Archive of Our Own

“I’m going to go home tonight. I need to.” 

Scott has never seen Kip look like this. Sad, plaintive—forgiveness and recrimination and disappointment and regret tied up in a single glance and placed at his feet. 

Scott nods. He says nothing to stop him. He does not reach out. Kip leaves, the dark shape of him in the tailored tux, the one Scott had fitted for him. His dress shoes are louder than Scott can bear against the tile. 

Afterwards is a blur. He drinks the first whiskey he’d poured. He drinks the second. He pours a third and sits in the silence of his penthouse, drinking too fast, waiting for the walls to close in. 

His stomach is a pit. At the bottom of the pit is a writhing mass: vipers, seething. 

He has let the one good thing in his life walk away. 

Just like that, the lights have shut off. 

When he sleeps, his rest is fitful. He clutches a pillow too tightly, presses his chest into the mattress, and waits for oblivion to crowd around him. 

Scott wakes up somewhere different. Or, rather, somewhere familiar. 

It’s 8am, his alarm is politely trilling, and he is staring at the nondescript ceiling of a hotel room. 

A loud snore to his right draws his attention. Breezy, his rookie, sleeping through the annoyance of the alarm with a grim determination. Captain’s privilege, rooming with rookies, grows less appealing with every passing year. 

He feels the adrenaline curling sour in his stomach. A dream. He’d had an awful dream. 

He snatches up his phone and silences the alarm. He opens iMessage and texts Kip, needing to console himself. 

I love you. Can’t wait to see you tonight. 

Kip texts back, a smiling emoji with blushing cheeks. It’s normal. It’s nice. It was just a dream. 

He sits up and swings his feet over the edge of the bed and looks out the hotel window at the grey Montreal sky. He wants, more than anything, to get home. With his Kip. 

He makes a tally of the obstacles between now and the moment he can finally drop the mask: team breakfast; bus to the airport; plane; St Thomas benefit. And then, blissfully, free. Hours with Kip until his Saturday home game against New Jersey, and then Kip’s birthday. 

He’s never had a boyfriend to dote on before. He runs through it: pick up the watch from Longines; confirm with the caterer; order the flowers. He’s been planning it for a couple of weeks now, each moment giving him a pleasant thrill. 

That feeling now is a little dampened by that horrible dream. God, Kip had been so disappointed in him. He can’t quite remember what they’d been arguing about, but it was almost certainly Scott’s fault. 

He sighs and rubs his hands over his face. He grabs his phone from the bedside table and check the time again. Right. Breakfast. Coach Murdock wants them to all be there so he can herd them off to a conference room afterwards and review tape from last night. 

Scott kicks his foot out and shoves at Breezy’s mattress. 

“Up and at ‘em, rook,” he says over Breezy’s complaining grumbles. “Coach wants us down and fed in an hour and a half.” 

Breezy groans and shoves a pillow over his own face. 

Scott sighs, then places his hands on his knees and pushes himself upright. His hip complains loudly at the movement; a nasty bruise is purpling across the skin there when he looks. A hit courtesy of a Metros enforcer. 

He heads to his duffle bag and grabs clean clothes. He brushes his teeth. He tames his hair. He shucks his sleep pants and pulls on something comfortable for the flight later this morning: sweatpants, Admirals shirt, a grey hoodie that Kip had left at his apartment one afternoon. It’s bordering on too small, but he does not care one bit. He tucks his nose into the collar and inhales a little. It still smells of Kip, just faintly. Spice and books and the Issey Miyake cologne he wears. 

He steps out of the bathroom, déjà vu rolling over him like a wave. Breezy is sitting up in bed, scrolling through something in his phone. 

“Bathroom’s all yours,” Scott says, and it feels funny. Like he’s said it before. 

He shakes it off and heads for the door. “See you down there,” he says, twisting the handle and stepping out into the carpeted hallway. 

Breakfast is the usual affair: primarily he and his team inhaling the hotel’s entire supply of eggs and coffee. Carter tries to keep the peace when two younger players start a juvenile contest of catapulting bits of scrambled eggs from their spoons into each others mouths—it inevitably escalated into a scuffle of pelted toast until Coach shouts at them to stop acting like animals and frogmarches them into a conference room. 

The tape review is boring. It’s usually not, but it’s New Jersey’s last game and the Devils suck so it’s not like there’s even anything to look at. Scott desperately wants to get home. He drums his fingers against his knee. He jiggles his foot until Bennet reaches over and punches him lightly. 

By the time they’re on the bus to the airport, he’s crawling out of his skin. They climb, beleaguered, up the air stairs onto the plane. He sinks gratefully into the leather seat. The day is sliding away—he checks his phone; it’s almost 1pm. They’ll be back in New York before 3pm. He can be back at his apartment by 4, if he’s lucky. 

Take-off is smooth. After this many years and this many flights, he barely even registers the change in pressure and velocity. He listens to Springsteen’s new album, High Hopes, which he’d downloaded onto his iPhone. 

In the seat next to him, Carter is fidgeting. “It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.” 

Scott tugs out one headphone and looks at Carter. “Hmm?”

“It’s too cold. Can I?” He reaches up and over Scott’s head to the air-ball vent, tilting it back in Scott’s direction. The cool air blasts down the back of his neck. He tugs the hoodie closer around himself, a little annoyed. 

The album winds down. He puts Born to Run on instead. The last strains of “Jungleland” are fading out as their plane lands with a bump on the tarmac at Westchester. The afternoon sun is winter-weak, and the sky an unpleasant grey. The car service is waiting—he waves goodbye to the guys and settles into the back seat, greeting the driver politely as usual. It’s a forty-five minute drive back to the Upper West Side. Traffic snarls, bringing it closer to an hour before he’s slipping out of the car into the sidewalk and heading back into his apartment. Kip won’t be waiting for him—he’d let Scott know that he’d be getting ready with his friend Elena for the benefit, and that he’d see him there.

The benefit tonight starts at 7pm. He wants, more than anything, to see Kip. It itches at him like it’s under his skin: the need, the desire. God, he loves him. It’s been barely three days, just roadies to Toronto and Montreal, but he can feel the distance every time they’re apart. Like Kip fills him with warmth and goodness, and when they’re not together it begins to leach out of him, ebbing out like a tide, leaving him exposed and raw as something washed in on a wave. 

He showers the flight off, and pads to the kitchen in his underwear. He opens the fridge: Kip’s left chicken pasta in the fridge bearing a post-it note with a smiley face scrawled on it. While it’s heating he does a walk through the apartment, looking for the small signs that Kip had been here without him. The bed is made, but the pillow on Kip’s side has a dent in it still from his head. He resists the impulse to bury his face in it and inhale. 

He paces around the apartment, an antsy feeling he can’t shake zipping under his skin. He’s not sure what it is: stress from the roadie and being away from Kip; or the pressure of the benefit tonight, the collision of his private and public personas. Maybe it’s just that as he opens the closet door to pick a tux for the benefit, seeing that the one he’d had tailored for Kip is gone, that he’ll see Kip wearing it tonight, he gets another rush of that déjà vu again: his hands gripping the closet doors, swinging them open, his fingers moving through the rack of suits. He blinks hard, tries to clear his head.

He eats. He reads. He texts Kip, says he can’t wait to see him. He gets dressed and calls the car service and before he knows it, it’s just after 7 and he’s meeting Carter outside the ballroom, and they’re heading up the stairs together. He immediately scans the room for Kip, trying to catch just a glimpse, needing to know that he’s there, but he can’t spot him. It’s making him anxious: this is the first time they’ll be in public together, and he wants to get this right. 

These things tend to always go the same: turn up, small talk, make a speech, take advantage of the open bar, and then try and slip away unnoticed before anyone tries to engage with him too much about his parents, murmuring that they’re sorry for his loss and other platitudes. He’s heard it a hundred times. This time it comes from Tom Holt, one of the team executives. 

“You’re playing so well at the moment,” he says, coy. “What happened, you meet a nice girl or something?” he asks. 

Scott’s brain fritzes—he can usually field these stupid questions, but tonight it’s so much harder, because tonight Kip is here, mere feet away, waiting for him. The lies are harder to control the closer he is to his truth, and he can’t let them slip through his fingers, eel-like in the slick of his fear. 

Carter, blessedly, cuts in. “I think we just found our groove as a team.” 

Scott drops his guard, just enough for the next comment to land uncomfortable and barbed over his heart: 

“Your parents would be so proud, Scott. Your mom, especially,” Holt says. 

Scott excuses himself. He won’t wait any longer. The more deeply he falls in love with Kip, the harder it is to be away from him. Days feel like weeks. This last roadie was an eternity. He needs to see him; needs the steadiness he brings to Scott’s racing heart.

“Hey, are you sure you’re okay?” Carter asks, pushing in close as they walk further into the ballroom. The look of concern on his face is genuine.  Gratitude rushes through him; Carter is a real friend, and he momentarily feels bad for being so pissy on the plane. He’ll make it up to him tomorrow. Tonight, he has more important things to do. 

“It’s fine,” he says, clapping Carter on the shoulder. “I should be used to it by now.”

He spots Kip at the bar: he looks incredible in the tux. He looks like he belongs here. The urge to take Kip on his arm and wheel him around to the dance floor is almost overwhelming—to show everyone that Kip is his, that this is the man he loves, someone this incredible and warm and lovely, so lovely. 

He steps forward into the room, towards Kip, and feels that feeling again: he’s been here before, he’s done this before. Adrenaline tingles through his fingertips. 

But then Kip is smiling at him from where he stands at the bar, just a quick grin, irrepressible despite their plan to play it low key. It fizzes inside him, overrides the nausea of the déjà vu with the warm glow he feels whenever Kip turns his light towards him. 

That warmth gutters out pretty quickly upon meeting Kip’s friend, Elena. Within about four seconds, he becomes painfully aware that she knows. A deep flare of panic sets under his ribs, his fingers light and flighty with the rush of nerves. The fantasy of standing proud beside Kip fades, replaced by an ugly, familiar fear. This room is filled with people who know him, who demand things of him, who rely on him: donors, his teammates, the scholarship board. 

Kip confirms it for him. 

“She knows,” he says, simple and devastating, once Elena has left for the bar. 

“I kind of got that. It’s okay,” Scott says, even though it is so incredibly far from okay. “She’s discreet, right?” 

“Of course,” Kip assuages, automatic. 

Their conversation lulls, the reality of the fracture setting in around them. 

“I’m looking forward to the afterparty,” he says, trying for levity and falling short. “We should leave right after my speech.” 

“Not before you dance with me,” Elena cuts in, reappearing with drinks balanced in her hands. She places them on the table and leads Scott onto the dance floor. 

It doesn’t take long for Elena to cut to the chase as they move gracefully between bodies on the dance floor. “Kip is miserable,” she says, matter of fact. “Are you?”

“No?” It’s more question than answer, because how could he be miserable? He’s happier with Kip than he’s ever been before, happier than he’s been in years. The word hits him like a cannonball to the chest. Miserable? The last thing he wants is for Kip to be unhappy—he would do almost anything to make Kip smile, to make his eyes shine, to have him grin and tuck in close and tell Scott he loves him. Those moments had never seemed hard-won before.

He looks over at where Kip stands on the edge of the room: his mouth is a twist of wistful disappointment and resignation. 

Shit, thinks Scott, mentally scrambling for ways to fix it. But the band is playing their final strains, and the dancers are slowing their movements, and it’s almost time for his speech, and Elena is reaching up and straightening his lapels. 

“Kip deserves sunshine,” she says, her hands warm against his chest. She looks in his eyes, her gaze searching and honest. “And so do you.” 

The words lodge deep in his gut, flaring painfully as he watches Elena walk over to Kip and place a hand consolingly on his arm. But he doesn’t have time, he can’t fix it, because he’s being waved over to the small stage, and they’re introducing him over the microphone, and he doesn’t even have a moment to go to the man he loves, to make promises he can’t keep, and to try and fix this mess he hadn’t even known he was creating. 

