Chapter Nineteen

THEY WIN THE first round against the Kings in five games.

Coach gives them the weekend off to recover from game five; they narrowly won in overtime, leaving Alex so wired he couldn’t sleep.

So, after staring at the ceiling for a few hours and then staring at Eli’s sleeping face for a couple more hours, he goes to the rink.

Because he’s Alexander Fucking Price, and he just led the Hell Hounds to a first-round win in the Stanley Cup finals, and no one is going to tell him he can’t.

He means to just skate.

It’s 6:00 a.m., and the place doesn’t open until 8:00, and he means to just do some gentle laps and clear his head for an hour. He’ll give a substantial tip to the rink admin who let him in and sneak back home for breakfast with Eli.

Except once he starts skating, his breath is harsh in the silence and his heartbeat is loud in his ears and it’s bright and cold and echoing, and he starts to think about all the little things he’d done wrong in the last game. The little things that could have turned into big things. He thinks about all the ways he nearly let his team down. And he knows he’s not perfect, and that anyone striving for perfection will inevitably be disappointed. He knows, objectively, he’s playing some of the best hockey of his life. And he knows—he knows—that punishing his body for being human will only hurt him more in the future, and that his therapist would likely scold him if she knew he was letting these thoughts percolate and fill his chest until he can hardly breathe.

But his therapist isn’t here.

And a pile of pucks is.

He starts with inside edge circles, the scrape of fresh ice loud and familiar and a comfort to his oversensitive senses. And then he scatters a bucket of pucks, picks four that are more or less in a square and does outside edge work, figure eights, until his thighs are burning and he can’t tell if his breathlessness is from anxiety or exertion.

He nudges the pucks into a different formation to do more inside edge work, dropping for a one-hand touch to the ice with each turn, then switching back to outside, then doing inside one more time because the first just wasn’t good enough. The next round he does edge transitions with knee touches, repeating the same mantra he’s been repeating since he was twelve years old and his coach made him drill so much he dreamed it at night:

Head up, Price, chest up, left foot turn, right knee down, back up, right foot turn, chest up, left knee down, don’t rely on the stick for balance, chest up, left foot turn, right knee down, chest up, chest up, chest up.

He makes a noise—unintentional and strangled and feral in a way that should probably frighten him. It echoes back to him, and he snowplows to a stop, letting the aggressive rasp of his breathing overshadow whatever that just was.

He’s fine.

He just.

Needs to work harder.

You did not come this far to only come this far, he thinks. Another mantra. Another thought his therapist would probably want to unpack.

He’s fine.

He starts again: outside punch and tight turns, double punch and tight turns, back to inside edge work.

His legs are burning; his lungs feel hot despite the chill; he’s sweating; his fingers are nearly frozen—but the tightness in his chest is earned now.

He scatters more pucks.

He’ll just do a little stick handling, and then he’ll leave.

He’s fine.

*

ALEX IS NOT fine.

Eli knows Alex is not fine. He has quite of bit of experience with being not fine and Alex—

Alex is not fine.

His sleeping schedule is getting more and more fucked, and he’s losing weight, and the circles under his eyes are growing, and he’s chewing absently on his cuticles in way Eli recognizes from his own time spent deep under the blanket of anxiety.

Except Eli doesn’t know how to tell him, in a gentle, nonconfrontational way: Hey, maybe you should be talking to your therapist more about coping mechanisms or something because you’re kind of falling apart. So, he puts it off. Playoffs won’t last forever.

The morning after game five of the first round, Eli wakes up alone at 7:00 a.m. Alex’s gym bag and keys are gone.

He narrows his eyes at the empty spot on the key hook by the door and then goes back into the bedroom to pull up Alex’s location on his phone.

He is completely unsurprised to find Alex’s icon, foreboding despite the bright glow of the screen, at the Hell Hounds practice facility.

Eli makes a cup of coffee.

He’ll deal with this after some caffeine.

And a dog walk.

And maybe a quick batch of muffins.

Except after caffeine and a dog walk and a quick batch of muffins, Alex still isn’t home. Eli is now pursing his lips at the calendar where the next relationship-meeting heart indicator isn’t for another two weeks. He snags the marker from on top of the refrigerator, uncaps it with his teeth, and draws a big heart on the current day.

“Great,” he tells Hawk. “Now I have to figure out how to stage an intervention before he gets home.”

She has no advice to give.

