I think aboutCoach.
I think about the wordCoachcoming out of him in the bar as the first word he said to me, because in his own head that’s the name for authority, and I took authority from him tonight. I took it for free. He said the wordCoachto the wrong man and didn’t even know he was doing it.
I think about him locked in a car with his father driving home.
I think about the jeans he had on. Dark. Tight through the thigh.
I think about him in a bedroom I’ve never seen.
I think about him in a bedroom I’ve never seen with a door he’s locked for the first time in his life. What he’s doing behind that door. I know. I know it like the rhythm of a song I’ve been hearing all my life. He’s lying on his back on his bed. He’s doing what I was going to help him do against that wall. He’s thinking about me. He’s crying quietly because he’s Theo. He’s coming. He’s saying my name in his head because he can’t say it out loud.
I come.
I come hard.
I come hard into the inside of my jacket because I thought ahead enough to do that and I didn’t think ahead enough to bring anything else. I’m going to have to go home in a come-lined jacket. I couldn’t care less. Then the wave is over. The bench is still cold. The river is still black. The streetlight is still orange. I’m still on a bench in a park alone at eleven forty on a Thursday night having jerked myself off thinking about a coach’s son I met on Monday.
I sit until a second jogger passes and doesn't look at me either.
I'm waiting for the thing that usually comes—relief.The body unwinds. The anger drains. You stand up lighter. That's the trade. That's what the body has been doing for me for twelve years.
The thing doesn't come.
The relief isn't there.
I'm sitting on a bench with my jeans half-open and my jacket wet. My body has come. My body isn't relieved; it isn't lighter. My body is, if anything, heavier, because it now has information it didn't have ten minutes ago. The information is that the exit has closed. The exit has closed on a Thursday in a park in a city I've lived in for three years. The thing that has closed it is a twenty-year-old with green eyes who saidCoachto me in a bar and didn't understand what he was saying.
I laugh again.
It isn't a laugh.
“Fuck,” I say to the bench.
The bench agrees this time. Or it doesn't. The bench is a bench.
I zip up.
I stand.
My legs are fine. My legs have always been fine. Legs aren't the problem. The problem is inside the jacket and inside the chest and inside the skull.
I walk back the way I came.
I don't take the direct route. I take the long one, past the back of Vigil, past the closed front of a dry cleaner, past a bakery that's already opening for the morning run, past a parking garage where a man is asleep on a mattress by the entrance and who doesn't stir as I pass. I do it because I can't make myself go straight to the apartment yet. I do it because walking is doing something and sitting isn't, and I can't sit in my own loft with a wet jacket thinking about a kid.
Halfway home I stop on a corner. I say it out loud.
“This is about Paul.”
It's the sentence I said to myself walking the first time tonight. The sentence I said to the sidewalk. The sentence I've been saying since Sunday, when I heard Paul Laurent was the new coach and started mapping where a man like that has soft places. It's the sentence I built this whole thing on.This is about Paul.I do him through his son. I ruin the son. Paul finds out. Paul can't do a thing about it because the damage is done and his control of the kid is a lie. I walk out of Frosthaven at the end of the season with a wrecked relationship between a coach and the kid he raised, and a trophy case that saysthis is what you get for benching me in my first week.
That sentence.
I say it to a corner.
“This is about Paul.”
The corner doesn't agree with me.
