Chapter Text
The rink is loud, but only in that way that all rinks are, when sound bounces off the ice and the scrape of blades cuts through the air like a drone of sharpening knives. Under his face guard, Scott Hunter sweats. It’s the final minute of the third period, and his team are up by two, but it feels like it matters. Hockey always feels like it matters.
He’s on a breakaway straight up to the offensive zone, about the cross the blue line when he gets checked hard by a player from the other team. He swipes the puck to his winger, Perez, who’s charging up, ready. Snipe it. Goal. He fist-bumps Perez, impact muffled by gloves.
“Nice shooting,” he says, grinning.
Perez smiles back, whoops, heads back for the puck drop. There’s barely any point, but the opposing team fight hard for the last forty-five seconds. By the time the final buzzer sounds, it’s 4-1 to the Bladerunners.
“Hoo boy,” Scott exhales, the adrenaline still coursing through him. He glides across centre ice, breathing heavily. Tough game. It’s early in the season, and everyone’s got something to prove. Not that it matters—the Bladerunners are practically undefeated in the Superior Hockey League: Long Island’s best adult men’s beer league.
He joins the line at centre ice for the handshakes that follow every game, win or lose. Gloves off, fist bumps along the line of losing players from the Royals.
“Good game,” Scott says as he passes along the line. “Good game.”
“Scotty, see you at O’Malley’s after?” Barber, the opposing team’s centre calls out as he skates away.
“After that fucking check? You’d better be buying!” Scott calls back, skating over to the boards.
His team are clustered around the exit, chatting to a couple of spectators in the lower tier of seating right by the doors to the locker room. Scott skates up, clasps a hand on Perez’s shoulder.
“Nice goal,” he says.
Perez smiles back. “Nice assist. Are you going to assist me at the bar later and buy the first round?”
Scott laughs. “Captain’s duty.”
Captain of a beer league team comes with a heavy set of responsibilities: make sure the team pay their dues for the season, make sure the fucking goalie turns up, and make sure there are drinks ordered and ready when the team get showered and over to the Irish bar across the road.
“Big Georgie!” Perez calls over to the man in the stands, getting his attention over the noise of the team recapping their best plays and shuffling off the ice. “You joining us tonight?”
Big Georgie—George Grady—is a legendary Bladerunners goalie. He retired ten years ago, at the end of Scott’s first season with the team, when he complained that forty-four was not a respectable age to be getting hit in the face with pucks anymore. He still comes to watch a lot of their games, though, dressed in his old jersey and claiming that it’s cheaper than tickets to Islanders games and he can probably get as good a display of athleticism out of Hunter, here, than anything in the NHL.
Scott usually laughs this off. His past as a player is public record. The rookie who quit.
That was a long fucking time ago, though. And he is not taking the bait with the whole athleticism quip—he knows he’s no elite player, not any more. No access to trainers and doctors and the exigencies of the league. Thank god. He’s also no spring chicken, either, pushing thirty-two. No Stanley Cup in his past, but he does have a few years at community college, a CPA, and a good fucking job in the city. Hockey, as much as it’s in his bones, is now something that he does for fun, and because he’s very good at it, and because it makes him happy.
Revolutionary.
“No brewskis for us tonight, the Kipster here made me promise to go home and watch The Last Waltz with him after the game.” Big Georgie gestures over his shoulder at the younger guy standing next to him.
Huh.
Scott doesn’t often get stopped in his tracks by guys he sees. He doesn’t really ever get that birds-dancing-round-his-head, sweet-chorus-of-angels, crepuscular-rays-alighting-on-the-earth knockabout, or hasn’t really since Mike Johansson transferred into St Thomas in senior year of high school and he had, for the first time in his life, fallen in love. Unrequited, but still. That was fifteen years ago. He’s been in love since then, but he hasn’t been blindsided in a while. He’d forgotten how it feels.
The guy—the Kipster, whatever that means—is fucking gorgeous. On the shorter side, like Big Georgie, but well built. Dark stubble across his jaw. Dark, curly hair styled casually, wire-rimmed glasses that flash with the reflection of the ice. Scott’s mouth runs dry as he swallows, trying not to stare.
“Awww,” coos Lato, one of their defensemen. “Big Georgie, is this your kid?”
Ahern, their current goalie, cuts in: “Georgie, no one’s making you watch The Last Waltz, we all know that shit is your favourite movie because we’ve all heard you, many times, three beers deep and yakking about—”
“—Scorcese’s forgotten masterpiece,” Scott and Perez chime in together. They laugh. They’ve all heard it. Big Georgie’s lore runs deep.
“You’re all ingrates and philistines,” Big Georgie says, shaking his head. He puts his arm around the young man’s shoulders and tugs him forward. “And yes, this is my son. This is Kip. Back from grad school, and very kindly accompanying his father on an excursion to relive his glory days.”
“Can’t relive them if they’re not over,” Scott says, and everyone laughs.
He catches Kip’s eyes. He blinks, swallows, tries to smile. Those eyes are intense, dark brown and assessing. Scott is suddenly very aware that he looks like shit, with his hair a damp mess, his helmet tucked under one elbow, his jersey probably reeking of sweat. He runs a hand through his hair, feeling damp strands and trying to push them into some sort of order. Obvious.
