Chapter Fifteen
Layton
I’d begun to dread the messages that I saw when I went into the office, despite the fact that managing that crap was my job. Twitter flared up every hour or so, and some of the comments out there about the Railers were just plain nasty. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, but still, I couldn’t help but feel like some of what was thrown was directed at me personally. That morning, though, I didn’t even have to make it into the damn arena to see the vitriol being thrown about.
I’d handled things like this before, but that was before we added the very real fear that being with Adler would cause everything to go sideways. I’d managed situations before where hate was commonplace, but never where it had touched me in such a visceral, personal way.
And I didn’t think I was coping. In fact there was no thinking about it. I knew I wasn’t coping. What the Railers were doing here was a million steps forward for equality in pro sports, but on a personal level would the Railers be the ones who had to pay the ultimate sacrifice? Would they survive? Would Jared and Ten make it through this?
Hell. Was Adler going to be hurt?
And why in fuck’s name was I feeling so dramatic this morning?
I saw the group standing outside the security gate, some in security uniforms, a couple of players; I recognized Arvy and Stan straight away. There was a commotion, some shoving and pushing, and I pulled over, willing to at least try to do part of my job even if this was a hockey issue.
I jogged over and made some sense of what I was seeing. Stan was holding Arvy back, two of the security guards bickering and forming a brick wall between them and a third security guy.
Arvy was shouting, “He was here. If he says he didn’t see anything—”
Stan pulled Arvy a little further back, and I slid between them and the security guys. I immediately looked to Bill, the same guy I saw in uniform every morning, the one whose kids were in college, the same man who always said good morning. He looked gray.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and held up a hand to stop Arvy talking even as he let out a loud curse word. I spun to face him. “Go in,” I snapped. “Cameras.” I waved behind them, where sometimes we had groups of people waiting for the players, taking photos, and getting autographs. There were only two that morning, some way back, and neither of them seemed to be pointing phones our way.
Arvy subsided and shook off Stan, stalking past security and deliberately hip-checking the new guard at the back, who flinched and moved aside. Stan followed, stopping to talk to the guard in a low voice. What he said, I couldn’t hear, but it was enough for the young man to pull himself tall and nod.
Funny how Stan, with the least grip on English in the team, had the best things to say.
“Tell me,” I said again.
The two guards in front of me, Bill and one I didn’t know, maybe a night guy, looked at each other. Then, with a sigh, Bill moved to one side, and I saw it.
The most unoriginal gay slur of all time. “Fags play here.”
I sighed and looked at the third guard, who seemed to be close to losing his shit in a ‘falling to the ground crying’ kind of way.
“Let’s get this removed,” I said. “Get a maintenance guy out here.”
“On it,” Bill said, and went into the small security hut.
I shrugged off my jacket, the biting cold of an early Pennsylvania morning not enough to deter me. I covered over the graffiti and stood there, but I needed something—anything—to hold it in place.
“Here,” Adler said in a soft voice, and leaned over me with a roll of hockey tape. He taped the jacket, and we stood back looking at it critically. We could still see the “e” of here, but that could be anything. Adler passed me his coat, and I opened my mouth to argue until he raised an eyebrow and it reminded me of what he’d said about the cold. Also, if I made a fuss, then someone could say something, as if they knew that Adler was kissing me, sleeping with me, and that we’d used both our cars just as a cover up. Abruptly, I didn’t want that to be a thing when we were standing there in that shitty situation.
“How did this happen?” I asked the new guy, who couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
“I didn’t see anything,” he said, and I stared long enough that he finally looked at me. Then he hung his head. “I’m sorry. I needed the restroom, and Ed was on rounds.”
Maintenance was there in minutes and it made me think there was paint on standby for cases like this. Had it happened before Ten had come out?
I closed my eyes briefly as my cell vibrated and I saw Cote’s name on the screen. The owner couldn’t have heard about this already, could he?”
“Foxx?” he said. “Are you dealing with this?”
I nodded mutely, then realized what I was doing. “Yes, sir,” I said. He hung up before asking any questions.
We’d been doing so well, managing the hate, community events to raise the profile of the Railers, and the day before I could have walked into the arena confident that the Railers would make it through this.
Now, this morning, I was shaken.
By the time I reached my office I was a mess of concern, and felt sick when I booted up my PC and waited for the notifications.
Ironically, last night had been quiet on the ’net. There were a couple of new memes about Ten and Jared—nothing I couldn’t handle by tweeting an infographic the marketing team had given me about the recent successes on the road. I had a picture putting Ten’s stats into perspective against his brothers’. But if I used that, then all I was doing was drawing attention to his ‘brothers’ teams, and the management of each of them were already a little edgy about certain things going down at the Railers, and how they might be affected before I’d properly begun my work with them.
