All Your Tomorrows

Then

Imagine you’re a good ‘Berta boy, born and raised in next year country, with the wind whipping across the barren Canadian plains and rolling off the frozen north. Trucks rolling along Yellowhead Highway, engine brakes grinding at three in the morning. Train whistles at noon and midnight. Feet of snow in winter, the drifts building up taller than your dad, and it was a good day if the mercury climbed above zero.  Summers buzzed with honey bees drunkenly zooming from wildflower to wildflower and, in almost perfect imitation, boys from the neighborhood running wild and free, with nothing but the wide prairie sky to contain all that boisterous boyhood.

Growing up a ‘Berta boy means hockey, and lots of it. Winter on rivers and lakes and playing in flooded backyard frozen over. Summers in the streets, scuffed tennis shoes dragging and homemade sticks slamming against pavement. No matter the season, your knuckles are always busted, your cheeks always bright red, and your lips hopelessly chapped and fraying.

Anything before age six is a blur: chasing the big kids, the older ones—seven, eight, nine years old, impossibly grown—who are already playing on youth hockey teams, with real sweaters and real skates and real equipment. You’re breathlessly waiting for your birthday, the big birthday; six years old is finally old enough to join your first team in youth hockey. 

Finally, finally, finally, the candles are on the cake. The next day, you and your dad are at the rink, signing up. All of the teams are the Lil’ versions of those big kid teams that everyone goes to watch play on Friday and Saturday nights. Junior A hockey is the biggest dream a boy under ten can dream, and maybe, one day, you’ll play for the Junior A Northern Kodiaks, too. For now, it’s the Lil’ Kodiaks, and it’s Year 1 of youth hockey.

Finally, finally, finally, you have a real team sweater, and you’re skating on a real rink, going to real practices. Twice a week, hockey is a part of your real life, scheduled around school and spelling tests and learn-to-read packets. There are boards and big lights and bleachers where the parents sit and huddle over hot chocolate. You’re the biggest kid in your group of six-year-olds, so Coach—who also coaches baseball in spring and teaches shop class at the high school—hands you a pair of kid-sized goalie pads and says, “Why don’t you try being in net?”

Finally, finally, finally. It’s game time, your first real game, and you’re suited up, strapped and lashed and buckled into all that gear. It’s hard to move, and kind of hard to see, but who cares? You’re on real ice, and that announcer is reading out your name. All the parents on those three-tiered bleachers are here to watch your game, watch you play. This must be exactly what Junior A hockey feels like. No, no; this must be what the show, the NHL, feels like.

The whistle blows. Immediately, a teammate slips and falls. The rink is fantastically huge to a kid, and Year 1 youth hockey skating can’t be described as anything more than clodding along at a snail’s pace. Maybe a snail would beat some of these kids, too, if they fell like that all the time. The game is as graceful as sugar-drunk bees swarming spilled fruit punch and going head first into glass windows.

But you’re all in the same team sweaters that are sponsored by the local auto shop, the one that offers free jumps in winter when everyone goes to watch those Junior A teenagers play, even though it’s negative crazy numbers and everyone’s car batteries turn into rocks. Your thoughts are too wild. The rink is too bright, too crisp, too vivid. The lights bounce off the ice, shoot white glares like starbursts. Your first game. All of it is happening too fast. O Canada, the too-big pads weighing down your body, the careful skid into the goal net—don’t fall, all the parents are watching. It’s happening at warp speed, a million miles an hour—to you at least. Heart racing, your six-year-old body zooming. Skates kerchunk–kerchunk against the ice, inelegant skids and stomps from kids who don’t know how to glide yet. Two of your teammates have fallen—splat—right on their butts, again, like ladybugs in summertime that wave their legs and can’t get right-side up until you nudge them along with your fingertip. One of the referees, a middle schooler, helps them get back to their wobbly skates.

Then—

A breakaway. The other team, those other kids, from that town impossibly far away—eighteen kilometers up Yellowhead, an entire solar system’s distance—and their forward is tearing toward you, puck wild in front of their barely-controlled stick. This forward is only six years old, too, so the puck handling is more of a chase and lunge than beautiful control, but. He’s still coming right at you, and you’re in net. You’re between him and the first goal of his life.

Every kid dreams about this moment: their game, first goal. Big bright lights, gasping, screaming parents, cheering and clapping and hollering your name. Right now, all those parents are on their feet, and the arena is quaking with their shouts: go go go!

The second riser, four in from the left: that’s where your parents are, and there’s your dad standing above the crowd, his arms up, hands clenched by his face, shouting, “C’mon, son, you can do it!”

The forward racing pell-mell at you is fifty-two pounds of six years old, Baby Wayne Gretzky, his eyes locked on the net and absolutely determined to score. It’s all he’s thought about for his entire childhood. It’s all his dad has talked to him about for two years: his first goal. His start down the path, that path, the one that leads to impossible dreams. This is his day. He’s dreamed about it, he’s hungered for it, he wants it, and he wants the acclaim and the prestige and the beaming look of joy on his dad’s face when he gets it.

All that’s in his way is you.

All those backyards. All those hose-filled frozen rinks. All those summers in the street hurling dead tennis balls and skidding the toes of your sneakers on the ground until your toes poked out of the ruined rubber. All the days and nights trying to emulate the big kids, trying to show off a move you just had to copy, and ignoring your mom and dad when they hollered at you to come inside and wash up for dinner. All of that, for right now.

Locked on. Squared up. Baby Gretzky needs about twenty seconds to line up for the shot, dusting off the puck this way and that and trying to get his skates beneath him, to center his hips and his ankles so he doesn’t swing himself all the way around instead of hit the puck. Someone down the ice has fallen again; they’ll be playing baseball in spring and will forget they ever liked hockey, and will stop showing up for the street games and the backyard ice rinks. The parents are still screaming, that excited parent cry that happens right before your kid is about to do something magical. Your dad has his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting, “You can do it, Lawson. You can do it!”

Baby Gretzky pulls his swing back, three inches of might on the incoming. Smack, stick to puck, and the rubber saucers for all it’s worth, moving at a wobbly crawl. But it’s airborne. Airborne, which, for a six year old, is like winning every gold at every Olympics, and never mind if the puck is going in the right direction. Airborne is airborne, and if it hits the house, so what? But here, now— A first game, an airborne puck, possibly a first goal. This is what legends are made out of. NHL commentators will replay home video of this Year 1 youth hockey game and say this was when everyone knew Baby Gretzky was destined to win the Rocket Richard trophy in the NHL. Right here, right now—

A leg kick, balance on the skate blade. You drop to a half butterfly, one knee bent, and you reach. You reach for all your inches, glove extended, open, waiting. It’s a picture-perfect goalie move, exactly like you used to pose in for the holiday photos your mom took when she made you wear that dorky Christmas sweater for Grandma.

Your bones grow millimeters, your cartilage stretches, your muscles elongate, everything inside of you reaching—

Thunk. Puck in glove, safe and secure, right in the basket. In your hand.

Baby Gretzky doesn’t get his first goal.

You get your first save.

And the bleachers go wild. There’s your dad, jumping up and down, his hands on his head and his smile so huge you can see it above all the other parents. Some of them are groaning, robbed of the experience of seeing Baby Gretzky’s first goal, while the others are clapping and grinning and whistling. You turn to your dad and you raise your glove over your head, accidentally drop the puck on top of your helmet. Thud. The middle schooler referee calls you a dork under his breath as he scoops it up. He rustles your shoulder a bit because he knows you, and you guys have played over summer together, but you forget about that immediately. None of it matters. Nothing matters in the world except for your dad’s smile, wider than you’ve ever seen in your life. You just got your first save, and your dad is proud.  

After, your parents take you out for ice cream, and you eat all of it, all three scoops and every drop of chocolate sauce, even though your stomach hurts a bit and you’re kind of wild with adrenaline and don’t need any sugar to fly higher. Glitter is still sparking at the edges of your eyes. That moment when the puck hit your glove is frozen in time, replaying on your eyelids like a personal highlight reel.

On the bench, Coach had said, “You’re a natural, Murray. You’re going to go places.” That’s replaying a lot, too. Junior A hockey, for sure. Maybe… Maybe even…

You’re six years old, a good ‘Berta boy, playing your first game on the rinks in the big open prairie. Sixteen hundred miles to the south, in Boise, Idaho, Brody Zeagler is chasing the family cat around the dining room with his plastic toy dump truck. He’s two years old, made of giggles and freckles and wild hair, gap-toothed and grinning, and he’s never heard of hockey. He’s never seen a puck or a stick or a pair of skates, and all he knows about ice is that his dad tells him “whoa” whenever they come across a slick patch, and Owen lifts Brody into his arms and carries him safely across, cradling his son close and giving him a kiss on his baby-chunky cheek before he set him down again to toddle off on another adventure.

There’s no reason at all to think that this game, this saved goal, or this perfect, amazing, wonderful day, at all of six years and 2 months and 12 days old, will set you on a collision course with that boy down in Idaho, but it will. It will. This is the very first step.

And tomorrow, the road will unfurl a little bit more, pave a little bit further. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow—

***

So imagine you’re a good ‘Berta boy, and your whole life, you’ve done things the right way. Playing hockey, like all good Canadian boys do. Junior A, baby. You made it. You’re balancing high school and hockey, and though most of your teammates think studying is for losers, you do your homework on the bus and turn it in on time. No one is going to get you with the dihydrogen monoxide scare, not like they got Kevin.

You’re also rocking the net, and you’ve got a save percentage that makes coaches weep. It gets the girls to bite their lips and eye you sideways, too, and the guys all punch your shoulder and say, “Bro, fucking big league beaut there. Hundy-p, bro.”

Your team is in the hunt for the Centennial Cup more often than you’re not. Your dad is still in the bleachers, sometimes, when he can be there, but your mom is long gone. Dad isn’t home a lot, either, with his long haul routes up and down the Yellowhead, crisscrossing all of Western Canada.

So your days are filled with hockey: playing it, thinking about it, dreaming about it. Tossing a puck overhead as you lie on your couch in the apartment you and your dad share over the laundromat downtown. It’s all your dad can afford, after paying for all that hockey.  

The thing is—

The thing is, you’re also thinking about something else, kinda, too. Especially when you’re like this: homework all done, practice over, no game tonight, and everyone on your team is being dumb on the group text, and you tossed your phone face down on the floor an hour ago. Dad’s not home, either. So there’s no one to say don’t.

