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The sleet pounds down unrelenting and heavy, clothes the roads in a sheen of ice, the shards like icicles. Kent hadn’t seen the streets punished by frigid weather and precipitation like this in years, never thought it could happen in Vegas. A scroll through his phone told him it was a historical record — the first occurrence of measurable snow for the date as far back as newspapers went. Well, he’d been taking miracles in stride over the past year.
But this one feels too fragile to disturb, too well-timed that he couldn’t trust it. Especially with the subject of many of those surprises sleeping soundly in the other room, just as likely to lose his composure with the news of delayed travel and a postponed game as he is to celebrate it.
Kent is tired. Taut body, mind stretched thin. He can admit the thrill of the All-Star weekend has faded, that the showboating is wearing him down. The years have left a mental weight on him that only showed in his ground molars, the slope of his shoulders alone. Hockey had been everything for over a decade and home had been the same place for nearly as long. The rink, and the same cool blue of Jack Zimmermann’s eyes.
He had built a life strong and sturdy without the hope of ever holding that gaze again, unaccompanied by cameras or the equally piercing look of a small blonde baker whose likeness to him Kent had been forced to ignore.
At first it had been to punish Jack. Something to prove he could live well without another life tacked onto his, though he had reluctantly and through gritted teeth come to learn that he needed other people. Including beloved Kit, who was close enough to a brat that she counted as a person.
Vegas built on him a hard outer layer. That sun, all the time. The lights, neon and persistent, jutting into the night sky even under cloud cover. The doubt from people who questioned again and again, why put hockey in the desert?
All he’d had to say is: Why not?
He loved the game. Heat, rain, snow, whatever climate that could be dreamt up — didn’t the people who thrived in it deserve to love it too?
Love it, they did. As his star rose, so did attendance. They didn’t just come for him, though — they came for the Fashionable Firsties, his first-liners Swoops and Scraps, all three of them stumbling through racks of clothing and attempts at personal style until looks landed enough for them to draw attention. They came to make bets with the bookies set up right outside the stadium, for a chance to win big even if it slivered more with expanding excitement for the team. They came for the rookies, wide-eyed and counting their lucky stars to have made it to the national stage, even on an expansion team, even in the middle of the desert. They came for the camaraderie, the way the team gelled under Kent’s leadership — the head pats and friendly shoulder bumps, the hair ruffles, the celebratory little wiggles after goals or hatties or particularly nasty plays that all somehow managed to eke their way into the right kind of masculinity thanks to the right turns of the pen.
And they came to see delicious plays. Smooth stick against ice, dip and dodge between defenders. The crash of helmets and bodies against the glass, the tangle of anger metaphor made real in the crush of bodies.
He's got a good career under his belt, Kent muses. A couple more seasons and he’ll be ready to shed the penthouse city apartment for a house somewhere. Maybe somewhere cold, with a lake he could play shinny on.
He should make coffee for him and Jack, he realizes. He knows it's nearly a surefire bet to lower Jack’s defenses, though even after years of therapy and a second bout of rehab he's still tiptoeing around the possibility of misinterpretation. Years past the eruption of whatever supernova he and Jack existed within, he still has a hard time staying still and not closing the distance between them. He pushes himself out of bed into the cold sharpness of Vegas winter without heat, crisp and cool and rarely accompanied by snow, shoves on an Aces beanie and an extra sweatshirt to avoid lingering in the heat of Jack’s big dumb warm body.
He knows what draws him like a moth to a flame. It doesn’t seem good for him to ever acknowledge it, not out loud. But the season has been pounding on him in a way that makes him acutely aware he's getting old and he doesn’t have it in him for emotional regulation or whatever his therapist liked to call it. If he didn’t leave immediately, he would’ve lingered and showed his hand, smeared all over his face, how much he still wanted Zimms. Jack. Whatever.
The freak winter storm had knocked out the heating, but they had fallen asleep in the same bed by accident. Though the maintenance worker was away on holiday vacation, there were plenty of blankets for each of them to make a cozy-enough nest to sustain themselves. But they had been watching a movie, some historical action slop that Kent threw on to appease Jack, and suddenly it was morning and he was blinking awake in a puddle of comforters next to Jack and his similar cluster of coverage.
