em | hockey enthusiast | book lover | expert yapper
requests are open | guidelines
watching right now: playoffs hockey
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)
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.
Coulld you write something about Kirill?? He’s such a lil cinnamon bun 🥹
grand gesture | kk97
requests are open | navigation
a/n: i apologize if i didn't do him justice i don't really know him like that lol
Later when he's trying to explain it, it sounds way worse than it is, and way more calculated than it ever felt in his head.
It starts in the locker room, the last stretch of the season settling into everything. Not quite over, not quite done, but close enough that the conversations start shifting. Guys are already half in summer—talking about where they’re going, who they’re seeing, how long they’re staying gone before everything starts up again.
Gear is half off, half on. Someone’s music is playing too loud from a speaker in the corner. Tape wrappers on the floor. It’s easy, loose in a way it only gets when the pressure starts to lift.
Someone—Marcus, he thinks later, because it sounds like him—leans back and says, “So what’s everyone doing this summer?”
Answers come easy.
“Cottage.”
“Florida.”
“Europe for a bit.”
“Nowhere. Sleeping.”
There’s laughter, overlapping, not really a conversation so much as noise filling the space.
Then someone looks over at Kirill.
“What about you, Kirill?”
He doesn’t think about it. He never has to.
“Russia,” he says, like it’s obvious.
It always is.
“How long?” Matt asks, glancing over while he’s pulling his shirt off.
Kirill shrugs, toweling his hair. “Couple weeks. Two, maybe.”
“And then?” Brock adds, not looking up from where he’s retaping his stick.
Kirill hesitates for a second, but it’s not hesitation that means anything. Just… not a question he usually has to answer.
“Come back,” he says. “Stay here.”
Quinn looks over at that, eyebrows lifting slightly. “Stay here doing what?”
Kirill shrugs again. “Just… summer.”
Marcus lets out a short laugh. “That’s not an answer.”
“It is,” Kirill says, a little defensive now, though he’s not entirely sure why.
“Okay, but like—” Brock glances up this time, “you got someone here, don’t you?”
There’s a shift.
Subtle. Nothing dramatic. But enough that the conversation narrows in, focuses.
Kirill frowns. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Marcus repeats, dragging the word out a little. “So what, you’re gonna disappear to Russia for a bit and then just… come back and hang out with her like it’s nothing?”
“It is nothing,” Kirill says. “I go every year.”
“Yeah, but not every year you have a girlfriend,” Matt points out.
He doesn’t say anything to that.
Because it’s true.
“Is she coming?” Quinn asks, more neutral than the others. Not pushing, just… curious.
Kirill shakes his head. “No. She has work. Her own stuff. It's only been a couple months.”
“That’s not really the question,” Marcus says, leaning forward slightly. “Like, did you ask?”
Kirill’s jaw tightens, just a little. “No.”
There’s a pause.
Not awkward. Just… loaded in a way he didn’t expect.
Brock exchanges a look with Matt, something unspoken passing between them.
“What?” Kirill says, sharper now. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Brock says, but he’s smiling a little. “Just… if I’m her, I might think you’re not that serious.”
“That’s not—” Kirill stops, frustration flickering. “That’s not what it is.”
“Then what is it?” Marcus presses, not mean about it, just blunt in that way he tends to be.
“I’m gonna see her all summer,” Kirill says. “Here.”
“After you go home,” Matt adds.
“Yes.”
“So she gets what’s left,” Marcus says.
“That’s not fair,” Kirill shoots back.
“I’m not saying it is fair,” Marcus replies. “I’m saying that’s how it might look.”
Silence stretches for a second.
Kirill looks away, grabbing his bag, pretending to look for something he doesn’t actually need.
Quinn speaks again, quieter. “I mean, if you’re serious about her… you show her where you come from.”
Kirill glances up at that.
“You bring her into your life,” Quinn adds. “Not just the part that’s here.”
“It feels a little early to fly her out to meet my family,” Kirill says, almost immediately.
“Yeah,” Quinn agrees. “But girls need that reassurance.”
Brock nods. “Yeah. It’s not really about the time. It’s about the message.”
“What message?” Kirill asks, though he already feels like he knows.
“That you see this going somewhere,” Matt says simply.
