Season's Change Page 6

  “That fucker,” Olly said, dropping into a chair next to him.

  “Fun night?”

  “He wanted to talk about his girl from juniors. Oh, Delphine,” he gasped, really Frenching up the pronunciation. “Is so sad, finally go to New York, zere are models everywhere, still cannot find a girl more beautiful than ma petite Delphine.”

  “Neither of you are fit to say her name,” Poiro informed them. He was leaning on Yelich and looking pathetic. Olly must not have put the “drink water now” reminders on his road-roomie’s phone. And Benji had never flown hungover before but he bet it sucked balls. Sure enough, Poiro staggered to the bathroom twice in the hour-and-twenty-minute flight. The coaching staff did not look impressed.

  Benji just fell asleep on Olly’s shoulder. Lukesy showed him a picture while they were deplaning, and said he’d have to pull up his lame fucking Instagram to see the caption. Olly blushed, looked awkward, and shoved him off the plane.

  Chapter Eight

  They didn’t have practice when they got back from New Jersey, which was a gift—Poiro had been a lot to deal with. Olly wouldn’t have been sleeping, anyway, but there was a difference between quietly listening to a podcast and having a six-five goalie cry it out about his long-lost love.

  And then there was the whole falling asleep on Benji thing, on top of the getting hugged by Benji thing. Benji was oblivious, which Olly knew—he fucking knew—was the right way to handle it. Bromance in the 505, aren’t they cute, Olly is totally his wifey, laugh it off.

  But Olly wasn’t oblivious.

  Olly couldn’t be oblivious.

  The picture on Luke’s Instagram story was set to be visible to his close friends only, and was going to vanish in twenty-four hours unless someone screenshotted it; and also, it was really fucking cute. Olly could see that, objectively. Benji was hunched over his shoulder, still wearing that godawful suit (did he only own one?); Olly’s head was tipped over to rest on top of Benji’s, and he looked conked the fuck out. Lukesy had captioned it “#onelove #bros #forever.”

  It was the first time Olly had fallen asleep on a plane in years. And now he felt wired, either because he’d finally gotten an hour of uninterrupted sleep, or because he was freaking out. They were supposed to be staying off their feet, but Olly couldn’t sit still. Meanwhile Benji was on the couch, watching Pitbulls and Parolees and chewing through a bag of turkey jerky. He was really serious about his caloric goals from the team nutritionist. But then Olly had never been trying to stay above 215 so he could splatter 170-pounders like bugs on a windshield.

  He shoved Benji’s feet out of the way and sat on the far edge of the couch. “We need more seating.”

  “Sure do.” Benji put his feet right back in Olly’s lap. Olly tried not to mind. Benji had no concept of a personal bubble; he would probably have asked Poiro for a foot massage. It was fine; it would be weirder for Olly to make a big deal about it.

  On the TV, a happy family hugged a wriggly black dog. The mom was crying.

  “Fuck, I want that dog,” Benji said. “Look at her little smooshy face.”

  “I dunno, we always had huskies.”

  Benji gave him a big-eyed, pathetic look. “Buddy. Why have you been holding out on me?”

  “My parents don’t have one right now.” His parents had had to put Pebbles down over the summer, while he was hiding at the lake, not even able to drag himself to Duluth to say goodbye to his family dog. Levi and Joey still had dogs, though, keeping the Järvinen husky streak alive. Sami and Olly were the dog-free weirdos, in more ways than one: Sami with his PhD program and Olly with the I-prefer-dicks situation.

  “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

  Olly opened Sami’s Facebook on his phone and chucked it over. He’d put together an album of pictures they’d taken since his dad brought Pebbles home. There were a few of her curled around his nieces and nephews that made his chest hurt. Fuck it, there was nothing cuter than a dog and a baby all snuggled up together. Pebbles had been a champion snuggler.

  “Bro,” Benji said a few minutes later. “Bro.”

  “What?”

  Benji held up his phone. Sami had added some pictures: there was a tiny Olly, bent over for a ball-hockey face-off with a dog play-bowing on the other side of the ball.