His speech is, by all accounts, a complete disaster. Not his performance, because he’s said these words and told this story so many times before. The sourness of the experience comes from how empty it sounds now. He used to mean it when he said that hockey gave him a family, gave him a whole life, gave him everything. Now the one thing—the person—that matters most to him is standing on the edge of the crowd unable to make eye contact with him as polite applause fills the ballroom and he steps away from the mic. His head feels fuzzy with a low, unfamiliar buzz—the déjà vu, the same one he’s been feeling all day, juddering through him again. His speech. He’d been so incredibly wrong: what he’d had before wasn’t everything at all—there’d been a gaping hole in his life, and Kip had come and filled it with his warmth and his smile and his love; that was everything. 

He has to tell Kip. He has to make it right. 

They leave early, as promised. The paparazzi are by the exit, and their camera flashes follow him into the town car. He feels the forced smile drop from his face the moment he closes the heavy car door. 

In a quiet alley behind the building, Kip slips into the back seat next to Scott. They don’t touch. They don’t speak. The disappointment in the small smile Kip gives him turns the mere feet between them into miles. They ride back to his apartment in silence. 

Upstairs, over whiskey, he makes his best attempt to rectify things. The birthday dinner, the catering, his surprise of the watch and flowers waiting to be delivered. Kip seems unimpressed. He makes, instead, a simple petition: come to my bar; meet my friends; be with me where I am. 

He knows what Kip is going to ask before the invitation is halfway out of his mouth, and he hates it because he knows what his answer will be, how disappointed Kip will be. Kip should leave him. Kip should just walk out. 

He shakes his head at the thought, déjà vu itching at the back of his mind. 

He changes tack. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t. Not yet. Maybe in a few years, things will be different.” 

He sees Kip recoil. And so he lies. “It’ll go by fast,” he says, knowing that it won’t, that it would be agony for both of them as he kicked that can down the road until Kip hated it enough to leave him. 

“I’ll retire, and then we can be like everybody else. We can be normal.” 

The word hangs between them like a funeral—it was never about being normal; it was about loving one another enough for nothing else to matter. 

“I heard what you said in your speech tonight,” Kip says, his voice soft and forgiving already. “I know they’re your family, but I have a family, too. And I keep lying to them, and I don’t want to.”

Scott nods, wants to argue but doesn’t, wants to shout that you’re the closest thing I have to real family, Kip, please stay and love me—but doesn’t. Because it’s too intense, he’s too intense. So he takes it. He’ll take it now, and they can repair it, they’ll have all night to rebuild. 

“I’m going to go home tonight,” Kip says, and a sharp pain flares behind Scott’s right eye, acute and bright. He raises a hand and presses his fingers into his temple. 

“Are you okay?” Kip asks. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he says. “Headache.” 

“Drink some water, take an aspirin,” Kip says, not unkindly. “I need to go. I’ll call you in the morning.” 

Relief floods through Scott. Kip will call tomorrow. It’s not too late for him to fix this.

All the same, Kip doesn’t kiss him goodbye. He doesn’t hug him, doesn’t leave him with any lingering touch. He doesn’t hesitate, never took his jacket off once they were inside to doesn’t need to gather his things. 

Kip walks out, the door closing loudly behind him. 

Scott takes two aspirin and drinks a large glass of room temperature water. He showers. He slides between the cool sheets of his bed. Kip’s pillow still has the impression of his head in it from this morning, the one he’d noticed the afternoon, and this time he doesn’t hesitate: he leans over and burrows his face in the fabric, inhaling the smell of Kip’s shampoo, the sleep-smell he’d left while Scott was on the road. It’s faint, but it’s enough. It’s enough for him to fall fitfully asleep. 

The sound of his alarm wakes him. He reaches one hand out to grab his phone and silence it—Kip will want to sleep in, it’s the first morning back after the roadie. 

His phone isn’t where he left it. He cracks his eyes open, and feels a wave of nausea wash over him. 

Montreal. He’s in Montreal. The hotel room, beige and soulless in the morning light, stares back at him. 

The alarm trills on, far too polite a sound for the current adrenaline that’s coursing through him. He must be still asleep. This has to be a dream. He pinches himself on the leg, hard—he’s not dreaming. 

In the bed across the room, someone snores loudly—Breezy, he knows it’s Breezy—and then groans out: “Turn your alarm off, Cap, just ten more minutes.” 

He snatches up his phone and silences the alarm. The day and date glare up at him from the screen: Friday 10 January 2014. He thumbs open his phone and pulls up his calendar: Flight, Montreal to New York. 7pm tonight, St Thomas Benefit. 

No, he thinks, and panic sets in. No, that’s not possible. 

He stands, his hands trembling, and he stumbles into the bathroom, pushing the door shut behind him. He opens his phone again and pulls up his messages. His last text to Kip, yesterday somehow, and nothing since then: There’s a surprise for you in my closet. 

Nausea crests over him again, boiling and effervescent in his throat, and he rushes to the toilet, flipping the lid up and leaning over the bowl just in time for a hot stream of vomit to come rushing out of him. He coughs, splutters, spits into the bowl. His chest heaves. Bile burns in his oesophagus. 

He stands and runs the faucet, douses his face with water. He looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t look like he’s insane: he looks like a man afraid. 

A fist bangs against the door, and Breezy calls out: “Yo, Cap, you okay?” 

“I’m fine,” he calls back, his voice rough. He’s not fine. He’s losing his fucking mind. 

He pulls his phone out and calls Kip. He answers on the second ring. Scott can hear a blender in the background; Kip is at work. 

“Hey, everything okay?” Kip sounds concerned. 

“Yeah,” Scott chokes out, relief at hearing Kip’s voice mingling with the ugly twist of panic in his gut. He clears his throat. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just wanted to hear your voice.” 

“Okay? What’s wrong?” Kip now sounds completely worried and rightfully so, because Scott sounds like a lunatic. He wishes Kip could soothe him, could call him babe and tell him I love you but he’s probably in the middle of the rush hour at the shop, and Scott is taking more than he should anyway. 

“Nothing’s wrong. I just…. You know I love you, right?” 

Kip pauses. “Yes?” 

“And I’m sorry, I’m sorry I can’t be more right now. I—I’m trying. Please, just don’t—”

He’s interrupted by a banging on the door, Breezy shouting that he needs to piss. Scott can’t do this here, not with his rookie listening in the next room. 

“I gotta go,” he says. He hears Kip’s voice over the phone’s speaker as he disconnects the call: Wait, just a sec, I’m— 

He looks at himself in the mirror. He takes one terrified moment of letting it show, and then slams down the shutter of his game face. He needs to get back to New York. That’s all that matters. 

The flight back is ninety white-knuckled minutes. He listens to Carter complain about the air conditioning with a sick sense of familiarity. He tucks himself into Kip’s hoodie, practically chewing the strings. He stares out the window at the passing landscape, until even Carter is knocking him on the shoulder to check if he’s okay. 

“I’m fine,” he says, staring for probably a beat too long into Carter’s eyes, searching to see if he’s noticed this too. But he gets nothing—no sign at all that anyone has been here before. 

He desperately wants to call Kip. Maybe he can take the car straight to the smoothie shop, and then…

The reality of that idea hits him somewhere over Vermont. What is he going to do: a grand sweeping gesture of intent? This is his life. He can’t just come out, he can’t. He can’t make a speech or give an interview that fixes this, he’s not ready. He needs to control it instead. Convince Kip to stay. Head his departure off at the pass before he walks out the door.

He messages Kip from the town car on the drive back to the city. Sorry about before, I think I’d just had a bad dream. I’ll see you tonight. 

Kip texts back: I can come over if you’d like? 

But Scott demurs. He’ll see Kip there. He’ll keep the distance and then they can come home together and he’ll fix it. He’ll fix everything. 

The moment he sees Kip at the benefit, his heart leaps. He remembers last night—last time—when Kip had walked out of his apartment. The numbness that had followed. Kip is here now, and he has, by some fortune, the gift of another chance. 

But he looks around the ballroom with frightened eyes: so many people he knows, so many people who know him, count on him. Kip calls to him like a beacon, but he pulls himself away. 

He and Carter meet Tom Holt on their way in. The déjà vu buzzes around him as Holt asks: “What happened? Did you meet a nice girl or something?” Scott’s eyes cut to Kip by the bar without even thinking about it. His hand twitches like he’s going to do something stupid like point at Kip and say: there, there’s the reason I love my sport again, and I am about to fuck everything up. Holt would probably think he was pointing at Elena. God, he’d probably be happy for him. 

He excuses himself and makes his way to the bar. It takes a staggering amount of self control to not place a hand on Kip’s shoulder, or reach out and kiss him, or do something else equally stupid. Kip looks worried, probably a mirror of Scott’s own face. 

When Elena heads to get drinks—as he’d known she would, because of course she will—he leans in close to Kip, closer than he probably should. 

“I’m really sorry,” he says. 

“What for? You said that on the phone this morning, and about twenty times over text since then. What’s going on?” 

And Kip looks concerned, looks nothing but preoccupied with Scott’s wellbeing. He doesn’t at all look like he’s two hours away from walking out of Scott’s life. 

“I’m aware,” Scott says, keeping his voice low, “that I am making your life harder than it needs to be.” 

Kip moves, like he wants to reach out, and Scott slips back, just an inch or two more of distance between them. 

“I promise, I’ll fix it,” he says, and then Elena is coming back with more champagne, which Scott downs immediately, much to the mild horror on Kip and Elena’s faces. 

He lets Elena pull him onto the dance floor. “He loves you, but he’s miserable,” she says. 

He looks at Kip where he stands on the edge of the room. 

“Does he love me?” He feels pathetic for asking, but he needs to know. “Or does he have one foot out the door?” 

“Oh, honey.” Elena looks at him with pity, her hands soft on his lapels. “It’s not that. He’d stay forever, even locked away. But that’s not what either of you deserve. You deserve sunshine.” 

The music cuts out, and the crowd applauds politely. 

“I’m gonna go make my speech,” he murmurs, reeling. 

The speech is a horror show. He speaks quickly and with flat affect, desperate to get to the end of his rehearsed lines. He stumbles his way off stage when he’s done, half convinced he’s going to vomit again, ignoring the stunned faces of his teammates and donors. 

He lets Kip hold his hand on the drive back to the penthouse. It feels like cold comfort, but he squeezes Kip’s fingers anyway. 

The moment they get back into the apartment, Kip rounds on him. 

“Okay, Scott, what the fuck is going on? Because you’re acting like that time we went to that gallery, and I’m sorry if I don’t really want a repeat of that. Is being seen in public with me really that much of an issue?” 

“No!” Scott cuts in. “No, of course not.” 

“Well that’s how it seemed. You couldn’t wait to get out of there fast enough.” 

“No, its not that, its not you—”

“It’s not you, it’s me?” Kip says, and then lets out a pained laugh. “Scott.” 

Scott had been pacing behind the kitchen island. He stops and turns to Kip. 

“Talk to me,” Kip says, his voice softening. 

“I just…” he trails off. He knows what will happen. Kip will leave. He knows because he’s seen it happen already. So he does what he does best: he pushes it down, he reaches for the lapels of Kip’s tuxedo, and he tugs him in to kiss him. 

Kip’s mouth is slack, and he’s pulling away. “We’ve done the sex-bubble thing, but I need more. Being with you in that room tonight—there was nothing I wanted more than to be on your arm. By your side. But I just feel like that’s never going to happen. You give me all of you within these walls but it’s not enough, Scott. I’m sorry.” 

Scott still has a hold of Kip’s jacket, although his hands have gentled now, his thumbs brushing over Kip’s chest. His eyes are swimming with tears because he doesn’t know what to do to fix it; he is paralysed, useless. 

“I heard what you said in your speech tonight,” Kip says, and a sharp pain flares behind Scott’s eyes. 

“I have a family, too,” he continues. “And I keep lying to them and I don’t want to.” 

Then don’t, Scott wants to say. Tell them everything, tell everyone. But a part of him feels like this is what he deserves—to be alone. Maybe this is an inevitability. What if he just lets Kip walk out forever? He just blinks his eyes, hard, against the twist of the headache as it blooms again. 

Kip takes Scott’s hands, squeezing them lightly before gently removing them from his chest. “I’m going to go home tonight. I need to.” 

“Wait—” Scott calls out and Kip heads towards the front door. But Kip doesn’t wait, and the sound of the door closing sounds like a slam in the apartment’s quiet. 