Shivering, still, in the cold, he takes a moment to wish he had been able to enjoy sharing the bed with Jack again. If not for his current self, for pre-draft Kent who was too hopeful for his own good, for the post-draft kid lonely out of his mind and driven sick with craving the company someone who didn’t want him back.
But he's in the kitchen now, goosebumped and awake enough to prepare two bowls of cereal. Raisin Bran, boring and dependable. To fill a glass with filtered water and dump it into his Keurig, enough to make two cups of diner-esque shitty coffee. Kent watches the brown liquid steam into one mug, with the Aces’ first logo, and then another, the skyline of the Vegas Strip. He sets the table, lays a placemat, then admonishes himself when he catches the behavior, wrings out his hands like he could undo their instincts.
“Stupid,” he mutters, even though his therapist fucking hated when he called himself names. Sue Kerri, she wasn’t around to eavesdrop. He’d told himself he would make Jack work to earn back his affection. After ignoring Kerri for the first month Jack had been back in his life, the deluge of dignified spiraling in her office and on computer screens began, mostly boiling down to: Why was there still a part of him that still hung around, like a dog frozen at its owner’s door, waiting to make himself look foolish?
“Love makes you do stupid things,” Swoops told Kent when he had been sneaking out to hook up with Carly, of all people. (“And really good dick,” he added somewhat apologetically when Kent shot him a withering look.)
Well, they’d confessed to each other in the back of Kent’s brand-new Ferrari when he was testing out its limits on the backroads of Vegas.
-
The year had been an experiment in smoothing out the rough edges. May, the wedge in everything — barely a month out of season’s end and Kent had gotten the call from ZIMMERMANN (WRONG). He was so scared it had been a butt dial or the worst news in the world delivered in a that he was afraid to move when he picked up the phone. He couldn’t breathe. His world frayed at the edges.
“Parse?” Jack started, small-voiced.
He waited Jack out. It was not unlike a face-off, he felt. He stood so still Kit worried at his sweatpants, pushing her paws into them with inquisitiveness that went unanswered. Bit his tongue to stop words from falling out before he could properly screen them, bled rust into his teeth.
It could’ve been one minute, it could’ve been five. Maybe years lay in the pause before Jack continued. Kent didn’t know if he wanted to stay in the moment and keep Jack on the phone for as long as possible, reminded of the times he would lay in bed just listening to Jack’s breathing to remind himself they were lucky enough to be alive at the same time, back when Jack still acknowledged his presence as something unambiguously positive. Or if he wanted to break the silence, clambering into it with hasty words like was his instinct just to prove that heavy emotion could still exist between them. But he was no longer in the grasp of his early twenties, so he could give Jack the courtesy of his patience.
“Uh, are you free this afternoon? I know this is a strange request, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, but I’m in your neck of the woods and need a ride.”
It was probably the first time in years Kent could remember Jack saying anything to him that wasn’t bland pleasantries workshopped for the media or sponsored by his husband. Caught off-guard, he resorted to shitty humor and hoped it could get him through the rest of the conversation.
“Which part of the woods? Because I don’t see any trees around here.”
“Yeah, haha, not a lot of trees in rehab.” Unless Jack pulled a classic Jack.
“What about Eric?” He was not above asking, Or putting a little bite into it. He had sworn off meddling for his own good after they married, although he would’ve been blind to see the way Jack stared at his ass during each year’s NHL Awards. It used to be painful all the way to his toes, sticking for days, but now it was mostly vindicating. Sue him for trying to take what he could where he could. His tailor rocked.
“Can you come or not?”
Classic Jack, brusque and to the point. Kent fought not to let his irritation show, though God forbid he snap at his mess of a man who had at least taken the deflection part of media training to heart. Likely too much.
“I’ll be there.”
Kent hung up and paced. He picked up Kit, who was obliging for a cuddle for about 0.5 seconds before leaping out of his arms to pad snootily to her food dispenser. He put his hands on his hips and then realized it made him look too much like Coach, and then realized he was closer in age to Coach than he was to being in Juniors, and then he took his hands off his hips and put his face into them.
“This doesn’t have to be a big deal,” he said to himself. Repeated it. Looked at the mirror, surveyed the curves and contours of his face. The roughed-up edges, the scar by his right eye where he’d been nicked by an improperly-built helmet. The eyes he couldn’t meet for years after Jack rejected him because they reminded him too much of that moment in the car, their bodies pressed against each other, Jack — then Zimms — looking at him with too much wonder. Too much awe.
