All Hail the Underdogs by E.L. Massey

Author:E.L. Massey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: contemporary, gay, interracial, YA/new adult, sports, ice hockey, team mates, writer, humorous, private school/ dorm life, slow burn, enemies to friends to boyfriends, enemies/rivals to boyfriends, coming of age, coming out, adoption, alcohol/underage drinking, family drama, emancipation, accidental baby acquisition
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2023-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

THEY DRIVE BACK the next day.

They wait until midday to leave, but the roads are still icy and the sky gray. Intermittent snowfall shadows them from slushy, one-lane back roads to the slick, salted highway.

Damien drives while Rome sleeps. They stop for gas, swap places, and Damien tries unsuccessfully to nap for another hour or so.

They’re passing through Portland when he gives up, and Rome says, suspiciously casual, “You want to play some music?”

Damien raises an eyebrow at him. “Only if you’re going to sing with me.”

Rome grins.

By the time they hit the Maine/New Hampshire line they’re both hoarse and hungry. They stop for food just past the bridge and switch drivers again.

Rome, holding Damien’s phone, aux cable tangled distractedly around his wrist and between his fingers says, “Do you want me to play some of your music?”

“My music,” Damien repeats.

“Yeah. Like, you don’t need to distract me anymore or whatever. I’m okay.”

That seems fair.

Damien requests some Ibeyi first, then Childish Gambino, then FKA Twigs. He mixes it up with some Joanne Cash, Michael Burks, and Nina Simone before switching gears entirely to The National.

He requests “Slow Show” specifically, immediately regrets his life choices, and then stares studiously out the front window, refusing to look at Rome, for the following three minutes and fifty seconds of damning lyrics.

When he does hazard a glance at Rome, his face is turned away, looking out the passenger window, and Damien can’t tell if the back of his neck is slightly pinker than normal or not.

Damien decides he’s done with potentially damning lyrics for the day. He asks Rome to find Explosions in the Sky and selects the entire The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place album to play.

He waits several minutes to say, “So I might have done something stupid.”

Rome shifts his whole body when he turns to look at him.

“What?”

Damien opens his mouth and then closes it again. He wonders if maybe Rome will forget he said something if he just…stays silent.

“Damien,” Rome says.

“It’s nothing bad. Nothing that will affect the team.”

“Okay,” Rome says. “But will it affect you?”

Damien swallows. “We don’t actually have to talk about it. I don’t know why I said anything. It’s personal shit.”

“I fucking cried on you yesterday,” Rome says. “I think we’re at the point where you can tell me personal shit.”

It sounds like maybe Rome is saying I want to hear your personal shit.

Wouldn’t that be something.

“My adoption was closed,” Damien says. “Which means my birth parents didn’t have any contact with me. In a closed adoption, once a kid turns eighteen, they can contact the agency and request information, and there’s this reunion registry so biological family members can find one another.”

He hasn’t told anyone this.

Rome’s fingers, worrying absently at the aux cable, go still. “Okay.”

“So when I turned eighteen, I did all that shit. Except after a few weeks, nothing turned up. So I ordered the 23andMe thing. Where you spit in the tube and send it off, and they tell

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