Two years ago, you had your first kiss with a girl at a pizza party and movie marathon. Everyone hid in the basement and played spin the bottle, turning the TV volume up real loud so the parents thought you were actually watching movies. At the time, it felt like you guys were breaking the law, and the Mounties were going to bust up the game, confiscate that empty Pepsi bottle, and arrest all of the boys. Now the memory feels like child’s play, like the bubbles you’d felt under your skin during that game were for some other reason.

Maybe because of the boy sitting next to you, bouncing on his knees, his hair a little long and curly over the back of his neck, smelling like that teenage body wash that all the boys thought was instant chick magnet juice.

And then, a year later, you kissed Baby Gretzky—not so baby anymore, and definitely not so Gretzky—behind the rink, because—

Well, because. And it was awesome. Way more awesome than kissing Chloe Petterson, who tasted like Cheeto Puffs and Seven-Up, and the buzz you felt after kissing Baby Gretzky was so intense, you floated on fucking air for days.

So you thought about that for a long, long time.

But you try not to think about it anymore. You don’t because when you asked your dad—shy and nervous, picking at the roast beef that had been on sale and the lumpy mashed potatoes on your plate—if there were any hockey players who liked guys, your dad had gone real quiet and then said no. No, there’s no one at all who plays hockey and likes guys, and if you want to play—if you want a shot at anything, son—you’ll keep your mouth shut about that and never say it again.

But, Dad…

You want to be like me? he’d asked. You want to be like me, driving all day and night for your whole life? Going nowhere? You’re supposed to get out of here, Lawson. You’re supposed to have a real life.

And you’d tried to say something, anything, to fix this—

But he’d said, don’t, son. Just don’t.

At the time, you didn’t realize that you were seeing fear in your dad’s eyes, not anger. Not anger, or fury, or disgust, but plain, basic fear. Fear of the world, and fear of what could happen, because all your dad wanted was for you to chase your dreams and get out of that windswept prairie, but maybe the world wasn’t ready for Junior A hockey players who liked boys to see their dreams come true. Maybe the world would turn its back on you if it found out you liked kissing boys more than you liked kissing girls.

So— don’t. Just don’t.

But the thing is—

That’s really hard to do.

***

Imagine you’re a good ‘Berta boy, and you’re the best goalie in the AJHL. Probably, maybe, you should make the jump to the CHL, but that’s also intimidating, because that’s real talent, and—

In Boise, Idaho, Brody Zeagler is sixteen years old. He’s just kissed a boy for the very first time. He knows a lot more about hockey now. Idaho isn’t a big hockey state, not like Minnesota or Michigan or Massachusetts, but people there know Brody’s name. He’s a natural, they say. He’s going to go places. He’ll be the pride of Idaho one day.

This year, you put your name into the draft. Yeah, maybe you won’t go straight to the show, and you know you won’t be picked on day one or in the first, second, or third round. But maybe you’ll go in the fifth. Maybe. All your fingers and toes are crossed.

Your name isn’t called. Not in the fifth round, and not in the sixth. Not in the seventh, even. And then the draft is over and it’s just you and your dad sitting on the couch in your tiny apartment, and Sportsnet has moved on to their next program, and there’s this giant hole opening up inside of you because—

Because this isn’t how it was supposed to be—

This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. After everything—

That first save. You’re going places, Murray.

It was a good goalie year, though. So many were up for grabs, with so many amazing ones coming out of Europe. What were goalies in Europe doing to get so dang good? Canada used to be a goalie farm, and all the best ones in the history of the show were born and raised up north, but now… Czechia and Finland and Russia were sending their best goalies across the Atlantic, and there was no more room for good ‘Berta boys anymore.

All those long drives your dad made, cutting his paycheck in half to pay for your gear. All those years, and all those practices, all those games, and all the teams. All the just don’t. It was supposed to mean something.

But it doesn’t.

And then… and then, and then, the Rocky Mountain Outlaws call.

Imagine you’re a good ‘Berta boy, born and raised right, and all of your dreams are finally, finally, finally coming true. You’re on your way, you’re going to the show, you’re suiting up for the NHL. It’s here. It’s happening.

And it all goes wrong.

***

Now

Flames snapped. Crackled. Darkness wreathed us like a shield, wrapping around the tips of the pines scrapping starlight and peaks of the Rockies that walled us off from the world. Pinpricks of light lay like a beachhead of time overhead, tossed glitter that stuck to the roof of the world. Brody had four hot dogs jammed on the ends of two whittled sticks, turning them over the flames and chattering away.

“Did you know—” Brody was crouched down, flat on his feet and rocking on his heels.

This was the prelude to a Brody Fact, something he’d dug up from the internet to serenade the team with on the plane or on the bus, or in the weight room, or while we were eating. Most of the time, you couldn’t get Brody to quiet down for anything—except for Morgan, of course. Not even duct tape worked. Connor tried once, pushing a little X of stick tape across Brody’s lips, but Brody kept talking right through the tape, until it peeled up at the edges and rolled off.

The only time Brody was quiet was when he was face-first in his phone, scrolling through Wikipedia or trawling the internet, hunting down some bizarre new fact or story to share with everyone. Lips parted just so, eyes bright, phone inches from his face. The closer he leaned in while he read, the more into whatever he was learning. He used to hitch his shoulder into my side on the bus and bounce his knee into my thigh, stare at his phone as he gnawed on Red Vines, the end of that red licorice spinning in a slow circle in time with his chews.

I could have easily followed along. Read what was on his screen and chirped him then or later, or beat him to the punchline when he set the team up with his stories and his facts. But I never did, mostly because, instead of paying attention to whatever he was fascinated by, I paid attention to him. Because I was fascinated by him.

Brody spun the skewer sticks in his fingers like he was rolling a hockey puck on the back of his knuckles. I waited with hot dog buns in hand, kneeling beside him at our hand-dug fire pit. Flickering poppy light painted Brody’s features, turned his sun-kissed cheeks to cherries and his messy hair into waves of copper. He was in my sweatshirt again, my favorite sweatshirt from my team in the AJHL, before the Outlaws got hold of me. The one he’d been wearing the night I got back to my house—after Hailey, after Brody confessed everything, after he went to Shea and showed him the note he’d written—and found Brody waiting for me in the dark, in my kitchen, shredding my napkins to individual fibers. It was the only sweatshirt he wore now. Even in Idaho. Even in front of his parents.

“Did you know, the Great Wall of China isn’t actually visible from space?” he said. “And there’s this whole thing, this whole debate, about what ‘visible’ means, and what even ‘from space’ means. Like, you can see cities pretty clearly from space, yeah? But is a city a ‘thing’, or is it a collection of ‘things?’ If it’s a collection of things, then that doesn’t really count as being impressive enough to say it’s capable of ‘being visible from space.’ But then, what about Google Earth, right? That’s seeing from space. That’s space-based satellites taking pictures of us. There’s probably a satellite overhead right now. Probably a dozen. But they’re using cameras and lenses and magnification, so does that count? Like, if the whole point of bragging about something being ‘visible from space’ was that it was so big you could see it even when you weren’t on the planet, then you can’t cheat and use magnification or whatever. So: how many individual things can you see from space with only your eyes? No telescopes or binoculars or anything.”

“Hmm.” I peered at him. “Are we talking man made?” He nodded. “Structures? Do things like mines count?” There were big pit mines in Canada, way up in the north.

“Mines do count. And yeah, you can totally see those gigantic open mines from space. I mean, you can see the Grand Canyon from space, so it makes sense.” He grinned, though, proud that I had figured out his puzzle. “What’s something else?”

Your smile. “I would have guessed the Great Wall, so I’m out of ideas after mines.”

“The cooling pond at Chernobyl.” He arched his eyebrows, face pulled into a combination of equal parts shocked and impressed. “Like, damn. The cooling pond for a nuclear reactor is so large you can see it from space?”

He whistled, then pulled back a skewer and tested the end of the dog. The skin was charred and bubbly all the way around. Perfection, and done. Brody swung the skewers my way, like he was Edward Scissorhands with extraordinarily long blades, and tried to maneuver the dogs into my buns. He missed by a mile, but kept trying, snort laughing as he nearly lost his balance. I grabbed the dogs with the buns and peeled them off the skewers two by two before he tripped and went sideways into the fire.

We sat next to each other, cross-legged and shoulder to shoulder. He jabbed the skewers into the sand ring we’d poured around the fire pit, and I passed him two of the hot dogs. He leaned into my side and hummed, a Brody sound, noise that meant happiness and contentment and rightness. He was never quiet by choice. Sound erupted from him: little sighs and breaths and whispered words, taps of his feet or his fingers. He even chewed loudly, and while we munched, he shot me a smile with both of his cheeks bulging, pouched with bun and dog.

This was summer, and Brody and I had been together for every day of it, from Boulder to Boise and now to here, wherever we were, deep in the Rocky Mountains. We’d driven until the road ended, then turned on a track and kept going, bouncing through the forest until it felt like we’d left reality behind. Brody had said he wanted to go someplace where there was only him and me and nothing else in the world, and he wanted to stay there until— Well, until.

We were still figuring out the until.

We’d had two perfect days here so far. Two days of sunshine and joy, of hiking through the woods and exploring our new world.

Less than a mile away from where we’d parked my truck, we found a hidden lake fed by snowmelt and spring run-off. The water was shockingly brisk, and we had to work our way in to our knees inch by inch, gasping at every step and playing grab hands, pretending to hurl each other into deeper waters and then backing away, laughing so loud our stomachs hurt.

One stretch of the lake had been beaten over time with soft wind and lapping waves enough to form a sandy shore, and we’d collapsed on the sun-baked stretch and toe wrestled while we warmed up from the inside out. We were flicking sand back and forth at each other with our feet, giggling and shit talking, and we were about to descend into all-out leg wrestling any moment, I could tell.

And then Brody went quiet, so suddenly, so completely. He’d been laughing so loud and bright the ring of it was bouncing off the baby blue sky, so happy-sounding, so much like before, and then—

Every part of him drew inward. He shifted away, sitting with a stiff back and his elbows hooked around his spread knees as he stared at the lake. He gnawed on his lip, and his toes curled and hid in the sand. No more playing.

