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One
Ryder
T his town blows. It’s hot, the humidity is stifling, and it’s not fucking Boston, which has been my home for the last decade. The billionaire brothers' desire to build a giant arena and fill it with nonexistent hockey fans in a state known for football and baseball forced me here. They paid me an ungodly amount of money for the trade, and now I have a three-year contract that made me the highest-paid goalie in the league, forcing me to be here. Otherwise, the only thing Atlanta has going for it so far is a wonderful array of sports bars.
It’s a rare Sunday afternoon that my brand-new hockey team, the Atlanta Hydras, has off from training camp. Instead of spending it resting or doing something on our own, we’re in some coach-mandated team icebreaker activity and forced to hang out in the name of bonding . I’m grumpier than usual from not sleeping well last night, thanks to the hot brunette I went home with. I spent the night learning my way around her body, and she returned the favor several times. It seemed like a great idea in the moment, but I’m regretting it now that I have to be functional. What was her name? Kayley? Kinsey? Something like that. Doesn’t matter now. I left her place in the early hours of the morning after too little sleep and showered off the skank juice—too-sweet cotton candy perfume and unironic body glitter that wanted to stick around—before nursing my hangover with biscuits and gravy delivered directly to my door and a nap before heading here.
I follow a few teammates into a busy bar called the Dirty Bird in Midtown and hope like hell the name means I'll at least get hot wings. Luck seems to be with me when a few guys from the D-line wave us to a large booth covered in piping hot trays of wings and fries with buckets of icy beers already waiting for us. There is a God.
A couple of wingers and Magnus, my goalie counterpart, follow closely behind us. We wait a few minutes for the centers and our captain, Sebastian, to show up. With the main roster all here, we dig into the spread paid for by Coach Kennedy’s dime, and soon the beer has the bonding happening naturally, if good-natured chirping and bagging on each other is the main objective .
“Soupy, Rookie, do you plan on fighting more with each other than the teams we’re playing this season, or are you ever going to get along?” Nico asks, referring to Campbell and Rook by their nicknames. It’s a fact of hockey life that pretty much everyone ends up with a nickname that’s a shortened form of your name or some play on words. Like my own last name of Kingston, which is shortened to Kingsy most of the time.
It’s true, Rook and Campbell have been at each other’s throats since we started practicing together and it’s really fucking bad they're on the same line and end up leaving me in the goal defenseless, having to take the shots from the rest of the team when they’re bickering with each other for whatever assumed issue they see. Their playing styles complement one another well, but neither will let their bad blood go long enough to realize it. Which is why we’re here, bonding.
Coach Kennedy is tired of screaming at us during practice to get our heads out of our asses and start acting like a team, so now he’s trying beer and wings instead. Coach Callahan, the goalie coach, sent Magnus and me along for the ride, even though we’re not the ones struggling to work together. Bonding is for the entire team , according to Cal.
I snag a beer bottle by the neck and tip it back. This might help the forced nature of the outing. Several beers and way too many wings later, the TVs hanging around the bar have caught my attention. Atlanta's football team, the Condors, are playing Buffalo. The commentators have said it’s the first Sunday game of the season no less than ten times already. The talking heads report Atlanta played well in the preseason and is favored to win. Not that I’ve paid any attention before this. Football isn’t my sport, so I’m not likely to follow it much. But I do know one of the players on the offense.
Knox Contraire and I grew up together. I called him my best friend until freshman year of high school. Then things got weird, and we went our separate ways. Good riddance, honestly. The bar groans together as Knox fumbles a pass and Buffalo gets a turnover.
“You’d think he’d be better at keeping his eye on the ball than that. He’s always liked handling them, a little too much,” I say offhandedly. I smile and sip my beer when a few of my teammates’ heads turn my way. The comment slipped out like second nature, given how often I used to say shit like this in high school. I know I have no business commenting on another professional sport, but damn, Knox is a prime target after a fumble like that and I couldn’t let it slide.
“You know Contraire?” Chad asks, looking intrigued.
“Grew up with the guy. He got weird in high school. Really liked watching everyone change in the locker room after gym class and practices. He popped a boner around all the guys and made things really awkward. No one wanted to change in front of him after that, if you get me.”
