The Nature of the Game (Stick Side Book 2), page 16
“You don’t say.” Alex’s voice was bland.
Ash turned his head to stare at him. “How’d you figure it out?”
“You look at each other as if you’re looking at something you know you’ll never have, but you want it desperately anyway, even though it could hurt you.”
Was Alex implying that Dan was afraid Ash would hurt him? After what Dan had done, he was worried about getting hurt? That was rich.
“I wouldn’t have known you had a past,” Alex continued, “if you hadn’t once mentioned a curly haired guy who looked like Mitch that you dated in New York. Thought it was just attraction at first until I put it together.”
“Mitch is right—you really do notice everything.”
Alex smiled softly and crossed his ankles.
“Does Mitch know?” Ash asked.
“Doubt it.”
“You haven’t told him?”
Alex side-eyed him. “It’s not mine to tell.”
Ash sighed and stared at himself in the reflection of the car window next to him, listening with one ear for sounds of their teammates entering the parking garage.
Fuck, he was tired and wired all at the same time.
“It was six years ago,” he said. “And it didn’t end well.”
There was a pause, then, “Six years?”
“Why do you say that like it means something?”
“Because it does,” Alex said slowly, choosing his words. “Something happened between Mitch and Dan six years ago and . . . It stands to reason that whatever happened between you and Dan is somehow related.”
“You know what that something is.”
“I do. I’m not telling you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
No, Ash wouldn’t ask him to. As much as he’d pushed against Dan at first, pushed against the explanations, the excuses, the apologies Dan so obviously needed to get off his chest, now Ash wanted to know. Needed to know. But he only wanted to hear it from Dan.
Dan’s words from a few weeks ago came back to him: I lost the two people who meant the most to me.
Those two people being Mitch and Ash, if what Alex said was true.
Everything I did was for nothing, Dan had also said. That Ash almost asked Alex about. Processing the words now, though, when he hadn’t bothered to weeks ago, made him realize just how much Dan had to live with, especially paired with the other thing Dan had said: I couldn’t see a way out of the corner I’d been put in.
Ash tried to organize his thoughts and put everything in order based on those bits and pieces.
Dan had been manipulated into doing something.
Whatever it was had led to him breaking up with Ash and Mitch because he hadn’t seen any other way out.
In the end, it hadn’t made a difference, and he’d clearly been living with the regret ever since.
Question: What had Dan been manipulated into doing? And who’d done the manipulating?
Theory: Greta Westlake. It made the most sense given Dan had gone to see her before they were supposed to meet at the airport.
Follow-up question: When Dan had realized he’d been duped, why hadn’t he reached out to Ash right away?
“Mitch and Dan seem to be okay now, though,” he said.
“Yeah. Dan came forward a few months ago. When Mitch passed out? Remember? Some things came to light then and . . .”
A few months ago . . .
“And you can’t say more without revealing Dan’s secrets?” Ash said.
“Sorry, I just—”
“No, I get it. You don’t have to explain. Did it take Mitch a long time to forgive him?”
Alex chuckled quietly. “About four minutes.”
Ash’s eyes snapped over to Alex. “Are you serious? After six years, why so fast?”
“Because Dan’s his brother. And Mitch missed him.”
Dan had been Ash’s boyfriend. Ash’s everything. And Ash had missed him.
He’d spent the past few weeks not forgiving Dan, while Mitch had been able to in minutes? Obviously Mitch was the bigger person.
“Not necessarily,” Alex rebutted when Ash said so. “They’re family. That’s a different kind of relationship than anything else.”
“Maybe.”
“Why hasn’t Dan already explained what happened?”
Ash shuffled on his feet. “I . . . maybe haven’t let him?” He’d been too angry to listen at first, and then he’d told himself that it didn’t matter—it’d been six years. Except it did matter; he’d just been afraid of the truth. What if Dan had left him because he didn’t love him anymore?
