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I nod. It was meant for that, but I feel like it became something of a national motto. Being gay was far from being accepted in general and being a gay athlete, one playing such a masculine sport at that… I sigh again.
“Carter and I were in school together. We were freshmen at UM. This was Brady’s senior year at Duluth.”
“You played with Billy? I guess I didn’t realize that,” Levi says.
I nod again and look at him. “He was our team captain. The superstar. He was also kind of an asshole back then,” I chuckle. Levi grins. Billy Dawson was Levi’s coach in Calgary, and Brady and Billy were the two hottest defensemen in the nation their senior years in college. They played at rival schools, but the rivalry eventually morphed into a deep friendship and respect for each other. They were picked sixth and seventh in the NHL draft that year. “He didn’t pay the freshmen on the team much mind.”
“I could see that. He can be kind of an asshole now.”
He waits for me to say more. I still don’t know how to do this, where to start. I haven’t told this story to anyone outside of therapy, and even in therapy, I’ve held back.
I run my hands through my hair, scrub them across my face. I jolt slightly at the pain the touch on my face elicits. Lost in my thoughts of Luke and Carter and the past, I nearly forgot how we got to this moment in the first place. I stand. This closeness to him is unnerving, and so different. “I’m not sure how to…I don’t know where to start.”
“Anywhere you want. Why don’t you tell me about Luke?”
Wow. That’s the hardest place to start. I usually avoid thinking about Luke. Avoid seeing his smile. Avoid hearing his soft slow voice reading poetry to me. Suddenly, now, that’s all I can hear. Over two decades later.
We were in a few classes together, mostly the required ones. He sucked at science and math and anything involving numbers and he hated them. I started helping him out with those classes and that soon led to something much, much more. He always knew how to make me smile. He relaxed me. My world was always calm when he was in it.
He filled our tiny off-campus apartment to the brim with books that ended up lining the floors. That seems funny to me now because he always recited poetry from memory. He never once needed a book to prompt him or help him recall any of Shakespeare’s sonnets or anything by Byron. It was Lord Byron he always turned to the most when his trigonometry limit had been reached. He knew I was a sucker for it. It always worked on me.
I’d never known anyone like him. He seemed so at ease with who he was. I wasn’t a virgin when we met, but I’d never had the emotional connection with another man that I had with him. I have felt nothing like it since and probably never will again. The little voice inside my head screams ‘liar’ before I even finish the thought.
“He wanted to be a professor. Wanted to teach the classics. There isn’t a word Byron wrote he couldn’t recite from memory. He also wrote poetry himself. Incredible poetry that should have been song lyrics. I loved it.”
“You loved him?”
I turn to Levi. My instinct is to say yes instantly, because that is the story I always told. Made it even more dramatic, made Carter and his friends seem even more villainous. I loved him as much as I could at that time. I look at Levi’s sympathetic eyes and my desire to get all of this out takes over.
“I definitely thought I did.” That is the truth. But the truth also is that it wouldn’t have lasted. “But, I loved hockey more.”
I swallow hard. That truth has rattled around in my head for years, but never have I uttered the words out loud before today, and it really was the truth. I loved hockey more than anything. The sport has always been the love of my life. From the second I put skates on as a kid in Minnesota and my dad gently pushed me out onto a lake. I was probably four or five years old then. He always tells people I was outskating the high school kids by the time that day slid into the afternoon. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. Skating came as naturally to me as walking right from the start. And I loved it.
But gay men didn’t play hockey… not back then. I kept my mouth shut and my mind laser focused on making hockey my career. I played well enough to accomplish that, but was careful not to play well enough to grab a lot of attention. And believe me, there is an art to walking that fine line.
“Carter had this group of friends,” I spit the word friends out and shake my head. “His friend choices have always been highly questionable.”
Levi grins and flips me off.
“Present company excluded… sort of,” I grin back at him, feeling way more relaxed than I should. Maybe Levi is exactly the right person to dump this on.
Back then there was a stereotype, an expectation of what a gay man was like. He wasn’t supposed to be masculine at all. He sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be an athlete, not one playing such a brutal sport, anyway. Neither Luke nor I fit that image. We were both big, muscular guys. Luke liked to lift weights with me. It was college, everyone had roommates. So Luke and I living together, lifting weights together, eating out together. It didn’t even warrant a raised eyebrow. We were a pair of college kids who were best friends. That we also shared a bed…nobody ever knew. Nobody paid us any mind at all. What the hell did Carter mean? Did I ever wonder?
“I honestly can’t remember what tipped the ringleader of Carter’s group off. But Keith, that was his name. Keith was in a literature class with Luke. I didn’t really know the guy. But Luke must have said or done something… because it happened suddenly.
“One day we wake up happily living our closeted lives and by dinnertime, Luke’s secret had been exposed to the public, in class, on campus and to his family.”
Levi stares at me, digesting what I was saying, trying to put all the pieces together. “But I thought Carter has always been gay. Why would he hang out with guys who would do such a thing?”
I raise my eyebrows and sit back down. “What better way to hide who you really are than to hang out with people who are the exact opposite of you?”
“But the Captain and Vicki, they would never… and Brady would never have judged him for being gay. Or would he have, back then?” Levi asks.
I shake my head. “No, he wouldn’t have, but he was one of the top hockey players in the country and Carter adored him. Even at different schools, I think Carter probably thought any association with a gay man would hurt Brady’s career.”
“So, he picked a band of bullies to hang with,” Levi mutters and runs his hands through his chestnut curls.
I nod. I didn’t know Carter well back then. I knew who he was simply because he was in a class with Luke and me. I knew he was Brady’s stepbrother because I was a hockey player. And everyone in Minnesota—hell, the country—knew who Brady was. Carter was crazy smart. Like the kind of smart where I doubt he ever cracked open a book. Everything came intuitively to him. I also suspected he was gay… I just felt it. He had the hot nerd vibe going on even back then, with the round glasses and neatly trimmed hair. Faded jeans hugging his long legs. He always wore a wrinkled button-down collared shirt which always seemed partially untucked, as though he had dashed out the door shoving it into his pants while running late for his morning classes. And I found that endearing.