Scott cries. He is not proud of it. He watches himself reflected in the window that looks out over the city, feels an ugly anger rising in his chest. He takes it out on a wall on his way to the bedroom, hammering his fist into the drywall until his knuckles bleed and there’s a crater punched into the spot right next to the Mickalene Thomas print Kip had put up. 

He leaves his hand throbbing and raw as he crawls under the comforter, still in his suit. Tomorrow, he can fix it. Tomorrow, he will start again. 

Scott wakes in Montreal and wants to scream. 

He rolls over and presses his face into his pillow, his hands clutching in the sheets, his body a long, singular line of anguish. 

“Yo, turn off the alarm,” Breezy shouts over the noise. 

Scott snatches up his phone, checks the date: Friday 10 January 2014. Again. 

Again. 

He rushes to the bathroom and calls Kip. He barely lets him answer before he blurts it out: “Kip, there’s something wrong. I’m going to sound fucking crazy, but I swear. I’ve done this before. I keep waking up in Montreal. I’m going to ruin everything tonight, and I’ll lose you, and tomorrow it will all happen again, and I—god, I sound fucking nuts. Kip. Kip?”

A silence on the other end of the line. And then, “Sorry, I missed all of that. The line went super fuzzy. Are you okay?” Kip sounds concerned, but not unduly. Like he hadn’t heard a word Scott said. 

He tries again, hissing into the phone sto Breezy can’t hear on the other side of the door. “I’m going crazy. I keep reliving today. I don’t know what to do.” 

“I, uh,” Kip clears his throat, like he’s hesitating. Scott realises from the background noise that he’s at work. “I love you too.” 

“Huh?” Scott strangles the phone in his hand.

“I mean, I love you too. And I love that you called just to tell me.” 

“What? I didn’t—I mean, I do, but…Kip, did you hear me?” 

“I heard you,” Kip says, the smile in his voice. “And I love you, too. Jesus, I gotta go, a bunch of sweaty basketball bros just came in. I’ll see you tonight.”

Scott stares at the traitorous phone. Kip hadn’t heard him at all.

Breakfast. Team meeting. Onto the plane. It all trips out ahead of him, a familiar road. 

Carter flops down onto the seat next to him. “It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.”

“Not really. Here.” Scott angles the aircon vent away from Carter and onto himself, unprompted. Carter looks pleased as he puts in headphones and pulls out his phone. 

He looks at Carter, considering, then tugs his headphones out. 

“Hey, Vaughny,” he says, and then licks his lips. He feels nervous. “Do you notice anything weird about today?”

“You mean apart from the fact that you didn’t absolutely throttle Breezy for throwing that much egg at Gillis?” Carter shrugs. 

“You don’t…I feel like I’ve been here before,” he tries again. 

“Well, yeah, we have permanent ass grooves in these seats.”

“No, I mean. Today is not the first—”

He’s cut off by a hiss over the PA system, and a loud feedback whine through the speakers. 

“Ugh, what the fuck,” Carter grits out, covering his ears. 

Scott shuts his mouth. The sounds subsides. Carter cringes and then turns back to Scott. 

“Sorry, what were you gonna say?” 

“Nothing,” Scott says, picking his phone up again and opening iTunes. “Forget about it.”

The plane takes off Scott hurtles, once more, towards New York and the grief that awaits him. 

It doesn’t need to be this way, he realises as the plane touches down at Westchester. There must be something he can do, something he can say to Kip to fix things.

But he can’t cut through at the benefit, either. Every time he tries to tell Kip, to warn him about what’s happening, he’s interrupted. Someone coming and tugging him away to meet a donor; a drink spilled on his shoes; a speech starting; a glass breaking. He’s stifled. 

By the time they’re back at the apartment, he’s all but given up. If talking won’t work, he’ll try action.

It’s late, and he’s tired, but he has Kip back at his place. Scott had done everything right at the benefit: dance with Elena, make the speech, placate Holt. He’d taken Kip’s hand in the back of the town car, had kissed his knuckles. Now they stand in the kitchen, two glasses of whiskey on the kitchen island between them. Kip looks so handsome in his suit, his bow tie undone, the top buttons of his shirt open. 

“It’s my birthday on Sunday,” Kip says. “My friends are throwing me this party. At the bar I go to, The Kingfisher. It’s a gay bar—”

“Why wait?” Scott interrupts. “I want everyone to know you’re mine. Kip, I love you.” 

He crosses the kitchen to the large window. The whole thing won’t open, not this high up, but there’s an upper pane that he pushes ajar. 

“Do you hear that, New York?” He shouts from the window, thirty floors above the city streets. “I love Christopher Grady!” 

The brief flare of euphoria in his chest fades as his voice gets sucked away into the sounds of the city below. He turns back to the kitchen, where Kip is looking at him with faint amusement. 

“I guess you’ve lost your mind?” he says, raising one eyebrow. 

“The only crazy I am,” Scott says, rounding the island and stepping into Kip’s space, “is crazy about you.” 

He brings their mouths together with fervor. Kip kisses him back, his hands curling around the back of Scott’s neck. 

He’s done it. He’s so sure. Kip will stay. 

Scott wakes up to the grey light of a Montreal morning.  He rolls over, presses his face into his pillow, and lets out a long, guttural shout.

“Woah, Cap, what the fuck—”

Breezy is up in an instant, Scott hears his footsteps, feels him hovering. 

“It’s fine,” he says, voice muffled against the pillow. “Just a nightmare.” 

Later that night, in his apartment, he begs Kip to stay. 

“I fucked up, I’m fucked up, I’m sorry,” he says, the familiar stab of headache flaring behind his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose, tries to push the pain away. 

“You’re not fucked up, Scott,” Kip says from near the other side of the kitchen island. “I just need some space.”

He hears the door close. His head throbs. He wants to be sick. Instead he downs both whiskeys, and then hurls the glasses, one after the other, to shatter against the marble splashback behind the stove. 

“It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.”

Scott twists the air conditioning vent away from Carter. He lets the cool air flow over his own face, dry and impersonal. 

“It’s my birthday on Sunday,” Kip says. 

“Hold that thought,” Scott cuts in, pulling his phone out. “This is important.” 

He unlocks his phone and opens Twitter. He barely uses his account—mostly just for retweeting the official Admirals account. He has a distressing number of followers, though. 

“I, Scott Hunter,” he says aloud as he types, “am gay. I am gay, and I am in love with…Kip, what’s your Twitter handle?” 

Kip is looking at him like he’s utterly insane. He probably is. This is his eighth time experiencing this night. He couldn’t possibly still have all his marbles at this point. 

“Scott, what are you doing?” Kip’s voice is cautious, like he’s trying not to spook a horse. 

“I’m making a grand proclamation,” he says. “I’m solving this once and for all. Is it at-Kip-Grady?” 

Kip is up and around the kitchen island all at once. “This is a very bad idea,” he says, reaching out to take the phone from Scott’s hands. 

Scott pulls the phone away. Kip reaches up to grab it, his fingers glancing against the screen. The phone gives a little bird-like chirp. 

They stare at the phone, at the tweet just sent. At the reactions that start to steadily trickle in, and then climb. 

“Oh god,” Scott says, as the retweets gather momentum. “What have I done?” 

An incoming call pops up on the screen: Todd, Scott’s agent. 

“Ahh, Jesus fuck, what have I done?” Scott drops the phone like it’s scalding. 

“Just switch it off!” Kip shouts, batting at the buzzing phone with a dish towel. It spins on the counter and skitters onto the floor with a clatter, lying between them like a bomb that they can’t defuse. Kip drops the dish towel over the phone, like that will solve the problem. 

Scott moves over to the couch and drops onto the cushions, his head clutched in his hands. His head aches, right behind his eyes, sharp and wrong. He feels Kip’s hand gently touch his shoulder, and then Kip’s arms come to circle around him. 

Scott breathes, breathes Kip in, Issey Miyake cologne and books and spice. He lets out a shuddering sob. Kip squeezes him, holds him tight. 

“We can fix it,” Kip murmurs, soft into Scott’s shoulder. “In the morning, we’ll fix it.” 

“He deserves sunshine,” Elena says, again, again, her fingers smoothing the lapels of his tuxedo jacket. “And so do you.” 

Scott wakes. Montreal. He checks his Twitter: nothing since the first of January, when he’d retweeted the team’s official New Year post. He lets out a sigh of relief, but the feeling curdles almost at once. 

He’s not fixing it. What if he can’t fix it? 

This time, in the kitchen, he goes for an easy win, something he can’t believe he hasn’t tried yet. 

“My friends are throwing me a birthday party,” Kip says. “It’s more like hanging out—”

“I’ll be there,” Scott interrupts, reaching out over the kitchen island to grab Kip’s hands. “I’ll come. I’ll be there for you. The Kingfisher?”

“Uh, yeah,” Kip says, a pleased smile spreading over his face. “Are you sure?”

“I’m so sure,” Scott says, happy and determined to do it right this time. 

“Okay,” Kip nods, smiling broader now. “Okay. Come here.” 

Scott goes to him, rounding the island and stepping into Kip’s space. They kiss, and then keep kissing, stumbling and shuffling backwards towards the couch, hands in each other’s pockets, inside each other’s jackets, under each other’s shirts.  

Kip had said, several days ago, several times ago, that they couldn’t fix this with sex, but by god he’s going to try. 

The room seems to sigh around them as they shed their clothes and stumble back towards the bedroom. 

He wakes feeling gritty. The Montreal sky is grey and bleak. His body aches in unpleasant and familiar ways. 

The memory of last night with Kip buzzes under his skin. It had felt so right, agreeing to come to the bar, making Kip’s face light up with relief and excitement and joy and pride, probably, and a hundred other things. When they’d made their way to bed, falling into and between one another, it had felt spectacular—more real than anything else. 

As he brushes his teeth, a horrible thought strikes him: that this is irreparable. That this day is all he can have. He braces his hands on the sink and looks deep into his own dark, haunted eyes. 

He spends the flight back to New York anxiously jiggling his foot, to the point where Carter hits him with a magazine and he finally gets himself under control. 

He thinks, of course, about Kip. About the way he’d felt last night under Scott’s hands, his mouth. There’d always been something so pure and so liberating about the way they’d had sex. He supposes, now that he has time to think about it, that’s it’s probably got a lot to do with the fact that being intimate with Kip is—for the first time in his pathetic life—sex with someone he genuinely likes, and, after an embarrassingly short time, sex with someone he loves. It’s the kind of sex he can actually think the words “being intimate” about without cringing, because that’s what they are with one another: no secrets between them, no fear, no judgement. Offering freely and taking with gratitude and laughing—he’d never smiled that much while fucking before. 

The intimacy, the pleasure, the physical manifestation of love: that must be the answer. He’s seen Groundhog Day. They just probably didn’t do it the right way last time. 

And so each time he wakes up and flies to the city he grits his teeth against the Montreal morning, pushes through the inevitability of the benefit, makes his speeches and excuses and then he tries again. He tries in as many ways as he can think of. Scott on his back. Kip on hands and knees. One time he braces his hands on the headboard and rides Kip’s cock like it’s the only thing that will save him. He feels Kip hard in his mouth as his knees bruise on unforgiving kitchen tile. In desperation he takes Kip’s weight, solid in his hands as he lifts him, pins him to the living room window, Kip’s fingernails digging into his shoulders and teeth sinking into his neck while Scott fucks him, hard, for all the world to see. He takes Kip’s spend a dozen ways: hot on his tongue, the crease of his thigh, his chest, his face, and deep inside, where he loves it best. 

And every time he makes the same promise, the one he doesn’t know that he can keep: I’ll be there, please wait for me, I’ll meet you where you are. 

He never gets tired of it, it always feels new because each time is the first time, and he could do this forever, love Kip forever, heart open, until the impossible end of his interminable life. 

The room sighs. His body aches. He wakes, screaming, in Montreal. 

“It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.”

Scott lets his head knock against the wall next to his seat, eyes tracking nothing outside the window as the plane idles by the hangar. 

“Put on a sweater,” he says. His voice is a stranger, swallowed by stale air. 

Kip’s beneath him, sweating along his hairline, fingers clenching in the muscle of Scott’s shoulders as Scott fucks him slowly, sweetly. Scott kisses Kip’s neck, trails a hot mouth to his ear, whispers that he loves him in rumbling tones. Kip looks at him adoringly, and doesn’t need to say it back. 

