The Locker Room (22 page)

this alone. But you can"t. Penny"s moving in here, whether you like it or

not. You"ve got what? Six guest rooms in this place, not including the

room that"s
supposed
to be yours? Good. She"ll be all moved in two days

time.”

“Grown men don"t need a babysitter,” he said with dignity,

although a private corner of his mind was jumping around singing,

“
Hallelujah, I don"t have to live alone!
”

The Locker Room 121

“Xander….” Andi trailed off and looked at her husband. “Help me

out here, Jed. You"re a man, you get that whole pride thing. Talk to

him!”

“Xander,” Jed said mildly, “do you love us?”

Xander blinked. He"d never said it, but of course he did. They"d

taken him in, given him luggage, and become a part of his heart like

nobody else in his life. “Of course,” he said, worried for a moment that

this had been in doubt.

“Do you remember how upset Andi was when she saw your first

apartment when you were just a kid?”

Xander flushed. He hadn"t been able to make that work. Some

grown-up he"d been! “Yeah,” he said, embarrassed.

“Don"t put her through that again, okay? Penny can save for a

house while she"s living rent-free, and she works in Folsom anyway.

You"d be doing us a favor.”

Xander smiled a little. It was transparent, and silly, and, well, yeah.

It worked. “Okay,” he said, flushing. “Can I go for that run now?”

Andi gaped at him and shook her head, then looked at her husband,

who was smirking at her. As Xander ran up the stairs for his running

shoes and some dog toys and his ticket out of the emotional void that

was threatening to consume him, Andi was smacking her husband on the

arm, completely at a loss for words.

122 Amy Lane

Jack-in-the-Box

XANDER took his cell phone and called Chris as he started his run.

Chris answered, groggy, but happy to hear his voice, and said he had to

sign papers in an hour and a half, and then asked about his folks, and his

family and….

The conversation was just so normal. Xander could almost believe

that they could make it work. It would suck, but it was only six months,

right? He"d endured worse. How long had he lived with his mother

before he"d broken away? He"d been scrounging for his own clothes at

thrift stores when he was nine. He"d been getting himself off to school at

the age of seven. He had a vivid memory of trying to forge his mother"s

signature on a field-trip form at the age of six. (He had no idea how he

ended up on the field trip, but he knew his teacher hadn"t been fooled for

one damned minute). He had memories of an Operation Santa van

pulling up to his house when he was eight years old, because he"d asked

for pants that came down past his calves. They"d been appalled at the

drug mess, and had even called Social Services, but his mother had

managed to clean up her act for a visit, and they were never heard from

again.

Xander had toughed it out as a kid, right? He could endure

phenomenal amounts of pain and punishment, rattling his outsized body

down the floor as a giant-sized adult. He could do this. He could live

apart from his lover for six goddamned months, right?

Then Christian said, “Xan, mom called me about the nightmares.

She wants to take you to someone so they"ll stop.”

Xander tripped on a rock and went sprawling, sending the phone

out into the stratosphere and giving what felt like a nasty sprain to his

wrist. He finally found the phone (thank God, not in the poison oak) and

redialed Christian, feeling scratched and sweaty and irritated.

“Fuck no,” he said when Chris picked it up on the first ring. To

prove his point, he took a picture of himself with bramble scratches

down his face and a big old rip in his favorite running shirt and a scrape

down his gingerly held left arm.

The Locker Room 123

Chris choked into the phone and said, “Damn, Xander—I"m not

sure if that proves that you like being crazy or if crazy makes you

clumsy!”

“I have nothing to say to anyone but you,” Xander growled, and

Chris gave a weary laugh.

“Okay. I hear you. I"m surprised half the lakefront houses can"t

hear you, you"re damned near shouting.”

“You had to move out last night and your mother tried to shrink my

head this morning, Chris. It"s going to make me grumpy!” Under-

fucking-statement of the goddamned century!

Chris"s sigh practically gusted his hair back from the phone alone.

“I love you, goddammit. I will love you forever. I just don"t—” Chris

made that grunting noise he always made when he didn"t want to finish

the sentence.

“Don"t what?” Xander demanded, irritated.

“Don"t want to see you in pain.”

“Then make sure you see me in six months, when you come back

to me!” Xander snapped, completely out of patience, and Chris snapped

back.

“I didn"t leave
you,
you know! I just left….” And then Chris

completely deflated like a blue sound balloon over the telephone.

“You"re on a business trip,” Xander said now, just like he"d said to

Andi and Jed.

“A business trip,” Chris repeated firmly.

“And we"ll see each other between times,” Xander said, more to

make himself feel better. They both knew—he"d taken a look at

Denver"s schedule, and Sacramento"s schedule, and the practice

schedules, and it was a real possibility that the man he"d seen every day

since he was fourteen might not be able to touch his hand or quiet his

fears or touch his body until the NCAA break in March. At least they

were both playing the All-Star Game.

“All-Stars,” Chris murmured glumly, and Xander was so pissed off

to hear Chris say it, he kicked a rock lying in the road.

It was attached to a basketball-sized boulder, lying under the

decomposed granite of the pathway, and Xander"s follow-through and

124 Amy Lane

connect broke his toe—truly, broke it. He"d done it the year before when

he ran into the bleachers during the game, and had played on it for the

entire season, and he remembered the pain, and he remembered the

feeling and oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
fuck
it fucking hurt,

and now he"d have to play on it all-fucking-over. His swearing could be

heard out over the lake, and the dogs came back to whine at him

worriedly, and Chris, not sure what to do about the situation from a

thousand miles away laughed bitterly over the phone until Xander

hobbled through his front door, desperate for some ibuprofen, some

Pepto-Bismol, and some motherfucking ice.

