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Chapter Text

Just about every other year, in the late summertime when all of Nevada took shelter from the scorching heat and endless red dust, Kent would swing open the door to his three-bedroom, three-bath Summerlin home to find a new rookie standing at his doorstep. Some new and overpriced car would be parked next to the Porsche or Cadillac Kent was leasing for the year. Sometimes they’d be carrying brand new luggage, but most of the time, they’d be moving from Boston or Winnipeg or Helsinki in the same beat-up duffel bag they carried from Major Juniors tournaments to the Combine to the Draft. All of them would radiate the same nervous energy. They’d shuffle from foot to foot, their eyes darting nervously, until Kit would brush up against their legs or Kent would give them a reassuring pat on the back. He’d snag one of the bags, toss it over his shoulder, and lead them through the house. There wasn’t much to see. Kent had a bedroom, two guest rooms, bathrooms, a living room with the latest game set up, and a gym that he was happy to share. They’d inevitably end up in the kitchen, sipping a beer or a green juice or whatever Kent happened to have in the fridge. They’d lean against his stark white marble countertops and still keep their gaze fixed on the floor. 

Despite how many times he’s heard the same sentence or done the same routine, it still feels like watching back grainy old footage. It was a movie he had lived through before. 

He can still remember the sound of the scuffed-up wheels of his hand-me-down duffle as he dragged it up the stairs of Rocco Scarmello’s newly purchased townhome. The key to his brand-new cherry 2009 Porsche 911 GT3 felt oddly heavy in his pocket. His cell phone was in that pocket too, sound on. Although it never did ring with a call from the person Kent wanted to hear from the most. He can also still remember the way his bitter laugh echoed off the half-painted walls when Rocky reminded him to be careful for what he wished for. They had both been burned by that. Ambition and happenstance brought them across the country to a place where everyone had pinned their hopes on a rag-tag team. They didn’t know each other yet, but they knew that their work would be cut out for them. 

Rocky, the guy Kent had lived with as a rookie, was an old-school East Coast guy through and through. He grew up in South Jersey and was fed a steady diet of watching the Flyers bash heads every night on cable. He spent a year playing for Boston College before being scooped up by the Capitals. There, he met the lawyer who would become his wife, had two daughters, and spent the better part of his career with the ‘A.’ 

They were happy. America’s capital was a beautiful place to raise a family, and it was only a train ride or a quick zip up the coast to go back home. His wife had a good job. The girls went to school with the children of world leaders. He got to play a game for a living, for God’s sake. He kept most of his teeth in his mouth. The team usually made it to the playoffs - where they’d inevitably get their asses handed to them by the Pittsburgh Penguins - but still. All in all, not bad for a self-described dumbass from Cherry Hill. 

Then, in the swampy heat of June in Philadelphia, it all came crashing down. Just as he had finally made peace with the fact that he’d probably never have that ‘C’ stitched onto his sweater, Rocky had gotten an unexpected phone call from his agent. He hadn’t even bothered to go to the Expansion Draft in Vegas. His nephew was graduating from Malvern Prep that week, and being a hockey player had always come second to being there for his family. There had been rumors, obviously, about who would be moving and official announcements about who had gotten protected. Sure, he hadn’t been included in that list of eight skaters that the Capitals had chosen to keep, but to be frank, he thought little of it. It’s not like thirty-seven-year-old players are hot commodities. Or at least, he hadn’t thought he had been a hot commodity. The call came anyway. He’d be a captain after all, for the brand-new team in Las Vegas.  Something about veteran presence in a new franchise, extensive NHL experience, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, Rocky had stopped listening after they told him he had to move out to Henderson, Nevada, a place he’d never been, within the next month. He could feel the sweat pooling around the collar of the dress shirt his sister insisted he wear that day. 

His daughters cried at the news, bereft that they had to leave their friends, their school, their grandparents, their soccer teams, everything that they had ever known. His wife smiled, but the edges of that smile were a little cracked. He had cleaned out his stall in silence. He couldn’t even think about speaking, about saying goodbye to the guys he had known for decades. They had been in his wedding. They had held his children. They were as close to brothers as anyone he’d ever met. Yet, the next time he’d see them, it would be from across the blue line. 

The ‘C,’ the culmination of all his dreams and aspirations, was a lot less sweet when he had to juggle a struggling new franchise, a cross-country move, a pissed off family, and the hockey world’s equivalent of the second coming of Jesus Christ in the form of a moody teenager. Kent Parson, it turned out, was a savior on the ice and a holy terror off of it. 

Kent remembered sitting on the floor of that townhome, still lingering with a fresh paint smell, and taking a long swig out of the green Heineken bottle Rocky had passed him. In six months' time, they’d sport matching Olympic Silver Medals; ten months from that moment, Rocky would pass him the Stanley Cup. The two of them, an unlikely pair, would sip champagne out of bendy straws side by side. 

That night, though, and a dozen nights just like it in the years to come, Kent and someone else would sit in the suburbs together and remark: 

“It’s quiet here.” 

That was what always struck him. 

Las Vegas was loud. Their fans were loud, so loud that sometimes Kent’s ears would ring all night from the force of it all. There was constantly the buzz of whirling slot machines, the honking of car horns, the drone of looping advertisements. Whether he left the stadium in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, neon lights painted the entire street in eerie shades of silver and red. It was a space that seemed to almost vibrate with noise at all hours of the night and day. It was a seemingly endless playground of color, sound, and people. 

The suburbs, where Rocky and then Kent and then Swoops, Scraps, Carly, the rest of them would all buy sprawling houses in exclusive gated communities, were achingly quiet. Other than the occasional jogger or kid riding their bike as cold dusk settled over their neighborhood, there was hardly ever a sound. When they did happen, birthday parties, cookouts, and get-togethers took place deep into each house’s backyards, near expansive pools and built-in pizza ovens. The din rarely made its way out to the street. Even in the midst of their Cup parties, you’d hardly be able to hear a hint of the entirety of the Las Vegas Aces from the next house over. 

Kent’s house was much the same. Most of the time, it sat completely dark and empty as Kent’s career brought him, and whatever rookie was living with him at the time, across North America for weeks at a time. Sure, Kent would have the guys over for a beer or two every once in and while. Swoops and Scraps’ kids swam in his pool and tormented his cat. His parents and sisters would visit for a week or two, filling the house up with the pattering of nearly a dozen feet. Most of the time, it was just Kent and his cat and the soft thud of bass through the soundproofed walls of his garage gym. 

Then he had to go win an Olympic Gold Medal and destroy his ankle in the process.

“Uncle Kenny,” his youngest nephew, Bryson, drew out the ‘Y’ at the end of his nickname, lisping through missing front teeth. “Can you pass me the salt?” 

Nearly twenty years ago, Olympic Silver, Stanley Cup championship ring, and brand-new Nike sponsorship in hand, Kent had drifted his way back to Buffalo, his hometown. Like any good son, he put away a few hundred thousand dollars of his fat rookie salary to move his family out of the cramped two-bedroom rowhome they had been living in since his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage. He had brought them across the city to a nicer, more spacious home. He could move his sisters to a new school, too. Both of his sisters graduated from Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart, the sister institution of the boys’ academy he attended for a year. They had their own room for the first time in their lives. They played in the expansive green yard that their children now did. While Kent’s many achievements dotted the walls, this was their childhood home, not his. It was their height charts in the kitchen, their old sports equipment in the garage, their old sweatshirts in the closet. 

He had been fine with that. He hadn’t lived with his family for years, and this felt like some small way to have his cake and eat it too. He could alleviate some of the guilt that gnawed on him occasionally. He could easily ignore the fact that Kylie had shot up six inches between the Draft and the next summer or the fact that his mother went gray in the time between one Christmas and his birthday the following July. He could provide a childhood for his sisters that was at least a little better than the one he had growing up. He could do all that while keeping a healthy distance in Las Vegas, where his space could be his and his alone, and no one could witness the relatively bad decisions he made for the better part of a decade. 

That was until he couldn’t walk for twelve weeks straight, was forcibly retired, and then took a job that required him to be in New York City several days out of the month. He had moved back home to recover, to launch the next part of his life, and nearly a year later, he hadn’t exactly left yet. 

Buffalo, he had quickly found out, was almost the opposite of Vegas in every way. What struck him, though, was how loud this house was. 

There was a kitchen timer shrieking in the background. His oldest niece, Taylor, had left her phone open on one of the counters as she ran to the upstairs bathroom. A TikTok about some expensive beauty product played on a full-volume loop. One of the younger kids had left some cartoon playing on the living room flatscreen. Claustrophobically close to him, Jack’s left foot tapped away underneath the kitchen table. The sound reverberated on the scuffed wooden floor. Jack’s hair was still soaking wet from his shower, and water dripped down his neck. Kylie, his youngest sister, was on call this evening, and her pager dinged incessantly. Zach, his brother-in-law, glanced down at his smartwatch and stifled laughter at some notification that popped up. His mother whispered something in his stepfather’s ear; David frowned at whatever his wife had said. From somewhere near the powder room, Kit’s meows evolved into increasingly high-pitched shrieks. Kent’s phone rhythmically buzzed as message after message came flooding in; clearly, everyone had something to say about that stupid picture that had been posted. 

Kent blinked, his eyes finally looking away from the picture hanging on the wall. It was a picture of him and Rocky, the teenage phenomenon and the veteran Captain, hoisting their franchise’s first-ever Stanley Cup together. Now, he had been retired for well over a year, and Rocky’s grandson was playing on the US Junior Development Program. The circle of time went around and around and around. 

“What?”

“The salt, Kent.” His sister, Karly, snapped as she tried to blot a giant splotch of blood-red tomato sauce out of her daughter’s white school polo shirt. The water she had dabbed on the stain had done little to fix it. It had done nothing other than become a larger pinkish stain that took up nearly the entirety of the poor kid’s tiny torso. “Bryson, what do we say when we ask someone something? Don’t be rude.” 

Bryson squirmed in his seat. A rubber sandal, already hanging precariously on his foot to begin with, dropped to the floor with a thud. “The salt, Uncle Kenny, please!” 

“The what?” Kent blinked again. He could feel the blood rushing to his head. There was a moment where both Jack and his mother met each other’s icy stare for a second. Jack’s constant foot tapping picked up its pace. His whole chair was practically vibrating. Kent’s mom dragged her metal fork across the porcelain plate, the earsplitting sound filling the room.

“Kent, are you okay? You look pale.” Kylie paused, mid-bite, to appraise her brother thoughtfully. She reached up with her free hand and pressed her palm to his forehead. It was blissfully cool and dry. “You’re burning up.” 

Without really knowing what he was doing, Kent launched himself to his feet so quickly that his chair tumbled backwards. The sound of the chair collapsing, of wood on wood, was an almost deafening addition to the discordant symphony. Kylie recoiled her hand almost as if she had been burned. His joints and lower back were practically screaming at his sudden movements. His ankle burned as the muscles seized. Still, before he knew it, Kent had brushed past everyone at the dining room table and made a rapid dash towards the exit. Through the walls, he could hear the sound of several chairs being pushed out. 

“I need some fucking air.” He mumbled under his breath as he swung the front door open and the frigid wind of an early upstate spring blasted him in the face. He pulled the door behind him with a slam. The sound reverberated off the pines that lined the long driveway. 

On the darkening streets, with just Kent and a fat moon low in the sky, it was finally quiet again. 

Chapter Text

Nine Hours Earlier

“Stop looking in the mirror.” Jeff’s voice rang off the walls. On the other side of the door, Kent could hear the muffled sounds of his extended family attempting to herd themselves from the living room to the garage where their cars were already running to stave off the northeast chill. It was roughly ten in the morning in Buffalo and just before seven in Vegas. Kent was running late, and Swoops seemed more than early to a tournament for his post-retirement obsession, pickleball. 

“How’d you know I was looking in the mirror?” Asked Kent as he ran a hand through his hair and secured his red, white, and blue winter hat on his head. The silver and blue Breitling Jack had gifted him for Christmas, an antique that had once been gifted to Bob for his retirement, sparkled in the overhead lights. Six button-downs, nearly half of the wardrobe he had at his parents’ house, despite living here for over a year, lay abandoned and crumpled on the bed. Jack’s Team USA hoodie, still sleep-warmed, sat in a heap outside the bathroom. 

“I was your roommate on roadies for literal years, dude. If you aren’t playing hockey, you’re looking in a mirror.” Swoops laughed as Kent rubbed overpriced sunscreen on the fine lines at the center of his forehead. His navy overcoat had a pill running down one of the sleeves. He resisted the urge to pull at it. “And I’m telling you to stop. I’m sure you look fine, ya beautiful bastard. It’s criminal that you got all the talent and all the looks.”

