em | hockey enthusiast | book lover | expert yapper
requests are open | guidelines
watching right now: love island usa s8
hii im a big canucks fan but im open to writing just about anything for anyone (especially if it involves the jealousy trope, check #em gets jealous), feel free to pop over to my inbox :)
below are my works, i’ll try to update as i go. i've got multi part fics separated but the blurbs, oneshots, and full-length fics are otherwise pretty mixed together in there ! the best way to find a full catalog of something is to search it on my account (like all my bedsy thoughts are tagged connor bedard x reader even if they’re not on here)
Really early on, Macklin realizes he knows how to be good. Not kind, necessarily, although he is that too. Not the kind of good that comes naturally, without thought.
The kind of good that gets noticed.
The kind that makes adults smile when they talk about him. That makes coaches trust him before he’s old enough to understand why. The kind that has people saying things like, “He’s different,” with a certainty that feels flattering until it starts feeling like a responsibility.
He learns that being talented is only part of it.
The rest is making sure everyone feels comfortable with the fact that you are.
By the time he reaches the NHL, the image is already built.
The kid everyone wants to believe in.
The future star.
The one who works harder than everyone else and is mature beyond his years.
And Macklin doesn’t hate it, which is what makes it complicated.
He likes being the person people are proud of.
He likes seeing his parents’ faces when he succeeds. Likes hearing teammates tell him he’s going to be special. Likes knowing he’s doing everything right.
But sometimes, when he’s alone after a game, when the arena has emptied and the lights are dimmed and there’s no one left to impress, he wonders what happens if he stops.
Not forever.
Just for a night.
What happens if he doesn’t make the smart choice?
What happens if he doesn’t think about tomorrow?
He doesn’t know.
Because Macklin has always been very good at tomorrow.
Until he meets you.
And you are, unfortunately for him, very good at today.
You’re introduced casually, almost forgettably, through a group of people who know a lot of people and somehow always end up in the same places.
The first thing Macklin notices is that you don’t seem particularly impressed.
Not unimpressed.
That would almost be easier.
Just… normal.
You don’t stare or ask a hundred questions. You don’t do that thing people do where they pretend they aren’t aware of who he is while very obviously being aware. You just talk to him.
About normal things.
A movie you hated. A restaurant with terrible service. The fact that his coffee order is painfully predictable.
“You get the same thing every time?” you ask, looking down at the cup in his hand.
He looks at it. Then back at you.
“Yeah?”
You smile.
“That’s the most Macklin Celebrini thing I’ve ever seen.”
He laughs before he can stop himself.
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know,” you say. “You just seem like the kind of person who has a favorite everything.”
He should be offended.
Instead, he finds himself smiling. Because you’re not wrong.
The first time his teammates realize something is different, it’s a few months later.
Not because he tells them.
Mack isn't exactly known for announcing his feelings.
It’s because he walks into the locker room after morning skate wearing sunglasses indoors.
Because technically he and you spent half the night driving around the city with no destination, listening to music too loudly and stopping whenever something looked interesting.
Because technically he had practice in four hours and should have gone home.
Because technically it was one of the least responsible things he’s done in years.
And he had the best time.
“I’m fine,” he says finally.
His teammate narrows his eyes.
“You’re smiling.”
Macklin immediately stops.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m literally not.”
“You literally are.”
And the worst part?
He is.
You don’t make him reckless on purpose.
That’s what everyone gets wrong.
They think you’re the reason he changes.
They think you’re some sudden bad influence who appeared and convinced the golden boy to start making questionable decisions.
But you never tell him to skip recovery.
You never tell him to ignore responsibilities.
You never tell him to stop caring.
You just make it easier for him to remember that he is allowed to have fun.
And Macklin, unfortunately, discovers that he really likes fun.
The first time he does something truly out of character, it’s after a win.
A big one.
Everyone is buzzing afterward, adrenaline still running too high for anyone to actually sleep.
Normally, Mack goes home.
That’s what everyone expects.
He celebrates for a little while, laughs with the guys, then disappears.
Because there’s always tomorrow.
Except this time, when you text him:
you alive?
He looks at the message for almost a full minute.
Then:
unfortunately
You send back a laughing emoji.
boring answer
And maybe it’s the fact that he’s tired.
Maybe it’s the fact that he’s still riding the high of the game.
Maybe it’s because he knows he should say no.
But instead he types:
what would be a more interesting answer
You reply immediately.
come find out
It’s stupid.
It’s impulsive.
It’s exactly the kind of thing Mack would normally talk himself out of.
And yet twenty minutes later, he’s in his car.
You spend the night doing nothing important.
That’s the thing he likes most.
Nothing important.
You drive around with the windows down even though it’s cold.
You stop at a gas station and buy snacks you don’t even like.
You sit in the parking lot of a closed store at two in the morning because the music is good and neither of you wants to move yet.
Mack laughs so hard at one point that he has to put his head against the steering wheel.
You stare at him.
“What?”
“You’re laughing.”
He looks up, confused.
“Yeah?”
“No, like really laughing.”
He shakes his head.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” You smile. “I feel like I’ve only ever seen you being responsible.”
He leans back in his seat.
“And this isn’t?”
You look around at the empty parking lot.
“We're sitting in a random parking lot at two in the morning eating gas station cookies.”
He looks down at the cookie in his hand.
Then laughs again.
“Okay. Fair.”
And something about that moment stays with him.
Because nobody has ever made him feel less like a hockey player.
Less like a prospect.
Less like someone everyone is watching.
You just make him feel young.
After that, it gets worse.
Or better.
He’s not sure.
He starts saying yes.
Which sounds harmless until everyone around him knows that Macklin Celebrini saying yes is actually concerning.
“Want to go out after dinner?”
Old Macklin would say no.
New Mack says, “For a little bit.”
Everyone knows “for a little bit” is a lie.
He stays out too late.
He starts sending ridiculous pictures to the team group chat.
He starts wearing clothes that make his teammates stare at him for a second too long.
He starts teasing people back instead of politely laughing.
He starts talking during interviews with a little more honesty.
A little more sarcasm.
A little less carefully rehearsed.
One reporter asks him about pressure.
Old Macklin would give the perfect answer.
Something about focusing on the team.
Something about controlling what he can control.
Something polished.
Instead, he shrugs.
“Yeah, obviously there’s pressure. Anyone who says there isn’t is probably lying.”
The PR person nearby looks like they’ve seen a ghost.
Macklin just smiles.
And later, when you see the clip, you text him.
they’re gonna ban me from hanging out with you
He laughs.
probably
A minute later:
worth it though
You stare at the message longer than you mean to.
Because Mack doesn’t say things like that casually unless he means them.
The problem, he deduces, is that the chaos works. It's scary that he likes this version of himself. The version that is less careful, who says what he thinks, who likes the way you look at him when he's being ridiculous. Like he's not disappointing you by being different. Like maybe different is the point.
The first time Mack realizes you're dangerous isn’t because you convince him to stay out late.
It isn’t because you convince him to break routine or do something impulsive or make a decision he’ll regret when his alarm goes off the next morning.
It’s something much quieter.
It’s the fact that you make him forget he is supposed to be anyone else.
Because there's a version of Mack that exists only with you.
This version is softer. Messier.
The kind of person who laughs into your shoulder when you tease him. The kind who forgets what time it is because he’s too caught up in a conversation that started about something meaningless and somehow became everything.
The kind of person who lets himself be known.
And maybe that’s what scares him most.
There are nights when he gets home and realizes he doesn’t want to do anything impressive.
He doesn’t want to go somewhere everyone knows his name.
He doesn’t want another night where strangers tell him how talented he is.
He doesn’t want another reminder that everyone has an idea of him.
He just wants you.
The first few times, he doesn’t know how to ask for that.
Macklin is good at asking for things that have a purpose.
More ice time.
More reps.
More chances.
More proof.
But wanting someone just because they make the world quieter?
That feels selfish.
So instead, he lingers. He finds reasons to stay.
He stands in your doorway after you’ve already said goodnight. He sits beside you on the couch even though he was supposed to leave. He tells himself he’s not tired even though his eyes are heavy.
Eventually, you look at him and smile.
“You know you can just say you want to be here, right?”
And he laughs softly because somehow you always make it sound simple.
“I know.”
But he didn’t.
Not before you.
Those nights become his favorite kind of chaos. The kind that exists only behind a closed door.
The world outside is still moving.
Phones still buzz. Schedules still exist. Morning skate is still waiting.
But for a few hours, none of that reaches him.
There’s no expectation or performance.
No version of himself he has to maintain.
Just the two of you tangled together in the quiet aftermath of another long day, sheets twisted around you, his head resting against you as the room slowly settles around you.
The first few times, he almost ruins it.
Not intentionally.
Just because he doesn’t know what to do with something that doesn’t ask anything from him.
He keeps waiting for the moment where he has to be impressive again.
Where he has to earn being wanted.
But you don’t ask him for anything.
You don’t look at him like he’s the future of hockey.
You don’t look at him like he’s something rare.
You look at him like he’s yours.
Like he’s just Mack.
And that somehow feels more overwhelming than anything else.
“You’re quiet,” you murmur one night.
He’s lying beside you, staring at the ceiling.
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s usually dangerous.”
He smiles.
“Yeah.”
A pause.
Then:
“Do you ever think it’s weird?”
“What?”
“How different I am with you.”
You turn your head toward him.
Macklin’s expression is thoughtful, almost confused.
Like he’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t have an answer.
“Everyone thinks they know me,” he says quietly. “And they do, kind of. But not this version.”
Your fingers trace absent patterns against his arm.
“What version?”
He looks at you.
“The one who doesn’t have everything figured out.”
The honesty of it settles between you.
The next morning, reality always returns.
Then his phone starts buzzing.
He groans.
You laugh.
“Welcome back.”
He closes his eyes.
“Can we ignore the world?”
“For how long?”
He thinks about it.
“Forever?”
You smile.
“Tempting.”
And he laughs because he knows you don’t mean it.
Neither of you do.
The world matters.
His career matters.
The things he’s worked his entire life for matter.
But for a little while, in the quiet space between night and morning, he gets to exist without carrying all of it.
And maybe that’s why he keeps coming back.
Not because you make him forget who he is.
Because you remind him he’s more than that.
But eventually, the high wears off. It always does.
It happens after a bad game. A really bad game.
Macklin can't stop replaying his mistakes and everyone thinks it's a good idea to tell him it's going to be okay which somehow only makes it worse. Because they don't understand.
They see the player.
You see the person.
And unfortunately, the person is angry.
He throws his gloves into his bag harder than necessary.
