Page 61 of Puck the Coach's Son
“Creed.”
“Cap.”
A pause while his hand rests on the doorframe.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
That's the whole of the warning. He goes.
The door closes.
The room is us.
Theo is at his stall in a towel. His towel is tucked at the hip. His hair is wet at the temples from sweat. He's shaking at the hands and not shaking at the mouth. His eyes come up to me for the first time since he walked in this morning. They hold.
“Stall,” I say. “Far wall. Go.”
He goes.
I give it a minute.
Then I go.
The last shower stall is tiled floor to ceiling in white and has a half-wall instead of a curtain, and the water comes on hot. The rink has good water pressure. The steam starts fast.
He's naked under the water when I come in.
His back is to me. His shoulder blades are the same shoulder blades I had against a wall. The water is running down the line of his spine, over his lower back, over the place the towel was hiding. He's pale. He has a swimmer's tan line that says his father let him out of the house sometimes last summer in shorts.
I close the half-wall behind me.
I'm naked already. I undressed at my stall, which is a thing I never do. I walked across the locker room naked because I didn't care. The locker room is empty. The rink is empty. The Zamboni is running somewhere else in the building. Nobody is walking in.
I step under the water behind him.
I put a hand on his hip.
He doesn't jump. He's been waiting for the hand. His body leans back into my body, not hard, a fraction, enough for me to feel the line of him from shoulder to thigh along the front of me.
My cock is hard against the small of his back.
I put my mouth on the side of his neck and I say, very quiet, “Keep it quiet, sweetheart. There's still guys in the building.”
“Yes.”
“Good boy.”
His skin goes a degree hotter where my mouth is. That's a thing I didn't know skin could do.
I pump soap from the wall dispenser into my hand.
Cheap soap. Institutional. It smells like any locker room in any rink in any city. I'm going to put this cheap institutional soap on him. He's going to walk out of here and go to lunch with Paul. The smell of this soap will be on him. Paul will sit across from him at a table and smell the soap and see a rookie who showered at the rink. Paul won't know that the smell of cheap institutional rink soap is going to meanI owned your son's body this afternoonfor the rest of my life.
I put the soap on his shoulders.
I spread it with my hands.
