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No one really knows who the house belongs to. Rumor goes that it’s actually some sort of NHLPA property, which no one Matthew’s asked so far could neither confirm nor deny. But there’s one thing every veteran NHLer knows: if you need to get away, if you need an escape to the middle of nowhere, there’s a house at the end of the road two and a half hours southwest of Helena, Montana with a hockey stick leaning against the wall next to the front door; and for anyone who knows how to look for it, there’s a key hidden beneath the loose wooden board in the porch floor below the stick.
“Stick marks the spot?” It slips out of Matthew’s mouth like a habit; too fast for him to quite mean to say it.
“Something like that,” Brady answers as he kneels to fish out the purported key.
It’s still hard to believe that his little brother found out about this super secret clubhouse before Matthew did, but captaincy has to have some sort of perks, Matthew supposes. Perks such as advance knowledge of the super secret hockey player hideout.
“I heard Panarin stayed here while he was hiding from the Russian government. You know, that mess back in 2021?”
Matthew hums, leaning back on his heels. If there’s any place to do it, this is definitely the spot. ‘The middle of nowhere’ might be a generous phrase to describe where they are. It’s nice, though: quieter than Matthew would’ve guessed. The city boy in him thought that there’d be more animals around; birds chirping, maybe. instead it’s quieter than he feels comfortable with. No background noise, no crowd, no hum of an engine passing by or the scratch of skates on the ice.
Three days. That’s all he has to manage, alone with Brady at the end of the world.
“Got it,” Brady says and stands up, taller than Matthew, the way he’s unmistakably been for years now. Matthew picks up the grocery bag with his good arm and leaves his duffel to Brady. The other arm twinges in his sling as he bends down. Brady turns the key in the lock and opens the door.
The place is suspiciously clean and well-maintained given the amount of hockey players that apparently pass through here regularly. Brady wouldn’t tell him exactly how the whole thing worked, but Matthew suspects that there is some system in place to allow their mysterious benefactor to take care of the cabin in advance. Off the small entrance, barely large enough not to stumble into their hung-up coats as they pass, there’s an L-shaped kitchenette in the corner and a small living room area centered around a small fireplace. On the other end of the living space, Matthew can see two doors leading to bedrooms. The whole thing is gilded in wood and plaid, real lumberjack-cabin-in-the-woods type shit, despite the fact that the house looks more like the Little House on the Prairie from the outside. Inexplicably, there’s a ship’s wheel mounted above the fireplace, spokes polished. How the fuck that kind of maritime accessory gets to a house in rural Montana is truly a mystery to Matthew.
“I’ll take the left,” Brady says, like it isn’t obvious by the way he speeds into the left-hand bedroom and lets his own bag thump down on the rug inside. Matthew takes his time emptying the contents of their grocery bag into the fridge, letting Brady carry his bag into the right-hand bedroom without a word. Brady’s done a lot more than that for Matthew over the past ten days.
It’s been over a week of showers, dressing up and down; carrying bags, skates, clothes and Matthew’s dignity; driving and cooking and taking care of Matthew— all of it in tense, fractured silence, with mere slivers of forcibly mundane dialogue in the cracks. An eerie sentinel has been following Matthew around. It looks and sounds a lot like his brother.
It’s not like Matthew wasn’t expecting something to go wrong when he planned it around the bye week in January. A late birthday present; he was gifting himself as much of an honest life as he feasibly could for his twenty-fifth.
He knew, long-term, the culprit wasn’t going to be his father, who always put family first and would do so no matter what, even if he was the man Matthew had first heard the word faggot from. Taryn was unquestionably going to be fine too, with her lesbian best friend. Matthew was actually most nervous about his mother, who could’ve gone either way. It wasn’t unfounded, but two months after coming out she made a point to turn to Matthew at the tail end of a family video call about Taryn’s recent breakup and ask: well, is there a nice man who’s caught your eye recently? and that was that.
