Page 70 of Goaltender Interference

“Well. You’re not retiring yet, Cap. We need you out there on the ice.”

Matt rubbed the back of his neck, looking again at the white stretch of ice, the blur of red and blue and white in the stands, the glare of the lights. He dreamed that image, sometimes, he’d seen it so many times. “Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t.”

But he couldn’t afford to be melancholy: it was time for the game.

Even this early in the season, Aiden was still punched in the face repeatedly by reminders that neither of them was getting younger. Every time Matt came home from a game, favoring his left leg, Aiden worried about it. Every time Matt mentioned, offhandedly, that he’d had an injection either during or before a game, Aidenworriedabout it. Every time Matt brushed off his concern, Aiden was only determined to figure out exactly what the hell was going on with him.

He remembered that Matt, like Aiden himself had during his playing years, tended to downplay his own discomfort. The knee was part of another series of injuries Aiden had missed over the decade of their separation. First a sprained MCL, then a tear, then a surgical repair. And then Matt pushing himself to get back on the ice a little too fast.

Aiden and his own shitty right knee could relate.

One night, Matt came home and winced when he sat down on the bed, not quite ready to fall asleep, body still amped up from the game.

“Are you okay?” Aiden asked, more because he wanted to know what Matt would say than because he didn’t already know the answer.

“It’s not great today.” Matt grimaced. “The game and then the weather...”

“You’re old enough that you have a bad-weather knee?”

“Always going to be younger than you, though,” Matt said, and winced again when he pushed the heel of his hand against the knee.

Aiden frowned and slid out of bed, walked around to settle on the floor between Matt’s legs. “Can I try something? This helps sometimes, when my knee’s bad.”

“What, a blowjob?” Matt asked, dryly. “I knew you were flexible, but...”

“Oh, you’ve got jokes tonight, eh?” Aiden’s fingers were on Matt’s knee, rubbing gently across it. “It’s just a massage the trainers showed me. For scars and shit. And ligaments. Can I try?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Matt said, finally. He let Aiden rearrange his leg for better access, clenched his teeth a little as Aiden started, but slowly, steadily relaxed under his hands.

Aiden didn’t work around the knee for too long—the trainers had said five minutes at most—but he moved his hands to press against Matt’s thighs instead, his calves. When he started, he could feel how tense Matt was, how knotted up every single muscle happened to be. His skin was hot and tight. By the time Aiden finished Matt had sunk into the pillows, liquid under his hands.

Matt’s eyes were closed, and when Aiden paused, for a minute, he mumbled, “Jesus, that’s good.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean—it’s different than at the rink because it’s...it’s you.”

“Did you tell them it’s still bothering you this much, Matty?”

“No, I don’t want it to be a thing, because of next season, my contract...”

Aiden looked down at him in the bed, his solid body, usually so strong and full of tension, completely relaxed. Aiden rested his head on Matt’s thigh and rubbed his cheek against it. “I could do this for you more often. If you want.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d... I’d like that.

“But you should—we should—sleep.”

“Get up here, then.”

And he did, and as he drifted off to sleep bracketed by Matt’s body, he did not think about next season.

It was a Saturday night at l’Arène, and the Royal had dropped a trap game against Utah. It had been the kind of game where nothing had seemed to go right: not Matt’s passes, not his judgment, not anyone else’s shots. Even Jack, with his normally lethal wrister and deceptive release, had been firing muffins into the Utah goalie’s chest pads. The kind of game where Coach Roy came into the locker room immediately during the intermission rather than waiting.

Matt took the lashing stoically, the way he always did, but no matter how they tried to rally in the third, it was just too late. Afterward he rounded up Crane and Koskinen and Cormier, gave them a little chat about every team having a few bad games in the season. How you had to leave them behind and move on to the next one. They would have to internalize the lesson, particularly because theywereplaying the next night, a back-to-back before they had a break and then a travel day. In the major league, you couldn’t afford to let a previous night’s failures follow you to the next game. He thought about one of the sentences fromMeditationsand shared that with them, too: that time’s a river, glimpsed once and already carried past us, but he wasn’t sure if they really appreciated it for what it was.

---