This is the twentieth time they’ve made love like this. The hundredth. The thousandth. Scott stopped counting. He knows that it won’t fix anything, that he’ll still wake up in the same hotel and have to do it all again. But this is worth it, he thinks. Kip’s not leaving. Kip is here, in his arms, in his life, just for tonight. He can have tonight forever; Kip won’t leave and nothing hurts and it’s perfect. He could live this moment eternally, their limbs wrapped together, breathing promises across the scant space between their bodies. 

He twines Kip’s fingers in his own, kisses Kip’s palm, his wrist. He loves him so much. 

He sinks into the feeling of it, sinks into Kip, a full-body warmth. He’s never leaving. He’s never changing this. He can have this. 

The room is heating. A headache, familiar and sharp but absent these past visitations, starts to grow behind Scott’s right eye. 

He rests his forehead against Kip’s, drinks in the sound of his moans and sighs, and turns his gaze to the window, follows an itch in his eye. The walls shimmer, writhe, encroach. He blinks, shakes it off. The pain throbs sharp in his head. The walls rattle, like loose panes of glass in a storm. 

It’s wrong. This is all wrong. The passion of moments ago twists, warps. He squeezes his eyes shut. The room spins as he realises what he’s doing.

He is a thief. 

Kip is looking up at him with love and trust and all things good, but Scott is lying. Scott is cheating him. Scott is gluttonous, greedy for moments he’s not earning but stealing, growing fat on misappropriated time that Kip doesn’t even know is being taken from him.

The pain in his head stabs at him—a punishment he deserves. He stills his hips, holds Kip’s face between the palms of his hands, drops kisses in his cheeks. It can’t hold.  

“I’m so sorry,” he says, solemn and sincere, despite the way their hips are touching, he’s seated so deep inside. “I can’t keep doing this to you. This is so unfair.” 

“It’s okay,” Kip says, smiling and coy. “I don’t mind. I like you like this. But we can switch if you prefer…?”

Scott isn’t smiling back. Kip’s face falls into concern, his warm eyes worried. “Wait, wait,” he says. “Do you want to stop?”

“No,” Scott laughs weakly, closing his eyes against the headache, drops his forehead onto Kip’s shoulder. “God, no, I don’t want to stop. But I have to. We have to stop doing this.” 

“What do you mean, this?”

Scott gestures between them. “All of this. Any of it.” His head is throbbing, panic rising because Kip isn’t getting it—nor should he, because for him, Scott thinks, disgusted at himself, this is only the first time they’ve fucked tonight. This is the only time they’ve come home from the benefit and tumbled together. For Kip it is romantic and inevitable. For Scott it is a falsehood, dark and ugly.

He can still feel Kip, warm and lube-slick around him, Kip’s legs locked around his lower back. He’s held, cradled in Kip’s body—a kindness he does not deserve. 

Kip’s face turns, his eyes narrowing. “Are you breaking up with me?” 

“No! Yes. I don’t know, Kip, fuck, I’m really fucking this up.” He’s still bracing himself over Kip on one elbow, a hand still tangled in Kip’s hair.

Kip moves to sit up, plants a hand on Scott’s chest. “Are you breaking up with me while you’re still inside me?” 

Scott looks down at where their bodies still meet. He’s still hard, by some miracle. He swears, pulls out, shuffles backwards on the mattress until he’s sitting at the foot of the bed. He drops his head into his hands. 

He feels Kip’s hand on his bare shoulder, light and tentative. 

“We should talk about this,” Kip says. 

The headache blares in Scott’s head, ugly and acute, like glass in his ocular cavity, grinding in time with the pounding of his blood. 

“We don’t need to,” he says. He needs a do-over. He needs Kip out of here so he can hate himself in peace. “Please just go.”

He needs to drink til he passes out. He needs to wake up in Montreal and try it all again. 

Kip’s gathering his clothes, an awkward and ashamed crab walk around the room. There’s no dignity for anyone to maintain here. Scott watches from the corner of his eye as Kip pulls on the tuxedo pants, the shirt. Perfectly fitted. A perfect costume. 

“You need help, Scott,” Kip says, buckling his belt, stepping into his socks. “I don’t know what this is, but you need serious help.” 

Scott stays, sitting, head bowed and body bare at the end of the bed as Kip walks out. He hears the slam of the apartment door. 

Three fingers of whiskey. Half a Valium from the stash he keeps in the back of a kitchen cabinet, drugs handed out like candy by the team doctors. It’ll be enough for now. His head throbs, his hands shake. He downs the pill and the booze and lies back in his bed, waiting for the oblivion of another chance.  

“Turn your alarm off, Cap, just ten more minutes.” 

Scott loads his plate at the breakfast buffet. Of all the hotels he’s stayed in over the many, many years of roadies, he figures he could have had worse luck for a breakfast-buffet-for-all-eternity. This hotel does fresh pancakes on request, a beleaguered young woman behind the griddle making them to order with a disconsolate stare in her blank eyes. He’s also discovered that he can get her to write his name on them in chocolate sauce if he lies and says it’s his birthday. Extra whipped cream. Glacé cherry. It got him through a span of mornings between the fiftieth and seventieth goes round of the day. A small mercy. 

Today he stacks his plate with enough sausage links and scrambled eggs and French toast and bacon that even Matti is looking at him like he’s got a problem when he sits down across from Scott at the table. 

“You feeling all right, Cap?” 

Scott stares a hole through the table. “Not really.” 

Jalo nods, slowly. He holds out a bread roll from his own plate. Scott takes it; it’s warm. He eats it dry, the lump of it sticking in his throat, easing down slowly. 

The chatter of the team is muted around him. He doesn’t intervene when Breezy launches a spoonful of rubbery scrambled eggs at Gillis. He lets it play out. He lets the sound of their happy squabbling wash over him. He can’t change it. 

He gets the pancakes. They taste like dust in his mouth.

Afterwards, he settles into his seat in the plane, rearranging the air conditioning vent so that Carter can’t complain about the cold. He shoves his headphones in but listens to nothing. Instead, he thinks. 

He must need to catch Kip earlier. Make a bigger splash. He’s heard Kip say it a dozen times now: I heard what you said in your speech. His speech. Before tonight, he’d given that speech—or versions of it—countless times. Dead parents, hockey everything, give money now, please. He’d already felt saturated with it, numb to the reality of its content. He bared a deeply protected part of himself every time he said it, reopening the wound of his parents’ deaths, his pathetic existence that ensued. The genesis of the hockey robot. The wiring of his circuits, optimised to reduce feedback and maximise performance. 

Every time he tells it at tonight’s benefit, he catches Kip’s face. The disappointment, the realisation that Scott isn’t going to change. Isn’t going to give up anything for him. That the programming runs too deep; that Kip is a bug in the system. 

He doesn’t want Kip to be debugged, he thinks fiercely. Kip is a system upgrade. Kip has stripped out his bad wiring, one piece at a time, to reveal the heart beneath. 

Scott hates that look on Kip’s face during his speech. 

Maybe this time he should change it. 

The ballroom is lit in a familiar warm lowlight, probably strategically dim so that no one feels too seen when they’re adding (or removing) zeros from the cheques they’re writing. 

Scott stands on the stage, microphone in front of him. It’s time. He knows this speech too well. 

“For those of you who know my sob story,” he starts, “I’m going to divert a little bit tonight.”

The room pricks up its ears in interest. This wasn’t the usual rote rendition they’d come to expect from him. 

“I’ve been playing this game a long time,” he starts. “Hockey, yes, but also the game I play when I stand on the ice as a hockey player, and everything that’s supposed to entail. I play the game when I stand here every year, Scott Hunter, tragic orphan, and thank god for private scholarships and a sport that gave me everything.”

He clears his throat. He’s sweating lightly. People are staring as he looks around the gathered crowd. Carter is looking at him like he’s crazy. Tom Holt looks like he’s swallowed a razor blade. They can feel it coming. 

Kip is looking at him with something like hope in his eyes. Scott shoots him a quick, nervous smile and then barrels on. He lets out what’s in his heart. 

“What I’ve come to realise over the last few years—and especially the last few months—is that hockey isn’t everything. It can’t be everything. Hockey gives us a mould that we fit ourselves into: strong; masculine; obedient. Anything that doesn’t fit within the boundaries of that has no place. There’s a lot about me, about my life, that doesn’t fit. Parts of myself that I’ve pushed down and pushed away, bottled it up and let it turn sour.”

And that’s how he feels, sometimes: that if he doesn’t keep the lid tamped down it’ll all foam out, ugly and unwanted. It’s how he’s felt for years. But not anymore. Not with Kip. 

He breathes. He looks at Kip, who hardly seems to be breathing, a stranglehold on his champagne glass. 

“St Thomas scholarships gave me hockey,” Scott continues. “Hockey gave me a family when I had none. And for a long time I let myself think that was enough. And then I met someone.” 

A ripple of surprised murmuring starts in one corner of the room. He ignores it, just looks at Kip, looks into his stunned and kind of scared eyes. 

“I met someone who reminded me that the bottled-up parts were good, too. He twisted off the cap and poured it out and said: Scott, all of this is worth it. You are worth it, exactly as you are.” 

The surprised noises are growing in intensity now, probably at the bombshell pronouns he’s dropping. He sees Carter in the crowd, edging forward, looking around with his body coiled like he’s ready to leap in front of a bullet or something, and Scott is so grateful for him. But Scott’s only got eyes for Kip. 

“So thank you, I suppose, to St Thomas and the scholarship program. They gave me hockey, which led me to the Admirals, which brought me to New York, which delivered me, luckily, to you, Christopher Grady. I love you.” 

Half the crowd is practically roaring now, and the other half is clapping in a smattering of polite, shocked applause, but he doesn’t care a whit. He drops the microphone on the lectern with a dull thud and steps off the stage, heading straight for the only person in the room that matters. 

He takes Kip’s hands. “Was that okay?” 

Kip laughs, high and disbelieving. “You’re fucking insane.”

“You’re worth it.” 

He kisses Kip, right there for Tom Holt and his teammates and his parents’ ghosts to see. 

His alarm goes off in the grey, Canadian morning. He stares at the ceiling, the faint crack tracing out from the corner near the TV. 

It hadn’t worked. Nothing works. 

He tries again. 

At the benefit that night he takes Kip’s arm, pulling him onto the dance floor. Kip is stiff, resistant, aware of the eyes on them for about five minutes until he relaxes in Scott’s arms. They dance, Kip’s hands on his shoulders, his hands on Kip’s waist, and they ignore the stares of the crowd around them. Scott’s feet feel like they barely touch the floor. 

At the end of the song, he dips Kip backwards and plants one on him. It fulfils every romantic fantasy he’s ever had. 

It’s not enough.

He tries again another time, takes Kip on his arm and wheels him around the room, introducing him to donors and Admirals money men. 

He tries again. 

He brings Carter over and says: “Vaughnny, this is Kip, I love him and you will, too.” 

He watches as Carter, flabbergasted, takes it in, smooths his face into genuine delight, and then says: “Kip? Your name is Kip? I fucking love this!” 

He’s surprised by that one, although he realistically shouldn’t have been. Carter has always had his back. He’s relieved that a hundred or so times through the grinder hasn’t dampened his friend’s fraternal spirit.

“You could have told me, you know,” Carter says, later that night when he corners Scott at the bar. “I mean, it’s your life, it’s your business. But I hate to think of you carrying that alone. I love you, man. I’ve got you.” 

“I know you’re not trying to hurt him,” Elena says, her brow drawn, and it’s clear that she gets it, that she can see right through him. “But no one wants to be kept a secret.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m trying to figure it out.” 

“He can’t wait forever. He deserves sunshine.” The lights flicker, a moment, a movement. “And so do you.” 

Every time he tries, his anxiety ratchets up another notch, his movements quicker, his heart racing harder. Nothing is working. Nothing is fixing it. He’s still here, night after night, his bow tie choking the life out of him as he bares himself for the vultures and gets no quarter. Each morning he wakes again in fucking Montreal and prepares, once more, to flay himself open; his chest degloved to reveal the painful beating of his heart. 

“It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.”

“Just move the fucking vent then, Vaughnny, Jesus.” 