He doesn’t notice you standing there until you speak.
“Hey.”
He looks up.
And immediately his expression changes.
The anger disappears. Not because it’s gone but because he’s embarrassed you saw it.
“I’m fine.”
You raise an eyebrow.
“Mack.”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t have to do that with me.”
And something about that breaks through.
Because everyone else accepts the answer, everyone else lets him put the mask back on. You don’t.
“I hate losing,” he says quietly.
You don’t respond.
So he keeps going.
“I hate feeling like I’m not good enough. I hate that everyone expects me to be calm about everything.”
His jaw tightens. “I hate that sometimes I want to just lose my mind.”
The honesty surprises even him.
You step closer.
“And?”
He looks at you.
“And what?”
“And what happens if you do?”
He laughs once, bitterly. “I don’t know.”
A pause.
“I think everyone would be disappointed.”
You look at him for a long moment.
“Mack.”
Your voice is soft.
“You know you’re allowed to be a person, right?”
Later that night, you’re sitting in his apartment.
No cameras.
No teammates.
No expectations.
Just the two of you.
He’s quiet.
“You ever think I’m too much?”
You look over.
“What?”
He shrugs.
“This.”
He gestures vaguely.
“The chaos.”
You smile slightly.
“I think you’re funny.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.” You study him. “It’s not.”
A silence.
“I think you’re someone who spent your whole life being told what version of yourself people wanted.”
He looks down.
“And now?”
“And now you’re figuring out what happens when you stop asking.”
He lets out a quiet breath.
Because that’s exactly it.
The terrifying thing isn’t that you brought out some darker version of him.
The terrifying thing is that maybe this was always there.
The reckless part.
The loud part.
The part that wanted to drive until sunrise and laugh until his stomach hurt.
The part that wanted to stop being impressive and just be alive.
You didn’t create that.
You just gave it somewhere to go.
Months later, someone asks one of his teammates what changed.
Why Macklin seems different.
Happier, maybe.
Less careful.
His teammate laughs.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
Then he thinks about it.
“Actually, yeah. I do.”
“What?”
“He stopped acting like he had something to prove.”
And maybe that’s the truth.
Maybe the good boy didn’t disappear.
Maybe he was never gone.
Maybe he was just waiting for someone who wouldn’t love him less when he stopped being perfect.
Someone who would still choose him when the lights were off.
a/n: the idea was there but i don't think the execution is. pls see the vision
Will was just late enough that you'd already paid for both drinks and were deep enough into your second glass of wine to feel justified in being annoyed when he finally slid into the booth across from you, hair still damp from the post-game shower, smelling like soap and something expensive.
"Before you say anything," he started.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
He looked at you. "You're doing the thing with your face."
"I don't have a thing with my face."
"You do." He reached across the table and stole a fry off your plate. "It's this." He made an expression — neutral, slightly too neutral, the studied calm of someone actively deciding not to be upset.
You threw a napkin at him.
He grinned. There it was. That was the thing about Will — he could disarm you in about thirty seconds flat, and the worst part was you could see it happening and still couldn't stop it.
"You said seven," you said.
"Game went to overtime."
"You could've texted."
"I did text."
You picked up your phone. One message, sent eight minutes ago: almost there, don't be mad
"That's not a real heads-up, Will."
"It's a heads-up."
"It's a cover-your-ass text."
"Okay, yes," he conceded, flagging down the server. "It was a cover-your-ass text. But I'm here now." He looked at you properly then — the kind of look that you'd spent four months trying to not let mean anything. "Hi."
You exhaled. "Hi."
He stole another fry. You let him.
The thing was — and you would never say this out loud, not to him, not to anyone — being around Will was fun.
Not fun like a good playlist or a night out. Fun like a live wire. Like the two of you had some private frequency nobody else was on, and every time you were together you both found it immediately and everything just. Crackled.
He talked too much during movies and somehow always had the right thing to say. He remembered the name of your childhood dog and brought it up at completely random moments. He could make you laugh harder than anyone you'd ever met and he knew it, used it deliberately, and you couldn't even be mad about it because it worked every single time.
And then there was the other thing.
The other thing was its own category entirely.
The other thing was the reason you'd driven across town in a snowstorm in November, why you picked up his calls at midnight when you had a 7am the next morning, why you had essentially stopped being able to think straight in a radius of about three feet from him. You weren't going to examine that too closely. The point was it was good — stupidly, inconveniently good — and it made everything else about this impossible situation feel like a very reasonable trade-off.
Most of the time, anyway.
You tried to have the conversation exactly once before you learned better.
You'd been on his couch, maybe six weeks in. He was showing you something on his phone, a video of Toff attempting to parallel park a rental car in Nashville, which was genuinely hilarious, and you'd been laughing and then you looked at him laughing and thought: okay. now. say the thing.
"Hey," you said. "Can I ask you something?"
"Yeah." He didn't look up from his phone, already pulling up a follow-up video.
"What are we doing?"
He looked up then. Put the phone down. Gave you his full attention, which was almost worse because it was a lot of attention. "What do you mean?"
"I mean—" You gestured vaguely between the two of you. "This. What is this."
He considered it for a second. Or he appeared to consider it. Then he shifted, closing the distance between you on the couch, and said, very close to your ear: "Right now?"
"Will—"
"I'm just asking for clarification."
"That's not—" His hand found the back of your neck and you lost the sentence. "That's not what I'm talking about."
"I know." He was smiling. You could hear it. "What are you talking about?"
You turned to look at him, which was a tactical error because he was right there and his eyes were doing the thing. "You're deflecting," you said.
"I'm clarifying," he said, and kissed you, and the conversation dissolved so completely that twenty minutes later you genuinely could not remember what point you'd been trying to make.
Which, looking back, was entirely the problem. And also, if you were being honest, not the worst outcome.
"You told Toff we weren't coming to his thing on Saturday," you said, standing in Will's kitchen with your coffee while he rummaged in the fridge.
"I told him I wasn't coming."
"He texted me asking why we weren't coming."
Will straightened up, fridge door still open. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"He just assumed. I didn't say we."
"Right, but—" You stopped. The but here had a lot of directions to go and none of them were easy at eleven on a Thursday morning.
"Does it bother you?" he asked. Simple, no edge, just looking at you across the kitchen island.
"I don't know," you said.
He nodded. "Okay." Then: "You want eggs?"
And that was it. Filed somewhere neither of you would look. You said yes to the eggs. He made them exactly the way you liked without asking, which should have felt like a nice thing and mostly did, except you were standing there watching him and thinking: that's the whole thing, isn't it. He knows exactly how you take your eggs and has no idea what to do about any of the rest of it.
There was one night, maybe two weeks before the Chicago thing, where you'd driven over with actual intentions.
Three things to say. You'd rehearsed them in the car. I need us to be clearer. I need to know you think about me when I'm not here. I need more than this. Solid. Reasonable. You were ready.
He opened the door in a t-shirt and joggers, already grinning like he'd been expecting you, and said "perfect timing" and pulled you inside by the wrist and you were very briefly a person with a plan and then you were not.
Later, some unmeasured amount of time later, you were lying in the dark of his room, his arm heavy across your waist, the city doing its quiet thing outside. He was almost asleep. His thumb moved against your side without him thinking about it, slow and warm.
You stared at the ceiling.
What were the three things?
You tried to remember. You could not remember a single one.
You turned your head and looked at him. The line of his jaw in the dark. The way he breathed. The completely unreasonable fact of him.
You thought: I should care more that I forgot what I came here to say.
You thought: I really, genuinely, completely do not care.
You closed your eyes.
The fight, when it came, was stupid. It was always going to be stupid.
The big stuff slid right off because you never quite gripped it long enough to deal with it, so it had to be something small that finally snagged. This time it was a road trip.
"I said I'd probably come up for the Chicago games," you said.
"I know."
"And you didn't say anything when the schedule changed."
"I didn't think—"
"I had to find out through the team Instagram, Will."
He went quiet. Standing in his entryway, still in his coat, and he just let the quiet land between you. That was worse than if he'd argued. Will could argue great — quick and funny and frustrating in a way you almost enjoyed. The quiet was different. The quiet meant he knew.
"I live inside this schedule," he said finally. "I forget other people have to plan around it."
"I'm not other people."
"I know." Gently. "I know you're not."
"Then act like it." Your voice came out steadier than you felt. "That's the whole thing. That's all I'm asking."
He ran a hand through his hair. You stood in his hallway and felt the gap between you widen in that particular way it had, like it had its own momentum, its own ambitions.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." That was the exhausting part. "You always mean it. That's sort of the problem."
Something moved through his face, not quite hurt, more like recognition. Like you'd named something he'd been hoping you wouldn't.
Neither of you moved.
Then he stepped forward and his hands found your waist — not a move, just there, warm and certain and completely unfair — and you leaned into him before your brain had any say in it.
"I hate this," you said into his shoulder.
"Yeah." His arms tightened. "Me too."
Outside, it had started to rain.
Cat asked you once, over coffee, how you'd describe it.
"Describe what?"
She gave you a look.
"I don't know," you said.
"That's not a description."
"We're good together in some ways and terrible in others."
"Which ways terrible?"
"Talking." You said it without thinking. "Any time something actually matters we just — orbit around it. Every time I think we're finally going to get there, something happens and then we don't."
"And the good ways?"
You looked at her. She raised her eyebrows.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah."
"Okay but how good."
"Cat."
"I'm just asking for a sense of scale."
"Very," you said, and felt your face do something involuntary. "Which makes it worse, honestly, because I know what I'd be walking away from. But then the Chicago thing happens and I'm like — does he even think about me when I'm not there? Or am I just—" You stopped.
"Just what?"
"Convenient," you said. "I don't know. Easy."
Cat put her mug down. "Do you actually believe that?"
Honest answer: no. That was the part that kept tripping you up. When you were with Will, really with him, laughing at two in the morning, him looking at you like you were the only thing in the room, you felt like the opposite of an afterthought. He made you feel like the whole point. That was exactly the problem. If he were colder, easier to dismiss, you could walk away clean.
"I don't know," you said.
"You should figure it out," Cat said. "Before it stops being fun."
You stared into your coffee. You didn't say: it's still fun. that's kind of the whole problem. it's so fun I can barely think straight and then something like this happens and I don't know if fun is enough.
You didn't say any of that. You just said "yeah" and finished your coffee.
It was after a home game — bad loss, arena emptying fast, everyone's eyes on the floor — that you saw the other side of him.
You came down to meet him and waited outside the locker room longer than usual. He came out quiet, jacket half-zipped, and when he saw you he just stopped.
