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Scott doesn’t play dirty. He can’t afford that kind of scrutiny. He plays clean, kind of boring, spends his time between hockey games gladhanding at fundraisers and then fucking off to Europe in the off season. Despite being really fucking good at hockey, he’s made being personally uninteresting into an art form.
Obviously he recognizes the same thing in Hollander from the second the kid steps on the ice. Christ, he’s good. Fast and sharp, smart about it. During their first game against the Metros that year, everyone could tell that Hollander played like someone who’d been playing major league hockey for two years, not two months.
The other guys see it too. Vaughan is real fucking good at cutting down shit aimed his way—there’s not a sports journalist in New York who could keep their job if they wrote the same made up bullshit about Vaughan’s supposed “aggression” or “brute force approach” that he had to deal with when he first got drafted—but neither of them are sure how to handle the way their guys talk about Shane Hollander. Leberg calls him a hockey robot along with the rest of the league, and Scott watches Vaughan’s mouth twist.
For years and years, the guys talk about Hollander like he’s a machine, not a real flesh-and-blood man like the rest of them. In the Admirals locker room it never got to the point of comparing dick sizes, but Scott’s sure that other locker rooms are soothing their losses by talking shit about how the kid can’t get it up or goes home to study tape with his glasses on, like he’s some kind of math whiz. It has a bad taste, man, Vaughan told him once while they were putting their suits back on after a game, but what could you do when it was kind of true. The kid played so good that it really did seem like he was born with a computer in his head that could just process plays on the ice faster than any other guy. Maybe that was a racist thing to think too.
It’s easy to see the huge fucking wall between Hollander and the rest of the world, the same kind of wall Scott has. Hollander’s not gay, obviously, but he probably does the same kind of risk calculations that Scott does. What he can be seen doing, what he can’t. Vaughan has to do that too, but he’s also just such a nice fucking guy that everybody steps up to the plate for him. He just has that quality in him that helps him play the room. In a kind world he wouldn’t need that skill to avoid getting called slurs by guys you’re supposed to trust with your life—but in this world, at least he’s got it.
Hollander doesn’t. Scott could tell that from the rookie awards—he wasn’t awkward like it was his first time at an MLH event, he was awkward like a guy who was choosing dialogue options from a multiple choice menu.
So Scott tries to keep an eye on him, all while he’s keeping his head down and winning gold at the Olympics and thinking about Kip and the Kingfisher. He puts his hockey socks on over the smoothie socks, which are absolutely fucking wrecked by now. He wonders if he’ll ever be brave enough to risk hockey for a birthday party at a gay bar.
Probably not. He puts his skates on. This is something Scott and Hollander and all the other sad fucks who play hockey have in common: there isn’t anything else for them out there. Even if there was, it’s too far to reach.
Scott finds out about Rozanov and Hollander the same way everybody else does.
Jesus Christ.
He sits down on the couch, the bottom dropped out of his chest. Empty. His hands are shaking. Kip comes out of the bedroom, but Scott can’t even look at him.
“Hey,” Kip says, into Scott’s ringing ears. He sounds like he’s talking through a blanket. Is he okay? Scott can’t see him. “Scott, are you— hey, baby, what’s wrong?”
Scott gives Kip his phone. Kip looks at it, sees the tweet, and hisses. “Jesus, fuck.”
Scott nods. That’s pretty much it. Jesus, and also: Fuck.
The room blurs a little bit. Scott worried about pictures all the time. Not so much videos, probably because he hadn’t thought that far. Somehow he’d thought that if someone took even a shitty pixelated zoomed-in picture of him and Kip in the same room they’d know right away. Short-form video content only really got big on social media platforms after the pandemic. After Scott came out on his own terms. He just wouldn’t have thought to worry about something like this, is all.
In 2015, after Scott did some deep breathing exercises and let Kip tell his dad but before Scott did yoga and a few shots and let Kip confirm what his friends already knew, they met up at a hotel while Scott was on a roadie. It was in Raleigh because Kip had a conference at UNC Chapel Hill and, because Scott is almost intolerably lucky, was willing to drive 30 minutes to his conference rather than sleeping on campus so he could stay in the hotel room Scott paid for.
He gave Kip cash for it because he was terrified of his name being attached to a room that another man slept in. Terrified isn’t even the right word. It was all-consuming, the fear. Somehow the thing that could happen was worse than death.
Scott had made Kip close the blinds because the windows were too big, even when they had all their clothes on. He’d worn a baseball cap and kept his face turned away from the security cameras. He’d asked Kip to tell him where the security cameras were so he could avoid them. The idea of a security guard catching sight of him for even a millisecond was almost too much to cope with. Not that they’d know it was Scott Hunter—and if they did, they wouldn’t suspect the truth. Honestly, an anonymous hotel meetup probably screamed drugs more than anything. Somehow that was better than the other thing, too.
“Baby,” Kip is saying. Scott shakes his head. He just hadn’t thought about videos. TikTok wasn’t around in 2015, and Vine wasn’t exactly a news source. YouTube was only just starting to be noticed by news outlets. It had never occurred to him— it had just never occurred to him.
