No wonder he'd looked at me like that.
I splashed water on my face and left without saying goodbye to Nate.
The parking lot was almost empty when I got back to my truck. I sat behind the wheel and looked at the clock on my dash, which said 3:47.
Ice time was at five. The rink was forty minutes away. I had time to go home, shower, maybe even grab an hour of sleep before I had to be back on the ice.
But home meant Derek's questions about where I'd been. Home meant lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking about all the ways my life had gotten so small.
I could skip it. The ice time was already paid for. Nobody would know if I didn't show up.
But I kept thinking about the figure skater's face when I'd told him I'd be there at five. That little lift of his eyebrows, like he was already calculating the odds that I'd flake.
He wasn't wrong about most of it. But I'd spent my whole life showing up when people expected me to bail, proving wrong every coach who said I was too small and every scout who passed me over. Every time someone looked at me and saw a kid who didn't belong, I'd shown up anyway and made them watch me earn my place.
Some figure skater with a stick up his ass wasn't going to be any different.
I started the truck.
The drive was bad. I stopped for coffee outside Rio Rancho. Most of the highway was a blur I couldn't remember afterward.
The rink was dark when I pulled in at 4:38, nothing but the security lights casting yellow pools across the empty lot. I sat there for a minute with my hands on the wheel.
I could have killed someone. I could have killed myself. The thought sat in my chest like a rock.
I grabbed my gear bag and went inside.
The locker room smelled like old sweat and rubber and that industrial cleaner they used on the floors. I'd spent half my life in rooms like this, in rinks from Ohio to New Mexico, and the smell was as familiar as my own skin. I dropped my bag on the bench and stood there for a second, swaying on my feet.
I just needed to close my eyes for a minute. Five minutes tops, maybe ten. Then I'd splash some water on my face and change into my skates and be on the ice before the figure skater showed up. He'd never know I'd been out all night. He'd never know I'd driven here half-asleep with whiskey still sitting sour in my stomach.
The bench was hard and cold against my back when I lay down. I bunched up my gear bag under my head and stared at the ceiling, at the fluorescent lights that weren't on and the water stain in the corner that looked like a dog if you squinted.
My body ached everywhere. I was twenty-one years old, and some mornings I woke up feeling like fifty.
I thought about the figure skater landing that triple axel. The way he'd moved through the air like gravity was just a suggestion, like he'd made some kind of deal with the universe that let him do things normal bodies couldn't do. I'd seen a lot of athletes in my life, had played with guys who went on to the NHL, but I'd never seen anyone move like that. It wasn't just skill. It was something else, something that looked a lot like magic if you didn't know better.
I'd been too busy being an asshole to let him introduce himself, so I didn’t even know his name.
What would he think if he could see me now, lying on a locker room bench at four in the morning with whiskey on my breath and a hickey on my neck and nothing to show for my night except a fake number in some stranger's phone?
He'd probably look at me the same way he had this morning. Like I was a problem he didn't have time for.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me. My last thought before I went under was about his hands, about whether they'd be cold from the ice or warm from his gloves, about what it would feel like to have someone touch me like they knew exactly what they were doing.
I was asleep before I could finish the thought.
His truck was already in the lot when I arrived.
The locker room door was unlocked. I pushed through it and stopped.
Red was lying on the bench, one arm thrown over his face, a gear bag shoved under his head like a pillow. His hair was dark with sweat. He was still in street clothes, jeans and a faded t-shirt that had ridden up to show a strip of pale stomach, and he was so still that for one horrible second I thought he was dead.
Then he made a sound, something between a groan and a snore. I let out a breath before rolling my eyes. Then I walked over and dropped my bag on the bench across from him. Hard.
He didn't move.
I unzipped it, pulled out my skates, and set them down with a loud thunk.
