Page 20 of Gravity
My focus is gone. My mind is in shambles. I am a mess off the ice, and—worse—on. My speed has disappeared. I’m always two strides behind the play, too slow to react. I’m chasing, grasping, desperate. I’m nowhere near where I need to be.
Tabernak, Coach Richelieu is going to have an aneurysm. He nearly threw the player’s bench onto the ice tonight after my fifth missed pass. He took me out of the game in the second period. The only question I had was why he waited so long.
I am poison. To myself, to this team, to everything I touch.
My failures have knocked my teammates flat on their backs. We are supposed to be an intricately balanced wheel, but I have demolished the center and now we are in tatters. I am no longer setting up cross-ice passes to Slava or MacKenzie. Etienne is no longer charging up the wing, ready to dance the puck off my blade and then into the net on a rebound shot. We are scattered. Shattered. The puck bounces harmlessly between us, and we are behind the play, watching it all.
The teams we play smell our blood in the water. They score goals that would never have happened two weeks ago. Before the All-Star Weekend.
Before I kissed Hunter.
I close my eyes and drop my head between my shoulders. It is dead silent in our dressing room, save for the rustle of sweaters and the dullthudof skates hitting the floor. No one talks. No one jokes. No one throws tape or teases.
C'est pourquoi tu ne rêves pas.
Tiny novas of indigo iridescence expand behind my eyelids, and I let my mind fall forward into the darkness. It would be better if I disappeared. If I vanished. The team could begin to rebuild and repair what I have broken.
But I am still here, like a coward, and I keep dragging them down.
Mon Dieu,Hunter's face right after I kissed him, and after he pushed me away. Confusion. Shock. Retreat. He didn’t at all feel what I'd convinced myself he must have been feeling. The lies I told myself while we were together… I thought, since we were inextricable on the ice, it meant thatoffthe ice, he, too, was thinking I was the missing piece of his life,non?
Non.Calisse, non. I was so wrong. So incredibly wrong. I misread everything. I projected my dreams onto the curve of his smile and the warmth of his shoulder when he leaned against me and laughed.
If I read him so completely wrong, what else do I read wrong? What if the plays I think I dissect are nothing but chance, my skates maybe a moment quicker than the others, perhaps my passes straighter, but nothing more? What ifeverythingI thought about myself is a lie?
Sûrement, of course I'm living a lie.
For a year, I have wrestled with these thoughts, wondering if my confusing yearning to have a man’s arms around me was more than a misfiring spark. When I imagined my future with a woman, that future seemed pale and lifeless. But when those imaginings became about aman, and I started dreaming of a man’s body beside mine, and then a man's lips on my own…
Itriedto push this away, and Itriedto not want, and Itriedto be different.
But these questions and these thoughts keep coming back.
Before, the man in my dreams was indistinct. He was warm and solid, and he held me close and blocked out the world, but he never had a face. He was an idea, a formless want. My imagination at midnight.
He has a face now.
Hunter's memory is a shadow inside me. He follows me. He is on ESPN and Sportsnet and on the NHL app on my phone. Headlines speculate about my sudden spiral and the crash of the Étoiles. Questions abound:what happenedtoBryce Michel?
Not a soul has come close to the truth, but is that only a matter of time? Am I a half-second away from my world being ripped away? One headline, one tweet, one mention:Bryce Michel is gay.
Does it matter if I lose everything when I am already shredding my world so perfectly? And not just my own world, or my own future. This team relies on me. This city put its faith in me. But I am failing, and falling, and—
And all I can think about is that kiss.
Hunter.
I see him out of the corner of my eye, as if he’s with me on the ice and we’re back under the lights in Vegas. I look up, and I think I see him by the goal, or coming over the boards, or smiling at me from the bench. Butj'ai tort. He’s nowhere near, and he won’t ever be again.
Mon Dieu, I cherished him, and I cherished those minutes and hours we spun into a world of our own, a reality where we dazzled one another and became each other’s heroes. I wanted to stretch that weekend into a year and spend countless sunrises and sunsets exploring the potential between us.Calisse, I fell in love with my hope, and I hoped for him.
Heat runs in straight lines down my cheeks. I try to force the tears away, slam the heel of my skate against the floor, but it's no use. My throat squeezes, and I grip my hair in my hands as I curl forward. My team has gone, and I am alone, and my world is collapsing.
I miss him so much.
ChapterNine
Hunter