I ran my hand up and down his back and waited. We said nothing, not for a long time. Just sat there together, in the stillness and the silence as Brody clawed his way through the darkness that had seized hold of him and had yanked him out of that perfect afternoon and that beautiful moment and had plunged him back into a nightmare.

***

We didn’t start our summer in the mountains.

Summer began the morning after everything imploded. Our season ended as soon as Coates floored it in his Porsche. We were all finished, done, that’s a wrap, the moment he decided to crash back into our lives. All twenty of us went plunging into remembered nightmares, reliving the worst of our personal highlight reels.

For me, those long hours of that first night, when I held Brody on the couch and replayed each and every moment and memory I had of him and me, are an impenetrable shroud in my soul. I can’t go near that night. It’s too much darkness and heart-shattered wailing.

That night ended, though. Dawn came, and with it, Morgan, and Brody’s parents, too. I was a mess, a grade-A mess, inside out and upside down, and when he walked out that door to go meet with Hailey and start putting himself back together, I—

I lost hours sitting on the porch steps at the rookie house. Hours and hours of chasing memories and digging a hole in the grass with my boot heel, gnawing a blister into my lip as my hands shook. My nightmares ran wild and free, roaring like that big Alberta wind used to do, soaring down from the Northern Territories and freezing my soul solid. I saw Coates and Brody, and I saw that corner of the dressing room, the one I’d sat beside all year long, where Brody had—

Howling wind inside of me. It circled my heart, looping around and around and around, loud as a scream.

All day, I waited for something, some sign or signal or anything at all, that would show me what to do and how to do it. Be there, Morgan had said. Be there. Easy for Morgan to say. We weren’t all built into superheroes like he was. I’d tried, over summer, to save Brody, but…

I didn’t have a hero’s history. God, I wish I had. I wished I had been the hero of Brody’s life, and that I had been strong enough to throw myself down the ice like Morgan had the very first day he was in Boulder. That I had hurled Coates to the ice and rearranged his face, and then gone to Brody after and taken care of him. Pulled a gorgeous smile out of his gorgeous face.

I waited, and wondered, and Brody finally texted me in the afternoon, long after I’d ruined the lawn. He sent me a disjointed message, something I could tell he’d typed out while his hands were shaking and he couldn’t really see the screen well enough through his tears to proofread. He’d met Hailey. Talked to her. Morgan had stayed through the worst of it. But it was hard to rip the seal off, and it was supposed to feel better, but it didn’t. Not yet. He was taking a break, texting in the bathroom, while Hailey talked to his parents, and could Lawson call if he wasn’t busy?

I called. Brody sniffled, and everything went Uno reverse as I had to be the one to chatter and fill the silence. Who knows what I rambled about: the squirrels in the trees, the sun arcing across the sky, the lawnmower droning a couple houses down the block. I talked like our two cell phones had a string tying us to each other, and the only way I could reach Brody was if I crawled my way to him, word by word, breath by breath, teary-filled sniffle by teary-filled sniffle.

Brody told me they were going to see Shea in a few hours, and that he was going to tell Shea everything. What do you say to that? I’d gone with “good luck” and then pushed my forehead into the side of my fist and glared at the dug-up grass at my feet, and then viciously scraped my heel into the foot-deep ditch I’d made.

“Are you coming home later?” Brody asked.

“You still want me to?”

“Yeah.”

“Um.” Are you sure are you sure are you sure— “Um, okay. Yeah. I’ll be there. Text me when you’re back from seeing Shea, and I’ll come over.”

He didn’t text again until hours later. It was almost ten p.m. when I drove the three minutes from the rookie house back to mine, and then pulled into my driveway next to Owen and Hazel’s farm truck.

My house was church quiet when I walked in. I heard the faint drip-drip of the faucet in the hall bathroom that I’d been meaning to fix but had always put off because any time I had a spare moment over the past ten months, I was going to the rookie house. (To Brody, I was going to Brody.) The only light came from the overhead above the stove and a single lamp in the living room. Owen and Hazel must have already turned in. They were probably exhausted, high-tailing it across two and a half states to get to Boulder by dawn. If they were in the guest bedroom, then Brody was probably—

“Lawson?”

God, there he was. Right there. Brody was at my table, curled over his phone and a pile of shredded paper fibers that used to be my napkins. The napkin holder I kept next to the bowl of fruit was empty, and Brody had shreds of fuzz around his fingernails.

He looked awful and beautiful at the same time. Red face, sunken eyes, bitten lips, his hair a mess. Exhausted, down to his soul exhausted, a little like he’d looked last summer, before Morgan had shown up.

He was wearing my sweatshirt, too. My old and broken-in one from my AJHL team. That was my favorite sweatshirt, with the old and faded logo and the stretched-out sleeves. It was massive on him, completely swallowed him up. The shoulder seam was practically on his biceps.

I crossed my kitchen at the same time Brody stood from his chair, and I reached him before he took a single step. My arms went around him, and he melted into me, his face buried in my chest as he breathed out like it was the first exhale of his day.

“You’re home.” His voice was soft, ragged and rough and frayed on the edges, like he’d spent all day talking. Brody was a champion talker, and hours of ramble never fazed him, but today…

I sank my face into his hair. He smelled like my shampoo. “You gotta be exhausted.” My lips moved against his scalp. “You need to sleep.”

His fingers curled around my waist, twisted into the hem of my T-shirt. “Um, ‘bout that…” He pulled back, and our eyes met. His were too bright, overglazed with wetness, bloodshot with the day’s weight. “Can I stay with you?”

He was already in my house—

It took a few seconds for my brain to compute his meaning, to understand what he was asking for. Heat burned through me, a wave of it, like I’d been bathed in fire. He wasn’t asking that. There was no way, at all, in the universe, he was asking for that.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he breathed.

You’ll never be alone. I nodded. “Of course you can.”

Brody had already showered and raided my dresser for a pair of my boxers and my sweatshirt, so he was ready to climb into bed as soon as we walked into my bedroom. I changed in my bathroom and did some deep breathing while I clung to the counter and watched Brody in my mirror’s reflection as he slid into the unused half of my king bed.

We hadn’t turned on any lights on our way upstairs, and when I flicked off the bathroom light, we were plunged into darkness.

“Oops.” Brody’s cell phone flared, lighting up the underside of his face like he was telling ghost stories at Boy Scout camp. He held his phone up so it would cast a glow for me to walk by, as if this wasn’t my bedroom in my house and I could tiptoe from my bathroom to my bed in the pitch black without opening my eyes. It was a sweet gesture, something so Brody-like, so wonderfully him that I tripped on my way to the bed, ran into the footboard that had been in the same place it always had, for two years now. I couldn’t help it; I was too mesmerized by the faint light crawling across the high points of his face and curling around his cheeks and his rounded jaw and slipping up into his unruly hair like angel’s fingers.

Something inside of Brody had settled as we’d climbed the stairs, and there he was, sitting in my bed like that had been all he’d wanted to do, as if for hours, he’d been imagining taking over half of my mattress and curling up beside me.

Unlike him, I was not settled or serene, and I had not been imagining this. Not today.

Brody waited until I’d slipped between the sheets to click off his screen. Darkness descended like a snap, but the image of Brody sitting up against my headboard stayed bright, an outline against my retina that clung to my optic nerves. Sheets rustled. The mattress dipped, bounced. Warmth flowed across the uncrossable center line of my bed. A shimmy, a wiggle, a pillow dragging, and then I felt Brody’s breath against my face. “Thanks,” he whispered. His breath smelled like my toothpaste.

I was aware of him, every inch of him, from his toes to his open eyes. The weight of his gaze bore down on me, even in this too-dark room. His knees were bent, edging across that middle space, venturing close enough that the skin on pajama-covered thighs buzzed. If I walked my fingers across the cotton sheets, I’d reach him before my arm was straight. I could hear his breathing. I could almost hear his heart beating.

Could he hear mine? Could he hear how much it was racing?

“Brody.” My voice was less than a whisper.

His fingertip brushed my cheek, softer than a sigh.

I caught his hand, pulled his fingers to my lips. Rested them there, skin to my open mouth, just breathing against him. His exhales were speeding up. His fingers curled around my chin, cradled my face.

“You know how I feel about you,” I whispered. “Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Should I—” I nuzzled his palm, rested my lips against the callus of his thumb. “Do I need to not? Not feel like this? If you need me to not, if you need me to stop, just say so—”

I couldn’t stop, not ever, but I could bury these feelings where Brody would never see them again. If that’s what he needed—if what he needed most was for his friend to not be in love with him, then that’s what I would give him. I’d give him anything. Everything. All he had to do was ask.

“No,” Brody breathed. “No, don’t stop.”

The noise I made— I dragged his knuckles to my forehead, squeezed my eyes closed. Breathed in the skin at his wrist, and tried not to sob. “I’ll never, ever— I’ll never push. I’ll never ask, even. I’ll never do anything to hurt you. I love you, Brody. And it’s okay if you don’t, you know. You don’t have to love me back.”

“But I do.” His voice was a broken, weary mess, and he clenched my hand so hard I thought he’d rip my fingers off. “I do, Lawson, but I’m broken. When everything bad happened, last summer, I unplugged everything. It’s like I had all these plugs to all these different parts of me, hockey and family and friends and video games and—” he’d stuttered “—and falling in love, and I ripped them all out. I ripped them all out, and I’ve been trying to plug them back in ever since, but not everything has come back. So I do… feel about you, but things also aren’t working right because I’m broken now, because of what I did. And I don’t know how long it’s going to take to not be broken, or if I’m ever going to not be broken. I don’t…” His voice wavered. “I don’t know what I can give you. I don’t know if I’m worth waiting for. Maybe I’m not gonna get better? You could have anyone—”

“Brody, I’ll love you forever. That’s never going to change.”

He curled into me and clung to my sides, hid his face in my throat, pressed his open lips against my skin and shivered. I held him for hours, while he slept and while he cried and while he fought off nightmares, shaking him awake so he could see my face and know he was in my arms and safe. I’m here. Each time, he’d shoot me a teary-eyed smile and push himself closer to me, as if he could climb inside my skin and find safety there. By morning, he was plastered to me, and I had my arms all the way around him, holding him as tight as I could.

