Chapter Fifteen

MATTS TAKES SYDNEY to the airport.

It’s an early morning flight after a late night following a second full day in a saddle. She’s sore and sleepy and pliant in a way that makes him feel fiercely, almost embarrassingly, protective as he practically carries her to the truck. He tucks her against his side on the bench seat and coaxes the heater to life before pressing a kiss to her head where it’s leaned against his shoulder.

They don’t talk on the drive, and the radio has been silent for years, which means tires on pavement and wind and the rattle of the dash are the only soundtrack to their journey. Sydney wears his hoodie again; the sage-green makes her olive skin look gold in the sunrise light slanting in the front window. It paints copper highlights in her dark curls and accents the cut of her jaw and the slope of her nose.

She is so, so lovely.

And she’s his. Maybe. At least a little. At least for now. His to kiss and to touch and to please, as best he’s able. The responsibility might overwhelm him.

When they get to the airport, Matts pulls her bag and her guitar case out of the back and then just stands there, wrapped around her, holding her as long as she’ll permit it.

“You think they’d let you carry me onto the plane?” she asks blearily. “If we ask nicely?”

“Probably not.”

“Ugh. Why did I stay up so late last night?”

He’d tried to coax her to bed multiple times, but there had been a full-on concert happening in the living room—guitars, harmonicas… Ellie even brought her ukulele. Sydney was in her element. And then, even when they went upstairs, she was so wired she stayed up long after Matts fell asleep. He’s not entirely certain she slept at all.

“Oh, no,” he says. “Are you reaping the ‘cussions’ of your actions?”

“Alas,” she says, “the ‘conses’ are ‘quencing.’”

“You’re adorable.”

“I’m not,” she mutters adorably into his chest. “I’m a sexy, stoic enigma.”

“That too,” he agrees.

He wants to gather her up and put her back in the truck. To head for the mountains through Crested Butte to Emerald Lake. To sit by the water in the truck bed with a blanket and the blue sky and to have her all to himself. Just for a day. Just for a while. Before he has to share her again.

Matts wants to see all her tattoos. All of her scars. All of her. To lay Sydney down in the sun and map all the things that make her body hers. He wants her to teach him the way she likes to be touched and then do it better than anyone else ever has.

He wants to say: I think I’d love you, if you’d let me. Please let me . But people aren’t supposed to say things like that, especially not so soon, so he doesn’t. Instead, Matts says, “I’ll see you in a month.”

And she kisses him.

And she leaves.

And he watches her go with an ache in his throat that feels like an omen.

*

IN THE FOLLOWING weeks, it’s both surprising and not surprising how little things change.

They still text. They still talk on the phone nearly every night. Matts is on his second box of question cards and has started keeping a spreadsheet of cursed knowledge to share with her. Sydney sends him pictures of the band backstage and on their tour bus and watching his games. Sometimes, she wears his hoodie. Sometimes, he can see the stick he gave her wrapped in trans Pride tape in the background, mounted on the wall above her bunk in the bus. Always, she wears his bracelet.

It doesn’t seem right that everything is so similar to how it was before because he feels like something has shifted. Some kind of tectonic event has destabilized the foundation of his existence in the process. Except he’s still meal-prepping and working out and lacing his skates exactly as before.

Part of the problem is that no one knows. He hasn’t told anyone. He wants to tell Eli and Alex, but if Eli hasn’t come to Matts about it, then Sydney hasn’t told Eli. Maybe Sydney wants to keep this—them—private. Which is understandable, but Matts wants to tell his closest friends that he’s kissed possibly the most important person in his life. He should have asked Sydney what she wanted. What they were. But he didn’t, and now he’s not sure how. Matts doesn’t want to scare her away by asking too much, by being too much. It wouldn’t be the first time he ruined something with a shameful level of enthusiasm.

There are some small changes, though, that he notes as a consolation: the warmth in her voice at night; how her implicit teasing has become undeniably, explicitly flirtatious; the way she says his name as if it means something; and how she pauses at the end of their conversations when they say goodbye, as though she’d like to say something more.

