I needed a job with good healthcare, and after this year I’d make sure that I had one. We ended the conversation with love-yous, and a promise that I would call tomorrow and tell Emma all about the game. Apparently she was studying a hockey book right now just to learn about the game. That’s my girl.
The game was intense. Everything was so fast, so loud down there, and I had no idea what was happening. One minute the skaters were at one end, and then in the next they were racing to the other. I couldn’t even see the puck most of the time. My first thought was how the hell they kept going for however long this game lasted. Then I noticed they switched people on and off a row of seats, and even that was a carefully orchestrated ballet of moves. Only with huge guys who had strapped-on blades instead of ballet shoes, and were pushing each other into the glass.
It was like the Barnard 33 nebula, a dance of colors and collisions that seemed random until I identified patterns. In this game the skater moved to certain areas, and it seemed to me that even the unpredictable could be seen as predictable, and ten minutes in I was actually able to see where the puck was.
It was thrilling, but for some reason I kept being drawn to the theatrics in goal. Not that I knew what the other team’s goalie was doing, because I never even looked at him, I was staring at Colorado and the way he dared people to hurl that black disc at him.
He was part of the unpredictable when he taunted, and shoved, and slid, and jumped, and did the splits, and that was all in the space of a minute. A flicker of admiration lit inside me when he stopped yet another speeding puck, which if my calculations were correct given an assumed viscosity of ice, and the angle of the hit, plus the height of the player and flex of the stick, was traveling at over one hundred miles an hour.
The noise from the game below reaching the box was minimal but there were video screens for close-ups, and every time the Raptors did anything impressive there was a lot of whooping in the box. So far Maddie had slept through the entire thing, but that had already been half an hour and they weren’t even finished with the first quarter, or period or whatever they called it. There were breaks each time the puck went somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and then breaks for no apparent reason at all, but in each break I found myself looking at Colorado and how he would circle his net while bobbing his head, as if he had a tune rolling around inside his skull.
Then he would push up his helmet and the crowd loved it when he squirted water all over his face and then tossed back stray hair. The camera crew even slow-mo’d one of those hair flicks, and that poke of interest became something different. Something that wasn’t familiar or comfortable.
Was it possible I was kind of turned on by the action on the ice, or more importantly by Colorado? It couldn’t have been that. Surely. I was there to do a job, and it paid well, and the longer I kept this role, the better off my little family would be and the better we’d be able to face the future. Three thousand a week was nothing to be sniffed at.
But there was something about Colorado which messed up my focus. I knew that I was not heterosexual. I’d done a lot of research in the past, but the research wasn’t me trying things and crossing them off a list, it was all from books and studies. My conclusion was that I was a gay scientist who’d rather have been reading and learning than getting messed-up and sweaty.
In my entire life I’d had relations with two people. One of them was Owen. I was thirteen, fresh off the back of a decisive science fair win, and he was the school rebel with piercings, attitude, and a potato battery that didn’t work. What the bad boy had seen in the science nerd I’d never know, but when he’d cornered me on the way home I thought it was to pummel me, and not to kiss me. That was a kiss, plus a bit of fumbling on his part as I’d stood there like an idiot.
Nothing ever came of Owen; he moved not long after that, his dad promoted out of state, and we spent the final weeks of us being at the same school in a game of hide and seek. Or that might have just been me. I was mortified, scared, and spent way too long in the nerds’ bathroom on the third floor by the science lab. That one place in the entire school was the only spot where it was okay to talk about all things science, and I was safe there for the most part. Of course there were often incursions from the jocks, but a judicious use of thiol kept them out, reinforced by a rumor that the geeks had covered everything with poison. Nerds 1, Jocks 0.
Then there was Devin, my tall, sexy, bi-curious high school nemesis and the one person who’d come anywhere near me in terms of SAT scores. I’d actually made it past messing in my shorts and we’d moved ultimately in one heady afternoon to me receiving oral sex. Of course, Devin being on the football team as well as being a fellow science geek made him a unicorn, able to work both sides of the classroom
