“I’ll find different lodgings next offseason,” David says stiffly, and she stands, but he’s already out the door, walks straight to the Greyhound station a kilometre away because he doesn’t want to stop long enough to book a flight, check the rail schedule, can’t stop or he’ll have to let it sink in.

There’s a bus into Toronto within the hour, and David buys a ticket, a can of pop from the vending machine, a sub because he barely had any dinner, and it’s too long a trip to ignore eating. It tastes like cardboard, though he doesn’t know if that’s just him or if it’s supposed to taste that way.

He gets into Toronto around two in the morning, taking the night bus down to the hotel Dave’s arranged for him during training. The concierge seems unimpressed with his interest in booking a room in the middle of the night, but she warms up considerably once she finds out he’s just trying to extend a month-long stay by a couple days.

“Our premium suite is unavailable until your original booking date,” she says, suddenly very apologetic. “Would a studio be acceptable in the interim?”

“That’s fine,” David says tiredly. He just wants to sleep. He would have managed it on the bus if there hadn’t been a crying baby two rows ahead of him.

The studio’s still impressive, not that David looks around much before he crashes. The next morning he buys replacements for all the toiletries he left behind in Ottawa, calls Dave to confirm the camp details, even though email’s typically their primary mode of communication.

He’s at fidgety, loose ends, enough so that he’s started checking more hockey blogs for the reactions to Riley. Most are positive, but there are a few that make David flinch, especially a fairly vicious one from a New York City based writer explaining why gay men have no place in the sport. He ends up buying a ticket to the Blue Jays game that night just so he can focus on something else.

The Blue Jays lose, and David buys a drink at the hotel bar to help him sleep, then another because he still feels wide awake. No one bothers him, so he lingers over a third before he goes to bed, though he can only sleep for a few hours at a time, waking up occasionally with his heart in his throat. Afraid, though of what he doesn’t know.

The next day he walks under a baking June sun, walks until he doesn’t know where he is, which doesn’t take long, and then keeps going, until he’s sweaty and hot and starting to burn despite the sunscreen he applied before he left. Then he walks back in the direction he came from, takes a cool shower in his room. It doesn’t do anything for his face, which is pink and flushed, sore and hot to the touch.

He sleeps on his stomach like he always does, and that night he wakes up every few hours just because his face is burning, high thread count pillowcases scratching like they’re burlap. Nothing helps, not the aloe he picked up, not trying to sleep on his back, because all that brings is insomnia, and the last thing he needs right now is uninterrupted hours to think. He has months to go until the season starts and nothing but this camp to do with them, and the more he thinks of options the more he realises how few there are. That he has nothing else to do.