We were together every moment we could be from that night forward. We were never farther than an arm reach away from one another, existing within each other’s orbit, close enough to pull together in a single second. Brody leaned into my side at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he glued his hip and his thigh and his knee and his calf to me whenever we sat beside each other on my couch. I was there for his sessions with Hailey, sitting with him while Owen and Hazel shared the couch cushion on Brody’s other side.

I had no idea what his mom and dad thought, back then, but they accepted my place at Brody’s side and in his life as if it had always been a fact of life. Where Brody was, Lawson was, too. We didn’t exist without each other.

Those two games and four days in Winnipeg, when I had to leave Boulder and play with the team and leave Brody and Owen and Hazel in my house, were four of the hardest days of my life.

Constant texting kept us together. He sent me selfies every hour. Him and his parents going out to eat or going for a hike. Him in the gym at the rookie house, sweat-soaked and disheveled. The three of them in the back yard, soaking up the sun.

Later, him in my bed, bundled up in my hoodie and holding my pillow against his chest, every light in the room blazing, his eyes a little too wide and too bright and his lips thin and tight, his fear bleeding through the photo at the thought of facing a night alone. I called him from the hotel as soon as I saw that photo, and we talked about nothing for the next three hours, chattering about hockey stats and sitcoms and the team and how Owen was trying to teach Brody about bird identification, but Brody had never grown out of the phase where all birds looked like crayon Vs on a sheet of paper, so he was completely lost as Owen pointed into the trees and described a rare Rocky Mountain fluttering breasted winged whatever. Brody had uh-huhed and nodded while Hazel had hidden her smile and checked off the rare whatever bird in Owen’s special bird watching app.

We talked until Brody fell asleep, and then I kept the line open, listening to him breathe as kept my phone near me. Brushing my teeth, getting ready for bed. Morgan was already asleep, and his snores mixed with Brody’s as I stared at my phone and listened to Brody sleep for hours. Eventually, his soft snores and the rustle of his hair against the pillow, one thousand miles away, lulled me to rest.

I woke in the morning with our line still open, Brody awake and puttering in my kitchen, humming to himself as he made coffee. “Morning,” he’d said, when I groaned and buried my face in the mattress.

It was so close to being there. I could hear everything. I could picture it all so clearly. “Morning,” I’d whispered. “Making breakfast?”

“Yeah. You want some? I’m gonna make omelets for Mom and Dad.”

“I bought more bell peppers that they like. And there’s fresh tomatoes in the fridge.”

“Sweet, thanks. Hey, did you know bell peppers are actually fruits? So Mom and Dad are actually eating a fruit omelet, which sounds gross. Red bell peppers have twice as much vitamin C as green ones, too.”

“Good thing I bought red ones.”

“You just like them ’cause they’re sweeter.”

Forget the game. Forget the playoffs. I wanted to be home, with Brody, sitting at my kitchen table while he moved around my kitchen and sang beneath his breath and ran off a drum beat against the frying pan with his spatula and a spoon. “I’ll be home soon,” I said. “Make me a fruit omelet then?”

“I’ll make you the best fruit omelet you’ve ever had.” He didn’t say anything else, not “Good luck at the game” or “Kick ass tonight.” We were three days and two games away from ending the season and going home, which is all we wanted to do. It wasn’t right, playing without Shea and Brody. It wasn’t right to chase the dream we’d started together when they’d been ripped away from our sides.

After the final game, and after Brody and Shea joined us in Minneapolis with their parents, and after the flight back, when Brody and I sat beside each other and held hands and not a single one of our teammates or Brody’s parents did a double take, Owen and Hazel invited me to their ranch over the summer.

“Come with Brody,” Hazel said. “Stay for the whole summer, if you’d like. We’d love to have you.”

***

Boise was a dream.

We took my truck, and we parked Brody’s Wrangler inside my garage for the rest of summer.

The whole drive there, Brody was chattering a mile a minute, regaling me with stories about growing up on the ranch and chasing sheep and learning how to skate on the frozen pond behind his house, and then how he’d be playing street hockey on the dirt laneway with his friends, obsessed, suddenly, with this game he’d casually picked up. He couldn’t get enough hockey. Hockey everywhere, all the time, summer, spring, and fall, and, of course, winter. Hockey posters in his bedroom, hockey video games in his PlayStation, hockey books on his shelves. Roller skates and ice skates and pucks and tennis balls and sticks. Owen drove him to the Boise rink almost every day for open skate, and then, once he joined a league, for practice.

“Dad kept all my trophies,” he said. “He’ll show you every single one. And he’ll tell you the stories behind them all, too.”

“I can’t wait.”

We’d held hands from Fort Collins to Green River, then from Green River to Pocatello, and then on to Mountain Home and into the outskirts of Boise. I bought him a pack of Red Vines when we stopped for gas, and I watched the ends of his licorice wag and wave between his lips as he chattered away, melting the miles and the hours of our drive.

The ranch house was south of town, on a sprawl of land that seemed to run forever. It was cut straight from a western fairy tale, with a red barn and a big horse paddock, and fields stretching over loping hills into the sunrises and sunsets. There was an L-shaped back porch surrounding the yard where Brody grew up, with a picnic table, a grill, and a patch of lawn that Owen had played with Brody on for eighteen years. Brody learned how to catch and throw and kick a football, a baseball, a soccer ball, right there. Later, he and Owen played field hockey together, with Hazel standing in goal until she said it was time to cook dinner and lined up Brody’s stuffed animals to play goalie instead. Most summer days when Brody was growing up, they ate at the picnic table in the yard, with Brody’s balls and sticks and stuffed animals in a haphazard heap beside them. Brody needed a booster seat at the picnic table until he was ten years old. After dinner, Owen would take the ATV out to make the rounds, buckling Brody into the seat in front of him and tightening the chin strap on his helmet.

I heard all the stories from Owen and Hazel: Brody the toddler learning how to swing at a T-ball and missing more often than he hit. Owen pitching a football underhand to Brody, who was pumping his legs across the yard and trying to reach for the epic catch, and whiffing by a good yard or three. Brody learning how to dribble a basketball in the driveway and getting popped in the face on the second bounce. “He wasn’t what you’d call athletically gifted,” Hazel said, laughing. “Until he found hockey.”

They took me on a tour of their trophy room, where they’d kept every one of Brody’s youth league memorabilia. They could recite the teams and the championships and the stories surrounding each stick, each photo, each jersey, and each mass-produced trophy. The pizzeria-sponsored U-9 after school club league, which was just a handful of kids and so few teams that everyone made the playoffs. The Mountain Home Wee Rough Riders, when Brody got his first goal and people started learning his name. Brody Zeagler had been a PE teacher’s worst nightmare for years, until he turned seven and played on the Lil’ Howlers, and his bumbling athleticism morphed into a grace on ice that took him—and everyone—by surprise. He skated like he was born to slap on skates, puck handled like he’d been wielding sticks since he was two years old.

“Take the ball out of the air, and apparently he’s amazing,” Owen said. “Baseball was too easy for him. He needed to be on ice.” Brody, listening, had grinned.

We played dirt hockey on the same laneway Brody had played on when he was eight, and then set up the goal nets and dragged out his old stuffed animals. This time, those raggedy stuffed animals played opposing players and stand-in cone-obstacles, and Brody shot pucks at me as I showed off, butterflying and windmilling and stretching for glorious saves I never risked making when a game was on the line. We played shootout and best of three, then best of five, then best of seven, and then our competitive fire took over and we played best of all, challenging each other to ever-more ridiculous “if you win, thens.”

Back in Boulder, during the season, we’d made games of everything: who could get dressed or undressed the fastest, who could shoot or save more goals, who could finish first on a race around the rink. Who had the longest toe reach, who could touch their tongue to their nose. Who could eat the most ice cream, or stuff the most bananas in their mouth. Brody won that one. He beat the whole team, even. It wasn’t even close. For a week after the banana championships, someone else had to untie his skates and unwrap his tape around his socks and knee pads, and he sat with his arms laced behind his head, sucking on Red Vines and chirping, “And people say my big mouth is good for nothing.”

In the early evenings, Hazel would begin dinner, usually coming out with something to grill while Brody and I were wrapping up whatever nonsense we’d devolved into. We’d be sweaty, giggling messes, dirt-stained and nursing grass burns and scrapes on our shins and our forearms, and Hazel would shake her head at us as she sipped at a beer.

“Brody, go help your daddy with the chore’n’,” she’d say every night, even though Brody was the one who always wound up our goofing off at exactly the same time each day so he could be ready to help Owen.

I offered to help, too, and followed him and Owen some days, but they had a rhythm between them and worked expertly together, moving through the barn and checking on the horses and turning hay and setting out feed and firing up the ATVs to rumble out into the fields for the evening circuit. When I “helped,” I slowed them down, interrupting to ask what goes where and how to do what next and fumbling with the pitchfork and the shovel. It was easier on everyone for me to stay out of the way, and so I hung back with Hazel while Owen and Brody zipped off into the fading sunlight. During the day, we’d take the ATVs out for fun—for mudding, after the rain—but when it came down to the work, I was exposed as a hockey playing city boy, even though I was from Alberta and my reputation as a ‘Berta boy said I should be a red-necked hick.  

Hazel and I grilled together, instead. She’d been the quiet parent while Owen and Hazel were both in Boulder, but there was steel inside of her, and a sharp efficiency that made me realize she ran the ranch, and the home, and Owen and Brody both orbited around her, letting the strength of her love organize their lives. I fell right into that, too, happily following her lead day in and day out. Grilling together, and while the potatoes were on the coals, we’d hang the laundry on the lines as she asked about my and Brody’s day and what we’d gotten up to. We’d shuck corn at the picnic table and share stories, sometimes about Brody, sometimes about ourselves.

I told her about growing up in Alberta and being a hockey kid in Canada, and how much the show was the dominant focus of your future. If you didn’t make it in the show, then all your hard work had been for nothing. In Idaho, Hazel and Owen had nurtured Brody’s love for hockey, and they’d loved that he’d loved it, but there had been a million choices for him outside of hockey, too. “Owen always said he was so good on the ice that he could play professionally, but he also told Brody he could be whatever he wanted to be. Every week, that seemed to change. Archeologist, paleontologist, veterinarian. Astronaut. Teacher. Garbage truck driver. Professional surfer.” She laughed. “Owen took Brody to South Dakota to dig up dinosaur bones when he was seven. A few months later, he set up a wave pool in one of the tanks so Brody could try surfing. That went as well as you’d expect.”

