Page 99 of Goaltender Interference

“I’m not scared!”

“Yeah, you are. If you stayed, and you actually fucking tried to change how you felt about things, if you actuallytriedto talk to Safaryan, and it didn’t work? Holy shit, that would suck, right? So you just fucking run away from it because that way you fucking control how miserable you are.” Gabe wasn’t yelling at him, exactly, but his voice was just as high and agitated as Aiden’s, his hands cut through the air decisively. Gabe had always been a hand talker, and now it seemed as though he was two steps away from trying to fight Aiden, right there in the living room. “Jesus Christ, Soupy, you are fucking choosing to be this miserable right now, do you know that? Youchosethis! You did this toyourself.”

Aiden wondered whether he had slipped into some kind of alternate universe, whether any moment he was going to blink, and wake up, and find that he was twenty-six again and backbetween the posts. “I’m not choosing anything. I didn’tchoose anything.”

“Okay, fine. If you won’t do it for you, can you at least fucking do it for me?”

“What?”

“I get that you don’t love me like that—and it’s fine, I’m over it—but can you at least fucking give things a chance with him? So I can see that it’s just possible. To play and retire and be in love with another man and have a life after hockey and shit. Can you fuckingtry to?”

“Gabe, I...”

Gabe put his hand square in the center of Aiden’s chest and shoved him down on the couch. He didn’t sit down himself, just kept pacing back and forth, arms hugged over his chest. “Soup, it’s just...you’ve been my role model for so long. I’ve modeled my game after you, I modeled my fuckingpersonal lifeafter you. You’ve got everything I thought I wanted. The Cups, the awards, the franchise career. But there’s always that question mark, right? Like what comes after. And it hurts me so fucking bad to look at you like this, and it scares me to think that this could be waiting forme, and I just want you to—I don’t know. Fucking give it a chance. So I can see you do it. So I can feel like I can do it. Forfuck’s sake.”

“Gabe—”

“Look, Soupy, don’t say anything else to me right now. Just think about it? I don’t know why you’re so fucking scared of maybe being happy, but please? Please. For me. Think about it.”

Aiden took a deep breath in. “Gabe, you’re the oldest twenty-two-year-old I’ve ever met, I think.”

“Yeah, well. I grew up fast. I had to. Soupy, Iloveyou. Please, like, fucking forgive yourself?” When Aiden stared at his hands and couldn’t answer, Gabe gave up, and sighed. “Okay. I said my part. Think about it.”

He let himself out.

Aiden did think about it.

He thought about it a lot, over the next week. He thought about what his mother had said and what Gabe had said. He thought about second chances and how he ruined his, and how he probably didn’t deserve a third. He thought about figuring out a way to translate his vague ideas about coaching into a reality, how much time that would actually take up if he let himself do it. He thought about the last thing Gabe had said to him. He thought about how anyone could know they were actually ready to start moving on.

He thought about Matt. He thought about how he’d hurt him, over and over, throughout the years. He thought about how his whole life had circled back around to Matt again, so many years later, a long and wobbly but ultimately inevitable orbit.

He thought about a lot of things.

The funny thing about it was that, even though Matt was holding it together pretty well, the rookies had noticed that something was wrong. He wasn’t sure whether they’d discussed it among themselves, whether they had a group chat specifically for shit like this, or whether Koskinen and Cormier had cornered Jack and forced him to do the hard work of approaching Matt about whatever it was they thought was going on.

“Cap,” Jack said, after morning skate. Matt was sitting on the bench by the boards, and Jack had skated up to speak to him.

They were playing Minnesota at home later that night, and it was a day where Matt had had to sit out of practice, because his knee was aching so bad. That didn’t mean he wasn’t present: they had video to go over with the coaches, stretching andother exercises to work on in the gym, a hundred other things he had to check in on and manage. Sometimes, he felt like he was another member of the coaching staff, with all of the suggestions he gave to his trio of rookies. There were worse things to be, he supposed.

“Yeah, Jack.”

“The three of us were talking, uh, and we’ve been keeping an eye on you over the last couple of weeks, and we noticed that, um, Campbell hasn’t been around anymore, and you’ve seemed pretty...pretty sad, so we just wanted to check in. You know.”

Matt closed his eyes and exhaled. “I’m fine. I’m touched by your concern. But really, you, ah...don’t need to worry about me.”

“No?” Jack said, skeptical.

“No.”

They stood in awkward silence for a few minutes. For as young and slight as Jack was, he had the steely expression that Matt had worked on adopting over the years down pat. “You know,” he said, after a long moment. “Just because you’re the captain and you’re responsible for looking out forusdoesn’t mean you need to...like...handle all of this stuff on your own. I was thinking about what you were telling me. About the captaincy and the burden. You know? It doesn’tneedto be like that.”

Matt ran a hand through his hair and smiled, a little wry. “Probably not. That’s how I’ve always been most comfortable doing it. I don’t know anything about your personal life, Jack, beyond what you’ve told me, but it’s something that for a long time I had to keep to myself. And then I just got used to that.”

“That’s really kind of sad, though.” Jack was still in his pads and jersey, sweat from the practice beaded on the visor of his fogged-up helmet. “Like, who can you even talk to about that shit?”

“That’s what a therapist is for,” Matt said dryly. “Rookies aren’t therapists.”

Jack rolled his eyes. He was a handsome kid, from a small town in BC called Anahim Lake, but he had adjusted very quickly to the pace and pressure of Montreal. Some people were meant to play here, Matt had always believed: he’d been one of them, and he felt Jack was another.

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