But if Ash was right about Dan having been manipulated or tricked . . . That changed things.
Alex cocked his head. “How do you expect to move forward with him if you don’t have all of the information? Assuming you want to move forward with him, of course.”
He did. He really, really did. His head, though, couldn’t stop remembering that text: I’m sorry, I can’t. Could he go down that path with Dan again?
“Think you’ll ever forgive him?” Alex asked.
Closing his eyes on a sigh, Ash said, “I think part of me already has.”
Try Out Center for Youth wasn’t quite as bad off as Coach Ness made it out to be. They’d had some flooding on top of suffering from missing siding and roof tiles and a few blown out windows, Ash found out when he and Alex and a handful of other guys on the team arrived half an hour later. Teri took them on a tour that started with the art room turned shower. Bubbles protruded from the ceiling where water had pooled, the paint and plaster cracked and slimy as water dripped down into strategically placed buckets.
“This sucks,” one of the guys muttered.
Scratch that. It was as bad as Coach Ness had made it sound. It might even be worse.
The only part of the facility to have survived was the ice rink, and even that had a chunk of roof torn off in one section above the east bleachers. The workout room was in the same condition as the art room, the locker rooms smelled of mildew, the walls were cracked and stained across the facility, and inside the huge gymnasium, light fixtures hung precariously by their wires in the corner. Midway through the gym, four of those yellow A-frame caution signs formed a weak barrier.
“Don’t go behind them,” Teri said as she concluded their tour, waving in the direction of the signs and what lay behind them: a storage room housing mats, basketballs, baseball bats, and other sports equipment as well as various tools like hammers and nails and measuring tape. “Obviously those could come down at any moment. Someone’s coming in to look at it tomorrow.”
“Was anybody hurt during the storm?” Ash asked.
“No. Thankfully there weren’t any staff or kids here at the time.” Teri led them back through the gym to the waterlogged front lobby and out the front door. The rest of the street hadn’t fared much better, debris and broken buildings lining the sidewalk. Ash swallowed hard and wished he were back in bed napping with Dan.
He’d never seen anything like it. Never seen a more solemn group of hockey players. The devastation was unreal and it was home and it affected people they knew and cared about.
The front of the building had lost a lot of its siding, and the painted Try Out Center for Youth above the door now read Tr. .Out C. .ter for. .ou h.
“As you can see,” Teri said, posture flagging, “it needs a lot of work, so I’d appreciate any help you can give me, even if it’s volunteering to remove some of the debris.”
Yeah. Definitely yes. This was . . . This was horrible.
Ash withdrew his phone from his back pocket and snapped a few pictures of the Tr. .Out C. .ter for. .ou h sign. He knew someone who could help with that.
Dan awoke to a quiet apartment, his skin goosebumped from the air conditioning. Fuck, he was cold. Why couldn’t Floridians find a comfortable indoor temperature to battle the heat outside?
Oh, there was a note from Ash propped on the night table.
DON’T TACKLE THE BACKYARD WITHOUT ME!
He sniggered at the all caps. Message received.
If you want to be useful, the note continued, maybe get my boxes out of storage?
It was signed simply A. As if it was too hard to add sh. So lazy.
There was a separate piece of paper with a key taped to it and instructions on where to find the storage room and what section of it contained Ash’s belongings.
Not that Ash’s belongings were hard to find. The sixth floor storage room used the sophisticated organizational system of masking tape on the floor forming dozens of neat twelve by twelve squares. Apartment numbers were written on the top left corner of each square. He found Ash’s assigned square not far from the door. Patio furniture was stacked on top of itself—chairs on top of the table and a cute love seat wedged underneath that—with a hideously creepy gnome between the chair legs. Boxes and small potted plants were stacked around it.
After propping the storage room door open with a box, Dan settled in for some snooping.