Marcus leans back again, stretching his arms out behind him. “Go big,” he adds, grinning a little. “End of season, nice dinner, say something that makes it clear. Girls like that.”
Kirill huffs out a quiet breath, shaking his head. “You guys are ridiculous.”
“Are we?” Marcus raises an eyebrow.
Kirill doesn’t answer.
Because the thing is—
It doesn’t feel ridiculous.
Not entirely.
It lingers longer than it should.
It would’ve been easy to brush off, to let it dissolve into the rest of the noise, but it doesn’t. It follows him out of the locker room, into the car, into the quiet moments where there’s nothing else competing for his attention.
He thinks about you.
About the way your life has expanded in the past year, how full it’s become in ways that don’t revolve around him anymore. Your schedule, your work, the way you move through your days with a kind of independence that he admires but doesn’t always understand how to fit himself into.
He thinks about the times you’ve said you’re busy.
About the nights you haven’t been there when he gets home.
About how normal that’s become.
And then he thinks about what Brock said—
If I’m her, I might think you’re not that serious.
It settles somewhere uncomfortable.
Because he knows how he feels.
He just hasn’t said it in a way that looks like something.
The dinner is his idea.
You notice that immediately.
Not because he doesn’t take you out, he does, but there’s a difference between something spontaneous and something planned like this. Intentional. A reservation made days in advance, a place that requires something nicer than what you’d usually throw on without thinking.
You feel it the second you walk in.
The lighting is low, warm. The kind of place where everything feels a little slowed down, a little more deliberate. Conversations quieter, movements softer.
You look at him across the table, a small smile tugging at your mouth. “What’s this for?”
He shrugs, like it’s nothing. “End of season.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
You study him for a second, like you might push, but you don’t. You let it go, because you trust him to say things when he’s ready, and because not everything needs to be dissected to mean something.
Dinner is easy.
It always is with him.
Conversation slips between things that matter and things that don’t, the kind of rhythm you’ve built over time without realizing it. You tell him about something that happened at work, he listens, asks questions in his usual quiet way. He talks about a play from practice, you follow along just enough to understand what he’s saying, not enough to pretend you know more than you do.
At some point, you laugh.
It’s something small, something inconsequential, but it catches him off guard a little. The sound of it, the way your face changes when you do.
And he just… looks at you.
Really looks.
The way the light hits your skin, the way you lean slightly forward when you’re engaged, the way your hand moves when you talk.
And the thought comes, clear and certain, without any buildup:
I love her.
It doesn’t feel overwhelming.
It feels obvious.
And right behind it—
Does she know that?
His chest tightens slightly.
He thinks about the conversation earlier.
About gestures. About making things clear.
About not letting something important go unsaid just because it feels understood.
So he says the first thing that feels big enough.
“Come to Russia with me this summer.”
You blink.
It’s subtle, but he notices it immediately. The way your expression shifts just slightly, like you’re recalibrating.
“Oh,” you say.
Not rejecting.
Just… surprised.
“I thought you were going for a couple weeks,” you add, tilting your head a little. “I wouldn’t want to, like, interrupt time with your family.”
“No,” he says quickly. “You wouldn’t.”
There’s a pause.
He feels it stretching, and instead of letting it settle, he fills it.
“Come for the whole summer,” he says. “Four months.”
This time, the shift is more obvious.
“Four months?” you repeat, a small, uncertain laugh slipping into your voice.
“Yeah,” he nods. “We can figure it out.”
The waiter appears then, like the universe has decided to interrupt at the worst possible moment.
“Can I interest you in dessert?”
Kirill doesn’t look away from you right away, like he’s waiting for your reaction to settle into something clearer.
When it doesn’t, he turns slightly. “Yeah. Chocolate cake.”
The waiter nods and leaves.
You glance at him.
There’s something off about the way he said it.
Not wrong, exactly.
Just… decided.
“We’ll figure out the details later,” he adds, like it’s already a plan.
You nod, because you don’t know what else to do with it in the middle of a restaurant, because it’s too big to unpack between courses and passing waiters and the soft clink of cutlery around you.
“Okay,” you say.
But it doesn’t feel like agreement.
You don’t bring it up again that night.
Neither does he.
And that’s the problem.
Because it sits there, unaddressed, growing just enough in the silence to feel heavier than it should.
A couple days pass.