At the time, Brady didn’t even occur to him. They were so deep under each other’s skin that it was unthinkable for Matthew to anticipate anything less than unconditional support; anything else would be an insult and deservedly get him his ass beat. If he even thought about it at all in advance, he thought Brady wouldn’t even be surprised, that it would just be an unspoken truth to him the way things are between two people who love each other best in the world. The same way Taryn wasn’t all-too surprised, punching him in the arm and rolling her eyes and hugging him and saying okay, love you. If I set you up, you gotta buy me beer for a whole season.
But Brady had laughed like it was a joke, and then Brady’d said, no you’re not. C’mon, you’ve never been like that, and then Brady’d gotten upset and said but wouldn’t it be easier if—
And then Brady hadn’t talked to him for five months.
Matthew had dragged himself through the end of the season and into the playoffs, plunging himself into hockey so he wouldn’t have to think about the lonely future in front of him where his brother and him never spoke again. Worse: where the only things they said to each other were plated next to the Thanksgiving turkey, stiltedly poked at with forks and knives before they stuffed the leftovers of their relationship in tiny boxes to take home and enjoy for another half-week before they went back to not talking at all.
Throughout the deep playoff run, his family had been a comfort over the phone, their familiar voices bridging the gap on one end while Sasha was his anchor on the other. It was half-solace, half-torture: the two of them were unbelievable together, better than Matthew could’ve hoped for. Matthew spent the season struggling against Sasha’s devastatingly understated humor and his quiet smiles and the way he was so in step with Matthew that knowing he’d spent his entire life until now without Sasha by his side hurt him somewhere close to where his sternum ended up breaking. Sasha’s voice felt familiar the first time he heard it and his grin cranked rusted gears in Matthew’s chest. Matthew didn’t know how much he’d been missing until he found it.
The night he broke his sternum, Matthew’d phoned his parents, letting their familiar voices and reassurances of pride buoy him through the drowsy drift of his painkillers, grateful to tears that he could still have this, at least. His family was here in a way that mattered, even if there was a gaping hole in that definition of ‘family’ where his brother should be. In a weak moment near the end of the call, when his mother’s soothing voice paused for too long, Matthew found himself asking for Brady. It was the only moment of silence Matthew got during the entire call. He fought through the haze of opiates long enough to say It’s okay, I know. He needs time, like he was reassuring his mom more than himself. She let him do it with the same grace she’d kissed his forehead with when she tucked the three of them in as children, and Matthew drifted to sleep to his parents’ inane chatter through the speaker of his phone on the wet pillow. When he woke up, it was to the ring of the doorbell and Brady silently standing on his doormat.
The text that comes through from Sasha in the late afternoon says: arrive ok? with a little smiley face emoji behind it. Matthew pauses when he sees it; he didn’t outright tell Sasha he was going away with Brady for the weekend, but he made a vague allusion in their last conversation that he didn’t figure would get picked up on. It figures that Sasha would check up. It still stuns Matthew sometimes, how carefully caring Sasha is. Not like Matthew’s something fragile and precious to handle with gloves and lock away; not like a prize horse to be kept at peak racing ability— more like a plant lovingly watered, or a dog affectionately walked. Something living to care for, to touch softly.
Yeah. You ok? is what Matthew ends up going with in return because he can’t fucking help himself. It’s not like he’s ever been a callous kind of dickhead; they were raised to be team players and pull the other guys up with them, but Matthew’s acutely aware that the instinct is unsupressable and immeasurable when it comes to Sasha. The barest memory of half a smile is enough; he needs for Sasha to be okay and make it so if he isn’t. Sasha just brings it out in him. Sometimes, Matthew wants to crawl inside Sasha’s skin just to feel him breathe from the inside.