He’d loved since then. Friends, Kit, even a past boyfriend he’d seen himself marrying if they hadn’t diverged over wanting kids. But nothing had ever clotted up the scattered breaths in his chest, the loose organs in his body, like Jack Zimmermann holding his face in his warm big hands in a frigid car, saying “Look at you. Look at you.”
But this didn’t have to be a big deal. It didn’t even have to be the resumption of a friendship.
So Kent grabbed his keys and drove. After a mostly quiet ride spent sneaking tentative looks at each other, he took Jack through the world’s quickest tour of his house before dumping him in the guest room while he locked himself in the room so he could definitely not panic. It was not his finest moment as a host or as a person, but Kent thought he could be excused given the circumstances. Particularly because he noticed the lack of a ring on Jack’s left hand as soon as he slid stiffly into the car and placed his hands robotically on his thighs, which still looked as chiseled as ever underneath Jack’s black Nike sweatpants.
“Swoops,” he whispered under his breath into the phone. “The summer might look real different than we thought it would.”
“Do not tell me this means what I think it means.” His liney’s unimpressed drone made Kent wince.
“Well—”
“If any part of your explanation has the initials ‘J’ and ‘Z’, I’m coming over,” Swoops threatened, then hung up with enough finality in the middle of Kent trying to scoop up words to form a response for him to spam text a variety of messages that ranged in urgency from no, pls don’t come xoxoxoxo to SWOOPS IF YOU ARE OUTSIDE RIGHT NOW I WILL NOT TALK TO YOU FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON.
Five minutes later, he checked Find My Friends to see Swoops conveniently headed in his direction.
As he swiftly walked to intercept Swoops from banging the doorbell five times before he stole the emergency key from underneath the mat, he bumped into Jack lingering outside his door, like a tall, dark, and handsome ghost.
Jesus. That chest. Kent was rarely self-conscious about his height but in the face of a Jack-Zimmermann-sized wall, he was starting to understand why men lied about their heights on dating apps. He felt vaguely guilty having a physical reaction to a man who had just endured rehab, but mostly ashamed that apparently he retained his muscle memory to Jack, despite years of therapy and efforts otherwise.
“Do you have anything to eat?” Jack asked. His voice was the particular type of rusty that Kent unfortunately remembered came from disuse, like after Jack had played a hockey game so intensely focused he said no more than four words to his players, or woken up from a particularly long nap.
“Not now, Jack,” he said. It came out 50% more shrill than he would’ve liked, but he continued on. “I’ll give you a better house tour in a second.”
He did his best to maintain his dignity while pacing to the front door, thrusting it open only to see Swoops leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed. Before he could react to push himself in, Kent shut and locked the door.
“Updates,” Swoops hissed. His hair was seriously mussed, which meant he had probably woken up and dislodged himself from his loving partner and gone straight to Kent’s, which also did not make him feel any more stable about the whole situation.
“He was in rehab, and now he’s here,” Kent said.
“And you’re just going to let him stay here?”
“I don’t know what’s up with him! I’m not sending him into you and Carly’s, ugh, love nest, or whatever you’re calling it these days.”
“We’d never do a threesome, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Something in Kent’s face must’ve given him away, must’ve telegraphed the emotions tumbling over themselves at Jack’s sudden and prominent re-entrance into his space and his life, because the next thing he knew he was face-to-face with Swoops’ shoulder. Being the shortest on the team was occasionally humiliating, but he found it comforting to inhale and exhale the familiar scent of one of Swoops’ rotating cast of Comfort Colors T-shirts. He could be normal about this. He had done several years of being normal about this. He had sent a card to Jack’s wedding that was only 10% sarcastic, meaning Jack definitely didn’t pick up on it and Bittle probably didn’t.
Swoops put his hands on Kent’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, eyebrow cocked up. “Are you smelling me?”
“No,” Kent said. “I’m just breathing.”
Unconvinced but letting it go, Swoops continued to study him. It was not unlike his focus on game day, which was odd to see during the off-season.
“Parser. KP. I know you’ll be okay. You know how to be friends with Zimmermann probably better than any of us, even if it’s buried in the mess of your personal history. Also, you have me, Scraps, Lisa, and Kerri in your favorites, and you know we’d come back you up and ply you with a crazy amount of junk food and ice cream and suntan lotion if you need it.”