You stay over.
That part hasn’t changed.
You fall asleep next to him easily, like you always do, your body fitting against his in that familiar, thoughtless way that makes everything else feel simpler.
You wake up the same way.
Curled into him, his arm wrapped loosely around you, his hand resting at your waist.
For a moment, everything feels normal.
Soft. Easy.
You tilt your head back slightly and realize he’s already awake.
Looking at you.
There’s something searching in it.
You smile, still half-asleep. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
His voice is quieter than usual.
“You’re happy?” he asks.
You blink, the question cutting through the haze of sleep. “Yeah,” you say, a small laugh following it. “Of course I am.”
He watches you for a second longer, like he’s measuring something.
“Okay,” he says. “Good.”
You frown slightly. “Why?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
A beat passes.
“Russia will be good,” he adds.
It’s the tone.
That’s what catches you.
Not excited. Not warm.
Like he’s trying to convince himself.
You push yourself up onto your elbow, the blanket slipping slightly as you shift.
“Can we talk about that?” you ask.
He stills immediately.
“Yeah,” he says, careful now. “Okay.”
You rub at your eyes, trying to gather your thoughts into something that makes sense out loud.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said at dinner,” you start.
He nods once.
“And I just…” you let out a small breath, almost a laugh. “It felt kind of weird.”
His stomach drops.
“Weird how?” he asks.
You hesitate, choosing your words more carefully now.
“I know we originally talked about you going for a couple weeks and then coming back,” you say. “And I get it if you want to stay longer, like for the whole summer. That makes sense.”
He nods again.
“But asking me to come for four months…” you trail off, shaking your head slightly. “That’s a lot.”
You give a small, self-conscious laugh.
“I have a job,” you add. “I can’t just leave for an entire summer.”
“I know,” he says quickly.
“And even if I could,” you continue, your voice softening, “I don’t think I’d want to spend four months living with your family.”
You wince slightly. “In the nicest way possible.”
He stares at you, something like panic starting to flicker behind his expression.
“It just felt really sudden,” you go on. “Like… you didn’t really think about whether I’d actually want that. Or if it made sense for me. Or us, I mean I feel like we're still getting to know each other.”
He opens his mouth, but you keep going, because now that you’ve started, you can’t really stop.
“And it kind of made me wonder if it was something else,” you admit.
His brows knit together. “What do you mean?”
“Like…” you shake your head, already feeling how ridiculous it sounds, but still needing to say it. “Like maybe it was a way to… put me off. Without actually saying it.”
He goes completely still.
“I know that sounds insane,” you add quickly. “But it just felt off. And if this is, like, not as serious for you as it is for me, you can just say that. You don’t have to… hint at it in a weird way.”
Your voice steadies.
“I can handle it.”
Silence settles over the room.
And then—
“Oh my god,” he says, sitting up abruptly.
You blink, startled.
“That is not what I was doing,” he says immediately. “At all.”
“Okay—”
“Do not come to Russia,” he adds quickly.
You stare at him. “What?”
“That’s a terrible idea,” he says, dragging a hand through his hair. “Four months? With my family? That’s—no.”
A small, surprised laugh escapes you. “Okay, now I’m definitely confused.”
He exhales sharply, frustration turning inward.
“The guys said something,” he admits.
You tilt your head. “What guys?”
“In the locker room,” he says. “They were saying if I’m serious about you, I should… do something big. Bring you home. Make it clear.”
You blink, processing that.
“And I thought—” he cuts himself off, shaking his head. “I thought if I asked you like that, it would show you I’m serious.”
You stare at him for a second.
“And you didn’t think to ask what I would actually want?” you ask, not harsh, just… honest.
“I did,” he says quickly. “I just… overthought it.”
You huff out a small breath. “Yeah. That sounds right.”
He lets out a quiet, self-deprecating laugh.
“I’m not trying to push you away,” he says, more serious now. “I was trying to do the opposite.”
You study him for a moment.
“And you don’t actually want me there for four months,” you say.
He shakes his head immediately. “No.”
“Not even a little?”
“Maybe a week,” he admits. “Two. Like a year from now”
You smile despite yourself.
“That sounds more reasonable.”
He nods, relief softening his shoulders.
“I do want you to meet my family,” he adds, more carefully this time. “Just… not like that.”