He’d been a bench over from me that day and I’d been getting so much shit from Commisso and Sanders, juniors on the hockey team who teased me mercilessly for my friendship with Knox. They’d made it clear I needed to make a choice—stick with Knox and suffer their wrath and hazing that would end up forcing me off the hockey team, or distance myself from him and join them. When I’d turned to throw some comment his way, I’d noticed the obvious tent in his boxers he was trying desperately to hide, and my mouth worked faster than my brain. Knox can't help himself when he’s around guys. Hide your bodies, boys, he wants ya! Yeah, it was stupid and immature, but my teammates' voices kept echoing in my head, teasing me about Knox being my boyfriend. So I did the first thing that popped into my head to prove I wasn’t into him. When you’re fourteen, no one has impulse control, and everyone is a target for whatever thought turns up in your head. I was a victim of my circumstances, even if he was my best friend.
“Wasn’t he with that thirst trap chick, Harlowe Sorenson?” Campbell asks.
I shrug and sip my beer before replying. “He might have been, but she’s married to one of the rich guys who owns our team now, so who knows what kind of situation they had?” Honestly, I don't know what Knox likes now, but my brain doesn't want to let go of the boy I knew all those years ago who couldn't control his dick anytime dudes undressed.
“I don't know, she’s crazy hot, and they were together for months,” Nico adds, gesturing with a chicken wing in his fingers. “If you get a chance to hit it with a smoke show like that, you’re not going to slum it with dudes. There’s no way. ”
Now I’m pushed to defend my statements, so I lean in hard. “Knox came on to me,” I spit.
It’s so vivid, I recall all the details like it happened yesterday. We were hanging out after one of my hockey games early freshman year before things went sideways. My team had won, and I wanted to celebrate with Knox after. We grabbed a pizza and went back to his house to play some video games until way too late. We both passed out on the couch, and I woke up to his fingers in my hair, like playing with it. It took me a minute to realize it wasn't an accident, he was intentionally touching me super softly, like he didn't want to wake me up. It was so confusing, because it felt kind of good, but I knew I shouldn't like that my guy best friend was doing it, or that he'd touched me at all. When he dragged his fingers down my neck, like he was going to touch me somewhere else, I finally pushed his hand off and asked what he was doing. His face was so scared, but he said my hair looked soft and he'd always wanted to touch it. It was super weird that he waited until I was asleep to touch me, like a fucking stalker.
“He was obsessed with me and wouldn’t leave me alone. That’s not normal behavior,” I finish.
“Ahh, Kingsy had a boyfriend!” Rook announces in a sing-song voice.
My hackles raise and I want to shut that shit down. It’s freshman year all over again with my teammates calling him my boyfriend and giving me shit for Knox always hanging around the ice rink waiting for me. No one is going to make fun of me for what someone else did when we were fourteen.
“Fuck that. Knox was a fucking queer stalker. I wanted nothing to do with that shit.” My voice is harsh. The words come out with a sharp bite to eviscerate their claims before they really begin.
“Chill,” Mercer says, the humor clear in his tone. “No one is saying anything about you, just the unfortunate situation you had to deal with. I think we’ve all been there with a stalker or someone who was too into us and couldn't take a hint.”
“What does it matter, anyway?” Davy asks. “Who you want to sleep with says nothing about you as a person or a player.” A few heads look at the quiet Russian quizzically. He doesn't normally weigh in on any of our discussions, yet here he is, dropping that bomb.
“Seriously. I think we all know a gay athlete who’s absolutely killed it in their sport at this point. It’s not like who you fuck influences how you play,” Westin adds, seeming to placate the rest of the table.
“Right? A hole’s a hole, and we all know sticking your dick in an asshole feels pretty damn good. It’s not too far a jump to gay sex,” Chad says.
“Fucking hell, Chad,” Campbell says as he throws a celery stick at our left winger who gets in more trouble than all of us combined. We’ll have to watch Chad when we play Vegas because there are a few too many rumors of him nearly getting arrested after being kicked out of strip clubs.
“Hey, even our sport has its homoerotic qualities. All the ass patting, helmet kisses, and group showers make us all look a little gay,” Fisher adds with a laugh. Campbell launches a carrot stick at him this time.
“I like the helmet kisses. It’s part of the tradition,” Magnus says in his Swedish accent.
“Can't forget the groin stretches for warm-ups,” Sebastian adds, shrugging.
“All I was saying is Knox should be used to playing with balls, ?so fumbling them is out of character for him,” I say, raising my hands to keep them from jumping on me again. I catch the chicken wing Campbell tosses at me now that he’s out of veggies. I laugh and bite into the wing and let the conversation move on now that we have finally stopped talking about football and closeted dudes.