The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

No one saw me turn my face into his hair and breathe him in. And no one, not even Shea, heard me whisper, “Thank you, Darling.”

He threw me a wry grin as he resettled his ball cap. “It’s tomorrow, after all.” Don’t do this to me, Shea. Don’t be wonderful. God, he was, though, and every day, he proved it.

Combine a professional athlete’s metabolism with a teenager’s? You’ve created a new supervillain, Always Eats Man, attacking your wallet today.

My shift to Shea was automatic. I needed— Something, and my primal, gut instinct was that he could give it to me. He hit me with those level, steady blues, a smile buried in their deep-water depths. He was as solid as the bedrock that lined the bottom of the ocean. I could rely on him like I could rely on the sunrise.

I snorted, dug out the final piece of brownie, and held it out for Shea. “You’re already better than me.” I hadn’t thought it through, just believed that Shea should have the last piece and offered it up. “No. I’m not.” He kept his eyes on mine as his lips closed around my spoon.

Hot

The triple colors of the traffic light moved across Shea’s skin like water. I forgot about the road, stared at him.

That's safe

Don’t say it, Morgan. Don’t fucking say it. My fingers tapped on the steering wheel. I made a left, rolled up to a stop sign. Don’t you dare. Our neighborhood was one right turn away. “Do you want to come over?

Also very safe

This was a bad idea, a very bad idea. One of my worst. What was I thinking, bringing Shea here?

The specter of Coates loomed in the shadows of my mind. I knew a lot, but not everything that he’d done. Fuck, did Shea think, for one moment, that he had to be here?

Oh no

“I’m not wrong about this, am I?” he whispered. Sirens. Red alert. Team. This is not simple, nothing about this is simple. My brain was hurling everything it could to try and stop me.

I had a hundred reasons not to kiss Shea, but Shea was stroking my leg, and he was looking at me like that, in that kind of way. That hungry, first-kiss way, his lips parted and his breath coming in hot.

I’d imagined all his moans and sighs and how he’d say my name, but, fuck, hearing him make all those noises—into my lips and my ear and bitten into my shoulder—launched me to a new dimension.

“I’ve never done this before.” “Been with a man?” “Been with anyone. I’ve never…”

Oh shit

He could have told me anything else, anything else in the world, and I would have been less stunned. Shea, a virgin? It wasn’t fucking possible.

“And I still want it to mean something when it happens. I’m waiting.” I blinked. “For… marriage?”

Ohhh shit

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t think things would go that fast. I thought we’d make out, then we’d talk—”

I mean you put your hand between his legs but ok

“Morgan… I like you. I like you a lot, and I thought something might be happening between us. I know I did this clumsily tonight—” His lips rubbed together. “I’d like to date you. Whatever this is, whatever we have, I’d like to see if it can go somewhere.”

“We can’t,” I finally said, tugging on my shirt. “We shouldn’t even be doing this. This is—” A mistake, I was going to say. This is a mistake. But my voice stopped at the sight of him.

Oof

“Shea…” I sighed. “I keep things simple, you know? I don’t… I don’t get involved like that.”

“I know you don’t date.” There was a note of humiliation in his voice. “I know your reputation. I thought…” His breath left him on a long exhale. He thought we could be different.

The night I had to wash my father’s blood off my hands was the night I decided no one else was going to get a piece of me large enough to break.

One person can change your whole life if you let them. Most people think that’s beautiful. I think give someone enough of you to shatter and they might just do it. Then what? What are you left with when they’re gone?

Shea was waiting for a forever guy, someone who could love him the right way. Someone who understood that Shea was a one-in-a-million kind of man. I could get that part right, sure. It was everything else I’d fuck up.

Love was an unused muscle inside me. I’d ruin this seventeen ways before the week was out. Shea would be done with me before we’d even begun, and I’d deserve getting kicked to the curb. So I couldn’t be the guy he was waiting for. He needed someone much better than me.

“Shea, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—” I shouldn’t have done any of it. Shouldn’t have let myself get close to him. Shouldn’t have let him keep working his way deeper inside me until, suddenly, he was there, a part of my life. I shouldn’t have cherished every little moment we were together and then craved to get back to him all the minutes we were apart.

“Shea—” He turned, and I saw the hot tears glittering on his cheeks that he’d tried to hide. It went through me like an electrical blast, as strong and sharp as an execution. Blood thundered in every corner of my body. I felt one millimeter tall.

