Page 72 of Home Ice Advantage
“You were a little know-it-all even then, huh?” Ryan had asked.
“Little? I was already six feet tall,” Eric had retorted. He’d grinned. “Unfortunately, you’ll never get anywhere near there.”
Ryan had flushed, although it was the half-pleased way that he always did these days, when Eric teased him. Because they both knew how much they enjoyed the size difference, how it worked in bed. Neither of them could say that in front of Eric’s mother, but they’d known it, and as soon as Eric had been able to get him upstairs and into his room, he’d showed him.
As practice wound down, Eric thought about Mark Sullivan’s furious face, the way he’d spat venomous words back at Eric when Eric had asked him to leave. Ryan hadn’t asked him to do it, of course. Ryan would never have asked for anything like that. His default manner of dealing with his family was avoidance, the same way that his default manner of dealing with Keen and some of the more useless veterans had also boiled down to it.
Eric had been happy to step in between them. But that didn’t mean that knowing exactly what a vile person Sullivan was made him feel any better. He thought about Ryan as a boy, growing up in that household. Thought about Ryan’s broad smile and bright brown eyes and the way he was so fuckingearnestabout everything. Thought about Mark Sullivan trying to crush that earnestness underfoot. No wonder Ryan never wanted to go home.
The coaching staff had gone into Ryan’s office after the practice, listening on speaker while he spoke to Conroy about Keen and the request for waiver. Conroy hadn’t been surprised, and Ryan had been short and to the point. When the call had ended, they went to tell Keen, before it was confirmed with the league.
Predictably, he reacted badly. “You’rewaivingme? You’re fucking kidding.”
“You should be glad that Sully is a more patient man than I am,” Eric said shortly. “Or you would have been sent down to Providence in December.”
“You had a chance to change your attitude and your play,” Ryan added, because of course he was always so reasonable about it. “The closer we’re getting to the trade deadline, the more roster flexibility I’m going to need, especially with call-ups. Unfortunately, Jesse, you are the odd man out on this one.”
Keen spat on the floor of the locker room. He muttered something under his breath that sounded awfully likefuck all of you. And with that, he turned around and stalked out of the practice facility.
Ryan drove Eric back to his apartment, silent and out of sorts. Eric thought about the language Mark Sullivan had snarled at him and the hot fury that had risen in his chest. He hadn’t told Ryan about what his father had said. There was no need to upset him. But it had been an internal triumph that Eric hadn’t let himself be baited into doing something stupid. He’d been polite and he’d been steely and eventually, he had won.
“Ryan,” Eric said, sliding his hand sideways to grip Ryan’s thigh. The muscle was tense under his hands, even sitting in the car. “Are you okay?”
Ryan’s brown eyes were troubled, his mouth, almost always smiling, turned down at the corner. “Should I have said something to my dad? I don’t like the idea of you fighting my battles for me.”
“You didn’t have to say anything to him if you didn’t want to.”
Ryan flicked the turn signal on, his eyes checking the right-of-way. It was convenient; he didn’t have to look directly at Eric while he was driving. “It’s just—you saw a little bit of how he is. When he gets angry, he won’t stop fighting until he’s just fucking destroyed everything in his path. I learned really early on that it was just easier not to engage. And honestly, it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to have a relationship with any of them.”
“Ryan,” Eric said quietly, “you know them best. And you know...you may not have been a fighter, but you werealwaystough to play against. Don’t forget that now, when things are complicated.”
“Thanks,” Ryan replied, except he still sounded out of sorts. Frustrated.
“Maybe it just wasn’t the right time.”
“When will it be? When will it ever be? Jesus, Eric, what if I’m always a coward like this?”
“It’s not cowardly. Trust me. If you think what you got with me was a scene, you can only imagine what it would have been like if you’d confronted him today. He probably would’ve blown a gasket.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t’ve left, that’s for sure,” Ryan said, and sighed. He turned on the radio—of course, it was already tuned to 98.5, the sports-talk station. They drove in silence, listening to the hosts of the show chatter on about the happenings in the league.
“And this is just in, following an investigation by the law firm of Johnson Brown & Williams, the final report on the Railers’ handling of the sexual abuse allegations during their Cup run decades ago has been returned. We have not been able to read the contents of the report, but it appears that the entire front office, along with Richard Terrance, the Railers’ longtime head coach, have been fired.”
“Holy shit,” Ryan said, and glanced sideways at Eric for the first time. “If they got rid ofTerrance—that’s huge.”
“He must have known,” Eric said grimly. “He must have known and never done anything.”
Ryan’s face reflected exactly what Eric felt: horror and disgust and worry. “And in the middle of the season like this, too. It must have beenreallybad.”
“It’s really hard to imagine that anyone could treat one of the boys like that,” Eric muttered. “It makes me just—furious, thinking about it.”
“It would never happen here,” Ryan said firmly. “Not like that. You can trust me on that one.”
“I do trust you to do the right thing. Quite a lot, you know.”
Ryan’s face was red when he glanced sideways again before turning his attention back on the road. They made the rest of the trip in silence, both lost in their own thoughts about the news.
III. SPRING