Page 60 of Game Misconduct

Just love me anyway, Danny thought, but said, “I’m going to be more careful from now on. It’s not going to happen again.”

“Danny—”

“Mike, I really, really don’t want to talk about this now,” Danny said, painfully self-conscious about the way the words were thick and a little slurred.

There was a long pause. “Okay. But, Danny—I—”

“What, Mike?”

“I just want you to be okay. Okay?”

The fridge was warming under his sweaty forehead. “I’m going to try to be, Mike.”

“Okay,” Mike said, but he sounded so uncertain, so unlike himself, that Danny knew he was just going to get fucked up about it as soon as he hung up.

“Mike, I...”

“Yeah?”

I love you, he thought,I love you, I fucking love you, but he said, “Don’t worry about me, okay?”

“Right,” Mike said, “sure, who was worrying,” and hung up.

Danny got fucked up about it, but this time, he set his phone alarm.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Mike wasn’t even upset that they had a game on New Year’s Day. He was on a plane to Nashville while Danny was on a flight to Minnesota. Tomorrow the Cons were playing in Dallas, so it was unlikely there was going to be any kind of crazy party like there’d been last year. He’d been working so hard at practice and during games, playing solid minutes on the third pairing and had even a few games as a second pairing with Lindy when Graham had been out with a concussion. With all of that, these days, alcohol hit him like a sledgehammer, and he felt like shit in the morning.

Of course, he kind of felt like shit anyway.

He’d been thinking about Danny pretty much constantly, but they hadn’t talked about it. In fact, they’d barely talked at all. It wasn’t that Mike didn’t have a lot of things to say because he sure as fuck did, but he didn’t think Danny would listen.

That was the fucked-up thing. He’d gotten used to keeping secrets, even from Bee. But they were the kind of secrets Mike had always kept: dumb shit like hookups he’d regretted, exactly how sad he was on a day-to-day basis, the jealousy he was ashamed of feeling when he thought about her All-Star Games and Rookie of the Year award, the usual. Bigger secrets, like the one he’d still never been able to say out loud.

Even compared to that, this felt bigger and more complicated than he could describe.

For the first time he wanted to tell her. Almost felt like he needed to tell her. It was eating at him, not knowing what to do, not being able to ask anyone for advice. And it wasn’t like Bee was really gonna be able to help with that because fuck knew it had taken her an entire year to figure out her shit with Mäkelä, but at least she would probably have like. Listened sympathetically. He’d gotten used to Danny doing that, but he couldn’t tellDannyhow upset the situation was making him.

What the hell did people do when they had feelings? Did talking about it help? Did people actually do that? Or did everyone just walk around like they were going to crawl out of their own skin, all the time?

“Michael,” Bee said, her voice low. The plane was always pretty noisy unless it was a red-eye home, but she knew him. She sat with Mäkelä sometimes, but she sat with Mike just as often. “Are you okay?”

He knew he was looking at her funny, but he had no idea what his face looked like. It was just one of those moments he knew he couldn’t control whatever was happening there. “I’m having a really weird year.”

“It’s almost over.”

“I can’t really see it getting any less weird anytime soon.”

Bee glanced around, scoping out the scene. Netty was in the front of the plane noogieing Singer’s head while Reed laughed at them, and some of the other nosier Cons weren’t paying attention. “Do you want to talk about it, Michael?” she asked, her brown eyes so warm and sincere that he almost gave in and told her right then and there.

“Uhh...maybe...but not, uh, here.”

“Whenever you want to, mon chum.”

“Thanks, Bee. Really.”

She patted him on the knee, and said, again, like a threat, “Whenever you want.”

He wasn’t fighting as much these days, but it was almost a relief when they were on the ice in Nashville and that rat Kovalenko slashed him in the back of the head and he had an excuse to beat the shit out of someone. His ears were ringing, but he whirled immediately to drop gloves and punch the helmet fucking right off that fucker’s head.

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