

TREV

As we all clomped up the chute to the locker room after warmups, I was dazed.

All thoughts of hockey had escaped my head, and I just…

I needed a minute. To breathe? To pull myself together?

Something. I was lucky I hadn’t eaten shit on the ice; I’d been skating since I was a toddler, but tonight I’d suddenly been an unbalanced train wreck.

How I hadn’t lost an edge and fallen on my face would forever be a mystery. Muscle memory, probably.

I joined my teammates in the locker room, and I dropped onto the bench by my stall. Normally I’d strip off my jersey, have a drink, and do a little stretching, but this time…

This time I just sat there. I stared at the logo in the middle of the floor, and I let my mind race the way it had been trying to since I’d gone to say hi to the twins.

My whole world always lit up the moment I saw my boys through the glass. I loved it. I lived for it. Tonight had been no exception.

I just hadn’t expected the way I’d feel the moment I saw Cam standing behind them.

He looked spectacular in that navy blue suit, and the instant I’d laid eyes on him, my whole world had lurched to a stop. For a second, I’d gone back to a time and place I hadn’t thought about in ages.

It was only the caustic look from my ex-husband that had jarred me back into the present, at least enough to finish my routine. I’d given the boys a puck, then gone back and fumbled my way through the rest of warmups.

Now that I was sitting down and had almost twenty minutes before we returned to the ice, I let my mind go where it had been trying to go.

I’d never in my life—before or since—been as confused as I’d been about midway through my senior year in high school.

Cam and I had broken up at the end of the previous school year, but we’d stayed friends. Since we were both unattached when the winter formal dance came around, we’d decided to go together.

That had taken a ton of pressure off. I didn’t have to awkwardly try (and fail) to connect with another girl. I didn’t have to nut up and face the crushes I had on some male classmates, which I was trying desperately to ignore because, dude, what? I was straight. Right? Maybe bi? No, straight .

Except… none of the girls ever turned my head.

Just a couple of boys on my hockey team. And one in my history class.

But I obviously wasn’t gay because why the fuck would I still get all loopy and stupid whenever I saw my ex?

In the crystal-clear lens of adult hindsight, it could not have been more obvious what was happening.

At the time, though, awash with hormones, confusion, teenage angst, and denial over my sexuality, I hadn’t had a clue.

Was I just regretting our breakup? Trying too hard to ignore how much I wanted one of the guys?

Now, it was plain to see that my growing attraction to Cam coincided with the slow but dramatic evolution of his clothes and hairstyle.

Looking back now, even during his most feminine periods, I couldn’t think of him as anything but a boy.

At the time, I’d had no idea he was quietly coming to grips with his gender identity.

He’d had no idea that every time he cut his hair shorter or made his clothes more androgynous, a few more of my brain cells went rogue.

When he’d asked my opinion of the chest binder he’d started experimenting with, I’d struggled to formulate an answer.

Of course I’d supported anything that made Cam happy and I always would, but I’d been so fucking confused about why I couldn’t stop staring at him the first time he wore one under his clothes at school.

Because he feels good in it and I love seeing him this happy. Duh.

Okay, yeah, but that shouldn’t fuck with my ability to concentrate around him. Should it?

On the night of winter formal, I’d had some naively optimistic thoughts of us rekindling our relationship. The chemistry was obviously still there. We were still close even after we’d broken up. A boy could dream, right?

The morning of the dance, I’d received a text.

Will you be mad if I don’t wear a dress?

Mad? Naw, of course not. Wear what you want.

Unless it’s that Joker costume you wore on Halloween. THAT IS A brIDGE TOO FAR, MY FRIEND.

LOL Well fuck. There goes that plan.

LMAO Uh-huh. Nah it’s cool. See you at 7?

(saluting emoji)

I hadn’t thought much of it after that. Dresses had become less and less a part of Cam’s wardrobe over the past year, so I honestly wasn’t even surprised.

But I was surprised when Cam stepped out onto that familiar front porch.

I’d been halfway up the steps, and I just…

I mean, fuck. “Not wearing a dress” was one thing. My dumbass teenage brain just hadn’t made it to the part where “not wearing a dress” to a formal event meant wearing a tux.

A black tux that had no business fitting that well.

He’d also cut his hair even shorter than before, adopting a very masculine look that was shaved almost to the skin on the sides with the top just long enough to style.

If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought this was Cam’s brother. But Liam had left for college last summer, and Cam didn’t have any other siblings at home.

This was…

Holy shit.

The corsage tumbled out of my hand, its plastic container popping open and sending baby’s breath and whatever else fluttering all over the steps.

“Oh! Fuck!” I doubled back to pick them up.

Once I’d recovered most of the flowers and some of my dignity, I joined Cam on the porch.