Like at the game last week when some kid behind the bench had somehow managed to throw a cup of lukewarm coffee at Jared, soaking him when it hit his shoulder.
Which had led to TV time, where the incident had been played on repeat, and everything circled back to the concept that it was the gay issue. How could I even begin to spin the fact that the cameras had caught gay slurs?
And the kid really had been a kid. No more than thirteen, egged on by his mom, of all people.
I scrubbed my eyes and pulled a notepad toward me, making a note of what I needed to do today. First off, I had to get my head around creating an assessment of everything that was happening. When I finished, it felt to me like we were still winning. The community was behind us, the fans for the most part were accepting, only a few people had canceled season tickets since the presser, and the original heavy influx of hate emails had trickled down to a few in among well-thought-out and considered reactions. The tone of the reactions to Ten coming out had changed subtly, particularly when it was Ten who’d put up two goals against Pittsburgh in an emphatic win.
The game tonight was a home game, and I didn’t know much about the team we were facing, only that they were rivals in a way that meant the fans were big on chanting at each other and holding up signs, some of them probably designed to put our team on the back foot.
I wrote down some notes about what to say to Coach Benning and went off to find him, locating him in his office with its open door policy and its wall of pictures of players, teams, and a couple with the Stanley Cup, which I knew meant a lot to hockey players. Benning was old guard, and I’d expected that he’d be the most reluctant in this entire process, but he’d been surprisingly affable.
I knocked on the doorjamb. “May I speak to you?”
He gestured me in. “You want to shut the door?”
I didn’t think he was asking me—he sounded resigned—and I shut the door and leaned against it.
“Some tweets, posts, they talk about tonight’s game, and I want to reassure you that management takes any and all threats to player safety very seriously.” I stopped, because that sounded a lot like management-speak, and I despised that. Also, Coach Benning was shaking his head.
“You take care of security; I’ll stop my players from killing anyone if they get all riled up.”
That was exactly what I wanted to hear. I needed to know that the players were safe, and that they’d taken my talks to heart. Only Coach would be able to paint it black and white enough for the team to take the words to heart.
Not to rise to the words thrown at them. Not to get angry.
When I left his office, leaving the door open, I deliberately walked the long way back to my tiny office, just to avoid the chance of meeting any players. I wasn’t ready to look any of them in the eye and tell them to relax and not to worry.
Because I would be telling them the opposite of what I felt.
When I reached my office, I reported the latest batch of threatening tweets to the authorities, who logged everything because that was all they could do.
Then I shut myself in my office and dealt with the things I could handle; the connection between our team and Boston’s and the reaching-out from two Canadian teams. Things I could control.
And I didn’t worry about what would happen tonight, or if Ten had a target painted on his back.
But most of all I had to forget Adler and his naive assertion that he was happy to come out to everyone, like it wasn’t the hardest thing for a pro athlete to do. He said he trusted me to change people’s perceptions, one team at a time. I wished I felt as positive.
I watched the warmups from the press box, distracted more by watching the crowd than the team. There was a healthy swathe of the opposing team’s colors, but I hadn’t spotted any posters from them or the home fans when the camera panned the crowd. Everything appeared calm, just two groups of fans, one bigger than the other, there to watch a hockey game.
Tonight was the Railers’ night; the battle wasn’t easy, but the win, a shutout, was hard fought, and I knew enough about hockey now to get the impression that we’d played well. Apart from some chanting, which was directed more at poor Stan in goal than the rest of the team, the crowd was good-natured.
The opposing team left the ice, and the Railers were head-bumping Stan and offering half hugs. Stan took a little longer to leave the ice, but he had this complicated patting that he did to his net, which Adler had explained was Stan’s way of thanking the net for its help. He was last off the ice, winding his way slowly toward the bench, his helmet pushed up on his head. He’d squirted water on his face and was grinning. I saw Ten waiting for him by the tunnel, pulling him into a hug. There were quick movements where they stood, but I was used to seeing Stan and Ten’s complicated handshake thing, which involved too much ass-slapping to be completely straight. I was smiling at that even as the press room went deadly quiet. Stan was on the ice, Ten hunched over him, and security was at the tunnel.
I didn’t think. I just ran.
I’d never seen so much blood on the ice, but Adler was right by me, still in his uniform, reassuring me that head wounds bled like fuck, and it was likely just a cut.