“But none of the brains,” Kent remarked, echoing the same teasing refrain the Aces had always said about him, as he pushed his blonde hair behind his ear again. Something that sounded an awful lot like the crashing of the plastic block tower Kent spent an hour assembling last night with the younger kids reverberated throughout the house. There was the beginning of a piercing cry. 

“You said it, not me.” Swoops’ laugh, just as loud and expansive as it had been during their shared rookie training camp, came out tinny over the speakerphone. Kent rubbed at his chest with the fleshy part of his palm. “God, I miss your sorry ass. You could always do broadcasting in LA when you come back. It’s a much quicker flight than your drive from Buffalo to the city.”

Kent looped his scarf, a rich maroon, into a knot just below his Adam’s Apple. “Listen, you know that the northeast is more of a hockey market.”

“Mmm, I’m not sure. The Las Vegas Aces used to have this guy, Kent Parson, and he kind of put the southwest on the map.”

It was the same conversation that they kept having since about September. 

Kent had generally reached a stage where he could walk pain-free without a brace. Sure, he needed additional physical therapy, but the Aces had made it clear that they as an organization would do anything they could to help out their former star. If he needed access to the best orthopedic specialists and physical therapists in the city, they’d make sure he’d have it. Most of his broadcasting was done in Boston, Toronto, or New York, but it wasn’t as if the West Coast lacked hockey teams. His charitable organization’s headquarters were in an unassuming office building in the Bronx, but there was little Kent did on the day-to-day that required him to be there. While his relationship with Jack was stable, it’s not like they were anywhere near moving in with each other anytime soon. 

There was objectively no reason he couldn’t return to Vegas. He just...hadn’t.

“Yeah, well, let’s hope I don’t fuck up whatever prestigious reputation you think I have.” Kent grabbed his phone off the dresser and drifted back to his bed. He carefully slipped his brand-new dress shoes on his feet. He hadn’t bothered bringing the rest of his expensive collection back east. He didn’t need them. After his surgery, the only thing he had ever really worn when he could start walking again had been sneakers. He also didn’t need to put together roughly a hundred pre-game outfits per year anymore. Jeans and sweats were more than fine these days. 

“By doing what? Fuck up dropping a puck on the ice for a fake faceoff?” Swoops snorted. On the other end of the phone, Kent could finally hear the incessant bouncing of those stupid plastic balls. Jeff finally had some company. 

“You never know.” Kent tried not to shudder as his fingers drifted over the knot of scar tissue on the inside of his leg. He could easily feel it through his thin dress socks. His ankle had healed well, but his doctor was transparent that the scars would never entirely fade. He would just have to learn to live with a little cosmetic damage. 

“I do know. You’ll be fine.” Swoops laughed again.  “And if you’re not fine, I’m sure everyone will have a good laugh about it on Twitter. I, for one, will.  If you’re really lucky, Hailee Steinfeld might even dry your tears. She’s going to be there? Right?”

“Jesus Christ, I’m telling Amy, you absolute dog. She’ll be there, but to be honest, I’d prefer Josh Allen,” responded Kent without even thinking. 

“Oh, okay, okay. I’m getting it now. Tall, dark, handsome, athletic - that seems to be your type across the board. I can respect that. Knowing you, it could be way worse.”

It had been worse. Kent had fun in his twenties. Really, he did. There are much worse things in life than hooking up with ice dancers, professional soccer players, actors, and one very notable popstar. It’s just that none of those relationships ever really screamed maturity. Kent got older. The rookies who joined him at the bar or the club stayed the same age. 

“Gee, thanks.” 

There was another pause. Someone downstairs opened and closed the refrigerator door. His stepfather, David's, booming laugh erupted, followed by a squeal from one of the kids. Somebody else clicked on the dishwasher, the loud whirling adding to the symphony that drifted up through the floorboards. 

“Speaking of tall, dark, and handsome, where’s Zimmermann?” There was a jostling as if Swoops switched from one ear to the other. 

“Aw, Swoops, you think he’s handsome?” Kent reached down to toss his dirty socks from the night before into the hamper next to the bedroom door. 

“Yeah, I mean, I do have eyes. He is the son of one of the eighties' most popular models and a professional athlete, for God’s sake. He’s on his way to having that silver fox thing going on. People go nuts over blue eyes. If he didn’t have the personality of a cardboard box, I’d say he’d be the most attractive guy in the league.” There was a slight shift in Jeff’s tone. It’s softer, a little rounded near the edges. “You haven’t seen him, though? Didn’t go to his family skate last night?”

Kent sucked in sharply. “No, I didn’t go. That seemed a little on the nose, don’t you think?”

Jack had asked him. It wouldn’t have been completely out of the realm of possibility. Everyone knew that they were good friends, that this was Kent’s hometown. Players brought their larger circle - siblings, cousins, childhood friends - to the Stadium Series all the time. No one would have suspected a thing. 

Kent, though, had declined. Partially because he didn’t want to take any risks that he didn’t strictly have to. Partially because he didn’t think he could stand the idea of lacing up his skates and stepping back out onto the ice if he wasn’t playing. Even getting out to FreeSkate or Open Hockey Sessions at the local rink was a mental challenge these days. Eighteen months ago, he would have been able to skate literal laps around Jack and pretty much every other player on his team. Now, he knew that he would struggle to even keep up with a relaxed loop around the rink. 

“So, who was there? Bob?”

“No, Alicia needed an operation. Cataracts, I think. I don’t know. Nothing serious.” Kent shook his head even though he knew that Swoops couldn’t see him. Outside of his bedroom door, he could hear Kylie on a phone call of her own. She was consulting with one of her colleagues about a difficult birth that a teen mom was currently going through. Leave it to her to be taking a work call on a Saturday morning. Where he and Karly were always alike in personality, he and Kylie certainly shared the same work ethic. 

“Hmm,” grunted Swoops. “I can’t believe no one was there for his last Stadium Series game. That actually blows. See - this is what you’re doing to me. You’re making me feel bad for Zimmermann of all people. 

“It’s not his last. His contract isn’t up for another two years.” Kent informed him as he finally emerged from his room to linger at the top of the stairs. The front door repeatedly swung open as the kids chased each other out to the car. David hauled out carseat after carseat from the living room with Zach’s help. Someone left the local news blasting on the living room television. Kent’s running sneakers, normally in a neat line to the right of the door, were scattered all across the foyer. 

“Christ, what will he be? Forty?”

“Thirty-nine.”

Swoops laughed again. “You fuckers are both the same. You’re gonna go until you can’t go no more.”

“I’ve got the scars to prove that I did just that.” Kent descended the stairs and turned into the kitchen. His mom and sister, Karly, both hovered over the kitchen sink as they tried to wash up the plethora of dishes from breakfast as fast as they could. In typical Parson fashion, their entire clan was already running five minutes behind for Kent’s media call. “Listen, man, I gotta go. Talk to you later?” 

“Sure, Parse. Don’t forget to actually enjoy yourself out there! Remember, like you always told us, hockey is supposed to be fun. ” Kent could feel Swoops’ pitying smile through the phone, and then the line was dead.

“Hey, Ken, nice watch,” his brother-in-law, Steven, smiled over the top of his chipped coffee mug as he floated towards the front door, chasing one of the toddlers. 

“Thanks, man,” Kent grabbed a plastic water bottle off the kitchen island and drained all of it in nearly one go. The remains of a breakfast feast, toast, juice, waffles, yogurt, and cereal, were still left out on the counter. Though most of the kids had picked through it already. He took one of the end pieces of toast and tried to choke it down. Most guys put on a few healthy pounds after retirement, but Kent was different. He had always struggled to get in the number of calories required to bulk up in the pre-season and keep the weight on during the playoffs. Now, without hours of intense exercise every day, Kent rarely even felt hungry in the mornings. 

“Listen, Kenny,” his mom wiped her hands on the dingy kitchen towel that she bought the same year they got the house. His old US Development Team sweater hung loosely around her wrists. “I made up the guest room for Jack for tonight.”

“Why does he need the guest room?” Kent tossed his empty water bottle towards the recycling bin and missed spectacularly. “I thought it was obvious that Zimms was going to stay in the room with me. He’s only in town for the night.” 

His mother wrapped her arms around her chest and quirked her face into a small frown. “Kent, please, you know the rules. Your sisters didn’t sleep over with their significant others before they were married. He’ll be fine in the guest room.”

“That rule really helped prevent Karly’s teen motherhood, didn’t it?” 

“Oh fuck you, Kent. I dodged teen pregnancy. I was twenty when I gave birth to Ethan.” His sister twirled around and pointed a finger at him accusingly. Technically, she was right. She had gotten pregnant a month or two after she had turned twenty. Their parents had been furious. Kylie, still in high school, had been cautiously excited. Kent had just sighed and spent a full night on Amazon ordering just about every baby item he could think of - a Las Vegas onesie obviously included. 

“Karly, language, please.”

Kent rolled his eyes and snagged another water bottle off the counter. He dug his fingertips into the soft plastic and relished the way it crinkled underneath his grasp. “That extra year makes a huge difference.”

“Yeah, it does actually.”

“Mom, I think you’re being a little intense. They are grown men after all.” Kylie rounded the kitchen, hands filled with a pile of mostly navy and powder blue clothing. “Kent, I’m getting ready to put on my coat. Which one do you want me to wear?”

“You didn’t share a room with Zach when you guys stayed here when you were dating,” his mother retorted as she picked up a sweatshirt from Kylie’s hands to investigate. It was an old Sabres hoodie that Kent must have gotten for Christmas in the late nineties. He didn’t even know that they still had it. 

“We did live together throughout my entire time in medical school and residency,” replied Kylie, holding up Kent’s World Juniors Nike zip-up.

“Did you?” Their mother picked at a non-existent piece of fuzz on one of Kent’s Las Vegas Aces’ Patagonia vests. 

Kylie laid the zip-up she was holding over one of the kitchen chairs and frowned. “Yeah, and you didn’t have a problem with it. So, what’s your problem with Jack?”

“Because let’s be real, that’s the issue here.” Kent crossed his arms protectively over his chest. 

He got it. Jack and his parents didn’t exactly have the best track record. He and Jack didn’t exactly have the best track record. But things between the two of them seemed to be going, for once in their lives, spectacularly right. He wanted him to get to know his family, to enjoy his time here. That didn’t look likely when his mom was policing the sleeping arrangements of thirty-six-year-olds. 

“What problems don’t I have with Jack?” His mother grabbed her own jacket and set her face in a stony line. “I’ll be in the car. We can discuss this later.” 

“Who pissed in Mom's cereal? Lord.” Behind him, he could see Karly approaching with her own armful of clothes as she artfully dodged a half-dozen abandoned toys on the floor. His nieces and nephews had hardly been here an hour or two, and they had practically wrecked the whole house, just after Kent spent forty-five minutes tidying up when they left after dinner last night. “Back to the matter at hand, what do you want me to wear?” 

“What do you mean ‘ What do you want me to wear ?’ Put on one of the USA hockey hats I gave you, or you could pull out one of your old Sabres sweatshirts from high school.” Kent tried his best not to look annoyed as he smoothed his hair into place one last time. He adjusted the lapels on his jacket until they lay just right. 

“And you’re sure that’s what you want?” Karly arched her eyebrow at him. Kent and both of his sisters shared the exact same shade of platinum blonde hair. Where Kylie kept hers long and tidy with chic updos, Karly’s curled right around her shoulders. Unlike Kent, both of his sisters got their mother’s rich brown eyes that seemed to track everything all the time. 

“What’s your other option?” He turned on his heel, dress shoes squeaking, to inspect the mound that Karly was cradling. 

“We have those Falconers sweats Jack got us for Christmas.” She held up the crewneck sweatshirt. It was from their exclusive women’s collection, Kent remembered, that one of the WAGs had developed. It was a stunning powder blue color with a sturdy embroidered design. All in all, lovely for sports merch. Completely unacceptable for this game. 

Kylie pulled out her matching one and held it up to inspect it. “I didn’t want to say anything at the time, but don’t you think it’s weird that Jack got us his own merch for Christmas?”

“Of course it’s weird, but Jack’s a weird guy. If you haven’t picked up on that yet, I can’t help you.” Karly threw her head back to laugh. Kent could feel the blood rushing to his face. 

It had been a weird point of contention between the two of them. Kent had wanted a low-key Christmas. He did love this sweet and uncharacteristically thoughtful side of Jack. He just didn't love that he had spent nearly five thousand dollars on Christmas gifts on his entire extended family. After all, Jack was just starting to get reacquainted with them. Jack, however, had never known how to give a low-key gift. Kent could still vividly remember waking up on his seventeenth birthday to a signed Wayne Gretsky jersey and a personal invitation to join him in a round of golf the following summer. He also remembered the fact that he had once made an off-hand comment about how much he missed a particular coffee shop in Las Vegas, only to wake up to a twenty-pound box of their beans on the front door in Buffalo the following week. 

