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Wyatt was already half-asleep, more than ready for his first road trip with Ottawa to be over, so he jumped about a mile when someone crashed into the airplane seat next to him and sighed.
“This seat is not taken?” Rozanov asked, making himself comfortable. Wyatt wondered if he’d ever asked permission before doing something, even once.
“It is now,” he said, and yawned.
Rozanov blinked at him.
“By you,” Wyatt explained, sort of waving one hand at him. “Because you just sat there?”
“Oh. Yes,” Rozanov said after another moment, and rubbed his face. “Sorry, is late.”
It was almost midnight, and they were finally leaving D.C. after two hours of weather delays because the minute it started snowing here, everyone acted like they’d never experienced precipitation before.
“Good game,” Wyatt offered, because he was polite, and Rozanov snorted.
“Not good enough.”
“It’s a rebuilding year.”
“What are you, some sort of hockey fan?” Rozanov asked dryly, and Wyatt laughed.
“Something like that,” he said, and Rozanov slouched back into the plane seat and gave him a narrow-eyed assessing look.
“Why did they hardly play you in Toronto?” he asked, after a moment, and Wyatt had to turn away, pretending like something in the front of the plane had caught his eye.
“I was the backup,” he said lightly, and shrugged, as if it was something he’d barely considered and not the question that had nearly eaten him alive his first few years in Toronto.
“Yes. Were they stupid?”
“This is really how you are, huh?” Wyatt said. He instantly wished he hadn’t, especially when Rozanov raised on eyebrow and folded his arms over his chest. Pissing off the team’s star player was not, like, the greatest start to his Ottawa hockey career.
“What is really how I,” Rozanov said, and paused for a split second. “Am?”
Wyatt took a deep breath and collected himself: he was tired as hell and he hurt everywhere and he couldn’t stop replaying every time the puck had made it past him tonight and he wanted to already be in bed, warm and snuggled against Lisa, except she was still in Toronto because it had fallen to her to dismantle practically the entire life they’d built while he stayed in a furnished apartment with an enormous TV and absolutely no soul and played hockey and tried not to think that the trade to Ottawa was the beginning of the end, that he should probably start figuring out now what he was going to do with the rest of his post-hockey life but he didn’t want to because what he wanted was to cling to this one stupid thread of hope like it was a lifeline.
“Nothing,” he said, and smiled so Rozanov would drop it. “You want gum? I’ve got spearmint.”
“Thanks,” Rozanov said, and he took a piece but gave Wyatt another look, like he wanted to keep talking about Wyatt’s hockey feelings, which Wyatt very much did not.
“You watch Game of Thrones?” he asked instead, pulling out his iPad. “I’ve got a headphone splitter and the first season downloaded. As long as you pretend it ends after the sixth or seventh season, it’s worth it.”
“Is this some nerd shit, Hayes?” Rozanov asked. Wyatt thought he was teasing. Maybe. Who could fucking tell?
“Yeah, but there’s also a lot of naked people and bloodshed,” Wyatt said, holding up the headphone splitter. “You in?”
Rozanov shrugged and pulled out some tangled earbuds.
———
Wyatt was not, like, nosy. For sure, he was interested. He was curious. He engaged with people, obviously, because most people were interesting and engaging and had cool thoughts and said neat stuff once you asked.
He passed out about ten minutes into the first episode, and when he blinked awake again, his iPad was closed and the whole plane was dark except for Rozanov, who was texting someone.
Texting someone and smiling about it. And laughing, sort of? And chewing on the inside of his lip and hanging onto every text that came in? Like he was fourteen and writing notes to his crush and his crush was writing back, all smitten and infatuated and gooey and shit?
Rozanov was nice enough, for a certain value of nice. He was friendly. Personable, even. Outgoing when he wanted to be.
But also: Rozanov was odd. He had a talent for talking nonstop and never saying anything about himself. He seemed like he was buddies with everyone and friends with no one, which: he’d been here for a couple of months, so, understandable. But Rozanov seemed like he played his cards so close to his vest that the cards were actually inside his vest, whatever, Wyatt was tired and metaphors were hard.
Point being: everyone else was asleep and here was this unknowable enigma, looking all blushy and wistful and shit. Unexpected, to say the least.
And Wyatt wasn’t nosy, but he wasn’t stupid, either.
Rozanov has a girlfriend? Wyatt thought, and then he pulled his hood around his face and went back to sleep.
———
“Hayes!” The shout rang through the parking garage, and Wyatt didn’t need to turn around to know who it was. There was only one loud Russian in the building.
“Rozanov!” he shouted back, turning in place and smiling back. It wasn’t like Rozanov made him nervous, but Wyatt had dealt with enough hockey players who were complete and utter dicks that he was still… cautious. Rozanov always gave Wyatt the feeling that he was looking at one of those magic eye 3D things where, if you looked the right way, an elephant or whatever would pop out at you. Wyatt had never been much good at them, but Rozanov made him feel like there was an elephant he couldn’t see and maybe wasn’t going to like. Metaphorically.
“Where are you going?”
Wyatt glanced at his Jeep, four spots away, then back at Rozanov.
“Is that a trick question?”
“Come get lunch with me,” Rozanov said, turning away to unlock his car like he was so sure Wyatt would follow him that he didn’t even need to check.
And—that was it. Wyatt had been in Ottawa for three weeks after years and years in Toronto, and it sucked. He missed Lisa, and his friends, and the city, and all he really had to make up for the life he’d left behind was the promise of actually playing hockey on a team not made up of idiotic, smirking fuckmuppets, but so far the hockey was grinding him down because it was game after game of desperately trying to prove he wasn’t old and washed up, and Rozanov was currently looking a little fuckmuppety and a lot smirky.
Also, he needed a nap, so no, he was not going to follow Rozanov into his car like some star-struck rookie.
“Can’t today,” he called, and put a smile on his face because he wasn’t a fuckmuppet either. “I gotta run some errands.”
Then he ignored whatever Rozanov shouted back, got into his Jeep, and drove off.
———
It was the end of practice, and Wyatt was thinking about stamps while everyone took shots on the goal before heading into the locker room, because he’d read somewhere once that technically stamps were interchangeable with legal tender since they were both issued in monetary amounts by the government, so he was wondering what would happen if he tried to buy a donut with stamps. No way, right?
He gloved a puck down and it thunked satisfyingly to the ice.
And what was the deal with stamp collectors? That had to be some kind of scam that had worked spectacularly well for one guy who’d convinced everyone else that an upside-down airplane was worth a shit-ton of money, and then because they were all convinced it was worth that much money, sort of like bitcoin but for—
He lunged right at the last second and just barely gloved another one down. Seconds later Rozanov skated past, and of course he had the temerity to look surprised.
“Nice,” he said as he went past, and yeah. It was nice, thanks.
“You can try again, if you want,” Wyatt called back, and he wasn’t really trash talking but he wasn’t not trash talking, mostly because Rozanov had been playing with him for weeks now and had still looked surprised and, like, what the fuck, dude. Rozanov didn’t respond, just scooped up a puck, looped around, and took another shot. Wyatt got that one too.
This time Rozanov didn’t look surprised, he just grinned.
“Again?” he called, already off.
“You can try it,” Wyatt shouted.
———
A little while later, one of the trainers leaned over the boards and waved.
“Hey,” she called. “I think the zamboni guy wants to get started.”
“The zamboni guy?” Wyatt said, blinking sweat out of his eyes, his brain still ninety-five percent hockey and five percent what’s the deal with stamp collectors, which left zero percent for the zamboni guy.
“Yeah,” she called back. “Big machine, makes the ice smooth?”
Wyatt pulled his helmet off, glanced at Rozanov, and then they looked at the clock in unison.
“Oh,” he said, because he thought it had been twenty minutes but it had been an hour and fifteen since practice ended, and shit, he had a lot of things to do today besides fuck around on the ice with Rozanov. He smiled at the trainer and skated out of the net. “Sorry, lost track.”
“No worries,” she said, and headed off, probably to tell the zamboni guy he was good to go.
Rozanov was grinning when they got off the ice, his face flushed and his hair sweaty and matted.
“I’m not great at time,” Wyatt admitted, rubbing his hand through his equally disgusting hair. “Sorry.”
“Sorry?” Rozanov said, and looked at Wyatt like he was crazy. “Don’t be sorry. Was fun.”
It was the most fun playing hockey Wyatt had had in… weeks. Months? He didn’t want to calculate that particular number, if he was being honest, so instead he grinned over at Rozanov, and Rozanov grinned back, and then they were both laughing for no real reason that Wyatt could tell except that hockey had been fun and it was a gift.
“I’d kind of forgotten,” Wyatt admitted.
“That we get paid to play a game?”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Weird, right?”
“Very weird,” Rozanov agreed. “Good, though.”
They walked in silence for a few moments, Wyatt trying not to grin like a maniac because hockey had been fun, and maybe this was going to work out, he couldn’t wait to call Lisa later—
“Running errands today?” Rozanov asked, changing the subject. He did that a lot.
It took Wyatt a second.
“Could be,” he said. “Why, you got a better offer?”
“Are cheeseburgers and poutine better?”
“Dunno,” Wyatt deadpanned. “Kind of a tossup between that and calling around for moving estimates.”
“That is the most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me,” Rozanov said, and Wyatt laughed again, probably because he was still high on endorphins, but whatever.
“There’s no way that’s true,” he said. “Hell yeah, I love poutine.”
———
Wyatt was not a naturally suspicious guy, but the whole Rozanov goes to Ottawa thing was weird as fuck because there was no good reason for it. Obviously Wyatt didn’t know the inner workings of anyone else’s contract negotiations, but Boston hadn’t wanted to keep him? A good team hadn’t offered him more money or something? Ottawa of all places? Wyatt knew he was there because Toronto wanted good draft picks more than they wanted him, but Rozanov made, like, zero sense.
Wyatt figured there were two options:
1. Ottawa had offered Rozanov something either intangible or illegal, like a herd of trained wolves to do his bidding or world domination, or
2. He was such a nightmare to have on a team that literally nowhere else would take him.
But Wyatt hadn’t seen any trained animals, and sure, Rozanov could be a dick but he was mostly a dick in a way that was annoying at worst and sometimes even kinda fun, so Wyatt still had no fucking clue.
And as much as he wanted to quiz Rozanov on what, exactly, his whole entire deal was, he also figured that everyone else on the planet had already asked and not gotten an answer, so.
“How’d you find out about this place?” he said instead of all that, dredging three fries through poutine while Rozanov took his sweet time answering, apparently, because when Wyatt finally looked up with a mouth full of fries and cheese curd, Rozanov was just watching him like he was trying to decide something.
The guy was weird for sure, but Wyatt could roll with weird. Way better than he could roll with boring.
“Or keep your secrets,” he said, reaching for more fries, and Rozanov snorted.
“Hollander told me about it,” he said.
“How’d he know about it?” Wyatt said around a mouthful of fries, which was impolite, but whatever.
“He’s from here,” Rozanov said, as if everyone memorized Shane Hollander Facts for fun. “His parents still live in town.”
“Oh. Cool,” Wyatt said. “I keep forgetting you guys are friends.”
Rozanov shrugged.
“I saw your press conference, by the way. I’m really sorry about your mom. That must have been hard.”
Wyatt chomped on another mouthful of fries so he wouldn’t keep talking and say something dumb and unhelpful like I can’t even imagine or you were so young.
“Thank you,” Roz said carefully, without meeting Wyatt’s eyes. “Did you find a place yet or are you still at a hotel?”
It was a pretty obvious subject change, but, well. Not everyone wanted to talk about their mom’s death by suicide at what was clearly a size up the new guy lunch.
“We still haven’t decided what we’re gonna do,” he admitted. “Last week when Lisa—sorry, she’s my wife—”
“Yes, you have mentioned her once or twice.”