Something went through his face. Not relief exactly. More like: oh. you're here.
"Hey," you said.
"Hey."
You didn't ask about the game. You'd learned that early. You just said, "Walk for a bit?"
He nodded.
You went a few blocks through the cold, shoulders bumping, not really talking. Will who usually filled every silence, Will who always had something, he just walked. Quiet and close and present.
Around the third block he reached over and took your hand. He almost never did that outside. He held it like it was something he needed to hold.
You didn't say anything about it. You just let him.
Walking back twenty minutes later, his thumb moving over your knuckles, you thought: this is the part. Not the obvious part, though also the obvious part. But this, the way he reaches without thinking. The way he holds on.
You didn't know what to do with that. You held on back.
"I think we're bad for each other," you'd said in the orange-dark of his apartment because he always forgot to close the blinds before sunset.
"Where'd that come from?" he said.
"Nowhere. Everywhere. I've been thinking about it."
"And?"
"We drive each other crazy."
"Yeah," he said easily. "We do."
"That's not a good thing, Will."
"Isn't it a little bit of a good thing?"
You turned your head. He was looking at the ceiling, a faint smile at the corner of his mouth, and you wanted to be annoyed but the smile got you, it always got you. "I'm being serious."
"I know." He turned to look at you. The smile faded into something more honest. "I know we're bad at some stuff. I disappear on you. I know I do it. I just—" He paused. "Out there I don't know what I'm doing. In here I always know what I'm doing."
"That's very convenient for you."
"It's convenient for both of us," he said, and you laughed despite yourself, which annoyed you.
"That's not — I can't — you can't do that."
"Do what?"
"Make me laugh when I'm trying to be serious."
"Why not?"
"Because then I forget what I was saying."
"Maybe that's the point," he said, quieter. Not the deflection version. Something more honest than that. "Maybe I do it because it's the only way I know how to say don't go anywhere. Don't be done with this."
You looked at him.
"I know it's not a great strategy," he said.
"It's a terrible strategy."
"Yeah." He found your hand under the sheets. "Working on it."
You didn't figure it out that night. Or the next one.
You kept orbiting, close and then maddening and then close again, and the big conversations kept almost happening and then swerving. He was still late sometimes. He still went quiet in the ways that made you want to throw something.
But he started texting before games went to overtime. And he started saying we on purpose, looking at you right after like a question, and you'd nod, and something would settle in his face.
One afternoon in February, two hours before warmups, empty arena, terrible hot chocolate, his idea, he said out of nowhere:
"What would actually talking look like. If we did it."
"Probably uncomfortable," you said.
"Yeah. I can do uncomfortable."
"Big claim."
"I've taken a puck to the face."
"That's completely different."
"Is it though."
You looked at him — this person who was genuinely maddening, who made you feel like the only thing worth looking at, who still hadn't figured out how to just say it but was sitting in an empty arena at two in the afternoon asking if he could try.
"Yeah," you said. "I think we could try."
He looked back at the ice. The side of his mouth pulled up — not the grin, the real one.
"Okay," he said.
The Zamboni finished its loop. The ice sat there, clean and unmarked.
a/n: i was so excited about this i wrote it directly on to tumblr so excuse me if there's any mistakes lol
The thing about summer is that it makes you nostalgic for things you're still living inside of.
Fraser notices this on the first night everyone is back together, crammed onto the back porch, knees touching knees, voices getting louder in that specific way that only happens when you're all finally in the same place after months of being apart. Someone has a speaker going and the music is low enough that nobody's really listening to it, which means it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do. There's a fire going even though it's not quite cold enough for one, because it never actually has to be cold enough. It just has to be summer.
Fraser has a beer he's barely touching.
He's watching you from across the fire and telling himself he isn't.
You'd showed up late, which you always do, and when you pushed through the side gate everyone made that sound, not quite a cheer but more like a collective exhale. Like the table had been a little uneven all night and someone had finally wedged something under the leg.
Fraser had felt it too. That settling.
He'd watched you hug everyone in turn, watched you laugh at something Connor said before he's even finished saying it, watched you drop into the empty chair like you owned it, like you'd always owned it. And he'd thought, with a clarity that startled him:
there you are.
Not like he'd been looking for you.
More like he'd just realized he had been.
The thing Fraser can't explain, even to himself, is that it isn't new. That's the part that keeps him up. None of this is new. He's been watching you from across rooms his entire adult life, cataloging the small things, the particular way you hold your glass, the way you tuck one leg under yourself when you sit, the way you always respond to bad news with a kind of stillness before you say anything at all. He's been doing it for years. He's extremely practiced at it.
The difference is that this summer something had shifted in him. Like a thing that was always slightly out of alignment finally slipped into place and he can feel how wrong it was before.
He knows, now, what he was doing all along. He just doesn't know what to do with that.
The cottage is the kind of place that exists outside of normal time, and Fraser has always loved it for that reason without entirely understanding why until now.
Three days in July, all ten of them, sleeping bags on the floor and someone always in the kitchen at midnight making toast. The lake is cold even in the height of summer and the dock creaks in a way that everyone knows the specific rhythm of, the particular groan of the second plank from the end. There are board games with missing pieces. There is a hammock that can technically hold two people but only comfortably holds one. There is a tradition of watching the worst movie anyone can find on the third night and arguing about it until someone falls asleep mid-sentence.
Fraser has been coming here for six years.
This is the first year he has spent the whole time acutely, almost painfully aware of exactly where you are in every room.
It's not that he ever had no idea.
He knew. In the way you know things you haven't decided to do anything about yet. In the way you know a song is your favorite before you've said it out loud to anyone.
There was a year — he thinks it was the year after they all graduated, but the timing blurs — where the two of you talked on the phone almost every night. Not about anything important. About everything and nothing in the specific proportion that only happens with someone you're completely comfortable with. He'd lie in bed in the dark with the phone against his ear and listen to you move around your apartment while you talked, the sound of cupboards opening and closing, water running, the occasional clatter of something dropped and retrieved. He'd memorized the acoustic geography of a place he'd only been to twice.
He never thought about why that was.
Or maybe he thought about it too much and then put it very carefully somewhere he didn't have to look at it.
The night that lives in him most is not dramatic.
It was the kind of party that starts with a plan and ends with sleeping bags on every available surface. At some point it had thinned out, the ones who had places to be had gone, and the ones who didn't had gotten quieter, and somehow Fraser had ended up lying on his back on the floor of the spare room with you beside him, shoulders almost touching, both of you too tired to move and not quite tired enough to sleep.
He doesn't remember what you'd been talking about.
He remembers the specific quality of the quiet between topics. He remembers the ceiling had a water stain in the shape of something he couldn't identify. He remembers your voice being softer than usual, the way it gets when you're not performing for anyone.
He remembers you saying, into the dark:
"I think if we ever actually tried this we'd ruin it."
He'd laughed. Something tight and reflexive.
"Yeah, probably," he'd said, or something like that, some version of agreeing, and then neither of you had said anything for a while and then one of you had changed the subject and that had been it.
He's replayed that conversation approximately four hundred times since.
He still doesn't know what you meant.
He still doesn't know what he meant.
The worst part is that he'd thought, at the time, with that particular careless confidence of someone who believes there will always be another opportunity: we'll come back to this. We'll be braver when we're less tired, when we're less scared, when it feels more like the right moment and less like a leap into fog.
He'd waited for the right moment for so long that he'd simply not noticed it pass.
The line that breaks something in him comes on the third night of the cottage weekend, which is also movie night, which means everyone is crammed onto the various couches and floor cushions in the living room with the lights off and the movie already forgotten in favor of talking over it.
Fraser is on the far couch, you're cross-legged on a pile of pillows near the window, leaning back on your hands, and the light from the TV catches the side of your face and Fraser is not looking at you. He is extremely not looking at you.
He catches maybe thirty percent of the conversation.
Then Mack — and it's Mack, it's always Mack, the guy has the social awareness of a golden retriever and somehow gets away with it — Mack says, reaching for another chip, not even looking up:
"God, I totally forgot you two almost dated."
He says it the way you'd say I forgot we had that dinner or I forgot that movie existed. Breezy. A footnote.
A small ripple of laughter around the room.
Fraser hears his own laugh come out of him before he's decided to produce it. Muscle memory. Reflexive. Something his face does without asking him.
"That would've been so weird," someone says. Connor, maybe. He isn't tracking.
"Honestly, I can't even picture it now."
More laughter.
You're laughing too. He doesn't look at you. He is very deliberately not looking at you. He studies a point on the far wall with the concentration of someone diffusing a bomb.
The conversation moves on. Within thirty seconds someone is talking about the movie again, or about something else entirely, and the moment is completely, totally, thoroughly over.
Fraser sits very still with a beer getting warm in his hand and thinks:
no.
No, but it wasn't nothing.
Was it?
This is the part that makes him feel insane.
With a breakup, you have evidence. You have a beginning with a name, a middle with memories that belong specifically to the two of you, an end that might be terrible but at least confirms the whole thing happened. You have the ability to say: we were something. Past tense, real and solid. Something that existed.
He doesn't have that.
He has six years of almost. He has late-night phone calls and a conversation on a floor in the dark and a thousand small moments that felt like they meant something but were never named. He has a feeling — this deep, persistent, inconvenient feeling — but a feeling is not a fact, and he can't point at a feeling and say here, this, this is proof.
And the thing that Mack said — I totally forgot you two almost dated — Fraser keeps coming back to the word almost. Because almost implies the real thing was close. Almost implies that someone, at some point, was aware that there was something to almost. Almost means it wasn't invisible.
But then I can't even picture it now erases the whole thing.
Both of those sentences were said in the same ten seconds.
Which one is true?
He starts, without meaning to, collecting evidence.
It isn't a decision he makes. It just starts happening.
The day after the cottage, back in the city, a group of them meet for lunch at a place near the park. At some point you mention a restaurant on the east side, and you say that place we used to go to, you know the one, the one with the bad lighting but amazing pasta.
Fraser's stomach drops.
You remembered. You said we. You included him in the we.
Then the conversation moves on.
He thinks about it for the rest of the day.
A week later, road trip stories come up — this happens at every gathering, there's a legendary road trip from four summers ago that's been retold so many times it's achieved a kind of mythological status — and at the mention of it you immediately look at him. Just for a second. Quick and reflexive. Because of the inside joke, the specific thing that only he and you know about, the moment that happened that was only funny to the two of you.
He sees it. The look. The you'll know what I mean of it.
He feels relief flood through him so completely he goes slightly light-headed.