The reply Matthew gets back is a picture: Sasha’s thick fingers wrapped around the stem of a wine glass, light hairs creeping up his forearm and lovingly curling around his wrist and up the back of his hand. The waterfront in the background is the view from his Finnish lake home outside Tampere. Matthew remembers the view from pictures Sasha’s shown him throughout the season. The caption reads: wine would taste better with you here.
It knocks the breath out of Matthew, softens him up inside his broken ribcage before he can help himself.
“What’s got you looking like Christmas morning?” Brady’s voice cuts through like a blade on the ice, and Matthew instinctively locks his phone and thumps it face down on the couch.
“Nothing.” He schools his face, turns obviously back to the TV. It’s the wrong thing to say, and if things with Brady and him were normal, this is where Brady would jump on him and steal his phone to check for himself who Matthew’s texting. Instead, he can feel Brady hesitate behind him, hear the barest inhale that isn’t followed by any speech.
It takes another few seconds of silence. Matthew tries not to focus on how unnatural it feels. “So you were texting someone?” Tiptoeing around on eggshells is unnatural for Brady, but his determination isn’t. This feels like the edge of something familiar: Brady bulldozing through his own awkwardness like he’s trying for a breakaway. There’s no good way for Matthew to answer, so he doesn’t answer at all. Unfortunately, Brady’s got his mind set on something, even if Matthew can’t for the life of him figure out what.
“You get along well with this person, huh?” Brady says cautiously.
This person. Like if Brady tiptoes around enough, Matthew might say, yeah, I like this girl, and pussy too. Matthew doesn’t want to deal with this, but he knows the only way this is ever going to be okay is if he headbutts through. Brady’s always understood one language best: confrontation. There's no other way around this.
“I like him fine,” Matthew forces himself to turn around and hold eye contact with Brady over the back of the couch as he says it. “But it’s not gonna happen with this guy.”
Brady takes a breath, and Matthew knows he’s steeling himself to bulldoze through; can see him slipping into his fledgling captain voice, still tinted green around the edges. Matthew is something to manage. “You should go for it. It’s—“
Before Brady can finish that sentence with something that’ll rub Matthew too raw with how forced it is, Matthew lies loudly. “He’s married.”
Brady flinches, shocked out of being a captain and into being twenty-three so fast that Matthew sees him fall into it standing up. He looks horrified, and before he can accuse Matthew of something he can’t take back, Matthew opens his mouth.
“Which is why nothing’s ever going to happen. He’s happily monogamously married. I’m getting over it.”
Most of that is a lie, but Matthew isn’t going to get into the fact that it’s his NHL captain right now. That’s probably worse than married in Brady’s eyes anyway. Besides, it was true enough for Johnny, before Johnny had looked at him with big, pitying eyes and said what did you expect, she’s pregnant, and moved to a different fucking conference about it.
Brady can’t help himself though, never has been able to. “You’re not,”—
Matthew is decisive, steels his voice hard enough for Brady to believe him and drop it. He doesn’t want to hear it. It hurts enough to know what kind of person his little brother thinks he is. “No.” He turns back around on the couch demonstratively, turning his back to Brady and picking up his phone again to pretend to text Sasha back.
Brady’s silent for a second, but evidently Matthew hardened his voice enough, or was abrasive enough, or maybe Brady just decided to be gracious and give him a fucking break because he leaves it the fuck alone. Matthew hears him wander three steps to the kitchenette, and then there’s the sound of drawers being opened to whip up something edible for the two of them for dinner. Matthew closes his eyes and puts his phone back down on the couch. Thank God for small mercies.
The woods are loud at night, as it turns out. The chirps and calls of the woods seep through Matthew’s walls at night until they lure him out onto the front steps, where he can hear the wide awake bustle of the woods. He can’t see much more than the next four trees and the dirt road leading up to the house, but there’s a world of eerie sounds that makes his breath catch and keeps him on alert.
He probably shouldn’t be out.