Carter looks hurt. Scott does not apologise.

Despondency creeps over him like moss. Each morning it becomes harder to drag himself out of the hotel bed. He lies there, eyes open, staring at the grey nothing outside the hotel window, watching the occasional drop of rain spatter and splash against the glass. He’s not sure at what point it started raining on these mornings, not sure how many times he saw the sky grow darker and the clouds heavier and the rain start spattering. 

Nothing else changes. No matter what he does, it doesn’t change. It can’t. 

The first time around, this night was the second-worst experience of his life. To have lived it now, a hundred times and more is just cruel. He counted at the beginning, making it to over eighty spins around before giving up. 

He wonders what he did to deserve this. 

More nights than most now he leaves the benefit alone, abandoning Kip at the ballroom. He slinks into his car and rides, shamefaced and lonely, back to his quiet apartment where he turns off his phone and falls into bed still in his tux. Sometimes he drinks to numb himself, but mostly he just lies there. He should at least shower, should wash the day off his skin again, but he doesn’t bother. 

He’s been depressed before. Being orphaned at the start of puberty can do that to someone. So can cramming oneself into the closet for the better part of two decades. But this feels different. The depression he’d suffered earlier in his life had had an outlet: throwing himself and others around on the ice, or, later in life, getting drunk and fucking strangers in bars on the Costa del Sol. Punching the occasional wall. Getting sent to the sin bin for his crimes. Running too far, too fast. 

He can’t do any of that now. There’s no game, there’s no time, and the only person he could sleep with is Kip and he’s not doing that any more since his revelation about how completely fucked up he was being with it. 

This is what he has: the grind of it. Wake up, breakfast, meeting, plane, apartment, benefit, home, repeat. He’s not even trying to break the loop anymore. Nothing has worked. Nothing will work. This is his life now: this one, horrible day, over and over, until he dies. 

And so he does. 

It scares him, the first time he does it. Later times, not so much. He doesn’t want to die, but he can’t keep doing this—he can’t. 

The fall from the hotel roof takes no time at all. He’d thought his life would flash before his eyes, but it doesn’t. All he sees is Kip, one quick moment: Kip wearing that buttery yellow t-shirt and sitting in Scott’s kitchen, sun streaming in the window and lighting him up, dust motes dancing delicate around him as he smiles, dimples deep, then laughs at something Scott says. A moment, a simple second, before his body’s hitting the ground in a half-fragment of pain and blackness. 

He wakes, gasping for breath, hugging his pillow to his heaving chest. He wakes alive in Montreal and his mind howls, the rain spattering thick on the window once more. 

“It’s arctic in here, man, aren’t you cold? Cap? Hey, Scott?” 

If dying doesn’t work, he decides, staring at his ill-gotten birthday pancakes at breakfast, then he should probably try to live.

“Up and at ‘em, rook,” he says over Breezy’s complaining grumbles. “Coach wants us down and fed in an hour and a half.” 

He feels brighter this morning. The fog of depression is passing like a black cloud wrung out in the face of his newfound determination. 

They say that there’s nothing like a near death experience to put everything into perspective. Perhaps five or so actual deaths have given him some clarity. 

The last couple of months with Kip (and the couple of hundred repeats of this day) have been incredible, but there’s been something missing while they’ve been confined to his apartment—disastrous art gallery date notwithstanding. What he’s wanted, but has been too scared to do, is to take Kip out, to show him off, to be with him, properly, in all of the ways that matter. 

His grand statement. Elena has told him enough times by now: Kip deserves sunshine. 

Everything that he’s been denying himself bubbles up before him in delightful possibility. Even if it doesn’t fix it, even if he wakes up here again tomorrow, it will be another chance to have what he wants. An honest life. One honest day, in repetition, cobbled together into a simulacrum of happiness. 

He looks at his reflection in the mirror as he brushes his teeth. He looks less haggard today, less like the dark circles under his eyes are going to swallow him whole. 

He pulls out his phone and messages Kip: Don’t go to Elena’s. Meet me at my place around 5. Please. 

The flight back to New York passes in a blur, while he plans. 

Kip knocks on his door with an anxious rap. Scott opens the door and Kip is standing there with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his checkered windbreaker, hair dotted with rain. 

“Everything okay?” he asks, returning Scott’s hug when he gets inside the entryway. “Your text seemed kind of serious.”

Scott wraps Kip tighter in his arms. “I’m okay, I’m better now that you’re here.” 

They kiss, lightly, because they can’t not, because they’re still drawn together with an inexorable magnetism that a thousand trips around probably won’t erode. 

“I’ve got an idea. Hey, listen” Scott says, because Kip is angling to kiss him again, and while he usually would be so on board with that, he kind of wants to do this now while he’s still feeling brave. “Let’s not go tonight.”

“Huh?” Kip looks adorably confused.

“The benefit. Let’s not go. Let’s go out instead. I still owe you that Mexican dinner, right?” 

Kip looks at him with faint suspicion. “What’s this about? Are you dying?” 

“What? No, I’m not dying. I’m just tired of not being with you. I want everyone to know you’re mine.” He grabs Kip’s hands. “I want us to be like everyone else. And I don’t want to wait until hockey’s over, I don’t want to wait until I retire and fade away and take you with me. It’s not fair to you. So, will you just…will you come out to dinner with me? Tonight?”

Kip is looking at him softly, with fondness. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.” 

They do end up at that Mexican restaurant, no queue this time because it’s still half past five in the afternoon and they’re practically eligible for an early bird special. They sit at a table in the quiet restaurant, feet touching under the table. They order Coronas with lime and eat artisanal guacamole and stone-baked tortillas and hold hands on the table while they wait for flan. 

No one takes Scott’s picture. No one approaches the table except for the disinterested server. No one’s even looking at them. His phone rings, again and again, but he silences it and puts it away in his jacket pocket where it hangs, ignored, over the back of his chair. It’s just him and Kip, just as it should be, just as he’s always wanted. Once he’s paid the bill, he stands, pulls Kip to his feet, and kisses him right there in the restaurant. His heart clatters about his rib cage so hard he’s worried it’ll burst out. 

He’s simultaneously scared and not—the fear is present, an ugly foundation beneath his feet, but creeping across it is something nice: a soothing flow of relief and satisfaction.  

Would it have always felt like this?

“I can’t believe you,” Kip says as they leave the restaurant, his hand tucked tight through the crook of Scott’s elbow. He’s looking at Scott with stars in his eyes. “What’s changed? I’m not complaining, but…you’re sure you want to do this?” 

Scott stares into Kip’s warm brown eyes. The fear gets buried under one more layer of pleasure, soul-deep contentment. He’s died for this. Now he chooses different.

“I’m sure,” he says.

“He deserves sunshine, and so do you.” 

He wakes in Montreal with a sigh. It hadn’t fixed it, he realises with resignation. But maybe that’s okay. He can keep trying. He was closer than ever—he could feel it, he swears, something tingling at the tips of his fingers as he’d gone to sleep last night, happy and sweaty and caught in Kip’s embrace. It was a nice feeling. He wants more of it. 

And so he does. 

Skip the benefit, he texts to Kip a dozen times, twenty times, more and more. Meet me at my place. Meet me at that gallery you love on Hudson and West Houston. Meet me at Bâtard. Meet me at Per Se. I’ll get us a table, I’ll drop my name. Meet me at Central Park. Meet me at The Met. 

They have dozens of dinners in dozens of fine dining establishments, the kinds of places that don’t put prices on their menus, that Kip baulks at without fail every time they approach. 

“It’s too much, Scott, it’s too expensive, seriously…”

Every time, Scott grabs his hand, cuts him off with “You’re worth it,” and drags him inside. 

They kiss over fine china, over modern stoneware and cocktail glasses, over three-hundred-dollar rib eyes, and amuse bouches with scallops, and fossilised carrots, and earl grey parfait that they obnoxiously feed each other on tiny spoons. He makes up for every time he told Kip he couldn’t come to his birthday with this: a thorough spoiling, because Kip deserves it, and a public declaration of love. 

They hold hands as they walk through gallery after gallery, unafraid this time, Scott telling Kip that “It’s okay, really. I’m okay,” before twining their fingers together, because this time he really means it, this time it has actually started to feel easy. 

Once, on the sidewalk, between dinner and drinks, a stranger stops Scott and asks for an autograph, a quick photo together. He obliges; Kip scoots out of frame, sticking his hands in his pockets and slinking into the mouth of an alleyway, putting an ugly distance between them. 

After the fan leaves, Scott turns to Kip where he stands, staring at his shoes. 

“You don’t need to do that,” he says. 

“Don’t be stupid, Scott. It’s your life, your career. You don’t need me there raising eyebrows.” Kip looks resigned, like he’s had this conversation with himself already. “I’m part of your private life. I get that. I don’t need to be part of the public version of you right now.” 

“I don’t really have a private life,” Scott says, scratching the back of his neck. “Whatever I do, however I come out, it’s going to be really, really public. I can’t avoid it.”

Kip looks pained. Scott gets it, he really does. It’s a lot to put on one person. He thinks briefly what his life might have been like if he’d been someone else: a normal guy, an accountant or something, dropping into the smoothie shop on his way to work, meeting Kip in the same way but with none of the trappings. Just two normal people. He wonders if it would have been the same. He likes to think it would; that, just like now in his infinite days, he would love Kip in every iteration. 

“If you don’t want that kind of attention, and you want to stay out of the spotlight, that’s fine, we can find a way to make it work.” He shifts, nervous. “Can we work it out together, though?” 

Kip takes a step closer towards Scott, and then another, until they’re side by side again. They’re not holding hands in the street, not kissing in the middle of Times Square, but they are doing this: together, in public, en route from one venue to another, on a date. 

“Yes,” he says, the edges of their sleeves brushing as they take off again down the sidewalk. “We can do that.” 

“It’s too cold in here. Are you too cold? Fuck, it’s arctic.”

“I’ve got you, V.” Scott realigns the air conditioning vent, angling it away. 

“Scotty boy, I cannot fucking wait to get home.” 

“Me neither.” 

Cool air rushes over him, and he smiles. 

The next time around, when they meet the same fan on the same sidewalk, Scott stops Kip from stepping away with a gentle touch to the middle of his back. You’re a part of me, if you want it, his hands say. 

They don’t do anything crazy, like kiss in front of the fan’s camera, or introduce Kip as Scott’s boyfriend. They don’t introduce him at all. But Kip is there, at Scott’s side, unquestioned and solid and real. And god damn if that doesn’t make everything feel a thousand times better. 

He realises that he was wrong: that being with Kip like this isn’t about shouting it from the windows or making public statements. It’s not about letting everyone else in to peer at the curiosity that he is. It’s about being with Kip, about giving Kip all of himself, showing him: this is what it looks like when I let myself love you. 

He doesn’t stop waking up in Montreal. He doesn’t stop taking Kip out. The fear fades, drowned by joy. He holds its head under and laughs at how easy it was to vanquish. 

The math is hard to do, because he stopped counting so long ago, but he tries: over a year now of this one, singular day. An extra year of loving Kip. A great, big pool of it, warm as he eases himself in, as he floats amongst it—not angry that he didn’t get here sooner, but grateful that it exists at all. 

He keeps swimming. 

They head to a gay bar one night after dinner, a club in Chelsea where the lights are low and the music is tooth-rattlingly loud. They spend the whole night on the dance floor, arms wrapped around one another, moving together to a tempo of their own. Scott kisses Kip right there among the throng of bodies, completely sober but drunk on lust, the way they move together, the way Kip smiles up at him under the pink strobes. 

They end up hooking up in a bathroom stall, which Scott had never thought he’d need to do with a man again—but maybe that’s what makes it so good, when Kip’s getting a hand inside Scott’s pants and stroking his cock, eyes glinting and mischievous in the dim lights: that he doesn’t have to do this again, but he gets to, with Kip, because he can. After he comes, he sinks to his knees on the stained floor and sucks Kip off with a single-minded focus, his heart beating fast and free, because they’re going home together after this. They’re going home, and crawling into the same bed, and kissing each other goodnight, and talking til the early hours until they can’t stop yawning and fall asleep half on top of each other, Kip’s hair tickling his nose. 