I laughed so hard tears pricked my eyes. “My dad thought the only way out was to play hockey.” And, since that’s how I got out, was he right? Could I have left if I hadn’t left with a ticket paid for by an NHL team? Where would I have gone if I was on my own? What would I have done if hockey had just ended? I was aging out, in my last year of eligibility in Junior A. If I hadn’t gotten that call from the Outlaws, where would I be at that moment?

Hazel smiled at me as she ripped the ears clean off a corn cob, one swift pull. “Nonsense,” she said, slow as honey. “You can do anything you want in this life, Lawson. Anything at all.”

They were kind to me, in every way they could be. They hadn’t known a lick about me, not one thing, that morning they’d walked into the rookie house and found me holding on to their son. Sure, Brody had talked about me, but Brody talked about everything. He spent three weeks once telling me about a cat he saw at the grocery store each time he went, and how he started buying canned food and leaving it open for the cat to eat at the edge of the parking lot by a clump of woods. “I think she’s got kittens. Should I call someone? Do fire departments rescue kittens, or is that just a Hollywood thing?”

Brody talking about me was the same as him talking about that cat, I’d assumed. Something buzzing through his life, catching his attention here and there before something else snagged on that big brain of his and pulled him away.  

Owen found me one evening after dinner, when Brody and Hazel were doing the dishes and I was cleaning the grill. Hazel and I had shared steak grilling duties that night, bickering companionably about best practices: how long on each side, when to flip, how to flip, cross hatch or straight grill marks, seasoning or no seasoning.

Owen offered me a beer, but I declined. I’d had a lot to drink, probably too much, when Coates was in charge, and a season without a drop of alcohol had left me feeling better than I ever had, physically. Brody never joined in when Logan or Connor sneaked a beer on the back deck in Boulder, and I’d stayed sober with him. Solidarity, maybe. Showing him he wasn’t alone, not even with the little things.

“You and Brody are close.”

As conversation starters went, that one wasn’t at all subtle. I’d squeezed the handle of that grill brush and swallowed hard, and regretted, for a moment, my decision to pass up that beer. “Yes, sir.”

“You know what I never understood?” Owen had his boot hitched on the picnic table bench, and he was staring at the sky and the remnants of the night’s summer sunset. His mustache twitched, left and right, and he balanced his bottle of beer on his knee. I heard Brody and Hazel laughing in the kitchen, heard Hazel’s sharp cry and Brody’s high giggle. He’d flicked her with soap, surely. Or put a dab of bubbles on her nose or in her hair.

“I never understood how some parents could pour their everything into their child, morning, noon, and night, and then, one day, decide they didn’t like something and just drop ‘em. Pull entirely away, say, no, not that, I’m not gonna love you no more because of that part of you. How do you do that? How do you turn off your love for your child? And how do you ever walk away from them?”

I’d stilled. Stopped scrubbing those bristles over the grate and stared at the cold coals and the powdery ash.

“There’s not a single thing in this entire world that could ever make me stop loving Brody. Not one single thing. I just don’t understand how other parents can cut their child out of their lives like that. I can’t understand it. I’ll love my son forever, always. In every way. Every single part of him.”

I looked up then and caught Owen’s gaze. He was looking hard at me, into me, trying to say with his eyes what he wasn’t saying out loud. A moment, with our eyes locked, and then he smiled, and he reached out and squeezed my shoulder, and he said, “You’re a good man, Lawson. I’m glad my son has you.”

So Idaho was a dream in so many, many ways. Beautiful, butter-melting yellow light, golden sunrises and blue-sky days. Brody barefoot in the kitchen making banana pancakes for Hazel and Owen and wearing my sweatshirt. Us in the fields, chasing sheep and chewing on meadow grass, hiking across hills and wandering after puffs of clouds. Driving into town and buying packs of Red Vines along with Hazel’s groceries, and sitting on the porch swing with my arm around Brody’s shoulder, swaying back and forth as he talked about the craziest flavors of jam he’d ever seen, how a “jiffy” was an actual unit of time, how people should plant more milkweed, and maybe the government should plant milkweed, too, wherever the government had big government land, and if there had ever been a husky-dachshund dog breed mix—and if so, how?

A dream, yes, but there were dark spots and nightmares there, too. For every golden moment, there was a bleak one. For every hour of chatter, there was an hour of Brody’s plunging silence, like he’d swan dived off the edge of a cliff within himself and was desperately crawling his way back into the sunlight. At night, we shared his bed, though Owen and Hazel had pushed a trundle into the corner of his room for just-in-case. Brody still had nightmares more often than not, shuddering awake with a gasp and a whimper, and when he did, I was there. I’d wrap him in my arms, and he’d roll into my chest, face pressed into my shirt, fingers dug into my hips, holding onto me like he was a baby monkey, and he’d cry silently as he trembled. “Why do things sometimes feel worse when everything is so much better?”

Time, Hailey had told him. Time heals. Time and patience, and slowly plugging things back into place. She leaned into the metaphor he’d used, about ripping out all his plugs, and they worked through each of them: dusting them off, examining them, exploring them, and then seating them back into place. He video chatted with her twice a week even in Idaho, and sometimes he texted her, too, when he was having a bad hour and needed a grounding moment from her. I texted, too, asking her what I should do for Brody when those moments happened, and how I could help him the best way I could. Be there, she’d said. Be there.

And… we weren’t together. Not the way Owen thought. We were bound together in a way I couldn’t define, but we weren’t boyfriends or partners or lovers. We hadn’t kissed. Not once. We held hands, and we pressed our shoulders and thighs and sides together, and we sat glued to each other on the porch swing and the steps and on the couch while we watched movies with Owen and Hazel, and during family dinner at the picnic table in the back yard, but we’d never, ever kissed. Sometimes I would brush my lips across his hair or the side of his head, or kiss his fingers in the middle of the night before curling them into my palm and holding him to my chest. He left soft, open-mouthed circles on my collarbone, places where he breathed through the pain as I held him. But we hadn’t stepped across that boundary from best friends—from one man in love with the other—to something more: to two men in love, and into everything that came with the promise of a kiss. That plug wasn’t settled inside of him yet.

Those dark moments seemed to root a frustration in Brody, and, more and more, he seemed to work his way out of them in irritation instead of shakiness. He’d find a bad mood after the darkness and spend another hour lost in silence, hurling tennis balls at the side of the barn or failing to make a basket at the hoop over the carport. Or, he’d sit alone on the porch swing and rock himself in an angry rhythm, glowering at the perfect day as I waited for him on the porch steps. Eventually, he’d slide in beside me, hook his arm through my elbow, and lay his cheek on my shoulder.

“This sucks,” he said once. Most times, he said nothing at all, not until he opened his mouth and started in on how the Eiffel Tower can be six inches taller in summer due to heat expansion and how “raise a toast” comes from the Romans literally dropping a piece of toast into their wine glasses before celebrating. “I just want to be better.”

“It takes time, like Hailey said.” He’d had a nightmare the night before, and I’d woken up with soggy tear marks on the collar of my T-shirt.

He was quiet, rolling his boot heel across a rock. “My nightmares aren’t even about that anymore.” His voice was more fragile than glass. “Last night, it was about you. I dreamed I’d lost you. That I wasn’t…” He kicked the rock away, sent it skittering down the dirt.

“You’re never going to lose me.” I tucked my face against his, buried my lips in his hair above his ear. “Never, Brody.”

“But I’m—”

“Never.”

We stayed curled together on the porch, hands locked tight together, faces in each other’s necks, breathing each other in as the bees and butterflies hummed in the milkweed and the wildflowers Hazel had planted and flecks of dust spun in the sunlight. Eventually, Brody started telling me that Australia was wider than the moon, and that early astronauts used to train for rugged lunar expeditions by burying themselves in remote parts of West Texas.

Still, that frustration kept growing roots inside of him, running wild and wicked in his veins. I could feel it growing, and saw it paint dark storm clouds across Brody’s sunny features. He’d come back from his video calls with Hailey pinch-faced and sullen, and we’d spend a quiet half hour together before he’d open up. “I don’t understand. Everything is so much better, so why aren’t I?”

All Brody’s life, hard work had led him to everything he’d dreamed. He’d hit two speed bumps along that path, both of them variations on the same problem: Coates, and now, the aftereffects of Coates. Hard work hadn’t been enough to push through Coates’ hell last summer, and no matter how hard he’d tried, he was still stuck. Now, hard work wasn’t making things happen inside Brody fast enough, the way he wanted, and he felt stuck again, in a totally different way.

We were sitting on the cross fence of the paddock after dinner, digesting and watching the stars, our pinky fingers hooked on the railing, when he said, “I want to get out of here. Just… go. Somewhere far away, where there’s no one else. No outside world, no social media, no headlines. No one checking in, asking me how I’m doing, or what’s going on, or what’s up today.” He turned to look at me, his eyes reflecting the glow from the barn lights into the velvet sky. “I wanna go. Where it’s just us, and we can…”

I covered his hand in mine. “I’ll go anywhere with you.”

***

So here we were. At the corner of nowhere and forever, watching sparks flicker into a sable sky and listening to the forest settle into its night noises. We were exactly where Brody wanted to be: out beyond the end of the world, off the edge of the map, where no one could find us or reach us or touch us. Our cell phones had lost signal an hour before we finally parked my truck, and we’d turned them off and chucked them into the glove box two days ago. Nothing existed but him and me.

Quiet settled between us. I eyed Brody, and watched him brush hot dog crumbs off his hands and pull one of his whittled skewers out of the sand to poke at the coals. I was learning Brody’s silences, studying the way his eyes pinched and his forehead furrowed. This one was new. He looked more contemplative than despairing, like he was swimming toward something rather than sinking beneath a storm surge.

“Have you ever heard of drop bears?” he asked. His eyes flicked up to mine a moment after he spoke, and he poked at a coal until it split down the center. “They’re the most dangerous creatures on the planet.”

“I know that one.” I grinned. “There was this guy on my juniors team, and he was so gullible, you could get him to believe anything. My teammates convinced him a drop bear had escaped in Edmonton and was running feral through the province. He started carrying an umbrella lined with aluminum foil because someone told him that was the only way to protect himself from the drop bear’s claws. He also freaked out about the dangers of ingesting dihydrogen monoxide daily and the radiation levels of hockey pucks.”