There’s something about this, though. Being a lone witness to the wilderness, stripped bare and vulnerable to any big bad wolf that might stop by in the dead of night. He can be alone here; doesn’t have to worry about the mistakes he’s making toward anyone else. He’s just an animal listening and making noise like all the other animals out here. Who cares about anything more complicated than survival?
A dull footfall echoes out from inside the house, startling Matthew badly enough that he stills. Brady’s awake, no doubt getting a midnight refill on his water glass. He waits, still and fragile as glass on the dark porch until the muffled steps recede past Brady’s bedroom door. Then, he barely dares to exhale louder than the creak of the porch rocking chair. He takes a last look around the loud darkness, the ominous pines reaching out towards their cabin.
He goes back to bed on tiptoe, wrapping the blankets tightly around himself once he slides back on the mattress. Like this, it almost feels like there’s nothing else in the world except his tight cocoon on the mattress and the nocturnal animals outside. Matthew squeezes his eyes together tightly. The chirps and cries outside continue on.
The silent détente lasts another eight miraculous hours. It’s right around mid-morning, bellies still swollen from a hearty breakfast, that anything happens on the front line. It starts by accident, a snowball rolling down from the peak of the mountain, picking up speed gradually. Matthew doesn’t even mean to go there at first. Brady’s voice sounds inane, grating with how stilted the conversation is that he’s practically holding by himself. It gets Matthew’s hackles up, how they go from not being able to talk to each other at all to this forced normalcy. He feels like a cat being pet against the grain of its fur.
Unfortunately, between the Matthew’s monosyllabic answers to his monologue, Brady makes the mistake of saying “… and I was bored out of my skull hanging around the house in May.”
The tone is too normal. Maybe that’s what kicks off the knee-jerk instinct to say it like it’s just part of the conversation or maybe it’s all the grating tension bearing down the air, but what slips out of Matthew’s mouth is: “I wouldn’t know, you didn’t exactly use your free time to call.”
Brady screeches to a halt. His voice, his shoulders, his face— he looks like a jumble of all his individual parts just skated face-first into the boards. It takes a second for him to find any stray words again, and when he does, he sounds annoyed and discomfited; caught out and pissed off with the shame. “You know. Emma and I have been busy planning the wedding and shit,” Brady says, shoulders up to his ears, caught out with every line in his body. It’s such obvious horseshit, but Matthew is so fucking tired and his fucking chest is broken, and if that’s what Brady wants to roll with— fine. Matthew will close his eyes and listen to lies. He’d do a lot worse for his brother.
“Okay,” he says, willing it to really be so.
There’s a pause, and then some rustling sounds, and then Brady makes a noise like an angry housecat. “Stop doing that.”
“What?” Matthew opens his eyes, and Brady looks about as angry as he sounds, even if Matthew for once has no fucking clue what’s got him looking like that time Taryn’s hamster pissed in his cereal.
“Stop letting it go! Why aren’t you angry? Call me on my bullshit, hit me, just— don’t fucking say it’s okay!”
Matthew stares. Brady’s simmer starts boiling. This is escalating faster than Matthew can keep up.
“You’ve never— you don’t let me get away with horseshit like that! Come on, wedding planning? You know mom and Noreen are doing that! What the fuck are you doing?”
“What the fuck am I doing? What the fuck are you even getting angry about right now?”
Brady’s shivering with rage. “Don’t you fucking care? I’m lying to you, don’t you even care?”
Matthew’s speechless. “I don’t care? Brady,” he says, the way their mom used to say Braeden when they were in trouble, the way he only does when he’s pissed off; when he’s trying to make a point; when he doesn’t fucking understand why they’re out of sync, “you didn’t talk to me for half a year.” Matthew can’t even think right now, slumped and broken in the armchair, and the longer he looks at Brady, the blurrier his vision becomes.
“So fucking let me have it!” Brady whirls around, fury in every line of his body, and then he sees Matthew’s face. For a lag of a split second, he still looks guilty, broken, furious, incandescent— and then whatever Matthew must look like catches up to him, and there’s just panic wiping off every other thought on his face.
