Page 73 of Delay of Game

“I just...wanted to check on you and make sure things were going okay,” Nate said. It was hilarious, really, that he was doing this. He wondered who captained the captain, who would come tohimand check in on him to make sure he was sleeping and wasn’t moping around after his center.

“Why wouldn’t everything be okay?” Gags asked. He sat down on the bed, mock-casually.

“Uh, you were just taking kind of a beating out there, and I just wanted to make sure you weren’t beating yourself up in here.”

“I’m fine, Cap,” Gags said. He looked like shit, really: he had a black eye, but the rest of his face was gaunt and shadowed, like he hadn’t been sleeping enough. His mouth was turned down at the corner and his eyes, pupils aside, were kind of bloodshot. He was fidgeting still, his leg bouncing nervously up and down so much that the TV, loose in its moorings where it was screwed into the bureau, rattled a little as he did it.

“You seem a bit jumpy?” Nate said, arms crossed over his chest. He felt like bouncing his leg too. He wasn’t good at this shit, even though he felt obligated to try. “I just wanted to tell you that what’s going on out there—getting targeted, getting knocked down—it’s not your fault. You’ve been playing really well and it’s a testament to that that the other team is going after you specifically like that. No one blamed you for that goal, you know?”

“Um. I mean, I know,” Gags said, and swiped his hands through his sweaty hair.

He sniffed, like his nose was running and he was trying to suck it in. His eyes darted toward the door, as if he was half expecting Belsky to walk back through it. He was clearly hiding something and for a moment, Nate wondered if he’d, like, interrupted something he hadn’t been supposed to, if Belsky and Gags—but that was an insane way to think. Just becausehehadn’t had any self-control around his teammate didn’t mean that anyone else was like that. Statistically it was almost impossible.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” he said, feeling the red flush starting to rise up his neck and the sweat prickle at the back of it. “I just wanted to check in and let you know that no one is expecting anything more from you than you’re already giving.”

Gags’s face softened almost imperceptibly. “Thanks, Cap. I really—I appreciate all of your little chats, you know? But I’m fine.Really.”

“Okay,” Nate said, trying not to sound too doubtful.

“Good night,” said Gags, and rubbed his eyes.

Nate walked down the hall to his own room, alone, feeling once again like he was missing something reallyfuckingimportant.

The Cons managed to grind out win after win against the Railers, although the series ended up closer than Zach would have liked. Bee had scored a few clutch goals. Sally had been playing his shutdown role to perfection, frustrating even the largest of the Railers’ forwards. But it still took them to six games to clinch it. And after that, they would play the Carolina Oaks, and then there were the Conference finals, and then, if they had managed to get through it, the Cup finals. He couldn’t afford to be tired, despite the brutal, bone-crushing pace of playing against one of the oldest and toughest teams in their division.

They had a few days off to recover, and Zach should have been using it to recover. Somehow, he just couldn’t fucking sleep.

It was funny, like breaking up with Nate had just popped the seal off all of Zach’s bad memories of Montreal. It was funny mostly because at the time he’d been there, he hadn’t even had any idea that they’d be bad memories. As far as Zach had been concerned, at least at first, he’d been having the time of his life, playing hockey and partying it up and getting his dick wet every chance he could. It had been like a buffet: everyone was eager to line up to give him what he wanted, whether that was access to the best dance clubs, the most exclusive bars, the best drugs, or a warm bed or cold bar bathroom or wherever it happened to be.

Zach had been so young that staying out all night and then waking up early to go to practice hadn’t made a dent in his quality of play, or so he’d thought. By the end of his time there it had started to feel like a bubble, expanding further and further until the skin was so thin it would burst. Until it finally had.

That had been a rude fucking wakeup call and he had struggled to get his shit together in the offseason so he could show up at training camp with the Cons and prove Rejean Poulin, the general manager of the Montreal Royal,wrong. He felt he’d done a decent job of that, but it had been an unpleasant few months, constantly second-guessing everything he’d done and every decision he’d made. It had really been Nate’s friendship that had helped ease him onto the team for real, helped cement him as an integral part of the roster and make him feel less like a cast-off fuckup and more like...well, like a real person.

But without Nate, Zach woke up from dreams that he would have enjoyed all those years ago but now felt a little more like nightmares. Sweaty encounters in dim bar bathrooms. Not the rush of coke so much as the drawn-out energy and joy of being around his friends. Wasted and pushing his way out of the sunroof of a rental car. A sloppy blowjob, the wet mouth of a girl whose face he couldn’t even remember. Now when he realized what his subconscious was doing, he woke up feeling wrung-out and guilty, like he was betraying his current self by remembering what his past self had done.

He didn’t have any choice but to shake it off, try to concentrate on the task at hand. They had to win the game in Philly to keep the home ice advantage, and they couldn’t afford to go out in the first round or second round again. The “rebuild” was way ahead of schedule, so maybe Gordon Smith wouldn’t blow everything up immediately the same way he would have if they had been trying and failing for a decade.

But he didn’t want to find out.

He had all of this shit knocking around in his head all of the time now, and he wondered how Nate had dealt with it all of those years. They’d talked about it before, the way his anxiety worked, the way his brain was constantly yelling at him with all kinds of doom and gloom. Zach had only been experiencing that for a few weeks—not that it was anxiety, but the general inability to shut off his own brain when he wanted to—and he felt like shit. The fact that Nate performed at the level he had all of these years...it was kind of mind-boggling.

Zach suited up for the first game against the Oaks, thinking about how he had practically begged Nate to just pretend that things were normal. That had been going great too, by the way. Even now he had to shrink his own body into itself because knowing Nate was a few inches away, half naked and getting ready to play, made the hair on his arms stand on end. It was a stupid thing to ask, the kind of wishful thinking that didn’t mean shit in the real world.

He frowned, watching Gags and Belsky across the circle. Gags was really looking rough these days, the dark circles under his eyes practically caving in. He sniffed and wiped his hand across his nose, his leg jiggling, bouncing up and down nervously, and something in Zach’s head clicked into place, and he thought,oh, shit.

That’s what Zach had looked like toward the end of his time in Montreal.

“Hey, Gags,” Zach said, while the rest of the guys were still getting ready. “Come out in the hallway with me?”

“Huh?” Gags asked, blinking. “Why?”

“Just want to chat about something, okay?”

Although he looked both terrified and suspicious, all at the same time, Gags complied. They went out into the hall, the lope of skates on the dressing room floor and then the rubber-lined halls. Gags shot a glance sideways at him but didn’t say anything immediately.

“So we’ve talked before,” Zach said.

“Yeah,” Gags agreed.

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