Yeah, Kent thought to himself, he could do this. He saw a flashback of all the times his friends had intervened and reminded himself to think about Juniors. God, those memories felt like they had cobwebs, reaching back to the days before his interest in Jack had sharpened into desire. Back then he had been so pliant for Jack, so ready to do anything for his eye. But he had been unsure of himself and still growing into his body, and now he was nearing thirty and equipped to deal with the ex-boyfriend who was allergic to closure and the source of his greatest mental agonies.
“So you’re good, and you’ll call me with any updates,” Swoops continued. “Otherwise the next time I’ll show up with Carly in tow.”
“That’s more a threat for me than Jack, and you know it.”
Swoops gave a lazy salute and hopped back into his deeply practical Prius, leaving Kent on the doorstep remembering he had misplaced the spare key underneath the mat the last time he hosted the team for an end-of-year bash to drink away their first-round-playoff loss.
Sheepishly, he called Jack to ask him to unlock the door. It was enough to break some of the ice, because Jack’s mouth was twisted up with amusement and he opened the door with an Uncrustable in hand.
“Looks like I can take you to get some food now, eh?”
“I see you found something good enough to eat,” Kent said, gesturing to the half-moon sandwich.
“Yeah, thanks for letting me raid your fridge.”
Jack’s face shifts. Kent must’ve done something. He didn’t know he would be telegraphing that much surprise. He didn’t expect Jack to thank him at all. His temporary houseguest clears his throat and backs away.
“Eugh, I’ll — I’ll just go for a run after this,” Jack said. “I’ll remember the key.”
“No need, I can leave the door unlocked,” Kent returned. He didn’t remember his voice sounding this stiff.
For a week, their interactions were like that. Two stray cats circling around each other, orbited by Kit, who skulked around the house eying Jack warily and possibly trying to gauge how her owner feels. Kent found a whiteboard somewhere and writes his schedule on it so Jack can plan around it. He re-upped on the banana protein powder he knew him and Jack both like. He stayed up late when Jack heads to bed early, once falling asleep sprawled on the couch during one of those nights.
When the blinds went up and sun stabbed him in the eyes, he couldn’t be blamed for letting crabbiness get the better of him. And besides, he had the emotional restraint to last a week.
“Does your husband know where you are?”
Jack didn’t shut down. Instead, he laughed, rubbed the back of his neck in the way he did when he was embarrassed but wanted to cover it up. In the 10 a.m. glare, Kent couldn’t look away from the redness that bloomed underneath Jack’s hand.
“I don’t know where he is.”
“That’s not really an answer,” Kent said. He looked away from Jack, at his hands, at the blanket he didn’t remember draping over himself, at the blank TV that broadcasted a shadow of Jack’s reflection. “Shouldn’t he be taking care of you?”
In response, Jack snorted. It was so un-Mr. Jack Bittle-Zimmermann-like that it startled Kent into laughter.
“You didn’t like the pies?”
“I don’t know if I liked any of it, when I really started thinking about it,” Jack admitted. The confession was so quiet and blunt that Kent weathered himself for the moment Scraps and Swoops would jump out of the curtains and yell “Punk’d!”
But he remembered this tone of voice from Juniors. The early games at Rimouski, before they were friends and Kent was on the other side of the lockers and heard a stream of Quebecois cursing trickle into English doubt. Later, he learned that was how Jack sounded after he had really started thinking about something.
He had played it back in his head, all the times Jack used that tone of voice when he thought Kent was asleep, a hand idly in his hair, confessing, I might love you, Kenny, but I don’t know how to carry it. I don’t know how I’m going to survive the draft if I don’t get first.
I don’t know if I want to survive a draft where I don’t go first. It makes it easier to have you here.
Sometimes I don’t know if I would rather have the pills or have you. We would never be able to be public about this.
Jack started talking again, measured and still so, so quiet. Kent leaned himself into the couch cushions as if it would increase his volume. “It was really stupid. I was over at my college buddies’ house, Lardo and Shitty. I think you met them. I saw the way they looked at each other, how much of a team they were. Their teasing. I thought, ‘Have I ever looked at Eric like that?’”
