Page 81 of Puck the Coach's Son
He tips his glass at me.Try again.
“He will.”
I set my beer down. Turn the glass a quarter-turn on the wet ring. “He has press. Then a debrief with the assistants. Then he writes his notes. He doesn't look up from his notes until the notes are done.”
Maddox runs a knuckle along the rim of his pint.
“And when they're done?”
“Then he goes home and watches the tape a second time.”
Maddox is watching my mouth while I list it. He nods, slow.
“And then.”
“Then he sleeps.”
Maddox takes a pull of his beer. Sets the glass down. Runs his tongue along his lower lip. The scrape on his neck moves when he swallows.
“So I've got a few hours.”
I don't know what to do with my hands. I put them around the pint glass. I look at the scratched surface of the table. There is a heart scratched into it with someone's keys and the initials are rubbed out. I can't meet his eyes.
“Theo.”
I look up.
“What?” he says. “You got shy?”
“No.”
“Then look at me when I'm talking to you.”
I look at him.
He leans forward. His forearms on the table. His forearms are huge. I've seen them a thousand times now and they still stop me.
“Let's talk about some things,” he says.
What we talk about, in no order, over the next hour and two more beers each:
Where he grew up. A town in northern Michigan I have never been to. A mother who left. A father who drank. A neighbor who put him on skates at four because the neighbor couldn't stand the noise of a kid in a thin-walled duplex. An older brother in prison for something he won't say out loud. The fact that he hasn't been home in six years and doesn't plan to go back.
Where I grew up. Everywhere. Wherever Paul was coaching. The longest we ever lived in one place was a year and a half in Sault Ste. Marie when I was nine and I still dream about that house sometimes. The fact that I don't have a friend I've kept since I was twelve because you can't keep friends when you leave every ten months. The fact that I used to think that was normal.
Hockey. He thinks Paul's system's too rigid and will break the team by Christmas. I think Paul's system's rigid because Paul's system has always been how Paul keeps a team alive. He laughs at me a little when I say that. Not cruel. He drinks his beer and saysfair, and I feel something in my chest do a small thing it's never done before. I've never been taken seriously by a grown man about hockey. Paul doesn't take me seriously. Paul tells me what I've done wrong.
Sex.
We get to sex because he decides we're getting to sex. He sets his glass down and he looks at me across the table and he says, “Here's the part where I tell you what I want.”
My stomach drops. Not in a bad way. Like the first pull of a rollercoaster.
“Okay.”
“I want to fuck you.”
I know this. I've known this since the first practice. He's said it to me fifteen different ways in fifteen different hallways and a storage closet and a bench. But he's never said it straight, no theater, no whispering under a stadium roar. He's never said it sitting across a table in a booth with his hands flat and his eyes level.
