Work Text:
Kent grins. He grins so hard his mouth hurts, grins so hard his muscles strain, ache like after an especially strenuous practice. He imagines that if he keeps grinning, his face might freeze like that, stuck in place for all eternity.
He’s not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
He grins when his name’s called first, no edge of your seat waiting, no anxious butterflies. He grins when his mother screams in his ear, lips so close it’s almost a kiss, and when his step dad claps him on the back. He grins through handshakes and photos and as he’s pulling the Aces jersey over his head.
By the end of it, his grin feels more like a grimace.
Bad Bob leaves him a message. It’s curt, giving just enough details to make Kent wish he didn’t know anything. Jack overdosed. He’s being treated at the hospital. He’s not awake, but also not in critical condition. It’ll be okay, except Bad Bob’s voice breaks on this part, so it probably won’t.
Kent listens to it on repeat, pacing around the hotel ice room because he can’t listen in the room he’s sharing with his mom and step dad. He tries calling Jack, then Bad Bob, then Alicia, with no luck each time. He tries the hospital, but they won’t patch him through.
He buys a Mountain Dew out of the vending machine and drinks it in two gulps. Diet soon, but not tonight. Then, he listens to Bad Bob’s message again. His voice cracks on the word overdosed and Kent swears into the quiet night.
In the morning, his eyes are red from lack of sleep, dark pools beneath them. Kent slips on sunglasses and smiles as bright as he can.
In the end, Kent doesn’t see Jack. He’s not allowed, Bad Bob says over the phone the one time they talk, but Kent’s pretty sure he’s lying and Jack just doesn’t want to talk to him.
“I’m sorry,” Bad Bob says, his voice still shaking. “Maybe later, okay, Kent?”
“Yeah, okay, sure. That’s cool.” Kent thinks he sounds pretty convincing. It’s not okay, but maybe if he pretends it is, it will be.
“I’m really proud of you, Kent,” Bad Bob says right before he hangs up. “You’ll do great things in Vegas, son.”
Something in his voice cracks and Kent wonders if he wishes it really were his son going to Vegas, not some grubby, blond usurper.
“Yeah,” Kent says, but Bad Bob’s already hung up.
Kent’s supposed to stay with one of the Aces, but it falls through. Shorty, who usually hosts the rookies, just had a baby and he and his wife are frazzled without having an eighteen year old stay with them. Instead, Kent coordinates with a handler to find him an apartment, because that’s apparently what you do when you’re a professional athlete.
She asks him what kind of place he wants and he just shrugs. No leaks, he thinks, but he knows enough to know that’s weird so instead he asks for a good view. She gets him a penthouse apartment, two floors, four bedrooms, three bathrooms. And two balconies.
His mom flies out with him and it’s her first time on a plane. Her hands shake so hard when she takes his hand and he can’t help but feel guilty for every place he’s gone, for World Juniors, for all the places he will go that she will never touch.
Once the plane lands, she takes him to some discount store to buy things for his new place even though they both know the handler’s having it fully furnished. They’ve got a large spread out for kids moving into college and moms and teens crowd around them, rifling through bins.
“I can’t believe time went by so fast one,” a woman says to Kent’s mom, holding a huge pink fluffy pillow.
“I know,” his mom agrees, shaking her head.
When they checkout, Kent reaches for his wallet, but his mom brushes his hand away gently.
“One last time, baby,” she says and hands the cashier her card and for the last time ever, Kent crosses his fingers and hopes it’s accepted.
Later, once he’s alone in his apartment, Kent books a two week stay in Hawaii at the Ritz Carleton. He doesn’t even look at the cost before he hits pay. He sends the link to his mom and goes to bed without waiting for a response.
In Los Vegas, everyone looks at him like he’s either going to bring them a cup, or spontaneously combust and take the whole team with him. Maybe the whole city, all the fucking casinos and high rises.
“Listen, kid,” the Assistant GM says in a conference room off the locker room. “You’ve got to tell me right now if substances are going to be a problem.”
Kent shakes his head. “No, sir.”
It’s the first bit of truth he’s given since the draft, the first honest answer. Drugs and alcohol were always Jack’s thing, a way to dull his edges. Kent, on the other hand, needed to be as sharp as a hunting knife on the first day of the season if he wanted to make it to the NHL.
Anyway, he knew what vices like that did to you. He remembers his sister Kelsi’s father, sunk into a lifelong stupor and owing 50k in child support that would never be paid. He remembers the sirens that night the boy who lived catty-corner overdosed, remembers them carting out his body, lips blue, limbs slack, nose bleeding.
That was a real overdose, he thinks now. Not like Jack and his fucking anxiety pills.
All told, he doesn’t think the GM buys it, but he lets it go for now.
His first game, Kent gets three goals, one assist. The crowd screams after each goal, pulsing through the arena that’s only half filled because the Aces are a crappy team. Still, it’s like ten billion more people than at their Q games.