“And what was scary is I couldn’t remember the last time. I couldn’t even remember if I did it at our wedding. Maybe I just thought I did when I was high on winning the Stanley Cup. And then I got scared. I didn’t want to keep living this life I was living. So I just started drinking more again and I wanted to see if he would notice. I wanted to see if he would be a team with me.”
Jack took a swig of some water, the metal bottle banging against the marble of Kent’s kitchen island. He let the sound reverberate before continuing, the words speeding up but still just as clear and dry, like taking a power play straight down fresh ice.
“And he didn’t, and we broke up, and I threw the ring in his face, and Shitty took me to rehab.”
“He’s a good friend,” Kent said, mouth moving before he realized what he was saying. He was surprised, too, at how that had been the first thing that broke free of anything else he could’ve said. He chanced a look at Jack’s face. To his surprise, Jack was looking in his direction. His gaze was steady. Kent pushed nails into his hands to be able to hold it normally.
A second could’ve passed. Sixty, even, or twice that. If he kept his focus on the familiar blue of Jack’s eyes, he wouldn’t need to see the way his face had changed over the years, wouldn’t need to notice the eyebags that seemed always to stay with him, from media scrum in his rookie year to now. It struck him, again, how many years had passed of them knowing each other, somehow always being in each other’s orbit once they had started.
“His wife clears him at beer pong, though,” he continued. He refused to be embarrassed for remembering even though he could feel his face grow red. He dredged up pride for how even his voice was in the face of Jack’s surprising steadiness.
Kent couldn’t remember the last time Jack had looked like that off the ice. It twisted up his stomach, which both wound itself into more knots and undid them all at the sound of Jack’s laugh, quiet and tripping out of his mouth.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Have you called them?”
“No,” Jack said, and to his credit, looked embarrassed about it. “I guess I’ll do that.” His hands only shook a little when he pulled his phone from his pocket.
He disappeared into the guest room for an hour — practically a whole afternoon in Jack-socializing-time — and when he came back, he planted himself awkwardly besides Kent, who half-turned from his stir-fry-in-progress to see Jack’s outstretched hand and pink splashed across his cheeks, the nape of his neck.
“Hi, Kent Parson. I’m Jack Zimmermann. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Zimms, Kent almost said, but swallowed the words, the shocked laughter that had threatened to loose itself at the sight of Jack Zimmermann, who he had known as a pudgy awkward teen with tufts of unkempt brown hair sticking out of his helmets, an unmoving young adult pale and wan on a bathroom floor, a stern voice through the phone choking back tears, a late-start college student slipping back into familiar party patterns, always, always a menace on the ice.
As, once and maybe always, the love of his life. A lap and strong arms to pull him in, a teasing smirk and dry wit, a boy who had grown into a man Kent would always be curious about.
“Is this a dumb idea? Sorry. Shitty said —”
“Don’t even worry about it,” Kent said. He put on his most winningest smile, the one news reporters loved to fawn over. Then he softened it, just a little. The onions slipped into smelling burnt. He took Jack’s hand in his own, anyway, and gave it a firm shake. “It’s good to meet you, Jack. I’m Kent. Parson.”
He had to be the one to remove his hand first.
Jack went home after two weeks at Kent’s place, the second of those weeks spent familiarizing themselves with each other like they were meeting for the first time, like they could paper over the past ten years. Kent had always been good at sleight of hand, but Jack knew his tells — the way he fiddled with his hands, his cagey look that was not unlike Kit’s.
He couldn’t blame Kent, but he was grateful he had entertained Shitty’s suggestion.
“Just — you gotta sit me down and tell me the full story about you and Parson some day,” he’d said, eyes narrowed as he studied Jack. “You’re always dancing around it. Obviously there’s something about him that makes you crazy.”
“Obviously,” Jack parroted. He had been thinking about Kent’s cowlick, how it still looked the same a decade later, how it moved when he swallowed hard.
“But there’s something about him that settles you, too.” Shitty stroked his mustache. “Maybe you just need to get to know each other again. As adults and seriously, not whatever weird Canadian too-nice thing you do when you’re uncomfortable with someone, or the press facade he always puts on.”
If you want him in your life, you have to work for it, Jack took from the conversation.
He did. That’s why he had called him, one of the handful of numbers he still knew by heart even through years of silence and stonewalling. He couldn’t remember Eric’s number anymore, anyway.
