And if I say they were actually together already before the season ended, and they went to Boston and started telling people that matter about them, then someone made a way-too-realistic offhanded comment about what it would mean for their careers, planted doubts about the implication of their relationship, and they both suddenly got cold feet, so they mutually decided to break-up. Try to see if maybe it was just a phase and everything would go back to normal, that maybe could stay as friends despite everything.
Because then it would be less scary. It would be infinitely easier to just bury it or find people outside the rink to keep their personal lives entirely detached from hockey.
Then Mack fucked off to Worlds. Will fucked off to New York and the Cape with his harem. Total zero communication. They both gave each other the cold and silent treatment. They tried following hot blondes on Instagram again, Will tried to go with Grace hoping she could link him up with her friends, Mack tried going with Team Canada in strip clubs, because maybe that would prove that whatever this was between them wasn’t as deep as they thought. That they could still be attracted to other people.
But the thing is, it didn’t work.
Will was surrounded by beautiful, old-money women during the Fourth of July and every gatherings yet he felt fucking lonely. He couldn’t even look at them for more than five seconds without wishing it was a pair of green eyes and brunette hair he was staring at instead. He even came close to finding one, who was ironically named so similarly to Mack that Will genuinely thought the universe was fucking with him. Then Mack was practically bleeding himself dry at Scotia Barn every single day because he’d rather break his bones and strain every muscle than come home to all that silence by himself. Because a certain blonde with blue eyes had stopped calling him about the most useless things, which Mack had somehow grown to love hearing.
So they spent those three months miserable, trying to fill that hollow void in their chests with literally anything. It didn’t work. Until they both finally broke, realizing they were either made to be together or never to be at all.
And it was so easy, the way they settled back into each other as if there was never a distance, never a heartbreak that had separated them both. When Will landed in Vancouver, he came prepared to tear his heart wide open for Mack. If Mack wanted him to beg, he would beg. Pride be damned. Dignity be damned.
Never mind the fact that Mack deflected that interview when asked about Will, as if Will was just another player on his roster that Mack couldn’t even be bothered to think about. He wouldn’t even say Will’s name when they asked him about his ultimate dream hockey line, as if he hadn’t spent almost every night since coming back from the Olympics tangled up with Will, murmuring into his skin that he wished it was Will on his wing because Will just gets it.
Will already learned that having the person you love completely out of your reach hurts in ways you don’t understand until they’re gone. That there was something unbearable about not having any claim on Mack anymore, as if he had never mattered, as if Mack had never once made him dizzy, high, completely drunk on love just by looking at him.
He didn’t know that Mack was just as desperate. Mack couldn’t stand the distance, couldn't stand waking up every day with that liquid-hot rage sitting beneath his skin, looking for somewhere to go. He was angry at the world because he needed someone to blame. Sometimes even God. Because Will believed in divinity, believed there was supposed to be some reason behind all of this, and Mack couldn’t understand it. Why was it so fucking difficult to just love someone? Why did he have to fall in love with someone who could break his heart and, somehow, threaten everything he’d spent his entire life building?
He couldn’t even bring himself to be angry at Will, not really. Not even when Will practically socked it into Mack’s face on his fucking birthday, out of all days, posting that TikTok with Fowler, like a reminder that he had people, that he was doing perfectly fine without him. Because that’s just how Mack has always been. He would rather blame everyone else before he blamed Will. He would rather throw things at immovable objects, yell at everyone, let the anger consume him until there’s nothing left but the ache, before he ever let his thorns prick Will.
And really, it was so simple. There was no grand declaration or flaying-your-heart-open type of confession like the ones they used to watch in those RomComs when the couple finally got back together. They simply looked at each other, recognized the misery they had put each other through in the hollow bags under Will’s blue eyes and the emptiness in Mack’s green eyes when they spotted each other across the airport, and decided they would never do it again, would never put each other through that again, would never hurt each other again.
When they got into Mack’s car, neither of them said much. There was an awkwardness to being around each other again after months of distance, like they had forgotten how to exist in the same space without carefully thinking about every movement, but somehow certain that there was a newly formed understanding between them, something that had simply settled into place without either of them having to say it out loud.
Will’s body moved before he could even comprehend it. His hand reached for Mack’s phone resting in the console, typed in his password, 027124 (Will had once made fun of Mack’s sentimentality about the choice of password), and opened his Apple Music like it was pure muscle memory.
He looked at Mack when Mack gently placed his hand over Will’s, where it rested on his thigh, and wordlessly interlaced their fingers together, his eyes never leaving the road.
Will supposes this was what their pastor had been talking about when he went to Sunday Mass last week. It made sense now, though. The topic had been about love, quoting Corinthians, about how the most extraordinary abilities, faith, or acts of sacrifice are ultimately meaningless without love. That love transcends all things and endures forever because love flows from the very essence of God.
Maybe this is what it means to love someone so deeply that your lives become impossible to untangle from each other. Maybe this is what it means for two people to be so deeply interwoven that no matter how far they run, the love they have for each other will always transcend everything; the distance, the ache, the fears, all the things that had once convinced them that maybe they were better apart.
Will tightens his grip around Mack’s hand, and Mack squeezes it back. The soft tune of Dej Loaf plays quietly through the car, filling the space between them. The lyrics say enough. About what they are now, about what they’ve been, and about the future waiting for them somewhere ahead.
I wanna love you with no fears, we can do this thing together. Close your eyes and take my hand, cause what we have is something special. Baby, let's just take our chance ♪.
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