He cleans the already pretty clean apartment because that is something he knows how to do. Then, when the Windex fumes haven’t given him any clarity, he calls Jeff.

“Why,” Jeff answers blurrily.

“Sorry. I know it’s early,” Eli says. “But I need help staging an intervention for Alex.”

“I hate you,” Jeff sighs.

“I know. He’s at the igloo, and he has been there for at least two hours. I woke up alone.”

“Ah, fuck,” Jeff says. “I’ve been worried about him. I caught him in the weight room in LA last week after that loss. Looked like he was trying to kill himself on the treadmill.”

“Fantastic.”

“You want me to come over?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try this morning, and you can invite us over to your place this afternoon so we can double down if needed?”

“And if not, you can just come over for dinner minus the intervention,” Jo says.

“Oh, yeah,” Jeff says, “you’re on speaker.”

“Got that.”

Eli groans, drapes himself over the freshly cleaned island still smelling of lavender, and knocks his forehead against the granite a few times. Gently, all things considered.

“Yeah, that sounds good.” He swipes over to check Alex’s location and is relieved to see he’s left the practice facility. “Hey, Alex is on his way back, I’ll text you later.”

“Ok. Hey, Eli?”

“Hm?”

“You’re doing good, kid. This—Alex during playoffs—is a lot, and you’re handling it really well even if it doesn’t feel like it. He’s so much healthier now than he was this time last year.”

Eli hopes Jeff is exaggerating but is afraid he isn’t. “Ok, thanks, bye.”

He slides his phone back and forth between his hands a few times and then stands decisively. “All right,” he says, pointing first at Bells on top of the refrigerator and then at Hawk. “Team meeting in the living room. We have ten minutes to come up with a plan.”

*

THE PLAN MOSTLY consists of Eli shoving a muffin into Alex’s hands and then shoving Alex onto the couch and then crossing his arms and staring at him until Alex wilts.

It’s weirdly effective.

“Is this an intervention?” Alex says, picking at the muffin.

His jaw is so sharp, Eli is tempted to go get a second muffin.

“It would be, only I don’t know how to—” Eli gestures helplessly for a moment. “Intervene. Eat that.”

Alex dutifully takes a bite, makes a little noise of pleasure, and takes another one.

“Have you been skating?” Eli asks.

“Yeah.”

“In a healthy, productive way?”

Alex chews for what feels like a needlessly long time. “No,” he admits.

“Do you…want to talk about it?” Eli asks hopefully.

“Also no.”

Damn. Worth a try.

“Okay, well. I’m calling an emergency relationship meeting about it, so you’re gonna have to. Or, I guess if you want to call Anika and talk to her, that works too.” He points to the calendar. “I made it official and everything, so.”

Alex takes another pointed bite of his muffin, and Eli resists the impulse to roll his eyes. He anticipated this.

He fishes the bottle of lube out of his pocket and tosses it into Alex’s lap. “Also, if you’re good, it can be a sex thing.”

Alex stops chewing.

He considers.

He starts chewing again, swallows, and then says, “So you’re bribing me to talk about my feelings with sexual favors?”

“Whatever works.”

Alex sighs. “What if I promise to make an appointment with Anika?”

“What if you make the appointment right now?”

Eli swipes Alex’s phone from the couch cushion next to him and proffers it, with ceremony, on his open palms.

Alex sighs again, louder, but texts Anika, asking to meet with her at the soonest next availability. He turns the screen to show Eli once he’s done.

“Very good, thank you.” Eli sits, shoulder leaned into the back of the couch so he can face Alex. He tucks his feet under Alex’s thigh. “I’d still really appreciate it if you’d tell me what’s going on in your head, and if there’s something I can do to help though.”

Alex finishes the muffin before speaking because, of course, he does. “It’s just—the usual gifted child syndrome stuff.”

“Gifted child syndrome stuff,” Eli repeats.

“You know. The whole—” He gestures wordlessly for a minute and then starts over. “So, Anika says most people skew one of two ways as kids. They’re either encouraged to do things themselves, or they have things done for them. The kids who are encouraged to be independent will try things and fail and grow, or they’re given too much freedom and end up feeling lost or abandoned. The kids who have things done for them are typically not as good at taking risks or dealing with the consequences of their actions once they’re adults. But they do feel more comfortable asking for help and are more likely to feel a sense of safety or confidence in a lack of judgment from their family.”

“Okay,” Eli says.