And then he went and held on a second too long the first time he felt Kent’s hand against him, completely platonically, for the first time in ages. Well, he had been touch-starved in rehab, and post-breakup, he reasoned. He was allowed irrational decisions that were, for the first time in a while, unrelated to substance use. Jack hadn’t gotten a particular Shitty dose of affection in weeks. He hadn’t felt Kent’s firm grip in much longer.
Rehab had been a blur of days, but he at least had felt more in control this time than the first. He spent his nights waiting for sleep to wash over him, tracing the bumps of the sterile white ceiling, running back through the steps of his life.
He realized, holding Kent’s hand in his, that he still knew what Kent’s brave face looked like. The taut press of his lips, the deepened shade of his eyes. How he could trace back the moment when it began to be directed at him and not for him.
Do better, Jack told himself, and tried to. He started by noticing how considerate Kent was as a host, because he had been housing rookies for years and never been half as thoughtful as Kent was. They drove out to Red Rock Canyon at hours he knew Kent would normally have slept at so Jack could avoid press. They went to one of those French acrobatic shows where the performers accomplished athletic feats twisting and turning in rainbow sheets of fabric, shimmering under stage lights.
“You’re good at this,” he told Kent in the middle of rewatching Mighty Ducks. The A/C ruffled Kent’s hair into odd shapes, further distorting it from its post-shower disarray. “Being a host.”
The compliment came out stiff, but he hoped it sounded honest enough.
“Thanks,” Kent said from the other side of the couch, soft but clear. “For letting me.”
The silence that fell after reminded him of the days in the Q, how simple it had been to just sit with Kent. To be sharing the same silence, even if inevitably one of them — usually Kent — would break it with a quip or observation that pulled Jack back into the flow of conversation.
But it still felt new. Fresh snow or just-formed ice. Too fragile to really hold anything.
He’d always loved those early signs of winter, though. The blue sky after blinding snow that matched the shade of Kent’s eyes when he was the most fiercely competitive.
Jack spent the ride to the airport wondering if he should hug Kent. They had graduated to shoulder taps after workouts, but there was barely any pressure, barely any remnant of Kent that stayed on Jack’s skin. He felt tentative and unsure, like the first moments back on the ice after getting slammed on the boards. Maybe it was because he’d never known any kind of casual contact with Kent.
With Bittle, he’d squeezed his shoulder affectionately as a gesture of affection, but more than once Jack had thought about the way Kent and him had been drawn together like magnets in Juniors, pressed up against each other in the most excusable ways during long bus rides and in the least excusable ones when the doors were closed or the drinks were flowing.
He didn’t want to give Kent a shoulder tap. He wished, briefly, that he had gotten a manual on how to be normal, both generally and around this person he was trying to remember how to be friends with. He stayed stuck on the thought until Kent had raised the volume on his bubblegum pop music — “Made by a Canadian, Jack, because I’ve got some respect for your home country,” Kent had said when he put on the album — as a sign to get out.
“That was fast,” Jack said, dumbly, willing his hands to undo the seatbelt more slowly as if it would force a right interaction to his mind.
“Well, we’re not too far,” Kent said. Outside his window, a TSA agent glared at them.
“I missed you,” Jack blurted out, bumbling out of the car with his backpack slung over one shoulder. No, that wasn’t right, he thought, and paused to look at Kent’s face, once, twice. The long line of his shoulders, his forearms steady holding the wheel, the lazy lean against the drivers’ seat. Jack cleared his throat. “I’ll miss you, Kent. I’ll call you when I’m back.”
Kent didn’t say it back, but he figured Kent had also said it enough times that he had to start evening the count. So he said it again, haltingly, when he called Kent just before midnight in Providence. Made a note to keep saying it.
He continued to talk to Kent. Small texts, photos of his run in the morning, the new zero-sugar seltzers and flavored water Georgia and Snowy surreptitiously gave him after he haltingly disclosed the inpatient part of his summer.
Thankfully, he avoided any deeply saccharine heart-to-hearts with his teammates. It was the small gestures he started to seek out and appreciate more, building on the practice he started with Kent.
As preseason crept up and swept into the regular season, Jack busied himself thinking about the particulars of his career. It was his last year with the Falconers, and the merry-go-round of trade-retirement-extension hung over his every run with Georgia and team outing, every game where he didn’t score or assist or do anything particularly notable on the ice, every particularly pointed slur or smash against the boards.