“Jesus, kid,” Shorty says after the third goal, slapping Kent’s shoulder.
“Hat trick, you mother-fucker,” Swoops says, knocking his helmet into Kent’s, grin huge.
And he’s right, because around them hats are falling like the biggest, heaviest snowflakes ever, cascading onto the ice. It’s this moment that Kent tries to remember when they lose 6-4.
“So,” a reporter asks a week later, “what’s a young man like yourself do in Los Vegas? You certainly aren’t old enough for the casinos.”
Kent grins and leans in, conspiratorial, as if to tell a secret. The reporter eats it up, leaning in too.
“I play hockey,” he says in a stage whisper. He hears one of the camera crew chuckle. “And damn good hockey, if I don’t say so myself.”
It gets a laugh out of the reporter who brushes her blonde hair out of her face. “Can’t argue with that!”
“Now, on to the real question,” she says and Kent already knows the question because it is always this question. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Still, hearing it sends his stomach to the pits of hell. He hates this question. More than that, he hates that he has to hate it, that nothing in his life can be fucking easy.
“Nope,” he smirks. “I’m free.”
He makes his face plastic and it’s easy, or at least easier than it used to be and he hates that almost more than the question.
He stays up every night that week, wondering if Jack heard that interview. Wondering if he did and it was like a switchblade to his stomach. He kind of hopes it was.
Kent’s good. He’s really fucking good. He gets them their wins and their almost wins. He scores and he scores and he scores so much that all the commentators talk about is what it would be like if he wasn’t on a team that sucks ass. Well, they don’t say that. They talk around it, but that’s what they mean.
And Kent, he loves it. He loves the way the crowd scream, loves the way his teammates rush him, quicks hugs and clapping sticks. In the Q, it was always Jack and Kent, run together like JackandKent. Here, it’s just Kent, Kent, Kent and he’d be lying if he didn’t say he loved that too.
The truth is, when all else is laid bare, Kent loves hockey. He’s loved it since he was five years old and playing street with the ten year olds, his sister’s soccer shin guards stuffed inside his socks because his mom was sure he was going to break a leg.
He loves it and not even Jack — Jack who he gave everything he had to — can take that away from him.
Swoops becomes his best friend easily, fitting as well as a custom made glove. He’s nineteen and a half to Kent’s eighteen and American born in a tiny town north of Fargo. He lives across the street because apparently the handler loves this neighborhood. He’s got a girlfriend, Allie, who he’s been dating since eighth grade and works as a nail stylist at a local salon.
Kent gets along famously with both of them. They might have grown up thousands of miles away, but they all know about being hungry, about wanting things so deep in your bones it hurts.
He and Swoops are the youngest two on the team and it shows. “Still babies,” Shorty says, patting their heads. “Little puppies.”
“Shut up, you fucking geezer,” Kent chirps. “Anybody would look young compared to you.”
Shorty pretends to be offended, but he’s not. He’s pushing forty which is ancient in hockey years.
Kent gets girls, sometimes.
Not always, but enough that nobody talks. In bars, bars that he’s still too young to legally drink at but who the fuck cares, he dances with them, hips pressed together, chests flush. Sometimes, he even takes them home, to the empty apartment and it’s not so bad because he’s eighteen and horny. When girls, their makeup smudged, clothes mostly off, put their hands on his groin, he can almost pretend it’s Jack with his sad, sappy eyes.
Girls are easy for Kent, have always been easy. Maybe that’s why they’ve never been it for him, never done it. He remembers being fifteen and back in bum fucking nowhere New York, remembers the first time he slept with a girl, his friend Jake’s older sister, half because he couldn’t get Jake’s blue eyes out of his head
It was easy then, too, but not satisfying. Artificial sugar, the kind that leaves a bad taste in your mouth afterwards. Not the real deal. It’s no different now.
“Mom’s worried about you,” Kelsi says over the phone, her voice garbled and fuzzy, a thousand miles away. In the background, he hears her daughter’s high pitched giggles, her son’s yell.
Kent doesn’t grin because he doesn’t need to, not through the phone. “Mom worries too much,” he says and hopes his sister will let him off the hook.
Kelsi hums. “It’s okay if the adjustment is hard,” she says and Kent thinks this must be the voice she uses with her second grade class. “It’s a big change, Kenny.”
“I’m fine, Kels,” he says, cutting her off. “I mean, sure, it’s hard, but I’m handling it.”
“Okay, but you know I’m always here if you need to talk, right?”
The thing is, she means it. Or at least, she thinks she means it. If he said he was gay, right here, right now, she’d tell him it was okay. She’d say she loved him. She’d mean it, he knows she would. If there weren’t a million miles between New York and Vegas, she’d hug him so tight his ribs broke and punctured both lungs and he died.
But it’s not that he’s just gay, it can never just be that. He’s a gay hockey player, emphasis on the hockey player. Emphasis on the fact that he can’t go a game without some slur being dropped, often easily in the locker room. It’s a burden he doesn’t want his sister to have to carry. It’s a burden he doesn’t want to carry, but doesn’t have a choice.