God, he misses her. Misses her like—he doesn’t even know. Matts has nothing to compare it to. And it doesn’t make sense because he’s never really had her. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Matts feels like he’s in his own special brand of purgatory, counting down the days until he gets to see Sydney again in person, and they can progress whatever this is to a place where he can name it.

When he pulls into the garage at Alex and Eli’s place the night before their first game in the second playoff series, Matts is listening to the final song of the most recent playlist Sydney has sent him. He’s still trying to formulate his thoughts about it when he gets upstairs. Neither Alex nor Eli are home, so Matts lets himself in with his key—he’s been practically living with them since Asher officially moved in with his girlfriend—and twenty minutes later, he’s typing up his thoughts when Eli gets home.

Matts helps him dump the bags he’s carrying onto the island, crouches to unvest Hawk and kiss her, and then stands to hug Eli.

“Hey,” Matts says. “How’s your head?”

“That’s a pretty personal question.”

It takes him a minute. “Oh, gross.” He steps back. “I meant because you had a doctor’s appointment today.”

“General consensus is that my brain is still fucked but not as badly as before,” Eli says brightly.

“Good?”

“Eh.” Eli starts emptying the cold bag onto the counter. “The more pressing concern is why our refrigerator still refuses to work properly.” He opens the door to the appliance in question, flipping it off with his other hand before reaching for the items on the counter. “They shouldn’t be allowed to market this thing as ‘smart.’ The technician came out three times in the last month, and the doors still aren’t closing right. And the touch screen won’t let us control the temperature, which, naturally, is the only way to control the temperature.”

The front door opens with Alex’s entrance. He kicks off his shoes, sheds his jacket, and greets Hawk on his way to wrap both arms around Eli’s neck from behind and smash a kiss against the side of his face.

“Hi,” he says, draped over Eli’s back. “What’d I miss?”

“Not much. I just got home. I was telling Matts I can’t wait to buy our own place and fill it with the stupidest appliances on the market. No touch screens, no Bluetooth connectivity. I want the himbos of the appliance world. Big. Stupid. Pretty. Easy to maintain. Indestructible.”

“And you shall have all the himbo appliances your heart desires.” Alex presses another gentler kiss to Eli’s neck and then releases him to help put away groceries.

“How long have you been here, Matts?”

Matts doesn’t have a chance to answer because Alex leans around the island to look at the laptop Matts left open.

“What is this?” Alex asks.

Matts freezes as if he’s been caught doing something inappropriate and not as if he’s updating a spreadsheet in one tab while writing what is quickly becoming a multi-paragraph song analysis in the other.

He has no idea how to explain this.

Eli joins Alex to squint at his screen. “Is this a Sydney thing?”

Or maybe it is that easy.

“Yeah.”

“She’s having you write essays?” Eli raises an eyebrow. “About music?”

“No, but she gives me a list of songs every week to listen to, and then we discuss them. I just wanted to get my thoughts organized before we talk next.”

Eli smiles at him softly. “You’ve assigned yourself essays.”

“Yes…”

“That’s adorable.” Alex gestures between Matts and the laptop. “Are you planning to actually do anything there, or—?”

“Yeah,” Matts says. “When she’s back next month before they start the second leg of their tour.”

Eli moves back to the island. “And your plan is…”

“Tell her how I feel.”

“Which is?”

“Too much, probably.” Matts exhales when they both just look at him. “If I’m not in love with her already, I’m probably close.”

“I knew it,” Alex says. “Kuzy owes me twenty dollars.”

“What?”

“I bet him you’d admit you were in love with her by the end of playoffs. He didn’t think you’d get there until after the summer.”

“I haven’t even slept with her,” Matts says faintly. That would be a compelling argument, maybe, if they were talking about anyone but Sydney. But they are talking about Sydney.

“I mean, do you think the sex would be bad?” Alex asks.

Matts swallows. He’s thought about that quite a lot, actually. The answer is definitive. “No.”

Alex shrugs at him, moving to help Eli unload groceries into the pantry.

“If it helps,” Eli says, “I’m pretty sure Syd is in the same place, feelings-wise.”

It does, a little.

“Enough about love,” Alex says. “Did you watch the tape coach sent yet?”

Matts exhales in relief and pulls up the video file on his laptop, then slides it over so Alex can take the stool next to him.

