Page 137 of Game Changer
* * *
“You all right, man?”
Scott turned his head to be met with a concerned-looking Carter. “Yeah. Fine. Why?”
“You look a long way from fine, Scotty.”
Scott faced the front of the bus. His team was en route from the hotel to the arena in Detroit to begin the next round of the playoffs, and now wasnotthe time to think about his personal problems.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure you’re not getting sick or something? You look tired.”
“Drop it,” Scott snapped. In truth, he was exhausted. He hadn’t slept well in days.
And now he was thinking about his personal problems.Dammit, Carter.
He still wasn’t sure what the hell had gone wrong—if he was mad at Kip, or at himself, or at no one. He was thoroughly miserable. He felt like he was in actual physical pain, but not like a bruise or an injury; he could endurethose. This was searing every part of him at once. He wanted to scream, or cry, or punch something. Or just hide where no one could see him.
Unfortunately, he had a team to lead to victory.
Goddammit, Kip.
Had Kip been unfair? Had he been wrong?
Definitely, about some things. Like, how Scott wasevergoing to think that Kip wasn’t worth it? If someone asked Scott what he’d be willing to give up for Kip, Scott’s knee-jerk reaction would beeverything.
But when he thought about it, that wasn’t really true. And when he thought about it some more, he realized that no onewasasking him to give up everything.
Besides, Kip had given up a lot. He had distanced himself from his friends, from his family. He had adjusted his life to accommodate Scott. What had Scott adjusted?
Nothing. He had just been trying to tuck Kip wherever he would fit into his ridiculous, high-profile life.
He didn’t think he had been unreasonable, asking Kip to be patient with him while he figured out a plan. There was no way Kip should expect him to just announce his sexuality to the world. They had only been dating a fewmonths.
But a few months or not, Scott was in love. Before that first glorious kiss, he had resigned himself to a life without romance. He had never expected any of this to happen. It had flipped his whole world upside down. And now he loved Kip so much that he could barely remember the lonely years before. He knew, in only a few short weeks, that he wanted to share the rest of his life with Kip. It was staggering.
He’d wanted to, but now Kip was gone. And Scott had no idea how to get him back because he had no experience with this sort of thing. And maybe it wasn’t fair to Kip to go after him. What could Scott promise him that would be different? He was in the middle of the damn playoffs; there was no way he was going to come out before they were over. And after that...
He really didn’t know. When he tried to imagine coming out, it filled him with dread. For one thing, if he did that he would always be “the gay hockey player.” Even if his teammates, and the fans, and the press, and the sponsors accepted him, his achievements on the ice would always take a back seat to his sexuality.
Scott was as private a person as he could possibly be, under the circumstances. He didn’t have any social media accounts. He didn’t go out to clubs or even restaurants all that often. He didn’t try to beseen(much to his agent’s chagrin). He didn’t do probing personal interviews, and he generally didn’t talk about himself much.
He had been able to hold on to some of his privacy because he had convinced the world that there was nothing interesting about him. He was good at hockey, he tried to be a good person, and that was it.
Being gay would, without a doubt, be something the world would find interesting.
He couldn’t think about any of this now. He needed to focus. His team, hiscity, was depending on him.
* * *
“Enough, Hunter! Enough!”
The referee roughly pulled Scott away from the man on the ice. Scott struggled against him, but a linesman took hold of his other arm and helped haul him away from the bloodied Detroit player.
Scott looked at the man’s pummeled face, and at his own busted knuckles. The adrenaline started to fade and the realization of what he’d just done set in.
“Shit,” he said.