“Why the hell would you wear those?”

Karly made a face at him, the laughter tapering off in her throat. Somebody outside honked their horn. They were now running at least twenty minutes behind. “Oh, I don’t know, because Jack’s your boyfriend? Who’s going to be spending the night at our house?”

“In the guest room, apparently,” added Kylie under her breath. 

“The same boyfriend you’ve been dating for over a year.” Karly continued. She jerked her head towards the wall where David had framed a photo of Jack and Kent smiling at the Zimmermann summer cabin next to Kylie's family photo shoot at the beach and a picture of Karly and Steven in Paris. “I think this is the longest you've ever been in a relationship. Feels like we should kind of be rooting for his team.” 

“It’s not like everyone needs to know,” snapped Kent. 

“They’re going to find out eventually, Kenny,” Kylie remarked. She placed her hand on his shoulder. It was tentative, just grazing the edge of his coat. Kent bit his lip, hard. He didn’t want to say something he’d regret. He hated how she kept writing this off as some kind of inevitability rather than what it actually was - his choice. 

“We’re going to be late.” He lunged and grabbed the keys to his car off the kitchen counter. 

Kent had played over a thousand games during his career, and one thing he came to love was the quiet little bubble that was the Aces locker room. Regardless of what was happening outside, the love, the hate, the cheers, the jeers, their locker room had been their space. He had always been surrounded by familiar faces, by his pre-game rituals, by the addictive buzz that seemed to precede every major game. What he hadn’t realized until this very moment was how much that bubble protected the players from the general chaos happening outside. 

The tunnels of Highmark Stadium felt busier than Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Entire media teams followed coaches and players down the halls. EMTs rifled through their bags, carefully wrapping and re-wrapping mounds of bandages and counting bottles of Tylenol. Equipment managers came running through carrying extra sets of pads and newly sharpened blades. Family members and lucky fans milled around. There was the click of a camera or the harsh tap on a phone every two or three seconds. Kent blinked rapidly, head spinning. 

“Kent!” 

He turned slowly to find a petite young woman smiling back at him, one he hadn’t seen in months. Her long blonde hair, a few shades darker than his own, rippled over her jacket. She held her arms open to him. A small brown paper bag hung loosely on her arm. 

“Liz!” Kent exclaimed, wrapping her up in his arms. She still smelled like the exact same brand of shampoo she had worn when he had first met her. He remembered when Creeky, one of the last rookies he had billeted, invited her over to the house for the first time. She stood there in his backyard, a nervous college junior, next to Creeky, who was maybe all of two months into his NHL career, nervously sipping the too-sour lemonade Kent had made. Now, she was a wife and a mother, and he was retired.  “What are you doing here?”

She pressed a small kiss to his cheek and beamed at him. “You puke in a guy’s pool once and he already forgets you.”

“I also puked that night,” laughed Kent. 

“I was pregnant. You were just drunk.” Liz smiled at him. 

Of course, Kent had remembered that night. It was the first year after Swoops' retirement. Usually, he had been the one to host the players and their significant others for the end-of-season barbecue. Without him, Kent reluctantly took on the duty. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the sound of pop music playing over the cacti in his yard and the dozen or so people splashing in his pool, the taste of the dangerously sweet margaritas, the warm night air on his skin. 

“Tracks. I totally forgot that Creeky was traded out here.”

Creeky had been named Alternate the year that Swoops had retired. He was no Jeff Troy, but Kent liked him regardless. It had been rewarding to see him grow so much as a player. He reminded him an awful lot of himself when he was younger. He was scrappy, hungry, and willing to do anything to put a puck in the net. Off the ice, though, he was much quieter, more reserved than Kent. 

When Kent had retired, Creeky had been tapped to step up. The management wanted him to be another legendary captain. The city wanted him to be another hard-partying icon. Creeky never had any intreest in being any of those things. He had wanted to be a good player and a better father. He had lasted all of twenty days before a last-minute trade over to Providence for a first-round draft pick two or three months after Kent’s injury. It was a much better fit for him. 

“Yeah, we moved out here like a year ago now.” Liz tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. 

“How old is Ruby now?” 

Ruby was their daughter, almost as if she were Creeky in miniature. She had his big brown eyes and thick black hair. However, when it came to personality, she was all Liz. Kent remembered cradling her small body in his arms on Liz and Creeky’s big back porch. It was the summer before the Winter Olympics. The world was warm and seemed to hold nothing but possibility. 

“Three and a half going on thirty. She’s around here somewhere with Carter’s mom. You gotta come say hello. She talks about Kitty all the time.”

“All the love for Kit and no love for Uncle Kent.”

Liz shrugged. That baby had tormented that poor cat, but Kent had gotten a good laugh out of it anyway.

“I like the outfit.” Kent gestured to her broadly. The Falconers walk-in costume celebrated all things Gilded Age luxury. Or at least, that’s what Jack said it was supposed to be when he had sent him a Snapchat in a sailor’s outfit - stripes, hats, and little silk scarves in all. (Kent had saved that screenshot to his phone, obviously.) The WAGs went with an old-school varsity look. Liz looked smart in her navy blue varsity sweater with a vintage falcon design stitched onto the front. On the side, Creeky’s number, #18, was stitched onto the sleeve with his signature embroidered in stark white thread overtop. It was topped off with a winter hat with his number embroidered on the front. 

“Yeah, it was Stevie’s idea. She’s married to RJ, the Alternate. You know, since Jack isn’t married, most of the WAG stuff falls on her. She’s, uh, the most senior WAG, technically. Sorry, I know all this stuff must sound stupid as hell, but we do have our own hierarchy kind of thing.” 

Kent remembered Jack saying something about Stevie. When she wasn’t busy taking care of their four children, she apparently loved taking photography classes at the local art school. They found out that they shared a mutual passion during the Falconers’ annual holiday party. He spent quite a few hours over at their house during the season. 

“She got good ideas?”

“They said she’s better than Eric.”

“Yeah, well, Bittle’s a trip, that’s for sure,” smiled Kent against his better judgment. He never hated Bittle, not really. He didn’t mind the fact that he and Jack still talked. They went to college together, and the Samwell team seemed like it would be a permanent fixture in Jack’s life. He could live with that. In fact, when he actually got to know them, he liked most of the guys from Jack’s college team. As for Bittle, though, let's just say that he was thrilled that he lived on the opposite side of the country. 

“Here. When I found out that you were coming to the game, I got you a gift.” Liz passed the paper bag over to Kent. 

“What is it?” Kent carefully pushed aside the bright blue and white tissue paper that was overflowing. He pulled out a fuzzy piece of white fabric. 

“Just the same winter hat all of the WAGs have. It’s just like the one that I’ve got on, but instead it has a little #1 embroidered on the front.” Liz smiled softly. 

Kent blanched. “Liz, I told you that in confidence.”

It wasn’t that Kent was completely private. Most of the Aces had known, especially later in his career as the climate around sexuality had changed slightly for the better. It was harder to hide it from the rookies that he had lived with. Still, there was a big gap between what he chose to do in his own home surrounded by his own friends and family and the notion of wearing Jack’s number literally across his forehead. 

“I know, I know. Nobody knows or suspects anything. I told everyone that I ordered an extra one. ‘By accident,’ of course. Zimmermann’s number is #1, and Carter’s is #18 and with mom brain and multitasking and the stress of the holidays recently , you know, I must have forgotten to type the ‘8’ on the order form. So they sent me this one, and I had to reorder the right one. Silly me.” Liz flushed deeply. Kent felt a little ashamed that he had made her feel so embarrassed. It really was a thoughtful gift. 

“Thank you, Liz. I, uh, really appreciate it.” He wrapped an arm chastely around her shoulders. 

“It’s something small I could do for you. You’ve been a good friend to me, a great teammate to my husband, and a member of Ruby’s support system out there when we were so far away from our family in Vegas. I thought it would be nice for you to have this especially since Carter said you and Jack were. Are…” Liz fumbled over her words, a slight blush painting over her features. 

Kent nodded and swallowed. “Close. We’re close.”

“Close, yeah.” Liz blinked once, twice. “I’m happy for you, Kent. You deserve it.”

“Thank you.” Kent ran a thumb over the raised embroidered #1. The fabric scratched over the pad of his finger.  “I hope I get to wear this one day.”

“Yeah, me too.”

As the Buffalo Children’s Choir completed the last notes of “O, Canada,” Kent held up a hand to wave and was greeted with the deafening sound of applause. He flushed slightly under the attention. The stadium was nearly at capacity for the game today, and he knew that there were hundreds more people sipping beer, hot chocolate, and straight liquor in the tailgates outside. Behind him, he could hear the rhythm of a few dozen players tapping their sticks against the boards. The air seemed to vibrate with booming energy. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome to two-time Olympic medalist, five-time Stanley Cup champion, the first American Triple Gold winner, former NHL All-Star, and your hometown hero - Kent Parson!”

Kent flinched. Not at the roar of the crowd or the way that it echoed off the hunk of steel and concrete that made up Highmark Stadium. Not at the shrill whistle, or the click of a camera, the harsh outdoor stadium fluorescents, or under Jack’s knowing gaze that he could practically feel drilling into his back. 

He can’t help but flinch at the word former.

Stuff like this, the pomp and circumstance, was all he had left in the world of professional hockey. There were, of course, dozens and dozens of opportunities available to him to do stuff like this - puck drops, charity balls, fundraising events. Yet, all of them seemed to be a cheap imitation of what it felt like to really be part of The Show. He saw into his future, and all he had to look forward to was spending his life chasing a high he’d never be able to reach. 

Still, Kent had a job to do, and one thing he had been historically quite good at was getting the job done regardless of how he happened to be feeling. He plastered a smile on his face and focused on putting one foot in front of the other on the rigid plastic platform laid out in front of him. He tried to avoid thinking about how the cool atmosphere of the rink seeped through his thin dress pants and how it had already been a year since the last time he got to skate on an NHL rink. Instead, he focused on waving from one corner to the other and making sure he didn’t fumble the puck as the ref passed it to his waiting hand.

“And now,” the announcer paused for maximum dramatic effect. Kent could see the Jumbotron focus on his face. He looked older these days. “Please join us in welcoming players from the Providence Falconers and your Buffalo Sabres for our opening faceoff.” 

Kent tilted his head to his left. He carefully tracked Jack with his gaze as he threw one leg and then the other over the bench to skate up to him. Even years later, as Jack cut a sharp stop into the ice, it was practically embarrassing how quickly Kent could feel his stomach turn almost molten. Jack had his Falconers winter cap pulled down low over his forehead, a tuft of salt and pepper hair falling charmingly across his brows. The game hadn’t even started, and his eyeblack was already smudged. The sooty look brought out the angles in his cheekbones and the electric color of his blue eyes. His mouth was curled up into the mischievous half-smile he had always reserved for Kent. It was early enough in the season that he hadn’t grown out his spring scruff. Instead, his jaw cut a sharp line that happened to fit perfectly in the divet of Kent’s own collarbone. The back of his jersey was tucked into his pads, and Kent couldn’t help but let his eyes dart at the way that Jack filled out the new uniform, all navy blue and rich gold. He already had a few inches on Kent, and with his skates on, he practically towered over him. Off the ice, Jack could be a bit of a basket case; on it, he projected nothing but cold competence. Kent swallowed instinctively. 

Every other time they had shared professional ice together, they had a task to complete. Kent had to be responsible, a role model. He had to focus on winning. This time around, his only job was to throw a puck on the ice and simply watch. 

“Hey, nine-oh,” smiled Jack as he scratched his freshly sharpened blade across the ice. Kent knew he should say something, but he couldn’t seem to open his mouth. 

“Hi, Zimms,” was all Kent could manage to squeak out. “Fancy seeing you here, huh?”

“Alright, alright. How ‘bout a little love for the hometown team, huh, Cap?”

Kent had been so wrapped up in the way that Jack’s eyes seemed to drag inch by inch down the whole length of his frame that he hardly realized the other player was here. He recognized that voice almost immediately. 

“Lancer, what the fuck are you doing here?” 

Standing next to him and Jack, to his utter surprise, was Riley Lance, the last member of their gold-winning first line. The last time he had seen him was at his Cup party six or seven months ago. He had just decided to leave college, and he was getting ready to prepare for the Draft that upcoming summer. From his wheelchair, Kent reassured him that he’d be fine, more than fine. There would be no GM in the league stupid enough to let Olympic-level talent go to the wayside. 