The first few times they texted, Kent took a couple days to reply, never with more than a couple emojis or a plain reaction. Shitty, in town for a couple nights on a work trip, had caught Jack staring glumly at his phone scrolling instead of reviewing gameplay.
When he saw Jack blanking out at the little green button by Kent’s Instagram profile, he confiscated the phone and forced them out to some reading from one of Lardo’s art friends. The museum got him out of his head, enough for Shitty to tell him on the car ride back to give Kent time.
“Ask him questions,” Shitty said.
So he did. He learned what kind of post-game meals Kent liked (al pastor tacos from the truck a couple streets down the stadium after a win, a spiked banana protein smoothie from a garish souvenir cup from his rookie year after a tough loss), what Kit looked like when she’s making what Kent calls a particularly “Jack-ish” face (grumpy), what a fall sunset looked like from Kent’s balcony. When he asked if they could call and watch hockey movies together, once a week, Kent said yes.
They kept conversations simple, and initially agreed to keep the day a moving target based on how their schedules were going. The Aces were off to a hot start, the Falconers a cold one, and while Jack was playing better than his worst year on contract — the year he and Bittle had gotten married — the shoulder and knee that had never healed quite right from injuries a couple years ago were acting up again. More than once in the beginning of the season he pushed their call to a day where he had a good game, before he realized he was being unfair to Kent and committed to keeping the day set up. It’s practice, he affirmed to himself. Do better.
More and more, he thought about asking Kent what to do about the contract question. He didn’t know the answer when he got on a business-class flight to Vegas for All-Stars, for his second time in the NHL as an attendee and not a player, hat pushed down low over his eyes and a deep sense of foreboding and dread sticking to his shoulders. All he knew was they’ll be playing on the same ice again, some kind of facsimile of being on the same team.
He had planned to reorganize his house, but Kent had mentioned taking on a new volunteer shift on weekends at a community rink, supporting under-resourced kids.
“I could show up for a shift with you,” Jack said before he could think too much about it, then backpedaled. “If you don’t care about what it would say.”
“We’re old friends, Jack,” Kent said. His eyes crinkled a little bit, which was how Jack knew he was about to say something eyeroll-worthy. “We’ve known each other for a little under a year. Practically an ancient friendship, even.”
“Look at you, measuring time in cat years,” Jack joked.
Kent’s eyes crinkled more. “Speaking my princess’s language. Well, we can play up the friends angle. It’ll be good publicity for the rink and garner a bunch of donations, since their end-of-year fundraiser didn’t do too hot. We can hit a puck around, which I recall you aren’t too bad at.”
“Ha, ha. I’ll see you then.” He hung up and thought: How sweet it is. All this time, how Kenny still knows that the most constant thing about us is hockey.
If it made his hand wander to his hard cock, the thought of them passing a puck between each other again, that was no one's business but theirs.
-
It’s cold when Jack wakes up to his blaring alarm, the day after his and Kent’s shift at the rink.
It’s cold, Jack registers, and realizes when he turns to face the half-obscured windows that there’s snow on the ground. In Vegas. He’s supposed to head back to the airport this afternoon, but the several messages on his phone tell him otherwise.
He could be dreaming. It is altogether very possible. Snow in Vegas seems unreal and so does game cancellation right before the regular season resumes. He wills his nerves back into a sense of semi-drowsiness, swings himself out of bed and lets muscle memory carry him to the scent of coffee emanating from the kitchen. He sees the top of Kent’s head, resting in his elbows, hair still impossibly messy, and he sees the play so clearly. Presses his lips to the soft strands, breathes in the scent of Kent’s lavender detergent and morning sweat.
Kent goes still.
“Jack,” he says, tone warning. He pushes himself away from the counter to stand on the other side of the kitchen island, and Jack can’t help but trace the long line of his body, taking stock of the man Kent has become, how badly Jack wants to take each layer of Kent’s clothing off and take Kent back to bed and —
“Are you checking me out right now?” he says, hysterically, trying to catch Jack’s eye. “Zimms. Zimms, please, don’t make fun of me like this,” and when his voice breaks, alertness rushes back to Jack. He shakes his head to clear off the fantasies.