He can talk about hockey.

Hockey, at least, is easy.

*

HOCKEY IS HARD.

Matts loves hockey. He does. It’s been a constant in his life for so long that he can’t imagine a day-to-day existence without the accompanying soundtrack of blades on ice or the echo of pucks ricocheting off boards. But hockey is a constant in the same way that family is a constant. Sometimes, even when he loves it, he hates it. Sometimes, Matts feels like it takes up so much of him that it doesn’t leave space for anything else. Sometimes, he wonders what he’d have become without hockey. If his mom hadn’t signed him up on a whim at nine years old. If he hadn’t scored six goals his first game and immediately been moved to a team of kids two years older than him.

Because hockey itself is easy. Scoring those six goals that first game was simple. The defense wasn’t defending, the goalie was mostly trying to stay upright on his skates, and the offense was laughably easy to intercept. Later, even on the older team, he was one of the larger players. He was fast; his balance was good; his hand-eye coordination was better. So, the hockey was easy. What was hard was the people, the other boys who envied him, his own teammates who tripped him when the coaches’ backs were turned, who called him a freak and a show-off and didn’t invite him to birthday parties even when everyone else on the team received an invitation. The parents in the stands were worse, adults screaming at their kids to target him, not to let him score on them again, screaming at him that he shouldn’t be there at all.

And then there were the coaches, who weren’t bad, exactly, but they quickly had expectations. Other kids could have bad days. Matts couldn’t. He carried the team, and he wasn’t allowed to set them down. If he did, the coaches let him know what a disappointment he was. And if he tried to talk back, to point out that he wasn’t the only one who had missed a pass or shot too wide or needed a fucking break , they said the same thing in different voices and different phrasing, but always the same thing: We expect more of you.

When Matts was sixteen, the equipment manager at his boarding school found him alone in the locker room one night, fighting tears after a game they’d won— won , but he was still too much for the parents in the stands and not enough for the coaches. And the equipment manager sat down and patted Matts’s back and said, “Skill comes with its own punishments. But just remember that you’re only feeling this way, you’re only being treated this way, because you’re the best one out there. And one day, you’ll get to a level where you won’t be. You’ll find your peers, and you’ll share the burden. And things will be easier. I promise. You just need to hang in there until you reach that level. Until you find your people. Okay, kid?”

Matts clung to that promise until he was drafted. And then he went to the first Hell Hounds training camp and reveled in being one of the better players on the ice, but he wasn’t the best.

The equipment manager was right. Matts found his people.

Alex was an undisputed prodigy. Kuzy was a force of nature. Jeff was the fastest skater he ever saw. Rushy had his own goalie magic. Then, Rome joined the Hounds and further emphasized that Matts was part of a team .

Except now, he’s feeling the burden of expectation again.

Coach told him, flatly, of the expectation.

Because Alex and Kuzy and Rushy are all out with injuries. The coaches have split him and Rome between the first and second lines, and there are green callups on the third and fourth lines. No one is comfortable; everyone is desperate. They won the cup two years before, and they made it to the final round of playoffs last year. The Hounds is the team with the most out queer players in the league. They’re the team with the most attention. There are expectations .

Which makes the A on his chest feel weighty and terrible as Matts sits on the bench and chews on his jersey and watches the time on the clock tick down while the score stays the same:

Two-zero, Stars.

It’s the second game in the second series, and they’re already down one.

Five minutes left, and he’s pretty sure they’re about to be down a second.

Matts touches gloved fingers to his chest, absently feeling for the bump of Sydney’s ring on the necklace beneath his jersey. He hopes she isn’t watching.

He pushes himself forward, throws a leg over the boards in anticipation of his shift, and then throws himself over.

He does his best.

Coach pulls their goalie at four minutes, and with Rome on the ice with him again, Matts is able to push through the exhaustion.

Rome intercepts the puck with a truly stunning reach that overbalances him, but he manages to send the puck right to Matts’s tape as he dives.

Matts doesn’t try anything fancy. He’s too tired for that. But he manages to split the defense with a quick fake out.

His first slapshot is blocked, but Matts gets the rebound and sends it back to Rome.

