KS Fill: Matt/Aaron; good first impression
For the prompt: Aaron and his mom come to see Matt play on the West Coast.
This was a fill for a Kickstarter supporter; they've generously allowed me to share this so everyone can enjoy.
It isn’t easy, getting his mother to go to a hockey game without telling her that the reason he wants her to go with him is because he’s dating one of the players. That things are serious. Serious enough that he’s trying to get a woman who gets cold in the shade on a summer day into an arena. A woman who changes the channel if any sport is on TV — except baseball, but he’s been assured that’s an exception she only makes when he’s around or if the game is one he’s playing in. A woman who makes sure to watch all the athlete profiles during the Olympics but never watches their actual events.
“I became a bit of a fan,” Aaron says, the first time she throws up her hands and asks him why he’s so intent on driving all the way to LA to see the Leafs play.
“You don’t have to drive hours and freeze your poor mother to death to watch them,” she says. “You can see them any time in Toronto, can’t you?”
Aaron would call her dramatic, but again: shade on a summer day.
“I’ve made a few friends on the team,” Aaron says, during his second attempt. “Thought I might catch up with them at the game.”
“That’s nice,” she says. “Maybe bring one of your cousins instead, go out after the game? I would just slow you down.”
The thing is, Aaron knows that if he told her that he was seeing Matt, that maybe seeing was an understatement, but he hadn’t actually seen him since the Jays season ended, and timezones and the unpredictability of Matt’s schedule means he’s barely even seen him on a screen since then, he knows that she’d be bundling up in her warmest coat and making Aaron tell her everything on the drive, listening avidly when she wasn’t scolding him for not telling her about Matt sooner or demanding that she meet Matt after the game.
But for some reason, Aaron can’t do it. It isn’t that he thinks Matt wouldn’t be okay with it, because he’s more chill about all this than Aaron is, and his family all knows about Aaron, even if they haven’t met him yet. It’s — he doesn’t know. He wants her to see Matt first, maybe. See him without knowing that he means something to Aaron, see him without any expectations, biases, even positive ones.
He wants her to take one look at him and go ‘that one seems nice’, even though he knows that wouldn’t happen, that they’ll be a hundred feet away, Matt just a number, a name too small to read without squinting. He wants her to like him.
It takes a bit of pleading and a night at a nice hotel, a reservation at a place he had to get a friend on the Angels to name drop for him, and offering to go shopping on Sunday, let her pick some things out for him, but when he drives up to LA Saturday afternoon, she’s in the passenger seat.
There’s a dramatic shiver when they do get down to ice level, but they just split a very nice bottle of wine and a good meal at an award-winning restaurant, so there’s some goodwill going on, and she keeps her phone in her purse, which is more than Aaron can say for a lot of the people around them.
Aaron’s still picking things up, but he knows enough by now to see the Leafs look a little slow, getting caught out easily, which probably isn’t a good sign. The Kings haven't manage to take advantage of it yet at least, though they’re pushing, and every whistle seems to happen in front of the Leafs’ net, the shoving matches getting a little more intense each time.
Aaron flinches as Matt starts to get into it with a guy who has some pounds on him, relieved when one of the linesmen intervenes before the gloves come off.
“Is one of your friends out there?” his mother asks. Maybe she saw the flinch. Maybe he’s got some other tell, one he doesn’t even know he’s showing. She’d probably just say it’s motherly intuition.
“You see the guy in the corner?” Aaron says. “The one with 22 on his back.”
“The one who just punched someone?” she says with a disapproving sniff.
“Uh,” Aaron says. “It was more of a roughing—“
“The one who just punched someone,” she repeats.
Matt and the King are both still wearing their gloves, so Matt would get a roughing call at most, but there may have been a punch thrown, gloved or not.
“That’s your friend?” she asks, after a moment.
Matt’s arguing as he gets escorted to the box. Aaron doesn’t know why. He really did punch someone. It may not be fighting, but it is a roughing call. But then he sees that only one penalty box door is open, and he understands entirely, indignant on his behalf. The King was just as involved as Matt was, and there were guys on the ice who dropped their gloves, should be in the box instead, or at least keeping him company in there.
“I—“ Aaron says. “Something like that.”
They’re both quiet. In the box, Matt’s fuming, and it’s hard not to fume himself, especially after the Kings finally break the stalemate with a power play goal. Aaron hopes they turn it around, and not just because if they don’t, Matt’s going to be annoyed all night. Apparently he's a fan.
“He seems nice,” his mother says. “Your friend.”
“Really?” Aaron says. “You seemed stuck on the punching, there."
“Well, they do that, don’t they,” she says. “In hockey.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “They do that.”
Not like he’s never been involved in a brawl himself, but in baseball they’re events. Hockey? Matt’s not even considered a fighter and Aaron’s handed over a few ice packs already.
“I’m sure the other guy deserved it,” his mother says, then, “What was that for?” when Aaron ducks down to kiss the top of her head.
“Nothing,” he says. “We’ll make a hockey fan out of you yet, mami.”
“God forbid,” she says, with a shudder that may be for effect, or just from the cold, and leans into him when he wraps an arm around her shoulders.