Then you don't say anything. The moment passes. The story continues without the inside joke being surfaced, and he doesn't surface it either, and afterward he isn't sure if the look counted as evidence or if he projected the whole thing.
He turns it over in his head for four days.
You show up to drinks that Friday in a navy hoodie that Fraser recognizes before he consciously processes why.
It takes him a full twenty minutes, sitting across from you in the bar, before it clicks.
That's his hoodie.
Not like, a hoodie like one he owns. That specific hoodie. He'd lost it years ago and assumed it was at Connor's or at his parents' or somewhere else entirely and had stopped thinking about it.
It's his hoodie.
You're wearing his hoodie.
The soft worn cuffs. The specific kind of fading at the collar. He would recognize it anywhere, which is an absurd thing to realize in the middle of a Wednesday evening but here he is, recognizing it.
He spends the next three days wondering if you know it's his.
He never asks.
He can't figure out how to ask without it sounding like what it actually is: do you know that I gave that to you once and do you still think about that and does it mean something that you kept it.
He can't ask that. So he just doesn't.
The problem, Fraser has started to understand, is not that he wants you back. You can't want something back that you never formally had.
The problem is more specific than that. More humiliating, in a way.
He wants proof that he didn't imagine it.
That's what this is. That's all of this. All the evidence-collecting, all the watching, all the replaying of the road trip glance and the we and the hoodie that might or might not be his — it's not about getting you. It's about needing to know that it was real. That whatever that was, the almost, the charged silences, the conversations that felt like they were about something underneath what they were actually about — he needs to know that it happened to you, too.
Because if it only happened to him, then he's been grieving something that never existed. And that's a specific kind of awful that he doesn't have words for yet.
But if it happened to both of you—
then it's real.
Even if it went nowhere. Even if it was just a thing that lived in the space between what they were and what they might have been. It was real.
He just needs one of those pieces to confirm it.
August arrives the way August always does, aggressive and golden, like it knows it's almost over.
There's a birthday party for someone Fraser went to school with, backyard, string lights, the whole thing. He almost doesn't go. He goes because you'll be there.
He's not proud of this.
You're in a green dress and you're laughing at something when he arrives, head tipped back, completely unguarded, and Fraser stands at the edge of the patio for a moment and thinks, with a kind of exhausted finality: this is what the rest of my life is going to feel like if I keep doing this.
He gets a drink. He finds the people he knows. He is, by all observable metrics, fine.
You find him later, when the party has gotten loud enough that the edges of it are quieter by contrast. You come and stand next to him near the back fence, where someone has left a candle burning, and for a minute you just stand there together watching the party like you're both viewing it from a slight remove.
"Hey," you say.
"Hey."
"You've been weirdly quiet tonight."
He looks at you. "Have I?"
"You went somewhere," you say. Not accusing. Just noticing. The way you just notice things he doesn't think he's broadcasting.
He's quiet for a moment.
"Just thinking," he says. Which is technically true.
You make a small sound, not quite agreement, and you're quiet too for a while, and Fraser is thinking about how you've always been able to do this — stand in silence with someone without trying to fill it, without making it weird, without making him feel like he has to perform being okay when he isn't. He has always found it extraordinarily comfortable and tonight it is also extraordinarily painful.
"Can I ask you something?" he hears himself say.
You look at him, patient. "Yeah."
He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He can't do it. He can't ask do you ever think about that night at Connor's place, the one years ago, when you said that thing in the dark because the question reveals everything and he has been so careful, so unbelievably careful, for so long.
"Never mind," he says. "Forget it."
You look at him for a moment longer than you need to.
"Okay," you say, and you don't push it, which is also something you've always done — known when to let something be. He's always loved that about you. He's currently finding it extremely inconvenient.
The last group hang before summer ends is another bonfire, back at Mack's, which is where they always start and end. It has the feeling of a season finale, the specific bittersweet quality of knowing everyone is about to scatter again and trying to wring one last good night out of the remaining time.
Fraser is better at pretending tonight. He's had practice.
At some point late in the evening the group thins out — couples heading home, people with early flights, the usual attrition — until it's just the four of them who are always the last four: him, you, Mack, and Connor. The fire has burned down to something smaller and redder. Nobody's refilled their drinks in a while. The conversation has gotten quieter, the particular quiet of people who don't have to perform for each other anymore.
Mack says something that makes Connor groan and stand up to prove him wrong about something inside, and then it's just Fraser and you on opposite sides of a dying fire and the night around you.
He's watching the coals.
He's not going to say anything.
He's decided not to say anything, which is, he recognizes, entirely consistent with a lifelong pattern of deciding not to say anything, and look where that's gotten him.
Then you say:
"I still think about that night sometimes."
Fraser goes very still.
He's not sure he heard you right. He keeps his eyes on the fire and does not let himself look at you too quickly, the way you'd move slowly around something you didn't want to startle.
"Which night," he says. Barely.
You're quiet for a second.
"Connor's party," you say. "The night everyone slept over and we talked until like four in the morning."
The specific contours of that night rearrange themselves in his chest.
"Yeah," he says. His voice comes out roughly. "Me too."
Another silence.
The fire shifts, a log settling into itself.
"I said something stupid," you say. Conversational, almost. Like you're discussing the weather. Like this isn't the thing he has been quietly coming apart over for the better part of three months.
"You didn't," he says.
"I did," you say. "I said we'd ruin it. Like it was already decided. Like I already knew."
Fraser is very carefully not breathing.
"Did you?" he asks. "Know?"
You're quiet for a long moment.
"I think I was scared," you say finally. "I think I said the ending out loud before it could happen to me."
He looks at you then. He can't help it.
You're looking at the fire too. Your face is lit redly by what's left of it, and you look — he doesn't have a word for it, exactly. Something open. Something old.
"I kept waiting for you to bring it up again," he says. He doesn't mean it to come out like a confession but it does.
"I kept waiting for you to bring it up first," you say.
He laughs. It comes out strange. Not quite a laugh.
"Of course you did," he says. "Of course that's what was happening."
You look at him then, finally, and the expression on your face does something complicated to his chest.
"I heard what Mack said," you tell him. "At the cottage."
"Yeah."
"I didn't laugh because it was nothing," you say. "I laughed because everyone was laughing and I didn't know how to be the person who didn't. Who sat there looking all—" you gesture vaguely at yourself, "—meaningful about it."
"So it was something," he says.
You look at him steadily. "Fraser."
"I just need to hear it," he says. "I know that sounds—I know. But I need to hear it said."
A beat.
"It was something," you say. "It was always something."
He breathes out.
He didn't know, until this moment, how much weight he has been carrying in his chest until he feels some part of it loosen. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But some.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you say.
The fire makes a small sound. Somewhere across the yard, Connor says something and Mack laughs, and the world continues in that easy way it does when it doesn't know that something irreversible is happening in a corner of a backyard.
Fraser looks at the coals.
He thinks about six years of almost. About a conversation in the dark and every moment after it that he didn't say anything. About a hoodie and a look and a restaurant and a thousand pieces of evidence he collected like a man building a case in a trial he never intended to bring.
He thinks: I could let it stay here. Resolved, in the way that unsaid things sometimes get resolved, quietly, without having to become anything. He has proof now. He has what he needed. He could file it somewhere real and leave it.
He thinks: but I have been letting things stay here for six years.
He looks at you.
You're already looking at him, and for a second the expression on your face is so familiar that it pulls at something under his sternum, something he has had no name for and has had no name for and is very tired of having no name for.
"What if we didn't wait anymore," he says.
Not a question, quite. Not a declaration. Something in between, the same ambiguous territory they have been living in forever, except this time he is choosing it deliberately. He is saying: here. This edge. Let's stand here together and name it.
You look at him for a long moment.
"Yeah," you say.
Simple as that.
"Yeah," you say, and something in his chest finally, after all of it, settles.
Outside, the summer does what summers do at their ends.
It becomes the thing you'll spend the rest of the year trying to remember clearly enough.
hi! would you ever consider doing a sequel or spin off to moss and metal? or maybe one shots from that universe?
i do not mean this in any way as pressure or anything like that, i’m just in love with that series lol. i love a “guy that’s grumpy to everyone but her” kind of moment
yes!! i actually had oneshots drafted about q**** and his brothers in that series before i went on a break but that obviously never got posted when i got back
i would love to write more for that universe especially if you folks have ideas for it
i also had oneshots drafted for in the same key but that series is unfortunately on the shelf for good
a/n: i lowkey feel like i've been writing in circles lately but here's something sort of kind of not good but not bad i think
The thing about loving someone who plays hockey is that the calendar becomes your enemy.
You learned this slowly, in pieces, each one small enough to ignore until you can't anymore. A missed birthday here. A FaceTime that cuts out at 11 PM because he has a 6 AM practice and you're three time zones away and neither of you want to be the one to say goodnight first. A weekend that was supposed to be yours, quietly swallowed by a road trip to Minnesota.
You never said it would be easy.
You just didn't think it would feel like this — like you were always reaching for each other across some invisible distance, your fingers almost touching, the gap never quite closing.
It started around February.
It started with you looking at your planner on a Sunday morning and realizing you couldn't remember the last time you'd had a full, uninterrupted day with Will.
Not a day where his phone buzzed every twenty minutes.
Not a day where you could feel him half-somewhere else even when he was right next to you.
Just — a day.
You tried to think back. Thanksgiving, maybe? But even then, his parents had been there, and there had been a game two days before that he was still quietly processing, and you'd spent most of the drive home talking about his linemates instead of anything real.
You put your planner down and sat with that for a while.
Then you picked up your phone to text him, and there was already a message waiting from him — just got out of film session, going straight to the gym, talk tonight? — and you looked at that question mark for a long time before you typed back of course. Because what else were you going to say? No, don't go to the gym. Stay on the phone with me and tell me what's going on in your head. You couldn't ask that. He had a job. You had a job. This was life, and life didn't pause because you were lonely.
Talk tonight became 11:30 PM. It became him sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, still in his suit, tie loosened, voice low so he didn't wake his roommate in the next bed. It became you curled on your couch with the lamp on, a cup of tea gone cold beside you, listening to him talk about the power play scheme they were running and whether his shot had felt off that game.
"It just didn't have the same pop," he said. "I don't know. I can't figure out what I'm doing differently."
"Maybe you're in your head about it."
"Maybe."
A pause. The kind that had been happening more often lately — not uncomfortable exactly, but full. Like there were things sitting in it that neither of you knew how to reach for.
"How was your day?" he asked.
