Page 68 of Delay of Game

Or whether they’d—shut up, Nate said to himself, for the umpteenth time that day.

After the next round of drills, Nate was sweating, not from the exertion. He stood next to Zach, who looked as casual and breezy as he ever looked.

“Uh, hey,” Nate said, softly enough that no one else could hear him.

“Oh, hey, Cap,” Zach said brightly. He was smiling his media smile again, empty and bland. There was absolutely no expression in his eyes. “How’s it going?”

Nate stared at him and Zach stared back. The smile never wavered. The sweat dripped down the back of his neck, his ears hot. He wanted desperately to say something, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He always had trouble thinking of the right words, but he never did around Zach. Not anymore. Not until today. All around them, the ambient noise of practice, usually comforting, felt overwhelming.

What came out of Nate’s mouth was: “Are we okay?”

“Peachy.”

“Are you...sure?”

“Why wouldn’t we be okay?” Zach asked. Smiling, and smiling, and smiling.

After the practice, Nate went home alone. He looked at his phone, but Zach hadn’t texted him. He knew, deep in the pit of his stomach, that things were over, that for whatever reason, it wasn’t ever going to be the same again.

When Zayde had died, Nate hadn’t known how to feel. It had been a hollow kind of pain, knowing that he should cry, but not being able to make himself do it. He so often felt overwhelmed by anxiety and emotions on a day-to-day basis, but there, in the biggest loss of his life so far, he had just felt numb and frozen. That had made him feel like shit too, like he’d somehow loved Zayde less than he thought he had. It was the same when Rachel had left. He’d basically just bag-skated himself at practice, pushing himself physically until his body did the work of feeling like shit for him.

He was numb and frozen now. He couldn’taffordto fall apart. There was an entire team and an entire city that was counting on him. Just because he’d fucked things up with his best friend didn’t change any of it.

Nate set the phone down, took a deep breath, and went to clean his bathrooms.

V. SPRING

Chapter Nine

March

It was hard to think about how Old Zach would have handled this, because he was such a different person now that it was almost unimaginable. Like, yeah, sure, he’d never had a real relationship before Nate—this hadn’t been a real relationship either, he had to remind himself—so he didn’t know how a breakup would have gone. But he knew how he handled almost everything else back then, and that was: drown it in alcohol or other chemicals. It was easy not to care about your coach being pissed at you when you knew you were just going to get fucked up later and have an absolutely insane time partying. Or at least you were until the party wasn’t fun anymore.

Zach was still deeply embarrassed by the two-week-long mess after getting traded. That one had ended with Jammer dragging him bodily out of a club and throwing him, fully clothed, into a cold shower to sober him up. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t afford to do anything like that now.

Usually when he was upset about something, he went to Nate and let himself be distracted that way. They’d spent a lot of time like that their first year, when the Cons were on the cusp of being good but weren’t quite contenders yet, when they’d both had their shit to work through.

But now he didn’t have Nate.

He did have his dogs. He took them for long walks in Fairmount Park, he spoiled them rotten with treats and grooming and new toys, and that filled up some of the time. He went out a few times for dinner with Mike after games, which was a surprising friendship he’d never really thought would develop given how prickly Mike had always been, but which he found he enjoyed a lot. It turned out that now that he’d settled down, Mike had a lot of thoughts about a lot of different things, and he was actually a pretty funny guy.

And then there was Gags.

He was doing okay on the ice. Cote hadn’t cut his ice time in a while, and he was pretty solidly a consistent presence on the wing of the third line. But Zach couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else going on with him. He watched Gags carefully at the team dinners after games, but he seemed just fine there, eating as much as anyone could ask for, laughing along at jokes, chirping the other guys, the life of the party. He always had dark circles under his eyes, though, like he’d been in a fight and was getting over a black eye, even though he hadn’t.

“You think Gags is good?” Zach asked Mike as they were getting ready for the game.

Mike was one of those guys who could tape his stick with his eyes closed, rotating it without looking like he had the entire rhythm memorized. Zach’s question threw him off, tape uneven, and he muttered a curse. “I don’t know. You think something’s up?”

Zach shrugged. “Just a feeling. He looks really tired.”

Mike glanced sideways to watch Gags, who was taping his socks. “I dunno. The league’s really an adjustment from minors, you know? We’re getting toward the end of the season. Could just be that—tired.”

“Yeah,” Zach said. But he didn’t feel convinced.

“I mean, he could have shit going on you don’t know about,” Mike said, shaking his head. “I sure did my rookie year.”

“Yeah?”

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