“I’d like that,” you say.
A small silence settles, lighter now.
You shift back down beside him, the tension easing out of your body as you do.
He follows you, pulling you closer almost instinctively, like he needs to reestablish something that slipped.
You go easily, settling against him, your head resting against his chest.
His arm wraps around you, steady.
“Just so you know,” he says quietly, “I wasn’t trying to get rid of you.”
“I know,” you murmur.
A beat passes.
“Even if that was a really bad way of showing it.”
You smile against him. “Yeah. It kind of was.”
He exhales, something like relief settling fully now, his chin resting lightly against the top of your head.
hii i am back and for good this time (hopefully)
i was very ill for a while and then also the whole team usa coming out as trumpies was pretty unmotivating to write :( moving forward i will not write for anyone on that olympic team (i think i've only written for 2 or 3 of them before anyway) and any requests for them will either be deleted or used for someone else. unforch just about every hockey player is uberconservative so unless they publicly go out and shake hands with trump i will continue to write for them
#canadadown send reqs for team canada tho they deserve it after losing in 3on3
also send me yap about the playoffs!! my canucks were eliminated, who would've thought, so i'm cheering for genuinely whoever i feel like depending on what game i'm watching lol
em how have you been? i miss seeing you on my feed and talking to you ☹️
to all of you who have sent a message like this in the last couple months thank you very much i am doing much better and very excited to get back to writing for you all :)
send reqs!! (but check out my new guidelines post beforehand)
Hii can u pleasee write a connor bedard angst fic🥹🥹 pls make it as angsty as possible lol thank u!!
easier | cb98
requests are open | navigation
a/n: i'm a little rusty 😼
The shift doesn’t happen all at once.
That’s the part that makes it hard to point to, later.
It’s not one decision, not one sacrifice you can hold up and say this is where it started. It’s smaller than that. Quieter. A series of adjustments that all make sense at the time.
When Connor gets drafted, you tell people you’re transferring because the program in Chicago is better.
It is.
You tell yourself extending your degree is practical. Strategic. It gives you more time, more options, more room to build something that belongs to you.
It does.
You don’t say that it also means you don’t have to leave him behind.
You don’t say that out loud. Not to anyone. Not even to yourself in a way that feels honest.
At the beginning, everything is softer.
You don’t notice it while you’re in it. You only understand it later, in contrast.
Your schedules are messy but forgiving. His world is busy, but not yet suffocating. Yours is demanding, but not immovable. There’s space between things. Flexibility.
You fill it with each other without having to think about it.
Late nights that turn into early mornings. Food eaten wherever you land—on the floor, on the couch, leaning against the kitchen counter while he talks through something that happened at practice.
You learn him in pieces.
The way he unwinds. The way he goes quiet before he admits he’s overwhelmed. The way he reaches for you without looking when he’s tired, like it’s instinct.
And you’re there.
Always there.
Not because you have to be.
Because it’s easy to be.
You don’t feel like you’re giving anything up. You don’t feel like you’re bending.
It just… fits.
The change is gradual enough that you don’t resist it.
Your program gets harder. Not all at once, but enough that you start needing to plan your time differently. You take on more. More responsibility, more work that matters, more things that don’t shift just because something else comes up.
You start meeting people who exist entirely outside of him.
People who don’t ask about his games, who don’t measure your life in relation to his. Conversations that aren’t interrupted by his schedule or his name or the weight of everything he carries with him now.
You build something.
Slowly. Intentionally.
Something that doesn’t depend on him to exist, and you’re proud of it.
You should be.
He notices the change before you do.
Not consciously. Not in a way he could explain if you asked him.
Just in small moments.
The first time you say, “I can’t, I already have plans,” and don’t immediately follow it up with, “but I can move it.”
The first time he gets home and you’re not there.
The first time he has to ask when you’re free instead of assuming.
They’re small, reasonable things, but they add up.
And he doesn’t know what to do with the way they feel.
You’re at his place, laptop open, something unfinished staring back at you. It’s due in the morning. You’re close to done, but not close enough to walk away yet.
It’s late. You’re both tired in that bone-deep way that doesn’t make you dramatic, just thinner at the edges. Less patient. Less careful.
He gets home later than usual.
You hear the door, the soft thud of it closing, the sound of his keys hitting the counter. Familiar. Routine.
