The Locker Room (38 page)

the attention from the press, from the fans, from the dancers—hell, even

from Mandy and Audrey, who did nothing but fawn all over him all day,

anyway.

The Locker Room 217

God, he was enjoying himself. Xander watched him for a moment,

under the lights, smiling as though pain were the same old tired lapdog

that fear had become.

It wasn"t his imagination, he thought, swallowing hard past the

ache that his throat had become. Chris really was golden.

He turned around to go talk to his team.

The locker room was… joyous. Loose. Everyone was focused but

cheerful. There was no squabbling except the good-natured kind, and a

lot of checking to make sure the uniforms looked just right. Xander

called his starters around him about five minutes before the coach came

in to talk to them, and hoped that, maybe, he could put his faith in the

people he"d served.

“Um, guys? Can I talk to you here?” He looked at them—Aames,

Burkins, Pollack and the completely healed Oswald, and felt a surge of

affection for the team that he"d never really felt when Chris was at his

side. Well, good. It was nice to be part of something larger than himself.

He just had to make sure they wanted him
for
himself, and now was time

to test that.

“Guys, you all know Edwards is on the sidelines, right?”

“Yeah—man, he"s looking….” Aames trailed off, his light-

chocolate, round face grimacing. He"d been going for the classic

“looking good,” but what he looked, and they could all see it, was

“retired.” He was never going to play ball again—and there wasn"t a

person there who wouldn"t feel that loss like an amputated limb. “Man,

we"re sorry. But, you know, he"s Chris. If anyone can have fun after the

game, it"s him, right?”

Xander smiled. “I hope so.” And now for the full-body blush.

“Um… look, some of you know, and most of you have guessed, but…

um… you guys know that we"re… um—” Fuck. How did you come out

to a room full of jocks? “Married.” His voice—sort of a low-pitched one,

mostly, actually squeaked.

“I thought they just voted and said you couldn"t do that,” Pollack

said, a little numbly. (Unlike his name might imply, Pollack was, in fact,

a black man, who wore his hair in a retro seventies afro. He was seven

foot three, and Xander had always liked him, simply because he"d made

Xander feel both delicate
and
smart.)

218 Amy Lane

“He means they"re the next best thing, Pollack! Jesus—I can"t

believe they graduated you from Texas.” Burkins was a little more

tactful when he wasn"t drunk. But not a lot.

Oswald was looking at Xander as though he held a dead bug.

“Eww. Really?”

Xander wasn"t sure how to answer that. “Um, yeah. But not ewww.

Is that going to be a problem?”

Oswald shrugged, still looking a little icked out. “You gonna grab

my ass on the court?”

It was Xander"s turn to grimace. “Ewww. Really?”

Aames snickered. “I think that"s a „no", Scott.”

Oswald still looked unconvinced. “Yeah, man, whatever. You still

planning to play ball?”

Xander nodded. “Yeah—if they"ll let me after tonight.”

Aames got it first, and the others were still struggling with it when

the light dawned. “Aww… Jesus, Xan. Really? Tonight?”

A sudden lump in his throat. God, Xander hoped they would

understand. “Yeah, Justin. Tonight. I… I can"t do this for everyone else

anymore. I gotta sort of do it for me, right?”

Aames nodded, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Yeah, man. No

worries. We got your back, right, guys?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Oswald snapped. “Just throw me the ball and

don"t grab my ass, man. It"s all I ever wanted from a teammate.”

Xander felt a little bit of humor seep in—because it looked like

they were going to be able to go out and play like they had all season,

and that"s all
he"d
ever asked.

“You know what, Scott? I can guarandamntee you that I will
never

grab your ass.”

Coach came out at that moment, and called them all to attention.

The music started to shake the floorboards; the entrance to the tunnel

went dark with strobing lights to punctuate the darkness. The crowd

noise became thunderous and deafening, and the announcer began their

intro. And the players were suddenly all about the purity of the game.

The Locker Room 219

They took a deep breath, bumped fists, and started the cold-bowel

adrenaline dump that Xander always associated with the game.

“"Kay, guys,” Xander breathed, loving the way his heart thundered,

loving this moment until his atoms quivered with it. “Just remember. Get

the fucking ball—”

“Down the fucking court and into the fucking net!” the team

finished, and that was their cue to run up onstage, underneath the

strobing light and the adulation that awaited them.

THE bench team almost lost their lead, and Xander strained his voice,

screaming his mantra at them.
Get the fucking ball down the fucking

court and into the fucking net! Fuck!
(That last word came out on a fit of

desperation as the twenty-point lead that the starters had sat down with

was narrowed to two points because the bench lost the rebound for the

five
zillionth
time.) The starters were up and into position, dying for the

buzzer, pushing against the invisible barrier of time like dogs pushing

against a window to get a bone.

The buzzer rang, the coach waved them in, and—

Xander had the ball, in what was usually their classic team

position, and Xander looked up, saw Aames waiting for the bounce pass,

and said, “May I?”

“Do it!”

And Xander blew past the defense and down the court and one-

two-up for a dunk, the kind where the basket was about at his waist.

The crowd screamed, and the game was right back on.

Xander had caught glimpses of Chris as he"d played. When he"d

been on the bench during the third quarter break, the two of them had

met bugged-out eyes every time the other damned team had scored. This

time, as the other team snapped the ball back into play and their forward

rushed past Xander in an attempt to get into an unguarded position, Chris

said, “Way to go, Xa-an!” and Xander whirled, managed to wink at

Chris, and threw himself in front of the opposing forward just in time to

intercept the ball with an unbelievably long-limbed, one-armed catch.