The first box contained a DVD player and a gaming console. Boring. He brought that down to Ash’s apartment and hustled back up. The second had some lawn ornaments, decorative rocks, and outdoor garden lights and the like. With the state of Ash’s yard, he wouldn’t be needing these anytime soon. Dan left them where he’d found them and moved on to the next box.
Jackpot! A box of framed photos. Many of them were of Ash with his team, both current and former. Dan managed to put the photos in somewhat of an order based on Ash’s hair color: brown, brown with gray at the temples, brown with gray streaks, gray with brown highlights, and finally fully gray. Dan liked that Ash wasn’t vain enough to dye his hair. There was an assortment of pictures of Ash with his mom, with his dad, and a handful of the three of them together from when he was a kid. One photo in particular caught Dan’s attention and held it: Ash and his parents, recently going by the state of Ash’s hair, on a beach somewhere with blue ocean and seashells and warm sand.
Ash’s parents hadn’t been able to make their marriage work but they were still friends, whereas Dan’s parents didn’t want to be in the same state together.
Putting the pictures back in the box with a sigh, he brought it downstairs and tackled the rest. He found books, old hockey equipment, trophies, a few pucks, various knickknacks no doubt collected from Ash’s travels, sun catchers, several pairs of dress shoes—
Wait.
Sun catchers.
Ash still had his sun catchers.
His breath caught. Stilled. Released in a rush. Carefully, he removed them from the box and set them down in front of him. Six in total. Half moons, suns, and stars. Most plain with crystals hanging from the top, but the two that were his favorite had a small design burned into the wood.
The first was the logo of Ash’s AHL team in Syracuse. It still looked like a blob of squiggly lines. The second simply had A+D. Cheesy, but honest.
He didn’t know what to think about these sun catchers. On the one hand, he was amazed and touched and honored that Ash had kept them. It was like reaching adulthood and realizing that Santa Claus really was real. The fact that Ash had kept them had to mean something, didn’t it? On the other hand, it was possible Ash had forgotten all about them, buried at the bottom of this box that contained other random odds and ends—bookends and a pencil holder and a pile of stickers for some reason.
But he still had them. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe it meant something. Dan chose to believe the latter.
Dan repacked the box of sun catchers and brought it downstairs, but froze outside Ash’s apartment door, which wasn’t latched properly.
“Why would you come back now?” Ash was saying. Silence, then, “But, Mom, half the roads are impassable, power’s still out in some places, and—”
On the phone, then. Dan hovered, biting his lip, the corner of the box digging into his belly. When the conversation continued, Ash trying to convince his mom to stay put wherever the heck she was, Dan gave up, bored, and was elbowing the door open when he heard Ash mutter, exasperated, “Mom, I’m not calling Laura. She knows where to find me if she needs help.”
Laura was the ex-wife. Dan backed out again, quietly, leaving the door ajar. But guilt hit him instantly; he couldn’t eavesdrop on Ash. He’d promised himself nothing but honesty with Ash from now on, and eavesdropping wasn’t just dishonest—it was sneaky.
Making as much noise as he could to announce his presence, Dan shouldered his way inside with an apologetic smile. Ash smiled back and gestured at his phone with an eye roll. Moms, he mouthed. And Dan . . . had no idea what he meant. What about moms? Dan had never met Mariana Tessler in person, only via phone when he and Ash had been together, but even through the phone, Dan could tell that she was Greta Westlake’s polar opposite. She badgered Ash about his love life, asked about his friends, questioned him on his food choices, if he’d done his laundry, what touristy things he’d seen in the Big Apple, if he’d found a new chiropractor. It was meant with love and Ash accepted it like it was normal. For him, it was.
Greta Westlake never badgered. She coldly demanded and then expected everyone to exceed her expectations. She’d once fired one of Westlake’s delivery companies because one of the truck drivers continually forgot to capture a signature upon delivery.
Ash wandered away for a bit of privacy, but Dan still heard his annoyed, “I don’t know what makes you think I want Laura back in my life.”
