But if Phil changed the subject, the door might close.Ben might never kiss him again as he had that night, and Phil might never get an answer to the questions burning under his skin.
What would you do with me then?
He sent the message before he could question himself and returned to his workout.
He was about halfway through the routine the trainers had worked up with him when Charlie appeared at the doorway.He wore a cozy maroon sweatshirt they’d just bought and smiled big enough that he looked like a real teenager and not a tiny adult.
“Hey,” Phil said.
“Hi.I, um, wanted to say thank you again for today.It was really good.”
“I’m glad.And I would say anytime, but I think Ben might murder me in my sleep.”
“Huh?”
Phil laughed awkwardly, trying and failing not to think about his phone.“He’s weird about me paying for stuff.”
“Oh.”Charlie shrugged, his shoulders sharp points under the thick fabric of the sweatshirt.“Well, he’s been on his own for a long time.”
Interesting.Phil had gleaned that Ben and Charlie didn’t have a prior relationship.Based on how they’d acted and a few choice words they’d exchanged, Phil got the impression Ben had been shunned by his family for being gay, except for when they needed him to do colossal favors like taking in another black sheep with no warning.He knew they were Mormons or, in Ben and Charlie’s case, ex-Mormons.But he didn’t know how long it had been since Ben had left.His CV had him coaching in Utah as recently as last year, but apparently that didn’t mean he’d still been close with his family.If he really had lost his whole community years ago, maybe it explained why he wouldn’t open up about what was happening with the team.
“Guess we’ll have to convince him,” Phil said.He continued to work with the resistance band, lying on his back and stretching it out wide with his feet.
Hesitantly, Charlie crept into the room and sat at the very edge of the mat.
“What’s up?”Phil grunted between reps.
“Um.”Charlie toyed with the sleeves of his sweatshirt.“I was…so, you’re, like, an athlete, right?”
Phil bit back a self-deprecating comment about how he wasn’t exactly out on the ice right now and nodded.
“Could you show me some stuff?”
Tensing his abs, Phil rolled to a sitting position.“What do you want to learn?”
Charlie bit his lip.“I don’t know—that’s why I’m asking.”
“Oh, no, I mean what’s your goal for exercising?Do you want to have more endurance; do you want to get strong; do you want speed?Are you more of a runner or a boxer or a swimmer?You do different things depending on what you want out of it.”
“Huh.You’d think they’d cover that in PE classes.”
Phil blinked.“True.”PE had been an easyAfor him in high school, and his hockey coach had covered the more intricate stuff.At the time, Phil hadn’t yet grasped that to some people, exercise wasn’t a daily necessity, or that not everyone had a hockey coach to work up a personalized training plan with them.“So what is it you’re after?”
Charlie looked over at him and then away, red suffusing his cheeks.“I want to be bigger.”
Clothes shopping had made him feel dysphoric, Phil remembered.“You know some guys stay slender even if they work out, right?”
“Yeah, I know.I just wanna be strong, I guess.”
“We can definitely do that.”
He walked Charlie through a basic workout routine: ten minutes on the treadmill, followed by the rowing machine, the leg press, and a sequence of free-weight exercises for his arms and shoulders.
“When those exercises start feeling easy, we can see about adding weight and using the bench press,” Phil told him.“If you keep at it, it should be pretty soon.”
Charlie, now sweating with the sleeves of his sweatshirt rolled up, asked, “How often do you do this?”
“I’m in the NHL,” Phil told him.“I do this every day.”
