Page 15 of Delay of Game

He was going to be normal about this because he had to be normal about this. He had promised Zach, and he always kept his promises.

He didn’t have a choice.

By the time training camp rolled around and the rest of the boys had come back from their vacations and offseason homes and training facilities, Zach wasreadyfor it.

He’d been thinking about the shit that had driven him out of Tulum for the last couple of weeks and he hadn’t come any closer to the answers. He needed to get Nate a Cup, but he didn’t even know where to start. He’d written and crumpled up so many stupid lists in the privacy of his own home, where Nate couldn’t see, and he wasn’t any closer to the answers.

The team was mostly the same this season, with a few subtractions and graduations. They’d lost Parsons in free agency, and no one had really been too sad to see him go—for some reason, Detroit had signed him for a 4x4 AAV. And, like, good luck with that. If you needed a guy to cross-check someone into your own goalie, Parsons was your guy.

But the core of the roster had remained the same. The coaching staff was the same. Sakari Mäkelä, their goalie, was all healed up from the injury that had kept him out of most of their last round of the playoffs. Beatrice Morin, the first woman drafted into the league and their star forward, was back. Mike Sato, coming off of a ridiculous career year and an entirely changed play style, was back, and even weirder, he was happy andsmilingand laughing, joking around with Bee as they shoved each other around the ice.

It felt like they were so close.

It had felt like that last year too. But for whatever reason, they just couldn’t get over the hump.

Well, the one good thing was that the Hornets probably wouldn’t make it to the finals again. Not after that last, long offseason and all the injuries they were probably still rehabbing.

Zach felt better while the team was actually doing the drills. Coach had them working on some of the same basics that the rookies had been doing, with a particular focus on the small game situations. His body felt good; he was always inshapeand conditioned, but it was satisfying to, like, have it recognized.

When he was moving, he didn’t have to think about Nate. When he was moving, he didn’t have to think about waking up with Nate hard against him, the promise of everything he couldn’t have just barely within reach. He knew it hadn’tmeantanything. He knew it was probably just morning wood, like anyone else might have gotten. It was just inconvenient timing that Zach had happened to be sleeping there as close as he had been. But it had felt... Zach wanted to shiver, thinking about the way he could have shifted backward against Nate. Just an inch, just a shimmy. Nate’s cock would’ve fit right up against the crease of his ass. It would have been so easy.

He knew what Nate had been doing in the bathroom after that.

He could have—

“Thinking, Zachary?” Netty asked him.

He had to get it together. He couldn’t be thinking about this shit during camp. He had to concentrate. Whatever had happened at Nate’s house, it wasn’t like it was anything that would happen again.

Even if Netty probably would’ve been the one guy on the team who would’ve understood the kind of distraction you couldn’t control, because he had cheerfully slept his way through half of Philadelphia. Netty was one of Zach’s good friends on the team: they’d spent a lot of time together during Zach’s first season, throwing parties and go-karting in Allentown. That didn’t mean Zach could tell him any of what was bothering himreally.

“What are we missing, Netty?”

“Missing? Don’t follow,” he said, scratching behind his ear.

“Theplayoffs, theCup—”

“Well.” Netty shrugged. “Probably would’ve helped if Mäkelä hadn’t gotten injured last year. You know?”

“You’reright, but...” Zach said, a little put out. “Even if Socks wasn’t up to taking over the crease, there should’ve been enough offense to put us over the edge. And I just couldn’tscorein those last few games. What do you think—”

For a man who had described himself as pathological fun-haver, Netty looked surprisingly serious when he turned his dark eyes on Zach. “Too early to worry about this, I think,” he said, and shrugged again. “We see how the season goes. We know what to expect in playoffs. Mäkelä has to stay healthy, but the rest? Granny said two things.”

“Uh...what did she say?”

Netty laughed again. “It’s just a saying, a proverb. You know, means like, no one can know for certain.”

“That’s the problem, though. Ineedto know. I need to—”

“Zachary.Youneed to chill. Come out and party with me again some time, we loosen you right up.”

Zach thought about it. He had to watch his shit during the season. There was a time he hadn’t cared about any of that. A time when he’d spent a good portion of the nights after games completely wasted. A time when doing lines in the bar bathroom afterward was just a way to keep the party going. A time when even if he woke up hungover in the morning, he rolled onto the ice like nothing was wrong. Hadn’t realized at all that it wasn’t normal to feel stretched thin and floppy like melting cheese. The worst part about that time was that he hadn’t even realized how bad it had been getting until he got the rude awakening of the trade.

Netty knew what he was about—once Zach had been traded to Philly, he couldn’t fuck around like that any longer—and he respected Zach’s boundaries, even though they’d still partied a bit that first year. It wasn’t like Zach wassober—he still went out with the boys as a team—but. There was a reason they didn’t spend quite as much time together these days. He’d tried dipping his toe into that pond that first season, and afterward, looking at himself in the mirror, he hadn’t liked what he’d seen. It just reminded him of the end in Montreal. The more responsibility that had been placed on Zach’s shoulders, the more conscious he’d become of what that entailed. Zach wore the A and had his goals, and Netty still seemed inhuman and impervious, no matter what he put into his body or who he took home.

It had just occurred to Zach, one day, that he couldn’t be that guy, even if Netty could.

“Not this close to the start of the season,” he said, a little regretfully.

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