And Evan’s hands had shaken so hard he’d dropped a pen.
* * *
Evan pulled up emails, scheduling conflicts, and travel logistics for the first away series. His fingers found a rhythm, his shoulders loosened a half inch, and for stretches of minutes at a time, he could almost convince himself the day had been ordinary.
Then his brain would serve up another image, unpromptedand perfectly timed.
Last Tuesday: Finn in the hallway outside the training room, in his practice jersey, telling a freshman something about defensive positioning. His hands drawing the play in the air. The freshman nodded, actually listening, because Finn had that. People listened to him. Evan had stopped walking and stood there for four seconds too long before his legs remembered what hallways were for.
Two days before that: Finn at the booster event, drink in hand, making a donor twice his age laugh about something. Completely at ease. Evan had been across the room doing his job, and every time he turned around, Finn was there in his peripheral vision, not looking at him, not performing anything, just being himself with a comfort that made Evan’s ribs ache because he could not remember the last time he’d been that unguarded in a room full of people.
Evan had been out for fifteen years. He checked the room before mentioning an ex-boyfriend. Heard his father’s tone go flat and neutral when the subject came up. Did the math, every room, every conversation, on how much of himself was safe to show. It had become so automatic he’d stopped noticing he was doing it, the way you stopped noticing a limp after long enough.
Finn didn’t do the math. Finn just walked in.
Evan’s hand tightened around his coffee mug, the ceramic cool against his palm, and he stared at the screen without reading a word on it.
His phone rang. His father’s name. Evan’s shoulders squared before he answered, the reflex so deep it happened before the third ring.
“Hey, Dad.”
“You left early.” A statement, not a question.
“Had work to catch up on. Schedule’s a mess with the arena renovations.”
A grunt. “Get it sorted. I don’t want any surprises this season.”
“You won’t.”
“Good.” The line went dead. Evan set the phone on the counter and looked at the ceiling, the plaster cracked in one corner where the house had settled over the years. Twelve seconds. That was the whole call. His father could run a Division I hockey program, manage a staff of forty, and reduce a conversation with his only son to the length of a TV commercial.
* * *
Evan didn’t stay home. He ended up at a bar off Main Street, a townie place where the bartender poured without asking, and the TV above the bar was always tuned to whatever Detroit team was losing. Evan ordered a whiskey neat and sat in a corner booth with his back to the wall, the vinyl cracked and cool beneath him, the overhead lamp throwing a circle of yellow light that didn’t reach the edges of the wood.
Three innings gone before he noticed his whiskey was done. He’d finished it without tasting a drop. The condensation ring from the water beside it had dried to nothing. Evan sat with the empty tumbler and did nothing about it. The bar noise washed around him: someone’s laughter cutting through the play-by-play, the crack of pool balls from the back room, the bartender rinsing a pint with water that smelled like rust. Same streets since childhood. Same last name in the office as on the rink. He was thirty-eight years old, sitting alone on a weeknight because going home meant sitting alone in a room where every surface was clean, and the faucet counted seconds like a metronome.
His phone buzzed against the wood. Unknown number, local area code.
You’re thinking about me right now.
Evan’s thumb stopped on the screen. The bar noise dropped to a frequency below hearing, the TV and the pool cues and the laughter all going distant, and his pulse picked up in his throat.
You’re thinking about me, and you’re telling yourself all the reasons it’s a bad idea. The age gap. The job. What people would say.
Then:Here’s the thing, Evan. I don’t give a fuck what people would say. And I don’t think you do either. I think you’re just scared.
Evan should ignore this. Block the number and pretend it never happened. That was the disciplined response, the response of a man who had spent his entire adult life on the principle that restraint was indistinguishable from character. Evan set the phone face down on the wood. Pressed his thumb into a groove in the grain and held it there. Picked the phone up again. Set it down. The Tigers were losing, the bartender was wiping a pint with a towel that had seen better decades, and Evan had no good reason to respond to a text from a twenty-one-year-old hockey player who had somehow gotten his personal number.
He picked it up.
How did you get this number?
I’m the captain. I have access to the emergency contact list.Of course he did. Evan could picture him typing it, sprawled on that disaster of a couch, the grin pulling at one corner of his mouth.
This is inappropriate.
Is it? I’m an adult. You’re an adult. Neither of us is breaking any rules.
