Chapter Text
The locker room is loud.
It usually is just before a game, a symphony of noise that Scott normally delights in, but right now he’d give just about anything for his teammates to shut the fuck up for five goddman seconds.
“You guys usually this rowdy before a game?” Kip asks through the crackle of the speaker of Scott’s phone. His own phone is propped up against something–a stack of textbooks Scott assumes, there’d been a teetering tower of them on the coffee table before Scott left, and he’d been vaguely worried that they would fall over and crush Kip while Scott was gone–and angled just so to make sure Kip stays on the screen of the video call even as he sits hunched over and scrawling away in a spiral notebook.
Scott shrugs and offers a smile.
He has an airpod in, is funneling the call through that, but it doesn’t do much in the way of helping cut back on the noise.
The curse of the locker room, Scott supposes.
Everything always echoes.
And a gaggle of obnoxiously loud teammates is certainly not helping.
“They’re excited,” Scott says, which is as much a reason as it is an excuse.
Kip glances down, wrinkles his nose, crosses something off in his note book, then looks back up at Scott and smiles.
Scott’s heart skips a beat or two.
Logically, Scott knows he’s not that far away.
It’s a home game and Scott has both feet firmly planted on the ground in New York. He’s not on a plane headed to…fuck if he knows, Monteral? Detroit? Wherever the hell he flies to for whatever team he’s playing against? It doesn’t matter. Scott is in New York. Kip is back at the apartment waiting for him to come home.
If Kip did not have to work on an essay he’d be here.
Scott knows that too.
But he isn’t here, because he has an essay to work on about unions and early labor laws, and school does come first no matter how badly Scott wants Kip here, so Scott facetimed him even though he’s supposed to go out into the rink in the next five or so minutes because he hates when Kip’s pretty face isn’t the first thing he sees when he skates out onto the ice in his home arena.
The distance between them, short as it is, feels all the worse for it.
“Excited is certainly a–” Kip starts, but Scott doesn’t get to hear him finish.
Scott blinks dumbly.
He is, quite suddenly, staring at the concrete ground and his own hockey skates.
His phone is out of his hand.
Gone.
“--rude, Carter.”
Kip’s voice is no longer coming from Scott’s airpod. It’s coming, instead, from somewhere just over his left shoulder.
Scott twists around.
“Scott was talking to you without us!” Carter argues. He has Scott’s phone, is holding it out at arms length so the rest of their teammates can crowd around him and fill the tiny screen like they’re some kind of newspaper clipping collage. A little difficult with everyone in their hockey gear, but they make it work. Somehow. Scott is kind of impressed. “That’s rude!”
Kip laughs.
Scott feels his shoulders slump and a smile tug at his lips.
It’s hard to be irritated and annoyed when Kip laughs.
“Alright, fair enough,” Kip concedes.
“Why aren’t you here?” Greg asks. He’s got a hand on Carter’s shoulder and is peering around him, squinting at the little phone screen. “That doesn’t look like you’re up in the stands. Unless you found some new spot in the arena I don’t know about.”
Scott stands, walking over to his team’s little–is it little if his entire team is crowded around his phone?--huddle just in time to see Kip hold up his notebook.
The page is a mess of scrawled words and sharp lines and bullet points that grow more slanted the longer they go on.
Kip usually has perfectly neat handwriting, far nicer than Scott’s own shaky penmanship, but when he gets lost in his own head about his work and assignments and ideas his handwriting becomes more akin to chickenscratch.
Scott is horribly endeared by it.
“Nope. No secret spot in the arena. I’m at home I’m afraid–I’ve got an essay I need to work on,” he answers.
Scott’s heart does something funny when Kip says home.
He officially moved into the apartment a few weeks ago, and even though Scott’s had a while to get used to it he doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the way Kip so casually refers to the apartment as home. Or the way Kip will be waiting for him in the living room, sprawled out on the couch. Or how sometimes Scott is the one waiting for Kip, bustling around the kitchen to have dinner ready. Or how sometimes they come back to the apartment at the same time, and they meet each other by the door and smile and laugh and maybe kiss each other hello before they slip inside.
Carter blows a raspberry. “Boo.”
“Sorry boys.” Kip really does sound apologetic. He gives a sweet smile, and he looks so lovely sitting there on the floor of the apartment–their apartment, Scott thinks giddily–hair mused and messy, a pen tucked behind his ear even though he’s already holding another pen, wearing one of Scott’s sweaters–the grey one that’s just big enough to start slipping down his shoulder but never fully does–and Scott wonders how pissed Carter would be if he took his phone back so he can take a screenshot. He has so many pictures of Kip on his phone already. Obviously he needs more. “But I’ve got the game on–promise I’m still watching.”
Kip picks the phone up, flipping the screen to show the television.
The television screen is panning across the arena, lights are flashing, and–oh shit, that’s probably their queue to get their asses moving, isn’t it?
“Oh shit–” Carter says.
He shoves the phone back into Scott’s hand.
Scott just about damn near drops it.
“Bye Kip! We love you!” Carter calls, hobbling to the locker room door.
“Bye Kip!” The rest of the team echoes.
Kip laughs.
Scott smiles. He can’t help it. He really can’t. He loves Kip’s laugh, and he could ride the high of it for the rest of his life.
He really fucking hopes he gets to.
“I think that’s probably your sign to go, sweetheart,” Kip says gently, a touch of amusement in his voice.
“Yeah, probably,” Scott says absentmindedly.
He’s kind of content to stay here, actually, as long as he’s got Kip on the phone.
Kip shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “Go. Play your game. Break a leg or whatever.”
Scott snorts. “God, I hope not.”
Kit laughs again, sweet and melodic, and it’s a good thing he hung up the call a second later because otherwise Scott would have stood in the locker room for who the fuck knows how long staring at his phone like a besotted idiot.
Well.
He is a besotted idiot.
But still.