Brody laughed. “Stay in school, kids.”

“Hockey was all that kid had.”

“Did he make it?”

Make it. Make it out of juniors, out of nowhere, out of obscurity. Into the show, into real life, into something bigger and better than whatever you were before you picked up a hockey stick. I shook my head. “No. He’s playing rec hockey now. Or he was, last I heard.” Keeping in touch with everyone back home hadn’t been a priority after my first six months in Rocky Mountain. There were too many questions. Too much excitement, too, all that breathless anticipation waiting to hear about my big NHL adventures. “Hopefully he’s graduated high school by now. I think he was in his sixth year, though.”

Brody shot me another grin, then refocused on the piece of coal he was mangling to sparks and embers. “Bet I can get Logan believing in drop bears.”

“Oh, definitely. He’d freak out for sure.”

“I’ll tell him one escaped from the Denver Zoo.” His eyes glittered, and he had that adorable look plastered to him, where his eyes were squinting and he smiled with everything he was, and joy just flowed from him. We stared at each other, and my lungs caught, and I thought, I am so in love with you.

And then he asked, “Are you gay?”

I blinked.

I had already professed my love for Brody, many times, in a very non-platonic, yes-homo way. And… there had been all those erections we were politely ignoring, that neither of us mentioned. I couldn’t help it: Brody coming back from his shower and into his bedroom in Boise, while I was waiting in bed and messing around on my phone. Him with just a towel around his waist that he shucked to the floor while he hunted for boxers in his dresser. I’d pull a pillow into my lap and avert my eyes, and Brody would give me a few minutes before he glued himself to my side and pushed his face into my phone, wanting to know what was new in the world of Reddit or Twitter or ESPN. Or my wandering thoughts when I was half-conscious, barely awake and holding on to him, feeling his warmth and smelling his hair and nuzzling the back of his neck. He’d sigh and lean into me, but we kept our hips apart like there was a forcefield between us.

“I never saw you date.” Brody flipped an ember off the end of his skewer like it was a puck, then tipped it into the flames. “I never saw you, like, interested in a guy. Like checking someone out or flirting or whatever.”

Of course he hadn’t. The only guy who mattered in my world was sitting in front of me. And if Brody and I never got off the ground, and if all we ever were to each other was the very best of friends, well. Other gay guys had spent their lives hopelessly in love with their platonic life mates, right? Surely I wouldn’t be the only one.

I couldn’t see a future where I wasn’t absolutely and completely in love with Brody, and where his smile or his laugh didn’t start and end my days. Who else could ever fill my life with infectious grins and wild facts, self-ignited sunshine and the sweet taste of licorice, and so much gentle, tender-hearted charm that he’d changed the trajectory of our world?

“Yeah, I’m gay. But I haven’t dated in a long time.” Not since you got off that bus from Boise. “And for a while, I hid it.”

I still remembered my dad’s face when I asked him if there were any hockey players who liked guys like it was a photograph, framed and centered on the back of my eyelids, ready and waiting to pop into my brain as soon as I blinked.

“But things changed really fast, you know? It wasn’t okay to be gay, and then… It was like no one really cared anymore. The world moved on. But I only dated a few times in Boulder.”

And dating was hardly the word for what I’d been up to. Hookups, mostly, because no one knew or cared who Lawson Murray of the Rocky Mountain Outlaws was, and I didn’t care to see the same face twice. Twice meant conversation, and all the getting to know you questions, and the last thing I wanted back then was to explain anything about my fucked-up life. You’re in the NHL! How awesome! What do you mean you hate your life? Surely it isn’t that bad. You’re a millionaire! Not like you’re there to braid hair with each other, amirite?

All I’d wanted to do was get out. Out of the NHL and out of Boulder. Out of my life, and out of my mind. Driving a truck up and down Yellowhead Highway and talking to no one sounded like perfection. Was it possible I could deliver packages to the moon? Was NASA accepting volunteers for one way space missions? Sign me up—I’d go anywhere to get away.

Brody was nodding, and his tongue ran along the front of his teeth, bulging out his top lip. “I’m not gay,” he said, and my heart just stopped. “Well, I don’t think I am. Like… I can see how everyone is attractive. Guys and girls. I know that that actress or model is a total smoke show, or that guy or actor or whoever is an absolute hottie. I can see it. I know they’re attractive, but… just seeing someone attractive doesn’t do anything for me.” He swished his stick in the coals, pursed his lips. I took a single, shaky breath. “Shea said that when he saw Morgan for the first time, it felt like someone had set him on fire.”

He grinned, and I chuckled. Shea was a smooth operator about a lot of things, way more so than Morgan, but his head-over-heels attraction to Morgan had not been one of them. It was a dead tie between how many blushes he’d failed to hide whenever Morgan talked to him and how many doe-eyed stares he’d thrown at Morgan’s back.

“That’s not how it is with me.” Brody shrugged. “I’ve only really fallen for three people in my life.”

“Who?”

He shoved his stick back in the sand and tipped to his side, propped on his elbow as he gazed at me. His cheeks flushed, the sun-kissed pink deepening. “So, the first was this girl in seventh grade. We were in history class together, and we sat at the same table. She and I would pass notes and giggle about all the silly stuff you laugh at in middle school. She was a cheerleader, and she used to wear her hair in a french braid and tie the end with all these ribbons in the school colors. I’d play with them, and she’d flick her braid in my face. I’d go to cheerleading practice so I could tell her how awesome she was, and how great she was at tumbling and cheering and stuff.” He shrugged, and he rolled the end of my hoodie string around and around his finger. “She rode horses and volunteered with this kids group, where she taught kids with special needs how to ride. I thought she was amazing. But she thought I was just a kid.” He flopped his head back on his shoulders and smiled at me, rueful and embarrassed and still flushed like a dark cherry. “She ended up dating a big kid. A high school freshman.” He waggled his eyebrows. I laughed and shook my head.

“Then there was this baseball player in junior year.” A dramatic sigh, like Baseball Boy had been Brody’s lost love gone off to war. I frowned. Brody winked. “He was Captain America. He was in the nursing assistant program at school, and he used to wear scrubs twice a week.” Brody groaned, and then he buried his face in my thigh. I flicked the back of his head. He caught my hand and threaded our fingers together as he rolled to his back and settled in, his head pillowed on my leg. “He looked like he rocked babies to sleep while escorting little old ladies across the street in his free time. He also had, like, thirty-nine siblings. His family was Mormon, and he was the oldest, so he was always helping out. He was in the dunk tank at a Girl Scout fall festival one year.” Brody bit his lip and waggled those eyebrows again. I scowled. “But… I think all his genes got pushed into the looks department, and there wasn’t really enough to spread out in the smarts end. He was, like, a completely empty box of crayons.”

I finally laughed, and Brody beamed at me like he’d won a prize.

“I tutored him for a semester. Was totally in love with him, too, and we even kissed once, but I broke off our fledgling romance when he didn’t appreciate my very learned and worldly texts.”

“Did you ask him how many man-made objects can be seen from space?”

“No. I asked him how many national anthems have no lyrics.” His eyes rolled up, and he bit his lip as his eyes glittered brighter than the moon.

He’d hit the team with that one over pizza and chicken wings in Buffalo, when we were sheltered in the hotel to avoid the boredom of the city. Shea and Morgan had sneaked out, super unsubtly, so if Brody wanted to trap someone with this pop quiz, he needed to go after either of them. “Four.” I tapped him on his nose.

He wiggled himself closer, tucking his head almost into my stomach as his smile unfurled from cheekbone to cheekbone. “I was devastated for, like, two weeks, until we went to the hockey championships.” He started sucking on the end of that hoodie string, as if he was all done with this story.

“And the third person?” I nudged him with my knee. He’d said he’d fallen for three people, and that, by my smart person’s count, was only two.

His flush flared again, and this time, he didn’t wiggle or roll his eyes upward to meet my gaze. He kept gnawing on that hoodie string as he stared at the flames shrinking into ruby coals. “Someone a million times better than both of those two combined,” he finally said. “Someone who’s kind, and sweet, and funny. Really smart, too. Patient. So patient, because he puts up with me, somehow. He pretends to listen to me all the time. He’s gentle, but he’s also strong. Like, so strong. Way stronger than I could ever be. He’s my hero, and he’s… ” Brody swallowed. “He’s legit perfect.”

Part of me had suspected this, but that didn’t stop the ice-cold dart of disappointment arrowing through me. “Morgan is an awesome guy.”

Brody shoved himself upward and spun on his butt to face me. “Morgan? No way. Gross, dude! That’s like falling for my dad.” He made a face like he was about to vomit.

“Shea?”

“Even worse!” He shoved at my shoulder and glared. “Neither of them, no. I’m not at all into them like that. They’re great, yeah, but… not my type.” He tucked his legs crisscross and hunched over his knees, still fiddling with that spit-soaked end of his hoodie string.

Who else in Brody’s world would fit that definition? I racked my brain, trying to match names on the roster with the man Brody described. We had some top-tier guys, yeah, but, other than Morgan and Shea, I didn’t know anyone who could tick all those boxes. Someone outside the team? Brody hadn’t spent a lot of time—or any time that I knew of—with people who weren’t Outlaws, but…

Well, I just thought, if he’d found someone like that, who meant that much to him, wouldn’t he have told me?

My face must have given away how hard my brain was working, because Brody took one look—a shy, quick dart of his eyes sideways, like he was nervous to see my reaction—and then he reached for me, lacing our fingers together. “Lawson,” he said. He squeezed, and looked at me like he was waiting for me to name the actress who’d been the reason Google Images was created.

Oh. Oh. Wait— “I love listening to you!”

Brody laughed, and he pitched right back into my side, tipping his cheek to my shoulder as he squeezed the blood out of my hand. “That’s what you heard?”

I’d heard it all, but thinking that those words were in any way meant to be for me, or about me, hadn’t even begun to sink in yet. “I don’t pretend,” I huffed.

“Do you remember how I talked the entire night before our first game? After the barbeque and the housewarming party, when everyone was supposed to go home? But you didn’t leave, and you and I stayed up on the couch all night?”

I laughed. “Vividly. You talked about the probability of blue lobsters occurring and what the real name for a hashtag is, and you described your entire senior year season of hockey. Every game. Every period.”

