Page 88 of Goaltender Interference

Matt was home for a few days and tomorrow was a day off. Normally Aiden would look forward to this: it was easier to ignore the shit swirling around in his head with a distraction, and Matt was as good a distraction as he could ever hope to have.

Aiden watched Matt washing the dishes. Matt kept looking back at him, a frown tilting the corner of his mouth, like he wanted to say something, but he was holding himself back.

Aiden did it for him. “What?”

“What?”

“You want to say something. You should just tell me what you want to say.”

Matt set the pot down in the sink and turned around. “Aiden, I don’t know what’s going on in your head, but this isn’t—this isn’t working.”

Aiden’s brain, constantly screaming, quieted completely. This was what he had been waiting for, and now that it was actually happening, he felt almost serene. “Okay.”

“What will it take for you to be satisfied? I’m doing my best, but like—I can’tfixyou. You can’t rely on me for that, and you’re still—”

“I know you can’t,” Aiden said, short and clipped. “I know that really well. I never expected you to.”

“It’s just... Iwantto help. And I don’t know how to help. Everything I try doesn’t seem to be... And it feels like you’re not even trying, sometimes.”

“I am—I am—it’s justdifficult. There’s too many things that feelwrong. I’ve been seeing someone about it, you know?”

“Well, do you think it’s helping?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. Things were easier when you were, before the season started, but now I’m just constantly thinking about it. I feel like until I can figure out some kind ofpurposeit’s just going to keep going like this. I don’t think I’m the kind of person who can just do nothing all day. It just feels like, like running out of time.”

Matt’s hand, still wet from the dishes, at the small of Aiden’s back. His handprint soaked through Aiden’s shirt. “What do you mean, running out of time? You’ve got all the time in the fucking world.”

“It doesn’t feel that way. Most of the time. It’s like I knew who I was all of these years because I had hockey, because that’s what Idid, and now I don’t doanything, and I just feel—I don’t know. Lost.”

“You’re not,” Matt said, insistently, “you’re right here, with me,” and Aiden didn’t know how to tell him that as much as he wanted it to be true, it wasn’t.

Later on, that night, Aiden murmured in Matt’s ear, “Come on, touch me, please,” because it was always easier in bed.

Maybe Aiden couldn’t figure out what the hell to say to make things better, couldn’t say half of the things he wanted or needed to say. But in bed, naked in the dark, it was easy to showMatt how much he loved him, with his mouth or with his hands, with all of the ways he could offer himself, without ever having to say one single word.

He wondered if Matt understood.

Matt sometimes felt like his life was split into two: the time he spent on the ice, with the team, and the time he spent with Aiden, at home. When he got to l’Arène or the practice facility at Brossard, he could put his worries about Aiden out of his mind, at least temporarily. Focus instead on the game, on pushing himself through the pain in his legs, on the things heneededto be focused on.

They were finishing up a relatively long home stand before they would head out to the West Coast for the longest road trip of the year, and as Matt pulled on his gear in the locker room and looked up at the faces of all of the captains who had served before him, the players whose numbers were retired, he had the strange jolt of a reminder that maybe next year he wouldn’t be doing this.

He watched Crane and Cormier, heads together in their side-by-side stalls; he watched Jammer, bobbing his head along with the music in his AirPods; he watched Fournier, silent and meditative in his own stall, a posture that reminded Matt of nothing so much as Aiden before a game, years and years ago.

He looked down at his knee, the scar tissue cutting through the hair of his leg, a thick pink line that hadn’t really faded.

He took a deep breath and prepared to go out on the ice.

Today they were hosting the Boston Beacons, the Royal’s perennial rival, though it wasn’t much of a rivalry these days. The Beacons were in the beginning of a rebuild, even as the Royal were heading toward one themselves. It helped thattheir coach was Ryan Sullivan, a Hall of Famer who had some decidedly modern ideas about coaching, but even he could only do so much with a roster that was half veterans on expiring contracts and half young players who were still learning the ropes. The one thing that Matt could say about the Beacons was that they were never out of a game, no matter how badly they played. It wouldn’t be an easy win, even if the team wasn’t necessarilygood.

At the very least, he wouldn’t have to deal with any additional bullshit. It wasn’t every game, but every few there was a player who thought about trying it, seeing whether they could antagonize Matt into doing something stupid by calling him slurs or chirping him about Aiden. Aiden, who came to home games more frequently than he didn’t now, and was photographed occasionally by nosy fans, sitting with the rest of the Royal WAGs.

Matt responded the same way he always did: waiting to pick his spots, rarely taking a penalty unless he needed to. The Beacons weren’t like that, though. You could see the work that Sullivan had done instituting aculture. The kids still took stupid penalties sometimes, but you never heard the players saying the kinds of things that had been common on the ice when Matt had started playing. The kinds of things that weren’t even uncommonnow. It was a nice reminder that, even if there was still a culture problem, the league was slowly starting to change.

Matt met Kai Williams, their best forward, a kid who was already carrying the entire team on his back, at center ice for the opening face-off. He was probably going to be their captain next year, and Matt made a mental note to reach out to offer him advice. It wasn’t easy captaining an Original Six franchise, especially through a rebuild.

“Hey, kid,” Matt said, as they lined up.

“Hey,” Williams said, and smiled. It was weird, knowing that there were guys who were playing now who gave interviews about how they’d grown up watching and admiring and modeling their games afterhim. Williams was one of them, and he was in his second season now, confident and sure. They both wore number four, and the face-offs had a weird kind of symmetry that way, a guy at the end of his career and a guy just beginning it. “How’s it going, Safaryan?”

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