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Scott doesn't like—boys; he never has: even when he was a boy himself, he always found himself drawn to the company of men. Their whip-cruel jokes; what they hid beneath. The thick whorl of hair that could nose up through the bright white V of an undershirt. A baseball cap; the glint of an earring; an ankle sock, pulled up. At first Scott figured it must be because he missed his father. The priest had told him not to worry. Then, a little later, he found it was something else. It was a worse thing, he thought, than grief.
Hockey players are, broadly speaking, not excellent conversationalists. A relief. Easier to tune them out.
“Me?” says Ilya Rozanov, gesturing obscenely after he manages a particularly beautiful assist and Scott, furious, getting too old for this, spits at him. “Oh, I fuck your mother. Thank you, we very happy together.”
Scott feels his face drain, then plunge into a dark red fury. It gets away from him, the way things do. “You little shit! You—you Russki shit!”
Rozanov looks down at him, his eyes flat and cold in their pity. “I fuck your father, also,” he says, nearly gently.
No; no, he doesn’t like the boys. He never asks for them. Still, he flies in from the States, and it’s true enough that he’s looking. Can every parlor madam—in Greece—in Morocco—in Brazil—in Thailand—smell that he has money to burn and no one but himself to spend it on? And once drunk enough to succumb to himself, he has to admit that (hairless; wet-eyed; pliable and yielding; close enough to a woman for plausible deniability, if someone caught you) he sees the appeal, intellectually. So, sure, sometimes. Desperate, lonely. Skin-hungry. Sure. Doesn’t everyone have regrets?