Page 35 of Payback On The Ice

Can I come, please⁠—

I turn the water off.

I'm not stupid. I know exactly what I did in Doug's cage this morning, and I know it had nothing to do with Nico. Nothing. Not one second of it. I wasn't thinking about my brother when I had my hand around Theo Lindqvist's cock and he was begging me to let him come. I wasn't thinking about the boards or the clip or April.

I was thinking about him.

That's the problem.

So I fix it.

"Nobody talks to him," I tell Jace on Wednesday morning, in the kitchen, before Lindqvist comes down.

Jace has his head in the fridge. "Nobody does talk to him."

"Wes talks to him. The freshmen talk to him on the bus. Okoye passed him the puck on a two-on-one last week."

"That's because he was open, man."

"Nobody talks to him."

Jace shuts the fridge. He looks at me with a container of yogurt in his hand, and something on his face changes, like he's noticing something he hasn't noticed before. Then it goes away. Jace doesn't like noticing things. It's why he's a good captain. He does what the room needs and doesn't ask why.

"Okay, D," he says. "Your call."

So nobody talks to him.

It goes around the room in a day. I watch it happen. Wednesday at lunch the freshman who's been sitting next to him on the bus, a kid named Petey from Bemidji with braces, gets up and moves when Lindqvist sits down. In the hall, guys who said hey last week walk past him like he's a fire extinguisher. In the weight room, nobody will spot him. He benches by himself, light, with the bar on the safeties.

He doesn't say anything about it. He just smiles. Wider every day.

Thursday at the Lantern he sits at the card table and Marcy brings him two bread baskets and he eats both, and he laughs at something on his phone, loud enough for the long table to hear. When I look up, he's looking at me. Right at me. He lifts his water glass.

I look down at my plate.

Saturday, I make it a team dinner. Pizza at the house. Twelve guys around the kitchen and the living room with a game on the TV, and one card table I bring up from the basement and set up next to the recycling bins, with one folding chair.

He looks at it. He looks at me.

"Seriously?"

"Sit."

He sits. He waits with his hands in his lap until I tell him to eat. Gunnar thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.

On the ice, it's worse. I make him collect pucks after every drill. I make him carry the water bottles out to the bench before practice, all thirty of them, in two trips, while the team watches from the boards. I make him wait at the end of the bench in the third period of Friday's game when we're up by four and Halvorsen wants to roll all four lines. Halvorsen looks at me when I say not him. But he doesn't put him in.

Every one of those things, I tell myself, is about Nico.

None of them are.

The mornings don't stop.

He doesn't miss on purpose again. He comes at me every day at six like he's trying to put a puck through my chest and out my back, and I stop him. Tuesday two for five. Wednesday one for five. Thursday two for five. I stop him because I'm better than he is. Because I've been doing this since I was six years old in a basement in Duluth with Nico firing tennis balls at me off the washing machine.

I stop him because if he gets to five, he walks away.

I don't let myself think about that one.