  “How do I text myself a picture from Facebook?”

  “You don’t?”

  “Oh, buddy.” Benji shook his head. “I most definitely do.”

  “Ugh, whatever.”

  “Is it weird if I friend-request your brother?” He was flipping through more pictures. “I need this in my life.”

  “If you have to pick one, pick Joey.” Joey was the most chilled-out of the brothers Järvinen. Levi and Sami would grill Benji mercilessly and tattle to their parents. Classic middle siblings.

  “Oops, I accidentally liked this one.” He held the phone back up. It was a picture from when Olly and Sami had been headed to the championship tournament his sophomore year. They both had blond mullets that they’d bleached in the kitchen sink. Pebbles was sitting on the couch next to them, giving them canine side-eye. “Outstanding lettuce.”

  “Everyone did it.”

  “I missed out on so much in Pennsylvania. We just grew patchy beards like a bunch of scrubs.” He handed Olly his phone back and poked his leg with one of his toes. “So are you close with your family? You don’t talk about them a lot or anything.”

  Olly checked his text thread with Benji. He’d screenshotted the face-off and the mullet and sent them to himself. Hopefully poster-sized versions weren’t going to show up in Olly’s stall tomorrow. “They’re fine.”

  “Bud, I think you say that when you don’t want to be honest.”

  “Ouch.”

  Benji shrugged. “I don’t know, you don’t have to tell me shit. But it’s not like I’m going to judge you. I haven’t talked to my mom in three years and my sister is married to goddamned Rob McMeade, so.”

  “They’re just...” Olly paused. “Well. My dad is your stereotypical hockey dad. The family joke is that he decided they were done having kids when the youth coaches told him he had one who could make it to the NAHA.”

  Olly had been happy to go back to Minnesota. He could have re-signed in Colorado when his contract had come up. But no—his dad had encouraged him to look at Minnesota, talked up the coaching staff. And he’d missed his family, wanted to spend more time with his nieces and nephews. It was home, damn it, even if Minneapolis was still two hours away from Duluth. He could go hug his mom, or take the boat out fishing with Joey or Levi. And he’d figured even his dad wasn’t going to be driving down to watch practices, or tell a NAHA coaching staff to give him more minutes.

  Then his dad started talking about taking early retirement from the port to have more time to support his career. Olly had been able to handle his input from the distance of a plane ride, over the defined period of a summer break; but the idea that Dad would have nothing else to do with himself, other than provide Olly with support, had been too much. So the wheels had fallen off. Like every other fucking thing.

  “I can see you thinking right now.” Benji poked him in the side again.

  “He wouldn’t let me go to college,” Olly continued, finally. “I had a full ride to Michigan. But he was worried about my, I don’t know, focus. So I went pro after Colorado drafted me instead. Even though the level of play wasn’t as good. But there weren’t all the distractions.”

  And he did not recommend a suburb of Salt Lake City as the place for any scared eighteen-year-old to grapple with their sexuality, much less one who was simultaneously starting a career as a professional athlete. Fortunately, he’d only stayed in the minor developmental league one season before he’d gone to the major D-League in Colorado: long enough to lose his virginity to an equally closeted Mormon neighbor, anyway.

  “I’m sorry yo
u didn’t get to go.” Benji paused. “It’s obvious that you’re smart, you know?”

  He snorted.

  “Shut up. Listen to me for a sec.”

  Olly shoved Benji’s feet off his lap, stood up, and paced over to the kitchen for a glass of water. Benji twisted himself around on the couch. From over the counter, he was all shoulders and curls and big green eyes.

  “What I’m trying to say... I think it’s great that you’re smart. That you probably could have done something other than get paid to fuck up your body, and pray you don’t end up with CTE and get dementia at, like, forty-five. I didn’t have another option. I don’t even know what would have happened to me if Andrew fucking Smith hadn’t broken his ankle after the NHTC combine, and I hadn’t gotten pulled off the alternates list. If your dad isn’t happy that he raised a kid who’s smart, who could have gone to a good school and become—fuck, a French translator, I don’t know—that’s pretty sad for him.”

