Page 20 of Punchline
“More like the way it should be. I’m not fragile,” Carson insisted. “Just because I’m not a pro anymore doesn’t mean you have to treat me like I’m made of glass.”
“I don’t!”
Carson gave me a look, and… fine, I deserved that. “I’m trying to get better,” I said.
“I know, and you are, but this is the first time since you came here that you’ve really gone for the soft spots.” He clapped me on the arm. “You needed that break, huh?”
“I did.” I’d ended up taking a full four days off from the gym, and that coupled with two more sessions with my therapist and a lot of sleep had been good for me. “I feel bad about canceling on Ethan, though.” Apart from his reply to my last text, he hadn’t been in touch all week. Before this, we’d gotten into the habit of daily texts—not many, mostly memes or clips from fights, hockey and otherwise, but it had been nice.
And then I’d gone and thrown a wrench in the works, and I hadn’t fixed it yet. I’d try today, though. Ethanwould be here for his lesson in ten minutes or so. “Help me clean the mat.”
“It’s your turn.”
“It’s your gross bodily secretions messing it up, you didn’t even make me break a sweat.”
“I hate you.”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, I know. Now grab the spray bottle.”
By the time Ethan walked in through the door, the mats were almost dry and Carson was back in his day clothes. “Hey, man.” He met Ethan at the door on his way out and they did the manly “pat-slap” hug that I was a little too tall to easily pull off with another person. “This guy is being an asshole today, so go hard on him, okay?”
“Vile calumny,” I said. “Utter mendacity. Cruel?—”
“Put your ten cent words away, nobody cares that you read dictionaries for fun.” Carson waved and walked out, and then…
Then Ethan and I were alone, and for some reason the awkwardness factor seemed to jump up a hundred percent. He wouldn’t quite meet my eyes and shuffled his feet on the carpet, like he wasn’t sure whether he should stay or go.
Weird. And a little hurtful. I didn’t realize how much I valued the easy friendship I’d thought I had with Ethan before it became—well, this.
“I’m sorry again for canceling last time,” I said, feeling out the strangeness between us. “It had nothing to do with you—I was just having a bad couple of days.”
“That’s—you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Ethan said. More like mumbled; I could barely hear him.
I frowned. “I think I do. It’s clear it’s bugging you, but I swear I wasn’t blowing you off. I have… ” Did I want to tell him this? I think I did. “I have some mental health challenges that rear up every now and then, and that was one of those times.”
“Oh, shit.”Nowhe met my eyes, all his hesitation replaced with concern. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I am,” I assured him. “It’s something I’ve got strategies in place to help me with. I’ve actually been a lot better since I moved here; this was the first time I really struggled, and it used to happen almost weekly. So… ” I gave myself a thumbs up. “Yay for me.”
“Seriously, yay for you, Jake.”
The earnest way he said it was almost enough to make me blush. There was something about Ethan, something disarming about the way hecommittedto what he was feeling. He wasn’t a good liar; I’d been around him enough by now to know that. When he thought something, when he felt it, he felt it all the way through, honestly.
Which was how I knew he was still holding something back from me right now. At least we’d cracked through the awkwardness, though. Maybe I’d find out more later. “Get your shoes off, we’re going to try some hockey-style defense today.”
He brightened up as he slipped his shoes and socks off. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of,” I amended. “Obviously we’re not on skates, but I want to talk about slipping today. Foot bath,” I added, and he backtracked and stepped in the bucket of soapy Dawn water and dried his feet on the towel next to it before stepping on the math. “No ringworm for us. Okay, so… ”
Hockey fights were almost always pure aggression, from what I’d seen so far. They were two-man (or sometimes more) brawls, and the bigger the punch, the better. That said, the brawlers—or enforcers, I guess, in hockey terms—who did the best also managed the environment the best. They were the ones who found a spot to latch onto on their opponent and didn’t let go, the ones who managed to back them into the wall to keep them from slipping away while they wailed on them. If you could move your feet or slip your head, you were harder to hit.
Ethan wasn’t built to brawl with the best of them, but he could definitely make himself hard to hit. We’d already talked about framing, but I wanted to revisit it with footwork and more active defense today.
“First things first.” I reached out and wound my hand into the collar of his T-shirt. “I hope you don’t care that this is going to get stretched all to hell.”
“Um. No.” Ethan was steadily getting redder, though. Eh, he would tell me when he told me.
“Good.” I dropped the fabric. “Grab me like that.”