I could feel his smile when he rolled his face into my shoulder. “What is the real name for a hashtag?”

“Octothorpe.” I kissed the top of his head, right over his big brain. “I listen.”

“And I said you were super smart, too. See?” Brody dragged our joined hands into his lap and tucked them both against his stomach. “I also delivered a 3 a.m. scene-by-scene breakdown of The Mighty Ducks, and all of the sequels, and told you how those movies had been a formative experience of my childhood. No one else in the world would have put up with me that night. Not even my dad.”

“You were excited, and I loved being a part of that. It reminded me about how I used to love hockey, and how excited I used to get before games. I missed that.” I squeezed his hand. “And I like hearing your voice.”

Brody was quiet, but his thumb ran in loops over my wrist. “You are my favorite person in the world, Lawson.”

It was such a Brody thing to say. I pushed my face into his messy hair again, kissed the top of his head. “And you’re mine.”

***

We were sleeping on egg crate mattress pads that a sales associate at the Cabela’s in Boise had lied to us about, claiming they were the most comfortable camping mattress in the world to sleep on. We might as well be sleeping on dirt. An hour into our first night, Brody rolled over and asked if I was still awake. When I said yes, he said, “Morgan is going to be pissed. These aren’t professional hockey player mattresses.”

“I won’t tell him if you don’t,” I’d said.

He’d rocked and rolled inside his sleeping bag, wriggling like a worm drying out on the sidewalk, and then had yanked the egg crate pad out from beneath him and flung it into the darkness. Then he glow wormed his way across the six inches between us, still encased mummy-style in his sleeping bag, and got himself good and comfortable against me. A long, deep sigh and a nuzzle against my shoulder later, and he was out. Minutes later, so was I.

We woke tangled together, our sleeping bags pushed down to our waists and our arms around each other, exactly like we slept at home, in both my bed in Boulder and in his bed in Boise. If I had my way, that was how we’d sleep for the rest of time, and maybe he was into that idea, too. Or at least, he was into sleeping wrapped up together for the foreseeable future, anyway. We brushed our teeth and swished and spat from bottles of water and then crawled into our sleeping bags and rolled into each other, lying arm in arm in the dirt.

The fire had burned low, but the coals were shooting out waves of crimson that brushed Brody’s face and hair into a ruby-hued dreamscape. He laid his cheek on my chest, and I played with the hair at the back of his neck. His arms were around my waist, hands dug inside my sleeping bag and pushed beneath my Outlaws sweatshirt, palms flat on my skin.

“What’s your favorite memory of last season?” he asked. His voice was a mumble against my heart.

You. I hesitated, then went for it, and said it. “Meeting you.” He pressed into me, a horizontal hug. “Morgan and Shea coming back married. Your first NHL goal. All our nights at the house together. Winning first place in the division. What about you?”

“Getting my first goal was pretty cool.”

“It was.”

“You gave us a penalty, though, coming across the red line.”

I laughed. “Like I wasn’t going to celebrate that.” Again, I felt his smile. I didn’t need to see it to know it was stretching from ear to ear.

“My favorite memory, though?” He burrowed in, plastered himself tighter to me. “There was this one day… It was early on. Before preseason. Before Morgan told us all we were moving into the house. Before any of that, way back when everything was still really new and fragile. It was just a day. A Thursday. We’d just finished practice, and we were all hanging out in the room, you know, how we did? And… I realized I was happy. Like, legit happy. And I wanted to be a hockey player again, and I wanted to be on that team, and I wanted to be an Outlaw. It was just his random afternoon really early on. Like, we still didn’t know everyone’s names yet, and Shea was still bruised up, and Gavin was still real wide-eyed, but… I can remember everything about that day.”

I held him as tight as I could, mashing my face into his hair as he dug his fingers into my ribs. “I’m so glad—” I whispered. “I’m so fucking glad, Brody.”

He shuffled closer, hitched his thigh and half of his sleeping bag across my thigh and my sleeping bag. “What’s something you really want? Really, really want, bad?”

There was one answer to this question—the only honest answer—that I would never tell him. Everything else I could say was just second place. “I want to win the Stanley Cup.”

“Every hockey player wants that.”

“I want to get three shutouts in a row.”

“Only three?”

“I’ll start with three. I’ve only had two. I’m not greedy.” He laughed. “And I want to score a goal with you.”

He hitched his chin on my chest and tipped his head to the side. “Primary assist?”

I nodded. “I imagine it sometimes. I clear the puck out of our end and send it up the ice to you, and you’re on a breakaway, ready for my pass. You streak right up the wing, untouched, the way you always do. And you fake out that other goalie—”

“That other inferior goalie.”

“—and you score. And that’s ours. Your and my goal. Something we did together.”

He smiled, big and bright, and rolled his bottom lip between his teeth. “We’ll have to do it. This season. We’ll do it exactly like that.”

My heart swelled as big as my chest, so huge it felt like it was going to burst. “What do you want?”

“I want to win the Cup, obviously.” He held up his hand, ticking off his wants like a grocery list. “And I want to play in Boise. I know there’s no pro team there, but, like, maybe we could do a preseason game there. You know how they do exhibition games? In small arenas? I wanna play a game there like that. And—” He blinked, and his eyes, holding the last of the fire’s faded glow, softened. “And I wanna play with you forever. My whole career. Because… I think I can do anything as long as you’re on the ice with me.”

I wanted to kiss him, so much, so badly. I wanted to press our lips together and tell him I’m yours, as long as I live, and I’ll never skate again unless we’re on that rink together, and You’ve got it backward, it’s me that needs you out there, because before him, I was the worst goalie in the league, the undrafted laughingstock scraped out of the bottom of the AJHL, and with him, I was the Outlaws starting goalie, responsible for 62 wins, part of the team that put us in first place in the central division.

We were meant to share that ice. We were meant to be together.

Together-together? Maybe. I didn’t know yet. That was still his choice, and I’d made a vow, both to him and to myself: I’d never push. The choice was his. If he was ready to reach out his hand for me, I would be there, but if he decided that wasn’t what he wanted, well, I’d still be there. He would never lose me. Not even if he broke my heart.

I curled my palm around his cheek and brushed my thumb beneath his eye. He leaned into my touch, nuzzling my wrist and brushing his dry lips across the pad of my thumb. Our eyes locked and held, and held, and held, until he dropped his lips and pressed a kiss to my chest, right over my heart, and then laid his cheek where he’d kissed my hoodie, as if he were pressing it in so it would stay a part of me forever.

***

We woke up tangled together, hopelessly crisscrossed in our sleeping bags. He built up the fire and made coffee and scrambled eggs for us both while he sang “Hooked on a Feeling.” I watched him and felt my heart melt, right into a soaked puddle beneath my feet.

After breakfast, we hiked the woods again, meandering through trails we made ourselves and exploring nooks and crannies of the Rockies that maybe no one had ever seen. Squirrels chased each other through the branches, and birds cried out as we interrupted their forest-floor foraging. Deer stared from a healthy distance, their bright eyes locked on and their startled gazes saying where did you come from?

We ended up at the lake again, but we still couldn’t wade any deeper than our knees. We hissed and shook our wrists and tried to dare each other to go further. Then, of course, it became a competition to get further into the ice-cold water, and Brody tried to claim victory by saying he was further into the lake than I was by virtue of the water going higher on his leg. Of course, he said that while standing behind me, and I pointed out that no, he was simply shorter, and because he was trying to squeal his way out of being cold, he deserved to be thrown in. That kicked off a chase in the shallows and an epic splash war, and we ended the afternoon on our sides in the sand, shirts off, cramps in our sides, half-soaked in freezing lake water, and warming ourselves beneath the sun.

Brody had a piece of tree bark in his hands, and he picked at the wood as we lay facing each other. His hair was damp and drying wild, like a mad scientist’s wacky portrait. Mine was shoved back and falling around my ears. I’d decided, sometime during the season, to grow it long, maybe inspired by Morgan.

“You know, I was pretty messed up at first when Shea told me he and Morgan were seeing each other.” Brody wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the tree bark and the splinters he was trying to push into the callus of his thumb.

We’d been chattering all morning, about the best tasting protein powder and why there wasn’t hockey in Australia and what the last letter added to the English alphabet was. He hadn’t slid into any dark or silent spaces yet. This was coming up because he wanted to talk about it, and because he was choosing to talk about it. With me.

“Yeah?”

“I knew they were both great. I mean, Morgan… Like, I knew he was wonderful. Shea, too. He’s my best friend, so I knew he was great. But… Morgan was still the captain, you know? So when Shea said he and Morgan were together, it sent me right back to all that stuff, before. ‘Cause Coates was the captain, and…” He shoved the tree bark into the sand and started to bury it. “I just thought the worst, and it was all coming back, and I was remembering how bad everything had been. Which was dumb, because I know they’re good guys, and not anything even remotely close to Coates. But fear isn’t rational, right?” He shrugged and finally met my gaze.

And then he smiled. “But then we had that video game tournament. Remember?”

That one was hard to forget. I nodded.

“And after Shea totally cheated and helped Morgan win, and then Morgan laid one on him, in front of all of us? That was it. That was all it took. All my fears went pop. Because they were so obviously happy, and so obviously in love. Morgan, like, came out for Shea. Did you know he was into dudes before that minute? They’d only told me two days before.”

“Well…” It was my turn to shrug. “I’d caught him scoping out Shea a bunch.”

Brody grinned, wide and wicked. “Those two… Man. But, like…” He bit his lip and stared into me. “They weren’t a secret. They didn’t want to be a secret. What they had wasn’t shameful. And that mattered a lot to me, because that’s all Coates wanted me to feel: ashamed. Hiding. His biggest weapon against me was telling everyone what had happened.”

I took his hand in mine. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

He wound our fingers together. “I know that now. I do.”

I had memories going rotten inside me, rank and foul and poisoning my soul like death touching fresh water. Shame had been my closest friend for two years, a feeling I was so intimately familiar with I could caress each curve and tender place like a lover. I’d nurtured my shame, kept it big and bright and full, pushing on my insides until I had no room to feel anything else. Flickers of pain danced like a spider moving across its web over my ribs.

It was our second to last game of the season, my second year at the Outlaws. We’d just put up yet another loss on the road, and I’d been lingering in the visitor’s dressing room, waiting until I was alone before I began to undress.