Matthew’s breaths are getting choppy, and it has nothing to do with his broken ribcage. By the time he realizes he’s sobbing— ugly, hurt animal sounds that jostle his upper body and ring pain throughout his body like a tuning fork—
“You left,” Matthew mangles between wheezes and awful wet sounds, “you took away my brother.” His voice cracks on the last word, hoarse and pained, and he heaves a shaking breath, face wet and hot, a mess from head to toe. “I’d let you lie to me for a million years if it meant I got you back.”
He lets the sobs shake through him, finally, the months of accumulated grief finally getting to him. All the fear and loss and pain and anger rattling through him and out; the ugly, jagged shape of them writhing out of his body, finally free.
It takes a long time until his breathing starts slowing down. He feels drained, the exhaustion catching up like he’s played a whole playoff game. Absentmindedly, Matthew wonders if that’s part of it, if there’s a delay in his body that’s only letting everything catch up to him now. When he blinks the last blurry tears out of his eyes and no new ones come, he realizes that Brady’s hugging him as tightly as he can without hurting him, murmuring into his ear. Matthew’s cheek is wet where Brady’s pressed his own against it.
“I’m sorry,” Brady keeps murmuring over and over. “I’m sorry.”
Matthew lifts his aching arm. His joints creak like they’re not used to this any more, rusted. For the first time in six months, he hugs his brother back.
After Brady helps Matthew to get dressed in the morning, he goes out for a run. They can’t seem to talk about anything but minutiae since last night. It’s like it’s been since Brady showed up in Sunrise: monosyllabic hums and gestures in lieu of actual questions and answers. They’ve been quietly shuffling around each other on eggshells for half the day, wrung out from all the emotion and unsure in a way that they’ve never been, as far back as Matthew can remember. If he lets himself think about it at all, he’ll curl up and start sobbing and never stop. So instead of thinking Matthew lies down on the rug, closes his eyes, and just breathes.
That’s how Brady finds him when he comes back from his run before lunch. He pauses, watches for a second to make sure that Matthew’s breathing evenly and painlessly. Then, Matthew hears him walk into the small bathroom and turn the shower on. He finally finds the guts to come over and sit down by Matthew’s body on the rug about an hour later. Matthew waits through the clicks and swishes of him fiddling with all sorts of things in every corner of the cabin before he finally resorts to the elephant lying in the middle of the room with a broken sternum: Matthew himself.
In the end, Brady doesn’t say: I shouldn’t have. He’s never been the type. Neither of them had the Oster self-righteous stubborn gene pass them by, and that amounts to being incapable of saying I was wrong.
But there is something Brady is capable of.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t around.” Matthew hears him tap the pad of his thumb against his arm; or maybe his knee. It’s a very faint, nervous tap of dry skin on skin. If Matthew’s eyes weren’t closed, he might not be able to hear it at all, but he’s listening intently now. “Taryn said you finally started opening up about… everything. That you finally could. And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for that. For you.” He takes a breath. The tapping stops. “I can’t change it, but I’m here now. I’ve got your back. And I’ll listen, if you want to tell me.”
Matthew doesn’t often come across as the older brother. When they were kids, the height difference gave him away, but after Brady hit puberty even that became obsolete. Brady’s always taken to responsibility like a duck to water. Matthew never shirked the big brother mantle, but he never wanted it as badly as Brady. When they were kids, it was mostly about that childlike desire to be as grown up as Matthew, to prove himself as being just as capable. As they got older, it settled into a cornerstone of Brady’s personality: being dependable, responsible, protective. Bossy. Matthew’s always been the more independent sibling instead. There’s a reason he’s the only one of them to not wear the 7. He started cutting his umbilical cord early and strayed far until he felt like he could love them and hockey on his own terms.