It’s different this time, different to previous goes around when they’d tumbled into bed—this time he isn’t desperate; this time he isn’t trying to fix anything. 

This time he is just living. 

He takes Kip one night to a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, because it’s fancy and stupid and he wants to. They fuck in the big white bed, windows open to the view of Central Park below as the sun slowly sets. It’s tender, better than anything any go around that Scott can remember. Scott lies back and lets Kip take him apart, Kip’s hands cradling his face as he fucks him, no desperation to it. There’s no hurry, just the languorous grind of Kip’s thick cock inside him as he gasps and moans into Kip’s open mouth. 

Afterwards they dress and have dinner down in the hotel restaurant, playing footsie and making eyes at each other over their menus. They drink Dom Perignon and take the rest of the bottle up to their room, leaving it to chill in an ice bucket on the bedside table while they fall back among the sheets. Kip crowds Scott up against the headboard, pours champagne on his chest and licks it off, tongue dipping into Scott’s navel, the bubbles fizzing and popping on Scott’s skin. They fuck again like that, face to face, Kip sliding down onto Scott’s cock, taking him so deep, drinking the champagne from each other’s mouths until they come, then falling asleep on expensive sheets. 

Scott repeats this particular day twice more, just because it feels so good. Just because. Just living. 

“Turn your alarm off, Cap, just ten more minutes.” 

“No can do, Breezy,” Scott says, throwing off the covers. “We’ve got a day to enjoy. Up and at ‘em.” 

Somewhere along the line, Scott has forgotten to be afraid. 

They take a town car to Brooklyn. The Grady house is small: two stories and an attic, a duplex on the west edge of Bensonhurst. Kip opens the front door with his key and walks in with an ease that Scott can’t imagine achieving for himself right now. 

“Dad?” Kip calls into the foyer. 

There’s music coming from somewhere deeper in the house: Billy Joel, Scott thinks. 

He’s so nervous. He’s never met the parents because there’s never been anyone whose parents he’d wanted to meet. But this is for Kip. This is with Kip—he holds onto that thought and wills himself to relax. 

“Hey, kiddo!” Scott hears George Grady before he sees him, and he sounds just like Kip: buoyant and pleased and easy. He comes around the corner holding a newspaper and pencil, glasses perched on his nose. He looks like Kip, too—the same warmth, the same openness in his posture. 

He stops when he sees Scott. 

“Uh,” he gapes. 

“Dad,” Kip starts, grabbing Scott by the hand. “I want to introduce you to someone.” 

George laughs, high and disbelieving. “You want to introduce me to Scott Hunter, New York Admirals captain?” 

He looks down and clocks their clasped fingers, and his mouth drops open.

“Hi,” Scott says, trying for a winning smile. 

“I want to introduce you to my boyfriend,” Kip says, but there’s a faint edge to his voice now, like he is also registering how deeply incredulous and ridiculous this entire scenario is. 

“Your boyfriend?” George asks, staring at Kip like he’d said something in an alien language. 

“Um, yes?” Kip says, and it comes out like more of a question. 

George closes his mouth. He folds the newspaper in his hands, and tucks the pencil behind his ear. 

“Well, okay,” he says, paling a little. “I guess you boys had better come in.” 

They end up, of all things, cooking together, Kip and George moving easily around one another in the tidy kitchen, Scott handed a vegetable peeler and stack of potatoes and put to work near the sink. Once the initial shock has worn off, it becomes easier, and the story comes out: how they met, how they’ve fallen in love, how precarious and difficult their situation feels. 

“I’m not surprised to hear it, although I’m sorry it has to be that way,” George says. “You know, it was hard enough for Kip to come out to his mother and me. It was the nineties, I guess we weren’t as vocal in our support when he was growing up.” 

He nods towards the kitchen window, and Scott sees it: a leadlight sticker of the pride flag stuck to the glass, catching the afternoon rays in a kaleidoscope. 

“I can’t imagine what it’s like in organised sport,” George continues. “But what about your parents, Scott? Have they met Kip?” 

Scott’s hands still on the potato he’s holding, a long strip of peel hanging down towards the counter. He senses Kip stop moving, too, ready to catch him should he need it. 

“My parents passed away when I was young,” he says. 

George’s voice is soft. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he says. His hand is gentle on Scott’s shoulder. And then, a reprieve: “How are you at shaping a meatloaf? Kip complains that mine comes out like a defective basketball. I tell him he can sass me like that if he picks up a ball to back it up.” 

“Hey, I work out,” Kip cuts in. 

“All vanity muscles, Scott,” George ribs. “Couldn’t set up a pick to save his life.” 

Kip is rolling his eyes but smiling, the back-and-forth between father and son easy and lived-in. Scott feels something warm and painful flower beneath his breastbone. He should have had this. Maybe he can share it now. 

By the time they’re sitting down to dinner, Scott feels utterly at home. George asks Scott a hundred questions, and makes fun of Kip gently in the way a loving parent can. He feels seen. He feels known. The food tastes better than any of the dozens of fine dining meals he’s had in his lifetime. Better than anything he’s had since he was twelve years old and hiding peas under his mashed potato at the family table, his mother excavating them with her fork and tutting in mock disappointment before eating them herself. 

“Will we be seeing you for Kip’s birthday?” George asks as they’re clearing the dishes. He sounds tentative, like he knows what the answer will be but is trying to coax the universe into giving him what he wants: his son loved whole, publicly, for everything he is. 

“I’d like to try,” Scott says, watching Kip’s back as he turns away to fill the sink. 

“It’s probably not easy for you,” George goes on. “Maybe kind of a ridiculous request, to ask you to go to a party at a gay bar. But here we are.”

“I’m doing my best,” Scott says. “You’re right, it’s not easy. My job can be a shitty environment, and I am…I was very scared. But Kip is worth it.”

There’d been a sharp wind through Brooklyn tonight, rattling at the windows. It eases now; soothed somehow, a silence landing outside. 

It seems to be the right thing to have said. George is looking at him with softness, pleased but also a little sad. A complex response to a complex situation, but acknowledgement that Scott is trying his hardest. 

George hugs them both goodbye. Scott promises to be there again for dinner as soon as his schedule allows. The warmth of the house chases them onto the street and into the town car. They drive back along dark streets, and Scott tips his head against the cool of the window, his hand and Kip’s clasped tightly on the bench seat between them. 

It’s a whole life, he thinks, his own words from his benefit speech ringing in his ears. It’s everything. 

“He deserves sunshine, and so do you.”

Elena’s hands are a familiar weight on his chest. The music swells. The lights flare. 

He wakes in Montreal. Rolling over in bed, he snags his phone from the bedside table. 

Meet me outside mine at 4pm. Pack a bag. Bring your passport.

It’s kind of a crazy idea, and Kip rightly sends back the curious eyebrow emoji in response. 

Trust me. He sends back. I love you.

He picks Kip up in the town car on the way back from the airport. Kip’s standing outside his building with a small backpack over his shoulder. He looks concerned. He’s probably right to; Scott no doubt sounds unhinged. But he wants to test the limits of this thing. Wants to give it all to Kip and see where the morning finds him. 

“What are you up to?” Kip asks, sliding into the back seat next to Scott. 

“You’ll see.”

“It took me way too long to find my passport, by the way. The photo on this thing is very embarrassing.”

“I wanna see,” Scott says, grinning. 

“No way.” Kip clutches his bag tighter.

“Give me something, then.”

Kip eyes him, trying not to smile. “It was 2009, you have to understand.”

“Go on.”  

Kip hums. “Okay. Two words: blue hair.” 

“No,” his smile widens in delight.

“Yes, I am sorry to report. I was twenty-one. I got my passport to go to Montreal, ironically, for a music festival.” 

“I bet you were incredibly cute.” 

“I was, I’ll have you know. I wore skinny jeans and watched The Decemberists play all their hits.”

“I have no idea who that is.”

“I know you don’t.” Kip pats him on the cheek. 

Scott leans across the seat and kisses him. 

“So are you spiriting me back to Canada, Mr Hunter?” Kip asks, his voice low. 

“Maybe.” Scott smiles, slow and easy. 

It’s not Canada but Italy, Kip discovers, when they arrive at the airport and get their tickets at the counter. They wait for their flight in the airport lounge, drinking lemonade and eating chicken sandwiches. 

“You know this is crazy, right?” Kip asks. “I can’t just go to Italy.” 

“Why not?” Scott asks, stretching his arm along the back of the bench seat they’re on. 

“Because I…I don’t know, actually. I can probably logic away every argument my brain wants to come up with.”

“Gimme your best shot.”

“Hmm. Okay. My job?”

“You hate your job.”

Kip puts a hand on his chest in mock outrage. “How could I hate my job when it brought me you?” 

Scott grabs his hand and kisses his palm. “What else?”

“Ummm, you have a job, you lunatic.” 

“No game tomorrow, then the All Star break. I can take four days with you in Rome.” It’s not true, but Kip doesn’t question it. It sounds so easy, so romantic. 

Kip sighs, but there’s no heat in it. “My friends are going to wonder where I am.” 

“So call them,” Scott says. “Right now. Tell them a handsome guy is abducting you.” 

“Elena would probably find a way to kill me through the phone somehow.” 

Scott grimaces. “She’d actually be right to. I really do need to meet her properly.” 

“Properly?”

“Um. You know. At all.” Scott covers. 

“We’ll get there,” Kip says, assured. “But, also, I did not pack a bag for Italy.” 

“I’ll buy you a whole new wardrobe when we land,” Scott shrugs. 

Kip pauses, and then slots their fingers together. “I guess I am already here. We’ve gone through passport control. I should probably just accept it.” 

“Good idea.” 

“I’m going to Italy,” Kip says, and Scott squeezes his hand. 

They have seats in first class, because Kip deserves the best. It’s getting late by the time they get onto the plane: Scott’s second for the day. He’s had a long, long day—long days, really—and he can feel fatigue starting to creep over him. They get buckled in, and hold hands while the plane takes off. 

Once the seatbelt lights are switched off, Kip pulls out his laptop. “I was saving this for next time you had a day off, which I guess is now.” 

He clicks around and opens a folder of media files, pulling up VLC and loading something on there. 

“Oh yeah?” Scott asks. “What are we watching?” 

“I’m finally going to make you watch Drag Race.” 

“Ah, my punishment for kidnapping you?”

Kip pushes at his shoulder. “Shut up, you’ll actually like it.” 

He pulls a little double headphone jack out of the side pocket of his bag and slots it in. “Not my first rodeo.” 

Scott’s eyes already feel gritty with exhaustion, but he finds his headphones and plugs them in. 

The show is loud, and bright, and brash, and he doesn’t make it through the first five minutes until he begins to drift off. He wakes with a start, scared that he’s missed it, that he’ll be in Montreal again, but the plane’s stale air is still cycling over him, and Kip’s hand is warm and real beneath his own. He’s not sure how much time has passed. He looks at the laptop’s screen and sees a woman in an incredible wig and a sequinned gown, staring down the barrel of the camera. His headphones are half out of one ear, but he hears her voice come through loud and clear: “Baby, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”  

The plan flies on, chasing the first creeping fingers of dawn. That beautiful blonde woman has a point, he thinks, as he succumbs to sleep once more.

Scott wakes and switches off his alarm before it has a chance to start. He’d dreamed of her: RuPaul, seated behind her table, imparting wisdom. 

He doesn’t remember dreaming in any go around before. The words rattle around in his brain, like there’s almost a physical weight to them. 

He rolls out of bed and pads to the bathroom in socked feet. After he splashes his face with water, he stares at himself in the mirror, rubs the dampness from his skin. 

Breezy’s snores rattle faintly through the door. 

“If you can’t love yourself,” Scott murmurs, looking into his own eyes, “how in the hell are you going to love anyone else?” 

He considers it. He cannot say for certain that he loves himself. There are aspects of himself that he likes, that he’s proud of. His athleticism, his physical body. He’s kind, he supposes, if he has to name an attribute that doesn’t have anything to do with hockey or the body that plays it. 

Loving himself sounds strange, self-indulgent. As for others who love him, well. There’s Kip, Kip loves him—a love that’s stumbling around on baby-deer legs and headed for the edge of a ravine if he doesn’t find a way to do something about it. Carter probably loves him, in his own way, if he had to put a name to the fraternity between them. 

