Page 56 of Omega’s Forward

That’s Dorn’s team.

I stand there in a towel looking at it and catch myself very nearly smiling.

I’m almost looking forward to it. That’s the kind of thought a captain is supposed to flag to somebody — the psychologist, the leadership group, his omega if he had one.

I towel my hair and keep it to myself.

I dress fast and I’m gone before half the room has hit the showers. Ozzy yells after me about McNally’s. I lift a hand without turning around.

A good captain stays. A good captain sits in the corner at McNally’s making one beer last, buys the kid’s pitcher himself.

I know every line of that job description. Tonight I can’t make myself care. I don’t even feel bad about that until I’m out of the parking garage, and then only a little.

The truck warms up slow. I sit while the windshield clears and my head turns to the same thing it always does.

Grown alphas do not lose whole months to some omega who doesn’t want them back.

I’m sulking like a teenager over somebody I fucked with for a handful of days. I’ve known that for a while now. Knowing it doesn’t help.

Some nights I want more than a do-over. I want all the way back — back to whatever the last ordinary day was, before I knew Gordie Rourke even had a kid.

The man was in my life for fifteen years. Not once did he say the word son.

I heard about it the way the rest of the team heard about it, after the funeral, from lawyers. There’s a version of things where it stayed that way — a name on a document, a signature we’d never meet — and in that version I mourn Gordie, hate the sale, and go on being a hockey player, and my house is just a house.

Instead I drive to Rosie’s.

*

This close to closing, the chairs are up on half the tables and the kid behind the register is pushing a mop in slow drags. He sees me, leans the mop against the wall, and reaches for a large cup, because we are long past the point of pretending I might order something else.

“Pumpkin spice, extra shot,” he says anyway. Ritual is ritual.

The first time I came in here after Everett left, I told myself it was curiosity.

A man ought to know what the fuss was about.

After that I told myself I’d developed a taste for them, which was a bigger lie and lasted longer.

They’re terrible. It’s mostly syrup, it barely qualifies as coffee, the cinnamon is far too strong. I order one after every home game and drink it to the bottom every single time.

They sell the syrup here in squat glass bottles. There’s a shelf of them right by the register. I picked one up once and stood there reading the ingredients, and then I put it back. A latte a week is a habit. A bottle in my own kitchen is a terrible idea.

I take the corner table, back to the wall, and get out my phone.

I have a system, and the system is healthy or so I tell myself.

One hour, once a week, in this chair. For that hour I’m allowed to think about him as much as I want. Look him up, read whatever there is to read, wallow straight to the bottom of the cup. When the hour’s up, that’s it until the next one.

That’s my obsession contained.

The system has only one flaw, which is that it doesn’t work. He gets into the other six days anyway. Anytime I see a gray suit. Anytime London is mentioned on the news.

On the last road trip I stopped dead in a hotel corridor because somebody’s citrus soap was drifting out of a doorway, and it took me the length of the hallway to get my face right again.

But my hour is my hour. I’m allowed this. Guilt free.

I do the rounds in the usual order.