Page 4 of Two for Holding
Phil shrugged, unrepentant, digging into his yogurt.“Most people are nice.”
“To you, maybe.”
The glare Phil shot his way cowed Tom, and he ate his own yogurt in silence.Journalists, especially, were frequently not very nice to Phil, and it had nothing to do with his defending.
“I’ll talk to him,” Tom allowed when they’d both finished eating.
As it transpired, Tom was saved from having to interact with Jax by virtue of him not showing up to breakfast.That tracked.Based on what Tom saw, he hadn’t gotten to sleep until after four, and the team bus left for the airport at nine.Kilian Howard and Diego Lunes, the two youngest players on the team at nineteen and twenty, respectively, made it by eight thirty.Breezy stumbled in at eight forty-five, bleary-eyed and wearing a backward baseball cap (the universal uniform of the hockey player too vain to cut his hair close and too hungover to put any effort into it).Tom, who had already been to his room to grab his luggage and check he hadn’t forgotten anything, waited patiently in the lobby for the rest of the team and watched Breezy shovel down whole wheat toast and eggs like a man on a mission.At least he was sticking to the diet plan.One could only hope he wouldn’t be regurgitating it all over the bus.
When the clock ticked over to eight fifty and then eight fifty-five with no sign of Jax, Tom grabbed a banana and a bran muffin for the road from the buffet table and got on the team bus.Everyone else was accounted for, and it was time to go.Jax could grab a commercial flight home if he couldn’t respect the team’s time.
Jax lurched onto the bus at eight fifty-nine and thirty-two seconds.He’d clearly rolled out of bed and straight into track pants and a backward T-shirt.Parts of his hair stood straight up, making the platinum strands dyed into it even more obvious than usual.
Breezy wolf-whistled and started a slow clap, which got Howard and Lunes going immediately.
Jax shot Breezy a lazy salute.“Breezy, my man.”
Thinking himself safely out of sight line, Tom rolled his eyes.
“Something funny?”Jax slid into the seat next to Tom.
It took effort, but Tom didn’t flinch.“I don’t tend to think of Breezy as a man.More like an overgrown puppy.”
“Mm.He does give good dog eyes.”
Tom shivered.Jax’s voice was pitched low and easy, seductive.“Sounds dirty.”
“I’m not fucking him.”
Tom whipped around so fast he smacked his hand on the window.“What?!”he hissed.
“I’m not.I know what you saw last night and what you must think, but I’m not slutting it up all over the league.”
Slutting it up all over the league.Slutting it up.All over the league.Slutting it up.Slutting.Tom hadn’t known that could be a verb.“I never said I—”
“Look, bro.I know you don’t like me or whatever, but—”
“Again, I never said I didn’t like you.”
“Well, I guess now you have a reason not to.But if you tell anyone, if you go to the press or management or whatever, I am not fucking afraid to stand up for my rights.There’s a nondiscrimination clause in—”
“Banana?”
Jax ground to a halt, staring at him, his heavy, dark eyebrows downturned enough to show his confusion, his wide, wide mouth still open.“Um.”
“Do you want a banana?Or a muffin?You missed breakfast.”Tom didn’t know why he offered.He’d have to eat plane food for lunch, and he hated plane food.Being an athlete with access to a charter plane hadn’t miraculously fixed all the annoying parts of flying besides lack of leg room.But Jax kept talking and talking, and the words “press” and “management” in conjunction with “slutting it up all over the league” made every hair on Tom’s body stand on end, and he had to make it stop.
As Jax studied him, Tom tried not to squirm under his intense, critical gaze.He was seven years older than this guy.
“I guess I’ll have the muffin?”
“Great.”Tom dug it out of his backpack, unwrapped the napkin around it, and handed it over.
Jax ate in silence, but every time Tom dared glance over at him, Jax’s eyes remained on him.Even when he’d finished, he kept watching, so intently Tom didn’t dare point out the crumb hovering at the corner of his pink lips.
Later, on the plane, Tom slid into a four-way seat next to Phil and across from Jimmy Hayes and Mike Vanderbilt, the only other two players over thirty.They played cards for half the flight, which mostly meant Tom threw whatever was at the top of his hand into the middle while trying his best not to focus on Jax, four rows down on the left, staring out the window with his big, clunky designer headphones on.With a gun to his head, Tom couldn’t have said what game they were playing.
The match against Florida would take place tomorrow evening, and the only scheduled workout beforehand was a weight routine.Tom could use his home gym.He’d have more than twenty-four hours to get his head on straight, to act normal about all of this.He only had to get through the flight, the landing, the team bus, and then walk home.He could handle this.He’d learned how to wait out the minutes of a losing game without showing emotion during Juniors.
