The Rest of the Story

by Tal Bauer

But now— Shea. Hockey wasn’t an escape when he was right fucking there.

Hockey is a game of microseconds and a million snap decisions.

This hurt right now, the wanting and not having and walking away. What would happen if real emotions got involved? If I gave him something of myself that he could break, and he did?

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

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.

“Is there anything else we can do for them?” Stop being wonderful. Stop coming alongside me and shouldering this weight.

“You’ve done a lot, is what I’m saying. You’ve given everyone a lot.”

I wanted, and I wanted not to want. I didn’t know where to turn. Up or down, left or right, there was always Shea.

Half the battle with me is getting me to stay, and there I was. Staying.

Him, the lights, the happy chatter of the wives, the laughter of the kids, our teammates scattered across the yard. All of it caught in my chest like one giant balloon.

“I missed you.” The confession was out of my lips before I’d thought the words through. What right did I have? I was the one who’d fucked everything up. I didn’t get to say that I missed him, that I thought about him constantly.

On a good day, I can string together a handful of words, form a few coherent sentences. 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.

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.

I thought I’d burst from it all, that the balloon in my chest would pop and take me right with it. Shea—drenched, his white away jersey stained with red Gatorade, his hair soaked with sweat and sugar—beamed at me across the dressing room, and that balloon went bang

“No one cares about goals scored by Morgan Elsher.” A long, deep pull of my beer. Shea shook his head. “I care,” he said. He was smiling. “If we’re going to keep count of my goals this season, then we’re going to keep count of yours, too.” It just came out, slipped right the fuck out before I could stop it. For a nontalkative bastard, I sure did open my mouth around Shea. “I’ll give my first one to you.”

He smiled, and it was like a million sparklers went off at once, a million little flashes of light in the depths of his eyes. The shine of him, the glow. He was incandescent. Wondrous. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I was so, so fucked.

“Here,” I said softly, handing it to Shea. For Darlin’, I’d written. Moogs’ First Outlaw Puck. Shea ran his thumb over the letters, his smile small and sweet and hitting me like a bomb blast. I wanted to hold him, wrap my arms around him, pull him even closer into me. Bury my face in his neck and kiss him again in all those gentle places, tell him yes, I want you, so fucking bad it hurts sometimes. “This is the first of many,” Shea said. His voice was as low as mine, hidden beneath the video game and Brody and Lawson’s shit talk. I smiled. “Maybe. But it’s the first one in a long time that’s mattered.”

There was an empty place inside me, and I blamed him for it being there. Maybe if he hadn’t been a jackass, I wouldn’t be this wonderful way I was, and maybe I could have been someone who could have had a shot with a guy like Shea.

He was as close to perfect as I’d ever seen, so close that it burned to be around him. He was like staring at the sun.

Shea—shirtless, in low-slung board shorts that barely clung to his hips, water dripping down his skin, skin I’d had my mouth on—was propped on one elbow and grinning. “Hi,” he said. I couldn’t have told you my name with a gun to my head. Every thought had been replaced with him,

There was something big I was missing, something about the size of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, coming at me fast. Call me a fucking fool, call me every name in the book, call me whatever you want, but know this: I’d never fallen for anyone. I’d never been anywhere close to this in my life. The way I’d lost my heart, the way I’d lost my thoughts, the way every single reference point in my life had shifted toward Shea was a big fucking mystery to me. I didn’t see it. And I certainly didn’t know what the fuck to do about it. I didn’t know how to be in love.

I have to do everything the hard way. It hurt more to stay than to flee, so of course, I stayed.

There was a votive in the middle of the table because the universe wanted me to see how perfect Shea looked by flickering candlelight.

I was lost in him. A bubble grew around us, melting the rest of the world into a heat haze, a bokeh buzz behind Shea’s glow. Our eyes found each other, danced away, found each other again. His cheeks were permanently flushed.

Shea’s cheek brushed mine. His hair tickled my temple, fell across my eyes. A black-magic buzz hummed through me. The darkness, the music, how Shea was everywhere and everything. I buried my face in his dark strands, hummed in his ear.

The bravery inside Shea would break your heart.

We were stranded on this bed, stranded together, weightless like we were plunging from the top floor of the hotel to the hard streets below. I heard nothing, save for a single, shrill note: the sound of a heart cracking in slow motion.

We were two blown-apart men. Two shattered hearts in one bed. Two tangled lives that should have been parallel.

It was so horrible I hadn’t imagined it could even happen this way: Shea inside out and ready to throw away his dream for a once-and-forever kind of true love, one man to have and to hold for all time, and to love him like no one else could.

