Here is what I do.
I turn the water off.
The squeal of the tap is louder than it ought to be. I hear it like a cough in a church.
I grab my towel off the hook. I do not wrap it. I hold it in front of me like a shield and walk out of the stall and across the tile past him and past the rest of them. I do not look at any of them, I do not stop, and I do not say a single word.
I feel the room watch me go. I feel Maddox watch me go most of all, and I do not know if what comes off him as I pass is disappointment or hunger or amusement, because I do not turn my head to check.
Somebody laughs behind me.
Somebody else says, “Awww. Don't go, baby.”
I walk. I walk to my stall and I get my clothes on over wet skin and I don't towel off and I don't look back and I shove my gear in my bag and I leave, and I leave without my stick and without saying goodbye to Dad and without anything except the sense of having barely, barely got out. My feet squeak on the hallway tile. I do not care. I have never in my life not cared about a sound I was making in a professional facility. I am caring about nothing except the distance between my body and that shower stall.
I make it to my car.
I get in. I close the door. I lock it. I sit.
My hands are shaking. I put them on the wheel and hold the wheel and wait for them to stop. The parking lot is almost empty at this hour because practice only just ended. A kid in a Wolves windbreaker is loading cones into the back of a facility cart. He doesn't see me. He doesn't care. He is a seventeen-year-old intern whose whole day is cones. I watch him load cones for a minute because watching him load cones is safe and ordinary and does not require me to face what just happened.
My hands do not stop shaking.
I tell myself I left because he was assaulting me. I tell myself I left because the room was watching. I tell myself I left because I was afraid of him.
None of those are true, or all of them are true and none of them are the main one, and the main one is this:
If I had stayed one more second, I would have gotten on my knees.
Not because he told me to. Not because the room laughed. Because every cell of me wanted to—I have never wanted anything with every cell of me before, and I did not know my body could do that. I did not know I was built for that. I thought I was built for hockey and being good and not being a disappointment.
I am sitting in a car in a parking lot with wet hair and an erection I am not acknowledging and a shake in my hands and a ringing in my ears that isn't from the hit, and I am realizing, the way you realize you've been wrong about the weather, that I am not the person I thought I was.
I put the key in the ignition.
I drive home the long way. I take every wrong turn I can find. I don't want to be anywhere. I especially don't want to be at home, where Dad will soon be. Where Dad will look at me once and ask me how practice was, and I will lie, and the lie will be the first lie I have ever told him, and I will have told it because Mad Dog Creed told me to get on my knees and I wanted to.
It takes me forty-five minutes to make a twelve-minute drive.
When I pull into the garage, Dad's car is there.
I sit with my forehead on the steering wheel until the engine stops ticking. I listen to the engine tick as it cools. I wait for myself to become someone who can walk in the house and answer a yes-or-no question without his voice doing anything.
Then I get out, and I go in.
Dad is in his office off the kitchen, tablet in his lap, reading something the team sent him. He looks up. “Well?”
“Practice was fine, Coach.”
I say it too fast. I hear myself say it too fast. I hear the way my mouth adds the wordCoachat the end to underline that this is a report and not a feeling.
“Good,” he says, without looking at my face.
I wait for him to ask a follow-up. He doesn't. He taps his tablet screen and goes back to whatever he was reading. I have been raised by this man for twenty years and I have never been more grateful for the thing he does not do.
I go upstairs. I close my door. I do not slam it. I have never slammed it. I lean on the door from the inside with my palm flat on the wood for the count of ten, and then I sit on the edge of my bed with my hands flat on my thighs and I stare at the wall.
I already know I'm going to do it.
