Ben’s eyebrows drew down.“Fuck—road trips,” he muttered.Phil wasn’t certain whether he’d meant for Phil to hear it.“What do I do with her during road trips?”
“You should stay here,” Phil said with no conscious input from his brain.“I’m here during road trips.”
A man wearing a novelty shirt and flannel pants had no right to look as coolly assessing as Ben did in that moment as he raked his eyes across Phil’s entire frame.In their wake, acute awareness of his untucked shirt, his bare feet, his bum knee, and his pounding heart swept through Phil.
“Thank you,” Ben said, and then he turned and left the kitchen.
It took Phil ten minutes of staring blankly at where Ben had stood to realize he’d never answered the question.Phil had asked, point-blank, why Ben wasn’t doing the one thing he’d been hired for, which was to coach the team into winning a game or two.And in response, Ben had kissed Phil so intensely that Phil had forgotten his question.
What did that even mean?
Was Ben secretly gay, and fear of being found out distracted him from hockey?
No, that was stupid.There were hundreds of players in the NHL, and statistically speaking, a few of them had to be gay or some other version of not straight.For years now, ever since the US had legalized gay marriage, Phil had been waiting for the Pride game where a player decided to come out.Every year, when June passed and the playoffs ended and it still hadn’t happened, a sort of idle disappointment would hit him.But sexuality angst was no reason to be bad at your job, or Phil himself would—
It just didn’t make sense.
Anyway, if Benweregay and secretly lusting after Phil, he would have been less distracted once Phil got injured and stopped playing with the team.That didn’t track.Ben had been equally shitty all season, regardless of Phil’s presence.What a shame.Phil wouldn’t mind kissing him again if it got him to focus on the team more.
Maybe Ben’s family was distracting him?This news about his niece seemed serious.But if Ben had known in advance, he wouldn’t be so stressed about her coming to stay.
The last option—the one Phil had avoided looking at directly for as long as possible—was that he’d been right all along: Ben and Pulvermacher had some incredibly shady plan involving the coaching situation, which they chose to keep from the team.
Had Ben kissed him in order to distract him from his suspicions?Was Ben really so cold?
Phil ran his fingertips across his lips, still tingling from the scratch of Ben’s stubble.
Ben didn’t kiss like someone who used it as a means to an end.Camille had kissed Phil hundreds of times on camera to show her long list of friends and acquaintances how good they were together.That had never left him half as confused.Ben kissed like a drowning man clinging to a life raft, and Phil might be an idiot for allowing himself to be lied to, but he’d always liked being useful.
If Ben had bad intentions, Phil told himself, he wouldn’t have pulled back.He wouldn’t have apologized.He wouldn’t have considered the consequences to Phil’s career.With Phil confused and, to be honest, aroused, Ben could easily have pressed his advantage.Phil would have gone along with it; he knew as much instinctively.And then, when they were naked and sweaty and vulnerable, Ben could have pressured him into silence.
He’d done none of that.
Which was good.It was a good choice.It was the right choice.
Phil wasn’t disappointed at all.
When enough time had passed and he could be certain he wouldn’t run into Ben in the shared en suite upstairs, Phil made the arduous journey up to his bedroom.He skipped showering, too afraid that setting foot in the tiled stall would remind him of Ben’s strong shoulders and steady guidance when he’d helped Phil.Instead, he went straight to bed.
When he woke up the next morning, Ben had already left, so Phil Ubered to the practice rink in Palo Alto.He found the team in mid-practice, performing one of the drills Phil had written up in the notebook he’d started collecting ideas in when he couldn’t stand to watch them lose on TV anymore.He’d been amazed Ben hadn’t thrown it out when Phil had shown it to him.He was more amazed Ben actually chose to use it.
He observed the team for a while.Thanksgiving had helped restore some sort of team unity, but Lunes—going by “Mooney” now—stuck firmly to his own line, jaw set.He didn’t make eye contact with anyone, but he did shoulder Hayes hard more than once.
They couldn’t have the team injuring one another during practice.
Ben said nothing about it.Why had Phil hoped he would run useful drills as well as keep the team peace?He never had before.
A locker room functioned on a delicate balance of selective blindness and honest camaraderie.Among the Sea Lions, guys learned fast to accept Tom’s preference of leading by example rather than through speeches.They also learned not to linger in the showers or leave their used, stinky gear lying around, or risk earning Tom’s impatient foot-tapping or Breezy’s disappointed look.No one wanted to deal with Breezy’s disappointed look.
Keeping spirits up was Phil’s job, which he accomplished with a mix of listening to everyone complain and playing pump-up tunes before games.Sure, the guys gave him flack for not including whatever country singers were most popular at the moment, but Phil knew what everyone really wanted from pump-up tracks: music they knew all the words to and a beat they could tap along with.Besides, if he let one of the Canadians take over, everyone would have to listen to Nickelback, a much worse fate than hip-hop from the early 2000s.
Phil turned his back on the team, now struggling through a drill they’d run with ease last summer during playoffs.He would keep working on Ben and get him to fix this later.Phil hung his coat up in his stall, then made his slow, uneven way to the trainer’s room.
Franziska waited for him with a perky smile and a resistance band, and he submitted to his fate of sixty minutes of intense physical therapy.
Phil was working through his final reps before moving on to upper body work in the weight room when Michelle Horowitz walked in.She nodded to Franziska, who was doing paperwork in the office, and took a seat on the weight bench across from Phil’s.
“Hi?”