Now, here he was. Lancer looked good, happy. His bright yellow pom pom on his own winter hat jostled as he pulled Kent in for a hug. His own eyeblack took up huge triangles just underneath his bright hazel eyes. An obnoxiously large set of running sunglasses, shifting between blue, yellow, and white, sat perched on his head.  He had put on an inch or two since Kent had seen him, and clearly he was following his meal plan. He appeared to be appropriately bulked, lean but strong, even at this point in the season. Most importantly, there was a confidence that hadn’t been there before. Lancer had called him “Mr. Parson” on the first day of the US Team’s training camp. Today, he was ready to take on one of the NHL’s most popular events of the year. 

“We’re both mic’d up.” Jack interrupted, pointing solemnly at the center of his chest. Kent was well aware that, just below Jack’s outstretched finger, a tiny microphone had been sewn into his pads. Kent also knew that it was designed to pick up any noise around them.

Kent winced. “Oh fuck.”

“Parse.” Jack reminded him again. There was, however, a fondness that rounded out Jack’s voice. It was a warmth that Kent could easily pick up on. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and grab Jack’s hand. Instead, he’d have to settle for grasping onto the puck even harder. 

He could feel his face growing hot. “Shit. Damn, - oh Jesus, I did it again.”

“You’re really out of the loop, old man.” Lancer threw his head back and laughed. He nearly lost his sunglasses in the process. He fumbled to catch them. Out of the corner of his eye, Kent could see the three of them, blown up to bigger than life, on the stadium screen. Some pop song thankfully drowned out the sound of their conversation. 

Kent’s face burned even hotter. “You’re only as old as you feel.”

“So as a retiree, I’m gonna guess that you feel about seventy, give or take.” Lancer laughed again, and damn, Kent had missed his familiar sense of humor, the feeling of being on a team, the feeling of belonging somewhere more than he thought he had. 

“Give or take.”

“I got called up last week. This is my first NHL game.” The younger man’s voice took on a softer tone, one filled with excitement but apprehension, too. “The powers that be wanted a Team USA reunion, so they let me do the face-off. Or I guess, they let me do the fake face-off.” 

“Congrats, man, that’s awesome. It’s true what they say. You always remember your first.” Kent tried to push down the strange wave of emotions that gnawed at him. At twenty-one, he had been roughly halfway to five hundred professional games played. While he already had two, the majority of his Stanley Cup wins and most notable career achievements were still ahead of him. He’d give anything to go back to it - anything in the world. 

“I don’t plan on going easy on you, kid.” Jack carefully lowered himself down into a readied stance. He looked deadly serious for a face-off that was more or less a photo opportunity. 

Lancer pushed in closer and dropped down to meet Jack’s gaze. “Wouldn’t want you to, Zimmer. Let’s see what those brittle bones can do. I wanna know if you still got it.”

“I want a good clean game, gentleman.” Kent held the puck out in front of him. Despite the chill of the wind, it was a bright sunny day. His hand looked stark against the pure white ice and the pitch black of both the puck and his slacks. He hoped neither Jack nor Riley was aware of the fact that his hand was shaking. 

Jack snorted. “You’ve never played a clean game in your life, Parse.”

“Well, I don’t play at all anymore, so let’s take this as a ‘do as I say and not as I do’ scenario.”

“Sure, Kenny.”

With that, Kent dropped the puck on the ice. It bounced once, twice before Jack snuck the blade of his stick underneath it and popped it into the air. It landed squarely in Kent’s outstretched hands. Kent was acutely aware of the dozens of camera clicks and hundreds of phones pointed at them as he patted both Lancer and Jack on the back. He already knew that that little stunt would blow up all over social media. 

“Have fun out there, guys.” He called as he watched Lancer drift back to his bench. Something envious and ugly twitched in his chest as he watched Lancer hop back onto the bench. His team reached around to clap his back or ruffle his hair. The equipment manager handed him his bucket, new and shiny. Kent could still remember the exact way he looked on the Vegas jumbotron as he turned to face the camera in his full kit for the first time.

Unlike Lancer, Jack lingered for a moment. He looped a gloved finger just beneath the collar of his shirt, and Kent could see the electric wire to his microphone bunch up visibly. He glanced back at his bench before jerking his hand sharply. Jack had pulled the power, effectively cutting the mic. A shiver crawled its way up Kent’s spine. There was no doubt he was going to need someone to plug it back in when he got to his bench, and that was certainly going to bring up questions as to why Jack felt the need to cut his mic. He was also sure that the NHL Media Team was going to be downright pissed with him - which was saying something. The NHL Media Team always seemed to be kind of pissed at Jack Zimmermann. 

“Let’s say we put a wager on this.” Jack dropped his voice several octaves. It hardly registered over the sound of the crowd. It took all of Kent’s mental energy to focus on what he was saying, effectively snapping him out of whatever morose reminiscing he was about to plunge into.  “I score a goal - what do I get in return?” 

Kent blinked again. His throat felt oddly dry. “Just one goal? Come on, you can do better than that, Zimms. You gotta make it worth my while. I’m going to need at least a hatty.” 

“I should have known that you would have wanted me to put on a show.” Jack tilted his head back and smiled in that exasperated way that drove Kent nuts. He rested his stick across his back and let both of his hands hang. “I guess I need to get to it then.” 

Kent had hardly sat down before there was the telltale shouting of a small but noisy crowd. The bulk of the crowd then erupted into a chorus of boos. A goal, naturally, just not for the home team. 

From his spot in the box, Kent could hear the Falconers’ radio staff make their call over the loudspeaker. Kent shifted and took a sip of his beer. Beside him, Kylie clapped with polite enthusiasm. His mom hovered just behind them, flanked by her son-in-laws on both sides. All three of them were making quick work of the quiche from the free buffet. The kids fluttered around. None of them, except for Taylor, were actually paying attention to the game. 

“We’re hardly a minute into the game, and Jack Zimmermann, the thirty-six-year-old Captain and Olympic Gold medalist, has gotten us off to an electric start here at the 2027 NHL Stadium Series.” The radio caller practically screamed. “We are not in Providence anymore, but it doesn’t seem like a hostile crowd will slow these guys down. I think the Falconers are aware that if they want to win, they need to set the tone early. Their captain took that assignment pretty seriously. It looks like somebody lit Zimmermann’s fire this afternoon.”

“Oh, not yet, but someone will later.” Karly laughed under her breath. Bryson, her youngest son, squirmed on her lap. His tiny Team USA winter hat sat askew on his head. The thick black curls he inherited from his father came spilling out of the sides. He clapped his chubby hands with an unmatched enthusiasm. 

Kent rolled his eyes. He was trying very, very hard to forget the burning in his gut. They had well over forty minutes left in this game. He needed to cool down. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re disgusting?” 

 “God forbid a woman just wants her beloved brother to be happy.” Karly’s mouth curled up into the exact same cocky smile Kent was known for.

“Uh, Kent?” Zach, Kylie’s husband, crouched down next to Kent’s seat. There was the overwhelming smell of his peppercorn cologne that seemed to follow him everywhere he went. “Have you seen this picture that just started blowing up online?” 

He squinted at the screen as Zach held it in front of him. On the ice, Lancer shot at the Falconers’ goal. A big swing and an unfortunate miss that rattled off one of the poles. Jack tore down the ice to chase after the loose puck. 

“Well,” Kent dragged a hand down his face. He could feel a headache growing behind his eyes. “Shit.”

Chapter Text

“Where the hell did you find this?” Kent could feel the edges of his ribcage expand as he breathed in deeply. He was trying very hard not to let his clear exasperation shine through too much, but he could feel the beginnings of a migraine nagging at the base of his skull. He grabbed the edge of Zach’s phone and tilted it closer to himself. The last thing he wanted was for the rest of his family to see the picture before he formulated a plan.

“On your Reddit page,” shrugged Zach as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. 

Kent couldn’t help it. He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose. He could almost feel an invisible band tightening around his temples. “You stalk my Reddit page?”

Zach was a hedge fund manager who worked remotely for a Fortune 500 company in the city. He had a kid who was still in diapers. He should objectively have better things to do with his time, Kent would have assumed, than scroll through r/hockey. 

“First off, stalk is a strong word. But, uh, yeah, you don’t?” Zach blanched. He fiddled with his wedding band with his thumb. “I'd absolutely stalk myself if I were famous. I’d want to know what everyone had to say about me.”

Around them, he and Kylie’s youngest daughter, Harper, zipped around chasing her cousin Bryson, who had absconded from Karly’s lap.  Kent’s sisters were in a corner laughing about something he’d probably never be clued in on. His mother was fixing a button on David’s sleeve. On the ice, there was a Falconers’ goal by Bouchard with the assist by Zimmermann. Kent slowly unfurled to his full height until he was eye-level with Zach. He wiped his hands on the front of his slacks. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the jumbotron zoom in on Jack with his wide smile and his bright blue eyes and deepening crow’s feet. Some disembodied hand was shaking his shoulder. Someone else was patting his helmet. 

“Trust me, I’m speaking from experience. You wouldn’t want to know what everyone has to say about you.” Kent twisted the watch on his arm, a nervous habit he picked up from Jack. “Besides, I’m not that famous.”

Zach raised a thin ginger eyebrow. “You’re the most recognizable hockey player alive, dude. Six kids in Jenny’s class dressed as you for Trunk or Treat this year. There’s even an Instagram dedicated to following you around Buffalo.”

“What?” A searing stab of pain bloomed behind Kent’s eyes. 

“Yeah, it’s called @wheresKVP. They’ve taken pictures of you, like, at Wegmans and getting pizza. All my buddies from college follow it.”

Kent failed to see what was so interesting about him buying a frozen cauliflower crust pizza for lunch. 

“And you’re just telling me this now?” 

“I thought you knew. Sorry, man.” 

“How would I know?”

Kent bit his lip. Something akin to sadness welled up inside him. If he were still on a team, if he was back home, this account probably wouldn’t have existed. Contrary to popular belief, his life wasn’t particularly exciting. In his twenty years in the NHL, he moved from the gym to the rink to his house to nationally televised games. There was never much of a mystery as to where KVP was.

Beyond that, if it had, the young guys would have clowned him for it so hard. Kent had prided himself on that as a captain. There was no such thing as off-limits in the Aces’ locker room. All the boys gave as good as they got, and not a week went by where someone didn’t tease Kent over his hair, his vanity, his cat, his choice in music, his seeming lack of dates. He was never Kent Parson. He was just Parse, another guy on the team. And he’d never have that again. 

“I literally just said, bro. If I were famous, I’d be all over this shit.” Zach shrugged innocently. “Besides, the yellow Porsche you drive isn’t exactly inconspicuous.” 

“Oh my God.” Kent hissed between his teeth. 

“What’s going on? What are you guys talking about?” Kylie came up and wrapped a solid arm around her husband’s midsection. She slowly leaned her head against his shoulder as she peered towards his cell phone. A perfectly done blonde curl framed her face. 

“Wait, don’t -.” Kent reached out a hand to try to grab the phone from Zach. 

Too late. He had already passed the phone into his wife’s waiting hands. Kylie, who has a terrible habit of leaving her glasses next to her work computer, brought the phone up so it was hardly an inch from her eyes. The way that she squinted reminded him of their father, poring over the sports section of the newspaper when they had been kids. 

“Kenny,” there was a hint of a smile in her tone, “is that you?” 

“Yeah, it’s me.” He held a hand over his mouth and dropped his voice lower. “ And Jack. Obviously.” 

Kylie studied the picture for a beat. She was smiling with a lovely pink hue to her cheeks. “You guys were cute together. Back then.”

“You think?” Kent gave his watch another twist around his wrist. The initials, RJZ, glinted in the bright lights of the suite. Jack had offered to have it changed, but Kent never followed through. He liked the idea of having at least some small part of the Zimmermann family with him. Bob, for all of his faults, was a good guy and more integral to Kent’s development than any of them would like to admit. 

“Yeah, I mean. Obviously, it’s pretty hard to deny what’s going on there, but you guys do look happy.” Zach plucked the phone out of Kylie’s hands and held it out for Kent to inspect further. 

Kent looked at the picture, really looked at it without the lens of fear and shock and anger. 

The transition from film to a digital copy has made them a little blurry, but there was no doubt that it’s the two of them on just about any night in 2008.

They looked so unbelievably young. Jack still had his baby fat around the edges of his features. At that age, he looked much more like his mother than his father. His face was deeply flushed, his eyes hooded and a little glassy. Kent, in comparison, looked wryly and spindly. Acne dotted his cheeks. His hair, much longer than he wore it even at the Draft, lay flatly underneath an atrocious neon and floral printed snapback. He still had the enormous fake diamond stud he wore up until the Memorial Cup playoffs in his ear. Both of them wore polo shirts. Jack’s red Hollister logo was stark on his white shirt. Kent’s had no logo at all. The two of them had solo cups in their hands and half a dozen rubber bracelets on their wrists. 

