Page 11 of Goaltender Interference

“Gabe,please. You need to back off.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Okay,” he said, finally, very hurt and extremely young, and Aiden felt like the biggest asshole in the world.

“I just have to figure some things out. Then we’ll talk, okay?”

“Okay.”

Aiden went upstairs and took a long, cold, shower.

He was going to get his life together, and he was going to make better choices about it.

He was going to be better.

There was just a single problem.

Matt hadn’t been sure what to expect when he came to New York with his family. He was familiar with the city; there were obvious reasons he’d visited the most of anyone in his family. He had figured it would be a long, boring trip.

It was just...he loved Miles and Jess. He loved being an uncle to their two small children, Ellie and Theo. He loved his parents. What he didn’t love was the way everyone treated him with kid gloves, the way they danced around the fact that he was thirty-five and divorced and alone. That was the thing about families, especially happy families: they felt that if you didn’t have that too, you were somehow less than, and they were determined to fix it.

Or in Matt’s case, fixhim.

It was tough in close quarters like this, when he couldn’t evade the questions about whether he was seeing anyone, ifhe’d talked to Emily recently, if he wanted the phone number of one of Miles’ teammates’ sisters. Always a woman, like they didn’t know he was interested in men, too. He had never lied to his parents, but they had never been exactlycomfortablewith it, even if they’d accepted Aiden up until the disastrous end of things. And after that, it had been like they’d hoped he’d come to his senses and settle down, provide the horde of grandchildren they’d always dreamed of. They’d been overjoyed when he had met Emily. It had been tough over the years, even the years that he hadn’t really thought about Aiden very often.

But now it was impossible to think of anything else.

He hadn’t intended to go back to Aiden again. He told himself that he absolutely couldn’t go back to Aiden again. But it was like his whole body oriented itself magnetically toward that house, knowing that Aiden was there, knowing that Matt would be able to touch him again.

Matt had been sober—actually sober—for a few years after their first breakup, and he’d briefly attended meetings. He wasn’t sober anymore, once he’d gotten his shit together, but the first place his brain went was: this felt exactly like a relapse. It wasn’t alcohol, or Xanax, but... He was going off the rails, and it didn’t even matter when he had Aiden again, panting underneath him, wrists tense under Matt’s hands, eyes watering when he tried to choke Matt down.

It was ironic, that he’d spent time in player assistance after Aiden had dumped him and after he’d made the disastrous decision to propose to a girl he’d known for all of three months. Outpatient rehab and intensive therapy. The guilt and shame of knowing how badly he’d spiraled after all of it. How hard he’d worked to pull himself out of it. It had taken years of work, and he wasbetter now. He drank moderately when he was out with the boys. He didn’t use any other substances. He had his shit together. And yet.

He had been sober from this stupid, destructive relationship for over a decade, watching Aiden from afar, and now... He knew better, he absolutely fucking knew better, and he was still making these stupid fucking decisions. It didn’t feel like making a decision so much as falling off of a cliff, the inevitability of going back there knowing that Aiden would open the door for him again.

It was easier when they were out and about doing the touristy things, but even that reminded him of Aiden now, of the summers they’d tried to sneak around under the radar in New York and Montreal and trips outside of the continent. He had a hard time getting through the MoMA because in every gallery they went to he had the most vivid fucking memories. The first summer he’d visited Aiden in New York and the two of them had gone through the whole museum, making out in the elevators after the doors closed and springing apart again when they’d opened, mocking the art they’d been too immature to actually understand.

That was the shit that really got him. Because even though he had Aiden for the week, physically at least, that wasn’t what he actually missed the most, what had screwed him the fuck up when Aiden had ended things.

He was the captain of the Montreal Royal. Hockey was a religion in Montreal the way it wasn’t anywhere else. He could hook up with almost anyone he wanted, if he’d been so inclined. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that even though sex with Aiden felt like setting himself on fire, what Matt had really missed were the phone conversations on the road, the stupid inside jokes they’d built up over the years, the way he could make such a serious, tightly wound goalie smile and laugh in a way no one else could, the way Aiden had taken such good care of Matt when he got mono one offseason or was recovering from a concussion. He’dmissed Aiden’s stupid dorky smile and the almost comically bad sock tans he got in the summer. He’d missed Aiden’s single-minded obsessions with hockey, but also with comic books and music. He’d missed how fuckingweirdAiden could be, sometimes, the way he never reacted the way Matt thought he would, no matter how many years he’d spent trying to crack the code.

He’d just missedAiden, the whole complicated package of him.

“Uncle Matt?” Ellie asked as they passed through the room withLeda and the Swan.

“Yeah, Ellie?”

“Are you okay? You look like you’re gonna be sick.”

Matt hesitated. He was a little hungover, but that wasn’t the problem and that wasn’t what he’d wanted to explain to his five-year-old niece, anyway. “I haven’t been feeling so great this week,” he admitted.

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes were very wide. “Do you wanna sit down?”

“Sure.”

The two of them sat on one of the gallery benches and stared at the wall in silence. At the far end of the gallery, next to their parents, Miles carried Theo on his shoulders as they looked at one of the larger pieces near the door.

Matt sat in silence with Ellie and absentmindedly rubbed his neck. It was still a little sore; Aiden had left a dark, mouth-shaped hickey there last night. It was fucking stupid to have let him but like the rest of this insane, fever dream of a week, Matt had done all of the stupid things against his better judgment.

---