The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

Hockey players are fucking gossip queens.

Let me tell you, the drive from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Boulder, Colorado, is a real winner. That was a lot of two-lane Dakota highways, pancake asphalt, and grassland stretching for mind-numbing miles. I stopped overnight in Deadwood, South Dakota, for the ambience and dragged myself into the outskirts of Boulder late the next afternoon.

Shea’s flush, his blue eyes, and his smile, which I already knew was bad news. A beautiful smile can make any man’s knees weak, but there was something about Shea’s that did more to me.

“I got it!” Brody snapped. He had a redhead’s temper and a teenager’s sullenness, and his “I got it” somehow rhymed with “fuck off and die.”

We got lost for a few minutes, sitting there in the dressing room and gazing into each other’s eyes. Color was coming back to Shea’s cheeks, and he was flushed in all the right ways, pink down to his collarbones, hair mussed and drying in sweaty dishevelment. He looked like a hockey warrior, valiant after a game-winning goal, not battered into the boards by his chickenshit captain. I could see the future in the sprawl of his muscular thighs, the coiled readiness to his slouch against the back wall, the fire igniting in his blues. Shea was going to go places in this league.

“Everything is going to change, and I want you to be here. I want you at my right hand, Moogs.” I gave her a little salute. “I’ll come say goodbye before I head out of town.” “I know you’ll take great care of the team.”

“It’s the right thing to do.” “Yeah.” Shea’s smile was slow, despite the obvious lingering pain. “And you did it.” I had to hand it to him. That was a smooth echo of our morning conversation. I chuckled. His cheeks pinked into that absurdly adorable flush.

I sank into an empty stall and scrubbed my palms over my cheeks. This was a team of ducklings that were desperate for someplace to put their trust and vets who needed a chance to exhale after the shitstorm they’d been through. They needed someone who could drag them out of this burning building and pull them to safety, remind them that there could be great things that came out of piles of ashes.

The big moments in life that test a man’s mettle always come flying in out of the blue.

Who do you stand up for when the gas meets the flame?

Home Depot didn’t open until 5:00 a.m., and I was parked outside ten minutes before the doors unlocked. They shouldn’t have sold to me. I looked unhinged: beard going scruffy, deep hollows beneath my eyes, my long hair escaping the knot at the back of my neck, fury and purpose in all of my movements. No one buys a chainsaw before dawn with good intentions.

Partnered up with Shea. Good idea or horrible one? We could have had that drink last night—and whatever came after—if I hadn’t been all up in my Good Ideas and Responsibility.

His leg was bouncing a little wide of his stall, and if I wanted to spread out myself, I could have pushed my thigh against his. My gaze caught on the cut of his quads, the bulges above his knees. He had thick skater’s thighs dusted with delicate hair. Beautiful legs, powerful legs, the kind that squeezed when they wrapped around your waist. Sex-on-fire legs that you could feel jumping beneath your fingers—

The rookies were looking up at me like they were Boy Scouts on a campout. Hell, some of them probably had been Boy Scouts last year, had still gone on trips with their toothbrushes packed by their moms. Now they were here, needing something from me.

Sweat glistened on Shea’s skin, ran in rivulets down the side of his face and the length of his neck. He was breathing hard, but he smiled at me as we headed to the bench. We stood shoulder to shoulder and leaned on our sticks, watching our teammates. I didn’t say anything about how he was pressed into my side, and he didn’t say anything about how I was leaning right back.

We found each other’s gaps and broken spaces and filled them in, and we came together like a kaleidoscope forming shimmering fractals out of piles of nothing. Every time you looked at us, we were different.

So call-ups from no-name minor teams and washed-up nobodies these guys might be, but too many people had thrown away what they thought were dull rocks without realizing they were diamonds that only needed some spit and polish.

Together, we started building a team out of dust and grit and raw hope.

—my mind would slip and slide right back to Shea.

But Shea and I weren’t just teammates. We were co-leaders of the Outlaws. There was nothing simple about Shea, or this team, and it was far better to just not think about things that wouldn’t ever—couldn’t ever—happen. He was off-limits, and that was that

I might as well have signed adoption papers for this team.

