How was I supposed to approach them now, when they’d already proved they were both strong enough to do all of this without me?
Which is why I almost missed the moment things began to fall apart. To be fair, the rink we’d rented for practice had terrible ice, so almost everyone was throwing too light but that was what the brooming was for. About halfway through the day, I noticed the tension between Evan and Perry was so tight, they weren’t listening to each other. Mistakes were being made that, during a game, could easily cost points and ruin their stats. After a particularly bad exchange, I pulled Evan aside.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.” He was about to slide past me so I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“Talk to me.”
“Now?” he asked. “Now you want me to talk to you? Maybe you could have approached us, oh, I don’t know, anytime during the past six months?”
“I’m talking about the game here, Evan.”
“Of course you are. You always are.” He pulled his arm free and slid off.
“Well, shit.” I looked around for Michael, but noticed he’d already pulled Perry aside to talk to him. I was going to have to wait my turn for his advice.
“We throwing rocks here, or what?” Evan called.
“Throwing rocks,” I agreed.
“And make sure you listen to the calls!” Robbie added.
Evan set his jaw, crouched with his broom on the ice, and waited for me to deliver my stone, saying nothing to either of us.
I’d left it too long. My feelings hadn’t changed but I’d shoved them down so they couldn’t interfere with the game and now there was no easy way to break the ice that was forming.
After a few more rocks, where no progress was being made, deliveries were getting worse, and tempers flaring hotter, I decided to call it. We’d eat the cost of the ice time we weren’t going to use but continuing when there was no communication happening was worse than a waste of time. Practicing while we were making mistakes was just practicing the mistakes. Better to get off the ice and go home.
Hopefully, we could clear the air and try again tomorrow.
I should have known the other guys would vanish the minute I called the practice, leaving Perry, Evan, and I the going directly back to the house while the others dispersed. I suspected that was by design. I guess the three of us weren’t the only ones feeling the tension.
CHAPTER 17
PERRY
I supposeat the end of the discussion, there was no real question. We all accepted, becausehello. Olympic dreams.
The next six months of our lives were bananas. Since all I needed for my job was my computer and a stable internet connection, my company set me up with the needed tech so I could travel. They called it supporting the cause. I called it reluctance to let go of the best draftsman they’d had in years.
Evan had to take a leave of absence from his job, but they also had a built-in subsidy for anyone training to pursue a spot on the Canadian Olympic team. Who knew? It wasn’t as much as he would have made working but it wasn’t nothing either.
Robbie quit his retail job but as it turned out, his roommate didn’t need roommates for financial reasons. He didn’t need anything for financial reasons because his family was independently wealthy. He opted to pay both their shares of the rent so their third roommate could keep the apartment while he was still in med school and he followed Robbie on the road whenever we had to travel somewhere for a tournament.
No one was going to convince me that man did not have a thing for Robbie. Since the team budget paid for four players and a coach, Robbie’s ride-or-die was paying Robbie’s and his ownway, and after the first month, he applied to Curling Canada to take over our team finances. When they saw the list of sponsors he could bring to the sport, they gave him the go-ahead, and after that, he was a permanent fixture with an actual role to play. Also, he had a sweet ride and all the time in the world to make coffee and lunch runs. He did all manner of errands Robbie asked of him without ever batting an eye about it. If he was straight, he had some hard life choices ahead of him.
When we weren’t at a tournament, we spent so much time in one rink or another, practicing and building our team rapport, that there was hardly any time in those first months to even contemplate how we felt about Alan. Or maybe it was that we didn’t find time to talk about it, and by that I meant I, at least, didn’t take the time to really think about how I felt.
That wasn’t to say the tension of it wasn’t there, because it was. Endless amounts of it, digging between my shoulder blades and rippling under Evan’s skin. The harder I fucked him, the harder he wanted it. The more it escalated, the more I realized it was a sliding scale I was never going to keep up with. That fact lived down in my bones, an ache that kept me constantly distracted from the job I was there to do.
While I was watching him, one random Wednesday at practice, as he slid backwards, listening to something Alan was saying to him that I couldn’t focus on, the ache throbbed.
“Evan! Watch where you’re going!” I shouted.
There was a stone behind him. He may or may not have remembered it was there. If he didn’t remember, and he didn’t see it because he was acting like a love-struck nimrod, he’d trip over it and maybe hurt himself bad enough he wouldn’t be able to train effectively.
He scowled at me, but he did look behind him and avoided the stone without issue, sliding off to the hack without looking back.
