Page 104

Mom

Even for an hour. I’ll take an hour.

I stand there in the cold with the phone in my hand, and something shifts. Not a decision yet. Just the space where a decision is about to happen. The specific quiet that opens up in my head for the first time in what feels like weeks.

I think: I want Margo to meet her.

The thought arrives sideways, unplanned, and it doesn’t feel like a question. It feels like something that’s already true and I’m just now catching up to it. I’ve never brought anyone home like this. Never had anyone worth bringing this way — that’s not self-pity, just fact, the accurate accounting of a life that’s mostly been me and my mom and the specific economy of two people getting by on very little. The guys have met her over the years, in passing, the ordinary way — she’s come up for a game once or twice, Cash and Beau and Wyatt have all shaken her hand and eaten her cooking at some point. But nobody’s ever come to that house because of me, the way I’d need Margo to come. Nobody’s ever needed to.

But I want Margo in that house. I want her at that kitchen table with the two mismatched chairs and the window that sticks. I want my mom to see the person I’ve been not-quite-explaining over the phone for weeks. The someone I met, it’s still new, I’ll tell you more later person who’s turned into considerably more than new somewhere along the way, without me making an official announcement of it.

Here’s what I don’t fully examine, standing outside the athletic complex in the cold: why this specific thing costs me more than almost anything else has.

My mom is the one part of my life that’s never been about anything except me. Not the scholarship version. Not the draft-projection version. Not the guy with a Tab on his phone and a development plan built around him by an NHL franchise. Just me. The kid who used to sit at that kitchen table doing homework while she got ready for a night shift. The kid she raised alone on a nurse’s salary in a two-bedroom house in Dorchester, on Birch Street, with a window that’s stuck since before I was old enough to remember it not sticking.

Everyone else in my life gets some version of the managed me. The wall. The terse answers. The careful economy of what I let show. My mom gets the whole thing, because she’s the only person who’s never once needed me to be anything other than exactly what I am. There’s no performance in that house. There’s never been room for one.

I think about the two of us, years ago, before hockey turned into anything more than something I loved and was good at. Coming home from practice to find her already asleep on the couch, still in her scrubs, exhausted from a double. Me pulling a blanket over her instead of waking her. That was the kind of thing I knew how to do for her even at eleven, twelve years old. There was never a version of that relationship built on what I could give her. It was always just: we take care of each other, because there’s nobody else who’s going to.

I think about the years she worked doubles specifically so I could play travel hockey, the equipment she found secondhand and made work, the practices she drove me to on no sleep because there was nobody else who could. I think about the specific quality of her tiredness on those drives. Not resentful. Never once resentful. Just present and worn thin and completely unwilling to let either of those things stop her from getting me to the rink on time. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be worth that. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded. I don’t know if there’s a version of succeeding that actually settles the account.

Bringing Margo there means letting her see that version. The unmanaged one. The one before any of the armor got built. The one that exists in that small Dorchester house on Birch Street, with a stuck window and a couch that’s older than I am. Where none of what I’ve become in the last three years matters as much as whether I remembered to eat something today.

I’ve never done that on purpose. Not with anyone. The guys have been in that house, sure, eaten at that table, but that’s different — that’s teammates passing through on their way to somewhere else, not someone I brought there specifically because I wanted them to see all of it. Not with anyone I dated before Margo, either, which is a short and mostly forgettable list. My mom’s house has always been the one place I didn’t have to translate myself for anybody. I’ve kept the deliberate version of that separate on purpose. Some kind of instinct that said: this stays untouched by everything else, because if I let the two worlds mix on purpose I lose the one place that was never conditional on anything.

I’m choosing to stop keeping it separate. For her. Only for her.

She lets herself in a little after midnight.

House is empty tonight — Cash and Wyatt and the rest of them went out to The Penalty Box after practice, some low-stakes team thing, drinks and darts and whatever else they do when nobody’s making them study. I got the invite same as everyone else. Told them I had film to finish. Which wasn’t exactly a lie, except the real reason was simpler than that: given the choice between a loud bar full of teammates and one quiet hour where Margo might show up, there was never actually a choice.

I hear the third stair creak. She still hasn’t learned to skip it, or maybe she has and just doesn’t bother anymore, not with me. By the time she pushes my door open I’m already sitting up, laptop closed, whatever exhausted half-sleep I’d fallen into gone the second I registered the sound of her on the stairs.

“Hey,” she says. Quiet. She’s still in her practice clothes, hair coming loose from its ponytail, the specific tired that comes from a full day of stunt sequences and LSAT prep and whatever else she’s been carrying that she hasn’t told me about yet.

“Hey.” I reach for her before she’s even fully in the room.

She comes to me the way she always does now. Not asking, not hesitating. Just crossing the distance and climbing onto the bed and into my lap, like it’s the only place she’s been trying to get to all day. I get my hands in her hair, pull the tie loose the rest of the way, and she makes a small sound against my mouth when I kiss her, something that’s relief as much as want.

“Long day,” I say, into her neck.

“Long everything.” Her hands find the hem of my shirt. “Don’t want to talk about it. Want you.”

I don’t need telling twice.

I get her out of her clothes slow, unhurried despite the hour, despite both of us running on fumes. Some nights that’s exactly what we need. Not fast, not urgent. I peel her sports bra over her head and she arches into my hands the second I touch her, and I take my time with her breasts, her nipples, working her with my mouth until she’s arching off the bed and gripping my hair.

“Theo —” Breathless already.

I keep going. Down her stomach, her hips, hooking my fingers into the waistband of her leggings and dragging them off slow, and when I get her spread out under me, bare, waiting, I don’t rush the next part either.

I put my mouth on her.

She tastes like she always tastes, warm and specific and entirely her, and I groan against her at the first taste, the sound vibrating right where she needs it. Her hands fist in my hair, pulling me closer, and I give her exactly what she wants — my tongue working against her pussy, slow deliberate strokes, then focus everything on her clit, sucking it into my mouth the way I know undoes her fastest.

“Fuck — Theo — right there —”

I don’t stop. I work her with my mouth and slide two fingers inside her at the same time, curling them the way that makes her back bow off the mattress, and I feel her tighten around my fingers, feel the shudder building in her thighs, and I chase it, relentless, until she comes apart with a broken sound and her whole body goes taut and shaking under my mouth.