“Yeah, well, I’m fine,” Kent says, instead of explaining all of this. “Hey, how’s school going?”
One of Kent’s Q coaches used to tell him that there was nothing like the NHL and he was right. It’s fast and furious and brutal and a whole flight of stairs up from juniors where half the guys wouldn’t even be drafted. Kent can feel himself stretching, growing, and strengthening. He feels his muscles bulking up, his skills honing, his speed quickening.
All that, and he can only think of Jack. Of how, when they first met, Jack was leagues better than Kent, Kent who was just a diamond in the rough then, a little kid that few could see the hidden talent in. Of how, as the draft approached they ran neck and neck, a constant battle for dominance that neither of them dare speak. Of how, the next time they play, he will be better than Jack no question because while Jack heals his mind, Kent is killing his body and rebuilding it into a well-oiled machine.
He doesn’t let himself consider that there might not be a next time. It’s him and Jack, okay? There will always be a next time.
The guys in the locker room love the word fag. They toss it around like candy at a parade. The other team’s goalie is a fag. The referee is a fag. That guy who gave Kent an illegal hit that wasn’t called by the faggy ref is a fag.
Kent doesn’t say it. He hasn’t since he was thirteen and his mom caught him saying it after a game. She dragged him out to the car, her hand tight around his wrist. “Do you want me to wash your mouth out with soap?” she asked in the car.
“Mom, c’mon—“ Kent said.
“Look at me, Kent. Say damn and shit and fuck if you want. I don’t care, but don’t let me catch you saying words like that one. You could hurt someone, alright? What if one of your teammates was gay? How do you think they would feel?”
That night, Kent hadn’t understood. At thirteen, gay wasn’t something he associated with himself yet.
Now, the words hit him like shrapnel.
In February, he takes a girl to his bed and reaches for her shirt and then —
“Hold on,” she says, pushing a hand to his chest, her voice thick.
And Kent, well, he’s gay and more than that he has an older sister who taught him that no always means no. He backs up, pushing himself closer to the headboard and watches as she falls back on their thighs. “You okay?”
She blinks at him and it’s a knowing blink, the blink of someone trapped in the headlights who knows this is the end. She’s pretty, he sees now, something he didn’t pay attention to earlier when the neon lights of the club blared down. She doesn’t need the thick foundation or the heavy eyeliner she’s wearing.
There’s a long, heavy pause and then she says, “I’m bi.”
“What?”
They always say hockey players aren’t known for their brains and it must be true or at least true in Kent’s case because it takes him a long moment to get what she’s saying and why she’s saying it.
He’s never actually said that he’s gay. Not to Jack. Fuck, not even to himself. He’s read about people saying it to themselves in the mirror, over and over again, and he hasn’t even done that because somehow that feels more real than making out with Jack on his billet parents’ couch at 2 AM.
He doesn’t say it now either.
“I’m not bi,” he says instead and then hiccups. Or maybe it’s a laugh or a tearless sob, he’s not sure.
“Yeah, duh,” the girl says. It would sound mean if she didn’t reach across right then and touch his hand, really gentle.
He lets her sleep on his couch because they’re both too drunk to safely go anywhere. He offers up the guest bedroom first, but she says she’s a couch girl, whatever that means.
They get out in the first round, swept in four by the Rangers and it fucking hurts. Not Zimms’s overdose hurt, but like getting kicked in the dick every hour for a week hurt. He scores exactly seventeen times in the four games, but it’s not enough and he fucking hates the world a little bit more even though he never thought that was possible.
Afterwords, he goes over to Swoops’s place and they drink until they’re drunker than Kent has been since the Q, since Jack. Swoops cries, angry hot tears and they roll down his face and Allie wipes them with a tissue, the smell of her mango coconut shampoo curling around them. Kent feels a hot flash of fury because there’s no one here to do that for him. It’s irrational, he knows. If he checked his phone he’d probably see multiple texts from his mom and sister asking if he’s okay.
But that’s not the point. The point is that there’s no one to be his Allie and there never will be. There can’t ever be.
He throws up in the bathroom.
That summer, Shorty retires. He’s forty. His joints ache, his lungs hurt. He wants to spend time with his kids before they’re angry teenagers, he says.
(Kent can confirm that angry teenagers are not fun to be around.)
Kent gets the captaincy. He’s almost doesn’t believe it, when they tell him because, sure, he knows he’s the best player on this shitty team, but he’s also nineteen. Nineteen and the fucking captain. Nineteen and the only chance the franchise has.
He smiles through the interviews, afterwards. He imagines Jack watching on the TV while he does some self-care bullshit like adult coloring.
It’s what keeps him going.
Kent makes it. He really, really makes it.
What they never tell you is that, sometimes even after you make it, you have to keep faking it. Sometimes, you have to fake it forever, until all you are is a hollow shell.