He draws a blank on anyone else. 

Back in New York, in his apartment, he kills time until the benefit. He’s sorting through his closet, trying to find a slightly more interesting tie to wear with his suit tonight, when he comes across a file box. Inside are stacks of Christmas cards. There’s nothing mysterious about them, he knows who they’re from: some from teammates sent over the years; one from Kip just a month ago with a sketch of a character called ‘Hockey Santa’ inside it; and a stack of almost twenty cards, the ones at the bottom starting to yellow with age, from his old coach, John Stuart. 

He opens the top card, and a letter falls out: 

Dear Scott, 

Merry Christmas to you! We’re all thinking of you up here. I’ve been watching your season, as always, and wanted to congratulate you on the way you’re captaining the team this year. You’ve really grown into a remarkable leader. Although I think I say that to you every year. 

News from us: Julia, our youngest, got married back in September. Her new husband is most decidedly not a hockey player, which means you’re finally off the hook. I made sure to remind her of how she’d always swoon around the house saying she was going to be Mrs Scott Hunter one day—she did not appreciate the trip down memory lane! But she’s married a nice man, they’re living in Utica, so we see her a lot. 

Diane is well—a breast cancer scare earlier in the year, but she’s pulled through. She said watching you get knocked out of the first round of the playoffs caused her more distress than her diagnosis. 

As always, if you’re up this way, drop by and see us. Merry Christmas, kid. 

With love,

John

Scott folds the card and letter back into its envelope. He opens another, reading the message inside. And then another, and another, back to one dated 1995. 

Dear Scott,

We know this year has been unimaginably hard for you. Wishing you a merry Christmas feels like it’s not enough. 

Our door is always open to you—not just this year, but every year. We loved having you billet with us this summer, and having you join us for the holiday break is a real treat. 

We know it’s not the same, but: Merry Christmas, Scott.

With love,

Diane, John, Harriet and Julia

He feels his heart clench. After his parents had died, and he’d been installed at St Thomas as a boarder and charity case, he’d faced the prospect of long summer breaks with absolutely no one to take him in. He’d been fortunate, that first year, that John Stuart and his wife had a spare bedroom and too much kindness in their hearts and had made room for him to billet with them over the summer. John coached hockey at the school, and his wife was a paediatric nurse at the hospital in town. Their daughters were just a little younger than him, largely disinterested in the sad boy who invaded their home for ten weeks over the summer every year (or so he’d thought). 

When he’d gone away to college, and then later, when he’d been drafted, he’d fallen out of touch with the Stuarts. With the exception of the one cliched Christmas card he received every year, he’d let that relationship wither. Too painful, perhaps. 

John hadn’t been like a father to him—no one possibly could have been, he wouldn’t have allowed it—but John opened his home and his heart to Scott when he needed it most. Every summer and winter break he’d spend in their spare bedroom, trying to help with chores, mowing the lawn in summer, shovelling the drive in winter; whatever he could to demonstrate his value. It was something that had become ingrained in him: show the work; show your worth. John had never asked him to do it, but he did it anyway. He needed to repay them: pay them back for loving him when they didn’t even know him. 

He stares at the pile of cards in his hand. They’d never dropped off, never slowed down or decreased in detail. The letters John sent still invited him in every year. The Stuarts still loved him. He didn’t really understand why: again, he was a stranger in their home, he was an extra mouth to feed. He was pretty sure he would have eaten them out of house and home by the time he was in his senior year and really starting to fill out his jersey. 

But still, every year, the card comes. John Stuart cares. John Stuart, for some unfathomable reason, loves him.

Scott doesn’t go to the benefit. He messages Kip, says he’s not well, that he’ll see him in the morning (what a promise, he thinks, that there will ever be a tomorrow). He switches his phone off and digs his laptop out of his duffle bag, plugging it in to charge. He boots it up and opens Google maps. He types carefully into the search bar: Montreal to Rochester, directions.

Scott skips breakfast. He sends a message to Murdock: making my own way back to NYC, see you Sunday practice. 

He asks at hotel reception for the nearest car rental office. There’s one not too far away, and he hoofs it there with his duffle slung over his shoulder. Half an hour later he’s behind the wheel of a silver Honda Accord, the heater blasting the warm rental-car-clean smell over his hands and feet as he makes his way out of downtown Montreal. It’s a six-hour drive to Rochester, six and a half when he factors in the border crossing. He can make it there in the early afternoon. 

Along the way, he has time to think. He holds the steering wheel loosely between his hands as turns onto Route 11 at Champlain, heading west. West New York is as beautiful as he remembers it being: snow-laden and peaceful, verdure just waiting beneath the snow for an April thaw. It makes him think of his parents, the closer he gets to Rochester: the nostalgia of familiar road signs, the promise of Lake Ontario just over the next rise, the presence of the garbage plate on the menu of the diner he stops at for lunch. It’s a place he hasn’t been back to in many years, or even really at all; not since he left for Princeton on his hockey scholarship at eighteen tender years of age. 

He puts the Stuarts’ address into his phone’s GPS and follows the directions to the familiar two-storey home. Its roof is dusted with snow, its paint a merry yellow in stark contrast to the white and grey of the day. He stops the car on the side of the road and gets out, shoving his hands into his pockets against the cold. He heads up the front steps and knocks on the door. 

When John opens the door, Scott’s first thought is that he’s gotten old. He hasn’t seen the man in fourteen years, he must be in his early sixties by now. A lot can change in that time.

What hasn’t changed, though, is the warmth in John’s smile when he recognises Scott standing on his front porch. 

“Scotty,” he says. “What a surprise! What are you doing here, son?” 

The casualness of it is too much to bear. Scott, overwhelmed, bursts into tears, right there on the threshold of the house that became his home. 

Later, inside, a cup of warm coffee clasped between his hands, he asks what he came here to ask. 

“Why did you take me in?”

John puts his own mug down on the coffee table, sensing the serious shift in conversation after their more casual catching up. 

“Well, I’d always wanted a boy.” He laughs a little at the look on Scott’s face. “I’m kidding! We made room for you here because you needed it. You deserved a home.” 

He nods. “It was a lot to ask of anyone. I was a stranger. And I…I needed so much.” 

“You were thirteen, son. Of course you needed help. After what you went through.”

“I don’t know what I did to deserve it.” 

John sets his mug down with a kind of finality. “Well, you were an easy kid to love. And not because you earned it. We still love you, Scotty. We’re always thinking of you. And we’re proud of you, of the man you became.”  

Scott knows that somewhere, here in this house, there is almost certainly a framed newspaper clipping from the sports pages from when he got called up to the show. He can just sense it, the way that the Stuarts radiate pride in him, without his having done anything to earn it.

He bites at his thumbnail. “I don’t know if you would be, if you knew everything about me.”

John shifts on the couch. “Scott, the only things that matter are the things I tried to teach you: kindness to yourself and others, generosity when you could spare it, and honesty. Those are the things that you need to live a life to be proud of.”

He takes stock of his life: two out of three. He has worked hard at being kind, at forgiving when he can, and making space for others. Generosity is a no-brainer, not with his contract. He tips well, he gives to charity. The last is the stumbling block—has been since he was fifteen and started thinking about kissing Ryan Kaplan behind the library.

“Honesty is hard,” he says, and the words taste like ash in his mouth. 

John just nods, sips his coffee. He waits Scott out. 

Scott thinks on it, for long moments. The missing part of the equation: honesty, where it matters, and who it matters for. He drove all this way. He has the momentum. He can see the play as it reveals itself. He can feel the parts aligning, like when geometry reveals itself on the ice. 

He leaves the quiet for another beat. And then, “I fell in love this year.”

“Ah,” John makes a noise of understanding, like all this makes sense now. “Who with?” 

There’s a crocheted blanket over the back of the couch: the same one Diane would tuck around him the few times he got sick, or the many times he was sad. Just a small thing, a small kindness and safety. He loops a finger through the yarn, twisting lightly. It’s softer now than when he was a teenager. 

He only hesitates for a moment. “A man,” he says. “Kip.” 

John hums, “I had a feeling.” 

“What?” He’s surprised to hear it. 

John shrugs. “You had Vincent Lecavalier’s rookie poster on your wall for two years, and I never once saw you give a single shit about the Lightning.”

“He was first draft pick in ‘98! It was aspirational!”

John gives him a look, the kind of serious parental look that would have sent him scrambling as a teenager and has a similar effect now.

“You also never picked up on the signals that both my terrible daughters were throwing at you for the better part of four years there,” John continues. “We thought for sure you’d end up a prom date. And we wouldn’t have been mad about it. But here we are. So tell me about this guy.”

Scott exhales, shaky with relief, breathing out a little bit of the tension he’s been carrying for years. 

“He’s amazing. Smart, funny. Better than me, in every way. But… I’m not giving him everything he needs. I can’t be there for him in the ways that matter. Hockey is…”

John nods. “Yeah. Hockey is.”

“I don’t know what to do. I didn’t come here for advice on my love life, not really.” 

“Well, let me give it to you anyway. Those same three things I mentioned before, Scott, make you worthy of being a man. I try to show up for Diane every day with those three things. But, most importantly, that’s what lets me look at myself in the mirror and know I’m doing my best.” 

Scott nods slowly, sucks his teeth. Runs his fingers again over the familiar knots of the blanket. “It’s not that easy.”

“No, but it’s usually worth it. Take the time for it. Let yourself live. Hockey will still be there for you, Mr All Star. Mr Team USA Olympic Captain.” He’s ribbing Scott now, but it’s with pride. With love. “You’re not going anywhere.” 

“What if those things go away?” he asks, and he’s so afraid of it, of losing so much. 

“Then you sue the shit out of the organisation for discrimination,” John laughs. “Your record’s gonna stand for a long time, Scotty. Your legacy. Nothing changes that.”

“And what do I do about the guy?” Scott asks. It feels surreal, to be able to ask. To peel back the layer and reveal that part of himself.

“He’s really special, huh?” 

“Yeah. He is.”

“‘Stick around and be a thorn in his side forever’ special?” 

“Yeah.” He grips his coffee cup hard as he acknowledges it.

“Then give him the best version of you. Take the time. Come back to him when you’re living for you.”

He stays at the Stuarts’ house until Diane comes home from work, her car loud in the driveway. She hugs him warmly, one of the best hugs he can remember having, and then she demands he stay for dinner. He sits in the same chair he sat in as a teenager, eating spaghetti that still tastes the way it did when he was sixteen. They don’t talk about Kip again. Instead, they talk about New York, and the Stuarts’ daughters, about the hockey season, about the play-off prospects. It’s a taste of a normal he should have had: parents to visit, a childhood home to drop in on. He holds the warmth of it close and covetous like a candle in the dark. 

After dinner, he helps to wash the dishes. 

“Would you like to stay tonight, Scott?” Diane asks as she dries. “We’ve still got your old room. I mean, it’s a guest room now, but you’re welcome to it.”

“We took down your old posters, though,” John cuts in, grinning at Scott conspiratorially. 

Before bed, he hugs them both goodnight. 

“Thanks for coming to visit, son,” John says. “Our girls are grown up and long since moved on to greener pastures. They don’t come back to dear old dad for advice so much these days. So thanks for letting me ramble at you.” 

Scott gets under the covers in his old bedroom. He lies with his head on the cool pillow, looking out the familiar casement window at the darkness outside, watching the snow fall fresh through the black sky. 

He falls asleep slowly, gently, his mind quiet, and his heart full. 

He wakes to his alarm in a hotel in Montreal. The three-hundredth. The thousandth. Maybe more. He should have kept count, should have found a way to measure the days so that he’d know: this will be the day when it stops. 

He thinks back to yesterday (today, again, but before) and his trip to Rochester. To John and Diane Stuart sitting across from him at the kitchen table, passing him a serving spoon and filling him up. He’s brimming with it, still. The knowledge: that he is loved, and that he needs to shine it back on himself. 

Come back to him when you’re living for you. 

He messages Kip from the bathroom, like he does most mornings now. He says he’ll be skipping the benefit tonight, and can they meet somewhere near Kip’s dad’s place and talk? Kip’s response seems wary but amenable. Maybe he knows what’s coming. Scott catches his own reflection as he’s packing up his toiletries bag. He thinks he might like what he sees a little better than he did yesterday.

