Maddox's hand stops.
His eyes are still on me.
For one long second, his eyes stay on me and his hand stays on me and the alley stays cold and the brick stays against my shoulder blades and the security light stays buzzing over our heads.
Then he steps back.
He takes his hand off me.
He does it slowly. He does it like a man putting down a loaded gun on a table, a man who's aware that he's the one who loaded it. His eyes track down my body and back up and whenthey get to my face again, he isn't angry, exactly, but he isn't not angry.
“Go,” he says.
I don't move.
“Theo.”
I move.
The bar is smaller when I come back in.
That's not true. The bar is the same size. I'm smaller.
My eyes find Paul before I want them to.
He's at the front, by the stools. He has his coat on. His hands are in his coat pockets. His face is the face he does when a player has done something that can't be fixed in this practice and will have to be fixed in a meeting behind a closed door. His jaw is set. His eyes are on me.
I'm sure he knows.
I'm sure he knows because my hair is off and my shirt is off and my face is wet and I've come out of a back door he didn't see me go into. The fact that I can walk at all is a function of muscle memory, not of any conscious decision I'm making.
Of course he knows.
Of course he doesn't.
Paul doesn't imagine his son being pressed to a brick wall by a man. Paul doesn't imagine his son being a man who wants to be pressed to a brick wall by a man. Paul has run his imagination on tracks for forty-eight years. The tracks don't go through this alley.
I cross the bar.
Phoenix doesn't look at me as I pass. He is studying his beer. Magnus studies me openly and then does the laugh that isn't alaugh. Grayson has slid past me and is back in some other part of the bar, pretending to be interested in a television. Jax might be gone.
“Theo.”
“Yes, sir.”
My voice is level.
I don't know where the level voice came from. I didn't ask my voice for a level voice. I asked my voice for any voice. The voice gave me this one.
“Car.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paul looks past me at the rest of the team. His mouth moves as if he's about to say something to them, then he decides something else.
“The rest of you,” he says. “This is not how professional athletes behave. I don't want to hear about this again. I don't want to read about this again. I am not your father. I will not behave like one. But I am going to behave like your coach, and tomorrow morning we will have a conversation about what your coach does when his players embarrass the organization. Six AM. Rink.”
Somebody groans quietly.