“Right,” Wyatt said, and smiled because he couldn’t help it. “She came up for a few days last week and we looked at a bunch of places but I dunno if we should bother with buying a place, or just rent, or what.” He shoved more fries into his mouth before he could also say who knows how long I’ll even be here.
“You think you will not stay?”
Wyatt just shrugged and made a gesture that he hoped conveyed I thought I’d warm a bench in Toronto until I retired and now I’m here so who fucking knows anything, really? while he tried not to notice that Rozanov had basically read his mind.
“Could go somewhere better,” Rozanov admitted, after a minute, though he was kind of smiling about it. “Less snow, more…”
He made his own hand gesture, so Wyatt picked up the thread.
“More literally anything else?”
“Yes. That,” Rozanov agreed, leaning back in the booth and smiling. “More something to do besides play hockey, watch hockey, and look at snow falling.”
“I read there’s a tulip festival every spring,” Wyatt offered.
“Sounds amazing,” Rozanov said flatly, and Wyatt snorted.
“You must miss Boston.”
Wyatt hadn’t exactly meant to say it, but sometimes the filter between his brain and mouth was more of a sieve. Rozanov looked away for a moment, and Wyatt wished he’d kept his mouth shut.
“Sometimes, yes,” he said, the paused again. “A lot, actually. Boston was very fun. I miss that, I miss being near the water. I even miss the terrible drivers.”
“I didn’t want to leave Toronto,” Wyatt blurted out, his filter failing again. “I mean—I don’t know. It’s complicated. Now I get to actually play but I’m four hours away from everything else I had going, you know? My friends are all there, my favorite comic store, the good kabob place that’s open all night, the second-run theater that does midnight showings of B-list horror movies, Lisa’s parents, all her friends…”
“You would have rather sat on the bench and stayed?”
Wyatt scrubbed both his hands over his face and wished he could rewind his mouth by about thirty seconds.
“No, of course not,” he said. “I’m all in. Go Centaurs.”
Rozanov snorted, but he was still smiling. “Is fine,” he said, and snagged the last two fries. “I do not think you are the first hockey player to have mixed feelings about being traded. But I can keep a secret.”
“Thanks,” Wyatt said, and felt a little lighter.
———
If, during Wyatt’s rookie year, someone had told him that one day he’d miss Toronto, he’d have laughed, or puked, or something. But he got through that year, even if he didn’t think he would—the stupid rookie hazing, the pranks that tended to tip over from funny to mean, the way half the team couldn’t be bothered to give the backup goalie the time of day. More than anything, he got through game after game on the bench, trying not to think about what could be different.
He’d made it to the show, and the show kind of sucked.
The hockey didn’t suck. The hockey was everything he’d dreamed of: the sheer giddiness of being out on the ice, the strange, comforting thrill of knowing he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Only he barely played hockey and had to deal with all the bullshit anyway.
In the end, it was his big sister Kristy who saved him, so he owed her, probably. She still lived in the city back then so when their playoff run ended she took Wyatt out in the Village and got him plastered, which got him talking, and by the time he was winding down she had his face in her hands and looked very, very seriously into his eyes and told him hockey couldn’t be his life.
There’s so much more, she’d said, with the earnestness of the very intoxicated. Look around you. Look at all this, look at everything that exists in this big beautiful city—
Then she’d started crying, because she was drunk and because she loved Toronto and probably because she’d once told him it saved her life, when she was young and newly out and their small town had felt like it was burying her alive, and Wyatt cried a little too because his sister was crying and because his dreams had turned out to be, like, a chocolate Easter bunny that wasn’t just hollow but was also filled with spiders or something, whatever, he was drunk.
But he’d woken up the next morning on her couch, with a cat on his head and a wastebasket next to him on the floor, and known she was right and hockey wasn’t enough. That if he wanted to make it through this, he needed more.
So he’d found more. The guys on his team were mostly dicks, so he went to board game nights at the comic store close to his apartment and made new friends. The team’s idea of fun was going drinking and picking up women, which had never quite been Wyatt’s scene, so he bought a mountain bike and joined a club. A year passed, and another, and one day he realized he was pretty happy, actually, in Toronto, bench or not.
Then, on the luckiest day of his life, he broke his collarbone. The doctor who fixed him had dark hair and dark eyes and a deadpan sense of humor and strong opinions on the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and Wyatt was so gone for her he forgot his own name.
After that, Toronto was perfect.
———
“To a bar?” Lisa said, like she’d never heard the words before.
“It’s a type of drinking establishment,” Wyatt said. “Where, if you’re old enough, a person will serve you—”
“You know that wasn’t the question, asshole,” she said, laughing. Wyatt grinned at the locker room wall.
“Yeah. A couple other wives and girlfriends are gonna be there. Sounds pretty chill,” he said. “And Bood, like, specifically asked if you were coming and you don’t want to disappoint him, right?”
“Hayes!” shouted the man in question, from clear across the locker room. “Tell your woman she has to come!”
“Your woman?” said Lisa.
“She’s gonna make you answer for that,” he told Bood.
“Good!” he said. “I’ll buy her a drink to make up for it.”
“He says he’ll—”
“I heard him,” Lisa said, and Wyatt could hear her smile. “They heard him on the moon.”
The man in question waved as he left, and Wyatt sat on the bench, lowering his voice.
“Last time I went out with them it was actually fun,” he said, answering her unvoiced questions. “The bar is pretty low-key. We, like, played pool and went home by ten.”
“Tell me more about your glamorous professional athlete lifestyle,” Lisa said.
“You love it.”
“As long as it’s not weird that I’m there,” Lisa said, because they were both remembering the time Lisa had come out with the team in Toronto, because technically, WAGS were welcome. She’d been the only one there, it had been a whole fucking scene, and the next day he’d learned that the other WAGS had gone somewhere else without inviting Lisa, even though she’d been at the game with them. It was the last time he’d bothered trying with most of the guys.
“Not weird,” Wyatt said. “Promise.”
“Then I’m there,” she said easily. “Send me the address.”
———
Three beers in, Wyatt had a big, crashing realization, the kind that felt like it was a meteor and he was an unfortunate tyrannosaurus. Not that he was a T. Rex type. Obviously, if he were a dinosaur he’d be an archaeopteryx, but they lived at the wrong time to get wiped out by a meteor, so.
This is good, he realized. He was hanging out with a group of hockey players, from his own actual team in his own actual city, and it was good. He had hockey player friends, obviously; he hung out in groups of hockey players all the time, but they had always been—chosen, friends he’d made in places besides Toronto’s locker room. And secretly, deep down, he’d assumed that all NHL teams were the same way once you were in them.
I like it here, he thought, and turned that thought over a few times in his mind. Flipped it around, held it up to the light like it was a stained glass window, checking for cracks. He was alone in the booth for the moment—Dykstra had gone to the bathroom, Roz had gone to get another round but was busy flirting with a blonde at the bar, Boodram was trying to teach one of the rookies how to play darts while Tanner tried to hustle him, Lisa was talking to Chouinard, who was nodding very seriously—and he stared at the TV above the bar, playing some hockey game, and he thought: I can’t believe I like it here.
“The problem with James Bond is he’s a spy, not an action hero,” Dykstra said from somewhere behind Wyatt before throwing himself into the booth opposite. “All the cool shit he does is spy shit, not action shit.”
Wyatt grinned, leaning back in the booth.
“That seems like semantic distinction at best,” he pointed out. “Isn’t blowing up cars and shit action hero stuff?”
“But he does it in a spy kinda way,” said Dykstra. “Like, with sneaky remotes and shit.”
“An explosion is an explosion,” Wyatt said. “That’s like, the pinnacle of action. There’s nothing more action-y than an explosion.”
“But James Bond is all about the low-key explosion,” Dykstra went on, because he was apparently determined to die on this hill. “He never, like, blows up the whole building. He blows up one guy, in one car. With a personal touch.”
Beers thunked down, followed shortly by Roz. Wyatt grabbed one.
“Are you still arguing about Action Movie Mount Rushmore?” Roz asked.
“I thought you were leaving with that girl,” Dykstra said, and Roz shrugged.
“He thinks James Bond isn’t an action guy because he’s a spy so all his explosions are personal,” Wyatt said.
“The fuck is a personal explosion?” Roz asked, and then they were arguing again, and Bood came back, and Lisa sat next to Wyatt and he put an arm around her as she made some very salient points in favor of putting Indiana Jones on Action Hero Mount Rushmore, and—it was good.
———
Scratch that. Watching Lisa lay out a very well-reasoned, thorough, and swearing-filled argument in favor of Indiana Jones while utterly destroying every point Dykstra tried to make wasn’t good, it was transcendent and also hot as fuck. God, he missed her, even as he was grinning so hard he thought his face might break.
———
“Was fun, yes?” Roz asked as they headed out the back door and into the fucking freezing parking lot, the first snow of the season still around the edges.
“For sure,” Wyatt said, breath frosting in front of his face.
“I know you had fun, Hazy, I was asking Lisa,” Roz said, grinning like the shithead he was.
“Yeah, Hazy,” Lisa snickered.
“Oh, fuck off,” he teased, and she laughed.
“Yeah,” she said. “The team seems pretty cool.”
“Better than Toronto?”
“I mean,” Lisa said, and glanced at Wyatt, because she had manners and circumspection and shit. “You know. Different.”
“They know Toronto sucked,” Wyatt said. “Sucks? Present tense.”
“Then oh, my God, so much better,” Lisa said on a hard exhale. “Those guys were just—a whole collection of mouth-breathing dickheaded assholes.”
Roz made a delighted noise, and Wyatt snorted.
“A collection?” he said, because that was a new one from her. Lisa grinned.
“Sure,” she said. “You know, a variety of dickheaded assholes. One in every flavor.”
“Mouth-breathing dickheaded assholes,” Roz corrected. Wyatt wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him quite this excited.
“Sorry, you’re right, that part’s important,” Lisa agreed.
“Mouth-breathing dickheaded asshole. Now I have something to say to Kent next time we play.”
“Tell him I sent you,” Lisa said, still half-laughing. “I want him to know it was me.”
“Just don’t drag my name into it. I’m supposed to be the nice one,” Wyatt said.
“Are you?” said Roz.
“It’s your own fault for marrying a foul-mouthed, uppity broad,” Lisa said.
“She is making a lot of very good points.”
“I can’t believe you’re ganging up on me like this,” Wyatt said, but he was still laughing, and the beers had worn off a little while ago but he still felt like—not a firework but maybe a sparkler or something, or a really nice candle, quiet and bright because Lisa was here, with his teammates, and they were getting along and they liked each other and Wyatt had never dared to hope for this, before. It had never occurred to him that he could.
“He plays professional hockey and he is complaining about this,” Roz said, pulling his phone out of his pocket, and then there it was, that weird, secret smile. “Sorry. I should go, but I will see you Friday?”
“For sure,” Wyatt said, and waved, and just before he and Lisa turned toward their own car he heard Roz say hey, I was just about to call you in the warmest voice he’d ever heard from the guy.
“He’s not that bad,” Lisa said as they walked back to the car.
“I’ll tell him you think so,” Wyatt said as they got in, and she snorted.
———
“You like it here,” Lisa said, later that night. They were tangled in a pile of blankets and pillows, Wyatt’s face in her hair. She smelled good, sort of herbal, like nice shampoo, and Wyatt was trying to memorize it for two days from now, when she was driving back to Toronto and the life he’d had until a month ago.
He still missed it. He liked Ottawa and missed Toronto, all at once, and he was falling asleep and trying not to because when he woke up he’d be a day closer to having the apartment to himself again.
“Yeah, I do,” he said, the first time he’d actually thought that out loud.
“Do they like you?”
“Everyone likes me,” he said, and she made a face and poked a fresh bruise on his ribcage. “Ow.”
“Ottawa General wants me to come back in two weeks for a third-round interview,” Lisa said, and Wyatt propped himself up on one elbow, grinning.