Like many of his pictures before the advent of social media and constant surveillance and media training, he was practically sitting in Jack’s lap. Kent was laughing with abandon. It was the kind of laughter that made his entire face scrunch up in an unflattering sort of way that he always hated. It was the kind of face he made at every single Cup party he ever had, the kind when he was truly happy. Jack had an arm anchored around his midsection, a red solo cup threatening to spill all over Kent’s side, and one hand cupped underneath Kent’s chin. His lips are pressed to Kent’s jaw. Not in an intentional way, but in a charmingly sloppy way - the sort of way that indicates Kent turned at the last moment or that Jack had missed his lips completely. Despite it, the Jack in the picture was beaming with a genuine smile against Kent’s cheek. 

Something warm and terrible and sweet all clawed at Kent’s chest. 

If they had been normal people, this is the kind of photo that would have been tucked lovingly in a family photo album. It would have been in a slideshow at their rehearsal dinner. It would have been the kind of photo that they laughed at together - over their dated outfits and teenage awkwardness and in the memory of the sheer drunken joy they shared. 

“Ken?” Kylie asked tentatively, snapping him out of his trance. 

“Listen,” Kent practically shoved the phone back into Zach’s hands and rubbed his palms against his slacks. ”When you guys leave, don't talk to anyone. Don’t let anyone else here talk to anyone. Don’t say a word to a single reporter. Let me get out ahead of this.” 

Kylie tucked her curl behind her ear. There was more polite applause as there was another Falconer goal. Zimmermann, solo, had taken the mail from coast to coast. The camera zoomed in as he had cocked his head upwards, seemingly searching along the line of suites that ringed Highmark Stadium. 

Zach shoved his phone into his back pocket. “So, uh, no comment?”

“No.” Kent snagged his beanie off of his empty seat and pulled it down over his head. He drove his hands into his coat pockets. “That makes it look like we know about it. Just play dumb. You don’t have time to talk - dogsitter, dinner reservations, sick kid, whatever. Just make something up. I don’t care.”

“Kent -,” started Zach, but he was already halfway across the room. 

“Where are you going?” Kent’s mother asked him as he rushed past her towards the back door of the suite. He could sense a note of worry in her tone. He swallowed thickly. 

“I’ll meet you back at the house.” He called over his shoulder as he slammed the door behind himself and tore down the empty staircase towards the lower levels. 

One of the benefits of being a former NHL star was the fact that Kent could more or less wander freely. No one batted an eye, asked for an ID, or said anything at all as he tore down towards the player locker rooms. There had only been a few minutes left in the second period. By the time he would make it down from the top of the stadium to the bottom, it was likely to be well into the third period. Jack, who had been shy and body conscious since the day Kent met him and probably quite a while before then, was never one to take a long shower in the locker room. He would rinse off so he was clean enough to change, and would likely be one of the first ones out. At max, Kent would have to linger awkwardly outside of the Visitors’ Locker Room for about thirty minutes. 

It wasn’t that Jack was great with the media. It wasn’t that Jack was going to know what to do about this picture and all of the insinuation that was going to come of it. Jack probably wouldn’t have anything helpful to say if Kent were being completely honest with himself. 

It’s just that Jack was Jack.

People - reporters, coaches, fans, former teammates - had asked over and over and over again how he knew that he was going to be okay, that he would make it through the third period of the Olympic finals, that he would score off of that one-time no-looker, that they would win. The simple answer was that he didn’t. He didn’t know any of that. All he knew was that Jack was at his side, and if Jack was there, then the two of them could do anything.

And they had. 

Kent zipped across an open and empty hallway, dress shoes clacking against the concrete floor and ankle seizing, when he finally heard another familiar voice call his name. He grimaced, not just from the burning sensation that was now shooting up his entire leg. 

Carrie Andersen. 

She was a local girl, growing up just across the border in Hamilton, Ontario. She was also the oldest of three. Her two younger brothers were former hockey players who had pretty illustrious careers in the OHL. Last he heard, one of them was still pinging around the Minors. She herself had been a competitive speed skater before going to college for broadcast journalism. Her undergraduate internship with the Men’s Hockey team at Boston College had turned into a lucrative career as a rinkside reporter in the NHL. Fans and players alike appreciated her deep knowledge of the game. Kent was certain there were other attributes that the sport’s fanbase found appealing. With her meticulously curled chestnut hair, curvy and compact body, and literally award winning style, everyone had to concede that she was absolutely stunning. 

Scraps had teased him about it for years. There was a small but very dedicated group of mostly young women online who would have loved nothing more than for Kent, a hockey hotshot, to run away with Carrie, one of SportsCentre’s top presenters. They made edits GIFs and videos. Not a week had gone by since Carrie had started working that he wasn’t tagged in some kind of silly, but somewhat endearing, fanwork of the two of them. There was at least one moderately popular novel about barely fictionalized versions of the two of them that had been blowing up online. 

It made sense. Carrie was the type of girl that Kent should have ended up with. 

It’s just that he was never really interested, for obvious reasons. 

Still, they smiled, they flirted, they got excellent sound bites that did well on Twitter. Kent even got a genuine tip or two over the years that he was able to incorporate into his game. Carrie climbed the ladder; he had a very reliable cover. It worked. It worked for years, ever since she had first interviewed him way back in 2017. Everyone was happy. 

Most of the time.

“Kent! We’re so glad that we could catch up with you here since we didn’t get to talk before the game. What do you think of this experience so far?” Carrie held up a mic, wrapped in her perfectly manicured hand, to his mouth. Her voice and its ever-so-slight flat accent rang off the empty floor and walls.

“Uh, good...” He blinked rapidly at the camera that was also now inches from his face. The ring lights were blinding. 

Carrie didn’t need to say a word. She simply arched a brow at him and repositioned the microphone half an inch closer. Kent blinked, once, twice, three times before his brain finally kicked into autopilot. Though like the rusty old minivan he drove when he was sixteen, it wasn’t as quick as he used to be.

“It’s been a great opportunity for me and my family. I’m honored that I was chosen to do the puck drop today. To get to do all this in my hometown, it’s a privilege. I grew up playing pond hockey not too far from here, and it’s fun to capture that experience again. Plus, you know, it’s always great to reunite with my good friends and former teammates from our 2026 Olympic squad. Those guys mean a lot to me.”

Carrie nodded curtly. The test had been passed.

She pulled the mic back towards herself. “This is indeed an Olympic reunion happening, including both players you played with and against. We’ve got several players from Team Canada, Team USA, Team Finland, and Team Sweden represented on these two teams. As a former NHL captain yourself, do you have any advice for your former Olympic rival, Stefan Sandström, as the Sabres try to battle it out in this last period?”

“Advice? No. I don’t.” Kent braced his hands on his hips. He leaned slightly to one side, trying to take the bulk of his weight off his leg that, unfortunately, was still burning. Carrie frowned again. “Sandström, uh, he’s good. He’s an Olympic medalist, a Junior Worlds champion, too. Clearly, he’s doing something right. Sometimes, uh, your team just goes through a rough patch.” 

Sometimes that rough patch lasts for decades, but Kent didn’t need to say that on international television. 

“Speaking of another Olympian, Jack Zimmermann is on a bit of a barn burner this afternoon. Three goals and five total points for the Falconers' captain, who is, by the way, not getting any younger. I know that Zimmermann is angling for another Cup run before he retires. Do you think this is the kind of effort that will clinch the Wild Card spot?” 

“I mean, it certainly won’t hurt.” Kent shrugged, eyes darting towards the end of the hall that curved into the entrances to the locker rooms. “Hockey is ultimately a team sport, but yeah, Jack is a phenomenal player. Always has been. He’s the kind of hard worker you want to follow.” 

A parade of the Sabres' ice crew hustled down the hallway. They waddled by, shovels in hand and hard guards ringing on the pavement. An almost supernatural hush came over them as they all practically gawked at him on the way back to their own locker room. Kent did his best to offer them a pained but charitable smile. It was just as weird, nearly twenty years on, to watch people light up as he came into focus as it was during his first year in the pros. 

“What about your other teammate, Riley Lance, who is making his NHL debut tonight? As an experienced veteran player and a fellow standout on the wings, anything you’d want to share?” 

“Ah, Lancer.” Kent smiled genuinely for the first time in hours. Something in his chest loosened. “He’s going to make fun of me for this, but yeah, I have some advice. I hope he enjoys it. I hope it’s everything he wants it to be and more. Sometimes, when you make a living out of something you love, it’s easy to let the job steal all the parts about that thing that made you fall in love with it in the first place. That would be my advice: don’t stop having fun. Never let that spark go.” 

Carrie smiled that small bright quirk of her lips that Kent remembered well. That was the kind of smile that Carrie gave when she had you exactly where she wanted you. “All that talk about fun - do you think that discounts how seriously a player needs to take the game?”

Kent’s jaw twitched. 

“I had fun every single day of my career. I can count the number of times I didn’t want to go to practice or a game over the course of my career on one hand. Every single time that I stepped on that ice, I enjoyed myself. Not a day has gone by since I stopped playing that I don’t miss it. I’ll let history be the judge on whether or not I took it seriously.” 

On the other side of heavy metal doors, the crowd groaned with disappointment. A clear swing and a miss for the home team. At least Zimms would be pleased. 

“Speaking of history, do you think there will be another Kent Parson?” 

“No.”

Carrie looked a touch pale underneath her camera makeup. Her eyes were blown wider than he had seen them. His tone was harsher than he had intended. He dug his fingers into his hip until he felt the pinch of his muscles getting pressed into his bone.

“So you’re one of one?” She countered, voice a little hesitant. 

A few months ago, Kent would have smiled, licked his lips, and fired off something charming. Carrie would have tossed her hair over her shoulder. Everyone online would have eaten it up.

He wasn’t sure if that person existed anymore.

“There will never be another Kent Parson in the same way that there won’t be another Wayne Gretzky or Johnny Gadereau or Connor McDavid or Eric McNally or Cole Makar or Bob Zimmermann.” He adjusted his hat, trying to tuck his still stubborn cowlick into it. “I don’t want there to be. I don’t want some kid trying to be me. None of us do, not really. I want each player to think about the unique skills and personality they bring to the game.”

“Thanks for your time, Kent.” Carrie carefully wrapped the microphone wire around her palm. There was something in her voice that he had never heard before. Another thing, like so many others, that seemed to be changing.

“Yup, thanks.” He tossed one hand up to wave and walked slowly and purposely down the hall. 

“Hey, Parson!” 

He had been standing outside the locker rooms for maybe ten minutes at most when he heard someone else call for him. He thought he had been tucked among the mats and turf relatively discreetly and out of the way. That clearly wasn’t true. Someone had found him anyway. That was a problem, among many, about being a public figure - everyone knew your name, even when you didn’t want them to. Especially when you didn’t want them to. 

Kent turned slowly to watch Stefan Sandström, still damp from the showers and with an angry red line of stitches just beneath his deep green eyes, wander towards him. The top few buttons of his shirt were undone, exposing a thick silver chain and a sharp collarbone. His arms were wrapped tightly around his chest. The last time he had seen him, Kent was sitting on a stretcher, and Sandström was blinking back angry tears in a deserted hallway. He would have been perfectly fine if that was the last time he had ever seen him in person.

Christ alive, this day could not possibly get any worse.

“Hey.” Kent slowly slid his hands into his front pocket and gave his laziest smile. “How’s that 15-24 record treating you, bud?”

Sandström offered nothing but steely silence as a response. 

Kent held up his hand apologetically and could feel his smile growing bigger on his face. He took a quick glance at the watch on his wrist. “Oh, right, right. I’m so sorry. As of about forty-five minutes ago, it’s now 15-25.”

Kent watched, with a sort of sick delight, the delicate muscles of Sandström’s jaw move as he ground down on his teeth. He stretched his neck from side to side and took a step towards Kent. Without thinking, Kent balled his hands into fists. He was almost shocked as Sandström, his own heavy gold designer watch hanging loosely on his wrist, held out one of his hands as if to offer a handshake. 

“Listen, Parson,” he started, Swedish accent thick. “I told Zimmermann, I’m sorry, okay? It was just the pressure that got to me.”

“Weird,” Kent paused for a second before continuing. He stared down at the outstretched hand towards him. “Weird because I played in two Olympic finals and four-ish Stanley Cup finals and I, personally, never said such vile shit to other people. Maybe it’s the inexperience with such high-level games? Sorry, I wouldn’t know.”

They stood like that for a moment. There was the sound of coaches and trainers and players shuffling off to meet with the press or to head off to their hotel or homes for the night. Kent strained to hear, hopefully, Jack’s familiar baritone. Sandström slowly retracted his hand, and his arms settled across his chest. 

So much for apologies, then. 