For the past six months, the world’s felt upside down. Matthew: finally bridging the gap to their parents and Taryn, that fissure driven there by the secret Matthew was keeping; by the inability he had to honestly talk to them about his life. The lone wolf returned home. Brady: silent, unreachable. The solid foundation of him torn away under Matthew’s feet. This, too, is unfamiliar: Brady tentative and letting Matthew take the lead. Maybe they need a little bit of the unusual to get back to normal. Maybe they’re never going to go back to normal again.
He’s never going to know before he takes the leap. Matthew takes a second; wonders if he’s really gonna do this. The fear of scaring off Brady again is almost crippling, but Brady asking for it is enough for him to scrape together enough courage to open his mouth and steel his spine. Strange, how the same person that can make him cower is the one that can give him courage.
Johnny asked him once, what it was like to have siblings. He didn’t ask it like he wanted to know something about Matthew; he said it by the wayside, the type of drive-by that always scraped up Matthew more than he let on: isn’t it exhausting with so many of you? And Matthew had rolled his eyes, and said: it’s awesome, actually. At the time, he hadn’t known how to say: it’s like having part of you live outside your body. Or: it’s like a phantom limb that pisses you off every chance it gets. Or: if I ever hit my head so hard I wouldn’t remember anything else, I’d remember Brady and Taryn. It’s hard to explain how that kind of love will only die once they’re in the grave. Even then, there’s a part of Matthew that knows it’ll sink into the soil where they’re buried, feed the worms and the roots of trees and sprout in the new leaves stretching toward the sky. Somewhere in the world, no matter how far apart, a hundred years from now there’ll be three trees with three new leaves reaching for the sun, remembering what it’s like to never really have to be alone.
Matthew opens his eyes. “My first year, I lived with Monny, remember?” They’re both staring at the ceiling, and Matthew can’t look at Brady until he’s done talking. He might not be able to make himself say it otherwise. “Johnny was around all the time, because him and Monny were so close.”
The way Matthew says it gives it away. “The married guy,” Brady realizes slowly, “it was Johnny. That’s not who you’re texting?”
“No,” Matthew confirms. “I wanted you to get off my back.”
Brady seems to absorb this, and Matthew steels himself and continues.
“It was so stupid. I started it. It was just fooling around, I didn’t think it was gonna turn into anything. But Johnny kept it going. He turned it into a game, like if we had a good game day we’d get to fool around. I didn’t think about it too much. I didn’t really think about it until he started getting serious with his girlfriend.”
Brady is purposefully still. Matthew can feel him reigning it in. He lets his eyes trace the wood grain in the ceiling beam.
“I didn’t think about it as him, like— cheating on me or anything. Or him cheating on her. It’s kind of what happened, but it didn’t feel like it, I don’t know. I didn’t need to keep— whatever, hooking up. But he played it off, got me to keep going, kept saying it wasn’t a big deal. Strung me along, got me to do what he wanted. He blurred the line between hockey and hooking up. He wouldn’t pass to me if I tried to put a stop to it, he just started hanging me out to dry on the ice. It was just one whole mess. I think I only realized what was going on by the time she got pregnant. I hadn’t even tried to— date, I guess. I just kept focusing on hockey, or spending time with you guys, or with Johnny. There wasn’t anything else. And it sucked. I only realized when he decided to go to Columbus, and he said, uh.”
When Matthew can’t go on for a second, Brady curls his fingertips silently against his pulse and tugs lightly on his wrist. Same way he did when he was four-and-a-half years old and he wanted Matthew to read to him after Mom had to go put Taryn to bed and he wanted to know how the bedtime story ended. Right in that time when he couldn’t really read all that well yet but Matthew was already in school.
“He said ‘What did you expect? She’s pregnant’.” Matthew injects it with the same cold pity Johnny did, lets it marinate in the silence. “I didn’t love him or anything, but I suddenly realized that I spent years of my life just… going along with whatever he wanted, you know? Letting him call the shots. And for what?” Matthew keeps tracing up and down the wood grain of the ceiling beams with his eyes. “I didn’t love him. I didn’t even like him in the end. It was all for nothing. So I left.”