“Look at me,” Kip says, and Scott looks at him, because he has to. Kip is asking. He did everything right and now he gets to have Kip, his handsome Kip, looking at him like he’s worth anything. How’d he get so lucky? Most days he wakes up and the fear is gone, because the thing he feared can’t happen anymore, because he beat it. Right now, all he remembers is the fear. It’s all he knows. “Hey. Can you say something for me?”
Scott swallows. His throat clicks. “Something,” he croaks out, wry, and Kip presses his forehead to his. Scott feels the warmth of it, feels Kip’s breath as he laughs. In a more normal voice, he tries, “Sorry. I’m— fuck.”
“Yeah,” Kip says, and then he crawls into Scott’s lap, warm and close and gorgeous, and Scott grips him tight. “I feel so fucking bad for them.”
Scott nods. He has to— Christ, Hollander. Rozanov too, but fuck. He has to reach out to them. He should call them, or maybe— probably their phones are blowing up, maybe he should just send a text message—
“Breathe, baby,” Kip says, and Scott inhales. Presses his face against Kip’s chest, feels the movement of his lungs against his cheek. “C’mon. Tell me. What’re you thinking about?”
“I would’ve fucking killed myself if that was me,” Scott blurts out. Kip’s grip tightens, and Scott exhales, out of air, all spent. He can’t walk it back because it’s true. It would be better to be dead. Five years ago that’s how he felt. It would be better to be dead.
“Okay,” Kip says, shaky, “I get that. It’s scary. I’m so glad we’re here, baby.” Scott presses his mouth to Kip’s shirt just to feel his warmth, his heartbeat underneath it. He pushes at the hem and Kip knows him well enough by now to raise his arms so Scott can push it up, just high enough to press his cheek against Kip’s chest and feel him, skin on skin. “I still gotta do all the work, huh?” Kip jokes as he pulls his shirt the rest of the way off, and the joke cracks open the air around them.
Scott laughs, and then he buries his face in the middle of Kip’s chest and cries, just big hulking sobs so brutal they hurt, almost. A good hurt, like the burn at the end of a game, one minute left on a tied board. He wonders if Hollander can stomach thinking of hockey right now—or if it’s the only thing he can think about at a time like this, the only way he can understand the world. Scott is like that sometimes.
“You’re okay,” Kip murmurs, and Scott nods. He knows, he knows. Kip kisses his hairline, his forehead, and Scott settles. “Yeah. It’s okay. You’re all right.”
“Yeah,” Scott says into Kip’s skin. He’s all right now. But Jesus, those fucking kids. Thirty years old now and only three years younger than him but years are hard in hockey, hard on the body and the mind, and they always looked so fucking young to him. And this is their worst nightmare. It has to be, because it was his, for decades. Scared before he even know what to be scared of. He was fourteen in his billet house, twenty in his first MLH locker room, twenty-six in that perfect and devastating winter when he met Kip and almost lost him. Thirty-three now, remembering the terror and the sickness of all those hard years.
“They’re strong,” Kip says, and Scott has to agree. “And you were so brave. It would be different if you hadn’t come out. It would be a completely different conversation. You know that. So that’s—” and Kip kisses him on his forehead, between the eyes, over his cheekbones. And then, finally, his mouth, and Scott kisses him back until he pulls back enough to say, “You did that.”
“We did that,” Scott says, because God fucking knows it wasn’t him alone out there on the ice. If he’d— Jesus Christ. He can’t even think about it really. If he hadn’t just won the cup, if someone had just found out. “I’m so fucking lucky you’re mine.”
“Same here,” Kip says, and then he leans back, trusting Scott to keep him upright. “Okay. Jesus, this is fucked up. I know it’s scary. But they’re gonna be okay, because they have you on their side.”
“Yeah,” Scott says.
“And you’re the smartest guy I know.” Kip kisses him and Scott breathes into it, holds his man. “Handsome, too.”
“Flatterer.” Scott knows he looks like a mess right now, covered in snot and tears and looking at Kip like he hung the moon, and Kip still thinks he’s handsome.
“So we’re all gonna be okay,” Kip says, and Scott nods, because when Kip says it, it has to be true. The world rearranges shape for Kip, makes space and chances where there weren’t any before. That’s how Scott sees it, especially whenever he thinks about being the luckiest man on earth. It’s all Kip.
Kip, his sweetheart, presses his forehead against Scott’s to look him in the eyes. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says.
Scott swallows. “I’m okay,” he says, finding that it’s true as he says it. “I’m scared. I’m so fucking scared for them. But I’m okay too.”
“You’re here with me,” Kip says. “In 2021. We’re out. We’re safe. You’re with me.”
“Yeah. I’m here with you.”
“Okay.” Kip kisses him again, again, until Scott’s pressed back into the couch and full up on nothing more than love, eating up all the fear inside of him. “Breakfast first. Then we see how Shane and Ilya are doing.”
Scott tries for a grin, almost makes it. “Then we fix hockey.”
Kip grins back, all warmth, all sweetness. “Yeah, Captain Hockey,” he says, and it doesn’t even sound sarcastic. Just true. “Then we save the world.”