Empty Net (3 page)

“—said to Coach. You ever find out?”

“No. Sorry. We don’t discuss our secrets during our gay sleepovers. Hux, you just blew up that car we were supposed to steal. We did this mission last week, remember?”

“Why are we doing it again, then?”

“You like the half-dressed girls in the hot tub at the end,” Murph offered helpfully.

Isaac laughed, and the conversation went back to explosives and shouting at each other to stop failing and successfully complete the heist. They didn’t talk about St. Savoy, but Isaac felt a strange feeling of unease as he headed home. Laurent was going to change things, and he hated that. He couldn’t imagine what having him in the locker room was going to do to the team.

The house was quiet when he got in, and he braved a quick dart into the kitchen to get some water. That had backfired more than once, when he thought his coaches were asleep and was treated to the unmistakable auditory evidence that they weren’t. Another time Isaac discovered Misha getting water in the kitchen after he’d obviously fucked Coach Ashford. Misha had been sweaty and not wearing a shirt.

Misha was an attractive man, even if he was way too old for Isaac to consider hot. He wasn’t Isaac’s type at all, but he’d had no idea that his coach had such impressive abs or all the tattoos. Isaac had stared blatantly, because fondness for pretty boys or not, those were hot.

But Isaac was safe, because it was quiet and no sex noises or half-dressed Russians interrupted his quest for a glass of water and a snack—he knew where Coach Ashford kept the Twinkies.

If it hadn’t been for the part where he decked his new backup goalie, whom he hated, Isaac would have been having a pretty great week.

At least he had two weeks before practice started. Two weeks to play video games with Hux and Murph, empty the dishwasher, eat some Twinkies, and pretend Laurent St. Savoy was just a bad memory.

ON THE
first day of camp, the room fell into a hostile silence the moment Laurent walked in. He could feel his new teammates’ icy stares as he made his way to his locker.

Someone had written St. Dickhead on his nameplate. Cute.

Hazing the new guy happened in every locker room, but Laurent knew it was more than that. It was a statement that said “we hate you” and “we liked watching you fail in the conference finals.” In addition to the new nameplate, someone had posted a picture of him from the end of the game in Asheville, when the Ravens were swept by the Storm. The words “spit on this”
were inked in red over his face.

His first time on the ice with his new team went about as well as he expected. During goalie drills he found himself on the receiving end of more than a few snow showers, and when the coaches weren’t looking, a few of his new teammates pretended to spit on him. Laurent was good at not reacting, so he just kept his mouth shut and tried to do his job.

Matt Huxley, the team’s enforcer, took a shot that came close to hitting Laurent in the face—and earned himself a whistle and a stern talking-to from the coaches. Laurent saw him fist-bump Shawn Murphy when he didn’t think anyone would notice. Those two were Drake’s best friends, and Laurent supposed he couldn’t blame them for wanting to make him suffer for that incident last season.

He thought about apologizing for it, but he didn’t. No one wanted to hear it anyway.

No one spoke a word to him when practice was over. Laurent could hear Drake, talking and laughing like Laurent wasn’t there. It made him angry, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t want anyone to like him. And at least when practice was over, he could go back to his apartment. That was the best thing about living in Spartanburg, and it was worth the intensity of his new teammates’ dislike.

Laurent’s apartment was one of two located on the top floor of a partially renovated Victorian-style house. The owner, Mrs. Bowen, lived downstairs. She was old, hard of hearing, and couldn’t say any part of Laurent’s name. But she gave him a hot plate and let him move in a week before he had his housing allowance, which was the nicest thing anyone had done for Laurent—ever, probably.

The apartment itself was a furnished studio with a surprisingly large bed, a bay window that let in way too much light in the morning, and creaky floors. It had a radiator for heat and a window-unit AC, a bathroom with a sink that dripped, and an honest-to-God claw-foot tub with a shower. It had clearly been a large bedroom with an en suite bath before it was converted into an apartment.

The kitchenette was definitely out of place, but it had a fridge, a microwave, and now the hot plate. Mrs. Bowen had offered to let him use her oven, but Laurent doubted that would ever be necessary.