Rome’s shot is blocked, too, and Matts ends up chasing the puck in a dangerous grapple with one of the Stars defensemen that takes them behind the goal and against the boards. Matts manages to tap it between his skates, twist with the man pinned behind him, and then pushes himself forward, lungs somehow cold and burning at the same time.

He wraps his stick around the goal at the same time that the defender crashes into him.

Matts doesn’t see the puck go in because he’s face down on the ice.

But he hears the goal horn.

They don’t celebrate. First, because his brain feels like it’s been rattled around his head, and his usual celly involves one-footed balance, which he isn’t certain he can achieve at the moment. Second, because one goal isn’t enough.

It’s 2–1, and they have two minutes left to tie.

He meets Rome’s eyes as Rome moves to take the next face-off.

Matts recognizes the grim desperation there.

They nod to each other, breathing heavily.

They’ll do their best.

Except their best isn’t good enough.

The Stars score an empty-netter forty seconds later.

The game ends 3–1.

The locker room is heavy with the quiet of disappointment.

No one talks on the bus.

An hour later, as they’re checking into their hotel, his phone rings.

“Hey,” Sydney says.

Matts makes a noise that might be a greeting.

“You tried so fucking hard,” Sydney says. “So please tell me you’re proud of the game you played and not beating yourself up about the loss.”

“Don’t wanna lie to you,” he mutters, accepting his room card from the lady at the desk.

Sydney sighs at him.

Matts shifts his guitar case onto his back as he waits for the elevator and for Sydney to continue. He’s too tired to put in his usual conversational effort.

“Are you still planning to go to the Drag Bingo thing tonight?” she asks.

Matts exhales. He was. There’s a charity thing in Dallas—The Resource Center—that puts on a Drag Bingo night every month. Eli convinced several of the players to go with him that month because their game was early. And it’d be good PR since marketing was leaning into their whole accidental Gay Team branding and it’s for charity; come on, guys .

“I don’t know,” Matts says. “Don’t feel like going out. What are you doing?”

“We’re watching some pretentious BBC thing on TV. We have to leave for the venue in ten minutes though,” Devo says.

“Oh,” Matts says. “Hi, Devo.”

“You’re on speakerphone,” Sydney says belatedly. “Sorry.”

“BBC thing?” Matts asks.

“Recording from Donmar’s. The Scottish Play.” She says it with an English accent.

“The Scottish Play,” Matts repeats. “What’s that?”

“‘Macbeth,’” Devo says. “Shakespeare.”

“Why not just say Macbeth?”

“I cannot,” Sydney says solemnly.

“You can, you dramatic ninny,” Devo mutters. “We’re not in a theater.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Matts says.

Devo sighs. “There’s this superstition that you can’t say ‘Macbeth’ in a theater, or terrible things will happen. But, again, we’re not in a theater. We’re in a tour bus.”

“All the world’s a stage,” Sydney says.

Matts smiles as Devo makes vexed noises, and then he’s pretty sure they devolve into a pillow fight. He reaches around to unhook his necklace, to slide the ring off the chain and put it back on his little finger.

“Okay, but you should go,” Sydney says a moment later, sounding breathless. “Because A, it will maybe get you out of your post-loss funk, and B, I would love to go, but I’m in Kansas being a rock star. So I need to attend vicariously.”

“Okay,” Matts says, refastening the chain.

“Yeah? You’ll go?”

I would do literally anything you ask me to , he doesn’t say.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” he does say.

“Take pictures,” she instructs. “And if you’re up for it, call me after the show tonight?”

“Okay,” he says. “And yes, please. Just text me when you’re done.”

*

THEY GET TO the club hosting bingo five minutes before the event is supposed to start.

“Holy shit,” Rushy says as they join the line to collect their tickets. “How did I not know about this place?”

Matts doesn’t think he’s just talking about the club. Rather, the whole street it’s located on is like some sort of…queer oasis. All the shops, restaurants, apartments, and bars are decked out in rainbows. Matts has never seen so many people of the same gender—or, in some cases, completely unidentifiable gender—in one place.

“The gayborhood is a beautiful place,” Eli says. “It’s probably good I didn’t discover it until after I was in a committed relationship.”

