Page 69 of Delay of Game

“Dude. I wascompletelyin the closet, and I felt like shit about it and my spot on the team. I’d only ever hook up on the road and then I’d, you know. Beat myself up about it after. I couldn’t even tell Bee about it. It was...a pretty bad time.”

Zach stared at him. “I had no idea.”

“Well, yeah, that’s the point,” Mike said. He shrugged. “Just saying, everyone’s got their shit. Some of us are better at hiding it than others.”

Zach thought about Mike’s rookie year, the dead-eyed way he’d thrown himself into fights, the way he had seemed to relish them, even or especially when he was getting the shit kicked out of him. “Or maybe sometimes we’re just really bad at recognizing it.”

Mike shot him a glance sideways, his dark eyes dancing with laughter. “And now he gets it.”

“Do you think I should talk to him?”

“That’s your call, bud. You know him better than I do.” He frowned, watching Gags and Belsky, sitting next to each other in their stalls, both looking at the same iPhone screen. “I can tell you that if someone had tried to talk tomemy rookie year, I probably would’ve bitten their fucking head off.”

“Gags doesn’t seem like that kind of guy,” Zach said doubtfully. “But maybe I’ll wait and see.”

“It’s good you noticed, though. But you just gotta trust your gut.”

Zach laughed, too loud in the locker room. It felt a little wheezy toward the end. “Bro, my gut is the fucking worst. It’salwayswrong.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “So do the opposite. I don’t know. I’m going to community college, I’m not fuckin’ Yoda.”

“No,” Zach agreed. He ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t know what to do about Gags the same way he didn’t know what to do about the rest of his life. He didn’t want to push where it wasn’t wanted, and he didn’t want to let something slip. He’d just have to wait and see.

Sometimes, Nate thought about texting Rachel and asking her how the hell she had figured him out. What she had seen that he hadn’t, when she had noticed it, why she hadn’t told him anything. Maybe it was a completely fruitless worry. Even if she had told him, it wouldn’t have made anything easier in the end, because he probably wouldn’t have been ready to accept that what he felt about Zach was anything except a really intense friendship, the kind that wasn’t at all unusual in hockey.

He still had her number, but there wasn’t anything to be gained from reaching out to her. They had broken up amicably enough, considering the length of their relationship and the way it had ended. It had been icy, but amicable. Still, they hadn’t spoken since she’d packed her bags except to arrange details about things like utility transfers and when she needed to come to pick up the rest of her stuff. He wondered what she would do if he reached out to askwhen did you realize?

But it was ultimately a useless endeavor. Nate had fucked everything up, somehow, and he didn’t know how to fix it and probably never would. He’d fucked things up with Rachel and now he’d fucked things up with Zach, and that was just his own fault, for being shit at relationships, for being so deeply in his own head that he couldn’t see what was going on in front of him until it was too late. That was the thing about Nate: he always fucked things up.

That was a sobering thought that stuck with him as he went through the motions of his daily routine. He went to the rink, and he came home. He worked with the coaching staff to discuss things they needed to implement with the forwards’ d-zone coverage. He talked at length with Belsky about adjusting to the grind of the season and the importance of not pushing through things when you weren’t feeling it, that it was okay to take a maintenance day if he needed it.

“Uhh, okay,” Belsky said, looking at him like he was crazy after Nate brought it up. “I’m not injured, my wrist is just a little sore. I’m managing it.”

“I’m serious,” Nate said. They were sitting on the bench at the practice facility, watching the defensemen working through a small-ice drill. “I know the general league isn’t always like that, but here we don’t want you playing through shit if you have something going on.”

Belsky laughed. He had a pleasant laugh, an unusually deep voice for a relatively young guy, booming and carrying. “Okay, Dad.”

Nate sighed. He’d gotten used to the rookies calling him Dad, even if he didn’t really like to hear it. It was a good thing they trusted him as a captain, but he wasn’t even technically in his late twenties yet, and it made him feel so fucking old. And then it made him feel like shit, because if he was a real father figure for them, shouldn’t he have figured out his shit by now, instead of imploding his personal life around his own head?

Because he was really imploding his personal life around his own head.

He had to sort things into life before Zach and life with Zach and life after Zach, and if he was being honest, life after Zach was pretty bad. Every time he came home to his empty house, devoid of Zach or the noise of the dogs, he was reminded of how he’d fucked things up. Every time he went to practice and couldn’t joke around with Zach during the little pauses between drills, he was reminded of how he’d fucked things up. He’d squirt the water from the bottle into his mouth and think about how Zach used to tease him when he did it. And it was even worse when he was playing.

The thing about having linemates was that by the end of the season, you should have developed chemistry. The key to a successful line was knowing how the other guys would think, being able to anticipate where they would be. When you played together long enough, it was automatic, about as close to a psychic link as you could get without being an X-Man or something. It was fucking weird that he could still do that with Zach, but he couldn’t talk to him off of the ice, couldn’t spend any time with him, couldn’t talk to him about his concerns about the team or the fact that he thought maybe Belsky was hiding an injury and the training staff hadn’t picked up on it.

They were on a weird kind of road trip, first to Carolina and then to Pittsburgh, where they would be playing their perennial rival and the defending Cup champions. Zach usually sat next to him during road travel, but today, he passed right by and went to the back of the plane, where he settled into a group of four seats turned to face each other with Bee, Mike, and Netty. He didn’t look Nate’s way.

Nate ended up sitting alone, which was fine. It gave him time to update the Google Doc with his scouting reports for the Oaks, who had been having some issues with goalie injuries, and his notes on the Hornets’ defensive depth—they had lost Garcia in the offseason, of course, but had picked up another veteran right-shot defenseman in free agency before the season started. All in all it was a wash, particularly considering they’d had the short offseason post-Cup hangover that a lot of teams had had, but by this time in the season it had evened out. Toward the end of an eighty-two-game year, everyone was starting to get banged up.

Everyonewas exhausted.

Nate felt exhausted too, heading out onto the ice to play another game at Zach’s side without being able to actually talk to him outside of the usual shorthand of yelling shit likeofforgot timeorone on. Every warmup was torture; they used to mess around during those too, flipping pucks at each other, pushing and shoving behind Mäkelä’s net, squirting each other with water or Gatorade.

Sally’s line took the opening face-off because his winger, Ben Meyer, was from Raleigh, and the coaching staff were kind enough to give a little nod to him on a homecoming game.

So Nate watched the first shift from the bench, fingers white-knuckled around his stick. Mäkelä froze the puck and the whistle blew; Nate jumped over the boards to take the defensive zone draw with Zach and Bee. It was Zach’s weak side, technically, but he’d been practicing taking those draws on the backhand—so it wasn’t even really his weak side anymore. And it had the added benefit of the curve facing the way you wanted to dig the puck.

Nate sighed when he saw him settle into the familiar posture. It meant the puck would probably get shoved back Nate’s way, but also just served as another stupid reminder of why he was so fond of Zach. All of the small details of the game that he studied, that he tinkered with. For someone who was constantly making jokes about how dumb he was, Zach was asmarthockey player. He had good hockey IQ, but he also read a lot, watched a lot, stole a lot of things from other guys. He’d noticed one of the centers on the Mariners doing it and had been intrigued enough to practice.

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