It wasn’t his room at home with his king-size bed and soft plush carpeting, but it was
his
. And best of all, his father wasn’t lurking downstairs like a Leviathan, stewing in his usual discontent and anger until his son gave him a convenient outlet for whatever pissed him off that day. Laurent had never understood where his father’s seemingly endless anger came from. Denis St. Savoy was a famous, hugely successful goalie who’d had a long and celebrated career. What he had to be upset about was a mystery to Laurent.

Once he’d put his clothes away on the lavender-scented, padded purple hangers Mrs. Bowen had so thoughtfully provided in the closet, he showered, changed, and went to explore the neighborhood.

That’s when he found Charlie’s Comic Shop.

Laurent loved comics, and he loved drawing, and hidden under a stack of sweaters he hoped he’d never need to wear was a sketchbook with some of his own artwork. His father had flown into a rage when he found Laurent drawing as a child, and Laurent had hidden his sketchbooks ever since. They were shoved in a bottom drawer in the rickety old dresser, even in his own apartment.

He spent an hour or so in the comic shop, and he was looking forward to reading a few of his purchases when he got home. But instead he found himself sitting at the small kitchen table with his sketchbook, some freshly sharpened pencils, and his kneaded eraser. And for the next few hours, he lost himself in the quiet scratch of his pencil and the lines taking shape on the page.

They were sketches of his teammates—there were the defensemen, Matt Huxley and Shawn Murphy, who flanked Drake like bodyguards and shot Laurent nasty glares at every possible moment. He drew Coach Samarin, tall and imposing, who reminded Laurent of the Witch King from the
Lord of the Rings
movie, and Coach Ashford, all-American and everyone’s best friend, easy with a smile or a word of praise, or a correction when he thought it necessary—or, when he thought no one was looking—a smile of a different sort for Coach Samarin. He drew Isaac Drake, with his lean dancer’s body that looked nothing like a goalie’s. He had a loud voice and a habit of waving his goalie stick around and shouting at practice. Laurent thought he was kind of an asshole to his own teammates, but they seemed used to it and, more surprisingly, to expect and even respect it. Laurent drew his dumb, dyed-blue hair and his stupid Jeep, and that look on his face when Laurent had spat on him.

And finally Laurent drew himself, all alone in a Spitfire airplane, crashing into the sea.

Then he rolled his eyes at himself, slammed the book closed, and shoved it back in the drawer. Time to read his favorite comic—about a cop with a hellhound for a partner—and concentrate on someone else’s demons for a change.

THE SPITFIRES
started the season a much different team than the last season, or so Laurent understood. Last year they’d had trouble with offense and hadn’t scored a single goal until the sixth game of the season. They started the current season with an opening-night win in front of a respectable crowd, and Laurent watched in grim silence from his place on the bench, his Spitfires ball cap pulled low over his eyes. No one talked to him during the game, but that wasn’t unusual. No one talked to him at all, if they could help it.

And Laurent wanted to be left alone. He could handle his teammates’ icy silences and his coaches, who couldn’t outright express dislike but managed to convey it anyway. But the Spitfires got along a lot better than the Ravens ever had, and part of Laurent wished things were different and that he could be one of them. The thought that he could have, if only he hadn’t pulled that stunt in the playoffs last year—to earn the approval of a man who would never give it—made him hate himself more than usual. He should have known his father wouldn’t trade him to a team where he might actually enjoy playing hockey.

“You do your time on a team full of losers, son, and when you’re back, you’ll appreciate it here.”

His father had made it clear when Laurent left for Spartanburg that it wasn’t a permanent placement. It was a punishment for what he did in the playoffs.

Not spitting on Isaac Drake, but the other thing—Laurent’s last-ditch effort to escape Denis St. Savoy for good. Of course it had backfired. Denis was never going to let him go.

Laurent started in net on a Sunday matinee at home against the Ice Dogs. His performance was high in technical skill and low in passion, but the Spitfires won the game and earned their two points, so that was all that should matter. The absence of the traditional “give the goalie head taps after the game” earned a bit of a murmur from the crowd, but the icy silence when his name was announced that afternoon told Laurent that the Spitfire fans hadn’t forgotten him either.