“I can pretend to pick you up at the bar later,” Alex suggests. “And you can be as slutty as you want.”

“Oh, sir .” Eli bats his eyes. “You’re too kind.”

Matts shows his ID and ticket to the bouncer and then enters to buy an overpriced blotter. Up the stairs and past the stage, he follows Eli, who several people recognize and stop for hugs. Matts finds his seat at a table near the back, organizes his bingo cards, tests the lip balm that came in the little gift bag, and tries not to stare at…any of the people around him.

Apparently, they have a theme each month, and this one is disco-related, judging by the crowd’s attire. There is a lot of spandex and sequins and neon and skin.

He feels extremely out of place.

Rushy and Eli appear at ease, but Rome looks just as uncomfortable as Matts feels.

“Have you ever been to something like this before?” Matts asks.

“No,” Rome mutters. “Damien said it would be good for me.”

“And we’re not going to say ‘bingo,’” a woman—is she a woman?—on the stage is saying. “We’re going to say…”

“GAYBINGO,” everyone in the crowd shouts back.

Matts glances back at Rome, but Rome is staring at the stage like he’s not really seeing it.

“Make sure you don’t use your phone while they’re calling numbers,” Eli murmurs to them. “They’ll stick you in the little jail on the stage until someone pays to bail you out. It’s one of the ways they raise money.”

Matts tuck his phone securely in his back pocket. “What are they called?” He tries to keep his voice as low as possible.

“Who?”

“The…people all dressed up. With the microphones.”

“The drag queens?”

“Are they women or men?”

“Oh. If you mean pronoun-wise, most queens like to use she-her when they’re in drag.”

The woman on the stage calls the first number.

They’re three numbers in, and Matts is just starting to settle into the familiar pattern of blotting a bingo card. He grew up in a small town where there wasn’t much to do on the weekends, and his mom loved bingo. Matts suspects this won’t be like bingo in Gunnison though.

The queen pulling numbers calls out, “O-69.”

Matts jumps when a good portion of the audience, including Eli and Rushy shout back, “OOOOooooh sixty-nine!”

It sounds…distinctly sexual.

Matts glances at Rome, who looks just as baffled.

“Oh dear,” the queen in the crowd says, picking on one of the guys near the stage. “Judging by that lackluster performance, he’s never had an O from sixty-nine, poor darling.”

The guy sputters while his tablemates laugh.

The queen on the stage shouts, “I-16.”

“…going on seventeen,” the crowd sings.

Matts marks his card but looks up again, trying to figure out if he’s missing prompts or something.

“B— Oh no, it’s our least favorite number,” the woman on stage says.

“Forty-five,” the audience shouts back.

“Is there some kind of manual that you’re supposed to read before coming to this?” Matts whispers to Eli.

“They’re pretty typical calls and responses,” Eli murmurs back. “You get used to them. I should take you to Rocky Horror sometime.”

They both look at their cards to check for G-32.

“The movie? What do you mean ‘take me’?”

“There are a bunch of theaters that run it during Halloween every year. People dress up and do callbacks. It’s a whole thing.”

“I went last year,” Rome says on Eli’s other side. “At Alamo in Katy. It’s fun. Though some of the costumes are a little—” He pauses as they call O-61, and Matts realizes he’s now one square away from a bingo.

“Not that I was complaining,” Rome continues. “Damien went dressed as Rocky. Literally, gold shorts and nothing else. Though he ended up wearing my hoodie most of the night because it was fucking cold.”

They pause again to mark G-43 and watch as someone who’s been caught on their phone is hefted up to the stage while the people below chant, “Lock him up.”

Matts is so preoccupied watching the guy laughingly protest as he sits in the little pretend jail that he nearly misses B-11.

And that’s—

“Bingo!” he says, raising his blotter. “I mean, uh, gaybingo !”

One of the queens with a mic who had been doing some crowd work a few feet away, collecting bail money for the phone user, sashays over to him.

She says, “Let’s see it, darling.”

He hands over his card and tries not to be overwhelmed by the amount of perfume she’s wearing. Or the amount of cleavage she’s showing. It’s shockingly realistic.

“All right, big boy, stand up and let us have a look at you.”