Brady takes it in, lets it soak into his prone body on the rug. Matthew’s afraid Brady’s going to let spill the words he was holding back before, words like homewrecker and disgusting. When he pipes up, it’s not with any of that, though. Instead, he surprises Matthew. “Is it better now?”
Matthew shudders out a relieved breath. “Yeah. A lot better.”
Brady’s hand squeezes around Matthew’s wrist again, and when he pipes up, he sounds earnest, warm, one-hundred-percent Brady. “I’m really glad.”
Brady eventually gets up to take a leak and brings a tub of ice cream with him when he returns. He feeds Matthew a spoonful when pressed, and Matthew relaxes a little when he puts the tub on the coffee table and lies back down on the floor next to Matthew.
“So,” Brady starts innocuously, “who is the guy you like? The one you’re texting.”
“Don’t say ‘like’, we’re not in middle school.”
“I know I’m not, but what are you,” Brady mutters under his breath. It’s so stupidly mundane that Matthew’s caught right between wanting to laugh and cry. On par, he settles on punching Brady’s shoulder lightly with his good arm. It still hurts, but it’s worth it.
“Hey, no fighting,” Brady admonishes, using his Mom Voice, perfected over two decades— but he settles instead of retaliating, and waits patiently for Matthew to tell him the truth.
Matthew takes a deep breath. It hurts his chest enough to remind him to hunt down some painkillers in a minute. “It’s still not going to happen, I think. But he likes… me, he appreciates me. He’s not trying to get something out of me or use me. And that’s really nice. It’s really good to feel seen like that.”
Brady waits patiently. It gets to Matthew, all of sudden. Brady’s always known how to manage him; how to manage all of them— Taryn, Walt, Mom, their grandparents. It’s what makes him a good pick for captain, and Matthew knows with all the fierce pride in his bones that it’ll make him a truly great captain, over time: the ability to let other people trust him with themselves.
So Matthew does. “It’s Barky.”
Brady turns so fast he bangs his elbow on the floor and curses at the pang. “Fuck, stupid floor,” he mutters, and it startles an easy laugh out of Matthew.
Brady looks up, instinctively affronted, but he softens up at the sight of Matthew and lets him laugh it up. It fucking hurts, actually, enough that Matthew’s laugh sounds more like “ha, ha, ow,” than a normal laugh. Before Matthew can struggle off his back with all the grace of a turtle, Brady gets up and comes back in record time with his painkillers and a glass of water.
It’s a good thing that Matthew’s a professional athlete because it makes sitting up without relying on his pectorals or shoulder muscles a lot easier. With Brady’s help, they manage to sit him upright pretty quickly and painlessly.
“So Barky, huh?” Brady prompts once Matthew’s swallowed one of the pills. He sounds cautious, and when Matthew glances up, there’s something tense in his face.
“Brady,” Matthew starts defensively, but before he can say anything else, Brady holds up his hands like he’s soothing a spooked animal.
Matthew watches him closely, but Brady seems earnest. He lets himself relax a little and warily tells Brady, “yeah, well. He gets me. We’re really in sync. I don’t know if I’m ready for anything yet, but I just like being around him in the meantime.”
That seems to sit for bit. When Matthew glances back up at his brother, Brady seems thoughtful. There’s something strange in his eyes. Almost— sad?
“Is it weird? That he’s your captain?”
“No, why would it be weird?” Matthew starts instinctively, but there’s something on Brady’s face that gives him pause. That makes him patient. “On the ice he’s my captain of course, but otherwise he’s just Barky. He’s the best.”
Brady mulls this over. There’s something going on behind his eyes, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s about Matthew all that much. They’re both marinating in the conversation, but the silence doesn’t feel bad at all this time. It feels like a shared bubble around them instead of a fathomless crevasse between. Matthew basks in the luxury of it. What a privilege: to have his brother take the shape he knows and loves, just an arm’s breadth away.
