He needed Sandro.
And that . . . was okay. If he’d learned anything from watching the Trailblazers over the past several weeks, it was that love—any kind of love—could survive need.
Wincing as he recalled rushing out of Sandro’s room and slamming the door on him, he turned around, and because he didn’t have a key to Sandro’s room, shamefully knocked on his door. “I’m sorry,” he said as soon as Sandro whipped it open. “I shouldn’t have shut the door in your face.”
Sandro’s eyes flashed. “Ya think? What the hell, B?”
“Someone leaked footage,” Bennett said, stepping into the room when Sandro opened the door wider. “And there’s a meeting about it that I need to get to.”
“Footage of what? Wait, your footage? Jesus Christ, that’s why you ran out of here so fast?” Sandro passed a hand through his hair. “And here I thought someone had died.”
Bennett cringed. “Sorry, I . . . Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Okay, so . . .” Sandro shook out his arms, like he was physically shedding the tension off his skin. “What kind of footage got leaked? It can’t be that bad, right? Wait, is it a sex tape?”
“A sex . . . ?” Bennett’s jaw dropped. “No, it’s not a sex tape, Jesus. When would I have . . . ? Who would I have . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” Sandro said, laughing at him. “If it’s not a sex tape, then . . .” He groaned. “Fuck, please tell me it’s not any of my teammates doing something illegal. Or immoral.”
“We haven’t recorded any illegal or immoral shit. What kind of things do you think your teammates are doing in their spare time?”
“I try not to think about it.”
Bennett snorted a laugh at the deadpan delivery. Taking his phone out, he said, “Fowler sent me a link. We can look at it together.”
The link directed him to a social media reel someone had labeled with Guess the Trailblazers aren’t so perfect after all.
“We’ve never said we’re perfect,” Sandro muttered.
The reel began with the headline The Real Trailblazers in all caps before it floated off the page and a video of Sandro and Eli in the Trailblazers’ kitchen replaced it. They were both in hockey gear sans helmets and skates, and those were their home-game uniforms, so this must’ve been before or after a game, or possibly during intermission. Sandro-on-the-screen slammed a bottle of Gatorade onto the counter as he let out a hard laugh that cut Bennett off at the knees.
“You want to know what my first season was like, Eli?” Sandro’s voice was hard through the phone’s speakers. “Professionally, it was a dream. I joined this team for their first season, and no, we weren’t the best, but we certainly weren’t the worst either. Nobody truly believed we could fill seats in this arena—hell, they were talking about moving us to a different city—but we did. Were things perfect? God, no. But it was fun and the guys on this team clicked like we’d been friends for years. Personally?”
The reel cut to Eli tossing his gloves onto one of the couches in the Trailblazers’ kitchen. “Fuck, I’m so tired of Coach breathing down my neck.”
Back to Sandro. “Personally, life was a fucking nightmare.” His voice cracked, and Bennett inhaled shakily. “I was here while my boyfriend was playing for a midwestern team, and after three amazing years together, suddenly he wouldn’t talk to me. He wasn’t okay, but he wouldn’t admit it, and trying to speak to him was like shouting into the void. My personal life was falling apart while my professional one was shooting for the stars, and it felt like I was being cleaved down the middle.”
Bennett let out a pained gasp, but he didn’t have time to process Sandro-on-the-screen’s words before the reel cut to Deeley clomping into the locker room. He tossed his stick aside. “What the fuck? How did we lose to fucking Montreal?”
“You missed a pass,” Sandbaker barked at him. “And it was all downhill from there.”
“Oh, fuck you, asswipe.”
The reel flipped back to Sandro, leaning against the counter in the team kitchen with his head resting on the cabinet behind him. His eyes were closed and his arms crossed over his chest. He looked defeated, and it carved a hole out of Bennett’s chest. “I dealt with it by playing good hockey, showing up for my teammates, and pretending everything was okay even though it wasn’t. I gave hockey all of my attention because giving it to my boyfriend and getting nothing back made me fucking sad.”
Swallowing the lump in his throat, Bennett opened his mouth to say something to the real-life Sandro next to him, but Sandro-on-the-screen kept going. “Was that the right decision? I don’t know. Probably not, considering I got dumped just before the season ended. But short of quitting everything and going to Chicago to be with him, I didn’t know what to do. So I played hockey and hoped everything would fix itself in time. But it didn’t.”
The reel ended there, then began automatically playing again from the beginning. Bennett hit Pause and let his arm drop.
Sandro groaned and pressed his palms into his eyes. “Fuuuuuck. I forgot there was a camera in the room with us. Ugh.” He carded both hands through his hair and blew out a breath that ballooned his cheeks. “Okay. Well. That’s not the worst footage that could’ve leaked. Not sure I like having fifteen years of bottled-up feelings laid out in the open like that, but—What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I . . .”
It felt like I was being cleaved down the middle.
The words sat like bricks on Bennett’s shoulders and lead in his veins, making his body feel heavy. Like he was trapped between four walls that were swiftly closing in on him. He’d known he’d broken Sandro’s heart, but hearing it laid out so plainly?
He sank back against the wall, unable to hold up his own weight. He hadn’t seen the footage of Sandro and Eli before. Hadn’t known it existed. He no longer sent David daily highlights, which meant he wasn’t regularly parsing through the camera operators’ video content. Instead, he’d set up a shared folder on a secure file transfer site, and twice a week, one of Fowler’s people uploaded all of the footage for David to browse through whenever he wanted.
