The Locker Room (40 page)

they both carefully avoided looking at Chris"s parents for this next part.

“Not quite, but, over that summer, yeah,” Chris said, looking

embarrassed for the first time.

“But I understand Xander was living with you at the time. If you

were in love—”

“Xan wouldn"t do anything—at least while we were underaged—

while he was living with my parents. He"s got that sort of honor thing,

you know? And I didn"t want him living in foster care, so I managed to

wait until we were eighteen. It felt… it felt right, by then.”

230 Amy Lane

Across the room, Andi groaned. “That trip we took, right after

graduation—remember that, Jed? We came home and the whole house

smelled like fabric softener?”

Jed hid his face and said, “Ow ow ow ow—my eyes! Dammit,

Andi—did you need to go there?”

The family might have laughed forever then, but on screen,

Xander"s face got tense.

“What happened?” Penny said suddenly. “I didn"t hear what she

said!”

“She asked about Xan"s mom,” Chris told her, his voice tight, and

the effect on the living room was electric.

“Didn"t your mother pass away recently?” Barbara asked

sympathetically, and Xander shrugged.

“I"d heard that, yeah.”

Chris looked at him, concerned. “When did that happen?”

“Right after the first playoff series—you were still in the hospital. I

had other things to worry about.”

Barbara shifted forward, as though about to get ready to do some

heavy work, in spite of the Chanel suit and the well-coifed silver hair.

“So, Xander, when was the last time you saw your mother?”

Xander looked away again. He did that a lot throughout the

interview, and it only made his regard even more significant when he

focused on something.

“I"d just turned eighteen. Chris and I had signed our letters the

week before, and his folks took us out to eat. We came out of the

restaurant, and there was a woman across from the restaurant

screaming at a guy about giving her some money for his bang as he

drove off. I"m pretty sure that was her.”

Chris looked at him in horror. “Oh, God. Xander. You could have

told us!”

Xander shifted in his seat, and for once didn"t look Chris in the

eyes. “Do you think I wanted you to know?”

The Locker Room 231

“I wanted to know,” Chris said now, and Xander fidgeted, the

object of everyone"s scrutiny and pity, and finally Xander just glared at

them.

“Look, Leo said be honest, okay?”

Leo patted his shoulder, and Xander wanted to die. “Yeah, kid.

Honesty. You has it. What else were you honest about? Should we see?”

“So, Xander, that sounds horrific. How do you recover from that?”

The man"s glare on television was not nearly as frightening as

Xander would have hoped, watching it. It looked miserable, and

mortified, and irritated—not furious.

“I had Chris and I had basketball. It was all good.”

And so on. She covered Chapel Hill, their deal with the Kings

when Xander could have gone anywhere in the league, and then, the

questions they"d dreaded the most.

“But guys—you"re pro ball players. How could you never be seen

with any women, and have nobody suspect?”

Their expressions on television were like two kids caught sneaking

cookies—except a thousand times worse.

“We were seen with women,” Chris mumbled. “We even slept with

a few of them. It was… it was—”

“We were trying to keep our coach off our back.” Xander stepped

in, to get him off the hook. “He… man, every other word out of the guy"s

mouth is „fag". We were just sort of desperate for him to leave us alone.”

“Well, did it work?” Barbara asked, as though this didn"t shock

her.

“It did,” Xander confessed. “It worked for the whole team. But…

we couldn"t do it anymore. It—” He looked miserably at Chris, who

nodded. “I was getting an ulcer, Chris couldn"t stop drinking. I… one

night I couldn"t go through with it. I met up with Chris at the locker

room of Arco, and… we just agreed to quit it. It was worse than being

outed. It was worse than anything. We kissed, you know, to seal the

bargain….” Xander trailed off, and Chris took up the thread.

“And the coach walked in on us, and I was transferred the next

day.”

232 Amy Lane

The interview went to commercial, but nobody in the room tried to

fast-forward through it. The attention of everyone in the room was

focused on the television screen, and Xander thought that if Chris could

run, the two of them would be running along their jogging path, running

with the wind in their face and their shame at their backs, running until

the horrible weight of this confession felt like the sand under their feet.

“That must have been awful,” Andi said, and Chris clenched

Xander"s hand until his fingers turned white.

“Mom—”

“No, Chris. I"m serious. Neither of you boys are like that. I can"t

even imagine how hard that must have been.”

Chris looked sideways at him, and Xander wondered if his face

was as white and blotchy as Chris"s was.

“It really sucked,” he confessed quietly. “I think it was even worse

than living apart.”

