Page 18 of Puck the Coach's Son
“What?”
“Is it real, Mad Dog? Or is it you fucking with Paul?”
I want to sayfucking with Paul.
I want to say it so badly I can feel the shape of it in my mouth.
The shape of it in my mouth doesn't fit right anymore.
“Phoenix.”
He waits. He is a good enough captain to let a man find the rest of the sentence. I can't find the rest of the sentence.
“Go home, Creed. Sleep it off. We'll talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
He goes back inside. I stand on the sidewalk outside the bar. The bouncer, who knows my face, nods at me and does not ask what happened, because bouncers who keep their jobs don't ask.
I start walking.
I don't call a car. I don't go home. I start walking, because the thing in my chest will not sit still, and I have never in my adult life had a thing in my chest that would not sit still.
I go three blocks. I go five. The street is a bar street and the bar street thins out as I get further from Vigil. At the corner of Eighth and something I don't catch, I stop and I stand on the curb and I do a thing I never do, which is I check in with my body.
My hand hurts. Good.
My jaw is set and my shoulders are up and my chest is doing the thing the chest does when you have run up a hill and the lungs haven't caught on yet. I wasn't running. I was walking. I'm not out of breath from a walk.
My dick is half-hard and has been since I said what I said in the bar.
The walk home is thirty-five minutes if I take the direct route. I take the direct route. I do not jerk off on a park bench, which is what a less disciplined version of me would do and what tomorrow-me is going to end up doing anyway if today-me doesn't make it to a bed.
I try the frame again.
This is about Paul,I tell the sidewalk.
The sidewalk passes along beneath me and says nothing, because the sidewalk lives in the world where I broke the cheek of a guy I've known three years over another guy I've known three days, and the sidewalk is not obligated to agree with the frame.
I keep walking.
I keep walking because there is a twenty-year-old somewhere in this city, in a kitchen with his father, or in a car driving home from a bar he didn't want to be at, or sitting on the edge of a bed with his shoes on, and he heard me say it. He heard me saythe only person who fucks Theo is me.He heard it in front of every man who has ever chirped him. He heard it from the mouth of the enforcer who told him in a shower stall twenty-four hours ago to get on his knees.
I want to know what his face did when I said it.
I want to know more than I've wanted to know anything since I learned to want things.
I keep walking.
5
THEO
The only person who fucks Theo is me.
That's the sentence that ate the bar.
It came out of Maddox Creed's mouth about four seconds ago and it's still in the air like smoke in a room where somebody just burned toast. It'll be in the air forever.