Kip smiles back, a small and half-sure grin.
“All right, boys,” Scott says, tearing his eyes away. “Showers, bar. One beer. Some of us have to work in the morning.”
“Scotty,” Ahern says, punching him on the back of his shoulder, “we all have work in the morning.”
The bar is pretty quiet when they get there—the joys of it being a Tuesday night in Kings Park. He has his one beer—a Belgian lager that’s on tap, by some miracle, at an Irish bar—then says his farewells to the guys and heads back across the road to the parking lot at the rink. He unlocks his Prius and slides in, wrapping his hands around the suede of the steering wheel.
It’s a forty-five minute drive back to his apartment in Jackson Heights. The roads are quiet enough at this time of night. Scott’s body is tired, the single beer making his joints feel warm. It’s a good tired, though—the kind of tired that accompanies a well-played game in good company.
Interesting company, tonight. Or, at least, interesting people in the crappy plastic bucket seats that pass for stands at the rink.
Kip.
He knows he probably shouldn’t even go there, not if Kip is Big Georgie’s son. It’d be like trying to date the President’s kid. Big Georgie is lovely, has been a friendly acquaintance for a long time. Scott’s not sure he wants to mess with that, though.
God, he thinks, as he takes the slip road onto I-495 back towards New York, you don’t even know if he’s interested in men. Do not get even remotely ahead of yourself.
He does, though. He replays that small, pleased grin for most of the drive. The way Kip’s eyes had glinted a little playfully behind those glasses. The confidence of his posture. The solid sound his body had made when Big Georgie had clapped him on the shoulder. Little things, little things adding up to a bigger picture in Scott’s mind.
He was interested, okay? So sue him.
He makes it home in one piece, despite the distraction. His apartment is in a six-storey building in Jackson Heights—a one-bedroom place on the third floor. He’s lived here for a long time, since he was eighteen and had nothing but meagre savings and a casual job as a labourer he was working while he figured out what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life. The rent was cheaper then. The apartment’s seen better days, but he keeps it nice. It’s got hardwood floors and big windows and he repainted last summer, so everything’s fresh and light. The kitchen is actually a decent size, which is great, because at twenty years of age he decided he’d had enough ramen and frozen meals and actually taught himself to cook.
The crowning glory of the place is the space in the building’s parking lot. He spent three years on a wait list for that, and they can claw it back from his cold, dead hands. He’d never really considered himself much of a driver, but he got the Prius second-hand a handful of years ago and never looked back. He does summer road trips up the New England coastline. And he doesn’t have to schlep his stuff on the subway out to the rink, which is a definite plus.
He takes the stairs instead of the lift, his hockey bag heavy over his shoulder. Inside, he drops his stuff by the door and heads to the shower. The locker rooms showers do not cut it. His work wife, Janice, makes fun of his hair-washing routine, calling it his curly girl method bullshit, but he likes to take care of himself. Less of the hours in the gym than he did as an NHL-bound teenager, his head almost permanently crammed under a helmet. These days it’s more like one beer league game a week, plus a few gym sessions and occasional runs in the park.
He’s not lonely, even if he is single. He’s had boyfriends before, had his heart broken. A few years ago, when he was twenty-seven, he spent six months in cohabitation bliss with Jordan Hornsby, a web developer he’d met on Grindr and seen seriously for a couple of years. It had ended, although not poorly. They wanted different things. Scott wanted to settle down in a way Jordan didn’t. Maybe it’s because he spent so much of his adolescence in transient spaces. Permanence calls to him, and he’s ready for love, but not necessarily chasing it. Finding a hook-up isn’t difficult—he knows what he looks like: tall, muscular, conventionally handsome with a full head of hair. But he’s always kind of been hanging out for more. Love like his parents had. Something real.
After he’s clean and his hair has been washed (and it’s not even that complicated, Janice, get a grip), Scott drinks two tall glasses of water and heads to bed. He pulls back the bedspread and climbs under the sheets. He grabs his phone and replies to a couple of messages from friends that had come in while he was at the game: Nick checking in about movie times for the weekend, Drew wanting an opinion on a woman’s Tinder profile.
His life is full. He likes his job in the city, and he has a career pathway there for him to follow. He has friends—lots of friends, from the team, from work, guys he’s clicked with at gay bars and ended up being close to for years. Janice, of course. A whole life he’s built up since he was twenty and alone and not knowing what the fuck to do with himself. A life he’s really happy with, and proud of.
If the emptiness of the other side of the bed bothers him, he doesn’t really dwell on it. It’ll happen when it happens.
He grabs his book from the nightstand: a Gillian Flynn thriller he hasn’t read before. The adrenaline from the game finally snakes its way out of his body as he turns the pages. He doesn’t think about Kip again that night, not intentionally. Maybe a fleeting glimpse of dark eyes and glasses and a small, returned smile, caught just before he falls asleep.
At next Tuesday’s game, Big Georgie is in the stands as per usual. Kip is on the seat next to him, watching the game with mild interest, a paperback book curled, unread, in one hand. And if Scott plays a little harder, a little faster, and a little better tonight than he has in a while…well, there’s not really anything wrong with that.