Scott gives Breezy a shake on his way back out of the bathroom. 

“Rise and shine, rookie. Big day ahead.” 

Breezy grumbles from under the comforter, and Scott leaves him to it. He’s got things he needs to do. 

He knocks on Carter’s door with a steady hand. Carter cracks the door open, his t-shirt rumpled and sleep-worn, although he looks awake enough. 

“What’s up, Scotty?” 

Honesty, Scott thinks. For yourself. 

“You got a minute to talk?” he asks. 

Carter spends most of the flight back to New York just looking over at Scott and grinning, like he’s some sort of maniac, and Scott has to shove him in the shoulder and tell him to cut it out lest he give him self a seizure from rolling his eyes too hard. It’s nice, though: the glee with which Carter took to Scott sharing his secret, this big part of himself. He shouldn’t have waited, if it was always going to be like this. And maybe it won’t stick, and he’ll have to do it again tomorrow, but it’s okay. He’s ready. It’s one brick in a vast wall of self-defence and protection. But it’s a start. He’s letting the light in. 

Carter doesn’t complain about the air conditioning even once. 

In his apartment, he takes a few minutes and gets changed into something slightly more respectable than his flight-worn sweatpants and Kip’s hoodie. He folds the sweater up, neatly, and holds it in both hands. It’s so soft, so warm. He tucks his nose into the fabric and inhales the smell of Kip. Still there. However many goes around and the sandalwood and spice is still there. He presses his face into the soft give of it, and then quietly places it in a drawer. He shrugs on a puffer jacket instead, and makes his way back down to the waiting car. 

They meet in Bensonhurst Park, not far from Kip’s dad’s place. Scott, in theory, shouldn’t know this, but his mind is flush with the memory of it: George’s house, that feeling of being whole that had come with it. He wants that again. He wants to earn it this time. 

He sees Kip coming. Kip is rugged up against the cold, knit cap pulled tight over his curls and a scarf around his neck. It’s threatening to snow tomorrow. Scott breathes deeply as Kip gets closer. Game face. He can do this. 

“Are you okay?” Kip asks. They don’t hug. They don’t touch. The unspoken rules are fresh today between them. The hundreds of times they’ve broken them in the endless cycle of the day have laid waste to themselves with the rising of the (same) sun. Kip does not remember. Scott pushes it down. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just needed to talk to you.” 

They walk, slowly, along the meandering path through the park. The grass is brown and brittle, a cold damp pervasive everywhere. 

“You’re freaking me out a bit,” Kip says, looking at Scott out of the corner of his eyes. 

“It’s fine, really,” Scott says. “Or it isn’t. God, I don’t know, I’ve been having the weirdest time lately.” 

Understatement of century, he thinks.

“Okay,” Kip says. “Okay, talk to me, then.” 

Scott sighs and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. “Okay. Let me tell you what I want, Kip. I want to be there for you. I want to show up for you. It’s your birthday this weekend and I want to celebrate with you, this year and every year from now.”

“I want those things, too.” Kip sounds so sure, but also like the response is automatic. Like he’s had the reassurance locked and loaded, waiting for Scott to bolt, to start making excuses. He should have seen this sooner. He should have done this sooner. 

“I can’t give you those things,” he says. 

“Because you can’t come out.” And that’s practiced, too—said with a dull resignation because it’s been haunting them since the very first day they met. 

“Not yet, not entirely. I’m working on that, I really, honestly am. I’m just not in a place right now where I can give you all of the things that you deserve. I don’t know how. Not yet.”

“Not yet?” Kip asks, and there’s that spark there, that hope, like maybe they can keep it together, they can slap enough duct tape on the rips that Scott’s eroding in the fabric of them. 

“I’m trying,” he says, and he means it. Honesty, he thinks. Be real, now. “I need to try and be better at…all of this. Being who I am, loving who I am. I don’t know how to do that. And I’m not saying that because I want your pity,” he adds, seeing Kip turn to him with a kind of sorrow on his face that he wishes he hadn’t put there, like he wants to argue with Scott for hurting himself. For hurting them. “I’m not saying it so that you stay with me, stay my secret, out of obligation or guilt. And I don’t want to string you along with promises of one day when you don’t know when that will be. It’s not fair to you.” 

Kip’s fingers tug at the crook of Scott’s elbow, pulling him over to a bench that sits under a bare oak tree. They sit side by side, not quite touching. Scott leans forward and rests his hands on his knees. 

“So what are you saying?” Kip asks, and his voice is thick and resigned, because he knows, Scott realises. He knows what this is. 

“I’m saying that I need to let you go.” 

When he’d thought about this, when he’d planned his speech out in his head all day, he had promised himself that he wouldn’t cry. But his eyes are stinging and there’s a lump in his throat—and maybe that’s part of honesty, too. 

“Kip, you’re the best thing—the very best thing that has ever happened to me. And I love you. So much.” 

“I love you, too.” Kip’s hand reaches out, his fingers circling Scott’s wrist. It’s enough, and it isn’t. 

“You deserve better. You shouldn’t be my crutch while I figure my shit out.” 

“That’s not what you’re doing,” Kip argues, and his voice is wet now. Scott turns to look at him, sees the tears that threaten in his eyes. 

“It is,” he says, because it’s true. “I’d let you drag me across the finish line, and that’s not fair. You deserve more than that, and you deserve more than the half-life I’m living.” 

Kip wipes at his eyes, and his fingers come back damp. He sniffs, then blows out a deep breath of warm air that curls steam in the cold. Scott catches the whisper Kip makes to himself: “Oh god, okay, here we go.”And then, in a surer voice, “You know the worst part, Scott? You’re right. It isn’t fair to me, and I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you without blowing all this up. But I don’t want to keep lying to my family. And I don’t want to be kept a secret. I don’t want to, but I would have. For you, I would have.” 

“No, you wouldn’t. And you shouldn’t have to.” 

Scott looks around: the park is quiet, mostly empty. Not that it should matter. He wraps an arm around Kip’s shoulder and pulls him close. Kip leans into him, tucks his face in tight to Scott’s shoulder. 

Scott takes a shaky breath. “Loving each other isn’t enough right now.” 

Kip makes a mournful sound, a quiet keen that cuts Scott like a knife. He breathes, shuddering, against Scott’s chest. 

“Right person, wrong time,” Kip murmurs, half-muffled in Scott’s jacket. 

Scott pulls back, wipes tears from Kip’s face with his thumbs, ignoring the way his own eyes are welling, are spilling, from the pain. 

“Right person, wrong time,” he nods. 

He throws all caution out the window then, because Kip is hurting, and so is he, and he needs to be real, as real as he possibly can in this impossible moment. He kisses Kip’s mouth, soft and salty, warm and sad. 

He lets Kip walk away alone, stays on the bench as Kip goes home, to a place where he is loved by people who can give him all of themselves. Until Scott can do better. Be better. 

As evening falls, he wanders to the south end of the park and looks out over Gravesend Bay. The water is cold and unforgiving as iron, unfriendly and grey. The wind whips around him, a quick gust, and then is gone. He feels, just momentarily, the last burst of the setting sun cast golden light across his face: a warm bright moment before twilight settles over the city. 

He takes a car service back to his apartment. Upstairs, he pulls Kip’s hoodie out of the drawer and clutches it to his chest as he crawls into bed. Everything hurts. But he knows, he hopes, as hard as he can, that he’s done the right thing.

He falls asleep in his own bed. Tomorrow, if it comes, will change. 

Scott wakes at home, staring at his own unremarkable ceiling. No alarm today - he doesn’t set one after a roadie, he needs the sleep. He might still need more sleep, because he has the weirdest headache. Loose and rough, right at the base of his skull. He must have slept funny. Or the roadie took more out of him than he’d realised. But He always sleeps badly when Kip’s not there. And now, well…

He did the right thing yesterday. He’s sure of it. He’s got shit to sort out, and he’s not dragging Kip along with him while he gets his house in order. It had been eating at him for a while: what he needs to do to do this right now.

He rolls over and gets out of bed and makes his way to the bathroom. He runs the faucet and washes his face. When he catches his own eyes in his reflection he feels…okay. Like he’s on the edge of a promise. Letting Kip go yesterday had been one of the hardest moments of his life. But it had felt right, as painful as it was. 

He’s got work to do. It started yesterday with Carter. He remembers it: the fire with which he’d woken up, the certainty that the time for lying was done. He can’t quite remember what had made him so sure, but a distant memory floats up, a childhood lesson imparted benevolently: kindness, generosity, honesty. 

And then there was the irrepressible gleam in Vaughnny’s eyes when Scott had told him the truth. A gleam that meant he was probably never going to hear the end of this. Good. No more hiding. 

There’ll be other steps, now. People to tell. Plans to make with Coach and with his agent. Groundwork for a full life. And then, when he’s swept the corners of his life clean, there’ll be room for someone else. Kip, if he’s lucky. 

God, he wants to be lucky. 

He dries his face, and heads back to the bedroom. His phone is buzzing on the nightstand. For a moment he’s worried it’s the St Thomas Foundation, furious that he missed the benefit last night. He sighs. He’ll write them a big enough check that they can’t be mad for long. And there’s always next year. These things all blur together anyway—if he’s been to one, he’s been to a hundred of the things. 

He checks the time: 8.45am. It’s Saturday, which means his cleaner will be here around noon. He’s got time to be lazy. The message on his phone is from Carter. 

C: Okay, important question. Fuck, marry, kill, Admirals locker room. 

He snorts. The irrepressible gleam. 

I’m not answering that, he replies. 

Carter sends back an image of a pride flag with the word ALLY across it in big, bold letters. 

Incorrigible. Scott’s smiling, though, at the blown-open windows of his former life. 

S: If it helps your ego, V, and you had a gun to my head, I guess I’d marry you. 

His phone buzzes again.

C: Yessssssss! 😎😎

He makes coffee and looks out the kitchen window over the city. The buildings are grey in the winter morning, but the sky is blue, clear and light. Manhattan is familiar, refreshing. He’s not sure why, but he’s achingly glad to be home. He never wants to see the Montreal skyline again. 

Out there, somewhere in the city, is Kip. 

Like the thought has summoned him, his phone lights up again with a message. He opens it with soft hands. 

K: Just so you know, I still love you. I’ll love you for a long time. Don’t be a stranger. 

Scott’s faint headache still persists, but it’s easing now in the light of the morning. The sun is shining. A weak winter light, but it’s there. He stands by the window with his toes in a pool of sunlight and texts Kip back. 

S: Give me three months. Not three years. The end of the regular season. If you still want this, meet me at the bench on April 25th, same time. I love you. 

Kip’s reply: Okay. 

He tucks his phone into his pocket and crosses his arms, looking out at the city below him. He steps forward into the sunshine, feeling it warm his shins now, his knees. 

He’ll call his agent later, after coffee and breakfast and a run in the gym downstairs. He’s got some changes to make. He has a life to start living. For himself. 

Three months later 

He sees Kip before Kip sees him, rounding a bend in the path in Bensonhurst Park. He stands up from the bench where he’d made a choice in January, where he’d opened a door to let Kip walk through. He waves, catching Kip’s attention. Kip smiles and waves back. 

They sit again together, side by side. 

“Hi,” Kip says, smiling soft and a little unsure. 

“Hello,” Scott grins. He feels a thousand times lighter today. 

“I read your interview,” Kip says. “Big week you’re having.” 

“It sure is,” Scott agrees. “This is the highlight, though.” 

Kip taps his hands on his knees, and then reaches over to place his hand lightly on top of Scott’s. “Your offer still good?” 

“Absolutely.” Scott breathes out, relieved. 

“It’ll be different now,” Kip says. “I’m actually a little nervous of what it’ll mean, being with you now that you’re out. You’re larger than life. Are they really contacting you about being Grand Marshall of Pride?” 

Scott laughs. “Where did you hear that?” 

“Twitter.” Kip rolls his eyes. Scott squeezes his hand. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too, Kip. So much.” 

He looks at Kip and Kip looks back, brown eyes warm and bright, cheeks dimpling with his smile, his buttery yellow t-shirt a perfect contrast to the bright spring sky. 

“So what do we do now?” Kip asks. 

“Now,” Scott smiles, “we take it one day at a time.”