Well, it was nice to hear that Dan wouldn’t be competing with an ex-wife. But by that same token, if Ash didn’t want his ex-wife in his life again, in what universe would he want an ex-boyfriend?
Annoyed with his own thoughts, he went back up to the sixth floor to lock the storage room door. Downstairs again, he left the key on Ash’s counter.
“Thanks, man,” Ash said, coming out of the bedroom. He pocketed his phone and headed for the sliding glass doors, but he didn’t go outside. Just stood staring out, hands on his hips, exactly like he had earlier.
Sad. A bit lost.
“How was practice?”
Ash turned from the door. “Good. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“About . . . practice? Did something happen?”
“Not at the rink. After, I mean. This,” Ash said, pulling his phone out and scrolling through something, “is the Try Out Center for Youth downtown.” He turned the phone to Dan, and—
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Ash went on as Dan thumbed through the photos. “It’s pretty bad.”
“The kind of damage that this city sustained . . . I’ve never seen anything like it except on the news.”
“Me too.”
Dan passed the phone back. “How can I help?”
Ash’s smile was slow in forming, but when it did, it was a thing of such beauty that Dan forgot to breathe.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See this?” Ash showed him the phone again. On it was a picture of the front of the center, a thick metal door with a white patch above it, and on that, chipped and faded red paint that must’ve spelled a word or a phrase before the storm. “It used to say the name of the center, but it was pretty tacky even before the storm. Could you build something nicer? Something friendly and inviting, but also sturdy? You know, like those pub signs? The ones that stick out from a metal rod from the front of the building and have a swinging sign on them?” He swung his hand side to side.
Dan rubbed his jaw, ideas and concepts already forming. “I could do that, yeah. I’m guessing it’s not a huge rush since they need to renovate first? Do they have a logo?”
“Um . . .”
“Never mind. I’ll check online.”
“Um.” Ash fidgeted. “About payment . . .”
Dan shot him a dirty look. “Please. As if I’d charge a non-profit for something like this. I don’t have anywhere to work here, though, or any tools or materials. Maybe there’s a trade school nearby I could work out of,” he said, thinking out loud. “I’ll need to go to the center and take measurements and talk to the owner or director or whoever about what they want—”
“I can take you next week.”
“Yeah? Great.”
“Thank you.” Ash squeezed Dan’s arm, and the sensation traveled through Dan’s blood and locked in his stupid, hopeful heart. “Really.”
“You’re welcome.” Dan’s voice was hoarse and his palms were sweating. They stared at each other for a moment, the air between them dense with everything Dan wanted to say. What would Ash do if Dan leaned forward to kiss him? The intention must’ve been written on his face, because Ash stepped back and smiled faintly. “I’m beat. Can I take you to your hotel?”
Disappointment gnawed at Dan, an empty chasm of regret, but he pushed past it. If Ash needed time, Dan would give it to him.
JULY 2003—SIX YEARS AGO
“So. You and Dan, huh?”
Ash froze, backpack in hand. On the bed was a brand new box of condoms and an unopened bottle of lube.
He quickly dropped the backpack, covering the evidence of tonight’s activities to come—ha ha!—and whirled to face his dad. “Huh? What?”
His dad leaned against the doorway and made a nice try, but you can’t hide from me face. “You and Dan. You’ve been hot and heavy for weeks.”
“Ugh, don’t say hot and heavy like that. Ew.”
“Your mom and I were hot and heavy once.”
“Oh my god, why?”
“I’m just trying to say that maybe you shouldn’t rush into things.”
“I’m not . . . We’re not . . .” Well, they were, but still. Not rushing, that was, but doing things. They’d started small and they’d discussed the succession of their sexual activities ad nauseam. Frankly, for two guys in their early twenties, they talked a lot and about everything.
“How come you didn’t tell us you’re gay?” his dad said, changing the topic. Clearly he could see that talking about sex with his dad was freaking Ash out, and obviously the subject of his sexual orientation was so much better.