And you opened your mouth to answer, and for a second, you thought about saying it. Thought about telling him that your day was fine but that you were tired in a way that sleep wasn't fixing, and that you'd looked at your planner this morning and realized you couldn't remember the last time you'd really had him, and that you were scared — not of losing him, but of this, of slowly losing the shape of each other in each other's lives.
Instead you said: "Long. But fine. Nothing interesting."
"Get some sleep," he said, gently. "You sound tired."
"Yeah. You too."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
You hung up and stared at the ceiling for a while.
The problem was that nothing was wrong.
That was the thing you kept circling back to, the thing that made it hard to name. He wasn't pulling away. He wasn't cold. He still texted you good morning most days, still sent you stupid videos he thought you'd like, still lit up when he talked about seeing you. When you were together, it was good — it was so good, easy and warm and everything that had made you fall for him in the first place.
But you were together so rarely now.
And in the spaces between, something had started to calcify. Some quiet distance. Not between your feelings — those were fine, those were solid — but between your days. Your lives. The ordinary texture of knowing someone.
You didn't know what he'd had for breakfast yesterday.
He didn't know that you'd been anxious all week about a project at work.
These seemed like small things. They were small things. But small things, accumulated, start to add up to something.
You were both so busy. Always chasing the next thing. He had games and practices and travel and film sessions and media obligations and the million invisible demands of being a professional athlete that people didn't see. You had your own full life — work and friends and the regular maintenance of being a person in the world. Neither of you had been reckless with this relationship. Neither of you had done anything wrong.
You just kept running out of time.
March came and went. Then most of April.
You saw him for four days over Easter when the schedule gave him a gap, and those four days were wonderful — you barely left his apartment, cooked together, watched three movies in a row on a rainy afternoon, slept in. You felt yourself exhale in a way you hadn't in months. You felt like you again, like you two again.
And then you drove to the airport and held on a little too long at the drop-off curb, and he pressed a kiss to your temple and said I'll call you tonight, and you watched his car pull away and felt the distance already beginning to rebuild itself around you like weather.
On the plane home, you wrote in your notes app, not really meaning to, just because you needed somewhere to put it:
I'm not sure we know how to be together when we're not together anymore. I'm not sure we're talking about the right things. I think something is slipping and I don't know how to say it out loud without making it into a bigger thing than it is. I don't want to make it a bigger thing. I just want more time. I want time to just be stupid and boring and normal with him. Is that too much to ask for.
You deleted it before you landed.
The call happened on a Thursday in late April, somewhere around midnight.
He called instead of texting, which meant something was either wrong or he just needed to hear your voice, and you were in bed half-asleep when your phone lit up. You answered on the second ring.
"Hey." His voice was different. Quieter. A little rough at the edges.
"Hey." You sat up, the lamp still off, darkness around you. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." A pause. "I don't know. I just — I needed to call you."
You waited.
"We lost tonight," he said. "Which I know. I know it happens. But it was one of those games where I just felt like I couldn't do anything right, and we got back to the hotel and everyone went their separate ways and I was just sitting there and I—" He stopped. "I just really needed to hear your voice."
Your chest went soft. "I'm here."
"I know." He exhaled slowly. "Are you okay? I feel like I haven't actually asked you that in a while. Like actually asked."
The question landed somewhere tender.
"I'm fine," you started automatically, and then stopped, because he'd called you at midnight to actually ask, and you owed him an actual answer.
"I'm a little…" You searched for the word. "I'm a little tired. Not physically. Just — I feel like we're both always running, you know? And I'm always trying to keep up with your schedule and you're always trying to keep up with whatever's happening with you, and somewhere in the middle of all that we keep almost getting to each other but not quite."
Silence.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Yeah, I know."
"I'm not upset," you added quickly. "I'm not — this isn't an accusation or anything. I just miss you. I miss you when we're apart and sometimes, honestly, I even miss you a little when we're together, because we're always so tired or distracted or—"
"Hey." His voice was low, careful. "Don't do that. Don't make it smaller than it is because you don't want to make me feel bad."
You closed your eyes.
"Okay," you said. "Okay. I'm scared that we're both so busy that we're forgetting how to just — be. Together. Without an agenda. I feel like every conversation we have is about logistics or your games or my work and I can't remember the last time we just talked about nothing. I miss talking to you about nothing."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I miss that too." His voice had dropped even lower. "I think I've been — I think I've been waiting for things to slow down. Like some part of me keeps thinking okay, after this road trip, after this stretch, after the season ends — and then it doesn't slow down. It never slows down."
"I know."
"And I think maybe I've been using that as an excuse. Like if I just keep going, keep my head down, keep working — I don't have to deal with the fact that things feel a little—" He paused. "Off. Between us."
The word hung in the air.
"Not in a bad way," he said quickly. "Not in a — I love you, I want to be with you, I haven't changed, none of that. Just. Off. Like we're slightly out of sync. Like we've been out of sync for a while and neither of us wanted to say it."
"Yeah," you admitted. "Yeah."
Another silence. This one different — softer, somehow. More like breathing space than distance.
"I don't want to wait for things to slow down," he said. "Because I think I've figured out that they probably won't. Not on their own. I think if we wait for it, we'll be waiting forever."
"So what do we do?"
You heard him shift, the rustle of sheets. You pictured him in some hotel room — Calgary, maybe, or Vancouver, you'd lost track — lying on top of the covers still in his suit.
"I don't know exactly," he said. "But I think — I think I need to stop letting the schedule be the thing that decides when I'm present. Because I can be here and still be present with you. If I'm trying hard enough."
"And I can stop pretending I'm fine when I'm not," you said. "Because that doesn't help either of us."
"No," he agreed softly. "It doesn't."
"Will."
"Yeah."
"I'm really glad you called."
You could hear the exhale of something releasing in him. "I was scared you'd be asleep."
"I almost was."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." You pulled your knees up to your chest in the dark. "I'm always going to pick up. You know that."
"I know." A pause. "I just — I didn't want to be another thing you had to deal with at midnight."
"You're not a thing I have to deal with. You're the person I love." You said it plainly, without fanfare, the way you'd say something you knew to be true. "There's a difference."
He was quiet for a beat.
"I don't deserve you," he said, and he meant it as a small thing, an offhand warmth, but something in his voice made it land a little heavier.
"Stop," you said. "Please just — stop thinking that way. You're not lucky to have me in some way that implies you're getting away with something. We chose each other. That's what this is. We keep choosing each other."
"Even when we're bad at it?"
"Especially then." You paused. "I'm going to keep choosing you, Will. I just — I need you to actually show up. Not just be present in theory. Actually show up."
"I know." And then, quieter: "I will. I promise."
You believed him.
Not blindly — you'd been together long enough to know promises were easier to make at midnight than they were to keep in the grinding ordinary of February and March and April. But you believed the intent behind it. You believed he meant it right now, and that was somewhere to start from.
"Okay," you said softly.
"Okay," he echoed.
Outside your window, the street was quiet. You lay back against your pillow, phone still pressed to your ear, and just breathed for a second.
"Tell me something," you said. "Something that has nothing to do with hockey."
A small surprised sound from him. And then, after a moment: "My mom called me last week and spent twenty minutes telling me about a documentary she watched about competitive dog grooming. I don't even think she has a dog. I think she just wanted to talk about it."
You laughed — a real one, sudden and warm.
"That's amazing."
"She sent me follow-up texts. With photos. I don't know where she got the photos."
"I love your mom."
"She loves you too. She asked about you, actually. She wants to know when you're coming to visit."
"I want to come visit."
"Yeah?" There was a smile in his voice now, tentative and warm. "I'll talk to her. We'll figure something out. Something real on the calendar, not just — when things slow down. Actually on the calendar."
"I'd like that."
"Me too." He paused. "I'm really—" He stopped. Started again. "I don't say it enough. I know I don't. But I'm really glad you're mine. Like genuinely. You don't have to — you put up with a lot of this, and I know it's hard, and you never make me feel bad about it even when you probably should, and I just — I love you. A lot. I love you a lot."
Your eyes stung, a little, unexpectedly.
"I love you too," you said. "So much."
"I'm going to be better."
"I know." You smiled at the ceiling. "And I'm going to actually tell you when something's wrong instead of saying I'm fine when I'm not."
"Good. I need that. I need you to tell me things."
"Okay."
"Okay."
You stayed on the phone after that — not talking about anything important, just drifting in and out of easy conversation, the way you used to. He told you about a terrible restaurant his teammates had picked in Columbus. You told him about a coworker who had been microwave-heating fish for three days in a row and the minor office crisis it had created. He laughed, low and warm. You told him about the book you were reading. He told you he'd been trying to finish the same three chapters of his book for two weeks and couldn't seem to make progress.
Small things.
Normal things.
But they felt, that night, like the most important things in the world.
At some point, his voice got slower and you could tell he was falling asleep, and you didn't say anything, just listened to his breathing even out, and when he finally murmured a half-asleep goodnight, I love you, you said it back quietly, and stayed on the line just a little longer.
Then you hung up, and set your phone on the nightstand, and lay in the dark with something settled in your chest that hadn't been settled in a while.
He called at midnight because he needed you.
You told the truth because he asked.
That was it, maybe. That was what it actually took. Not a grand gesture. Not a perfect stretch of open calendar. Just — the choice, over and over, to keep reaching. To not let the distance become a habit.
Wherever you like, you thought. I'll go. I'm not leaving you alone in this.
You fell asleep with the lamp still off and the room quiet around you, and for the first time in months, you didn't feel like something was slipping.
You felt, instead, like something had been caught.
He flew in six days later.
It was only two nights — a gap between an away game and the next home stretch, twenty miles of driving through airport traffic, a Tuesday that didn't mean anything.
He brought groceries and made you dinner in your kitchen, and you sat on the counter while he cooked and talked about nothing: the documentary his mom had recommended, the book neither of you were finishing, what you wanted to do over the summer if the schedule cooperated. At some point you ended up with his hoodie on over your pajamas and he kept reaching over to tuck a piece of your hair behind your ear while he was in the middle of sentences, just because he could, just because you were there.
After dinner you fell asleep on the couch together watching something you'd both seen before, and when you woke up it was past midnight and the TV was still on and he was warm and solid beside you.
You looked at him for a moment.
He had a practice in nine hours. You had a meeting at eight. You were both going to be exhausted.
You didn't care.
You reached up and turned off the lamp.
Outside, the city hummed. The calendar was already filling up again — it always was, it always would be. March would come back around eventually. Another long road trip. Another Thursday at midnight with one of you in a hotel room somewhere.
But you'd figured something out on that phone call that you were going to hold onto: the answer wasn't the open calendar. The answer was the reaching. The choosing. The midnight calls and the honesty and the stupid grocery store dinners in the middle of a Tuesday.