Eli laughs unrepentantly beside him as Matts awkwardly stands, making sure to avoid accidentally stepping on Hawk.

“Honey, I could climb you like a tree,” the queen says with a whistle. “How tall are you?”

“Six three. Six eight in skates,” he answers automatically.

“An athlete!” she carols. “You know, around here, we typically give our height in heels. But quick, someone who knows sports—what’s the Dallas hockey team called?”

“Stars!” multiple people supply.

“Are you one of our Stars, baby?”

“Uh, no. I play for the Houston Hell Hounds. We’re…the Stars’ biggest rival.”

“The gay team!” someone shouts. Several others cheer.

“Ohhh, an enemy ,” she says, facing the front of the room. “And we’ve let the sly fox infiltrate our den.”

“He can infiltrate my den anytime,” someone close to the stage yells.

“Down, boy,” she chastises, then returns her attention to Matts. “Completely unrelated. Are you a single gay or a taken gay? I may not know hockey, but I know the captain of the Hell Hounds is married to that cutie chef with the dog.”

Eli makes a strangled noise next to him.

“Oh, I’m not one of the gay ones,” Matts says. “That’s Alex. And Rome and Rushy? But only Alex is gay; Rome and Rushy are bi. So if you mean gay as a term including everyone within the, uh, spectrum of— It’s a spectrum, right?”

“Oh, I could eat you for breakfast,” the queen says.

“Please do not,” he says. “But anyway, they’re all taken. Sorry.”

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Justin Matthews?” He says it like he isn’t sure.

“Justin Matthews.” She wiggles his card in the air. “You do have a gaybingo, and you may go collect your prize. Now, off with you. I believe I’ve just spotted Elijah Rodriguez, and is that Hawk? Oh, my word, I will not pet her. I know I can’t, but the temptation is strong .”

Matts makes his way to the table off to the side, where she points. He hands over his card to a girl with immaculate pink and purple eyeshadow. Her dress has so many rainbow sequins that he feels briefly off balance as if trapped in one of those rainbow kaleidoscope toys he used to play with at his grandmother’s house when he was a kid. She’s like a living disco ball.

Matts says this out loud, and she laughs while handing over his prize money.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” she jokes.

“I was planning to just donate it back to one of the people walking around with the money tins.”

“Well, in that case, by all means, spend it in one place.”

Matts does end up tucking all the money, a few twenties at a time, into the various collection tins by the time the night is over. No one else in their group gets a bingo, but Eli, Alex, and Rushy clearly have an excellent time regardless.

Rome is quiet for the majority of the evening, laughing occasionally at the queens’ antics and cursing colorfully when he’s close to a bingo two different times but someone else wins first.

When the event is over, Alex and Eli stay at the club to dance, while Rushy heads to a nearby bar to meet up with one of the Stars players he’s friendly with.

“Split an Uber to the hotel?” Matts asks Rome.

“I think I might walk around for a while, actually.” Rome’s looking at a teenage couple passing by holding hands. The taller girl is being pulled along behind the smaller one, laughingly protesting something. Rome’s facial expression is difficult to read, but it almost looks like he’s in pain.

“You want company?” Matts asks.

Rome’s eyebrows go up. “I wouldn’t turn it down. But I figure this isn’t your scene.”

He isn’t wrong.

But Matts knows Rome’s body. He knows how it’s supposed to move. And Matts doesn’t like the strange, tense way Rome has been holding himself for most of the evening.

“Let’s go,” he says.

Sydney’s concert won’t be over for another hour anyway.

They make their way past the shops and bars and apartments, maneuvering around the club-goers. When the crowds thin and the air quiets—no longer full of music bleeding from open doors—they turn back. After two circuits, Rome exhales in a way that might be a laugh. Matts doesn’t like that either.

“We can call an Uber now,” Rome says.

“Or we could make one more round,” Matts suggests. He’s out of his depth here.

Rome studies him, hands in his pockets, eyes pale and bright, reflecting the neon of club sign lights. He bites his bottom lip, and his teeth are a jarring contrast against his dark-freckled skin. “I appreciate the show of solidarity, man, but I don’t think it’ll make a difference.”

“Make a difference with what?”