220 Amy Lane

Before the crowd even realized what happened, Xander was down

the court for another shot—this one from the three-point line, because he

felt like it, and suddenly, what had been a two-point lead was a seven-

point lead, and the timbers of the little tiny Arco Arena rattled with the

bloodlust of the nearly eighteen thousand rabid fans who had been long

denied.

Tonight was their night. The rest of the team helped, of course, but

for that quarter, the fourth quarter, Xander played every play as though

he was the star.

Because, for once, he was.

He handed the ball off when it was needed—Aames, Oswald,

Pollack, Burkins—all of them racked up a few points. But Xander had a

twenty-five-point quarter. Twenty-five points that he took for himself,

and made them beautiful, and made them count. Twenty-five points

where “Get the fucking ball down the fucking court and into the fucking

net” was absolute fucking poetry of muscle, blood, heartsong, and bone.

Two seconds before the buzzer, Xander made his last shot,

impossibly over the heads of two of New York"s finest, dunking again

like a rookie show pony, landing like he had nothing to fear.

The buzzer went off, and he threw his hands to the sky just like

Chris would have wanted to, and screamed triumph into the stands.

If he"d wanted to, he was sure he could fly. Anyone looking at the

tape to see him cut a swath down the court would have sworn he already

had.

WHEN the press of his screaming, hugging, sweating, shouting, delirious

teammates had faded, he suddenly found himself facing his first reporter,

one of ESPN"s finest, and he wondered if the woman—a strong,

beautiful black woman in her early thirties who had won Olympic track

medals in her youth—was ready for the sports scoop of her life.

He turned around and spotted Chris on the sidelines (where his

retinue was taking care to make sure he wasn"t jostled too much by the

crowd) and waved, a little shyly.

The Locker Room 221

Chris grimaced—shy? In front of twenty-gazunga people? After a

game like that? But he winked and waved back.

And Xander turned to the reporter and made history.

“So, I"m talking to Xander Karcek, the undisputed MVP of

tonight"s game. Mr. Karcek—you"ve said before this series that you

were playing all your games for your best friend, Christian Edwards,

who was injured earlier this year in an automobile accident. Was that

true tonight?”

Xander shook his head. “Chris kept asking me to play one for

myself. Tonight I played for myself. I figured, you know, the guy was

my heart anyway. If I played to make myself happy, he"d feel it.”

The reporter looked a little disconcerted. “So, Christian Edwards,

your best friend….”

Xander looked at her, looked at the camera, and then looked past

both of them to where Mandy was pushing Chris so he could hear the

interview. He winked at Chris, saw Chris"s dawning comprehension and

surprise, and said, “He"s more than my friend, Ms. Robinson, and if the

NBA doesn"t know it, it"s because they haven"t wanted to. My whole

life, all I"ve wanted was basketball and Chris Edwards. Tonight, I had

basketball. The rest of my life, it"s going to be Chris Edwards.”

He tried a smile after that, as the reporter floundered for words.

“But… but… but the NBA playoffs… are you going to play the

playoffs…?”

And now Xander said what he"d always wanted to say, even from

the beginning, from that first kiss behind a hedge, clinging to the only

thing he knew was good.

“If basketball loves me as much as I"ve loved this sport, then it"s

not going to care who I am when I play it. If the world hates me more

than it loves basketball, then I"d say that"s the world"s loss, but I"m not

going to live like that anymore, and I"m not going to make Chris do it,

either. Now if you"ll excuse me—”

He walked steadily to Chris"s chair and grabbed the handles on the

back, taking over the steering while the reporter stammered into the

microphone.

222 Amy Lane

“Are you insane?” Chris asked weakly, and Xander had to lean

forward to hear him.

“He"s fucking nuts!” Mandy muttered. She looked up and saw that

the word of Xander"s postgame interview was making its way around the

arena floor, and suddenly hollered, “Dancers! Get your asses over here,

we need you!”

Suddenly, they had a phalanx of dancers on either side, guiding

their way down to the tunnel, just as the press really got wind of the story

and went to charge. Xander grabbed tight to the handles on the

wheelchair and sprinted, their friends and family right behind them, as

they made it through the doors to the men"s locker room.

The room was full of half-naked Sacramento Kings, who all looked

surprised as Xander and Chris (and Mandy and Audrey and Pete and a

couple of other girls) charged in, but Xander wasn"t looking at them.

He leaned back against the shut door with the battalion of press on

the other side of it, and giggled like a teenager, while Chris giggled back.

“Jesus, you fucking dorkfish! What in the fuck did you just do?”

Xander sobered abruptly. “I played this game for myself. It"s all

you"ve ever wanted me to do, and I did. And playing for me means you.

It means you, and me, and the world can take a flying fuck. It means

whatever we do for the rest of our lives, we do it forever, and we do it

openly, and—” Xander took a deep breath and wiped his mouth with a

hand that was shaking and cold.

“I mean, Jesus, Chris. It can"t possibly be any harder than hiding

was. Or being apart. Or having the world think we"re just overgrown frat

boys. Right?”

Oh please, God, let it be all right. Xander had known that it was a

possibility. He"d known this was the flipside of doing this for himself—

that maybe coming out, being together in the sunlight, wasn"t what Chris

really wanted.

Chris looked at him, a bittersweet smile on his face, and pressed