Page 66 of Delay of Game
“You could, you know, talk about it.”
“I can’t fucking dothat.”
“It makes things a lot easier.”
“I can’t.”
“Okay.”
“Dude, I’m being serious.”
“Okay!”
“So why can’t you talk about it?”
“I just... I can’t make things worse than they already are. I know if I talk to him about it I’m gonna put my fucking foot in it for sure. And it’s not just me I have to worry about, Mike. It’s the rest of the team.”
Mike rubbed a finger against his temple. “It’s probably not as bad as you’re—”
“I’m just going to have to do the only thing I can do, which is pretend the last fucking three months of my life never happened.” In one gulp, he downed the rest of his coffee and slammed the mug, for emphasis, down on the table.
Mike stared at him. “Zachary fucking Reed.”
Zach stared back, determined, triumphant. “It’s going to work. It has to. Trust me. I’m your alternate captain.”
Mike continued to stare at him, but thankfully, did not add,this is the least convincing speech I have ever heard in my life.
Zach ate his eggs and drank the coffee Mike refilled for him, and winced, again, thinking about the way he’d acted the night before.
It wasn’t completely out of his wheelhouse to lose his shit in response to some bad news. His epic bender after getting traded to Philly was still talked about in awed tones and memes on r/RoyalMontreal. But the intensity of what he knew was really grief still caught him off guard.
The more he thought about pretending the last three months of his life had never happened, the more it solidified. Because he wasn’t just losing Nate romantically. He was probably going to lose his friendship too.
And Nate had been his best friend for years now.
And if he was going to admit that he was in love with his best friend, he might as well admit that he’d probably been in love with him from the very beginning.
Three fucking years. That was a lot to lose.
But he’d have to deal with it, one day at a time, because they were in the playoff hunt and they were in the Cup hunt and he didn’t have any other choice.
He was going to do it.
He just had to get over Nate first.
Nate’s all-consuming feelings of doom were often inaccurate and mostly driven by anxiety, but when Zach played probably the worst game he’d ever played in his entire life, disappeared afterward, and didn’t answer any of Nate’s calls or texts, he thought that probably this was one time he was absolutely right.
It was the first time since they’d known each other that Zach had done anything like that.
In all of this time he’d been worrying about it, he hadn’t thought about how he’d actually feel when itdidhappen.
And now that it was here, he mostly just felt numb acceptance. Maybe the rest of it would hit later, but he’d spent so much time thinkingguys like you don’tgetto have things like thisthat when he actually lost it, it just felt like the universe aligning back into the way that it was supposed to be. The way that it always did if he felt too happy, too optimistic, too excited about anything. It was the same thing as making the playoffs, only to get knocked out of them in the first or second round.
For the briefest moment he thought that maybe, maybe he was overreacting, maybe this wasn’t the end of things after all, but when Zach didn’t respond toare you cominghome?even though he’d read it, Nate realized that whatever had happened wasn’t just his imagination.
On autopilot, Nate went about his day without Zach, who was in Princeton at Mike’s house.
It wasn’t until now that Nate realized how much of his time he actually spent with Zach on a day-to-day basis. Even before Nate’s spectacularly bad judgment in December, they’d gone to the gym together, carpooled to practices and games together, and spent a good portion of their nongame time just hanging around at either Zach’s place or Nate’s place or in hotel rooms.