“It was like living apart in the same house,” Xander confirmed.

“Those days—” He shuddered. “Horrible goddamned feeling.”

Penny fast-forwarded through the next few commercials, and

Xander was sure it was because she wanted something other than the

silence to fill the room. But the next questions weren"t any more

comfortable. Chris"s DUI, how hard it was to live apart when they"d

been all but married since they"d graduated from high school, the

specifics of the accident and Chris"s recovery—hard questions.

Exhausting questions. By the time the interview was done, Chris was

looking like death warmed over, and it was Xander who called a halt.

“So are you going to enter an alcohol recovery program, Chris?”

“If he needs to,” Xander said, taking control of the conversation

completely. “And that"s all we"re going to say about that, okay? He"s

tired. We"re done. It"s been a pleasure, but—”

The narration took over then: “And I knew that I had overstayed

my welcome. The boys had been more than generous, both with their

time and with their honesty, so I tried one more question before I ended

the interview.”

And the action was in the living room again. “Mr. Karcek, I only

have one more question, and it"s for you.” At Xander"s tacit nod of

The Locker Room 233

permission, she went on. “Your answers in this interview have been

articulate and almost poetic. Do you ever get tired of the press calling

you Cave Man?”

“I do,” Chris said, his voice faint. “Every goddamned time.”

The interview ended, and the narration resumed, concluding with:

“So now that we"ve seen how difficult it is to live under the radar

in the NBA, we asked the boys" agent what they had in mind for their

next move. His response was that their story wasn"t finished yet. For one

thing, Sacramento hasn"t played the championship series. I asked if that

was a possibility, and he told me that as of yet, nobody had contacted

Xander Karcek to let him know he wasn"t invited back to play. In fact, no

one from the ball club has made any acknowledgment whatsoever. As far

as we know, this championship will be special for more than one reason.

Besides it being the first championship series for the Kings since 1953, it

could also be the first time an openly gay player has played a

championship game in the NBA. As Leo Schindler told me, it all hinges

on their next phone call.”

The narration faded out, the credits rolled, and Penny actually

walked over to the television to turn it off.

She turned back and looked at Xander and Chris, clenching hands

together on the couch, and said, “I, for one, am really proud of both of

you. That looked brutal.”

“Can I go now?” Xander asked, and although the room laughed,

one look at Chris"s sympathetic expression told him that at least one

person knew he"d been mostly serious. An answer to that question was

put off anyway, because at that point, the phone—which had finally been

plugged in again—rang.

Leo jumped to get it.

“Guys,” he said, looking at the number on the caller ID, “there"s

only one person this could be. That"s the team owner. Are you ready for

the verdict?”

They looked at each other, and Xander"s mouth curved faintly. He

had Chris. He could face anything.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

With a nervous smile, Leo picked up the phone.

234 Amy Lane

THAT night, as Xander slept on the couch, soothed by Chris"s breathing,

he didn"t have a nightmare. He didn"t dream about the next day, or what

it would bring, all that was waiting for him on the morrow, and none of it

even crossed his mind.

Instead, he dreamt of an ordinary morning. He would wake up and

go running, and Chris—completely healed—would come with him, the

dogs frolicking at their feet. He dreamt that they would come home and

shower—and maybe they"d even shower together, and wouldn"t that be

fun? And then they"d make love—silly, goofy, wildly passionate love on

the bed that they woke up in.

He dreamt that they"d come downstairs for breakfast, and Lucia

would give them shit about it being eight in the morning, and half the

day was gone, while Penny and Audrey and Mandy, and maybe

boyfriends as well, chattered and talked, and basically made sounds like

family.

It was then, in the dream, as they were eating breakfast together,

that Chris said, “So what are we doing today?”

And Xander"s heart was full of ideas.

About the Author

AMY LANE is a mother of four and a compulsive knitter who writes

because she can"t silence the voices in her head. She adores cats, knitting

socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckle-

headed macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or

doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency

hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever or sometimes for

no reason at all. She writes in the shower, while commuting, while

taxiing children to soccer/dance/karate/oh my! and has learned from

necessity to type like the wind. She lives in a spider-infested, crumbling

house in a shoddy suburb and counts on her beloved Mate, Mack, to

keep her tethered to reality—which he does while keeping her cell phone

charged as a bonus. She's been married for twenty-plus years and still

believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she

doesn't see any reason at all for that to change.

Visit Amy"s web site at http://www.greenshill.com. You can e-mail her

at [email protected].