“You need to tell your goons to leave me alone. I’ve been a scratch for half of the last season, man, because your fucking buddies won’t leave me be.”

He did see that around March of last year, Phoenix decided to ring Sandström's bell when the Avs played the Sabres at home. Jack gave him a good high stick to the chin when the Falconers last played in Buffalo. Tiger had hooked him when they had been in Nashville, sending him careening down the ice. He had been a healthy scratch during the two games he played in Vegas; the Aces had been out for blood ever since Kent had gone into surgery. However, to be fair, he had never asked any of them to do that. He just wasn’t complaining. 

“What goons? I can’t even play. I was literally in a wheelchair.” Kent barked out a disbelieving laugh. “Besides, one of our players is literally on your team, dude. You think Riley Lance of all people is going to go fucking Tonya Harding on his own teammate? Please, spare me. No one loves winning like that kid. Whatever team he’s part of, he’ll ride hard for you - even if it’s your pathetic shitstain of a team.”

“It’s not just Lance. It’s the rest of the dudes from Team USA. I know you guys talk, and I know you had them tell their teams what happened between me and Zimmermann.” Sandström narrowed his eyes and pointed an accusing finger towards Kent. Kent was never like Bob or any of the other enforcers; he didn’t necessarily relish the violence of the game. Being a pest, getting under guys’ skin, that was fun. Smashing someone else’s head in, less so. However, Kent did miss the fact that had this been a game in Las Vegas, Scraps would have already broken this kid’s hand. Life was a lot easier when someone’s profession revolved around fighting your battles for you.

“I don’t need to tell anybody shit, dude. They all had ears. We all heard what you said,” shrugged Kent innocently. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, The Show’s a small place. People talk, and they come to their own conclusions. I didn’t need to say anything at all.”

There was another beat of silence between the two of them. There was the click of cameras and the familiar sound of a dozen hockey sticks all clanging together. 

“I said I’m sorry.”

The words that Kent had been waiting nearly a year to hear settled over him. Too bad , he thought to himself, that the idiot didn’t mean a single one of them . 

“You don’t have to apologize to me. Honestly. People have always been saying crazy shit about me. It’s whatever.” It was Kent’s turn to take a step closer until he and Sandström were practically nose to nose. The clinical smell of citrus soap flooded his senses. “But somewhere in this stadium, there’s a little kid who loves hockey and also has a crush on a boy on his team or in his class or whatever. That's who you should be apologizing to. If one kid doesn’t pick up a stick or step on the ice because of the shit that fucking losers like you say, that’s the real tragedy. That’s the kind of shit that should keep you up at night. I know what my legacy is. You have to decide if you want that to be yours.”

“So it’s true then?” Sandström questioned. Neither of them stepped back a single inch. 

“What?” 

Sandström jerked a thumb back towards the locker rooms. “You and Zimmermann. I’ve heard you say a lot of shit, man, and not one word about how it isn’t true. Besides, we all saw the picture.” 

Something red hot like fear and shame and anger broiled in Kent’s guts. 

He took a slow intentional breath and offered the same lazy smile he had always been known for. At his side, his hand shook. “Yeah, I guess you did. I have plenty of time to scroll, too, since neither of us is playing.”

“Is that all you have to say, Parson?” It was Sandström’s turn to offer him an almost predatory grin. This close up, Kent could see that several of his front teeth were chipped. His canine seemed to be even sharper than all the rest. 

Kent laughed again. “Jesus Christ, you’re risking it all on a rumor and a picture from the internet. You’re dumber than I thought.”

“That’s not a no,” pushed Sandström.

“You fucker, you think I’d tell you anything? I wouldn’t tell you what color underwear I got on.” Kent intentionally reached up and tapped Sandström’s chest patronizingly. He could feel him go rigid under his hand.  “Go tell the rest of the league your little pet theory. See how that goes. They’ve already put you on the bench. Next game, someone’ll put you in the hospital.” 

“Is that a threat?” Sandström snarled. 

“It can be.” Kent smiled lazily. 

Without Kent really ever processing it, he watched a large hand grab the edge of Sandström’s shoulder and pull him back almost violently. He stumbled nearly six inches before he finally found his footing. He, unfortunately, found himself backed right up against Jack. 

At this point of the season and at this age Jack was practically a brick wall - well over six feet and an extra dozen pounds on his already imposing frame. Regrettably, he was out of his sailor’s costume from the Falconers’ entrance. Instead, he was back in one of the dozen cool gray suits he owned, navy peacoat neatly folded in his arms. His collar was soaked, and his hair was damp. Something dark and unrecognizable had come over his features. His face was still flushed red. From the heat of the shower or the exertion of the game or a well of anger, Kent couldn’t say for sure. 

“Stop talking to him.”

“But -.”

“I won’t tell you again.” 

“Fine. Have a good night, Zimmermann.” Sandström readjusted the lapels of his jacket and stalked off towards the players’ parking lot on the far side of the stadium. He took one long, last look at Kent before he left.

“I’ll have a better one without you,” Jack snipped back in what Kent always thought was his bitchiest French-Canadian accent. He slowly wrapped his hand around Kent’s arm. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing of importance, Zimms.”

He was big enough to admit that the yellow Porsche probably wasn’t inconspicuous in Buffalo, New York. It certainly was out of place on the deserted corner of a wooded back road that Kent hadn’t driven on in nineteen years. Though, to be fair, he had bought this car with the idea that he would be taking it for a drive down the Las Vegas Strip or on historic Route 66. He hadn’t purchased it at the ripe old age of thirty-four with the intention of hosting clandestine makeouts in his hometown. 

Though the tinted windows did help with that. 

They had walked out of the stadium in silence. Jack didn’t need to say a word for Kent to know exactly what he was thinking. They had hardly made it to the car before Jack’s hand was carefully wrapped around Kent’s waist, and Kent was relatively sure that Jack was half-bricked before he even got out of the shower. 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

Not that Kent was complaining. There were few places in the world that he would rather be than where he was at that moment. The differing sensations were almost dizzying. The air in the car was cool but humid and seemed to buzz with an almost electrical charge. Jack seemed to radiate heat as he pulled him closer. His mouth was burning and insistent on Kent’s neck as he carefully made his way down his jaw, his throat, the space where his neck met his shoulders. Jack had always had terrible circulation since he had been a teenager, and his thumbs were frigid as they rubbed tiny circles on the bare skin just above Kent’s belt. His heavy aquatic-forward cologne was a practical haze in the tiny two-seater. Kent shivered as Jack shifted underneath him, a hand reaching up to grab the scruff at the back of his neck and pull slowly to get a better angle. The pressure was heavy, and Kent could feel his head swimming. There was the sharp pinprick of pleasure as Jack’s teeth grazed a particularly sensitive spot. 

“What song is this?” Kent laughed breathily as the radio blared some melancholy tune. It had been a mistake to let Zimms pick the music, but in his defense, Jack had used his right hand to scroll through Spotify and let his left hand rest on Kent’s upper thigh. It’s not like he was exactly thinking straight. 

“It’s ‘Bobgayceon’ by The Tragically Hip,” mumbled Jack against the crook of Kent’s neck. His teeth clumsily caught flesh, and Kent shuddered again. Jack pulled at Kent’s hair harder. 

“Who?”

“Canadian thing.” 

Kent wiggled slightly, trying to find a more comfortable position. The top of his head skimmed the delicate glass of the sunroof. “Aww, come on, baby. I thought you fully jumped ship over the border.”

“And give up Celine?” Jack looked at him with a mock stricken expression.  

“I’d never ask you to do that.” Kent couldn’t help but press a chaste kiss to his cheek. 

In the past few months, he had wondered if this is what old married couples felt like. He had loved the Jack who stared back at him from the picture in 2008. He loved this Jack, the one with gray streak hair, a flushed face of crow’s feet and smile lines, and joints that creaked and ached and cramped during juvenile car makeout sessions, even more. 

“Speaking of a ‘who,’ who's coming to dinner?” Jack’s thumb drew lazy patterns just above Kent’s belt buckle. He pressed a kiss just below Kent’s Adam's apple. He felt his breath catch in his throat. 

“Why? You got a better idea, Zimms?” 

The smile that bloomed on Jack’s face was downright devilish. 

“My plans involve skipping dinner altogether.”

Kent would have also loved to do that. There was no need to ask him twice. He was convinced he could have sex with Jack Zimmermann every day of his life and still not have enough. Except it seemed like said Jack Zimmermann had forgotten that he had waived his single occupancy and team-sponsored room to catch up with an old friend while he was still in town. For the foreseeable future, that said old friend lived with his parents, and his parents seemed to have determined that Jack would be staying in the guest room. 

The guest room just so happened to share a wall with the master suite.  

“We can. I’ll be in New York in like two weeks. I’ll come to your home game.” Kent pressed another kiss to Jack’s other cheek. “I’ll take the train up and then stay a few days with you.”

“I guess.” Jack practically pouted. “What about our bet?” 

“Yeah, yeah, you won. Rub it in. A bet is a bet, though. I’ll do whatever you want. Just in a few weeks. ” Kent carefully scrambled himself over to the driver’s seat and took a glance at his watch.  “Shit, we’re already late as is. Come on, Zimms, I know it’s not ideal, but can’t you do this for me?”

“That doesn’t answer the question of who is coming to dinner.” As Kent fumbled in his coat pocket for his keys, Jack pulled down the passenger side mirror to sweep his hair back into place. He carefully buttoned up the rest of his shirt. Unfortunately, his crinkled trousers were a lost cause. Still, he looked much less debauched than he had before. 

“The whole crew. My mom, David, Kylie, Karly, Zach, Steve, the kids.” Finally finding the key, Kent made the car roar to life. 

“Got any cousins you forgot to invite?” Jack laughed under his breath as he reached out his hand. Kent threw it expertly in reverse and pulled out down the road, threading his right hand into Jack’s. A spot on his collarbone started to throb. He instinctively went to rub the tender skin and winced at the slight pain. He could feel the blood starting to rush towards his cheeks. Karly was never going to let them live this down. 

“My cousins live out in Laguna Beach.”

“Oh, darn,” deadpanned Jack. 

“Just because you come from a family of only children doesn’t mean the rest of us do.”

Kent had spent one Canadian Thanksgiving with the Zimmermanns as a teenager. It was Jack, his parents, and Kent around the table. The meal had been catered and had only lasted about thirty minutes before they had drifted off to the living room to watch the Habs game that had been on that night. Alicia had served some genuinely terrible low-calorie pumpkin pie as Jack and Kent lazed an intentional six feet apart on the couch. It wasn’t a bad holiday, Kent reasoned later. It was just so different from the four or five-hour affairs he had been used to growing up. The Parson family had always had thirty or forty people packed into their tiny townhouse living room. The television had always been blaring. Flag football was always happening out in the small park across the street. There had always been more food than Kent would have been able to eat in a month. 

“I’m just not sure that your family is a huge fan of me.” Kent tried not to think about the way that Jack’s hand squeezed his.  

“What are you talking about? The kids love you. They send me your stupid fan cam edits all the time.” Kent swung his arm around to make a sharp left turn onto a main road. They were only fifteen minutes from his parents’ gated development. 

“My edits?”

“Uh, yeah, I’ll show you one.”

Kent regretted that as soon as he said it. There was absolutely no way that he was going to show Jack the thirst-trap edits that teenagers made on TikTok that his niece had sent him - even if he was particularly fond of the one set to “Pony” by Genuwine. 

“Eugh,” Jack huffed. “I don’t want it to be weird. The last time I saw your entire family, it didn’t go, uh,...well, to say the least.” 

“It won’t be. I promise you my mom will get over it eventually.” Kent signaled to change lanes and zipped around a slow-moving van. It was hardly 6 PM, but the January night had covered everything in an inky darkness. He squinted as the oncoming car forgot to turn off its brights. “Can you go in my phone and double-check the new gate code? David changed it, and I keep forgetting it.” 

“Sure.” Jack reached into the cupholder and plucked out Kent’s phone. There was the heavy thump of Jack fumbling with the touchscreen as he keyed in Kent’s password. 

Laughter bubbled up in Jack’s throat. “Jesus Christ, I haven’t seen this in years. I forgot how stupid your single piercing was, and my hair looks like shit. Where did you even get this picture?” 

“Someone leaked it on my Reddit page, apparently.” Kent, distinctively, was not laughing. He tightened his left hand around the steering wheel. Around them, dozens of cars pulled in and out of the shopping centers that lined the road.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know who took this picture?” Kent sucked at his teeth. His mind had been turning since this afternoon. It wouldn’t stop the picture from leaking, but maybe his lawyers could at least stop any more photos from getting posted online. Admittedly, Kent would consider himself pretty good at damage control. You couldn’t make it, corralling eighteen to twenty-one-year-olds in Las Vegas for years without picking up a few things. 