Alex looks down at his hands. “Sometimes, there’s a third kind of kid, though, who’s marked as gifted early on. In sports or school or whatever. And that kid is encouraged to do things themself. Except when they fail, which is normal, their failures are criticized, and the kid is told they should have been successful. When the kid points out that others are failing, too, they’re told those people aren’t…their peers, I guess. Because the kid had already illustrated with previous successes that they should be held to a higher standard. Now, they’re competing with their own perception of self as described to them by an authority figure. And then they internalize that they must have become lazy or aren’t working hard enough, or maybe they’ve somehow lost the thing that made them special to begin with.”

Eli exhales at nearly the same time Alex does.

“Shit, ok. Definitely following,” Eli says. “So every time you succeed at something, you feel good because success is supposed to feel good. But you also feel like you’re digging your own grave as, inevitably, that success will be used against you at some point in the future.”

“Yeah,” Alex agrees. “And as an adult, your self-worth is all tied up in your accomplishments. So even when you’re successful, you don’t feel as if you’re good enough. The minute you’ve achieved something, the achievement gets added to the list of things that make any failures even more noteworthy. And when you do fail at something, it feels like the end of the world. Since you’re certain you should have, and could have, succeeded, even if you don’t know how.”

“And you don’t want to ask for help,” Eli says. “Because it feels like admitting to failure. You don’t like relying on other people, in general—it feels like ‘cheating.’”

“So,” Alex says, quiet and breathless and honest, “you’re really only confident when you’re doing something you’re exceptionally good at. But even then, you live in constant fear of somehow losing your ability. Not necessarily because you love the thing, but because you’ve separated the very concept of joy from an activity and attached it instead to your…perceived success at the activity.”

Eli does understand. He so, so understands.

“What can I do? Tell you you’re doing a good job? Not just with hockey but other things too? Point out the…little victories or whatever?”

Alex grimaces, then makes a contemplative face. “Actually, that might help. Stupid as it is.”

“It’s not stupid if it helps. And I know it helps for me, so you’d better not call it stupid, or I’ll be insulted.”

Alex smiles, genuine and soft and vulnerable. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Ah,” Eli says, climbing into Alex’s lap. He links his hands behind Alex’s neck. “You do. Because you’re so good. And you try so hard. You haven’t left your clothes on the floor in weeks. And you rinse the sink out every night instead of letting nasty crusty bits of food hang around until the cleaning service comes next. And you remember all my favorite foods for the grocery list without asking, and dote on Hawk and Bells, and you’ve been so damn attentive to me and any possible way you could help with my recovery.”

“Maybe too attentive,” Alex mutters.

“Maybe too attentive,” Eli allows, “but it’s because you care.”

“I do.”

“And you do such a good job caring. Such a good job taking care of me and the girls. You’re a good partner and a good pet parent and a good friend. And you’re also a damn good captain and hockey player, and I’d be happy to call up the boys who can speak on that with authority if you need me to.”

Alex’s ears have flushed pink by the time Eli is done with his little rant, and Eli is delighted to see it. He ducks to kiss one such ear, just because.

“Not necessary,” Alex says.

His phone buzzes with a response from Anika asking if he wants to talk in two hours.

He dutifully answers yes please and tips the screen to show Eli.

Eli kisses his mouth this time. “Thank you.”

Alex slips one hand up the back of Eli’s shirt and pulls their bodies flush, breathing into his neck. “Thank you,” he says, maybe a little cracked, maybe a little more honest than he meant to. Eli just squeezes him back and pets the back of his head until Alex’s grip loosens.

“Hey, Eli,” Alex says, tone conspiratorial. “Have you showered yet?”

“Mmm? No. Not yet.”

“I need to take a shower.”

“You definitely do.”

“Okay, asshole. I’m just saying. I made an appointment with Anika. And I talked about my feelings. And we both need to take a shower.”

Ah. Eli understands, now.

“All of these things are true, yes,” he agrees, wide-eyed and feigning confusion.

Alex shoves Eli, laughing, off his lap so he can find the lube and then throw it, gently, at Eli’s face. “Are you coming or not?”

“Not right now, but I assume I will be shortly,” Eli answers beatifically. “Also, we’re not having shower sex during playoffs when my balance is still shit.”

“How about shower foreplay, followed by very safe doctor- and NHL-sanctioned bed sex?”

“Done,” Eli says, seriously extending one hand to shake.

Alex takes his proffered hand and drags him to the bathroom, and Eli thinks maybe he’s pretty good at interventions after all.