Page 35 of Delay of Game

“I, uh... It’s cool, Zach.”

Zach looked away from him because it was too much, and at the clock, because it was right there, and saw that it was almost three in the morning. They reallyhadjust been making out for hours. What the fuck washappeningto him? “I—uh—should probably go back to my room. You know. For tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah,” Nate said. His face was unreadable. “It’s late.”

“I—uh—good game,” Zach said, “really good game, buddy,” and fled.

Good game?Seriously, what the fuck was happening to him?

He was not at all sure he wanted to find out.

Nate stared at the door for the second time that week, and thought,okay, no more drinking.

He forced himself to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom to get a glass of water from the sink and realized that they had both forgotten that they’d been inZach’s hotel room. Zach’s bathroom kit was sitting on the sink, messily spilling over onto the counter. Nate looked at it for a moment, sighed, poured himself the water, and drank it.

He had no idea when Zach was going to figure it out and come back, or whether he’d just crash with someone else, but Nate didn’t know if he wanted to stick around to find out. He’d gone and fucked things up again, when he’d really been trying to be the responsible one. It was just like every careful plan went out the window when he was around Zach lately, even though he’d gone into the bar bathroom intending to ask a question and only ask a question.

That was one thing he knew for sure: hereallycouldn’t be here when Zach realized. He didn’t want to provide an explanation as to why he was still hanging around the hotel room. What if Zach was so weirded out by the whole thing that he’d run away, andthenhe came back to find Nate sitting there like he was hoping to go again? How disgusted and scornful he’d be... Nate could already feel his ears turning red, the burning heat of the deep-seated humiliation rising to the surface as quickly as always. His stomach churned, the old, familiar nausea.

So instead of staying, Nate got dressed, stumbled toward the door, and shut it behind him. He went back to his own hotel room. But he didn’t get anything approaching a good night’s sleep. It took him a long time, tossing and turning and replaying the best blowjob of his life over and over again in his head. The way Zach had been so keyed up by going down on him that he’d come just from Nate’s lightest touch.

In retrospect it was probably pretty ridiculous he’d thought he was straight.

On the plane to Miami, though, Zach flopped into the seat next to him like nothing had happened. At least at first. He wasn’t wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing last night, so clearly, he’d figured it out, or at least worked up the courage to go back to his room. Where Nate hadn’t been. He grinned a little sheepishly at Nate, and asked, “Sleep well, Cap?”

Nate choked on the water he’d been in the process of drinking, swallowed hard, and lied, “Uh, sure. Yeah.”

“Okay, good,” Zach said, and then slouched down into the seat, stretched out his legs, and closed his eyes, leaving Nate seething in the thin line between the frustrated desire to shake him, and the desire to kiss his eyelid. Becausethatwas an extremely normal thought to have.

Jesus Christ, his brain was not doing him any favors this week.

They beat the Barracuda. The Florida team was finally coming out of a rebuild, starting to look like a dangerous group. Especially in transition. Still, tonight, it wasn’t even close. Nate had a hat trick, and the final score was 7-1. Complete and utter domination. It had only been two games, but it felt like they were playing like themselves again, finally.

After last night, and with another game in Raleigh the next day, no one was going out, which was perfectly fine with Nate. He ran on autopilot in the locker room for postgame interviews, exhausted from the game and his mind a thousand miles away. One of the reporters noticed.

“Nate, you’ve just won two games and had your fourth career hat trick, and yet you don’t seem satisfied—can you elaborate on that?”

Nate mumbled something about how he was always looking to the next game, and the goal this year was the Cup, but it was only about a quarter of the truth.

Later that night, safely in his own hotel room, Nate half listened to the news on the TV in the background while he flipped through the Google Doc he and Bee kept updated for the rest of the team, with notes on their upcoming opponents. Some of it was from the coaching staff, some of it was Bee’s insane well of hockey minutiae, and some of it was Nate’s contributions. He wasn’t sure how many on the team actually utilized it on a day-to-day basis, but he pretty reliably saw Mäkelä, Mike, and Sally’s names pop up at the top, so that was something, anyway.

It wasn’t always necessary, but he liked to have the knowledge fresh in his head. Knowledge and planning were the best ways to manage anxiety, and he had certainly been incredibly fucking anxious the last couple of weeks. He tried not to think about the Zach thing too much, but it was almost impossiblenotto think about it.

Sex, his brain supplied helpfully,not the Zach thing.It was sex, and you don’t want to think about sex with Zach. Because you had sex with Zach. Twice. You started it. Twice. It was really good sex too, not like the last time you tried it.

Nate looked at the document again and said, out loud, “Carolina. You are playing the Carolina Oaks tomorrow. They’re probably going to fire their head coach midseason. It’s a mess down there.”

Someone knocked on his door.

Nate set his phone down and went to answer it. He didn’t really think about the fact that he was only wearing boxers, because it was probably one of the guys from the team, so it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen it before. He’d been trying to get better about letting people look at him and not being fucked up about it, trying not to think of his body as something he hated, but rather something that he had to use for his job. And as he’d settled into the captain role, he’d gotten into the habit of talking to anyone who needed to come in and talk. He wasn’t always very good at it, but it had definitely gotten less awkward than it had been his first season, and he thought he’d helped some of the rookies, at least. It was important to have a welcoming environment where people could feel like their voices mattered.

And, you know. That shit.

He opened the door, and Zach looked up at him, the bright, megawatt smile on full display. It wasn’t his crooked smile, the one Nate particularly loved and the one that lit up his entire face. It was the one that didn’t quite reach his eyes. The one he used for the media. Nate was instantly suspicious because usually a smilethatwide either meant that Zach had fucked something up or was intending to fuck something up.

Usually, Nate wasn’t on the receiving end of that particular smile. It was unnerving.

“Can I come in?” Zach asked. He wore a pair of gray sweatpants and the Agalloch T-shirt he’d stolen from Nate’s room at his parents’ house in their first season after Mom’s Chanukah party. He’d never given it back and Nate, once he’d discovered where it had gone, had never asked.

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