Ten had tossed a puck up to a kid in the stands by the tunnel, and the kid’s dad had thrown it back in temper. Stan, with his goalie reflexes, had moved between the puck and Ten, the puck smashing into him. Stan hit the ice hard.
So much blood, added to the fact that the medics took Stan off the ice on a stretcher.
Security hustled the dad and the crying kid away from the remaining crowd, and the players, who all wanted a piece of whoever had hurt their goalie. Nowhere had I ever seen the “protect the goalie” mentality more than in the locker room of irate skaters. I hovered at the back of the room. What was I going to say? What could I have done? That poor kid, no more than seven or eight, had heard his dad spewing hate and watched the violence right there.
Ten was quiet, Jared sitting next to him, their knees pressed together. Ten was pale and Jared looked ready to kill someone. All I could think was that I’d lost control of the situation. Words weren’t going to stop the hate.
What had the team been thinking, hiring me to fix this problem? All I wanted to do was shove everyone back into the closet and hide in there with them where it was safe.
The door opened and Stan ambled in, his face bruised and swollen, stitches over his eye.
“Am okay,” he announced, and waved his hands in front of his face. Everyone crowded him. He was leaving to see a specialist, but that wasn’t going to stop him celebrating a shutout first.
The worst part wasn’t when Ten hugged him, it was when Jared did, thanking him in a broken voice.
I didn’t go straight home, driving aimlessly and thinking about what could and couldn’t be done right now. I’d spent a couple of hours on damage control, and was proud of the fans who were part of a groundswell of support for Stan, and then Ten and Jared. Most were horrified, and when players on other teams began to retweet calls for upgraded player safety, it appeared that something had come out of Stan covered in blood, taking a puck to the face for Ten.
When I finally arrived home, I knew Adler would be there. He didn’t have a key to my place; that was something I’d been working up to, back when I’d had hope that I was doing the right thing. Now? Well, fuck, I wasn’t so sure.
Adler pushed himself away from the wall as I unlocked my door, and followed me inside. He hugged me from behind when the door was shut, and for a few seconds I allowed that. He’d mended that part of me that would have pulled away. I trusted him to hold me and not hurt me. But this had to stop.
“I’m done with this,” I said, still facing away from him, still in his arms.
His hold tightened momentarily, then he carefully turned me to face him. “Layton?” He sounded puzzled, but there was still the hint of a smile curving his lips.
I swayed toward him, my body betraying my logical thought that Adler shouldn’t be there and needed to leave right away. Determined, I stepped back and away, and his hand dropped from where he’d been lightly holding my arm.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Our goalie could have been seriously hurt. I let self-doubt in and I misjudged the mood of the crowd.”
Adler shook his head. His smile had slipped a little, but he had that air about him of a man who didn’t see the bad side to any of this.
“It was one man,” Adler said.
He stepped nearer to me, but I moved back, going into the kitchen so the counter was between us. I wasn’t scared of Adler—I was terrified I would back down if he touched me. Adler needed to be safe, at least for a bit longer. Wait until having an out hockey player was the norm, and not something to be held up and examined. I would still do my job, but I wasn’t going to be responsible for Adler lowering his barriers. He’d been a professional hockey player for a long time with his secret—why ruin it just to be with me?
I hadn’t even decided I was staying here.
This was just a short-term affair.
Sex. Is all.
I told myself that repeatedly until I almost believed the words.
“I need to focus on this,” I began lamely. “On making sure I change the narrative for this situation.” I was rambling, I knew I was, but Adler was listening and hadn’t come any closer. He pushed his hands into his pockets and waited patiently for me to finish.
“I’m not ready for you to be hurt,” I finished.
“I’m old enough to decide for myself,” Adler said, his tone careful. “And I love you.”
I looked at him, right at him, at the man I’d fallen in love with, and knew I needed space to get my head straight. If he came out, people wouldn’t understand.
“I love you too,” I said. There was no point in lying. “But I won’t be responsible for… I have work to do… I need you…” I stopped, because my thoughts were jumbled, messy and wrong.
“No one will hurt me,” he said, and I really think he believed it.
“They called me those names, they cursed me, spat on me, made me into something they could fuck, and then they left me naked on a road, Adler.”
I knew right there I’d fucked up. I hadn’t told him it was more than one boy who’d hurt me, that it was a group of them who’d been drunk, high and filled with hate.
“They,” he murmured. “Layton—”
“I just need some quiet to think this all through,” I said, desperation in my voice.
And like the very best man in the entire world, the most thoughtful, considerate boyfriend, the kindest of all souls, he nodded, and left, with a quiet, “I love you—remember that.”
I tried.