The despair in the room had an acid taste to it. It had been so hard to breathe, or to be in that room, or to wear that jersey or suit up into those pads. After each game, it seemed like far, far too much work to bother to strip the gear and rinse off the failure. There were nights I imagined that I could sit on that bench forever and let the world spin around me. Maybe if I was quiet enough or still enough, I wouldn’t have to be in it anymore. I could evaporate into a brush of air that moved through the dressing room like a fan set to low, and my jersey and my pads would fall to the floor, topple into a pile of forgotten equipment, and, maybe, someday far in the future, one of my teammates might ask, “Hey, whatever happened to Lawson?”

That night—our second to last game, another loss in a string of losses—and I was alone in the room, finally, only beginning to summon the energy I needed to work out of my gear. I pushed to my feet, turned to my stall—

Agony, sharp as a saw ripping down my side. Bright, burning fire crawling across my ribs and into my lungs and up and down my spine. I hit my knees, clawed for the bench. Every breath felt like I was being stabbed, and the knife twisted once it was all the way inside me. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, not a thing. Not the stick getting thrown across the room or the door slamming, or the feet pounding down the hallway in a cadence I had grown horribly familiar with and knew by nightmare and twisted memory.

The flight back to Boulder was an endurance through anguish. I breathed in sips and starts, clung to my armrests, swallowed back sobs and cries because it hurt too much to be in pain. A bruise bloomed across my side before we landed in the shape of a hockey stick. Three days later, it stretched from my armpit to my hip. My ribs crunched like Rice Krispies when I tried to touch them.

For the last game of the season, I wrapped myself in bandages and tape, took four Oxy pills I’d begged a teammate for, and spent sixty game minutes with a limp blocker and an immovable stick. We lost, 6-1, and every goal came in on my stick side, right above the frozen blocker.

Summer was a heat haze of pain, and I spent each day religiously deadening myself to everything in my life. My ribs, my memories, my failure as an NHL player. Don’t think about it. Don’t fucking think about it. Don’t feel it, either. Don’t feel a thing.

My voice was ragged and ruined while I told Brody everything, and then it split in half as I said, “Then a bus from Boise pulled up outside of the rink, and—”

Brody pulled my hand to his lips and kissed each of my knuckles. He looked me in the eyes as he pressed his lips to my skin, dropping slow, gentle brushes of his chapped lips against my joints.

“Last night, I said my favorite memory was meeting you. That’s not exactly true. Meeting you is one of my favorites, yeah. But my favorite memory of all is seeing you for the very first time. When you got off the bus that day, and you were…” I still couldn’t hold the memory fully and completely inside of myself, even now, even after a year. “You were like light being brought into darkness. You smiled, and my heart stopped.”

“I wish I knew you last summer,” he whispered against the back of my hand. “How come you stayed away? The first time I really met you was after Morgan beat the shit out of Coates.”

“I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t a good man then. I wasn’t… I was miserable, and angry, and frustrated. I was also so infatuated with you that I ached inside, just thinking about you. And about what it meant that I could still feel something. I was so desperate to make things right for you.”

“You went to Gavin, and Gavin—”

I nodded. I’d clawed together my desperation and my courage, and I’d told Gavin it had to stop, it all just had to stop. Brody— I’d tried to say. He can’t—

Back then, before Morgan, Gavin had been our sometimes-leader. He was psychologically battered more than the rest of us because of it, and he’d moved from day to day in a shell-shocked haze, trying to smooth out the bad times with an ice-cold silence, and then distract Coates from the worst of his rampages by sticking his neck out to try and absorb the incoming fire. He only succeeded about half the time.

But, oh, those times he did. I was the one who stitched up the gash on his forehead. We’d done it in my truck, fumbling through a first aid kit I’d bought at a gas station as he bled through one of my old t-shirts. My hands had been shaking so badly I thought I was going to stitch through his eyeball, and he’d clenched his jaw and grabbed onto my door handle until the leather screamed. “Just clean it up so Julia can’t tell,” he kept saying. “I don’t want her worrying. She’s just had a baby, man. She can’t deal with this right now.”

None of us could deal with any of it.

“All the stuff that happened,” Brody started. “It all seems a lot further away now. Like it was just a year ago, but it feels like… like those memories, and how bad I felt, and how horrible it all was— It feels like they belong to a different person. Almost like I’m watching a movie, sometimes. Like it’s a different life.”

“Yeah.” I could divide my life the same way: Before Brody and After Brody, and, more recently, after Hailey and Brody. After those team sessions where we’d bared our souls to each other and dug up all those old graves, and when we’d chased Coates out of our collective history for good.

Brody’s voice dropped to a whisper. The sounds around us seemed to fade and then still, the waves going silent, the birds unmoving, the breeze motionless, until all I could hear was the scrape of his words and the brush of his lips, dry skin over dry skin. “I used to imagine it every day: my plan. I was obsessed with it. I thought through each step, day and night. I knew exactly what to do, if only I had five minutes alone without Shea hanging around. I was so certain it was going to happen. I didn’t think anything could save me.”

My hand clenched down on Brody’s so hard my teeth started to chatter. My heart erupted, anguished and aching and fracturing, bursting on the fault lines of my love for Brody. I couldn’t imagine the future he’d almost created, a world that wasn’t filled to each and every corner with all of his beautiful, wondrous light.

He was still whispering. “That night Morgan took us out to dinner, after we switched hotels? You remember? We sat next to each other?”

How could I ever forget? “You told me Japan has over two hundred flavors of Kit Kats and you want to try each one.”

“I hadn’t thought of those Kit Kats in months.” A tear slid down Brody’s cheek. He shuddered, his shoulders shaking, and he tried to smile at the same time a sob ripped out of his chest. “That was the first night I didn’t think about my plan. After that day, after talking to you. Instead of imagining it before I went to sleep, I thought, ‘what’s going to happen tomorrow?’ and ‘what’s Morgan going to do with the team?’ and ‘that guy I met, he’s really cool. I want to get to know him more—’”

We fell into each other, arms and legs tangled, cheeks together, faces pressed into each other’s throats as the tears flowed. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t do anything at all, other than hold him to me and bury my face in his hair as I told him, “I love you. I love you so much, Brody.”

He dug his fingers into my hair, into my scalp, and pushed his lips against my ear. “I love you, too, Lawson. I do, I do. I love you, too.”

We stayed on that beach, holding each other as we wept, for a long, long time.

***

When the sun was sinking and the water turned to glass, and the colors in the world shifted from robin’s egg summer skies and sun-drunk shades of green and gold into the pastel breathlessness of a slowly-blooming sunset, we sat at the water’s edge, our toes just out of reach of the lake. We were touching from toes to ankles to knees to hips to shoulders, and we were holding hands, our arms balanced on our thighs.

“Hailey said it would take time.” Brody’s thumb moved in slow circles over my knuckles.

Day by day. Be there. Together. I had been on the edge of oblivion the night Morgan had found me, holding on to Brody like he was a life raft and I was the one about to drown. You have to love him. I’m glad my son has you. Be there. Day by day.

“She said it would take time, but that I’d get all those plugs put back into place.” Brody cupped his free hand around my jaw and turned my face to his. “She was right.”

His lips met mine as the sun kissed the surface of the lake. He tasted like Red Vines and laughter, like resurrection and gold, like joy and forgiveness, gentleness and heroism. He tasted like tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, because every tomorrow had him in it, and the world was perfect because of that, and because of him. Because he was here, and because he was happy, and because he’d worked so hard to put himself back together.

He nuzzled my forehead and brushed his nose against mine. I chased his lips, kissing him again, and again, not ready to let go, not even for a moment. He beamed, and met me kiss for kiss, his smile huge and broad and gorgeous, so much I had to kiss him again. And again. And again.

We were holding tight to each other, foreheads together, breaths shared, his hand on my jaw, mine lost in his unruly hair. The setting sun shot out sparklers of light, Mother Nature’s fireworks show in private celebration to us. All I’d wanted, more than anything else in the world, had been his kiss, but I’d only wanted it when he wanted to give it. I wanted him to kiss me like this, because he was happy and whole and because he wanted me, and because he wanted to build a life with me, the rest of his life, in fact, and it was something he looked forward to and dreamed about and craved with every other thought that passed through his beautiful mind.

He smiled again, and cradled my head in his hand. “This is the new best day of my life.”

***

Our goal happened in October. It was Shea’s first day back on the ice, suited up and on the game roster, and our arena was packed. A sold-out crowd, everyone on their feet, our anthem rocking the whole place left and right. We were putting the hurt on Nashville, in control of a solid lead. Shea had two goals, and Brody had one. Morgan was looking happier than he’d ever been, gazing love-struck at Shea as Shea skated as beautifully as he always had. Broken femur? No problem, not for champions like Shea.

Nashville came at me with an odd-man rush, and I came out aggressive in the defensive zone, stripping the puck off the Nashville forward and sweeping it around, back into my control. Normally, I’d launch a quick pass to a cycling defender or to one of the centers who’d dropped back to help defend, but this time…

This time, I saw Brody on a breakaway down the wing, sprinting for the neutral zone. I could hurl this puck to him, pass it over everyone’s head, and he’d reach it at the same time it crossed the blue line. He’d be behind the Nashville defense, too, nothing but him and the goalie, one on one. And Brody always beat the goalie when he went one on one.

Our eyes met. He grinned.

I launched the puck his way, and—

It played out exactly like I’d dreamed. My pass to him, him on a breakaway, him gliding to the net, left, right, left, shoot—

I tipped my head back as the goal horn blared, and as the arena roared, and all of our fans leapt to their feet and screamed our names. Zeagler and Murray, Brody and Lawson, Goal. Goal together. Our goal.

Brody skated back to me instead of to the bench, and he flung his arms wide and jumped into my arms at full speed, looping his leg around my waist and his arms around my neck, nearly tackling me into my net. He whooped, and then toppled down my front, all of our equipment catching in odd places, our pads and helmets askew and our sticks held awkwardly, but our arms were around each other, and we were in front of the whole world.

Brody beamed. He had his mouth guard dangling out the side of his mouth, mashed between his teeth. “Love you,” he said.

I tipped my helmet against his and stared into his starry eyes. “Love you, too.”

And the Cup?

Well…

---

Thank you for reading!

Guess What!? There’s a sequel to All Your Tomorrows! 

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