“Hey,” you say, not looking up right away.
“Hey.”
His voice is flat. Not cold. Just… drained.
You glance over. He looks it. Shoulders tight, expression distant in that way you’ve learned means he hasn’t fully come down from everything yet.
“How was it?” you ask.
“Fine.”
You nod, turning back to your screen. You don’t push. You’ve learned not to push when he sounds like that. He’ll tell you if he wants to.
There’s a stretch of quiet.
Comfortable, once.
Now it feels like something else.
“Can you—” he starts, then stops. You can hear the hesitation in it.
You look up. “What?”
He gestures vaguely toward your laptop. “Can you just put that away for a bit?”
You glance at the screen, then back at him. “I will. I just need like ten minutes.”
“Your ten minutes or a regular ten minutes?”
“I’m almost done.”
There’s a beat.
He exhales through his nose, something restrained. “It’s always almost done.”
You frown slightly. “Connor—”
“I just got home,” he says, cutting in. Not loud. Not sharp. Just tight in a way that signals he’s closer to the edge than you thought. “I haven’t seen you in two days.”
“I know,” you say, softer now. “I just—this has to get finished.”
“I’m not saying it doesn’t.”
“It sounds like you are.”
He shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. “I’m saying I’m here.”
“And I’m here,” you reply, gesturing between you, the room, everything. “I just also have other things I need to do.”
It’s reasonable.
You’re being reasonable.
That’s what makes the tension stretch instead of snap.
Because there’s nothing to argue against, not really. Just the feeling underneath it.
“I feel like I don’t see you anymore,” he says.
The words land heavier than the ones before them.
You blink. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m not saying it to be unfair.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I don’t know,” he admits, frustration creeping in. “I just—when I finally have time, you’re… somewhere else.”
“I’m not doing that on purpose.”
“I know.”
“Then what do you want me to do?” you ask, genuinely.
He doesn’t answer right away.
That’s the moment.
The one where he could pause, step back, choose something softer. Something that doesn’t cut as clean.
But he’s tired.
And he feels something he doesn’t know how to explain.
“You weren’t like this before,” he says.
Your fingers still over the keyboard.
“Like what?”
“Busy,” he says. “Unavailable.”
A small, disbelieving breath leaves you. “I’ve always been busy.”
“Not like this.”
“Because I’m not in the same place I was before,” you say. “Things change.”
“I know they do,” he says quickly. “I just—”
He stops.
You watch him, waiting.
And then, quieter, almost like he’s not sure he wants you to hear it:
“You were easier then.”
It doesn’t echo.
It doesn’t need to.
It lands exactly where it’s meant to.
You look at him.
He realizes it immediately. You can see it in the way his expression shifts, the way regret flashes across his face before he can even form the words to fix it.
“I didn’t mean—”
You close your laptop.
Slow. Deliberate.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”
“Wait—”
“Connor.”
Your voice isn’t raised. It doesn’t need to be.
“I really don’t think this is a conversation we need to have right now.”
He stops.
There’s a second where it feels like he might push. Like he might try to take it back before it settles.
He doesn’t.
You move around him, brushing past without touching.
You go to bed at the same time.
You lie on opposite sides without acknowledging it.
There’s space between you.
Not much.
Just enough to feel intentional.
He shifts once, like he’s going to say something.
You close your eyes.
He doesn’t.
The next day feels wrong for how normal it is.
You wake up. Get ready. Move through your routine like nothing happened.
He’s already up, leaning against the counter, phone in hand.
“Morning,” you say.
“Morning.”
You make coffee. He asks if you want anything. You say no.
He leaves before you do, pressing a quick kiss to your temple that feels more like habit than choice.
You let him.
You both do.
The sentence stays with you.
Not loud. Not overwhelming.
Just… there.
You were easier then.
You turn it over in your head throughout the day, not in a spiral, just in quiet acknowledgment.
He’s not wrong.
You were easier when your life had more room to bend. When your priorities aligned without friction. When loving him didn’t require negotiation.
Now it does.
Now you have your own things. Your own time. Your own momentum.
You don’t orbit him anymore.
And maybe that changes what this is.
He’s home when you get back and you can tell he’s been waiting.