Can you write mat barzal fluff? Maybe him meeting a girl at a karaoke bar or something fun?? I’ve had Man I Need by Olivia Dean stuck in my head all day and it makes me think of him
setting the tone | mb13
requests are open | navigation
a/n: is now a good time to mention that i genuinely don't know anyone on the islanders lol. also realizing now that i didn't read this req properly i'm so sorry lol i hope you still enjoy this
The thing about Mat is that he's good at a genuinely alarming number of things.
He's good at hockey, obviously, which isn't a small thing to be good at. He's good at reading a room. He's good at making people feel like the most interesting person in the conversation without appearing to try. He's good at parallel parking, which you've told him is not a flex and he has told you is absolutely a flex and you've agreed to disagree. He remembers the names of everyone he's ever been introduced to. He tips well. He knows how to pick a restaurant without spending forty-five minutes on Yelp.
These are facts. You've lived with them long enough to accept them as the furniture of your relationship, present and unremarkable, just the conditions of loving someone who happens to be good at things.
What Mat is not good at is singing.
This would be a small and easily managed fact about a person if Mat knew it. If Mat had received the information at some point in his life that his voice, while pleasant in conversation, in laughter, in the low register he uses when he's half-asleep and saying something only technically coherent — that voice does not translate to music. If someone had told him at any point in the past that when he sings, the note he aims for and the note he hits are rarely in the same zip code. If any person who loved him had sat him down and said: Mat. Buddy. No.
No one had. And so here you are.
"I'm not doing karaoke," you say, from the backseat of the cab.
"You literally already agreed," Mat says. He is looking out the window with the satisfied expression of someone who has won something.
"I agreed to come to karaoke. I didn't agree to do karaoke."
"Those are the same thing."
"They are genuinely not."
He turns from the window and looks at you with the specific expression he reserves for moments when he finds you unreasonable, which is an expression you find unreasonable. "Who goes to karaoke and doesn't do karaoke?"
"People who like their dignity."
"You have so much dignity. You can afford to spend some."
The cab stops. He's already out of the door, holding it open for you with entirely too much cheerfulness for eleven o'clock on a Thursday.
The bar is the good kind of karaoke bar, which means it has private rooms rather than a stage. You've been to the stage kind once and the memory still finds you at inconvenient moments. The private room kind is survivable. There's a couch, a coffee table with a laminated song binder that is somehow both enormous and sticky, two microphones, a screen, and a monitor that will show you the lyrics in a font that suggests the nineties never really ended.
Bo and his wife are already there, settled into the couch like they've been there long enough to get comfortable, which knowing Bo probably means they arrived fifteen minutes early. Anders is beside them with his arm stretched along the back of the couch, talking to Schaefer, who at twenty years old has the specific energy of someone who showed up ready to take karaoke more seriously than anyone else in the room and is trying not to let it show.
Mat drops into the space beside you with his arm immediately behind your shoulders, the motion so automatic it probably doesn't register to him as a decision. He reaches across you for the song binder before you've even fully sat down.
"I'm going first," he announces.
"You don't have to do that," Bo says, which is a kind thing to say and also technically a warning.
"I want to set the tone," Mat says, already flipping pages with the focused energy of a man who has a vision.
Bo's wife looks at you. You give her a small, helpless shrug. You have been in this relationship long enough to know that there is no intervention available at this stage. Mat has the binder. The tone is going to be set.
He picks a Celine Dion song.
You know the moment you see it on the screen, the specific tightening in your chest that is half-affection and half the anticipatory secondhand embarrassment of someone who loves a person very much and is about to watch them do something irreversible.
"Mat," you say.
"I've got this," he says. He says it the way he says everything — with total, unearned, completely sincere conviction.
"That's a big song."
"Big songs are better," he says. He adjusts the microphone.
Schaefer leans over to you. "Has he done this before?"
"God, no," you say.
Mat does not have it.
What he has instead is something that exists in confident parallel to the song — a version of it that lives entirely in his own head, melodically independent from the recording, delivered with the full physical commitment of someone who has never once doubted themselves in this or any other arena. He holds the microphone with both hands. He closes his eyes on the big moments. He points at you during the chorus with an expression of pure, earnest sincerity.
Bo's face is a controlled catastrophe.
Anders has turned to look at the wall, which you initially think is polite and then you realize his shoulders are shaking.
Schaef is completely still in the way of someone who has decided that stillness is the only safe option.
Mat finishes. He drops the microphone to his side. He looks around the room with the expression of a man waiting to receive what is rightfully his.
The room gives him what the room has, which is a complicated mixture of genuine warmth and barely-contained structural collapse.
"That's what I'm talking about," Mat says, satisfied. He sits back down beside you and puts his hand on your knee. "Your turn."
"Hard pass."
"You said maybe in the cab."
"I have reconsidered."
"Come on," he says. He nudges you with his shoulder, easy and familiar. "One song. Just one."
The thing is, you can sing.
This isn't something you lead with. It's not something you perform or announce. You grew up doing it, choir and then lessons and then just the accumulated years of loving music in a private, unhurried way, and it lives in you the way things do when you've had them long enough that they stop feeling like skills and start feeling like just part of how you're built.
Mat knows you can hold a tune. He's heard you humming in the kitchen, singing along low and absentminded to things playing in the car. He has never heard you actually sing, really sing, with intention and volume and the full weight of a song behind you.
You pick something you know completely. Something that fits your voice the way good shoes fit — without effort, without thinking about it. You put the number in and pick up the microphone and don't look at anyone while the intro plays.
When you start, you feel the room change before you see it.
It's subtle at first. The specific quality of silence that means people have stopped their side conversations. Then you hear it — the absence of everything else. No rustling, no ice clinking in glasses, no Schaefer scrolling through his phone. Just the song and your voice and the room holding very still around it.
You don't look at Mat until the second verse.
His face stops you for just a second, almost imperceptibly, before you find your place in the lyric again. Because Mat, who has never in your memory looked genuinely speechless, looks genuinely speechless. He's leaning forward slightly, elbows on his knees, and he's watching you with an expression you don't have a clean word for. Something between stunned and undone. Something that has nowhere else to be.
You finish the song.
Bo says something loud and appreciative. Anders whistles. Schaefer starts clapping with an enthusiasm that confirms he had been taking this very seriously all along and simply waiting for an appropriate outlet.
Mat doesn't say anything immediately.
You set the microphone down and look at him. "Okay?"
"You—" He stops.
"Mat."
"You can sing," he says. Like this is new information that requires complete reprocessing. Like you have handed him a document that changes the meaning of several prior documents.
"I told you I could."
"You said you could hold a tune," he says. "That is not holding a tune. That is—" He gestures at the space where you were just standing, apparently at a loss for what it is.
"It was one song."
"Do another one," he says immediately.
"No."
"Please."
"Mat—"
"That was genuinely—" He shakes his head. He looks at Bo. "Did you know she could do that?"
"I had an idea," Bo says diplomatically, with the expression of a man who has learned to be careful around Mat's enthusiasm.
"How did I not know she could do that," Mat says, to no one in particular, which is a question with a clear answer — that you have been the quiet keeper of this specific thing for the entire length of your relationship — but he seems to be asking it of the universe rather than of you.
You sit back down beside him. He looks at you like you have done something remarkable, which is a look that would be easier to receive if it didn't make your chest do what it's currently doing.
"Sing another one," he says, softer this time, less demand and more genuine wanting.
"Later," you say.
He accepts this in the way he accepts most of your terms, which is to say immediately and without negotiation, and puts his arm back around your shoulders, and you feel him watching you slightly differently for the rest of the night, like something has been rearranged in his understanding of you and he's quietly delighted by the rearrangement.
At some point around the third round of drinks, Mat's relationship with the music binder becomes less strategic and more impressionistic.
He does a Bon Jovi song that is genuinely no better than the Celine and approximately three times as committed, complete with a moment where he turns his back to the room and then spins around on the final chorus with an expression that can only be described as dramatic. Anders, who has been steadily undermining his own composure all evening, fully loses it. Matthew buries his face in his hands with the exhausted fondness of someone much older than twenty.
Between songs, Mat is loose and warm beside you, his weight comfortable against your side, laughing easily at things, telling a story about practice that is probably funnier to him than it actually is but becomes funnier because of how funny he finds it. He's had enough that the careful architecture of public-Mat has gone soft at the edges. The version of him that is unguarded, unpolished, operating entirely on genuine feeling.
You've always preferred this version. It is your favorite thing that most people don't get to see.
You sing one more song, late in the evening, partly because Mat has been asking with the patient persistence of someone who is drunk enough to have lost track of how many times he's asked. You pick something slower this time, and the room does the same thing it did before — settles, attends, holds still.
This time you watch Mat the whole way through.
He has both hands around his glass. He's watching you with an expression that is open in a way that would probably embarrass him tomorrow, undefended and completely concentrated, like there is nothing else in the room worth looking at. Like he is doing the specific math of loving someone and repeatedly arriving at the same answer.
When you finish, he says nothing for a moment.
Then, simply: "God, I love you."
"You're drunk," you say.
"Both things are true," he says.
By midnight, Mat is adorably, comprehensively useless.
Not sloppy — he's not that kind of drunk, never has been. He's the other kind. The warm, slow, sincere kind where everything is a little funnier than it is and the world is a soft and wonderful place and he wants to tell you about it at length. He's steady on his feet, mostly. He just requires slight steering.
You say goodnight to Bo and his wife, to Anders, to Schaefer, who shakes your hand with great seriousness and tells you that your voice was genuinely exceptional, which makes you like him a lot. Mat attempts to have an extended goodbye conversation with everyone individually and you gently navigate him toward the door across two or three minutes.
Outside, the air is cold and clear, the city doing its nighttime thing around you, and Mat puts his arm around your shoulders and tips his face up toward the sky for a moment like he's checking on it.
"Good night," he says, approvingly, to the sky.
"Great night," you agree. You steer him toward the curb and pull out your phone for a cab.
"You were so good," he says. He says it the way he's said it three times since you finished your second song. Each time with the same fresh sincerity, like it hasn't occurred to him that he's said it before.
"You were very committed," you offer.
"I was," he agrees, without irony. "I fully committed." He considers this. "You were better though."
"High bar you set."
"Very high," he says seriously. "You cleared it."
The cab arrives. You get him in with minimal incident.
In the cab he holds your hand with both of his and looks at your profile while you watch the city go by, and you can feel it without looking — the particular quality of his attention, the way he's watching you right now versus the way he watches you ordinarily.