Shea appeared at my Jeep, parked in the driveway, as I was hauling everything out of the back. “Want help?” It was the tail end of summer, and all that honey-hued sunlight caught on his hair and his eyes and just stayed, like he’d been painted with gold. He was wearing short shorts that clung to his thick thighs and an Outlaws T-shirt that clung to his pecs. His biceps bulged beneath his sleeves, and his Adam’s apple jutted out from the tanned hollow of his throat. Those long legs went on forever, cut and carved with muscles and curves that would make you dizzy if you traced them too fast with your eyes.

We killed as much time as possible setting those grills up on the back deck. Maybe we didn’t have to work so closely together. Maybe our hands didn’t have to brush that much. Maybe I didn’t have to stand behind him and help wrestle one into position. He didn’t need to linger with me while I was messing with the charcoal, either, sitting on the porch railing while his knee grazed my arm.

bell pepper. We were touching from knees to hips, elbows to biceps. We were quiet and content, with the light shimmering through the wall of windows connecting the kitchen to the back yard. It should have been too bright. He should have felt too close. I should have moved away.

“I’ll make you proud, Morgan.” “I know you will, Darlin’.”

Dazzling gold light fell across Shea’s face, capturing his laugh in a gauzy meringue and lavender heat haze. He was wrapped up in that tender glow, so gentle it seemed like a caress running up his bare arms and over all of his gorgeousness. He was a fucking dream. I had to look away to breathe again.

I snagged a spot on a tree stump. Shea folded himself down in front of me. I spread my legs, let Shea lean back. His shoulders brushed the inside of my thighs.

He showed up wearing a suit that was a far fucking cry from the funeral director garb I’d seen him wear to Coates’ Last Cult Supper. This suit was cut to fit him like a second skin, with the jacket wrapped around his shoulders and the legs as close-fitting as a sigh. The indigo of the fabric looked hand-dyed to match the shine of his eyes.

I could still smell Shea. Where he leaned into my side, where his cologne hung in the air in the shape of him. I could smell him, and I was dizzy with his scent. I had a moment’s daydream, a flash of imagining so vivid and scorching it burned me. Shea with his head thrown back, throat arched, gasping my name. His hands tangled in my sheets, thighs quaking— Focus. Game. Team. The guys are going to need you, especially today. So not that. Not him. Not ever.

“The most important day in hockey is tomorrow. Tomorrow, you tackle what went wrong today. Tomorrow, you improve. Every day, every tomorrow, you get better.”

“Everything you need is already inside of you. You know where we need to be, and when we get home, we bring our game up. So let’s get going. We’ve got work to do tomorrow.”

Not Shea. He stared me down, fires burning in his eyes hot enough to fracture diamonds. I couldn’t fucking breathe. We were locked onto each other, separated by this dressing room and our team, and I was lost in the riptides of his ocean blues. All I wanted, that moment, was to go to him and pull him into my arms. Let our lips brush. But he’d ignite me if I tried. I knew he would.

We were looking into each other, but this time it was gentle. This was the lap of ocean waves against my skin, his gaze tranquil and inviting.

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.”

Don’t do this to me, Shea. Don’t be wonderful. God, he was, though, and every day, he proved it.

We were on the edge of something I’d thought I’d locked down and put away.

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.

“When you know your teammates like that—when you know them so well you know the decisions they’re going to make before they make them—you play in the future. You’re not reacting to the game; you’re defining it. You’re playing ahead of my play, and ahead of the next one. That’s how you dominate.”

“This is our tomorrow. That game yesterday is the past. Today, tomorrow, and every day after, we become who we are meant to be. You got me?”

“You have a future career coaching champions.”

Don’t be wonderful, Shea.

One of Shea’s gifts was how he could draw me out of all that shit, pull me from my spiraling and settle me on solid ground. I loved it. It felt like I’d stepped into someone else’s life, like I could be a different person when I was around him. I was someone who could make him laugh, keep him laughing.

“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.

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

Why did he make a move on me like he knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was me

There was so much to say, to try and tell him—I was broken in places that really mattered, I’d spent half my life turning my heart puck-hard, I didn’t want to feel something open up inside me, strange and uncomfortable and prickling at my scared places.

I had no idea how to wrap my life into sentences, tie it all up in a bow and hand it over to him. It was easier to sit on this couch and glare at the floor. Falling in love wasn’t my thing.

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.

“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.