“I wouldn’t make fun of you about this, Kenny,” he repeats. He feels embarrassed, caught wrong-footed, like they’re back to that unsteadiness the week after rehab. Jack can see very blatantly how he deserves it in this moment, and he desperately wants to mend it, tries to stop himself from spiralling before anything is even over.
“I thought we had a good day, yesterday,” he says. “Don’t you think so, Kenny?” Footsteps come from another one of Kent’s guest rooms, which is how Jack remembers that after their volunteer shift, Kent had been a responsible captain and picked up Swoops and Carly from their edible-induced stupor at the Strip. Jack would really like to be done with public confessions, but he supposes that two people who Kent trusts is much better than an entire arena, and maybe they won’t be listening.
“One good day!” Kent says, hysterically. He chugs his coffee and glares at Jack from across the kitchen island. The footsteps stop conspicuously. Jack plows on.
“What about the past nine months?” he says, helplessly. “Kenny, I’m not awake enough to say something fancy. But you mean so much to me. You always have. I feel so lucky to be able to get to be your friend again. I know how much I hurt you, and I’m sorry. I can never be sorry enough. I wanted to do better and I’ve been trying, and I guess I’m just saying I realized I still wanted to try in that other way. As partners.”
He’s out of breath by the time the words spill out of his mouth, but he hasn’t stopped looking at Kenny, not once. He wants him to know he means it, and this is the surest way he can without ignoring the Don’t touch me signals Kent is emanating.
He and Kit really do act alike, Jack thinks, and smiles in spite of himself.
“I haven’t even said anything!” Kent says, eyes still so wide. They look Jack’s favorite shade of blue in the light. Even with the heating is out, Jack’s entire insides bristle with heat. “What are you smiling about?”
“I just like being with you,” Jack says. “I’m sorry I was dumb about it for so long.”
He loves Kent. It hits him with startling clarity, the first breath of winter air piercing against his skin. He’ll take any way he can have him. Friends or otherwise. The past nine months have taught him he can’t go into the years-long drought of press pleasantries and awkward glances again, not with Kenny. He means too much.
Jack opens his mouth to say that, until he sees the moment Kent’s defenses crumble, his eyes falling to the ground and hands shoved into his sweatshirt middle pocket.
“I guess it was your turn to say something stupid,” Kent mumbles. “I’ve got plenty of practice with it.”
“Damn, get his ass,” comes Swoops from elsewhere in the house, immediately followed by Carly’s gruff “Shut up and let him make his mind up. Do you think surprise confessions of love count as a good luck charm for our playoff contention?”
“Yeah, shut up!” Kent calls out, for good measure. The footsteps, though not without inaudible grumbling, recede to the bedroom, and then it’s just Jack and Kent.
Kent has his brave face on again, and his lip is trembling. Jack crosses the distance in one stride and smooths away the quiver, looks down at Kent.
“You never ended up getting taller than me.”
“Yeah, well,” Kent shrugs. There could be so many other things Kent could say that could hurt, and they’re all superimposed into the silence — Kent became a better hockey player, more consistent and more durable. Kent got to live the hockey dream they had fantasized about together as teenagers who didn’t know anything about the actual being in the NHL. Kent got to go first. Kent didn’t get forced into being the poster child for gay sports players.
But Kent does none of that. Instead, he just stands there, looking at Jack.
“You’re being so brave,” Jack says, and it comes out more earnest than he intended. “You’ve always been so brave, Kenny.”
He bends down, puts a hand on the small of Kent’s back and tangles another in his hair, and kisses Kent properly, leans him against the kitchen counter and it’s a no-look one-timer — Kent kisses him back. Kent kisses him back, and Jack concentrates on caressing the fibers of the new muscles in Kent’s back, pulls him so close there’s no more room for anything between them and they’re rubbing up against each other like they used to, but it’s so much better to feel the certainty with which Kent moves, how he holds himself.
He’s hungry to put his hands on Kent, and he’ll take him to the bedroom so soon, beg Kenny to take care of him and reminder him how good and eager and quick of a learner he can be, but first Jack just wants to rest his palms on Kent’s cool face and drink in the look of awe, how precious it is to hold him.
So he rests his hands on Kent’s cheeks, and when Kent pulls away, Jack smiles at him, doesn’t let him leave Jack’s orbit.
“Look at you,” he says. “Look at you.”