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I think it’s less about Tristan, and more that Vic isn’t great at telling people no, but he’d rather take a slap shot to the dick with no cup than put me on display when I’ve said I don’t want it.
“Well problem solved,” I throw him a bone since he’s probably in physical pain trying to avoid the pretty little marketing guru. “You can tell her that the romance is DOA and there’s nothing to feature.” Vic squirms on the bed and I roll my eyes. “What?”
“The problem is that she likes you,” Vic says. “She likes the twin thing, so I figured if I avoid her tonight, and we fly out tomorrow for our game, she’ll be distracted. Then by the time our away set is over, you’ll be out of town again.”
“Thanks.” Gratitude burns through me. Vic will catch hell from the woman when she realizes what he’s up to. It won’t hurt his contract or his game play, but it’ll be uncomfortable. It means a lot that Vic didn’t just serve me up on a silver platter.
“Don’t thank me,” he says. “I know you don’t enjoy coming to games. The least I can do is keep you out of the spotlight.”
I liked yesterday’s game. I want to tell him. Was it only yesterday? Then again, he’ll assume I liked it because of Quinn. Would that be even worse? I couldn’t bother to show up for my twin, but I had fun because of a woman?
The tv chatters on, the fluorescent lights bathing the room in a warm orange glow, and the heater under the window buzzes as it struggles to circulate warm air. I can’t remember the last time Vic and I were quiet together, just like this. I can’t remember the last time we were in the same room together. Just the two of us. Last Christmas was the whole family. We’d been inseparable as kids, often sitting in silence that mom deemed creepy. Then both of us stopped standing still, too busy racing along the ice after a small disk of vulcanized rubber. Until one day I lay down in a hospital bed and Vic kept moving.
“How’s mom?” I ask, breaking the quiet before it suffocates us both with memory.
That’s another relationship I need to try repairing. Most of our interactions are through text or email. I avoid trips here. When I am here, I stay in a hotel instead of at Vic’s. Seeing her in person is the hard part. In the years since my diagnosis, she hasn’t even changed her hair. Seeing her—the same worry-lined face that fetched me ice chips and held plastic bowls for me to puke in—the woman who shaved my head and threatened to shave her own until I stopped her, the woman who brought me memoir after memoir of amputee and cancer survivors, the one who’d enrolled me, the minute I received the all clear, in the local branch of the special Olympics… well, seeing her thrusts me right back into my angry, hurting, mean sixteen-year-old body, and the guilt I feel at the way I’d lashed out at her over and over again threatens to choke me. Normally I’d make a note to bring this up with Dr. Shire, but I’m leaving soon and it’ll be a non-issue again.
“She wants you to move here.” Vic says as the next episode starts on the screen. “Says it would be easier to keep an eye on us both if you were here.”
It probably would be easier. For her. The guilt burns hotter because even after my distance, my silence, she still wants me here.
Vic and mom have always moved as a unit. When Vic signed on with Chicago, shortly after I started my PhD at Northwestern, our mother had come along for the ride. It made sense since Vic was on the road a good portion of the season. Mom could keep his house in order. Anna was already married and living her life in Colorado, and I was living in graduate housing in Evanston.
Even when they were half an hour away, I avoided visits and phone calls. I cited schoolwork, internships, boards. Then I was getting my foot in the door, building my professional reputation, making my name with the only thing other than hockey I’d ever been good at.
Mom’s been angling, since Vic signed the paperwork on his seven-year contract with the Arctic, to get me to move here too. It’s like she’s forgotten how often I have avoided family get-togethers. I feel guilty as hell for it, but the joint living situation is half the reason I have this hotel room. Even though Vic’s McMansion has more than enough guest rooms, I just can’t imagine that much forced togetherness. Not anymore. I haven’t even stopped by to see them in person. I should.
“I’m not leaving Chicago.” I love my job. I love my condo. I have decent friends and neighbors.
“You get to tell her, not me,” Vic says. “We were both hoping the redhead might be an excellent motivator, at least to visit more.”
I’ve been trying not to, but now I can’t help thinking of Quinn. Round and hot against me, eyes flashing as she smiles. My body floods with the same warm contentment it does every time I think of her or am in the same space as she is. The pull below my bellybutton feels like a magnet tugging me inexorably towards her, even as it stiffens my cock. Luckily, I get that part under control—there’s nothing weirder than an erection next to your sibling—but I still can’t help the soft smile that crosses my mouth.
“Yeah.” The word leaves my mouth without conscious thought, and then I remember how things had unraveled in that waiting room. “I don’t know. We didn’t end things on a high note.”
“What did you do, Erik?”
What had I done? Been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Put her guard up. I should have put two and two together a lot sooner. There was a reason Sean recognized me, knew my name. It wasn’t just a mega fan of my brother’s. He had a vested interest in getting to know me. That made sense. And then I’d heard her voice and my stomach had dropped because I knew how it would look.
I’d considered telling her she was wrong. Fighting her initial accusations, fighting the distrust and the anger, but I’d turned around in that hospital room and the fight had gone out of me as if someone had punched me full of tiny holes. It wasn’t just Quinn standing in the door, glaring at me, confused and hurt and scared. It was Vic picking a fight with another Juniors player when they asked where I was. It was my mom telling people it was just allergies after sobbing in the bathroom.
Quinn had stood in that doorway wondering if I’d overstepped and sought her father on my own. If I’d invaded his privacy because of something she’d said or done. I wasn’t. She hadn’t. But it didn’t matter. No one is rational when they feel cornered.
I’d been willing to wait her out. To give her time to let her dad explain. Her fight-or-flight response had overwhelmed her, and that was okay. I wanted her to feel like she could fight against me—yell at me, scream at me, curse me—and know I would not scare off. The joke was on me. She scared herself off and there was nothing I could do about it.
“We don’t have a future,” I tell my brother because ultimately that’s what it boils down to.
“Well, you could come visit more, see her then,” Vic says, “Make a future.”
Our connection was too fast. Too strong. Too dangerous. Quinn was right. Either it was a fluke borne from our proximity at an emotionally difficult game, and it would have fizzled out the minute we were both back to normal, or we would have both ended up bloody and brutalized when I boarded my flight back home. And I was always going to go home. I don’t think it’s a fluke, though. I don’t think this feeling, this tug between us, is stress-borne.
And if the pull had been even a fraction less than what it was, then maybe more visits could have been possible, but this level of chemistry… We’ll end up in the same standoff every time. Actually, we’ll end up in a worse standoff because there was no way that I won’t develop actual feelings if I spend more time with her.
“Long distance only works if there’s an end in sight.” I say. “I’m not moving.”
“Who said anything about long distance?” Vic asks, “Just have some good old-fashioned fun.”
We tried that and look what happened?