“I told you they would,” he said. “Obviously. You’re the best.”
“And you’re so unbiased.”
“I can be biased and right at the same time, thanks,” Wyatt said, and he couldn’t stop smiling because it was true, she really was the best, and he liked it when other people proved him right, and it also meant that maybe they’d get to live together again sooner rather than later.
“Sure,” she said, smirking a little, her hair in her face, her ribs rising and falling under Wyatt’s hand as he burrowed back in. “But you do like it here, right?”
He thought about it, this time. He breathed her in deep and stroked his thumb over her bare skin, still heated, and tried to gather the scattered, frantic pieces of the last month together, and what he came up with was—
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “I really do.”
———
“I tried,” Roz said, skating past Wyatt during a break in play during their next game against Toronto. “But only got through mouth-breathing dickhead so far.”
“There’s still two periods left,” Wyatt said, and Roz laughed.
It was pretty sweet when Wyatt blocked Kent’s fifth shot on the goal in the third period, and it was even sweeter when he saw Kent’s face, all twisted up with rage, glaring daggers.
“Your wife’s a dumb slut,” he snarled, then looked confused as fuck when Wyatt started laughing. “Fucking weirdo,” he said, and skated off.
Over on the bench, Roz gave Wyatt a thumbs up.
———
Wyatt was really, truly going to leave the whole Roz has a mystery girlfriend thing alone. He honestly was. He was going to practice mindfulness and staying in his lane and repeat the mantra it is not my business one hundred thousand times, except the universe absolutely did not want him to.
No. The universe wanted Roz’s phone to somehow always be in his line of sight, and the universe wanted Roz to never lock the screen and to be texting hearts all the time. The universe wanted Wyatt to walk by Roz’s car and accidentally notice a coffee cup left in the passenger-side cupholder, way out of Roz’s reach. The universe wanted Wyatt’s dumb, overactive, observant brain to see what were very obviously fingernail marks on Roz’s shoulder after they had a day off.
And taken one by one, nothing meant anything. There were perfectly good and normal and non-secret-girlfriend reasons for all those things, and Wyatt told himself that at least once a day. Reason and logic dictated that he was inventing something out of nothing, so he should just pretend that Roz’s phone was invisible and stop thinking about it, for the love of God.
———
It was not invisible. Jesus Christ, the eggplant emojis.
———
Ottawa wanted him to stay. Management had said as much. He’d been starting virtually every game, and Ottawa probably wasn’t going to make the playoffs that year but they were looking closer than they’d been in… Wyatt didn’t even know, but he did know that for the first time ever, he could feel something coming together on a team, some sort of simmering potential when they were all on the ice.
Hockey was fun, again. Wyatt had almost forgotten.
———
Lisa got the job. They celebrated by drinking too much wine at a really nice restaurant and making out in the Uber on the way home. Wyatt was ninety percent sure that the driver hadn’t seen anything worse than PG-13, but he still tipped really well and they even got through the front door before he had his head under her skirt.
———
The second Wyatt took his scarf off, Tanner Dillon fucking whistled about it.
“Nice,” he said, and then, because he was a dumbass: “Someone got lucky!”
“Lisa in town?” Dykstra asked, kind of smirking about it.
“It’s a bruise,” Wyatt said, and because God was cruel, that got everyone’s attention.
———
Honestly, Wyatt could just ask Roz about the girlfriend. Asking was very normal human behavior and there was nothing wrong with it. Asking wasn’t doing anything out of line, and Wyatt had done his very best to not know any of this, actually, so he was for sure fully justified in acting like it was common knowledge that Roz was seeing someone and just asking about it, like a regular fucking person who didn’t ever fixate on learning things he wasn’t supposed to know.
———
“Hey,” Wyatt said quietly, once the locker room was emptying out and most everyone was wearing clothes. “Feel free to bring a plus one to game night if you want.”
Roz was sitting on the bench and his head jerked up when he looked at Wyatt, and his face was so weird, almost like—panicked?
But then it was gone and he raised one eyebrow and said, “A plus one?”
Wyatt shrugged and grinned. “You know. Anyone you might want to bring to a game night. Friend. Buddy. Girlfriend.”
That got a stare so long and indecipherable that Wyatt had time to reflect, very thoroughly, on how much he probably should have kept his mouth shut.
“If I did have a girlfriend, I would not make her come to game night,” Roz finally said as he stood, then gave Wyatt some sort of look as he walked past. “But there is no girlfriend.”
Then he left Wyatt standing there and feeling like an asshole and also, somehow, now absolutely certain that something was up with Roz.
———
“There’s for sure a girlfriend,” Lisa said, scrolling through her phone. They were on the couch, his arm draped over her shoulders, ignoring some movie because talking was more fun. “All these gossip tweets and photos of him making out with random girls are a couple years old.”
She scrolled a little more, stopping a few times.
“Everything substantive, at least,” she said. “I’m not counting Ilya Rozanov talks to woman or whatever. All of you have to do that, sooner or later.”
“Unfortunately,” Wyatt teased, and Lisa elbowed him in the ribs.
“Or maybe he’s taken a vow of chastity, I don’t know,” she said. “He suddenly get right with God?”
Wyatt paused, frowning. “Maybe?” he said. “He’s always wearing a cross.”
“Always?”
“Yeah?”
“Is it new?”
“How am I supposed to know?” Wyatt asked. “I’m new.”
Lisa muttered something about him being no help, but she snuggled closer as some cars chased each other around on the TV and she scrolled through more pictures of Roz on her phone. After a few minutes she tapped one, then zoomed in on his neck.
“He’s got a chain on in this one,” she said. “Is that it?”
It was a shiny chain, peeking out of the neck of a t-shirt at some press conference. Wyatt couldn’t even tell what color it was.
“Maybe,” he said. “When’s that from?”
Lisa went silent for a moment, then sighed. “Twenty sixteen,” she said.
“When do the makeout pictures stop?”
Lisa tossed her phone down on the couch and tilted her head back against Wyatt’s arm, looking up at him.
“I’m about to do something and you can’t make fun of me for it because you brought this to me in the first place,” she said.
“Just a little.”
Very seriously, Lisa held her finger and thumb a centimeter apart.
“Deal,” Wyatt said, and Lisa got up and headed for their office.
———
That was how Wyatt learned you could make a timeline in Excel. He considered himself more knowledgeable about spreadsheets than a good ninety-five percent of the NHL, but he’d had no idea about that one. In about twenty minutes, they had a visually pleasing, well-laid-out timeline of Roz’s activities over the past few years. Lisa assured him that it would be very easy to add further data points in whenever necessary, and Wyatt couldn’t even pretend that wasn’t hot.
She also knew how to password-protect an Excel file—which absolutely did not make Wyatt even a little hard, of course not—which was good because no one could ever know Wyatt had made a spreadsheet (or helped) so he could investigate his teammate’s love life. There was regular goalie weird and there was what the fuck, Wyatt, and he knew which category this one fell into.
———
Wyatt didn’t even want to care whether Roz had a girlfriend. One, it was none of his business. Two, it was none of his business, and three, if Roz wanted to keep something a secret, it was absolutely none of Wyatt’s business so help him God.
Roz’s girlfriend being none of his business, unfortunately, did not actually matter. It was something that Wyatt wasn’t supposed to know but that maybe he could figure out, and that meant his brain never shut up about it no matter how hard he tried.
He knew there were people who could just… think about nothing. He’d once sat next to a teammate on a flight to the West Coast, and the guy had honest to God sat in silence and stared at the back of the seat in front of him for five hours. Just remembering it made Wyatt feel itchy.
Roz obviously had a girlfriend, because his face didn’t quit looking like that when he got texts, sometimes, and sometimes he’d sneak away and make a phone call and come back way too happy, and sometimes the guys would chirp him about cute girls in a bar or whatever and he’d just get this funny little smirk on his face as he chirped them back, like there was an inside joke that only he knew about.
But also, like, he never actually picked up. He’d flirt with the cute girls who came up to him, but he never left with anyone. He never even initiated flirting, which Wyatt guessed you didn’t have to if you were Ilya Rozanov, but it was interesting nonetheless.
So, maybe not girlfriend, but like—special lady friend. Girl he wanted to be his girlfriend, or something like that, only maybe it was complicated because there was some reason they couldn’t—
It didn’t have to be a girlfriend.
And.
Huh.
———
Wyatt rubbed his face against that soft, velvety skin where Lisa’s hip met her thigh, and listened to her half-yelp and half-giggle and half try to catch her breath, fingers still threaded through his hair. He’d been gone for ten days and it had seriously not been cool.
“Do you think Rozanov is straight?” he said a few minutes later, once he’d rolled off and pushed his face against her side, all soft and warm and God, he just wanted to sink in and stay there forever.
There was a slight rustle, and then Lisa lifted her head, face pink, and she was looking down at him before flopping her head back again.
“You have to give me five minutes before you start talking about your teammates,” she said, but she was laughing.
“Even Roz?”
“Especially Roz,” she said, and Wyatt clambered up the mattress until he could give her a slow, lazy kiss. When he pulled back, she wiped at his mouth with her hand, and Wyatt just snorted, grinning.
“You love it,” he said.
“Shut up,” Lisa answered, so he kissed her again before rolling off and letting her curl into him, both of them half-sprawled, her head beneath his chin.
“But seriously,” he said, after a minute.
“You think Rozanov is,” she said, and paused for a split second, like she was running through the options. “Bi?”
“I very specifically asked you.”
“I’ve talked to him for like five minutes total,” Lisa said, grabbing Wyatt’s wrist and arranging his arm to her liking. She could be bossy like that, sometimes arranged him like he was her own personal body pillow even though he had seven inches and fifty pounds on her. God, he was so into it. “Does he ever check out dudes?”
“What does that even look like?”
“It looks like checking out dudes.”
“It’s not like he’s pulling off his sunglasses and doing that aaahhoooga heart-eyes thing at randos on the street!”
“That what?”
Wyatt grinned into Lisa’s hair, trying not to laugh. She was definitely about to give him shit.
“You know,” he said, as she pulled back and looked up. “Like in cartoons, when Bugs Bunny walks by dressed like a hot girl bunny, and everyone goes AHHOOOOHHGAA and their eyes pop out like hearts?”
Lisa was trying so hard to keep a straight face.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t seen the episode where everyone is super horny for gender-bent Bugs Bunny.”
“You’re missing out.”
“Am I?” she asked, but tucked herself against Wyatt again, all warm skin and soft muscle and bony points. Wyatt idly wondered where the blankets had gone. Probably kicked off the bed in their enthusiasm.
“No, I’ve never seen Roz check out dudes,” Wyatt said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not into dudes, it just means he doesn’t check dudes out around his dumb hockey teammates. Which I would also not do if I checked out dudes.”
“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “Maybe? But I can never tell with the Europeans.”
“Yeah, me either.”
“You can’t tell with anyone,” Lisa pointed out. “You had no clue about Ryan.”
“He’s from Nova Scotia!”
Lisa snorted and bit her lip like she was trying not to laugh. “Does that matter?”
“I dunno,” Wyatt said, and he was grinning again, because he could never help it around her. “It’s the Maritimes.”
“Oh, the Maritimes.”
“You know what they’re like. All Maritimey and shit.”
Now her forehead was against the hollow of his throat, one arm draped over his ribcage, her body curled into his, shaking with laughter. Wyatt put a hand on her ass because he could and felt so bright and glowy it was like he’d swallowed radium.
“Is this about the girlfriend he doesn’t have but who he’s totally still texting all the time?” Lisa asked once she stopped laughing. Wyatt kept her up-to-date on, well, everything.
“Maybe he’s being so weird because it’s not a girlfriend,” he said, drumming fingers on her spine. “I wouldn’t blame him for not telling people.”
