Page 45 of Game Misconduct

Maybe Landry would surprise him.

Danny snorted as he put his helmet on. No one really surprised him anymore.

What also didn’t surprise him was falling back into the easy grind of playing games, working out, occasionally hanging out in crowded rooms with his teammates in hotels across the country, and trying not to think too much about one night out of his entire year. It was hard not to think about it, though, when Mike started doing things like giving Danny his phone number instead of just using the voice call function, or FaceTiming instead of using Snapchat, and Danny could see him in his apartment on a steady computer camera instead.

It definitely made phone sex easier, but sometimes they didn’t even screw around, Danny just watched Mike going about his night. PlayingCall of Duty, watching YouTube clips of the teams he’d be playing, cooking dinner, or they talked about random shit. Danny hadn’t told him about the first, big injury in any detail, not yet. It was still hard to talk about it at all, even years later, even with how often Araceli told him he should really talk to a therapist who wasn’t her. But he told Mike about getting traded, the last time, from Detroit. How disappointed he’d been. Told him about Josie and how much he missed her when he was on the road.

Didn’t tell him about why he rarely saw her.

And Mike made him laugh until his stomach hurt with stories about the band he’d had with two of his teammates on the Harriers. “I was sixteen, I was super into hardcore, and I wanted to be Mike Maxymuik, and they just wanted to play, like, My Chemical Romance covers,” Mike said sheepishly. “So I’d just, uh, play my own shit in the background while they did their thing. We sucked, dude. Majorly sucked.”

“What did you play?”

“Are you serious? Drums! Maxymuik was your first clue.”

“Like I’m supposed to know who that is?”

“Ugh, of course you don’t know Cursed.”

“What was your band called?”

“Uhhh...”

“You don’t want to tell me?”

“I do, but give me a break, I was only sixteen. It’s pretty bad.”

“What was it?”

“Uh. Suicide Pass.”

Danny just shook his head, and Mike sighed and made Danny promise to listen to some albums. Nothisalbums, which Mike swore had never been recorded. Just albums Mike liked. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually do it, because he was getting the idea that they had no overlap in their music taste, but it was kind of cute that Mike had wanted him to listen. The whole thing felt weirdly normal. Despite the fact that they were often a country away, despite how they had started this thing in the first place.

He caught himself feeling good, which was dangerous.

Except it wasn’t like he could let himself enjoy it too much. He knew why it was so easy. Mike didn’t know the worst of the shit going on in his head, with his body. Mike wasn’tworriedabout him. It was an easy thing, but if it got deeper than that, if Mike started looking at him with the kind of worried eyes that Araceli always had these days, Danny wouldn’t be able to handle it. That would be the end of things.

The only reason it worked was that Mike just let him be, and they were both kind of assholes, and...and that was it. He didn’t deserve people worrying about him like that, and for now, it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t.

And if Mike had an easy talent for making him smile, well. That was a bonus, wasn’t it?

It was a night when Mike wasn’t around and Danny didn’t have a game, and he was lying on the couch nursing a drink and staring at the television as it spewed out Netflix documentary episodes without actually registering what was going on. That was how he usually spent those kinds of evenings, cradled in the fuzzy embrace of alcohol and narcotics, no pain in his body and no pain in his head.

There was a noise from outside. A crash and a rattle of metal and glass on the pavement.

At first, he didn’t think twice about it. There were raccoons sometimes, and they could get into anything. Sometimes they got into the garbage cans. There was another crash, and this time, Danny hauled himself to his feet to check outside and figure out what to do if itwasraccoons. The last thing he needed was a rabies shot.

It was almost midnight, so overcast that the only light was the diffused gold of streetlamps. The little path that led from the driveway to his kitchen door was strewn with garbage; one of the cans had been knocked over and the lid had popped off. He could hear rustling from within and sighed. It didn’t really sound large enough to be a raccoon, but he wasn’t in the fucking mood to pick up all of the trash tonight.

He crouched down in front of the can and used his phone flashlight to peer inside. Glowing green eyes stared back at him, and the filthy, scraggly orange cat hissed. It had either knocked over the can or something larger had knocked it over, and the cat had decided to take advantage.

“Hey, buddy,” Danny said, extending his fingers toward it.

The cat was a kitten, really; it couldn’t have weighed more than two pounds. It lunged forward and dug its tiny needle-pointed teeth into his hand, which, well, Danny couldn’t blame it. He let the cat attack him, scratching and biting, until it abruptly decided either that he wasn’t a threat or that it was bored of such an undignified display. Instead, the kitten turned away from him and began licking its own ass, and Danny found himself laughing, in the dark, trying to pull a cat out of the garbage.

It had been a strange enough year, that was for sure.

The kitten bit his hand the entire walk back to the house and scratched him viciously while he tried to figure out where it could sleep. It probably had fleas and other parasites, but he had the free day tomorrow to find a vet and get it treated. Or drop it off at a shelter or rescue, which was probably the more sensible thing to do.

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