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“How turned on are you right now?” Levi growls.
Brady laugh. Both men are standing staring at their wife, who slides from Travis’s embrace and bows to our small but boisterous group of onlookers.
I skate over and smack Levi’s pads. “Fuck, that even turned me on.”
“Logan,” Travis shouts. “I say we give the old man a weekend off and take Devyn to Phoenix.”
I’m sitting on the bench and drinking it all in. The laughter, the smiles, the chirping. The old guys hanging tough with the young ones.
And Davey. My man. Smooth as silk on the ice. I lose track of who was supposed to be on which side. Doesn’t seem to matter anymore. If someone heads out of the zone with a puck, a few players jump in to receive passes and others immediately step up to defend. Or attempt to. The young ones for sure want to see if they can take Brady on…which they all quickly realize they can’t.
Brady and Davey together…impossible.
Davey comes to a halt breathless and rests his arms on the boards by me to watch for a moment. I toss a bottle of water his way.
“I cannot believe you never landed an endorsement deal with that skin, those looks, and you can actually play,” I say and wink at him. Of course, I knew that long before today. He doesn’t know how much I watched him skate through the years. How many college games – and even NHL games – I attended under the guise of going to see Brady. It just so happened that every time I went to see Brady play, the team he was playing was Davis’s.
Davey squirts a stream of water my direction, then makes his way around the boards and onto the bench to sit next to me.
“You were every bit as hot as Nic back in your heyday.”
“I was?” He looks at me aghast and then laughs.
“You still are,” I say and lean against him. “Actually, I think you’re even better looking with a little age on you.”
And he is. I like the years on him. The tiny creases around his eyes. The thin smile lines I seem to get to see more and more these days. He removes his helmet and gloves and sets them down next to him. I look at his strong hands and those long fingers. I like the experience in those hands too.
“I had the opportunities for the endorsement deals and the fashion spreads. I just didn’t want them.”
I wait for him to say more.
“I didn’t want the attention. It absolutely petrified me, because if anyone found out I was gay, I was certain my career was over. Any career was over.”
I look at him and nod. “At times I think we haven’t come very far, and we sure as hell haven’t come far enough. Back then was very different for a gay man.”
“Especially for a professional athlete,” Davey adds.
He runs his hands through his hair, damp with sweat and raises his eyebrows as he looks at me and then back to the ice.
Devyn and Levi and Brady are still playing around with each other on the ice. Their ice. Their laughs and giggles filling the arena. The rest of guys are leaving the ice and heading to christen the locker room.
“I did just enough to keep my job, but not draw a lot of attention.”
“You never gave yourself a chance to standout,” I say. My jaw drops a bit as the reality hit me of just how talented he is. “You never allowed yourself to be the player you could be.”
Davey shrugs, growing uncomfortable with the subject. A hint of sadness flickers in his eyes.
“You probably… shit… you must have been an incredible player to control it like that, only let people see what you wanted them to,” Carter says. “Wow.”
I shrug again. He’s right. I never let myself be the player I probably could have been. I know there was a lot more in me. I never let myself dream of Norris Trophies. I played the game I love and got paid a lot of money to do it. That was enough. Once I met Brady scouting became a dream, I hadn’t known I had. A talent I hadn’t known I had. A talent Brady extracted from me. But again, a job I don’t want attention for. Thankfully, he seems to have always understood that.
“But you even stayed in the closet here. Why?”
“Privacy, I guess. It’s what I was used to. And you know Bryan now. I love him, I really do. Everything he does for this sport and the LGBTQ community. But you know him. He would have jumped at the chance to have another advocate at his side. And I’ve never felt strong enough to be that for him.”
Bryan Grayling, owns the Grizzlies with his brother, Chris. They are both former Olympic skiers and Bryan is openly gay. While he would have never asked me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with, my private life would have ceased to be that if I had been out in my early days in Denver. I stayed in the closet and even as he soon suspected, he also respected my need to keep my sexuality hidden.
“So, even though everyone knew, they let me walk around as if they didn’t. And actually, I don’t think people here did at first. And I had Devyn, she was happy to be my cover story… I know it all seems so stupid when I say it out loud now.”