Rome looks away. He rubs one palm over the crown of his buzzed head as he shakes it. “I have no idea how to even begin explaining that to you.”

“Because I’m not…gay?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s just—” His hand comes off his head to gesture, to encompass the everything of the rainbow-lit street. “Half of me feels like I’ve finally found a place where I can take a full breath, and the other half feels… I don’t know. Even more out of place than I usually do.”

Matts doesn’t follow.

“I wasn’t closeted,” Rome says. “As a kid. Not exactly. I just didn’t date anyone. Boys or girls. I wasn’t tortured or depressed; I never had a crisis or anything. I liked who I liked, and I ignored all of it because I had hockey. And I was so focused on hockey the rest of it didn’t matter until—”

“Damien,” they say together.

“I’m not like Alex,” Rome says. “I didn’t suffer because of what I am. But I’m not like Eli or Damien either. I didn’t fight for acceptance. I wasn’t brave. I didn’t have any of the—”

Rome exhales hard, lacing his fingers together at the back of his neck as he looks up at the sky. “I feel like either pain or triumph or some combination of both is the foundation of being queer. I’m— I probably have nothing in common with the people here. I can’t imagine we share many of the same experiences.”

Matts thinks about his conversation with Sydney the week before when he told her he was going with Eli to the fundraiser.

Oh, I’m jealous , she’d murmured. The Gayborhood in Dallas is one of the few places in Texas I feel completely safe. I cannot describe the relief I felt walking down Cedar Springs for the first time. It was like dropping something heavy I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying.

“Do you feel safe here?” Matts asks.

Rome rocks his head to one side and squints at Matts. “Yeah?”

“Like, safer than you would walking downtown or something?”

“Sure,” Rome says. It sounds like a question.

“I’m not good with body language. But you walk differently when you hold hands with Damien in public. And you look around like you’re expecting a fight.”

“I mean, 95 percent of the time, people don’t give a shit. But that 5 percent makes you overthink things the rest of the time.”

“So, you wouldn’t overthink things if Damien was here now. You wouldn’t look over your shoulder before you kissed him?”

“No,” Rome says slowly. “I wouldn’t.”

“You have that in common with everyone here, then,” Matts points out. “That’s one thing.”

Rome breathes, slow and deep. He stares at Matts like he’s done something surprising.

“What?” Matts asks.

Rome touches his fist to Matts’s upper arm, two light taps, knuckles against the skin of his bicep. “Have you ever thought about meeting your past self? What that’d be like?”

Matts doesn’t enjoy the exercise. “I’d probably want to punch him in the face.”

Rome grins. “Fair. You mind doing one more lap? And then we’ll get you back to the hotel so you can wait by the phone for Sydney to call.”

The rest of their walk is completed in silence, but Rome’s posture has slackened into something more natural. Easy.

Matts realizes he’d feel safer holding hands with Sydney here too. He wouldn’t be worried for her safety. He thinks maybe he should suggest taking a weekend trip together. Matts knows she likes dancing. He’d try to dance for her if it would make her happy. Maybe they could come during Pride month? He needs to figure out when Pride month is.

Matts thinks, abstractly, about what that would be like. Drinking with Sydney. Dancing with Sydney. Getting to go home with her at the end of the night. Waking up with her in the morning.

He wants it.

All of it.

All of her.

*

“HOW’S THE ROCK star this evening?” Matts asks in lieu of saying hello when his phone rings an hour later.

“Tired,” the rock star says. “Concert was great. Leaving the venue was shit.”

“Protestors?”

“Protestors. Not many. But they were loud. Also, my voice is fucked, so I can’t talk long.”

Sydney’s voice is delightfully rough. Hearing it through the phone isn’t the same as hearing it pressed against his neck after a night of post-drive singing, but it still makes his chest feel oddly buoyant. The words counteract some of the charm of the tone though.

“I’m sorry. Anything I can do?”

“I could use a hug,” Sydney says.

“Two weeks,” Matts points out. “And then I’ll hug you all you want.” He’s aiming for flippant, but it comes out more cautious than anything else.

“Two weeks,” she agrees.

“Speaking of, I know you’re only home for a couple of days, but would—and it’s totally fine if you don’t want to, so don’t feel like you have to say yes. And you can think about it; you don’t have to answer now—”

“Matts.”