I didn’t deserve him But, goddamn, I wanted to. I craved the chance to be the man worthy of becoming Shea’s one true love.

Everything I yearned for was wrapped up in Shea.

I’d never felt this way. I’d never lost myself in someone else. Certainly had never given away my heart so completely, so utterly, that my life no longer belonged to me. Shea and I had built a shared world and filled it with our favorite things. The team, our hockey, each other. For me, him. All the walls I built, all the broody ways I’d insisted I would never give away a piece of myself, and yet— Here I was. Here I fucking was.

“Morgan,” he breathed, so softly I don’t think I was supposed to hear him. He nuzzled my jaw, pressed his lips to my neck. “I’m in love with you.”

He tumbled into unconsciousness in my arms, breathing me in, his confession a brand on my soul.

“Shea, I— I don’t deserve you.” My voice cracked. “I don’t. I know that. But—” But he was a glimpse of a future that I wanted. He could be my forever, the rest of my life, if I tried my fucking hardest. There was nothing, nothing at all, more terrifying than squaring up to myself at three in the morning last night and asking how badly I wanted to be with Shea. How much was I willing to risk? To give?

Everything. All of me, every part. My heart, my body, my molecules, my atoms. My past, my present, my future. My dreams, my hopes, all of it, every single thing; they all belonged to Shea. I didn’t fucking deserve him, and this was most likely going to end in disaster, but could anything be worse than last night? If we tried—if I tried, as hard as I could—was it possible that we could do this? And could I, somehow, be the man for him?

“You mean everything to me.” My words hung between us. “You are everything to me. So let’s do ...

I’m yours. I’m yours as long as you want me. You can smash me to pieces, shatter me into smithereens, and it will all be worth it, just for the chance to be part of your life.

“You said—” Shea frowned. A vertical line appeared between his brows. His gaze dropped, fell to my hands, clasping my iPad like it was a life preserver. “You said you wanted to give me the world.” “I will.” My response was automatic. My desire to leap out of the plane and get to work even more so. Where to start? Did I dig up the foundations of the earth, or did I try to harness the moon? Gather treasures and pile them at his feet? I didn’t know what to do, didn’t even have a shred of a clue. All I had was my hockey stick and my two hands, but, by God, I was going to—

“I don’t want the world.” Shea slipped his hand into mine, wove our fingers together. “I want you, Morgan. I just want you.”

I wanted to give Shea the world. He wanted me to be me. Buying him his favorite flavor of coffee creamer seemed like a step in the right direction.

“No. Whatever you’re thinking, no. What I want is you. All of you, Shea, and that means more than your body or getting you into bed. I want your hopes, your dreams, your desires, and more than that, I want to be responsible for bringing those to life. You want to wait. You want to find your one and only, and I want to be a part of that.” Maybe, maybe, maybe, his one and only could be me

You never got a second chance at a first love, and we were both figuring that out in each other. Shea was mine, and, fuck, I wanted to be his. I wanted this foreverness to last, for the too-much, too-gold, too-perfect high to never fade.

I drew him a purple portrait of us on the back of my napkin: two stick-figure hockey players holding hands with a big heart over their heads. Don’t say I’m not a romantic.

I cooked because when we were on the road, every meal was eaten out or catered in, and good, down-home cooking became a treat. I was determined to spoil Shea every way a man could possibly be spoiled, and this was right up there with his coffee creamer and keeping butter pecan ice cream in my freezer.

Nothing made sense until my fingers moved through his hair as he dissected relativity, and time travel, and dissonance, and how reality was fickle, shifting and twirling and spinning away, until you realized the trick was what was real was only ever what you decided it was.

I wanted to work for it. I wanted to prove to Shea that I could be the man he was waiting for. Most of all, I wanted Shea to choose me, not when he was out of his mind because I’d deep-fried his frontal lobes in lust, but when he was looking at me. Really looking at me, at all of my rough edges and my imperfections and my broken ways. I wanted him to want me forever.

It was the thought of it that fractured my mind. What on earth would it feel like to be gifted with all of Shea’s love, all of his devotion, a lifetime’s worth of his hope, and his decision: you are the one I want forever, you are the one I have waited for. Impossible. Those were impossible dreams.

I told him I did. I told him I chased you.” Shea grinned. “You did. I was minding my own business when you hit me with that smile of yours. You brazen seductor, you.”

I told him I was as serious about you as I was about playing hockey: that I wanted both for the rest of my life.”