Page 16 of Gravity
“But… is that enough? There will be years ahead of me after hockey,si Dieu le veut. And in the future…”
These are the fears that have kept me awake at night, that slide through my veins and turn my thoughts to shadows. My consciousness bruises me through the darkness until I drag myself back into the light. Back to the arena, back to the spotlights, back to the blinding overheads.
Hockey has been everything in my life… but now I am thinking ofmore.
Of after the games. After the applause. I'm imagining hours with someone by my side, watching the stars and talking until we’re almost falling asleep on each other. Or of spending a day on the river.Or of holding someone’s hand.
Holdinghishand.
Daring myself to lean in for a kiss.
“What do you want?” Hunter asks.
A chance. An opportunity to see if you and me can be more than two men sitting beside a river. A kiss, a first kiss, one I’m only just realizing I want more than I wanted to hear my name called out during the draft—
The sun’s heat burns down on us, but it is nothing compared to the terror scorching through me. It separates my thoughts like I’m being ripped apart. I look away and fling my rock into the gently moving water. It breaks the surface and sinks—and so does my optimism.
“I have never been able to want,” I finally say. My hands, now empty, search for something and twist together. My fingers dig into my knuckles until they turn pink and white. “You don’t grow up dreaming when you’re a poor boy from a mining town, and especially when you have five brothers. You think one day at a time. One meal at a time.Tabernak, I was just happy when I had skates and could find old hockey sticks to tape together. Everything beyond that was…” I exhale, hard.
Je suis né pour le petite pain—I was born for the bun. For a small life, a simple life. I am supposed to be working in the mines like my father and brothers. Now I'm a millionaire hockey player, with giant paychecks and fancy hotel rooms and first class flights. Money is no longer a problem, except that of course it is. Playing hockey is a finite career. I will not live this life forever, and this income will not last. Maybe more than my fellow teammates, I think about what comes next.
Tabernak, if my thoughts were only about finances…
What accident of genetics made me the best hockey player of my family? We all grew up on the river.Was it genetics, or was it my single-mindedness? My brothers spent their boyhoods slinging pucks and tennis balls, but when they crossed that threshold from boy to teen, they were pulled in a dozen new directions. Girls, cars, hunting. My brothers passed around the same five posters fromSports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition like a prized rite of passage, but I was the one who spurned the sultry stares and bikini-clad bodies for posters of hockey legends. The Canadian Greats, legends from the Étoiles.
I was a boy who held his breath, who dared to believe I could draw myself into those posters, and who imagined one day being,peut être,good enough to skate at the Junior Regional Championship.
My life has been a continuum, one long stretch of hockey sticks and frozen rivers and coaches telling me to reach for the next level. Now I am here, and there is nothing left to reach for. There are records, and there is the Stanley Cup, and then there are—
Black holes. Emptiness. Loneliness.
My name etched into eternity is a cold comfort. I cannot sleep beside the Cup. I cannot wrap my arms around it and feel its heartbeat, or feel its breath move through my hair. I may love this sport, and love the chase of this championship, but it will not love me back.
“You can dream now.” Hunter is trying to be helpful. He’s trying to cheer me up. Again, he leans into my shoulder and stays. He’s sun-warm, and I feel his heat sinking into me in a way that makes my nerve endings shiver. I can smell him, his hair and his sweat andhim. “You can have anything.”
Anything? Can I have your kiss?
I say nothing, just turn and smile back, though it feels forced, wan and very French-Canadian. “I just want to know what it all means.”
* * *
Hunter fallsasleep on the drive back to the city. He slumps against the passenger window, his damp hair curling against his temple, his mouth open as he breathes softly. The air-conditioning is cold, set to turn the truck into a Quebec afternoon, and I see goosebumps rise on his forearms. I flick my dry towel over him, covering him like I could tuck him into a blanket, and spend the rest of the drive stealing glances at his eyelashes fluttering across his cheek as he dreams.
He wakes when I pull up to his hotel’s entrance. “Oh man, I’m sorry.” He’s embarrassed, a faint flushing darkening the arches of his cheekbones. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you.”
“C’est tiguidou. No problem.”
He doesn’t get out of the truck right away. He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, and the moment is lengthening. I exhale and don’t breathe in. He inhales like he’s taking in my oxygen. Neither of us blink.
“Come to my hotel?” The words tumble out. “Peut être? If you are not tired? But if you need to sleep or need to pack…” I trail off. He has a hundred things he can do other than spend any more time with me. I have monopolized his weekend. “It is our last night here.” Which is why he should do anything else. “You are welcome to come.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, my face blank, wondering if my desperation is as obvious to Hunter as it feels to me.
“Lemme shower and change, and I’ll be over in about an hour?”
“Fantastique.”
ChapterSeven