Jack cocked an eyebrow. “From twenty years ago? No, I don’t.”

“Fuck, what am I going to do?” Kent pulled his hand out of Jack’s and raked it through his hair. His cowlick flopped down low over his brows. His beanie had long been tossed into the back.

“I’ve already told you. I’m here to back up whatever you choose.” Jack shrugged noncommittally as he adjusted his seatbelt over his broad chest. “If you want to, tell whoever asks that I was drunk or high or out of my mind or something, and that we didn’t know what we were doing. It’s probably the truth.” 

“That makes me feel great, Jack. I love hearing that I was just a drunken hookup.” Kent changed lanes again and pressed down on the accelerator. The stupid Porsche, again, wasn’t at all inconspicuous, and he knew he was being risky pushing seventy in a forty-five zone. He just wanted to go home. 

“Christ, Parse. You were never just that. Ever.” Jack’s hand settled on Kent’s knee, and he tried not to visibly flinch. “I’m literally going to dinner with your family - who doesn’t like me, by the way. You got me. You’ve won. Relax. Not everything needs to be a competition.”

“Pot,” Kent lifted his right hand off the steering wheel to point at Jack. He, in turn, rolled his eyes almost immediately. Kent slowly pointed the finger back at himself. “Kettle.”

“Kent, you’ve said you don’t want to come out. I don’t want to be in a position where you feel like I’m forcing you to do it.” Jack inhaled deeply. He moved both of his hands to his own lap and fiddled with his cuticles. “I’ve been on that end of it. It’s not fun. It should be your choice when you’re ready. I’m giving you an out - one that doesn’t exactly paint me in a flattering light. If you want it, take it.”

It was true. That would have been a very easy out. Everyone who knew anything at all about hockey, and quite a few people who didn’t, knew that Jack had struggled with drugs and alcohol. People knew what it was like to be a teenager unsupervised. The parties they went to in the Q were no different than the parties happening in college houses, dorms, and fields across North America. Kent could apologize for being a bad influence, denounce underage drinking, and say nothing else. It would be easy. 

“Do you regret it?” He readjusted himself in his seat as he turned down the street that led to the gates. 

“Regret what, Kent? You’re going to have to be more specific. There are plenty of things in life that I should regret.” There it was. The mean defensive Jack backed into the kinds of corners that only Kent seemed to be able to find. “Coming out? Spending the majority of my teen years addicted to benzos and painkillers? Having a drinking problem? Knowing that this is probably one of hundreds of photos from events I can’t even remember? Hurting the people I cared about? Embarrassing myself and my family? My stunted career? My failed engagement?  I could go on.”

“Just stop, Jack.” Kent ground out as he forced his car to slow. There was a strict fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit in this development, and he knew his neighbors had no hesitation in letting him know if he was seen going over it. Around them, dozens of empty lacrosse nets and basketball hoops stood in the darkness like eerie sentinels. 

“I’m going to assume you’re talking about coming out. I regret how I did it, and for a while, I resented the hell out of Bittle. But I’ve never regretted the actual fact that I came out.” Kent could hear Jack’s jaw click as he talked. 

Kent hummed. His parents’ house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Kylie’s BMW was parked crookedly in the circle. Steven’s truck took up most of the space in front of the garage. He’d have to park out in the street until his sisters and their families went home for the night. It was a minor annoyance, but it was another frayed edge on an already unraveling day. 

“I don’t think you would either, but that’s not my decision.” Jack slipped his hand back onto Kent’s knee as he put the car into park. 

“I get it. I do. It’s just - I wanted it to be my choice. Not because some dick with a Reddit account forced me to say something. It’s not fair.”

“No, Kenny, it’s not.” Jack smiled, something soft and small and wet. 

He killed the engine, and for a moment, the two of them just sat in silence. In front of them, the house stood, barely containing the flurry of activity inside. Every window was lit up with a bright, warm light that streamed through the gauzy white curtains. Someone was standing in the window in his parents’ bedroom. A lone mitten, stark white, sat out in the driveway; one of the smaller kids must have dropped it. The front door was cracked open slightly, enough for Kent to see Kylie chase down a toddler in a flash. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a dog yapped. Jack’s fingers threaded through his and squeezed. 

Chapter Text

Walking into his home was like getting hit in the face by a wall of noise and heat. Buffalo this time of year was frigid, the kind of cold that set into your bones, while the ground floor of the spacious three-level home was nearly as hot as a furnace. Nearly a dozen coats, boots, hats, and scarves lay abandoned on the floor next to the door. Kent absentmindedly tossed the singular mitten he scooped up outside onto the pile. Someone had lit the living room fireplace that was off to the side of the entrance. He could hear the sound of Ethan’s Xbox as it blasted the soundtrack to a game. There was the sound of Karly and Kylie singing along to some 2000s pop song in the kitchen. Someone’s heavy footsteps thumped in the hallway above them. Kent nearly flinched at the sound of Jack’s duffel bag hitting the wooden floor behind him. He blinked once, twice, and tried to fight off the growing dread in the pit of his stomach. The only thing that seemed to center him was the feeling of Jack’s hand, heavy and calloused, on his lower back.

“Get lost on your way home, huh, Kent?” Kent’s stepfather, David, materialized at his side. He was beaming at the two of them, perpetually laughing at his own insinuation. Despite the fact that he had been retired for years, his face still wore all of the signs of his career as a construction foreman. His dark brown eyes nearly disappeared in the deep-set lines of his face. Despite the fact that it was freezing outside, his skin still held a bronzy hue to it that Kent had only ever been able to achieve once - when Sports Illustrated forced him to get a spray tan for his Body Issue centerfold.

“David...,” warned Kent, his face growing flushed. 

“I’m just teasing you, kid.” David patted the side of his face softly, his wedding band cool against Kent’s hot cheek. He took a step over to sling an arm around Jack. At nearly five inches shorter than him, David looked a little absurd as he rocked up onto his tippy toes. The footsteps from the hallway above grew even louder. “Jack, good to see you! You played one hell of a game out there, bud. Providence is looking great this year.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it. I hope it’s enough to take us all the way, Jack demurred. 

By that, Kent obviously knew Jack would be willing to run his team into the ground to get a Stanley Cup. Time had mellowed him out, had made him a little bit smarter and a little less reckless than Kent. But there was never a time in his life when Jack would have been satisfied with not winning. The Falconers hadn’t made the playoffs for the past two years, and with a newly minted gold medal in his collection, Jack couldn’t seem to take it anymore. While this afternoon had been exemplary, Jack and Creeky had spent much of this season dragging a mostly inexperienced Falconers team to the solid middle of the standings - marked improvement over the past few seasons. As much as Kent was envious to admit it, it looked like some of Jack’s best hockey might still be ahead of him. He had always been hungry to win. Since the Olympics, it seemed like he was starving . 

“Bryson, Harper, now!”

Kent, David, and Jack all tilted their heads upward to see three of the kids, Bryson, Harper, and Taylor, armed with just about every hat that they had in the house. Tiny toddler caps and vintage snapbacks that Kent hadn’t seen since he was a teenager came raining down from the landing at the top of the staircase. David sidestepped his way into the kitchen to avoid the barrage. Kent couldn’t help but chuckle as the brim of one of Harper’s tiny Aces hats hit Jack square in the forehead. Once they were out of ammo, they tore down the stairs to meet them at the bottom. Taylor, stuck in that awkward phase between a child and a teenager, blew right past them to join her brother on the couch as he tapped away on his controller. Bryson, the youngest out of all of them and therefore the perpetual accomplice to whatever scheme the older kids hatched that day, wandered off to the kitchen in search of his mother. Harper, though, launched herself at Kent’s legs.

He was nearly thrown off balance, and he could feel his ankle seize. He took a deep breath, trying not to wince in pain, and hoisted her up. Her legs instinctively wrapped around his midsection. Her weight was soothing as he adjusted her on his waist. 

“Jack! Here’s your hat!” Harper carefully placed the cap she had in her hands, an Aces one that Kent got his rookie year, on Jack’s head. Its flat brim and chunky cursive lettering had been all the rage in the early 2000s, but nearly twenty years later, it looked foolish and dated. It sat a little crooked on Jack’s head. He smiled for a second before carefully pulling it off.

“Um, thank you?” He responded, still cradling the cap. “What’s all this for?”

Harper beamed. She tightened one arm around Kent’s neck and waved dramatically with the other. “For your hat trick tonight! I saw you on the big TV when we were at the game. You looked really happy.”

“The big TV?” Jack’s forehead wrinkled in concentration. “Oh, the Jumbotron, yeah. I was really happy. I always like playing hockey, and I’m excited to spend time with your Uncle Kenny.”

A burst of warmth bloomed in Kent’s chest. 

“Yeah, Spud.” Kent pressed a kiss to the side of Harper’s sticky cheek, invoking the nickname he had given her ever since Kylie insisted on wrapping her in a brown baby blanket as a newborn. She had been going for a little teddy bear; Kent felt like the color more accurately represented an Idaho potato. That had gotten him cursed out in their sibling group chat. “How about a little love for me?” 

Harper attempted to reciprocate. She tried to kiss Kent’s cheek in return, but missed, nearly headbutting him straight in the eye. Jack, though, seemed to find it abundantly charming as he pressed a solid kiss to Kent’s other cheek. Jack placed his hand back around Kent’s waist and drew him closer. Kent found himself smiling so hard that his face ached. The stress of the day, in this moment, melted away. This was more of what he was imagining when he thought about retiring - happiness, stability, a family, maybe. 

“Alright, kiddo, you’re killing my back. I’m going to put you down,” Kent carefully lowered Harper to the floor. She was hardly out of Kent’s arms before she launched herself at his leg. It was his bad one, because of course it had to be. It was easier to deal with the minor discomfort than it was to peel her off of him. She was a certified Stage Five Clinger. 

While Taylor was the only one of his nieces and nephews who shared his interest in hockey, Harper was the one he was closest to. To be fair, for much of the other kids’ formative years, Kent lived as more of an abstraction they saw on the television screen sometimes than an actual family member. His schedule made him miss birthdays, holidays, graduations, first steps, lost teeth, reunions. When he had originally moved home, Harper had barely been two years old. Now, she was approaching four and soon off to pre-school. With parents who worked demanding day jobs, Harper and her sister always seemed to spend nearly endless amounts of time at their grandparents’ home. In turn, Kent spent much of his recovery on the couch, Harper napping on his chest, and Kit curled up at his feet. For her, he had been a near constant presence since the day she could actually start remembering things. 

“Am I going to have to return this?” Jack fiddled with the hat in his hands. If Kent were to guess, he’d imagine that it probably still smelled like got2b Glued hair gel and Hollister So Cal cologne. 

“Alert the presses: Jack Zimmermann wants to steal a hat from a toddler.” 

“Here,” Zach swooped in and snagged the hat out of Jack’s hands. “I can take that. It was my kid who made this mess. I should probably be the one to clean it up.” 

“Thanks…,” Jack’s voice trailed off. He had gotten better in his old age, but Jack had always been terrible with names. For much of their Juniors career, he called everyone simply by their jersey number. 

“Jack!” Harper piped up. She leaned her head all the way back, thin blonde hair nearly skimming the floor. She tightened her grip around Kent’s leg. 

“Sweetheart, the adults are talking.” Zach quieted her before extending his hand to Jack.

“Zach. I’m not sure we’ve actually met before. I think I saw you at the Olympics, but I’m sure you had other stuff on your mind. You’re from Rhode Island, right?”

Kent couldn’t remember if they had met either. In fact, he couldn’t even remember if he saw Zach or Steven, or even David at the Olympics. After his injury, he remembered his sisters, his mother, Jack. The rest of it all was blocked out by memories of searing pain, the dizzy euphoria of his gold medal and historic achievement, and the looming and sinking realization that this injury wasn’t like his broken collarbone, cut hand, lost tooth, or sprained elbow. It wasn’t one that he could come back from. 

“Uh, sort of,” Jack grabbed Zach’s hand to give it a firm shake. “I used to say that I was from Québec, but Team USA didn’t love that. So, I guess I would say that I’m from Pittsburgh, raised in Québec, went to school outside of Boston, and now I just live in Rhode Island.” 

“Do you like it?” Zach asked in the breezy small talk sort of way that allowed him to be both president of Delta Chi in college and a manager at one of New York’s best financial firms at hardly thirty years old. 

“I appreciate the history of Rhode Island,” responded Jack diplomatically. 

“That’s such a media response, babe.” Kent chuckled, lightly punching Jack’s arm. 

“Ugh, fine.” Jack rolled his eyes but tightened his hand around Kent’s waist. “I like that it’s close to my parents and most of my friends. It’s a pretty open and accepting town. Providence, uh, really rallied around me. Mostly, I like that I’ve been a franchise player and don’t have to move every two to five years. That’s my favorite part.”