Not for the first time, Wyatt was glad he was straight, and then also not for the first time he felt guilty about being glad he was straight. It wasn’t the heterosexuality he was glad about, really, just all the stuff that came with it. Like, he had never had to think twice about introducing his life partner to someone, or worried what his teammates would think if he told them he was into women.
He’d kissed a dude, once, just to make sure. It had been at some college party with no hockey players, and they’d both been drunk, and somehow the conversation had devolved into what if we’re bi and we don’t even know? Like maybe we should check? Like maybe the clouds will part and angels will sing and shit?
No angels had appeared. Later, Wyatt figured out that his lack of interest in kissing dudes should have been his first clue. At least now he never had to wonder if he was missing something great.
“Well, and there’s the Russia thing,” Lisa said.
“Mmm?”
“It’s illegal to be gay in Russia. Or queer at all.”
Wyatt’s hand stilled, because: oh, fuck. He hadn’t thought of that.
“What happens if a famous Russian comes out?” Wyatt asked, frowning into the space above Lisa’s head.
“I dunno exactly, but it’s not great,” she said. “Probably keep your suspicions to yourself.”
———
Wyatt sprawled sideways on the hotel bed in his boxers, the phone ringing in his ear, the room wobbling just a bit too much around him. J.J. was a bad influence and also every bartender’s best friend, which was a hell of a combination.
“Hey,” Lisa answered on the third ring. “How’s Montreal?”
Wyatt just sighed noisily into the phone. They’d lost, which wasn’t really a surprise, but it did suck.
“Guess who’s gay,” he said instead of talking about hockey.
Lisa paused on the other end of the line.
“Like, literally guess?” she asked.
“Shane Hollander,” Wyatt said.
“Oh,” Lisa said, in the tone of voice that meant she was trying to remember who Shane Hollander was.
“The dickhead who scored on us twice tonight,” Wyatt grumbled, because honestly, fuck Shane Hollander sometimes. “Montreal captain? Half-Japanese? You think he’s cute.”
“He came out? Like out out?”
“Just to his teammates,” Wyatt clarified. “But. You know. Hockey players are gossipy as fuck.” As if he didn’t immediately report any and all gossip to Lisa. As if his favorite part of hearing good hockey gossip wasn’t getting to tell her about it later.
“Oh, yeah, he’s totally cute,” Lisa said, presumably looking at a picture of Shane Hollander. “So do you have to be gay to be a hockey captain now?”
Wyatt was too drunk to follow.
“Huh?” he managed.
“What’s his face who kissed his boyfriend when he won the Cup,” she said.
Lisa could name every bone in the human body and could explain the entire lymphatic system in detail and had an encyclopedic knowledge of viruses, but she couldn’t remember hockey player names to save her life. Wyatt figured it was a reasonable trade off.
“Scott Hunter,” Wyatt said. “I mean, that’s two?”
“I’m sure plenty of other people are queer and not out,” Lisa said. “It’s gotta be rough. Some places more than others.”
She meant Toronto and how often Wyatt had come home furious about some bullshit Kent or Barrett had spewed. He still missed the city, but he didn’t miss them.
“Sounded like Hollander’s doing okay,” Wyatt said. “J.J. is, like, aggressively supportive of him. Like willing to beat someone with a rainbow flag aggressively supportive.”
“That doesn’t sound familiar at all,” Lisa said, laughing, and Wyatt sighed into the phone. He had, when necessary, been willing to get in peoples’ faces for his sister.
“Sometimes people need their asses beat,” he muttered. “I should text Price, see how he’s doing. Speaking of which.”
“Go to sleep,” Lisa said, yawning. “And keep listening to gossip so you can tell me about it.”
“Should I text Hollander? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Text him what?”
Still flopped on his belly, head hanging over the side of the bed, Wyatt stared at the hotel carpet. It offered no advice.
“It’s cool that you’re gay,” he finally said.
“That could be a starting point.”
“Hurray, you’re gay?”
“Are you a greeting card?”
“Fuck, babe, I dunno. Just something nice? Like hey I heard this thing and I think we met once for one half of one second and I bet a lot of people are about to be absolute dicks to you but I think it’s cool and brave? How’s that?”
Lisa didn’t say anything for a moment.
“I think,” she finally said. “You should sober up before you send anything but keep that last one in mind.”
“Is it weird to text him at all?”
“Maybe?”
Wyatt sighed into the phone and wondered if there was some advice column he could write into that specialized in professional athletes trying to be good, inclusive bros without fucking it up or making it weird in a culture that could really be a shitshow.
“Wait,” he said, sat up suddenly, and then regretted sitting up suddenly. “I could ask Roz, they’re friends.”
“Does Roz know?”
“That they’re friends?”
Lisa burst out laughing, and it took Wyatt a solid ten seconds to figure out why.
“Shut up,” he said, grinning.
“If you know, he probably knows,” she said, still laughing.
“Probably,” Wyatt said, facedown in the comforter. Fuck, the room was all spinny and stuff. “I’m overthinking this. Am I overthinking this?”
“Get some sleep,” Lisa said. “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Wyatt said, and even managed to brush his teeth before passing out.
———
Wyatt was stretching a few days later when someone walked in and plopped down on the mat right next to him, as if their concept of personal space was a little fuzzy.
“You texted Hollander,” Roz said. “About coming out.”
Wyatt’s head snapped up and before he even realized what he was doing, he’d double-checked that the room was empty, no one outside the door.
“Is just us,” Roz said, because he wasn’t an idiot.
“I went out with J. J. in Montreal, and he told me,” Wyatt explained, feeling oddly caught out, like he’d been doing something he shouldn’t. “And I don’t really know him or anything, but I thought it might… be good?”
That morning, a few days after they’d gotten back from their roadie, he’d finally texted Shane Hollander a Lisa-workshopped version of his last drunken suggestion. Hollander had been friendly when he replied, they’d chatted a little about Ottawa, it had been nice. So Wyatt had no idea why Roz was invading his space right now, giving him a look that he probably thought was intimidating.
“It was,” Roz finally said. “His team has been…” he tilted his flat hand in the air, the universal symbol of meh.
“I wish I was surprised,” Wyatt said, who wasn’t surprised about that but was, a little, that Roz had apparently discussed this with Hollander in the few hours since he’d texted. And that Hollander and Roz talked about, like, feelings and problems and shit?
It was good. Roz seemed like he needed friends, and Hollander seemed cool. Just… surprising.
“Yes. Same,” Roz said, voice tight, accent a little thicker. “And most hockey players would rather wade through raw sewage than send nice texts to gay people.”
“Stuff like that always seemed like it helped Kristy,” Wyatt said, and Roz blinked. “My sister. She came out in high school, and we lived in a really small town, and, you know.”
“Your sister is queer?” Roz said, maybe more surprised than Wyatt had ever seen him.
“Yeah,” he said, a little mystified, because plenty of people had queer siblings? “She and her wife and kid live in Vancouver. I got them tickets for our next game out there.”
“That is great!” Roz said, and he was way more excited than Wyatt would’ve expected.
“Thanks,” Wyatt said, kinda at a loss. “I think so too?”
“What are you doing this summer?” Roz asked, and Wyatt stared. What?
“Lisa and I have been talking about going to Thailand or something,” he said. “And I’ll probably visit Kristy for a while, but otherwise I’ll be here, playing house husband.”
“You like kids, yes?”
“Yeah?”
“Great,” Roz said. “Come coach at our hockey camps in July. Will be fun.”
Wyatt thought about that for several seconds, and finally came up with: “Did you just ask me to coach at your camps because my sister’s a lesbian?”
It was the first time he’d ever seen Roz blush.
“We want the camps to be, you know,” he said, and waved a hand around like Wyatt would know what he meant. “For everyone. Because hockey should be that way and… is not.”
“Oh,” Wyatt said, and his brain felt like the tumblers in a combination lock, pins suddenly all clicking into place, because he’d always wondered how the hell Roz and Hollander became friends, but it was starting to make sense if they had a shared cause.
Wyatt must have stared too long, because Roz shrugged and stood.
“Let me know,” he said, heading out of the room. “I will text you the dates.”
“Right, thanks,” Wyatt called after him.
———
“Bro,” Dykstra said, plopping down next to Wyatt on the locker room bench. “We gotta talk.”
“What’s up?”
“You can’t ask me about cartoons in the middle of a game, dude,” Dykstra said. Wyatt blinked at him. Had he…?
“Sorry, man,” he said, wondering what exactly he’d asked Dykstra. Sometimes—okay, usually—his mind wandered during games, but he tended to play better when he was also thinking about, like, how spiders managed to keep from getting tangled in their own webs.
“No bigs,” Dykstra said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Just messes with my focus, but you keep doing whatever works for you. Which is apparently cartoons.”
“I can’t pay too much attention,” Wyatt said. “It’s like, if I think about what I’m doing too much I can’t think about it at all.”
Dykstra looked at him like he was speaking Klingon.
“So you asked me about my favorite Ninja Turtle in the middle of a game?” he said.
“Donatello,” Bood shouted from halfway across the room, somehow involved in every conversation at once.
“I don’t know. Sort of? I was thinking about getting pizza after the game, and then I was thinking about getting sausage pizza, and then I was thinking about that one episode of the Ninja Turtles where they get pizza and there’s one giant sausage ball in the middle and they all fight over it, but it’s actually—”
“You fuckin’ nerd,” Dykstra said, affectionately, putting his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder.
———
It was intuition, sort of, except that made it sound like Wyatt had a room full of moon-charged crystals and tarot cards, and that was not his jam. Nothing wrong with it. Tarot cards looked cool as fuck, they just weren’t for him.
More like Wyatt had learned a long time ago that his subconscious worked out problems better and faster if he left it alone for a bit. Sort of how if you tried to look directly at a star, it was hard to see, but if you looked at the blackness of space right next to a star it would be brighter, something about rods and cones that Lisa could explain but he couldn’t. Sometimes it felt like magic, like knowledge simply being bibbity-bobbity-booed right into his brain, but it wasn’t. Just brains being brains. Mostly, his intuition was pretty chill and usually helpful.
Like: Cavanaugh wants you to think he’s gonna shoot for the top corner, but it’s a fake out and he’s going for the bottom.
Or like: Johansson seems like he’s having a rough rookie year being away from his family, maybe invite him over for dinner.
And one time, it was like: by the way, Roz’s secret boyfriend is Shane Hollander.
———
It was on the ice, actually. Their last game that season against Montreal, and play had stopped and Wyatt was half thinking about hockey and half wondering what animal scallops came from, like, were they bivalves or something? What did they look like in the wild? Were they in a shell or free-floating or were there tentacles? And Roz and Hollander were both still there, bothering each other, when Hollander said something and skated off, looking annoyed, and Roz—
Roz had the same look on his face he had when he was texting hearts and eggplant emojis and oh, fuck.
Jesus holy motherfucking Christ, what the fuck.
———
“Everything good?” asked Dykstra, back in the locker room. “Look, everybody has an off night once in a while.”
It had been Wyatt’s worst game all season, and he couldn’t even think about it. For a moment he stared at Dykstra, a little afraid that if he tried to talk he’d open his mouth and accidentally say Roz is secretly dating Shane Hollander oh my god what the fuck?!
“Just tired,” he managed, and was pretty sure he even smiled.
———
Maybe it was a prank. Please, God, let it be the longest, subtlest prank in the history of dumb hockey pranks. Let Roz be waiting for Wyatt to say something about him and Hollander so he could record Wyatt’s reaction and show the whole team so they could all laugh at him, or something, except—except that wasn’t it, and Wyatt fucking knew it.
Unless it was a really complicated prank. Maybe the whole team was in on it. Maybe every conversation he’d had with Roz this whole season had been part of the prank. Maybe everyone but Wyatt knew about it and when he finally broke and opened his mouth they’d all have a good laugh and he’d look like an idiot.