Tell me to go fuck myself, Shea. Get furious, and then get over me and go find someone better. Don’t waste your time on me.

In my mind, I saw Shea’s eyes locked on mine right before he asked to date me, that absolute hope blended with his nerves. Shea…

I didn’t feel worthy of the way Brody listened to me, like the words I spoke had real, physical weight. Like they sank into his bones as he reordered his existence around each and every one.

I didn’t have the first clue how to manage building something real with a guy like Shea, and all of my ideas were the second-rate kind of shit you get from reading tawdry magazines at the grocery store. A guy who deserved the world needed more than cheap attempts at romance.

Even if we tried, and even if I somehow managed to get things right more often than I fucked things up, what if—still—everything went wrong? What if I couldn’t keep him happy? What if, even if I tried my hardest, even if I wanted to hold on to Shea with everything I was, he decided—smartly—that I wasn’t the man he was waiting for?

So life was beautifully, wonderfully amazing. Except for the Shea-sized hole in it.

I was proud of myself for a job well done: Shea was somewhere and I didn’t know where, and I was lying to myself convincingly enough about not caring that I’d started to feel halfway good. That’s when Shea folded himself down onto the step beside me.

I wanted to stop time, hold the world off with my bare hands, keep the headlines and the bad press and the shitty takes that were coming away from my guys. I wanted us to win, not just to prove the whole damn world wrong, but because they deserved it. Because they’d built more than a team in these months: they’d built a family, and here we were. I wanted to protect that with everything I was. Take every muscle fiber, every calcium atom, every drop of blood I had, and build a fortress around these men.

I could get away with the “I’m fine” business with damn near everyone else, but Shea could call me a liar with a look and then be gracious enough to not add to my agonies.

He still slid effortlessly into my life even now, not raking against the grain or snagging on the edges after our mistake. My mistake. He was Shea. He was wonderful.

We’d been officially named captain and alternate captain after practice that day. Kathy gave us the C and the A in person on the ice. It was etched into stone now—or at least into our jerseys—how we were meant to work together. Teammates. Co-captains.

“How are you?” I asked. I felt like shit asking because how do you ask someone you made cry how they’re doing?

Shea had every right to tell me, I’m fine, no thanks to you, asshole. In fact, I’m dating this supermodel volunteer firefighter now, would you like to see his Insta? He rescues puppies and sponsors orphans, and we take ...

Shea was quiet. “The whole season could be a bust, you know. We could go zero and eighty-two, win nothing—” “Don’t be so optimistic—” “And,” he said, his shoulder brushing mine, “it would be enough. It’s already enough. What you’re doing for everyone. And what you already did…” He trailed off.

We’d never talked about it. Out of all the conversations we’d had, we never dipped into the days and weeks before, when Shea and the rookies had been at Coates’ mercy.

“I missed you.” The confession was out of my lips before I’d thought the words through.

“I missed this.” I flicked my fingers between us as if I could sum up the complexities of what we were in a thoughtless motion. “We’re good together.” A shadow fell across Shea. He took a breath, a quick little inhale, and his lips hung open a second before he spoke. “We are good together. And I missed you, too.”

Get me talking about hockey and I can sound somewhat intelligent. Put me on the front porch in the dark, looking at the guy I won’t admit that I feel some kind of way about? There wasn’t a single word in the universe coming out of my lips.

Eighty-two games—we were about to play eighty-two games, and they were trusting me, of all fucking people— “We’re going to be okay.” Shea’s voice. I blinked. My hands were clammy, cold sweat rising on the back of my neck. “Everything bad is behind us, Morgan.”

I did everything I could to keep their spirits up. We were always together, and I made it a point to do something in every city we were in. In Columbus, an all-you-can-eat chili buffet, and in St. Louis, we spent almost six hours in an arcade, bowling and playing laser tag and trash-talking each other on Skee-Ball and Dance Dance Revolution.

Love this

That meant Shea and I were roommates.

OH MY GOD, THEY WERE ROOMMATES

It was a lot easier to share a room—or a plane, or a bus, or a meal, or a life—with Shea when we kept ourselves so busy we didn’t have time to dwell on all the ways we were overlapping.

We still sat a little too close to each other on our flights. We didn’t really have to touch that much when we shared my iPad. We didn’t need to sit next to each other at every team meal, and maybe it was a little strange that the team thought of us as a matched set.

We were so glued to each other that the rest of the guys started calling us each other’s nicknames. We were so interchangeable it didn’t matter...