Page 28 of Delay of Game

“So Jammer’s new girlfriend is like an Instagram poet or something,” he said, to break the silence, pushing some of the leftover eggs around on his plate.

“A what?”

“Like...she writes poetry, but it’s all really short and it has illustrations, and she posts it on Instagram. I’ll show you.” Zach realized his phone was probably still in his jeans, which were nowhere in sight. “Anyway, it’s like,I struggled with the loneliness inside myself, before I let it blossom into a sunflower.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“It’s poetry, dude, I dunno. It’s kind of funny, you have to see the—here, give me your phone.”

Nate handed it over without further argument, and Zach entered in Nate’s passcode. Six digits; his number and the year the Cons had drafted him. The phone background was a fairly new picture. It was the first line—Nate, Zach, and Bee—sitting on the bench together at a game, staring out intently at the ice. Bee was whispering something to Zach, who had his arm slung over Nate’s shoulders. Zach sucked in a breath and opened Instagram to show Nate exactly how bad the poetry was.

Nate leaned over the island to get a better look, close enough that Zach could see the freckles on his shoulders and the blond hair on his chest. Which, he now knew, was soft under his fingertips.

This was fine.

He’d kept it bros for three seasons so far. A drunken blowjob wasn’t going to change that.

Especially if Nate didn’t remember it.

JesusChrist, Zach was fucked.

Somehow, Nate managed to keep it together until Zach had found his jeans—they had ended up wedged behind the couch—and gotten dressed to leave.

Zach had hesitated in the door for a second, like he’d wanted to say something, and Nate had a desperate, wild thought:you could kiss him and see what happens. But there was nothing artificially lowering his inhibitions like last night, so he’d swallowed hard and said, “See you at the rink, bud.”

Zach stared at him for slightly too long, said, “Yeah,” and let Nate shut the door behind him.

He stared at the door for a minute. He looked down at his bare feet on the wooden floor. He started to walk back toward the kitchen, but that required effort, so Nate sat down on the floor.

Then he lay down on the floor.

That seemed like a good way to handle things.

He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten through the entire morning without breaking, but he was getting better at controlling himself. That was a lie. He was getting better at controlling himself while sober. Drunk Nate was a complete and utterdisaster. Hand over his eyes, he groaned in dismay, remembering far too clearly exactly how much of a disaster he’d been.

Like—in retrospect, there were probably a lot of things about last night that he could be freaking out about. Kissing a dude. Hooking up with a dude and enjoying it as much as he’d ever enjoyed being with Rachel. Surprisingly, maybe, he wasn’t that freaked out about that aspect of things. He’d never really thought about it before, but also...like...just in retrospect, a lot of things about his life made sense in a way that they hadn’t necessarily made sense before.

Maybe there had been something more to his dumb, hormonal teen locker room angst, the detailed admiration of his teammates’ bodies and his complete hatred of his own. The way he froze up talking to anyone, uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t even begin to describe. And as an adult, maybe there was a reason he had usually just kept his eyes level in the locker room as a rule.

It definitely was not a particularly heterosexual thing to kiss your best friend, and, well. Some of it had probably been percolating in the most secret parts of his brain, the parts that half of his conscious thought wouldn’t even acknowledge, for longer than he’d realized. Maybe...he wasn’t straight?

Maybe he would have figured it out sooner if Rachel hadn’t swooped in to rescue him from his youthful flailing and he’d never had to think about it again after that, but who the hell knew? And hewasreally, really fucking dumb, no one would have ever said otherwise. It was absolutely in character to not even have a goddamn clue about this until his midtwenties.

So: a surprise to him but not, really, that surprising.

He wasn’t freaking out about hooking up with a guy.

Hewasfreaking out about hooking up with a teammate.

He wasabsolutelyfreaking out about hooking up with Zach.

Zach had seemed completely unfazed. He’d woken up, eaten the food Nate had made for them like he had done for years of their friendship; he’d invaded Nate’s personal space like it was a concept he’d never heard of, like he’d done for years of their friendship; and he’d talked about stupid things and made Nate laugh, like he’d done for years of their friendship.

Not once had he mentioned anything that had happened the night before.

Which was completely fine because Nate didn’t want to talk about it either.

It was so fucking obviously a huge mistake. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. Hell, it hadfeltlike a great idea at the time.