“Shane.”
“Yeah.”
“Now. I am ready. Now.”
“Yeah,” Shane breathed, “yeah, okay,” and slicked himself with a shaking hand and lined up and pushed in slow, watching his face the whole time, sinking in by degrees, the heat and the grip of him, and Theo’s breath left him in a long unspooling sound, the last of the wall going out with it. Shane bottomed out and held there, forehead dropped to Theo’s, both of them shaking, and said, reverent and filthy in the same breath, “I’m inside you. Fuck, Theo. Fuck. Say you’re good. Say it—”
“I am good.” A beat, the accent intact even now: “You are not moving.”
“Bossy,” Shane said, wrecked and grinning, and moved.
They found it the hard way, the good way: Shane braced on both arms above him keeping his weight off the bad shoulder without being told, hips working in long deep strokes that made Theo’s catalogued body forget the inventory, made him arch up off the mattress with his good hand clutching Shane’s back, fingers digging in hard enough to mark, the brace pressed harmless into the pillow, made him say things in two languages he would never say in the locker room, would never say flat, fortare and there and yes and once, low, unmistakable, fuck, and Shane moaned at that and drove in harder because Theo’s heels were pulling him in, because Theo’s body was demanding it, because for once neither of them was defending anything. The cold room steamed at the window. The headboard knocked the wall in the rhythm of it and neither of them cared. Shane’s frozen hands had gone hot, and he got one between them and stripped Theo’s dick in time with his hips, fast and slick and merciless, talking through all of it, “come on, come for me, let me see it, you don’t have to hold anything anymore, you don’t have to hold anything ever again.”
Theo came first. Came hard, with his eyes open and on Shane’s, with nothing held back and nothing hidden and nothingowed, shooting between their stomachs in long pulses while he said Shane’s name as if it were the only word he’d ever meant, and the clench of it, the sight of it, the un-faked total surrender of the most careful man he’d ever known, dragged Shane over the edge right behind him, three more strokes and gone, buried deep, shaking, mouth open against Theo’s jaw, coming inside him with everything he had, into the one person who’d decided to keep him anyway.
After, Shane eased out careful and didn’t move off, just shifted his weight to the side of the bad shoulder, the wrong side, so Theo wouldn’t have to hold himself up, and pulled the blanket over them both against the sixty-three degrees. They were a mess and neither of them moved to fix it. His hands were warm. He noticed that first. His hands were warm and the weight under his sternum was gone.
“That wasn’t even,” Shane said into the dark, the old reflex, the ledger, but his voice had no fight in it. “I’ll never get this even. You gave away your whole life. I can’t pay this back.”
“No,” Theo agreed. He was tracing something on Shane’s spine with the cold-warmed fingers of his good hand, lazy, certain. “You cannot. There is no ledger anymore. I tore it up.” He pressed his mouth to Shane’s hair. “Stop counting. Come to bed.”
“I am in bed.”
“Then stay in it.”
And Shane, who had carried everything his whole life, stayed.
* * *
And so the call, when it came two days later, came for Shane.
Mercer told him in the office, the same beige office where he’d once said the day you learn to defend a lead is the day I can send your name down the road. He didn’t make a speech. Hesaid, “Bauer called. Chicago wants you up. Tomorrow.” Mercer almost smiled. “She said you were the easy phone call, clean paperwork, young, upside. She also said, off the record, that she watched the Milwaukee tape three times and she’d never seen a defenseman try harder to lose his own audition. She liked you anyway. You earned it. You defend a lead now, which I did not think I’d live to see.” And then, gruffer, looking at his computer instead of at Shane: “For what it’s worth, and it isn’t nothing — Lindgren took himself out of it. Came in here and told me the truth about that shoulder, then told me to give Bauer the honest read on you. The pick was hers. She made it off the tape, not off him. But he got out of your way on purpose, and a man doesn’t do that for a teammate he doesn’t—” Mercer stopped. Cleared his throat. “Anyway. Pack a bag. Don’t embarrass me.”