HE PLAYED on it. Of
course
he played on it. And when he was running

during practice, no one even noticed he was in pain. It wasn"t until the

coach blew a whistle for a halt that he started to limp, and as the court

doc came running up to check him out, the coach snapped, “It"s just

because his little boyfriend isn"t there to carry him! Leave him the hell

alone!”

Xander wasn"t really sure what happened to the ball in his hand.

One minute he was dribbling it slowly, and the next minute it was

rebounding off the wall by Wallick"s head. Wallick was fit, though—

he"d ducked, and now he glared at Xander through narrowed eyes.

“
Karcek!”

“I"m "bout done with practice, Coach,” Xander said numbly. “I"ll

get my foot wrapped and finish up at home.”

With that he walked past the guy, and wondered if anyone else

could guess that he had just barely missed committing assault.

The court doc wrapped his bruised, tender toe, and then secured it

to the rest of Xander"s long toes, and pressed some pain relievers in his

hand.

“You drive today, Xander?”

He barely remembered to nod. Chris usually drove, but yeah,

Xander had dusted off the big black SUV (Chris had gotten it as a

birthday present and had it “pimped out” with gold rims and flashy

The Locker Room 125

fixtures, just because he knew it screamed the things that Xander was

uncomfortable with) and driven himself.

“Yeah,” he whispered, tucking the painkillers into his gym bag.

They were more powerful than the ibuprofen, but a lot harder on the

stomach, and Xander"s stomach was already starting to churn this

morning. Pancakes and strawberries were not sitting well, and Xander

wondered sourly if it wasn"t time to eat oatmeal or granola or something,

since he was being so damned grown-up about all this bullshit.

“Don"t take those when you"re driving, okay?”

Xander shrugged. “Don"t like taking them in general,” he said. He

never had. Ibuprofen was about as hard as he got.

Doc Malloy grunted. “That"s going to hurt a lot, Xan—and you"ve

got a game tomorrow. I"d go home and put that up if I were you.”

Xander grunted. “Sure, right.”

“Yeah, well, before you go out and party all night, at least let me

wrap that scratch on your arm. What in the hell did you do to yourself

this morning?”

“Tripped on a rut in the road and kicked a rock.”

Malloy was an older black man, with buzz-cut graying hair and

small, laser-point black eyes. The gaze he leveled at Xander was

disconcerting, to say the least. “How"s Chris doing?” he asked quietly,

and Xander looked away.

“He"s settling in. Staying with Cliff in Denver.”

“With that harpy of a wife Cliff"s got? God, we"re going to miss

him here.”

Xander must have made a sound, because Malloy patted his

shoulder.

“Well, you don"t have to be married to a guy to miss him.

Roommates, brothers, whatever. You spend some time with someone;

they leave a hole when they"re gone. You take care of yourself, Xander.

You"ve got to get your head in the game. Chris could read your mind out

there, and Pollack out there—he can barely read a newspaper! You"re

going to have to bust your ass to keep this team in the playoffs, right?”

126 Amy Lane

“Playoffs?” Xander had been wandering.
He"s not my roommate.

He"s not my brother. He"s my lover, my husband, my reason to live.

What would Malloy say to that?

“Well, yeah!” And now Malloy"s laser-point look had changed,

become fathomless, and he was looking at Xander in mute supplication.

“Xander… man, I"ve been working for this team for fifteen years, and

I"ve seen us in two places. I"ve seen us in “almost enough” and “two

floors down from the basement.” God… you and Edwards? That"s as

close as this team"s been to winning, you know?”

It"s only a goddamned game!
He thought it, but he couldn"t say it.

The guy had just wrapped his toes and listened to the shit he didn"t say.

Xander might be pretty good at self-pity, but he was usually
awesome
at

keeping it to himself. He wasn"t going to smack poor Malloy down for

loving the same thing that had given him Chris in the first place.

“You really want to see the win, don"t you?” he asked quietly—but

he felt the question, deep down in his heart.

“Boy….” Malloy straightened up and looked away. “See, I was in

my thirties when this team came to town. I was trying to finish nursing

school, because they didn"t have a sports medicine degree or a

physician"s assistant degree then. There was just two-year nurse and

four-year nurse, and I was going for four years because, dammit, I

wanted to be on the
floor.
I"d blown off my college education for this

game, and I"d do it again, and now I just wanted a chance for it again.

But this town? This is a weird sort of place, man. About twenty miles up

the road you"ve got rich white people living on converted farmland.

Down here, you"ve got a mix of people, and out here, with the Arena?

Twenty years ago, this was a coyote"s toilet. So you"ve got all these

people, all these different people, and it"s like they"ve got the worst of

being poor—they"ve got the ghetto poor and the redneck poor, and a

town full of dirty politicians. About the one thing they"ve got that holds

them all together is this goddamned basketball team.”

“I remember,” Xander said, swallowing hard. He remembered

being a kid, living in that shitty apartment, and living and dying with the

Sacramento Kings. He remembered the night they"d lost the playoffs to

the Lakers—not in truth, but in spirit—the whole night had been cursed