And every single other scenario Wyatt came up with over the next few shell-shocked hours made more sense than Roz and Hollander are dating. There were a million reasons he was wrong, a million more likely explanations for—what, Roz making some kind of face in the middle of a hockey game? Everyone made faces, all the time, it was a sport. It didn’t even need an explanation.
By the time Wyatt was finished reasoning with himself, he only had one major problem left: he was right, and he knew it.
———
“Look at me,” Lisa said, both hands on his face, staring up into his eyes.
“I didn’t take any hits.”
“I saw you.”
“That wasn’t nearly hard enough for a concussion.”
“Wyatt.”
“I have a helmet!”
Lisa didn’t answer, just held up one finger. Wyatt rolled his eyes before dutifully tracking it back and forth until she seemed satisfied.
“You can just say you don’t believe me about this,” he said, trying not to laugh.
“Would you believe you?”
“Oh, definitely not,” he said, and now he was grinning because honestly? What the fuck. “Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
“You really think Roz is dating—” Lisa gestured with one hand. She’d forgotten Shane Hollander’s name again. Wyatt loved her so much.
“Hollander.”
“Do you have any actual evidence? That’s not circumstantial?”
Wyatt took a long drink of the blue Gatorade, leaning against the island in their kitchen, and tried to come up with something that Lisa might actually count as evidence.
He failed.
“It’s all kinda,” he said, and ran a hand through his still-slightly-damp hair. “Vibes-based.”
“Vibes aren’t data,” Lisa pointed out.
“That doesn’t mean they’re wrong,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t not believe you,” Lisa said.
“You also don’t do believe me,” Wyatt said, grinning, and Lisa rolled her eyes but she was smiling.
“Fuck off,” she said. “Is it even legal to date another hockey player? Like NHL legal?”
“I think it’s an Air Bud situation.”
Lisa narrowed her eyes for a moment. “Is that the one where there’s no rule that says a dog can’t play basketball?”
Wyatt grinned and pointed finger guns at her, one hand still holding the gatorade bottle. He was feeling punchy as fuck but how the hell was he supposed to feel? This was weird and concerning and alarming and weird, and Wyatt felt like he should be doing something about it, except like—what? Something had to happen now, right? Wyatt couldn’t just live his life knowing this and not, like, implode.
“Okay,” Lisa finally said, and she tilted her head and crossed her arms in her working through possibilities and finding solutions stance. Wyatt’s whole body relaxed. “Let’s say they’re dating. What are your options for next steps, particularly in the absence of proof?”
Wyatt took a deep breath, because Lisa had a good point. Lisa usually had good points.
“I mean, in theory I could tell people, who would all think I’m crazy,” he said, ticking it off on a finger. “Coach? Owners? Team? Twitter?”
Lisa was making the world’s most skeptical face, and she wasn’t wrong.
“Right, so, obviously not for a million reasons,” Wyatt went on, an ticked off another finger. “I could ask Roz about it, I guess.” Another finger. “I could ask Hollander. Or I could keep my mouth shut forever and not do anything.”
He sighed and rubbed his hands over his face.
“It’s the last one,” he said.
“You could ask Roz,” Lisa pointed out. “You’re friends, right? Maybe he’d appreciate a supportive teammate in his corner.”
“I don’t think we’re that kind of friends,” Wyatt said, and tried to imagine a scenario where he said some version of so actually you have a romantic relationship with Hollander to Roz’s face, and he couldn’t. He simply could not. “Also, what if I’m wrong?”
“Then I think you keep the secret and try to forget about it,” she said, shrugging. “Assuming there’s even a secret to keep.”
———
The holy shit, Roz’s boyfriend is Hollander maybe-revelation did not help Wyatt mind his own business. It did, however, make the final week of the season absolutely excruciating because Wyatt knew two things:
1. He absolutely, upon pain of death, had to keep his mouth shut, and
2. He was not very good at keeping his mouth shut.
———
At the start of the next season, three things all happened at once:
One, he was suddenly, like, medium hockey-famous. As in his name got said on Sports Center a bunch of times and there were articles with titles like Wyatt Hayes: Who is He And Where Did He Come From? Twitter decided it had, like, opinions about him, and he lost an entire day reading about himself and freaking out before Lisa found him, took his phone, and blocked everything she could in an act of spousal mercy.
Two, the aforementioned Various Hockey Media figured out that he and Roz were friends and decided they’d hung out all summer, which wasn’t really true, it had only been the hockey camps, but they declared it equal parts shocking and adorable anyway.
And three, the Centaurs hired a social media guy.
———
Of all people, Dillon Tanner was the one to start the #centaurbromance tag, because he was a little dumb and a little bit of a dick and thought it was just hilarious when Wyatt fell asleep on a plane with his head on Roz’s shoulder. Which, like, happened if you spent enough time exhausted on airplanes, which they did.
It blew up. Wyatt had to admit he didn’t totally get the big deal—they were friends, so what—but Harris the social media guy seemed very excited to be trending and Wyatt liked Harris, so he went with it.
The second picture, of Roz passed out on Wyatt’s shoulder, really sealed the deal and now it was a thing.
———
“Tumblr’s always the worst. Whatever you do, don’t look at the Hayesanov tag,” Harris said cheerfully, like he’d given helpful advice and not just planted a horrible seed in Wyatt’s brain. “See you guys when you get back. Send me content!”
“Okay. What is Hayesanov?” Roz asked, the second they were out of Harris’s office.
Wyatt didn’t say anything, just glanced over at Roz. He raised one eyebrow. Roz glanced back at Harris’s office, then shrugged, and Wyatt didn’t want to seem like he was dying of curiosity, but he kind of was.
Good thing Roz already had his phone out. They both swiped in silence for a moment, then Wyatt abruptly stopped.
“Uh,” he said, and glanced up. He was pretty sure he was already fire-engine red.
“This is,” Roz said, and met Wyatt’s gaze. If he didn’t know better, he’d think Roz looked… scandalized.
“So,” Wyatt said, and he wasn’t panicking because he was a grown adult who paid bills and played a contact sport for a living and he was not going to freak out over a drawing, but also, the drawing had dick veins, for fuck’s sake, he was allowed to feel weird about it.
Also kind of scandalized. Also oddly guilty? Also a little worried that not wanting to look at a picture that featured him, Roz, and dick veins made him somehow homophobic but Roz was standing across from him also looking very pink and thoroughly shook, so he was probably okay on that front.
“I guess Harris was right,” Wyatt finally said after a good thirty seconds of silence.
“I am going to close this and never think about it again,” Roz said evenly, and Wyatt nodded.
———
“Wow,” Lisa said, sitting on the kitchen counter when they finally saw each other the next night, opposite Wyatt, who has his head on his arms on the breakfast bar. “That is vascular.”
“Oh god,” Wyatt said, muffled.
“Almost looks uncomfortable,” she went on.
“You weren’t supposed to look at it,” Wyatt said, weakly. “You were supposed to… I don’t know.”
“Make you unsee it?”
“Can you do that?”
“Not with any precision,” she said, and when Wyatt looked up, she was tilting her head slightly and looking at her phone as if it were a somewhat puzzling x-ray.
“I’m gonna need more explanation,” he said.
“Amnesia,” Lisa said, still looking at the picture on her phone. Was she trying to memorize it? Jesus. “Certain brain injuries can induce it, but obviously it’s impossible to control what memories are lost or for how long. A healthy lumbar spine isn’t this flexible, for the record.”
“Thank you,” Wyatt said, now half-sprawled across the countertop, one elbow on a pile of unopened mail that he was definitely going to get to any day now. “Are you finished looking at pornography of me and my coworker or should I give you a few minutes alone with it?”
“I know you used to read Game of Thrones fanfic,” Lisa said. “How were you not expecting this?”
“How was I not expecting an explicit picture of my real-life friend and I to be the very first thing that came up?” Wyatt asked. “You’re right, how did that not cross my mind? I should always expect erotic depictions of myself and my colleagues.”
Lisa was quiet for too long.
“You have to stop looking at it,” Wyatt said.
“Sorry, someone reblogged it with a short story,” she said. “The punctuation is terrible and they’re way off with what they think you say in bed—”
“Okay,” Wyatt said, pushing back from the breakfast bar and coming around to where Lisa was. “Nope. Phone time is done.”
“Wyatt’s angelic blond curls were slicked with sweat, his eyes wide and desperate—no!” Lisa yelped, pulling the phone away as Wyatt tried to grab it. Adorable, how she thought holding it over her head would work. “This is thievery.”
“This,” Wyatt said, grabbing her wrist and laughing, “is me maintaining what shreds of dignity I have—”
“It was just getting good!” Lisa twisted out of his grip, her arm behind her back. “I don’t even know which curls they were talking about!”
Wyatt sighed and leaned his hands against the edge of the counter, bracketing Lisa’s knees. She was grinning, her arms behind her back, looking so pleased that Wyatt almost felt bad about what he had to do next.
“You did this to yourself,” he said, somber. “Remember that.”
Before she could respond, he wrapped one arm around her waist, grabbed the phone from behind her back with the other, and stuffed it in his pocket as she wrapped her legs around his waist and—bit his shoulder?
“Don’t bite me,” Wyatt said. “Ow.”
“It wasn’t even that hard.” She still had her legs around him, warm and tight and solid, and God, she smelled good. She was the same height as him like this, and Wyatt was kinda into it.
“I better not have to hear about bite marks at practice tomorrow,” he said, and Lisa smirked.
“Or what?”
Or nothing. Lisa could leave a thousand bite marks if she wanted, really.
“Or, I’ll make you pay,” he said, grinning.
Lisa rolled her eyes. “No, you won’t,” she taunted.
“You think I won’t?”
“Not even a little.”
Wyatt sighed and hung his head a little to hide his smile, biting his lip.
“All right,” he said, and in one swift movement lifted her off the counter and over his shoulder. Lisa yelped, laughing. “If that’s what you think. Quit kicking, I might drop you.”
“Unhand me!”
“Soon,” Wyatt said, and carried her all the way to the bedroom.
———
“Hey,” Wyatt said the next day when he found Roz on a workout bike, mercifully alone in the room. “We’re not telling anyone about the Hayesanov thing, right?”
“No. They would never shut up about it,” Roz agreed instantly.
“I mean, I told Lisa, but that’s all,” Wyatt said. “Seemed weird not to.”
“Yes. Same.”
“You told Lisa?” Wyatt asked, confused, and his mouth figured out what Roz meant before his brain did and he said, “Oh, you mean you also told—”
But Roz was already saying, “—would be weird not—”
Wyatt shut his mouth before he could say your significant other and Roz also shut his mouth and in a last ditch effort to do something with his hands and also his face that wasn’t make eye contact with Roz, Wyatt pulled his phone out of his pocket like he’d just gotten a text.
“Anyway,” he said, and put the phone back. “It’s our secret, see you tomorrow.”
Roz just sighed and muttered something about early flights.
———
The bromance was, weirdly, what took Wyatt from pretty sure about Roz and Hollander to definitely sure about Roz and Hollander, because Roz was chill about everything #hayesanov short of actual pornography, but he couldn’t even call Hollander by his first name in front of other people without falling all over himself to correct it and then trying to act like it wasn’t weird that he’d just gotten so awkward about referring to a close friend by first name.
It went something like: Harris would post some picture of them doing something friendshippy, like having a conversation, and the comments and chirps would roll in and Roz would laugh along and shrug it off. Even the one where it really looked like they were gazing into each other’s eyes at sunset—they’d been in an airport, actually, and Wyatt was pretty sure he’d been looking past Roz at a giant pretzel someone was eating—didn’t get more than a snort and a shrug from Roz.
But when Wyatt off-handedly asked Roz if he was going to hang out with Hollander after they played in Montreal one night, he got several seconds of alarmed staring before Roz said Hollander? like it was a brand-new word and then followed that up with oh, maybe, I said I would text him, we might do something, what are your plans? I think our hotel has a good bar.
