Page 30 of Puck the Coach's Son
I take my head out of my hands.
I look at the sky.
The sky is the kind a city has, where the clouds are orange from the light below. No stars. I haven't seen a star since I moved out of my grandmother's house at seventeen.
“You're in trouble, Creed.”
I say it out loud to the bench.
The bench doesn't answer.
“You're in a lot of trouble.”
The bench continues not to answer.
I laugh. It isn't a laugh. It's the shape a laugh takes when there's nothing in it. I laugh at the bench. The bench is unmoved.
Here's what I do.
I don't send the text to Lila.
I don't send the text to Cody.
I don't send the text to Miranda.
I don't text the number I have for the woman at the gym who isn't one of my regular three but who told me at a party once that I could call her whenever.
I don't text Theo. I don't have Theo's number. Theo's phone is probably on a counter in an apartment whose address I don't know. If I had Theo's number, his address, and his permission, I'd be in Theo's bedroom inside an hour. The rest of my career would be a thing I was remembering.
I sit on a bench in a park at night in the cold.
I undo my belt.
I've never done this in public in my life.
I've done a lot of things in my life. I've fought men in alleys who were bigger than me and walked out with their wallets. I've fucked women on the kitchen counters of men who paid my way through juniors. I've drunk things I shouldn't have drunk, with people I shouldn't have known, in rooms I shouldn't have been in. I haven't masturbated on a park bench.
I have a reason.
The reason is I can't go home yet. If I go home, I’ll call Lila. I’ll let her come over. I’ll use her body to put the thing in me somewhere. Tomorrow I’ll have to look at my face in the bathroom mirror and know that I used a woman who was kind to me as a dumpster for a feeling I had about a man. The reason is I can’t go home yet. The reason is the body will do what the body does. The body will do it tonight. I’m going to choose where.
I choose a bench.
I pick one that has enough dark between the streetlights. I sit with my back to the path, facing the river. My jacket is long. I can make this unreadable from any distance over three feet. Anyone walking up is going to see a man sitting on a bench. If they see more than that, they’re looking for it. If they’re looking for it, they have bigger problems than me.
I close my eyes.
I don’t think about Lila.
I don’t think about Cody.
I don’t think about a single one of the bodies I know how to use.
I think about him.
I think about his shoulder blades against the brick. His pulse under my fingers. The shake. The sound he made that wasn’t a word. How his face opened when I saidI’m gonna do it in this alley,like a man who’s found religion against his will. I think about the heat of him through the shirt. His hips tilting up toward my hand before my hand got anywhere near them. He was going to come in his jeans. He was going to come in his jeans if I’d left my hand on his stomach another thirty seconds. I know this the way I know how to read a rink. He was there. He was there and he didn’t know he was there, and that’s the purest version of wanting a person I’ve ever seen in my life.
I think about his mouth.
