Page 28 of Puck the Coach's Son
I want things I don't want to want.
I put the phone down face-up on the bar.
I pick up another whiskey.
“Creed.”
Phoenix. Behind me.
I don't turn.
“Don't,” I say.
“Don't what?”
“Whatever you came over here to say.”
He sets his empty beer on the bar next to my hand. He doesn't sit on the stool beside me. He stays standing. I know what this is. He's standing so he's taller than me. Captain move. I let him have it because if I stand up, he'll sit down and we can do this for an hour.
“You came back in.”
“Observant.”
He turns his glass a quarter turn on the bar.
“I told you to go home.”
“I heard you.”
“And.”
I swirl the ice in my whiskey.
“And I came back in.”
He exhales through his nose. A quiet exhale. The kind a man makes when he isn't yelling at you on purpose.
“Maddox.”
I look at him. He doesn't call me Maddox. He calls me Creed or Mad Dog. Maddox is for my mother, who's dead, and for the old trainer at the Rapids who died last year, and for Phoenix when Phoenix is serious enough to step out of the nicknames.
“What.”
His jaw works. He looks at the bottles behind the bar and then at me.
“Coach came in that front door. Coach came in, walked past me, and took his son out that front door. Theo's face. Tell me you saw his face.”
“I saw his face.”
He nods once, slow.
“Then you know.”
I know.
I knew when I released his jaw in the alley and stepped back. I knew when I watched him walk out the alley door on legs that weren't his. I knew the second Grayson saidcoachand Theo made the noise he made, because it was the noise of a twenty-year-old who's been trained to fear his father like a dog trained not to bark. I knew.
I knew and I came back in.