  Olly turned back around to fidget with the ice maker. His eyes were stinging. It sucked that his daddy issues weren’t even in the top three problems in his life. He could still hear the last words his father had said to him, when Olly had called to tell him he was going to the Eagles: “I can’t believe I raised a son who’s running away the second it gets hard.”

  Olly had smashed his phone against the wall of his hotel room instead of howling back that his father had no idea how hard his life was, every single fucking day that he woke up and strapped on his skates and waited for the axe of his sexuality to fall on the back of his neck. He’d sent every call since then to voicemail.

  Olly wasn’t the kind of person who smashed phones or ignored his dad’s calls. He also wasn’t the kind of person who got drunk enough to take a guy home to the apartment he shared with Eamon Crowder, or considered coming out to his dad in a screaming rage, so.

  “Want to go to old-people yoga?” he asked the refrigerator, because he couldn’t sit still and the trainers would kill him if he went running on a recovery day.

  “Sure, bud.”

  * * *

  Olly cried—with actual tears, running down his face—in class. They were all in downward dog, after some twisty rotation sequence, and he just felt them...happen. Watched them drip down onto his loaner purple yoga mat and spatter on its goddamned lotus blossoms.

  He was so fucking angry, and he was so fucking sad, and he was such a goddamned fucking mess. His body felt like his enemy. It wouldn’t let him sleep; he could feel the impact it was having on his recovery, even this early in the season. He could barely go three days without puking. It wouldn’t let him get out of his own way, whether it was fear of taking another hit that would land him on a surgical table, or fear that he’d hit his limit, that he’d maxed out, that he couldn’t do this anymore, the one thing that he’d let become the entire point of his goddamned life. The thing he’d sacrificed for, the thing he’d fought for, the thing that kept him away from his mom and his brothers. The thing that meant he’d never had a real relationship in the entire twenty-four fucking years he’d been on the planet. Fucking hockey: it was all about playing through the pain.

  But the yoga made him be in his body, the bag of nerves and bone and blood whose capabilities were the cornerstones of his entire fucking life. He couldn’t shove it down, like he could on a run or out on the ice. He couldn’t fight it.

  He had to listen to the fucking teacher and be fucking present in it.

  And it was crying. And he couldn’t stop it.

  * * *

  Yeah, so, Benji was worried about Olly. He hadn’t shut himself up in his room after yoga, but he’d come as close as he could get while sticking to the letter of their pinky promise: he watched tape on his tablet with his headphones in, while Benji had tried to work on his Pro Hockey game. Olly hadn’t even bothered to chirp him for losing to the Xbox, or reminded him to use all the complicated moves he’d shown him a few days ago.

  And Benji hadn’t said anything, but he had totally seen him crying during yoga. Benji wasn’t going to judge; he’d had to dip into his therapist’s tissue box more than once in college. So he had long since worked through any feelings he had about boys don’t cry or whatever bullshit.

  After practice, Coach O pulled him into his office. Benji tried not to feel like he was twelve years old, sitting on the wrong side of his middle school principal’s desk. “Bowie. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “About, uh, what?”

  Coach O steepled his fingers in front of his face. He had reading glasses shoved onto the top of his head. He didn’t look like he was about to send Benji back to Hershey. “How’s your living situation going?”

  “Olly and I get along okay.”

  “No issues?”

  “Um. I mean, no.” Benji paused. He didn’t want to act like this was a whole Thing, but Olly definitely wouldn’t want anyone else on the team to hear it. Mental health should be a normal thing, just like Olly’s MCL surgery, but that wasn’t how it worked. He went with “I think he’s got some, uh, stuff going on.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Benji chewed on his lip, looked down at his knuckles and back up at Coach O. His face was carefully smooth.

