Page 8 of Delay of Game

His parents still held out hope they would get back together because on paper, everything about Rachel was perfect. She was smart, she was ambitious and she wasbeautiful. She was Jewish. She had grown up on the Main Line and had those Main Line manners, the kind of girl who’d gone to Camp Ramah in the summers. But when her parents moved into the city when she was in high school, she had met Nate and had never looked back.

“I’m not lonely,” he said. His mouth felt stuffed full of cotton balls. “I have Zach. I mean, I have the team and Zach. And Bee, I mean, and the rest of the guys. I’m really busy.”

It was stupid, that his mind immediately jumped to Zach, when Mom was talking aboutromance. But Zach was the person in his life: the biggest and most important person in his life. Pretty much the only person he felt completely comfortable around.

“But don’t you want to be able to comehometo someone?” Mom asked, patting Dad on the hand. “When I came home from a rough night driving the 3, it helped to have your dad here to vent to.”

“It’s the last thing on my mind right now,” Nate said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. He hated lying to his parents. It was easier just to omit things, the same way he’d done his whole life. To retreat into silence and let their well-meaning worry wash over him. It was the same reason he kept coming back, dutiful and uncomfortable and awkward, even though he knew how the conversations would end.

“Okay,” Mom said. “But just so you know, if you want to, we started paying membership dues at B’nai Abraham again, so we could always...”

“Mom! I don’t havetime.” Nate exhaled. “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, I really didn’t. I just have—uh, a lot on my mind. Could we please—could we please talk about something else?”

“Sure,” Dad said, skeptical.

It was a quiet rest of the dinner. Nate’s hands and back felt clammy and sweaty as he kept his mouth shut during it. The only comfort was knowing what he’d planned next. He just had to make it through another few hours.

Nate exhaled a smoke ring. It was almost a perfect night, now that he’d made his escape from his parents’ house. He couldn’t really see the stars through the glare of the city lights below and all around him, but sprawled on his back in a chair on his roof deck and staring up at the night sky with the moon lazily traversing across his field of vision, it didn’t matter. His body felt relaxed and heavy in a way it never did when he was playing.

It was a risk, taking a week after the Cons either failed to make the playoffs or their postseason ended, to get very drunk and smoke a lot of weed without talking to another living soul, but he did it anyway.

Marijuana wasn’t a performance-enhancing drug. It technically wasn’t included on the list of banned substances, but even then, it would not look good if it showed up on a random test. He rarely did anything that would risk his career or captaincy. But this was the way he’d learned how to reset in juniors. Theonlyway he could deal with the crushing anxiety and responsibility that weighed him down during the year. The only way to go into the grind of another season, knowing they were going to lose.

He’d been through eight years of losses, and each year it was harder to bear. It was even worse now that he was the captain, and in addition to being responsible for mediating with the refs and for the team’s success on the ice, he was responsible for so much more off of it. It was Nate’s job to do everything from making sure the guys knew when they needed to make it to the airport and the buses to mediating personal disputes between players to checking in and making sure that there weren’t any issues with the coaching staff. And particularly because he didn’t have a WAG to do it, Nate made sure he organized a lot of the social outings himself.

He was entitled to one week off per year. One week to get crossfaded and forget literally everything. The week helped.

At least, the week usually helped.

Except.

This summer he was having a hard time letting go the way he usually did. Heusuallylet the phone die and limited his computer time. Became impossible to reach, completely disconnected. His friends didn’t call him. His teammates didn’t call him. His parents didn’t call him. Even his agent knew not to call him.

This summer, he had his phone compulsively in hand.

Specifically, he looked at Zach’s Snapchat and Instagram stories...well, a lot more than he should have. Even when he tried to ration himself (the rules: only check once a day, no repeat viewing allowed, no stalking any linked profiles) he found that promise impossible to keep.

Zach was the kind of guy who had bros in different area codes. Alotof bros in a lot of different area codes. This summer he’d already gone home to Vancouver and then to Miami and Tulum, bouncing around each city with separate groups of friends. Nate found himself stalking their profiles too. Sometimes he’d catch a glimpse of Zach in one of their videos, lurking in the background or front and center, and his attention would focus on that tiny sliver, the beacon that drew him.

Zach, drunk and cheerful, smiling that fucking smile that lit up his whole face. Zach in the background of a video in a nightclub, dancing extremely badly, completely unembarrassed. Zach trash talking one of the bros, imitating him with a painful accuracy. Zach doing body shots and having body shots done off of him on a private Instagram profile linked in one of the earlier stories that Nate had maybe requested to follow earlier that day. Zach with his arms thrown over the shoulders of two of his friends, the three of them beaming like they’d never had so much fun in their lives.

That was the one he kept coming back to, studying the faces of the other hockey players who had claimed parts of Zach’s life that he couldn’t access. They were probably perfectly nice dudes. Prominently featured was Jamie Ayer who, along with Matthew Safaryan, the Royal’s captain, was one of the few guys from Montreal who had stood by Zach after the trade. Nate knew how hard the situation had been for Zach andshouldhave been grateful to Jammer for making it easier.

But he found himself frowning anyway.

At Jammer’s easy smile and thick torso and bare abs and Zach’s face, which was doing the twinkling thing it did that made Nate want to smile back no matter what kind of mood he was in. It was a weird feeling, twisting his stomach, looking at it. Those guys barely even saw Zach during the year, didn’t know him the way Nate did. They probably thought partyingwasall there was to him.

They didn’t know the guy who came to practice earlier than almost anyone on the team, who was always last on the ice after a game even when he had to play mind games with opponents. They didn’t know the guy who came to dinner at his friends’ parents’ houses dressed up and made even Nate’s taciturn father soften reflexively under the force of his megawatt grin.

This was supposed to be Nate’s week to disconnect his brain, to be alone to recharge.

But here he was, alone and recharging, and all he could think was that he was really fucking lonely.

When he’d been with Rachel, even she avoided him when he got like this. He was so carefully in control of himself the rest of the year that the dark mood after the inevitable season’s loss scared her, and when Rachel had been scared, she’d expressed it with annoyance. Even after she’d left, he hadn’t wantedanyonethere.

And now, after the worst loss he could ever remember, all he could think about was Zach.

And the worst thing about it was Nate knew what was going on.

---