“Right.” He breathes. “Would you want to stay with me for a night or two? Asher moved in with his girlfriend, so it would just be us. I don’t have any expectations or anything. But—”

“I thought we agreed you have tenure now,” Sydney says.

Matts can’t formulate a response to that.

“Yes, I’d like to stay with you,” she clarifies.

“Good,” he manages. “Great.” He clears his throat, reaching for his laptop. “Until then, do you want some cursed knowledge?”

She groans, voice going muffled for a moment. “Could you give me whatever the opposite of cursed knowledge is? Like, something that will restore my faith in humanity?”

He closes his laptop.

“Yeah, I can do that. Are you ready?”

He hears her sheets rumple as she changes position. “Ready.”

“Okay. So. On April 14th, 1912, the ship RMS Titanic was several hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Due to a combination of greed, entitlement, and a false sense of invincibility, it hit an iceberg just before midnight and quickly started to sink. It was only equipped with enough lifeboats for maybe a third of the people onboard. The crew hadn’t been appropriately trained, so they didn’t know the capacity of the lifeboats, meaning many of them were lowered into the water only half-full. The captain radioed for assistance and sent up distress flares, but the only ship within close proximity, the SS California , didn’t respond. The air temperature was freezing, and the water temperature was actually below freezing. Saltwater freezes around twenty-eight degrees, and it was right at that, meaning even those who made it into the lifeboats probably wouldn’t survive until morning.”

“I said restore my faith, not shatter it completely,” Sydney mutters.

“Shhh, be patient.”

“Of course, apologies. Please proceed.”

“The RMS Carpathia was sixty miles away. Now, the Carpathia was a small, slow, barebones ship. Her top speed was fourteen knots, which is, like, sixteen miles per hour, though she rarely worked her way up to that speed.”

“How fast could the Titanic go?” Sydney asks.

“Twenty-four knots, and she was doing around twenty-two when she hit the iceberg. So, in the small, slow Carpathia , the operator—who wasn’t even supposed to be on duty—hears the distress call on the radio, and he wakes up the captain just past midnight. Now, the captain knows that even at their top speed of fourteen knots, it would take at least four hours to reach the Titanic . He also knows they shouldn’t be doing anything near fourteen knots because visibility is shit, and the water is full of icebergs.”

“Like the one that took out the Titanic .”

“Correct. But the captain—his name was Rostron—he said, fuck it, we’re going to do our best. Rostron woke up his crew and all the passengers, and everyone got to work. They rigged all the lights they could find to illuminate their path in the water. They readied lifeboats. Passengers prepared their own staterooms with blankets and warm clothes for incoming survivors. They turned the larger community areas of the ship into triage and hospital spaces and diverted all power to the engines and the kitchens, where they boiled water for hot drinks and made soup. And, most dangerously, Captain Rostron had the engineers push the ship way faster than she was ever made to go.”

Sydney makes an intrigued noise. “How fast?”

“Seventeen knots. She maintained seventeen knots, through iceberg-infested water, in the middle of the night, for three hours, arriving to rescue the Titanic ’s survivors just as many of them in the lifeboats were succumbing to hypothermia and their injuries. Hundreds had already died, and if the Carpathia ’s crew and passengers hadn’t decided to risk their lives, pushing the little ship past her top speed, hundreds more probably would have died.”

“Holy shit.”

“Most stories about the Titanic , even the movie about the Titanic , all note how few survivors there were. Only seven hundred of the two-thousand-something people made it back alive. But those seven hundred only lived because a tiny steamliner’s crew and passengers chose to risk their lives for the chance to save the lives of strangers sixty miles away.”

Sydney makes a humming noise.

“I’ve always thought,” Matts says, “that the rescue made for a better story than the reasons behind the ship sinking to begin with.”

“No kidding.”

“Is that what you needed?” he asks after several seconds of silence.

“Yes,” she says, soft and warm and so intimate it hurts. “That was perfect. Thank you.”

Matts doesn’t know how to respond to that.

“Two weeks,” he says as if either of them needs reminding.

“Two weeks,” Sydney repeats.