"I didn't know that about you," he says.
"You knew I could sing."
"Not like that." His thumb moves across your knuckles. "Not like it was just — part of you. Like you weren't thinking about it." He pauses, searching for the sentence. "Like it was just how you talk."
You turn to look at him. His face in the moving light from the windows is open and honest and slightly glassy in the specific way of someone who means every word they're saying and is additionally too far gone to consider not saying it.
"You're full of things like that," he says. "Things I find out and they just — fit. Like I should've known and somehow it still surprises me."
"What kinds of things," you say, because you want to hear him say it, because he doesn't often talk like this and when he does you want to keep it.
"The way you read the end of books first," he says immediately, like the list has been queued. "The way you know the names of all the plants but pretend you don't care about them. The way you laugh at things before they're funny because you see where they're going." He thinks. "The way you sang tonight like no one was watching even though everyone was watching."
"You were watching," you say.
"I'm always watching," he says simply. "That's not new information."
The cab stops. You pay, because Mat is currently operating below the threshold required for financial transactions. You get him out of the cab with his arm slung across your shoulders and walk him into the building, into the elevator, down the hall, him cooperative and warm and occasionally commentating on things.
"Cold floor," he observes, shoes off in the doorway.
"Come on," you say.
"Our apartment smells nice."
"Mat."
"It always smells nice. I don't know why I don't say that more." He looks around the hallway with the appreciative expression of someone encountering it for the first time. "We should talk about that."
"Tomorrow," you say. "Come on."
You get him to the bedroom. You get him to sit on the edge of the bed. You pull off his jacket while he watches you do it with the expression he's been wearing since the karaoke bar, attentive and unhurried and soft around the edges.
"You didn't want to go tonight," he says.
"I went."
"You always go," he says. "Even when you don't want to." He says it without accusation, just as an observation, something he's noticed and is only now saying out loud. "I like that about you. That you go anyway."
"I like going," you say. "I just like complaining about it first."
He smiles, slow and warm. "I know," he says. "I know that."
You go to get water from the kitchen and when you come back he's lying down, shoes off, shirt gone, staring at the ceiling with the peaceful expression of a man whose thoughts have slowed to a very manageable pace.
He takes the water and drinks most of it and sets it on the nightstand with the careful precision of someone who knows they need to be precise right now. You change and climb in beside him. He rolls toward you immediately, arm coming around you, forehead dropping to your hair.
"Schaefs said you were exceptional," he says, into the top of your head.
"Matthew was very serious about the whole thing."
"He's right though." His arm tightens slightly. "You were exceptional." A pause. "You're exceptional at a lot of things."
"Go to sleep, Mat."
"I'm just saying."
"I know you are."
"I think about it sometimes," he says, quieter now, voice going slow at the edges the way it does when he's almost there. "How you just — have all these things in you. And I get to know about them."
You close your eyes.
"Like the singing," he continues, mostly to himself now. "Like tonight I found out my girlfriend sings like—" He stops, searching. "Like something. I don't have the word."
"You don't need the word."
"I'll find it tomorrow," he says agreeably. "I'll tell you tomorrow."
The apartment settles around you. Outside, the city does its quiet late-night version of itself, smaller and further away than it was an hour ago.
"Marry me someday," he murmurs. Not a question exactly. More like a thought he forgot to keep inside, something that has been sitting in him long enough that in this state it simply surfaces, easy and inevitable as anything.
You open your eyes in the dark.
"Ask me when you're sober," you say.
"I'll ask you every day until you say yes," he says. He says it with his eyes already closed, voice soft and trailing toward sleep, like it is the most reasonable plan he's ever made, like there is no version of the future he's considered where this isn't exactly what happens. "Don't think that's not the plan."
You lie there and listen to his breathing slow into something even and deep, his arm heavy and warm across you, the space between you shaped like both of you and no one else.
The hotel room is the same as the last hotel room.
That isn't a complaint. Connor stopped having opinions about hotel rooms somewhere around the third month of his first full NHL season, when the sameness of them became something to lean on rather than resist. Same white ceiling, same blackout curtains, same hum of the climate control set too high by whoever had the room before him. Same narrow strip of city light bleeding through the gap in the shades because he never pulls them all the way shut. He doesn't know why. Some instinct toward the outside, toward proof that the city exists and he's in it.
He knows he's in New York because of the sound of it. Not the traffic, though there is that. It's something else, a specific kind of pressure the city exerts through the glass. An insistence. New York doesn't let you forget where you are.
He lies on top of the covers, still dressed, shoes off but everything else on, the way he does on road trips when he's tired but not ready to commit to sleep. His phone is on his chest. He's not looking at it. He's looking at the ceiling and thinking about you.
Which isn't unusual. He thinks about you often enough now that it's stopped feeling like a choice. You've become a frequency his mind drifts toward without asking permission, in the quiet after a game, in the cab between the rink and the hotel, in exactly this kind of room at exactly this kind of hour.
Tonight it's worse than usual, which he's been trying to identify a reason for and failing. The game was fine. Dinner was fine. The guys were loud in the restaurant and he'd been present for it, laughing when he was supposed to, talking when it was his turn, and then the cab back and the elevator and the room and the door closing behind him, and then this. This specific quality of alone that he doesn't get at home.
The bed is enormous, white and untouched and too much space for one person. He's aware of it the way he's aware of the city outside — as a fact that keeps asserting itself. He keeps thinking about what it would be like if you were here. Not in an abstract way. In an involuntary, specific way that he can't switch off, the pull of it low and insistent in his chest. You in this room, in this dark. The idea of it quiet enough, small enough, contained. Just the two of you and the strip of light from the curtains and no noise that either of you didn't bring in with you.
He knows you wouldn't be here. He knows why. He's been over that particular geography enough times to do it with his eyes shut. But his body hasn't gotten the message, or doesn't care about the message, because it aches anyway — wanting the weight of you next to him, wanting your voice in the room instead of just in his memory, wanting to feel his pulse slow the way it only seems to when you're close enough that he can reach for you without thinking about it first.
That's the thing he keeps not saying out loud to anyone. Not the longing in the abstract. The specific, physical reality of how much easier it is to be in his own skin when you're nearby. How the noise of everything — the season, the road, the relentless public-ness of his life — quiets in a way that has nothing to do with effort when you're there. He can breathe slower. He can stop performing enough to actually rest.
Here, he can't rest.
He thinks about what you said once, offhand, in the way you said a lot of the truest things — like you were just talking, like the weight of it wasn't intentional. I don't do well in crowds. Too much input. I need things to slow down eventually.
New York does not slow down. New York is the opposite of slowing down. He pictures you here, at this hour, with the city pressing against the glass like something that wants inside, and he can feel it in his chest — how wrong it would be. How quickly you would want out. The image collapses before it can fully form. You and this city are incompatible in ways that are no one's fault and require no villain.
This is the thing he keeps arriving at, the edge of the same thought he's walked to a hundred times without going over.
He could want you here and it wouldn't make you fit here. He knows that.
He picks up his phone. He puts it down. He picks it up again and opens your name in his contacts and stares at it for so long the screen dims and locks itself in his hand.
He doesn't call.
He lies in the dark and listens to the city and thinks about your face. About the way your shoulders drop when you finally feel safe somewhere. About the sounds a room makes when you're in it. About the fact that every bed on this road trip has felt like a problem to solve instead of somewhere to actually sleep, and he hadn't admitted to himself until just now that you are the variable that changed.
You don't know he's in New York until you see it.
That's the problem with following someone's team on the schedule app you downloaded in October when you told yourself it wasn't about him. The information just arrives without warning or buffer. Chicago Blackhawks at New York Rangers, 7 PM. And then there it is in your chest, the specific ache of knowing exactly where he is and exactly what that city does to you and understanding, clearly, unsentimentally, why you are here and he is there.
You'd been to New York once. A work thing, two years ago. You'd lasted four days before the noise of it had worn you so thin you'd cried in your hotel bathroom for twenty minutes over nothing specific, which meant it was about everything in general. Too many people in too small a space making too much sound with too much urgency and nowhere, nowhere to put your eyes that wasn't also demanding something from you.
You hadn't told anyone about the bathroom. You'd finished the trip and come home and sat in your apartment in the quiet for an entire evening without turning on a single light.
That was before Connor. That was before you'd started understanding that some things about yourself were fixed facts and not flaws to be corrected.
You open the schedule app and look at the game time and then close it and set your phone face-down on the table.
The problem — you've been over this, alone, in the privacy of your own head where the conversation can be as honest as it needs to be — was never the feeling. The feeling was never the problem. You'd known what was happening between you as clearly as you'd ever known anything, the slow pull of it, the way his attention felt different from other people's attention, the way he made rooms quieter without trying to. You'd known, and he'd known, and there had been a period of three or four months where the knowing hung between you and neither of you named it because naming it would mean deciding something.
The deciding was the problem.
His life is motion. Not metaphorically. Literally. He lives in airports and in cities that aren't his city and on buses between arenas and in hotel rooms that belong to no one. He is twenty years old and the world he inhabits is loud and public and constantly moving, and you are someone who needs things to eventually be still.
You'd understood this. You'd sat with it and turned it over and understood it, and you'd let the almost-thing between you remain an almost-thing because the alternative required one of you to ask the other to become something they weren't.
You were not going to ask him to stop moving. That would be asking him to stop being Connor.
He had not asked you to start moving.
And so.
You sit in your apartment in the quiet you need and think about him in New York, in whatever hotel room, in whatever city-lit dark, and the ache of it is clean and familiar by now, like a bruise you've stopped being surprised to find.
He plays well, which is the cruelest joke the universe has available tonight.
He is good at compartmentalizing during games. He has always been good at this. The ability to reduce his world to the size of the ice, to what's immediate, what's relevant, who's where and where the puck is going and what the play needs from him right now. It is one of the things that makes him the player he is. He steps into that space and the rest of himself waits outside for him.
Tonight it works perfectly. He is present, quick, decisive. He scores in the second period on a read nobody else in the building makes at the same speed. The sound of the goal horn bounces off the glass, off the ceiling, off the crowd that is not his crowd but makes noise the same way every other crowd does. He raises his stick. He is fine.
After, in the locker room, his teammate beside him is talking about going out. A couple of the guys. Just drinks. The city's right there, might as well.
Connor nods along. "Maybe," he says.
He doesn't go.
He goes back to the hotel and back to the room and lies on top of the covers again, and the city does the same thing it did last night, pressing its noise through the glass. He thinks about calling you. He thinks about it with more seriousness than he's allowed himself in a while, turning over what he would say and how he would say it and what he's actually asking for if he dials.
