Weakness.
Every good thing comes with the expectation of punishment.
Every person who gets too close feels dangerous.
And somehow I stood in front of Rhys and promised him tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
Like I was the kind of person who could make promises likethat.
Like I’m not fucking broken and dead inside.
Locked in a cage that my father started to build, but I’m the one who finished it and started calling it discipline.
It feels like a locked door.
It feels like food slid under a gap by someone who wanted to help and didn't know how and said nothing.
It feels like seven days alone in a room at fourteen being taught that who I was needed to be beaten out of me before it ruined everything.
It feels like Danny.
It feels like Jonah.
It feels like Rhys.
Like everything I’ve never let myself have.
And the cruelest part — the part I've never let myself look at directly — is that it worked.
It worked completely.
I am the thing my father made. Controlled. Contained. A version of myself with all the wrong parts removed so neatly I almost forgot they were ever there.
Almost.
Until Rhys Callahan.
Until someone waltzed into my locker room and took up every inch of space in my head like he had a right to it and made me furious and made me laugh and made me show up to parties I hated and sleep in rooms that weren't mine and press my mouth to his hair without deciding to. Until someone made me remember what I gave up and made me feel everything I had been holding back unconsciously.
My fist comes down on the boards.
Not hard. Just enough to feel something.
I close my eyes.
I could go back.
That's the thing. I could go back right now. His room. Lie back down beside him and let this be the thing it's clearly trying to be and stop doing the thing my father taught me to do and just —
Let myself have it.
And then what.
The season ends. The year ends. The draft comes. I go wherever hockey takes me and it takes me somewhere and what does that mean for this. What does it mean to let someone in this far and then have to choose. What does it mean to be a gay man in a professional locker room in a sport that has made very clear, for my entire life, what it thinks of that. What my father thinks of that.
My father knew.