He stands when you walk in. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
You set your bag down, buying yourself a second before you have to fully step into it.
“Can we talk?” he asks.
You hesitate.
“I don’t think I’m really in the right headspace for that.”
“Please,” he says, too quickly. “Just—please.”
You nod before taking a seat with him. “Okay.”
He exhales, relieved, and starts immediately.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “About what I said. I didn’t mean it like that, I was just frustrated and I shouldn’t have—”
“Connor.”
You stop him. He goes quiet.
“You don’t need to take it back.”
“I do,” he insists. “Because it came out wrong—”
“It didn’t.”
That stops him.
You meet his eyes.
“It didn’t come out wrong,” you say. “You meant it.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You meant it,” you repeat, softer. “Maybe not the way it sounds now. But you meant something real.”
He exhales, frustrated. “That’s not fair.”
“It is,” you say. “And it’s okay.”
He looks at you like that’s the worst part.
“I was easier,” you continue. “Back then. When we first moved here my life was simpler. I had more time, more space. Most of it went to you.”
You don’t say it accusingly.
Just honestly.
“Now it doesn’t,” you add. “And that’s different.”
“Different doesn’t mean worse.”
“It doesn’t,” you agree. “But it’s not as convenient.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“Isn’t it?” you ask.
“Yes,” he says, more firmly now. “It’s about me feeling like I don’t see you anymore.”
“And I feel like I finally see myself,” you say, before you can stop it.
He stills.
“And I don’t want to lose that,” you add, quieter.
“I’m not asking you to.”
“You’re not,” you agree. “But I think part of you wishes things were the way they used to be.”
He shakes his head. “No. I just—need time to get used to this version of it.”
You study him.
“You’re saying that now,” you say. “But yesterday, when you weren’t thinking about it, you said something else.”
He flinches.
“That’s the part I believe.”
Silence.
You take a breath.
“I got an offer,” you say.
His brows pull together. “What?”
“A job. In New York.”
His expression shifts, something sharper cutting through the exhaustion. “Since when?”
“A few days ago.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I was going to.”
“That’s not something you just wait on.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I knew this was coming,” you say.
He goes still.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ve been thinking about this,” you say. “About us.”
“And?”
You hold his gaze.
“I don’t think we work anymore.”
The words sit there.
Heavy. Quiet.
Final in a way that doesn’t need emphasis.
His jaw tightens. “You don’t get to decide that on your own.”
“I’m not deciding it for you. I’m deciding it for me.”
“Based on one argument?”
“Based on everything.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s not how this works. You don’t just walk away because it’s hard.”
“I’m not walking away because it’s hard,” you say. “I’m walking away because I don’t think it’s going to get easier.”
“Then we make it easier.”
“How?”
“We try,” he says. “We adjust. We figure it out.”
“It’s only going to get busier from here.”
“Then we adjust more,” he insists. “That’s what you do when you love someone.”
You look at him.
“I do love you.”
“I know,” you sigh.
“And I think you love me.”
“I do.” And your voice cracks. “But I don’t think that’s the issue.”
“Then what is?” he asks, frustration breaking through. “Because it sounds like you’ve already decided there’s no solution.”
“I think we want different versions of this,” you say. “Different versions of each other.”
“I don’t,” he says immediately. “I want you. Exactly as you are.”
“Even if that means I don’t revolve around you?”
“Yes.”
“Even if it’s inconvenient?”
“I don’t care about convenient,” he says, sharper now. “I care about you.”
You search his face.
“I haven’t been good at this,” he admits, quieter. “At… understanding how much things have changed for you.”
You don’t interrupt.
“I know I’ve been selfish with your time. I know I expect things to fit the way they used to because that’s what I’m used to. But that doesn’t mean that’s what I want.”
There’s something raw in it.
Something unpolished.
“I can do better,” he says. “We can do better. If we have to, we can talk to someone, or set time aside, or whatever. I don’t care. I just—”
His voice falters.
“I can’t lose you over something we haven’t even tried to fix. I don’t need you to be anything other than what you are,” he adds. “I just need time to catch up.”
You feel it then.
The pull.
The history. The version of this that worked so easily before.
And the version now, harder, sharper, asking more of both of you.
You look at him.
Really look at him.
And for a second, you don’t know which version wins.
You just know they can’t both exist without costing you something.
