CHAPTER EIGHT

David has a shitty night of sleep. He flies out of Las Vegas on the first plane going northeast rather than his scheduled evening flight, transferring in Detroit, which feels unpleasantly ironic, considering that’s Lourdes’ hometown. When he gets back to Ottawa it’s to a quiet, empty apartment, a routine that feels empty. No matter what David does, it’s never going to be good enough.

He trains as hard as he can, until his trainer starts to hint about quitting if he keeps it up, because he doesn’t want to be the sort of trainer who injures his clients. It’s probably an empty threat, given the amount of money David’s paid to have him one-on-one on a daily basis, but it does make David slow down enough to catch his breath.

He’s mostly caught it before the headlines take it right away again. David doesn’t read hockey blogs anymore; before he even made the U18s they were talking about him, and anything nice they might have said was drowned out by insults he remembers to this day. But hockey blogs are one thing, the national news is another, and the first NHL player to come out as gay is national news in Canada.

It’s a fourth-liner on the Leafs. His name doesn’t ring a bell with David despite the fact he played them three times last season, but obviously Riley wouldn’t have played against David’s line. He looks normal. Brown eyes, brown hair, slightly too big ears. Ordinary. In the picture that leaked, the picture that outed him, his arms are around another guy, mouth occupied. David’s struck most by the fact he just looks like a normal guy, that he wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t told, that there are people out there like him and he can’t even tell.

That night he does read the hockey blogs. It isn’t exactly hard to find articles about Dan Riley, though the majority of them say roughly the same thing, “About time”, and nothing else. His mother’s back from Moscow the next day, and David takes it easy during training, to his trainer’s visible relief, makes dinner as quietly as he can while his mother takes a nap on the couch.

He wakes her when it’s ready, clearing his throat from across the room until she startles, coming to the table when he mentions dinner. He’s just taken his first bite when, instead of saying something about the weather in Moscow or remarking about how beautiful the Kremlin is, she says, “I assume you’ve heard about that gay young man in your league?”

David tries not to choke on his bite, swallowing with effort. “Yeah,” he says, belatedly. “It’s pretty big news.”

“I hope your league treats him with the respect he deserves,” his mother says, looking over at him like he, personally, was planning on doing otherwise. “I know organised sports are very homophobic.”

David swallows hard around nothing, twice, trying to keep silent, before he can’t. “What would you know about my league anyway?” he asks. She knows as much about the NHL as she knows about him. “You don’t even watch my fucking games.”