The room found out. They lost their minds, banging sticks on the floor, Wozniak whooping, guys pounding Shane’s shoulders hard enough to bruise. Marek hugged him, hard, and said into his ear, “Go be great. And figure out the other thing, the ninety-miles thing, don’t let it die on the highway,” and Shane couldn’t answer because his throat had closed.
And across the room, at his stall, Theo was banging his stick with the rest of them, applauding the call-up he’d given away, his face doing the flat stone thing it did over the biggest feelings, and only Shane knew what it cost him, only Shane could read the grief under the celebration, and for one second across a loud locker room their eyes met and held: you did this for me, I know, I’d do it again, I love you, don’t you dare make this a goodbye. Then Tripp Vandenberg stuck his hand out for Shane to shake, and the moment closed, and Shane shook the kid’s hand, and the kid said, low, just for Shane, “Earned it. Both of you. Go,” and let go.
Tripp Vandenberg, at the brink, did not make his phone call. Theo saw the reason for himself, or part of it, two days beforethe call came up. He’d gone back for a forgotten glove and found Marek and the kid in the tunnel outside the video room, Marek’s voice never once rising, one forearm laid flat against the cinderblock beside Tripp’s head, and Theo caught only the end of it: “—doesn’t get to keep a room. Not here, not in Chicago, not anywhere the story follows him. And it follows.” And Tripp’s face, the easy entitled face that had never in Theo’s memory been anything but sure of itself, went still, the particular stillness of a young man being shown, for the first time, the real price of a thing he’d been about to buy on credit. Marek clapped his shoulder, friendly, which was somehow worse than a threat, and walked off whistling. Whether it was that, or a conscience under the entitlement, or just that pulling the trigger played different up close than it had in the lot, the call to the league office never came. The records stayed buried, and Tripp got sent the message every prospect gets sooner or later, that the spot comes when it comes and not before, and went back to being twenty-one and excellent and waiting, which is the whole job at twenty-one. He nodded at Shane in the room the day the call came up. Just once. It was almost respect.
* * *
Shane packed his two duffels again, eleven minutes, the sum of him, but this time Theo packed the car, one-handed, stubborn, and this time it wasn’t leaving. It was just ninety miles.
Chapter 13
The last night in the one-bedroom apartment, they did not sleep, and they did not pretend they were going to.
The duffels sat zipped by the door, two of them, the sum of Shane, packed and ready in the dark for a six a.m. that would carry him ninety miles north, and the apartment was sixty-three degrees, and the bed was the one bed, and tomorrow it would be all Theo’s side again. They both knew the arithmetic. Theo had done it the moment Mercer said tomorrow: ninety miles, an hour and forty in good weather, a visa hanging on a marriage and a marriage about to be conducted across a state line, a season of falling asleep against the same warm spine reduced now to phone calls and the gaps between road trips. He had built a ledger of it and it had come out bad, and then he had torn that ledger up too, because there was a new rule now, the rule from the entryway, and the rule said you did not give the worst number more weight than it had earned. The number was ninety. It was not goodbye. He had to keep telling his body that. His body, which had spent four nights learning Shane was gone and was now being told to unlearn it for one night and learn it again at dawn.
So he did not file it. He took inventory the new way, the only way that didn’t hurt: he counted what was here.
Shane was here. Shane had pulled him down onto the bed already, no joking, no curse to take the weight off it, and waskissing him slow, slower than the reunion night, slow enough to last till morning, his cold hands framing Theo’s face. They’d warmed against him by now; they always did. Theo thought he might miss that most, Shane’s frozen hands going hot against his skin, the small daily proof that Theo ran warm enough for both of them.
“Stop thinking,” Shane murmured against his mouth.
“I am not thinking.”
“You’re doing the math. I can hear you doing the math.”