Sometimes, when Roz was being more of a dick than usual, Wyatt brought Hollander up just for fun. It was maybe not the nicest thing to do but it sure made for satisfying revenge, and besides, it was interesting. No one else on the team noticed a thing, which was almost more frustrating than trying to keep a huge secret. Wyatt would’ve felt like he was going crazy, or imagining things, except for the fact that it all made perfect sense and Lisa and her timeline spreadsheet agreed with him.
———
Then he was at Roz’s house playing video games and shit talking, and Roz got a call from Hollander, and Wyatt truly did not mean to glance over and see that Hollander’s profile picture on Roz’s phone was Hollander, half-awake and grumpily glaring up from a pillow.
Wyatt wondered if God was testing him. Maybe he was hockey’s version of Job or something, but like, for nosiness.
———
Also, Roz apparently had a bottle of lube in every fucking drawer in his house. Next time he could search for his own Xbox controllers.
———
Wyatt was zoning out on a bike, thinking about gingerbread houses and how cool it was that they stuck together like that while Bood did some stretches on a nearby mat, when Roz walked in and closed the door.
“Captain meeting,” he said, when they both turned.
“You know I’m not—“
“Yes, fine, grownup meeting, then,” Roz said, waving a hand in Wyatt’s direction.
“So what are you doing here?” Bood asked.
“Barrett,” Roz said, arms folded over his chest. “What the fuck.”
There was an unexcited silence.
“He is good at hockey,” Bood pointed out.
“Plenty of people are good at hockey without being complete dickheads,” Roz said. “Fuck. I hate this.”
Wyatt kept cycling, staring into space. He’d spent the past two years giving Barrett, Kent, and the rest of Toronto as little thought as possible. It had been great for his mental health.
“You know how, like,” he started. “Every villain has that one henchman who kinda stands off to the side and taunts the good guy but the second he doesn’t have that protection, he rolls over and begs for his life?”
Roz and Bood watched him patiently, waiting for him to finish making his point. Wyatt tried not to feel a little squishy about how well they knew him.
“Like the Joker and Harley Quinn, back before she got cool and left him and had her feminist awakening and stuff,” he went on. “If you can call it that? There’s a lot of discourse. Anyway, Barrett always seemed kinda like the Harley to Kent’s Joker.”
Now Bood and Roz looked at each other for a moment.
“Barrett wants to be Kent’s housewife?” Bood finally hazarded. “I saw Suicide Squad.”
“I’m so sorry,” Wyatt said automatically, and Roz snorted.
“He is Kent’s henchman,” Roz clarified. “Maybe he will be less of dick without Kent around. Though Harley Quinn did still cause a lot of destruction in that movie.”
“Okay, forget Suicide Squad, like, both for the metaphor and for your own good,” Wyatt said. “But yeah. Maybe he’ll be less awful without Kent? He did call Kent a rapist to his face, so there could be hope.”
“Calling a rapist a rapist is a low fucking bar,” Bood said. “Sorry. Alleged rapist.”
“He’s trash, I’m sure he did it,” said Wyatt. “Honestly, I’m surprised Toronto traded Barrett that fast. Usually they were a little more, I dunno, subtle? Like, I’d have thought they’d protect the rapist without looking quite so much like they were protecting the rapist?”
“Why bother?” Roz said, shrugging sarcastically. “If anything comes of the—fuck, what is the word?”
“Allegations?” said Bood.
“Yes. If anything comes of the allegations it will be a miracle.”
He was right, and it pissed Wyatt off because there was no reason hockey couldn’t be both fun and filled with nice people, but everyone liked to act as if it were one or the other. Why assholes like Dallas Kent got treated like they walked on—
“I got traded not long after I got into it with Kent and Barrett,” he said, the words bypassing his brain and going straight for his mouth.
“You did?” Bood asked, still sitting on the floor.
“For what?” Roz asked.
“Being homophobic dickheads,” Wyatt said. “It was actually when—”
And then, for once in Wyatt’s life, his brain-to-mouth filter not only activated but went into full panic mode, so he managed not to say that press conference you did with Hollander. There were things he was pretty sure Roz was better off not knowing.
“Uh,” he said, because Filter Panic Mode wasn’t great at supplying him with alternate suggestions. “When Price came out to the team? That kinda blotted everything else from my memory.”
It was a pretty good save.
“I wish I could’ve seen their faces when he did that,” Bood said wistfully. “Scared shitless, right?”
“It was beautiful,” Wyatt agreed. Roz was watching him in a way he didn’t appreciate, and, shit.
“Hopefully Barrett learned his lesson,” Roz said, still watching Wyatt, and Bood sighed.
“I won’t be holding my breath,” Bood said.
———
“Hazy,” Wyatt heard, twenty minutes later in the parking garage, and: fuck.
“Hey, Roz,” he called back, and waited for him to catch up. When he did, Roz glanced over his shoulder at the doors, like he was making sure no one else was there, and he seemed… nervous?
It wasn’t the first time Wyatt had felt kinda protective of Rozanov, but it was the weirdest time, especially when he didn’t say anything right away, just fell in step with Wyatt as they walked.
“There is something you didn’t say,” Roz finally said, still staring straight ahead.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t say, believe it or not,” Wyatt countered, and it actually got a half-laugh.
“What was it?” he asked, and finally looked over at Wyatt, because Roz had never simply let something go, ever, in his entire life. “Either you did not want to tell Bood or you did not want to tell me, and I think I know which it was.”
Very briefly, Wyatt considered a few ways of getting out of this, like telling Roz he’d made the whole thing up, or saying Kent had accidentally watched Drag Race and had to tell everyone what he thought, or maybe throwing himself in front of a car, but none of those things seemed like particularly viable options. Wyatt was an okay liar, but the problem with lying was that then you had to remember the lie, and tell more lies, and remember those lies, and sooner or later he’d forget one and it would be way worse than telling the truth in the first place.
“I need you to promise me something,” he said when they were stopped next to Roz’s SUV, alone in the parking garage.
Roz raised one eyebrow, his hands in his coat pockets, and said nothing.
“Go on,” prompted Wyatt.
“I am promising nothing until I hear what it is,” Roz said, which, fine. Wyatt rubbed his face. He hated feeling stuck in the middle like this. Why couldn’t his filter have worked about one sentence sooner?
“This happened two years ago,” he finally said. “Promise me you won’t hold it against Barrett. If he’s still a dick now, then fuck yeah, we’ll kick his ass together. But people change.”
“Fine,” Roz said. “I will be nice if he is nice. Tell me.”
It was Wyatt’s last chance to throw himself onto the pavement and hope a car came along. He braced himself instead.
“They were being shitty about your press conference with Hollander,” Wyatt said. “I’m not gonna repeat what they said, not that I even remember the exact phrasing, but it was gross.” He swallowed and looked Roz straight in the eyes. “And homophobic.”
And Roz was the one to look away for a moment, over Wyatt’s shoulder, while Wyatt experienced the silentest silence that ever did silence.
“But they were not talking about me,” Roz said slowly, looking at Wyatt again. “Which is why you are making me promise not to kick Barrett’s ass for it.”
Wyatt took a breath so deep his lungs burned with the cold and didn’t break eye contact because he’d been dancing around it long enough and if it was going to go catastrophically, may as well get it over with.
“No,” Wyatt said. “They weren’t talking about you.”
It was the most uncertain he’d ever seen Roz look. Roz was good at being confident and also good at faking it—Wyatt could tell, he wasn’t stupid—but he looked away again, over Wyatt’s shoulder, and chewed on his lip for a second, and suddenly looked so young and vulnerable that Wyatt wanted to hug him.
So.
He did.
He’d never just hugged Roz before, even though he was pretty sure they were good friends; they’d only ever bro-hugged with pads on and hockey as an excuse, never a you seem to need emotional support and I’m here to supply it kind of hug. Even through two layers of puffy coats he could feel the moment where Roz froze and then the moment where he decided he was going to hug Wyatt back. He hugged like a dude who didn’t get a lot of hugs, and it made Wyatt want to sit down and have a chat with all the people in Roz’s life who were supposed to have been hugging him. Roz could be a lot, but everyone deserved hugs.
“Hey,” Wyatt said, instead of all that. “I got you, bud.”
There was another very long pause before Roz spoke, during which Wyatt wondered if he’d really fucked up.
“Thanks, Hazy,” Roz finally said, so, maybe not.
———
Two and a half weeks later, Harris was in the locker room after practice again and Barrett was turning every shade of pink again and generally acting like he could barely manage the English language yet again and Wyatt was trying to mind his own business and it was going as well as it ever did.
And—again!—no one else seemed to notice that Barrett turned into a pile of flopsweat and sad heart emojis whenever Harris turned up. Except Roz, of course, who was currently shooting are you seeing this looks across the locker room at Wyatt and Wyatt was trying to shoot stop fucking staring looks back but then again, Roz had never once minded his own business.
“What the fuck?” Roz asked five minutes later after Wyatt herded him into a training room before he could start drawing heart-shapes in the air and pointing from Barrett to Harris.
Wyatt scrubbed both his hands over his face. “What the fuck,” he agreed.
“Is not what I was expecting.”
“Okay,” Wyatt said, gathering himself. “So—okay. Barrett has a huge fucking crush on Harris, right? Am I—?”
He settled for waving his hands through the air in what he felt was an appropriately inquisitive gesture.
“No. Yes,” Roz said, and then made a face. “Whichever one means he for sure wants Harris’s dick.”
Helpfully, Wyatt’s brain started supplying him with a montage of all the gross homophobic shit he’d heard Barrett say over the years they’d played together, which morphed into his brain playing that on one half of the screen while simultaneously playing a montage of all the sad puppy looks he’d been giving Harris for the past two weeks on the other screen and, goddammit. He was starting to feel bad for the guy.
“Well,” he said. “That’s one explanation for all the bullshit. It kind of makes sense. In a fucked up way.”
And Roz went—flat.
“Does it?” he said. Wyatt did some mental swearing.
“Super fucked up,” Wyatt said pointedly, because fucking duh, Rozanov, obviously be a homophobic shithead if you’re secretly queer had not been a stellar move on Barrett’s part. “Just, like, I can see how he got from point a to point b if point a is ‘I’m into men’ and point b is ‘oh shit I play hockey no one can ever know.’ And point c is ‘double fuck, I play hockey in Toronto.’”
“Is there a point d or are you finished?”
“I’m not excusing him,” Wyatt said, wishing once more for a magic remote that could rewind time by about thirty seconds. “Obviously it was shitty and a bad call—“
“Was more than a bad call,” Roz said, his accent a little thicker the way it always was when he was really pissed. “Bad call is drinking too much and throwing up on the couch, not being a—“ he exploded in a stream of Russian, and fuck, this was maybe the angriest Wyatt had ever seen him. “—and throwing people into a truck because you like something you think you are not supposed to.”
For once, Wyatt shut up. Roz had a point, and what the fuck was Wyatt supposed to say?
“You’re right,” he said. “Sorry.”
“Of course I am right,” Roz said. “Just because you are gay and play hockey on a team full of—” he spat a Russian word that Wyatt didn’t know, “—does not mean you have to fucking do it yourself. There is always keeping your mouth shut.”
Roz swallowed hard and ground his teeth and glared at the door they’d slammed shut.
“There is always being a better person than Troy fucking Barrett,” he said, and Wyatt nearly cracked. He nearly said God, it must be hard, and he nearly said I think Hollander’s a better person too, but he fucking chickened out again because he was never going to grow enough of a spine to talk about it, apparently.
“I know,” was all he said, and Roz shot him a glare too, for a second, before looking away again and heaving a breath.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Is not your fault.”
“No. Be pissed,” Wyatt said. Roz raised an eyebrow and Wyatt shoved a hand into his hair, trying to figure out exactly what he meant. “You can. You should, if you want.”