The last real conversation you'd had — not the texts, not the brief calls that stayed safely on the surface — was the one where you'd both stopped pretending the thing between you was nothing and also stopped pretending it was simple. He remembers where he'd been. Hotel room. Not this one, different city, same white ceiling. You'd been at home. He could tell from the quality of the silence on your end, the way you had more room to breathe into the phone.
I don't think I fit your life, you'd said. Not as an accusation. As a fact you'd arrived at carefully.
He hadn't argued with it. That was the part he kept coming back to. He hadn't argued because he didn't have a counter-argument that held. He'd wanted to say try, but try what? Try being someone who isn't undone by the noise and the motion and the relentlessness of it? You can't try your way out of being a person. You'd both known that.
It's not you, you'd said, and he'd almost laughed, not at you, at the situation, because of all the things to be true it turned out that one was.
He stares at the ceiling and thinks about your face — specifically the face you made when you were thinking through something honestly, head tilted slightly, eyes somewhere in the middle distance. He'd catalogued it without meaning to, back when he still had access to it regularly. He wonders if you'd make that face about him. He suspects you do.
He wonders if that means anything. He suspects it does.
He picks up his phone.
He calls.
You're almost asleep when it buzzes.
The specific way your body reacts to his name on the screen is something you haven't managed to train out of yourself, a small seizing in the chest, an immediate alertness. You stare at it for two rings. Three. The choice is available to you. Let it go to voicemail. Revisit it in the morning when you're more defended.
You answer.
"Hi," you say. Your voice is already softer than you mean it to be.
"Hi." He sounds like he's been awake for a while. There's something slightly worn in it. "Sorry. Is it too late?"
"I was almost asleep."
"I can—"
"Connor." You shift against your pillow. "What's wrong?"
A pause. The long kind, the kind he uses when he's being careful. You'd learned his silences early. They were different from other people's silences. His were deliberate. He thought before he spoke more than people assumed, given how young he was, given everything.
"Nothing's wrong," he says. "I just— wanted to hear your voice. I know that's—" He stops. Starts again. "I know."
You don't say anything. You let it be what it is.
"I'm in New York," he says.
"I know," you say. "I saw the schedule."
Another pause, and this one has a different texture, warmer somehow, or maybe you're imagining it.
"You looked at the schedule," he says.
You don't dignify that with more than a quiet exhale.
"How's the city?" you ask.
"Loud," he says. "Too many people in—" He catches himself.
"You can say it."
"Too many people," he finishes, softer.
You close your eyes. Outside your window it's quiet, the specific quiet of a city block at midnight where nothing is demanding anything of you. You've got the window cracked because you sleep better with outside air, and the sound that comes through it is not New York. It's something much smaller and much more manageable and specifically yours.
You think about him in a hotel room with the city pressing through the curtains. You think about how wrong that city would feel against your skin. You think about how he knows that.
"I scored tonight," he says, which is not what he called to tell you.
"I know," you say. "Saw that too."
You hear him almost smile, the specific sound of it.
"Good read," you add, because you did watch the clip, because you always do, because that particular self-deception stopped being one a long time ago.
"It was there," he says, the way he always deflects praise, the way that's never convincing because you can hear the quiet satisfaction underneath it.
Silence again. This one is comfortable in a way that aches.
"I miss you," he says. Quietly. Like it costs something.
You exhale. Your chest does the seizing thing again, slow this time, thorough.
"I know," you say. Because you can't say it back yet. Because saying it back opens something, and you're not sure what comes after the opening, and you're lying in your quiet apartment at midnight and he's in New York and you're still, fundamentally, the same people with the same shapes and the same problem.
But you don't hang up.
You lie there with your phone against your ear and listen to him breathe in a city that would eat you alive and feel the strange, exhausting intimacy of it — how much it's possible to be with someone across that kind of distance, if both of you are choosing it, if both of you are staying on the line.
"Tell me something," he says, eventually.
"About what?"
"Anything. What your apartment sounds like right now."
So you do. You describe it without performing it. The open window, the sound of a car passing slow, the radiator that makes a sound like an argument two floors down. Your voice goes quiet and even in the way it does when you're close to sleep and not defending anything. He listens without interrupting.
When you stop talking, he says, "That sounds like you."
You don't know exactly what he means and you understand it completely.
He flies home the next morning feeling like someone has wrung him out and hung him up to dry, which is not a hockey thing. He's fine, physically. He ate, slept adequately, his body is doing what it's supposed to do.
It's something else that's rung out.
He thinks about the call on the plane. Thinks about your voice in the dark, unhurried, describing the small and specific sounds of a life that is entirely yours. Thinks about the way you'd said I know instead of I miss you too, and how that was somehow worse and better at the same time. Worse because it meant you were still being careful. Better because it meant you were still being honest.
He stares out the window at clouds and thinks about what careful costs.
He'd watched people in his life handle wanting things with a kind of blunt efficiency he'd always admired: they decided, they acted, they adjusted as needed. He could do that on the ice without thinking. Off it, he found himself slower. More uncertain. More aware of the ways wanting the wrong thing for the right reasons can do damage.
He doesn't want to do damage to you.
But he's also been in enough hotel rooms to know that whatever this is, it hasn't reduced. He'd been prepared for it to. Time, distance, the relentless motion of the season — he'd thought it would thin out, the way most things thin out under enough pressure. It hadn't. If anything the opposite, like the missing of it had compacted into something dense and permanent in his chest.
He pulls out his phone at thirty thousand feet and types out a text to you and deletes it and types it again and this time sends it before he talks himself into more careful.
I don't think this is going to stop. I want you to know that. No pressure. I just needed to say it.
He watches it deliver. He puts the phone away.
Over Nebraska, it buzzes.
I know, you've said. And then, after a beat: Me either.
He reads it twice. Looks out the window. Exhales.
You stare at your phone for a long time after you send it.
The me either had arrived in your fingers before your brain signed off on it, which probably means your body has been holding it for a while, waiting for a clean moment to hand it over. You'd watched the text send the way you watch something irreversible happen, that specific stillness of after.
It is terrifying. You should be clear about that. Not in the abstract, you-don't-know-what-comes-next way, but in the very specific, you-know-exactly-what-your-limits-are way. Nothing has changed in the shape of things. He still lives the life he lives. You are still who you are.
But.
You have also lain awake enough nights now to know what the alternative costs. You have sat in the specific quiet of an apartment that is calibrated precisely to your needs and felt the absence of something you were almost too careful to let yourself have. You have watched his games on your phone with the sound low because the crowd noise is too much but the game itself is something you can't stop wanting to follow. You have picked up your phone and put it down and picked it up again and talked yourself into waiting, giving it time, letting the feeling prove whether or not it would last.
It has lasted.
You don't know what that means practically. You genuinely don't. You are not going to pretend the logistics resolve cleanly, that love, or whatever this is, whatever it's becoming, is sufficient infrastructure for two people who need different things from the world. You know better than to pretend that.
But you are also twenty-three years old and you have spent six months being very sensible about this and he is somewhere above the middle of the country saying I don't think this is going to stop and your hands are already typing before you've decided anything at all.
You type: Can we talk when you land?
Three dots. Then: Yeah. Yes. Call me when you're ready.
You put your phone down and look at your apartment, the window, the pale morning coming through it, the specific and calibrated quiet you've built around yourself like something load-bearing.
It is still yours. That doesn't change. Who you are doesn't change.
But there are things you haven't tried yet. Smaller cities on the road. Games where the arena is easier. Nights like last night where the distance collapses to the length of a phone cord and his voice in the dark is so familiar it fits against you like something that was always there. You don't know how much of this can be navigated and how much of it is fixed, but you haven't actually tried to navigate it yet, and you've been treating this is hard like it means this is impossible.
Maybe those aren't the same thing.
Maybe — and you're allowing yourself this one maybe, this one carefully held piece of hope — maybe you don't have to fit his life wholesale. Maybe there are versions of this that have different shapes than the ones you imagined.
You sit with that.
Outside, something is changing, the light shifting, the city rearranging itself into morning. Your radiator makes the argument sound again. The window lets in air that is cold and manageable and yours.
You wait for him to land.
He calls you from the parking lot of the facility.
He could have waited, gone home first, given himself time to think about what he wants to say. He does not do this. He sits in the driver's seat with the car still running and calls you immediately, because he has already done six months of waiting and thinking and he is done being careful at the expense of being honest.
You answer on the second ring.
"Hi," you say.
"Hi." He exhales. "Okay. I've been thinking—"
"Me too," you say.
He stops.
"I've been thinking," you continue, and your voice has that quality, the one he catalogued, the careful honest quality, "that I've been treating this like a binary. Like it either works perfectly or it doesn't work at all."
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't want to interrupt.
"I don't think it works perfectly," you say. "I want to be honest about that. I'm not going to promise I'll be someone who can do every city and every road trip and every crowded room, because I can't, and telling you I can would be—" You exhale. "It would just be setting something up to break."
"I know," he says. "I don't want that."
"I know you don't." A beat. "But I've also been using that as a reason to not try anything, and I think that's—" You stop. "I think that's fear. Not practicality."
Something in his chest releases that has been held for a long time.
"I don't need you at every game," he says. "I don't need you in every city. I just need—" He stops. Figures out what the end of the sentence actually is. "I just need to know I'm not the only one who doesn't want to stop."
Silence. The long, deliberate kind.
"You're not," you say.
He leans his head back against the headrest and stares at the fabric of the car roof.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay," you say.
Outside the car, the Chicago morning is doing what Chicago mornings do in late winter, the cold more tired than angry now, like it's considering releasing its hold. He watches a few people cross the parking lot without seeing them, aware of his own heartbeat, aware of the phone in his hand and your breathing on the other end of it.
"I have a home game Wednesday," he says.
"I know," you say, and he can hear the shape of your smile in it.
"You could—" He doesn't finish the sentence.
"Yeah," you say, before he has to. "I could."
He doesn't score on Wednesday. He plays well, the way he usually plays, present and committed and reading the game three seconds ahead, and you are there in a seat that is not in the loudest section, with your headphones in one ear as a precaution, in a city that is not New York, and at some point in the third period, without really planning to, he finds you in the stands.
You're watching. Not his direction, not specifically, you're watching the play, and you have the face you make when you're genuinely absorbed in something, head tilted, eyes tracking. He sees it from the ice, briefly, in between one moment and the next, and feels something settle in him that has been unsettled for six months.
Not fixed. He's not going to pretend it's fixed.
But moving. Forward. Toward something that has an actual shape instead of just the shape of what it might have been.