“Uh. Sorry.” I gestured with the container, which now held a corsage that definitely wasn’t worth wearing. “I guess… we can just skip this?”

Cam’s laugh had lit up my whole world. “Yeah. We can skip it. It, um… doesn’t really go with the…” He’d gestured down at himself.

“I mean, if you’d given me some warning, I could’ve gotten a boutonniere.”

“I did say I wasn’t wearing a dress.”

“Yeah, but there’s not wearing a dress, and there’s…” I gestured at Cam. “ Not wearing a dress .”

He’d looked down at the tux, then back up at me, eyes full of nerves and worry. “So… does that mean… I mean, is this okay?”

“It’s…” I gulped. “Uh… Yeah. Fuck, yeah. It’s…” I shook myself and raked my eyes up and down Cam’s body and rasped, “You look incredible.”

And then he’d smiled, and my knees actually went weak.

Attraction to Cam was nothing new, but this?

Oh my God. It was like one of those movies where someone got a makeover and came out looking like a completely different person who was a zillion times hotter than before, except Cam had been hot to start with.

He cleared his throat, and some shyness crept into his expression. “Do you think anybody will be weirded out?”

I’d instantly been overcome with a sense of protectiveness that usually only reared its head when an opposing player threw a dirty hit on a teammate. The urge to drop gloves and make someone regret his life’s choices.

“If they have a problem with the way you look,” I growled, “they can take it up with me.”

Turned out, no one who mattered had been bothered. Some of the mean girls looked down their noses. Some of the immature dudebros had asked when I’d gotten a boyfriend. But all of our friends agreed with me that Cam looked amazing, and we’d had a great time.

We didn’t stay for the whole dance, though.

A few slow dances had turned into a few long looks I recognized from our recent past, and we’d been out of there by eleven.

By the time I dropped Cam off long after our two o’clock curfews, we were well and truly back together. I’d been on top of the world, and?—

“Hey. Trev.” Hoes smacked my shoulder, jostling me back into the present. “You coming?”

“I—”

Oh. Fuck. The team was heading out to the ice.

Because it was time to play hockey. Professionally. Well, first we had to do our intros, since it was our home opener. But then we’d have to play hockey.

And my brain was someplace else. Jesus Christ.

As I waited for my turn to be introduced, I kept thinking back to the past. Our reconciliation hadn’t lasted long after that dance. It hadn’t ended badly, just abruptly, with Cam insisting “it’s not you, it’s me.”

A month after that, he’d come out as trans. And if realizing he was a boy had made so many things make sense for me, I could only imagine how it had been for him.

Not long before we graduated, I came out as gay.

Several of our friends had joked that now we could get back together for real, but we’d agreed to keep things the way they were.

We were both still trying to process so much about ourselves, and we were also heading off to college, and it just…

wasn’t a good time. We were kids who didn’t even know who we were; definitely not relationship material.

Looking back, it was so obvious that Cam had been coming into his own as a trans man at the same time I’d been figuring out I was gay.

Being the na?ve kids we were, we hadn’t understood that, and we hadn’t been able to be what the other needed at that time.

Not as a couple, anyway. As friends, absolutely.

But we’d both been so confused about who we were, we just couldn’t process that alongside a relationship.

Cam wanted to find his footing in his new identity.

He struggled with his body image, with believing he was attractive, with being sexual in a body that didn’t match who he was.

He just didn’t have the bandwidth to be involved with anyone beyond friendship.

As for me, I was just a confused train wreck about my sexuality. I was afraid I’d be ostracized as an athlete if I came out. I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t really gay because—in my eighteen-year-old brain—the only person I’d ever been with or wanted to be with was technically a girl.

Yeah. I know. I wasn’t proud of it, and just thinking about that now made me cringe.

I was glad I’d never said any of it out loud, especially to Cam.

There’d been a lot of things I hadn’t understood back then, and I was seriously thankful I’d kept them to myself.

As an adult, I understood that Cam had always been a boy, and that my attraction to him made perfect sense now that I understood my sexuality.

And now, here we were. Older. Wiser. Living in the same space.

And one look at Cam in a suit tonight left me just as gobsmacked and stupid as I’d been that moment I’d seen him in a tux all those years ago.

For the same reason, too—because he was absolutely the most stunning human being I’d ever met.

When we’d both been sixteen, he’d been everything in my sixteen-year-old eyes.

When we’d been eighteen, and we’d both started really figuring ourselves out, I’d been confused about everything except how undeniably attractive Cam still was.

And now that we were thirty…

Christ. Sixteen- and eighteen-year-old me hadn’t had a clue just how jaw-dropping this man would be after we both grew up.

He’d come to Pittsburgh so we could help each other resolve our crises. I just hadn’t bargained for him igniting another:

How the hell was I supposed to play hockey with this beautiful man nearby?