“You know, you’re taking this pretty well for how badly you took it at first.”
Brady tenses up, and Matthew can already hear him denying it, some stubborn sneer like I didn’t take it badly on the tip of Brady’s tongue— but Brady takes a breath and says something else instead. “Yeah, well, I didn’t want to believe that you kept such a big secret from me for so long,” Brady admits slowly. “It felt like I didn’t even know you, you know? I was so mad that you didn’t tell me. By the time Taryn yelled at me to stop being such an asshole homophobe I just didn’t really know what to do. I thought you’d get mad and call my bullshit like you usually do. Then you just never did. I figured you knew it wasn’t like, an asshole homophobe thing.”
“No I didn’t know it wasn’t an ‘asshole homophobe thing’.” Matthew considers calling Brady on the months of radio silence, on the wouldn’t it be easier if— that still rings in his ears, all these months later. Words that Brady might not even remember anymore. He opts for something more forgiving. “You know dad used to say shit like ‘faggot’ and ‘cocksucker’ all the time.”
Brady looks annoyed. “I’m not a fucking boomer, dumbass. Like, no, I don’t wanna think about my brother sucking cock, that’s gross. But that’s ‘cause you’re gross, I don’t care about the dicksucking.”
“Wow, gotta get you a fucking sash for that.” Matthew mimes the drape of a sash with his free hand even though it hurts, illustrating the word placement down the imagined band. “‘Don’t Care About the Dicksucking’.”
“I’ll wear it to Pride.” Brady pokes him in the good arm, but Matthew stays silent.
“You know I can’t go to that.”
Brady stills, like it hadn’t really occurred to him. Then he flops back down on the rug, arm slung over Matthew’s middle, since he can’t flop his whole body down on top of him without crushing his injured ribcage. “Not the parade,” he says brattily on purpose, sounding so much like Taryn for a second, like when she says no, duh, don’t be dumb. “I’ll wear it at home. We’ll do like an at-home pride party or whatever. Do a bunch of shots and swim in the pool. I’ll out-lap you and beat your gay ass.”
“You’re a gay ass,” Matthew mutters, almost pure snotty sibling instinct— but his heart grows three sizes in his chest, and he squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn’t accidentally cry all over the rug.
“Last day today,” Matthew volunteers the next morning at breakfast. The sun is streaming in through the window and illuminating every plane of his brother’s face. “Wanna go for a hike?”
Brady blinks at him for a second, then grins. Matthew thought he could get away with being casual about it, but of course Brady notices: it’s the first time Matthew’s asked him for something since he showed up at Matthew’s front door. Can’t get anything by him. It’d be almost embarrassing if it didn’t make Matthew’s heart feel so full.
“Yeah, sounds great,” Brady says, beaming like a puppy and trying to tamp down on the excitement before it starts being too much for Matthew. His considerate little brother.
They finish eating first and grab some water bottles for the road, then Brady bundles them both up in appropriate clothing. It’s while Brady kneels down to lace up Matthew’s hiking boots that he asks. He can’t look at Matthew, eyes focused on his fingers, which is how Matthew knows it’s too important for Brady to face head-on.
“Did you write your best man speech yet?”
Matthew swallows around the lead ball in his throat until he’s sure his voice will come out evenly enough to make it through the answer. He focuses on a curl at the top of Brady’s scalp. He can’t look at it head-on either; they’ve always been more alike than they haven’t. “I was planning on going off-the-cuff. You know I’m better at winging it.”
Brady smiles, bright and genuine and goofy. He rises to his feet and helps Matthew up. “Sounds good.”
He doesn’t have to say anything else. The only thing left to do is grab the keys, open the front door and hold it open for Matthew. When Matthew finally steps outside the fresh air hits like a cold splash; a crisp dawn; a new life.