  He was a good coach. Benji didn’t think he’d hold it against Olly, that he was struggling. Coach O didn’t treat his guys like they were robots, nothing more than live bodies to plug into his preferred system and rack up points. But still. Olly was a private person, who was obviously going through some shit even if he didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

  Benji swallowed. Coach O’s eyes were steady, calm. Held no judgment.

  “Like mental health stuff,” he said, because in the final analysis ignoring it wasn’t going to get Olly anywhere.

  “What makes you say that?”

  Fuck it. Benji laid it out: the jumpiness, the insomnia. He didn’t mention the crying at yoga. That seemed a little too far.

  Coach O took off his glasses and folded up the earpieces, before he set them precisely down on his desk. “That’s it?”

  “I mean, I think that’s enough? Isn’t it?”

  “It’s plenty,” Coach O answered, sounding weirdly relieved. “Thanks for telling me.” He paused again. “Are you okay, living situation-wise?”

  Benji blinked across the desk at him. “Why wouldn’t I be? Olly’s my boy. I had my own shit to deal with, so I know it doesn’t mean he’s, like, weak or whatever.”

  “If you ever have any issues,” he said, “I want you to come to me first. With anything.”

  “Sure, Coach.” Benji squinted. “I dunno what that would be about, though. Unless you have some way to get him to do his dishes.”

  Chapter Nine

  Two days after Olly cried in fucking old-person yoga, they lost 4-2 to Vegas, one of those nights where nothing clicked. Olly couldn’t have found Yelich’s tape if he’d had a fucking GPS in his stick. Luke and Dewitt clawed back a goal each in the third period, but it was too little, too late.

  The locker room and the parking deck were both quiet post-game. Benji was still wearing his terrible blue suit; Olly should have dragged him shopping, but he hadn’t had the energy. Poiro caught them before Olly had hit the button to unlock his car.

  “Present for Bowie,” he yelled, tossing a suit bag at Benji. “I can’t look at you in that piece of trash anymore.”

  “You didn’t have to buy me a suit, bro,” Benji said. “It’s not that bad.”

  “It is that bad. And I didn’t buy you a suit. That’s one of mine, and if your giant ass rips it, you’re getting it fixed.”

  “With, like, duct tape?”

  Poiro clutched his chest. “You wound my soul.”

  “Buddy,” Benji said, “have you ever wondered whether your life would be easier if you were seventy-five percent less dramatic about literally everything?”

  Ol
ly turned a laugh into a cough.

  Poiro still speared him with a glare. “Oliver, get this asshole home before I take the suit back.”

  “Can’t have that,” Olly answered. “In you go, bud. We can burn the trash bag out on the balcony.”

  “Maybe not,” Benji said, sliding into the passenger seat. “It’s kinda plasticky. I don’t think it would be great to breathe in the fumes.”

  * * *

  Olly was innocently pouring himself a travel mug of coffee the next morning when the door to Benji’s room swung open. He inched out, holding Poiro’s suit jacket and his suitcase in front of him. Olly had never seen him look so...nervous?

  What the fuck. This was a rookie who’d gone toe-to-toe with some of the NAHA’s most legendary active players, and barely batted an eyelash. To say nothing of when Olly was freaking out all over him. Olly still didn’t quite know what to make of that.

  “Okay over there, buddy?” he asked, because it was the least he could do after Benji had spent so much time dealing with what a mess he was. That reminded him: he’d promised to help Benji with an Instagram post about the road trip.

  Benji swallowed. “I don’t know.”

  Again: what the fuck? “Are you sick?”

  “No, it’s not...” He trailed off. Stiffened his shoulders. “I don’t know if I can wear these pants.”

  Olly had just taken a poorly timed sip of coffee when Benji stepped out from behind the jacket. He barely managed to avoid spitting it down his light blue shirt. “Oh my god.”

  It was pornographic. He didn’t know how Benji had gotten Poiro’s pants on, much less buttoned. Benji was a big boy in every sense of the word, and every single inch of him was on display.

  Every. Single. Inch.

  Benji tried for a leer, which mostly failed. “That’s what all the puck bunnies say?”

  “How did you get those zipped?”