He’d never been much of a fan favorite in Asheville. So it wasn’t that unusual.

The day before the team was scheduled to leave for their first road trip of the season, Laurent learned he was to be roommates with Drake on the road. It made sense, as Drake’s last roommate, Anthony Lathrop, was his former backup who’d retired the season before. Neither Laurent nor Drake were happy about it, but Coach Samarin gave them both a stern lecture about how they were teammates, and if Laurent had issues sharing a hotel room with a gay guy, he was welcome to sleep on the bus.

It didn’t matter because, as Laurent quickly found out, Drake had no intention of staying in a room with him.

He came up to Laurent as they were loading their gear on the bus. “Look, St. Savoy. I’m going to stay in Hux and Murph’s room, and you’re not gonna say a damn word to Coach about it either. You and I both know that rooming together is not going to make us get along.”

Laurent gave an indifferent shrug. “I don’t care what you do, Drake.”

Being abandoned still stung, even though it shouldn’t. Laurent sat by himself on the bus and, when he was sure no one was paying any attention, pulled out a small sketchbook and started to draw. At some point on the trip, even with his teammates’ dislike heady in the bus’s generally cheerful atmosphere, Laurent was able to actually relax. Not having his father there made it an entirely different experience, and if he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, Laurent could imagine he was part of the team for real.

It was in the locker room a few days later that everything finally came to a head. Laurent was cautiously looking forward to the peace of his room and wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. He was waiting for his teammates to stop showering and go do whatever they did after games, when someone reached around him and slammed his locker shut.

Huxley of course. “What the fuck do you want?” Laurent snapped.

“We were just wonderin’, is all. How come you don’t ever shower with the rest of the team. Huh?” Shawn Murphy asked from his other side and leaned in too close. Laurent hated being crowded—
hated
it—and searched quickly for something he could say to anger them enough to either punch him or leave him alone.

The bottom dropped out of Laurent’s stomach because he hoped to God that no one had ever noticed that he didn’t shower with the team. Or that, if they had, maybe they just chalked it up to him being an unfriendly asshole. “Just ’cause the rest of you are fags doesn’t mean I am.”

Sometimes Laurent heard the things that came out of his mouth and wondered who the hell he was.

“Jesus fuck,” Huxley said and shook his head. “You’re committed to this antigay shit, I’ll give you that.”

“
Merci
,” Laurent drawled. He tried not to think about how he’d seen Hux reading one of his favorite comic books—the one about the demon detective—and had almost done something stupid, like mention it. “We done here?”

“It’s just, like… why are you such a hater?” Murph asked and poked him in the shoulder. They must have figured out Laurent hated to be touched, because the two of them did it on a regular basis.

“I’m not. I don’t want to bend over and have someone’s cock in my ass,” Laurent snarled, and a tiny voice in his head asked him what the hell he was doing and if any of it was worth becoming a person who could say that and sound like he meant it. It was harder to ignore that voice without his father around.

Murphy looked like he was going to say something, but Hux gave a rough jerk of his head toward the door, and Murphy just hit Laurent hard with his shoulder and moved past.

Hux leaned down and said, “You know what? I hope when we play your asshole ex-team, that Coach starts you in goal. I hope they spit on your fucking face, since none of us can.” He gave Laurent a shove and headed after his friend.

Laurent didn’t understand what they meant by that, until he remembered what next week was.

The Spitfires were playing the Ravens.

Oh God. There was no way Samarin would put him in goal… would he?

Of course he would. You’re miserable, and you go out of your way to insult him and his team. If you think he won’t take any opportunity to get you back, you’re wrong. That’s how it works, idiot. Didn’t you learn anything playing hockey for your father?

Laurent heard a horrible, raw sound and realized it was himself, breathing. He looked around, made sure he was alone, and went to take a shower. He needed the heat and the water to calm him down.

He’d been in there a few minutes, just starting to relax beneath the spray, when he heard a voice drawl, “Well, well. Look what we have here. Mr. I’m Afraid of Showering With the Gays.”