Page 1 of Game Misconduct
I. SUMMER
Chapter One
July
Summer in Philadelphia probably wasn’t as hot as it might’ve been somewhere else, but it still felt like swimming through hot glue during the worst of it. The entire city smelled like baked brick and melting asphalt, sweat, and stale piss, and Michael Sato was alone and miserable.
The two things didn’t connect, logically, but the smell certainly didn’t help his mood.
He hadn’t gone home for the offseason and he didn’t regret it. His parents had asked. They had pleaded, actually. But he’d told them he had to keep training. After his mediocre-at-best season, he couldn’t afford to slip one inch if he wanted to make the Philadelphia Constitution’s roster this season.
And that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The half-truth had always been his modus operandi when it came to his parents. It was pretty much the only way they had ever let him leave Gardena, and it had worked for him for twenty-five years. It was also his modus operandi when it came to everyone else, if he was being honest with himself.
He’d spent most of his time during the summer lifting weights, eating an ungodly amount of grilled chicken breasts and salmon and protein shakes, trying to bulk up after the inevitable end-of-the-seasonmy body’s eaten itself, ignoring repeated calls from his mom and then texts asking how he was doing—which weren’t his mom expressing concern about him so much as they were a trap to seewhathe was doing—and playingCall of Dutyby himself for hours at a time until he passed out on the couch of his empty apartment. He’d spent a lot of time sadly jerking off, thinking of nothing in particular.
So yeah—he didn’t regret not going home exactly, because that would’ve been bad for different reasons, but goddamn, he was fucking lonely.
He got along well with the guys on the team, but he didn’t like...hang out with them outside of the season. That was partially his own fault, for being a secretive freak, but it was hard to feel comfortable around a bunch of dudes when you had so much to hide, when you had so much to lose. Really, his closest friend—onlyfriend—was Bee.
But he didn’t have Bee, because she was having the time of her life with her boyfriend this offseason, and Mike was...he just wanted to get fucked up, or fuck someone up, or maybe get fucked, or maybe all three at once. He felt like ripping his entire skin off and clawing out his eyes, Greek myth-style. If he sat in the apartment by himself for much longer, he was going to completely lose his mind. Like the inmates on the 567th episode ofLockup. Which he had watched, sequentially.
Or like,despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
You know.
That shit.
That incredibly stupid shit, which his brain would not stop spewing at him whenever he slowed down long enough to let it.
It was that feeling, that restless fury, that had him wandering down from their shitty apartment at 17th and Arch and farther into Center City. He didn’t really have anywhere he was going. He bought some falafel at Goldie and ate it as he walked. Licked tahini from his fingers. It wasn’t in his diet plan, but that didn’t matter. No one bothered him. The heat was oppressive and sweat dripped down his back by the time the sun set, so he decided to cool off and get something to drink.
One drink led to several drinks led to many drinks as he bar-hopped his way through Philly, all alone. It was a good city for it. A beer town; lots of options. If you wanted local beer and brewpubs, you could find it. If you wanted craft from anywhere else, you got it. If you wanted to chug Bud Light at a dive bar, Dirty Frank’s or Oscar’s or Drinker’s had you covered.
He mostly just wanted to get fucked up and not talk to anyone.
He got recognized a few times anyway, signed some autographs and smiled awkwardly for pictures. It didn’t happen to him nearly as much as it happened to Bee, and he didn’t think it was even his face people knew so much as it was the muscles and the tattoos and the signature buzzed hair.If I ever wanna go incognito, he had thought once,I can just grow it back in.
He wasn’t sure why, but he was still out near ten. Mike’s alcohol tolerance was decent enough that even though he was, objectively, wasted, no one could really tell. He shouldn’t have walked the way that he did, but his ambling ramble took him down 13th Street and into the heart of the Gayborhood.
It was really a stupid idea. It wasn’t like he could ever pick up here—no one really recognized him, but he couldn’t risk ending up on Twitter or something in case someone did—but walking by some of the bars and seeing other dudes just not giving a shit about anything like that made him feel even more alone.
It had been a really long time since he’d hooked up with anyone. He’d done it a few times in his first year with the Cons, but only on the road, where it seemed less risky, where he definitely wasn’t a household face. And now he was grounded for the summer, with nothing to do and no one to talk to. The silence of his and Bee’s apartment weighed down on him until he gave in. He’d scrolled through some apps; his accounts were anonymous, of course, no pictures because even his abs were easily identifiable. But no one had even caught his eye. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have been worth it anyway.
Shoulders hunched forward, he kept walking, and if he hadn’t looked up at exactly the wrong moment, he would’ve missed it.
Someone lit a cigarette deep in the alley and the smell drew his attention like a siren’s song. He’d quit. He was always quitting, because it was fucking hell for your game, and he was making healthy choices these days. There was a part of him that always craved it anyway. So he looked.
And then he kept looking.
The guy who lit the cigarette was a giant of a man, six and a half feet tall and burly as hell. Like he had muscle, but he wasn’t cut like Zach Reed, one of the Cons’ alternate captains, was cut. He was solid, a bit of meat to cushion him, like he came by all of his size and strength naturally. The kind of body Mike always found most attractive. Someone who could actually manhandle him, maybe, if he wanted it. Thick, wavy black hair hung in front of the guy’s face, and when he flicked it out of the way with a jerk of his head, Mike realized two things. If you had asked him later which one he had realized first, he would not have been able to say.
The only thing he would admit to was that he recognized him.
Daniel Garcia, his archnemesis, the architect of most of his misery last year, his first in the league. Mike could still remember, clear as day, how nervous he’d been his first game, knowing he had to do something to prove he deserved to be in the lineup. He’d picked a fight with the biggest, meanest guy on the ice, and that happened to be Daniel Garcia. And Daniel Garcia had kicked his ass. Mike could still remember the fury burning under his skin, the unbearable humiliation. And the concussion. They’d dropped the gloves every game after that, too, and every single time, win or lose, it had only made Mike madder. The way Daniel Garcia always seemed to belaughingat him, the way Mike’s rage and terror and desire and need to prove himself was just a joke to him.
He’d always fought back, always delighted in humiliating Mike when he could—maybe a mature, logical person would say that he hadn’t needed to fight Daniel Garcia to the point where one of his teeth had broken off on Mike’s knuckles, but Mike was not a mature, logical person, and neither was Daniel Garcia. Daniel Garcia, here in Philadelphia, Mike’s adopted hometown. DanielfuckingGarcia, that fucking asshole, because of course he would be here today.
If Mike hadn’t been drinking for the last five hours, he would have turned on his heel and walked away. But he had been. And that horrible thing under his skin, the burning rage with no target, the thing that wanted to fight and fuck or fuck and fight, that thing was out in full force now. It was impossible to fight someone to bloodied faces and knuckles and concussions and broken teeth every time you met them and not feel the urge to do it again, even when you met them in different circumstances.