Page 30 of The Long Game

“Jack, we’ve got this. Go take care of whatever you need to do.”

Jack thanked Travis, then hung up and knocked on the locker room door twice before entering. Seeing Colton again was a shock, even after only a couple of minutes. He looked like a shorter, younger, angrier Grady.

Jack wanted to ask how he could help, but Colton didn’t look open to talking, so while he changed back into his street clothes, Jack focused on texting Garrick and the others, asking them to finish up the clinic in his absence and promising he’d be back to clean up.

Jack noted the frayed cuffs on Colton’s jeans and the holes in his sneakers. They might have been fashion choices, but Jack suspected it was more about alackof choice. His instinct was to fix it, todo something, but he was at a loss. He didn’t think Colton would want his charity, even if Jack had new clothes or shoes or anything else to offer him.

Together they packed up Colt’s hockey gear in a bag, labeled it, and tucked it into the storage area Jack had set aside for this purpose.

Colton was halfway to the exit before Jack was done locking up.

The ride was silent, with Colton staring out the window and Jack wishing he had some idea of what to say. As soon as he pulled up in front of the shelter, Colton was out of the truck and gone.

Grady saton Barnaby and Travis’s couch and stared at the television. The game was on, but Grady had no idea who was playing. He felt adrift, his brain going a thousand miles an hour in no useful direction while his body felt heavy with fatigue.

He’d had no intention of going out tonight, but Jack had shown up and dragged him upstairs to the third floor, whereBarnaby and Travis lived in the apartment above his own. He wouldn’t have been willing to go any farther.

Jack stood in the kitchen, not twenty feet away on the other side of a butcher block-topped island, speaking quietly to Travis and Barnaby. Grady had given him permission to tell their friends what had happened, but he didn’t listen to anything beyond Jack’s initial assurance that everyone was okay.

Grady didn’t have Jack’s confidence.

He startled when Jack dropped onto the couch beside him, their elbows bumping and knees knocking. Not for the first time, Grady remembered waking up with Jack in his arms and wondered how that could have been just that morning.

What would Jack do if Grady asked to sleep with him again tonight? Only maybe this time Jack could hold Grady, and Grady could cling to Jack until he stopped picturing Colton’s shocked face over and over.

They said Grady Samuel was dead.

Normally, Jack and Grady barely touched each other, a policy Grady had stuck to as a means of self-preservation and because Jack had seemed to prefer it that way. Jack mostly kept a clear margin between himself and any of his friends. Hell, if this morning was anything to go by, Jack kept it with his mother, too.

But not with Grady last night. And not today.

Grady was trying not to read too much into it and to just be grateful.

“Hungry?” Jack asked as he balanced a plate piled with pizza slices on their knees and pressed their thighs together to ensure it didn’t fall to the floor. Objectively, it wasn’t that intimate, but it sure felt that way compared to the eighteen-inch minimum distance they’d been maintaining for years.

Stuffing a slice of pepperoni into his mouth, Grady watched New York score a run—becauseof course. As if it wasn’t badenough that Jack was a Habs fan, he also loved the Yankees.TheNew YorkfuckingYankees.

Trash-talking Jack’s deplorable taste in sports teams, and Jack’s subsequent indignation, went a long way toward restoring Grady’s equilibrium. By the time the game ended, the only lingering weirdness—other than Jack’s body pressed to his side—was how obviously everyone was keeping an eye on him.

Grady gave Barnaby a pointed look. “Just ask.”

Barnaby gestured helplessly. “I’m just…I’m a bit worried. Jack told us one of the kids at the Pathways Center is your cousin.”

“Yeah,” Grady sighed. “His name is Colton Michael and I haven’t seen him in fourteen years. He would have been about two when I came out to my family and they told me I was dead to them.” A humorless laugh jerked up from his chest, bitter as bile. “And apparently, that’s what they told the younger kids had actually happened. That I died.”

Which shouldn’t surprise him but for some damn reasonhurt. He should have been well past the point where his family could wound him. It pissed him off that he wasn’t.

Barnaby and Travis appeared speechless, which, Grady thought with a wry smile, was a first.

Jack slid his hand onto Grady’s knee and Grady grasped hold because, fuck it all and anyone who had a problem with it, they were the kind of friends who held hands now.

Did it make sense? No.

Did he care? Also no.

Barnaby and Travis cast what they probably thought were subtle glances at Jack and Grady’s clenched hands before meeting each other’s eyes in a silent conversation Grady was glad he couldn’t hear.

Then Barnaby raised his hand, and if Travis had looked any more fond of his giant dork of a boyfriend he’d have melted into a puddle of goo on the floor.

---