Roz folded his arms in front of himself.
“He was a dick to—” Hollander. “People,” Wyatt said. “He earned it. I’ll give the kid a second chance and play nice, but you don’t have to. Fuck, maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Yes. Great captaining.”
Wyatt shrugged. They looked at each other for several seconds, and there was something on the tip of Roz’s tongue, Wyatt knew it, he was about to just spill everything and then they could just talk about this like normal people—
“You will be nice so I do not have to be?” Roz said, so no, they weren’t going to be normal.
“Until I gotta be otherwise, yeah,” Wyatt said, and they nodded at each other, and left the room.
———
“You took Troy Barrett to Bennet’s gay bar?” Wyatt said, flopping backward on the couch. “And you didn’t invite me?”
“No one is stopping you from going,” Roz said, missing the point on purpose.
“I can’t believe you picked Barrett over me,” Wyatt said, flexing his hand, thumb knuckle cracking. Roz had apparently forgiven Barrett at light speed, which was probably for the best.
“Okay, first of all, every time we are in New York you already have plans to get drinks or dinner or hang out with someone else,” Roz said, as if it was Wyatt’s fault for making a friend once in a while. “Two, I am pretty sure you have been to a gay bar before. Actually I am pretty sure you have been to that gay bar.”
Roz was technically right, but that didn’t make him right right. Wyatt went with a different tack anyway.
“That was Barrett’s first gay bar?”
“Yes.”
Wyatt settled in, propping his feet on the coffee table.
“Was he stoked, or terrified?”
“Yes,” Roz said again, and Wyatt snorted.
“Kid’s a mess,” he agreed. The menu screen for Restaurant Madness, a cooperative video game because Wyatt was not in the mood to get into it with Roz over Mario Kart or anything else right now, flashed on Roz’s TV in front of them. It looked like the next level involved making enough pizzas to feed a school bus filled with monsters, but Wyatt needed a break for a minute.
“I did not invite you because he seemed like he needed…” Roz waved his hand around the way he did sometimes when English was escaping him.
Wyatt came way too close to simply saying advice from a queer elder? because they weren’t there and might never be there, and he was accepting it gracefully.
“Mentorship?” he offered instead.
“Yes. That. Also he has a big hero crush on Scott Hunter for some reason.”
“Weird, Hunter’s so ugly and bad at hockey.”
Roz raised an eyebrow. “Do you have a crush on Hunter?”
“No, but I have eyes,” Wyatt said, grinning because Roz always got annoyed when anyone complimented Scott Hunter on literally anything. “Hunter’s a nice guy.”
“He is not nice,” Roz muttered.
“Are you kidding? He’s the nicest,” Wyatt said about a man he’d met, like, twice. Giving Roz a taste of his own medicine could be extremely fun. “Did you see that profile of him in Ice Report last month? Dude is an inspiration. And he has great hair. I think he’s gonna win the Conn Smythe this year.”
Also, Wyatt didn’t say, you’re obviously jealous that he’s out to the whole world.
Apparently, they were never going to talk about it, because Roz loved to harangue everyone else about whatever he pleased, but shut it down the second anyone got too close to him. Maybe in a few more years, Wyatt figured, they’d finally be good enough friends that they could actually say, out loud, that he and Hollander were a couple, but apparently the level of friendship required for that was miles beyond whatever he had with Wyatt.
Wyatt knew he shouldn’t let his feelings get hurt about it. Roz didn’t, like, owe him information about his personal life, obviously. Wyatt had just… thought they were pretty good friends, and for fuck’s sake, Roz knew he knew. Right?
God, this was so fucking complicated and weird.
“Is it bigger than his crush on Harris?” he said instead of all that.
“I promised him I would not tell anyone about that.”
“He confirmed it?” Wyatt said, because that was actually surprising. “Like, with words?”
Roz mimed zipping his lips shut and then throwing away the key, which was a mixed metaphor, but whatever.
“You asked him,” Wyatt went on. “No, wait, you told him because you think you know everything all the time—”
“Is not my fault if I am right.”
“—and he admitted it because you hung out with the rainbow squad at a gay bar?”
“I am confirming nothing.”
Does he know about you? Wyatt wanted to ask, and it was right there, on the tip of his tongue, but he chickened out at the last second. That conversation only led to weird places. Better to stick to the tested and true waters of never talking about it.
“Well,” Wyatt said. “If he hurts Harris I guess we have to kill him.”
Roz just hummed in agreement and restarted the game.
———
There were a million things that made Wyatt panic, every day, boring, mundane things. The pile of unopened mail on his kitchen counter. Realizing he’d forgotten an appointment. Looking at a clock and discovering it was a full two hours later than he thought.
But give him a crisis, and everything clicked into place. Something about that surge of adrenaline made the world slow down, Wyatt’s focus sharpen. It happened on the ice, the way he could suddenly feel everything that was about to happen.
It happened when the plane to Tampa suddenly jolted like it was going to fall out of the sky. His tray table was already up when they made the announcement for the emergency landing because he’d known, somehow, his phone already out, the plane’s wifi still on.
We’re making an emergency landing and if it doesn’t go well, I love you, he texted with the perfect clarity of crisis.
Wyatt wished he’d memorized more love poems. One, even. Something with better words than he could summon.
You were my favorite part of this life, he typed, and put the phone away. He wished he’d done better, but it was enough. It had to be.
An engine was smoking and the whole plane was rattling. Someone was praying in French nearby and someone was praying in English further away. Wyatt didn’t remember any prayers but he didn’t need them because now, of all times, he was calm and still placid as a lake. He put his head down. He braced for impact. He waited.
———
And then after all that: it was fine. He held it together and didn’t even feel like he was holding; his voice didn’t even shake until he called Lisa and it was hearing her try to keep it together that finally broke him, a little. But it didn’t last after he went into the bar and made sure everyone was there and okay for a certain value of okay, and then he got shots and pitcher after pitcher, and they were all alive and they were going to stay that way and he and Bood and Roz got absolutely fucking tanked while they talked about everything but their feelings or their mortality.
He may have woken up next to Bood’s feet, in Bood’s room, in Bood’s bed. The other bed had been completely stripped and he’d discovered why when he walked into the bathroom to find Roz firmly nested and sound asleep in the bathtub. It looked incredibly uncomfortable. Wyatt closed the shower curtain and made it to his own room to puke.
———
When he got home, he made it through the front door before he cracked, like the moment he could shut the door on everything he fell apart.
“Hey,” said Lisa, looking up at him. She’d shown up at the airport to drive him home, even though his car was there. “Hey. I know.”
Fuck, his hands were shaking. His head felt weird. He sucked in a breath and she unzipped his coat, pushing it from his shoulders.
“Thanks,” he said as it slumped to the ground behind him.
“I’ve got you,” she said, his face in her hands, her dark eyes serious. “I’m taking off your shoes, then we’re going upstairs.”
“Don’t,” he said as she knelt, because why was she taking shoes off, they were shoes, they were gross. “I can—"
Lisa looked up, and Wyatt stopped talking. When she was done he left his shoes where they were and let her guide him upstairs and onto the bed. Wyatt sat on the edge and pulled her into him, between his legs, and buried his face in her chest with her arms wrapped around him.
He didn’t know how long he stayed there. Long enough that he drifted on the waves of her breathing, long enough that he started to feel put back together.
“If I die, you should get married again,” he said, because of all the things he’d thought over the past few days, that one seemed like the most important, somehow. “I would want you to be happy.”
Lisa exhaled shakily. Wyatt kissed her sternum because it was in front of him.
“You think I could find this again?” she asked, and her voice was shaky too.
Wyatt didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t, that was for sure, but Lisa could. How could she not?
“I think you’d deserve to,” he said, and she pulled his head back, hands in his hair. Wyatt closed his eyes.
“I don’t want to find this again,” she said, and her voice was firmer now, had that determined edge it got sometimes. “I want to keep you.”
Lisa pressed her lips to his in a soft, sweet kiss, and she tangled her fingers in his hair and pushed a little harder and Wyatt pulled her in a little at a time, flesh and blood and real and there; she was blinding heat and white light and Wyatt let her take him over.
———
Wyatt’s phone was already blowing the fuck up when he rolled out of bed and into the kitchen, and his first thought was to panic that someone had died.
After several heart-stopping seconds, it didn’t seem like anyone had died, but there was A VIDEO. A shocking and newsworthy VIDEO, that everyone was feeling very all-capslock about, and since Wyatt hadn’t had any coffee yet it took him longer than it should have to put together that apparently THE VIDEO featured Roz and Hollander and oh, fuck.
When he finally watched THE VIDEO for himself, Wyatt was mostly relieved it wasn’t porn. Given the general level of hysteria, he’d been expecting something way more scandalous than fully clothed people kissing in a mirror, which, what the fuck, Pike.
Also: did Pike know? He knew now, that was for sure.
Before Wyatt could contemplate the mysteries of Hayden Pike any further, his phone rang, and when he answered, Bood sounded relieved and exhausted and more than a little shook.
“You see it yet?” he asked by way of greeting.
“Only just.”
“You talk to him?”
“I’ve been awake for about five minutes,” Wyatt said, balancing his phone between his ear and shoulder and pouring himself a very large cup of coffee. “You?”
“He’s not picking up,” Bood said. “Listen, me and you should probably talk, can you come over? I’m trying to let Cassie sleep since we’re gonna be gone so I’ve got Milo duty.”
“Sure thing,” Wyatt said. He hung up a minute later, and then stared down into the coffee mug like it was going to impart some wisdom on the situation. It didn’t.
“Shit,” Wyatt said to his coffee, and went to go put on pants.
———
“Who the fuck is Evan Charbonneau and how’d he get my number?” Wyatt asked as he and Bood walked to Bood’s kitchen, where there was more coffee. Bood had a baby monitor clipped to the waistband of his sweats and looked like he needed the caffeine.
“Calgary?” he guessed. “Detroit?”
“He and a hundred of my other closest friends want to know if it’s a prank,” Wyatt said, and Bood just snorted, so what he thought was answered, then.
“I turned mine off before I lost my mind,” Bood said as they walked into the living room and sprawled onto opposite corners of a massive sectional.
“I should,” Wyatt said, and didn’t.
They sat there and stared at opposite walls. Wyatt’s brain felt like a hamster in a wheel or something, busy but directionless. He felt like he should be doing something, but fuck if he knew what.
“Look,” Bood said suddenly, leaning forward and rubbing his hands across his face. “Can I say something to you so I don’t say it to anyone else?”
Oh, God. Wyatt counted Bood among his good friends but you never knew, did you, not really. He braced himself.
“Sure,” Wyatt said.
“This is kinda weirding me out,” Bood admitted, rubbing one hand over his face. “I just—Hollander? Are they… together?”
He was silent for a moment, staring at a wall.
“Oh, shit. That’s where he goes all the time,” he said. Then: “Is that why he’s here?”
“It’s weird,” Wyatt agreed.
“The Hollander part is weird, not the bi part,” Bood went on, then paused.
“For real?”
“Cassie,” Bood shrugged, and Wyatt just nodded. “She’s a lot smarter than me.”
“I know the feeling.”
“He tell you?”
“No,” Wyatt said, taking another gulp of coffee. “But I guessed a while back.”
Now it was Bood’s turn to say, “For real?”
“He’s not as careful as he should be with his phone,” Wyatt said, because one day he looked at Hollander and a light went on in my brain wasn’t an adequate explanation and he knew it.
They sat on Bood’s couch for several long minutes, finishing their coffee and staring into the distance. Wyatt tried to think and kept failing, his brain a semi-panicked whirligig of oh no and what now and fuck, I gotta do something.
“We gotta do something,” Bood said, a minute later. “At least make sure nobody on the team says shit.”
“You think they will?” Wyatt thought they mostly wouldn’t. Mostly.
