With steady hands, Wille writes COLLIN GRAF across the top of his whiteboard.
Beneath it, he lays out his main goals: Get to know him. Get him friends. Become his friend. Then, with the memory of Graffer’s smile from the other night still seared into his brain, he adds: Make him smile.
Graffer doesn’t even like him?
Yeah, right. Not if Wille has anything to say about it.
hey no pressure but wanted to ask when the greky fic might be out? you're doing god's work
i wish i had better news for you but i’m so busy rn that probably not for another few weeks at best… unless something goes awfully wrong it should be done before the end of may though! every time i sit down to edit it i keep adding more instead because these dipshits have me in a chokehold. so its slow going lol.
if it serves as any consolation for the wait here’s a tiny piece i wrote about that almost-kiss it looked like they had last season :)
it’s not even his own goal, but collin’s electric with it just the same.
he slams his body into ekky’s, wraps an arm around his back, but when he leans in to knock their buckets together, ekky turns to face him. there’s a split second of eye contact—ekky’s gaze full of pride, of satisfaction, the high of a good goal, but more than that want.
collin feels, well, something make its way down his spine, the ricochet of their helmets hitting reverberating in his teeth, and then he’s expecting ekky to pull back. in the microsecond he has to do any form of processing, all he registers is that ekky isn’t, in fact, pulling back, and instead seems to be getting even closer.
collin, when he looks back on this moment, gun to his head, could not tell you why he doesn’t stop him. he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t flinch, lets ekky keep approaching. his eyes flutter shut and it takes another split second of nothing happening for him to open them again, when he feels ekky moving in a different direction, his arm still wrapped around his back.
it’s nothing, really.
collin succeeds in pushing it out of his mind till the end of the game. he’s sloughing his gear off in the locker rooms, the air thick with the pungent scent of sweat and grime that always permeates the room post game. he’s just finished untying his skates when he hears someone congratulate ekky on his goal.
and then it all comes rushing back to him, the heat of ekky’s breath on his face, the way his eyes had flicked to his lips, how unthinkingly easy it had been to—to what? to lean in to kiss him?
that can’t be right. they were on the ice, for fuck’s sake, playing a fucking game. there’s no way ekky had been about to try and kiss collin. in front of their teammates, god, and drew and randy.
he can already hear sheng peng in his mind. shoving his phone in collin’s face post-game, asking how ekky’s lips had felt against his own.
soft, he’d answer. just like how they look, and he’d frown, just the littlest bit, as he said it. truly only someone like peng could come up with a question that stupid. yeah, obviously they’d be soft, graf’s seen ekky apply lip balm too many times for them to be anything else. and then peng would ask if collin had liked it, and he’d scoff and say of course. and--
he goes home and replays it, over and over and over.