Bood gave him a grave, tired look.
“Not when we’re done with them,” he said, and yeah, that was about right.
———
Wyatt flopped down on the grass, white shirt be damned. It didn’t help. Now the sky was spinning, the few visible stars wheeling around like they were on a damn tilt-a-whirl. Fuck.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“Welcome,” said Hayden, who he’d flopped next to. “Fuck.”
“Why was there,” Wyatt said, and tried to think. It didn’t go great. “Good Scotch? I don’t like scotch. It tastes like licking a match.”
“But a delicious match.”
“Like. A delicious, burny match.”
“Yeah.”
There was a long silence. Wyatt narrowed his eyes, trying to see if he could get the stars to behave. No luck.
“You know what,” Hayden said, with the distinct air of someone About To Express An Opinion While Drunk. “I did them a favor.”
“Dude.”
“No. I did. Did you see how happy they were?”
Wyatt opened his mouth to tell Hayden exactly how dumb of a dumbass he was, but Rose Landry’s face appeared in the periphery and then there was a soft whump on Hayden’s other side.
“Who the fuck,” she said from her spot on the ground. “Brought the Scotch. Fuck.”
“I know.”
“Hayden thinks he did them a favor with that video,” Wyatt told her.
“Oh, my God.”
“Right?”
“What, like they were doing so great?” Hayden said, sounding very drunk and a little defensive. “They were gonna come out, I just helped things along. They’re welcome.”
“Can I give you some advice?” Rose asked.
“Tell him,” said Wyatt.
“Don’t say that to them,” she said.
Hayden sighed hard.
“At least not to Roz,” Wyatt offered. “Because if he kills you, which he might, you know your best friend is gonna be the one helping him hide the body, and if we’re all being honest here they’re gonna do a pretty bad job of it and then your best friend would be in jail on accessory to murder charges. And probably convicted because those two would not be good at murder. And think about how sad you’d be with your best friend in jail.”
“Fuck,” Hayden said, thoughtfully. “I’d be so sad.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Rose. “You’re dead in this scenario.”
“Oh yeah.”
Across the yard, some people burst out laughing. It sounded like J.J., but Wyatt wasn’t about to risk lifting his head to find out.
“Still super sad, though,” Hayden said.
“Hey,” said Wyatt, who’d just discovered a new thought. “Who in the NHL do you think would be the best at getting away with—”
“Hazy. Are you going around telling people you are my bestie?”
Wyatt blinked until Roz came into view above him, glaring down.
“Hey!” Wyatt said. “Great wedding. Needed some chairs, though.”
Roz huffed and, Wyatt was pretty sure, rolled his eyes.
“Where the fuck do you even get chairs,” Roz muttered.
“You hire a wedding planner,” Hayden offered.
“Pike,” Rose said. “How much of your wedding, exactly, did you plan?”
Hayden mumbled something incoherent, so Wyatt reached out and patted his arm.
“Lisa did all the stuff that needed a spreadsheet and I did most of the phone calls,” he said. His hand was still on Hayden’s arm. He patted it again and took it off. “God, she’s so good at spreadsheets.”
“There are spreadsheets for a wedding?” Hayden asked, and Wyatt turned to look at him.
“My dude,” Wyatt said. “There are spreadsheets for everything if you want spreadsheets bad enough. Do you know what the right person can do with a spreadsheet?”
“No,” answered Hayden, eyes wide as saucers.
“So Hayden planned absolutely none of his own wedding, don’t listen to him,” Rose said before Wyatt could start extolling the inherent sensuality of Microsoft Excel.
“Wait,” Hayden said. “Since when does Rozanov have a bestie?”
“For like two years,” Wyatt said, incredulous. “It’s me. I’m his bestie. We’re gonna make friendship bracelets that say bestie and then also whatever bestie is in Russian.”
“What,” said Roz, apparently still present.
“They’re, like, bracelets. For being friends,” Wyatt explained.
“I do not need a bracelet.”
“I can get Jade and Ruby on that,” Hayden offered.
“Tell ‘em to make mine pink as fuck,” Wyatt said.
“On it.”
“Hazy,” Roz said, his voice suddenly closer and then his head was, like, six inches away from Wyatt’s, the four of them in a drunk semi-circle on the ground. “Why do you think you are my bestie?”
“Because I am,” Wyatt said, turning his head slightly. He was a little afraid that if he, like, fully turned it he’d be weirdly close to Roz’s face and that seemed like a rude thing to do to someone at their wedding? “And if you tell me I’m not you’re gonna hurt my feelings. A lot.”
“I did not say that.”
“Well, you implied it by asking why I thought I was your bestie.”
There was a silence exactly long enough for Wyatt to start feeling offended.
“Fine,” Roz said at last. “We are besties.”
“We better be. I kept your stupid secret for like two years,” Wyatt pointed out.
“What secret?” said a new voice that sounded enough like Hollander that it was probably Hollander.
“What secret do you think?” asked Rose.
“Two years?” asked Roz.
“What,” said Hollander.
“Yeah?” said Wyatt, squinting at the sky and trying to remember, like, how long two years even was. “I was pretty sure then but I wasn’t, like, for sure for sure until maybe last year?”
“Wait, okay,” said Hollander, and Wyatt risked turning his head enough to look at him. “Did you know when you texted me about coming out?”
“Oh, fuck no,” Wyatt said. “Though I probably should have guessed when I texted you and five minutes later Roz hunted me down and was all ‘so you have texted Hollander and here are my feelings about that.’”
“That is not what I sound like!”
Hayden and Hollander both started giggling.
“Stop laughing. It took you like eight years and Shane had to tell you,” Roz said.
“I guessed.”
“Wait,” said Wyatt.
“You did not guess, you made a stupid joke that was a right clock during the day.”
“Did you just say eight?” Wyatt asked, because he must have misheard. Eight was, like, way too many years.
“Hazy actually figured it out.”
“Hold on,” Wyatt said, and sat up. It was a strong choice, but he soldiered on, twisting around to look at Roz and Hayden. “Fuck, okay. Did you say eight years?”
“Maybe,” said Hayden.
“Wait, so, when was your rookie—” he paused and held up some fingers, then looked over at Roz on the ground and Hollander, still standing, his shirt untucked, shoes missing, and a pint glass of something that looked like champagne in one hand. “And then you guys were,” he went on, lifting more fingers. “And then I got drafted in—”
“It was the whole time,” Rose, an angel, interrupted. Wyatt blinked.
“I need you to clarify that,” he said.
“They were hooking up the whoooole time,” Hayden said, flailing one arm through the air above him.
“Pike, I swear to God—”
“They’ve been casually fucking since their rookie year but didn’t start actually dating until a couple of years ago,” Rose said.
“Thank you, Rose,” Wyatt said pointedly.
“Which is still a secret, Hayden,” said Shane. Roz made a noise and raised one arm to make a grabby hand in Shane’s direction.
“I’ve got a drink,” Shane said.
“Then drink your drink and come on. The ground is very fun right now.”
“Rozanov said it first,” Hayden went on. Shane made a noise into the pint glass that was now half-full of champagne.
“Is my wedding day. I can do whatever I want.”
Shane made a second noise.
“Like tell people about our epic romance.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Shane, as Rose snorted and Hayden made sort of a sad mooing sound. “When did you figure it out, actually?”
“You remember the last time I let you get a hat trick?” Wyatt said, the grass rustling as Shane flopped into the space between Roz and Rose. Shit. Roz and Rose. That was gonna be hard.
“You didn’t let me,” Shane said. “You think I need—”
“Have you done it since?”
“That doesn’t mean shit.”
“It means I haven’t let you score—"
“Boys!” Roz said, directly between them.
“Ilya’s really got a type, huh,” said Rose. Wyatt cleared his throat and prepared to be an adult.
“It was right after your first goal that game,” he said, and then couldn’t resist saying, “which is why you got two more.”
“Bullshit—”
“You figured it out mid game?” Hayden interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“How?”
“Hayden cannot even figure out hockey mid-game. Ow,” said Roz as Shane muttered something about a goddamn fucking truce.
“Uh,” said Wyatt, and tried to think of something better than what had actually happened. He didn’t. “I think it was because Roz, like, made the same face at Hollander that he makes at his phone when he’s sending eggplant emojis.”
“What,” said Roz.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Shane.
“You think?”
“Yeah? I just, I don’t know. Realized it then,” Wyatt said, and closed one eye because maybe that would help? It didn’t. “I mean, so like, I knew that Roz was obviously seeing someone because he’s not good at being subtle—”
“I am very subtle,” Roz mumbled.
“—but he was being super shady about it so I was like ‘she must be super secret,’ and then I was like, ‘maybe it’s a dude,’ and he like, called Shane’s parents by their first names once? And was mysteriously gone a lot? And once gave me suspiciously accurate directions to a restaurant in Montreal? And, yeah, I dunno.”
“Wait. Did anyone else figure it out?” asked Shane.
“Of course not. They’re hockey players,” said Wyatt.
“Hey.”
“He doesn’t mean you,” Shane told Hayden, and Roz snorted.
“Hayden is exactly who he means,” Roz said.
“Everyone knew something weird was going on, no one thought Hollander was his secret boyfriend,” Wyatt clarified. “The leading theory was World of Warcraft.”
“What is War of Worldcraft?” asked Roz. Rose started laughing.
“Exactly,” said Wyatt.
“Did anyone else ever figure it out?” asked Rose.
“I really don’t think so.”
“If they did they have kept their mouths even more shut than Hazy, and Hazy did a very good job,” said Roz.
“Aww. Thanks, bestie,” said Wyatt, and offered a fist bump to his right.
“You are welcome, bestie,” said Roz, and missed the fist bump by several inches.
———
“Roz!” Wyatt shouted, adjusting his bag on his shoulder. Further down the hall, Roz turned, keys in his hand.
“Hazy!” he shouted back, turning and waiting.
“Lunch?” Wyatt asked when he caught up. “First poutine of the season?”
“I was starting to think you were too busy for me,” Roz said, grinning. “So many rookies to welcome.”
Someone had to make sure all the new guys knew what was what, even if Wyatt wasn’t a hundred percent sure he did, yet. Still, he wasn’t gonna say that to Roz.
“Quit whining, I got around to you eventually,” he said instead.
“This is how you treat your bestie? You are not even wearing your bracelet.”
“It’s at home, I didn’t want it to break,” Wyatt said. “You’re not wearing yours either.”
“Yes, but they were your idea.”
“Do you want to get lunch or not? Because I’ve got plenty of—”
Wyatt gave up talking because Roz made his Hollander Face, so Wyatt looked over his shoulder. It was still weird, but like, ninety-five percent less weird which meant it would be normal soon.
“Hi,” Hollander said. “What’s going on?”
“We’re gonna go get lunch, you wanna come?” Wyatt asked. “That poutine place you told Roz about, like, three years ago.”
“I told you about a poutine place?”
“Was right after I moved here,” Roz said. “Wyatt and I go there.”
Hollander looked from Roz to Wyatt and started smiling. Wyatt blinked.
“I’ll let you guys catch up,” Hollander said, shrugging a bag higher on his shoulder. “I’ve got stuff I gotta do.”
“You are sure?”
“The poutine’s pretty good,” Wyatt offered, and Shane grinned.
“Nah, you guys do your thing,” he said. “I’ll see you at home.”
Then he paused, and Roz paused, and they sort of looked at each other for a moment like neither of them was sure what to do, and Wyatt was relieved that they hadn’t fully figured out the weirdness, either.
But then Roz grinned in that incredibly pleased way he had sometimes that took five years off his face and said, “Yes, at home,” and Hollander nodded and walked off.
“His loss,” Wyatt said.
“He doesn’t like poutine,” Roz confided as they walked to Wyatt’s car. “Who does not like poutine?”
“There’s no accounting for taste,” Wyatt said, and Roz snorted.