“That’s it?” Kent questioned. 

“You like Vegas?” Jack responded as if it were impossible for anyone to like living in Las Vegas because he would hate it. Like many people, though, Kent was convinced Jack was just misinformed about Vegas. Almost no one lived near the casinos, with most folks preferring the outer suburbs and cities like Summerlin and Henderson. They boasted a quiet neighborhood feel, plenty of hiking trails, and tons of good restaurants. Those were places he might love, if he had given them the chance, if Kent had ever actually asked Jack to spend an extended amount of time with him at home. 

“Sin City, baby. I loved it.”

“Apparently, you don’t mind Buffalo, though.” Zach glanced at Kent, knowingly, out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not a bad place to live, by the way. I like it better than home. I’m from Cincinnati.”

“Blue Jackets fan?” Jack’s features lit up like they always did when he was talking about hockey. 

“Uh, no, sorry. I guess I’m an Aces fan through and through now,” shrugged Zach. “I obviously knew who Kent was and, like, Wayne Gretzky, but that was it. I didn’t follow hockey at all before I started dating Kylie. I’m much more into basketball.”

“We went to the Knicks for his bachelor party.” 

“That’s a nice way to say that Kent paid for courtside seats at the Knicks game.”

“I told you, I had a friend who owed me a favor.”

That friend happened to be one of the Knicks’ Strength and Conditioning Coaches, whom he had met on Instagram. His name was Tyler, and he had played across the pond in one of the Euroleagues before retiring. They had a year-long fling whenever Kent happened to be around the East Coast. New York, Washington, Philly, Boston, Providence, New Jersey - all of it left them ample time to scratch a particular itch. Kent just didn’t need to share that with his future brother-in-law. Although the tickets had come in clutch, and he generally liked Zach’s friends. It was nice, even just for a long weekend, to pretend to be a normal person with normal friends who had normal hobbies. Zach’s friends had never had a guy knock out one of their front teeth or spent twelve hours hiding in a bar bathroom to try and avoid the paparazzi. 

Kent watched as Jack’s eyebrows crept upward. He reached out a hand and squeezed his bicep. “You’re cute when you’re jealous, Jack.”

“Anyway,” continued Zach, “I can give you the rundown. I was kind of overwhelmed when I first met everyone, too.”

“And to think we were missing four out of the six kids at that point.” Kent laughed. Thank God it was just his immediate family here tonight. If his mother had invited her brothers, the house would have been flooded with cousins, aunts, uncles, spouses, and a few dozen extra kids. 

“I’m Zach, and over there is Steven.” Zach pointed to Steven, who was just around the corner. He and Karly had their heads bent together, talking about something quietly as they chopped a mountain of vegetables for the salad to go with their mom’s famous lasagna. “Obviously, you know Kent; he’s the oldest. I’m also sure you know Linda, his mom, and David, his stepdad. Karly is in the middle. She and Steven met in high school, and they have four kids - Ethan, Taylor, Aaron, and Bryson. I’m married to Kylie, the youngest. We met as undergrads at Ohio State. We have two daughters - Jennifer and Harper. Jenny is around here somewhere, probably with Aaron, andHarper very clearly wants to ask you a question.”

“Jack, are you my uncle?” 

Harper, with her big brown eyes, looked up at Jack with heartbreaking sincerity. Kent didn’t know what he loved more - Harper’s adorable curiosity or watching Jack squirm. 

“No, um, not really. Uncle Kenny is your uncle because he and your mom are siblings -.” Jack started. 

Kent reached a hand down to run through Harper’s hair. He hardly moved an inch before his hands got tangled up in her knotty strands. “I’ve told you, Spud. Your mom is my sister, like Jennifer is your sister.”

“I don’t have any brothers or sisters. It was just me and my parents when I was growing up.” 

And his live-in nanny and their housekeeper, Kent thought to himself. 

“That’s sad,” replied Harper matter-of-factly. Zach and Kent struggled to contain their chuckles. 

“I used to think so, sometimes. Then I made really good friends, and now I spend a lot of time with their families and their kids. They call me Uncle Jack. They’re very important to me, just like you are to your aunts and uncles.” 

Kent could practically see the gears turning in her little head. 

“I know Kent said your best friend from college had a kid recently.” Zach piped up, focusing the conversation back on the adults. 

“Yeah, Vi.” Jack smiled softly. The picture of Jack with his buddy, Shitty, crammed on the single leather recliner at the birthing center in Boston, a tiny pink bundle in Jack’s arms, was one of Kent’s favorites. “She’s the cutest kid ever. She’s about three or four months old now and just so small. She’d definitely fit in the bowl of the Stanley Cup. She’s one of the crew now. Then, um, there’s Chris and Caitlin's kids. I think Dex’s wife is pregnant. Tater has a full starting lineup at this point. Oh, and now that Robbie and Eric are adopting, I guess -.”

If Kent’s life were a movie, he reckoned, this would be a full-on record scratch moment. 

“Jack, what? You didn’t tell me that.” Kent practically hissed. 

Jack replied, a defensive edge in his voice. “Since when do you care about what Eric Bittle does?” 

“I don’t. I just think that’s important for you to mention, Jack.” Kent bit down on his lip hard. It was a bright pinprick of pain, and he could taste the distinctive iron tang of blood.  

Zach’s confusion was plain on his face. “Who’s Eric Bittle?”

“My friend.”

“His ex.”

“Oh.”

“Jack!” Harper practically shrieked. Kent’s leg long since had gone numb. There was the sound of Ethan and Taylor squabbling in the other room. Steven brushed past them. He didn’t need to say anything. All he did was give them some kind of firm glare for the arguing to cease and for him to return back to his station. The rich smell of roasting tomatoes hung in the air. 

“Yes, Harper?” He turned his head down to look at her.

“Uncle Steve isn’t Mommy’s brother. Why is he an uncle?”

“Uncle Steve is married to Mommy’s sister. So we call him Mommy’s brother-in-law, and that makes him your uncle. It’s like my sister, Aunt Angie. Her husband is my brother-in-law, and then that’s your Uncle Ben.” Zach tried to explain patiently. Kent made a mental note to ask the children’s librarian to find some picture books about family dynamics when Kent took the little kids on their monthly trip to the library next week. Although he couldn’t help but pause. Karly and Kylie were both stringent about not posting their kids on social media. With this stupid @wheresKVP account floating around, he couldn’t help but wonder - did people take pictures of him when he was out with his nieces and nephews? Would a picture of him at storytime end up online?

“Well, what happens if Jack marries Uncle Kenny?”

Zach heaved. It seemed like his life was a constant barrage of questions.  “Then Jack would also be Mommy’s brother-in-law, and he would become your Uncle Jack.” 

Harper inspected Jack with a critical eye. “So you could become my uncle?”

“Uh, maybe one day.” Jack’s entire face was turning a lovely shade of pink. Out of habit, he twisted the watch he was wearing around his wrist. It was a golden Rolex Kent had bought for his birthday with the coordinates of Milan, 45.4685° N, 9.1824° E, engraved in the center. 

“Do you want to marry Uncle Kenny?” Harper asked innocently. 

“Harper, please.” Zach’s exasperation was clear. He raked his hand through his hair and offered Jack a tight smile. “I’m sorry, by the way.” 

“Good question, Spud.” Kent reached down to give her a high five. Her small hand hardly took up the space of his palm before she scampered off in search of one of the older kids to pester. Kent’s leg ignited with a pins and needles sensation as blood started to flow again. 

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Kent’s mother, Linda, finally breezed into the walkway. She pressed a kiss to Kent’s cheek and exchanged the most wooden hug that Kent had ever seen with Jack. “Jack, good to see you.” 

Jack’s arms hung awkwardly at his side. “Hi, Linda. Thanks, um, for letting me stay the night.” 

“It’s no problem. The guest room is upstairs. It has an en suite, and I put out some towels for you. Karly’s making dinner, and it should be ready in about thirty minutes or so.” She gestured to the top of the stairs. The door to the guest room was cracked open. A warm light flooded the hallway. 

“The guest suite?” Jack addressed his mother but turned fully to Kent. He quickly looked at the ground. He probably should have mentioned that was a possibility when he was going over the plans a few days ago. He had just been so excited about the possibility of spending time with him that he hadn’t wanted to say anything that was going to have Jack second-guessing this plan. 

“Did Kent not tell you that’s where you’re staying?”

“Not exactly.” 

“Mom, you’re still going on about the guest room?” Kylie walked in from the living room. Her long blonde hair curled down her back, free from her trendy claw clip. Kent couldn’t help it as his mouth curled into a smile as he watched Zach look at his wife with clear adoration. He was a good guy through and through. “Please, they’re grown men. It’ll be fine.” 

“Zimmer, Zimmer, chicken dinner,” Kylie reached up to press a kiss to Jack’s cheek and lightly pat the other. “It’s good to see you again. Thought we’d never see your ugly mug back in Buffalo after you yacked your guts out that one summer.” 

“I got a little overexcited about the cake.” 

They were, of course, referring to Jack’s dismal experience at Kent’s eighteenth birthday party. Jack had eaten more ice cream cake than should have been humanly possible, and he had paid for it. Kent can still remember laughing, partially because it was funny and partially out of pity, as Jack puked for ten minutes straight into a public trash can. 

“That’s putting it mildly.” Kylie settled herself at Zach’s side. His hand instinctively reached around her waist and pulled her close. The two couples stood across from each other, almost as mirror images. “What are you doing during the last week of February, Zimmer?" 

“We have a string of home games, why?”

“Great! I’ll be at Brown for a conference. We should get dinner.” Kylie raised her eyebrows suggestively. “Kent, maybe you could come along? It might be fun for us to go on a road trip together.”

“I’ll have to see. I do, you know, have an actual job.”

Everyone seemed to forget that Kent did have some responsibilities. He was a special sports presenter on Good Day, USA. Most of his stories revolved around the human interest of the game. What did it mean for this football player to host a day camp in his old neighborhood? How did that college volleyball team rally around their teammate who was diagnosed with a brain tumor? He had even tried wheelchair basketball with the US Paralympic team early in his recovery. These segments weren’t as demanding as professional hockey or being a doctor, but he did try, at least, to take it seriously. As far as jobs went, it was fine.

“Come on, Kent, they let you do whatever you want,” Kylie reminded him. That was true. Much of his filming schedule revolved around his availability and interests. It’s not like Kent had to actually work for a living. If he never did anything that earned him money another day in his life, he’d be more than fine. 

“We’ll see.” 

Jack scratched at the back of his head. “But, anyway, uh, I’m glad that Kenny invited me over to his house. It’s good to see you guys.”

“Our house.” Linda piped up to correct him. A soft frown pulled at the edge of her features. 

Jack looked around and blurted out without thinking: “Oh, Kent, I thought you said you were the one who bought this house.”

“Um, yeah, Zimms. I did. It was my rookie money, but it’s my parents’ house. Their names are on the deed,” Kent gritted his teeth. Even Zach cringed.  “Listen, not everyone is born into a mansion. Sometimes you gotta go out and buy one yourself.”

Jack looked taken aback. “Stop being melodramatic, Parse. My parents’ house isn’t a mansion.”

That was an out-and-out lie. Kent remembered visiting the Zimmermanns for the first time during a rare free weekend. Their finished basement hosted movie theater-style seating. The pond out back froze over every winter and was large enough to host a nearly regulation-sized game. Jack’s walk-in closet, with its dozens of workout shirts neatly organized by color, was larger than Kent’s childhood bedroom. Kent had spent hours working out with Bob and Jack in the private gym that they converted one of their garage stalls into. 

“Dude, it has a library and a home gym in the early 2000s, before having a home gym was cool,” sighed Kent. “But yeah, to be clear, this is technically not my house - even if I bought it.”  

Jack glanced around sheepishly. His face deepened to an almost scarlet red, and his eyes nearly bulged out of his head. He cut a pathetic figure. “Right. Uh, right. I’m sorry. That was rude.”

“Yup, it was,” deadpanned Linda as she practically stared a hole through Jack’s head. 

“Mom, come on,” sighed Kylie. The kids burst into a fit of laughter in the other room. Zach craned his head to see what was going on. “Lay off. He didn’t mean anything by it, and he apologized. It’s fine. You’re being a little melodramatic about all of this.” 

“The guest room is just what’s happening, alright? I’m not sitting here and arguing about it.” Linda shook her head in exasperation. “Can everyone please go wash up so we can serve dinner? Kylie, I think I hear your pager going off.” 

“When were you going to tell me about Bittle?” Kent propped himself up on the bed in the guest room. He watched idly as Jack carefully shaved along his jawline. The deep blue towel that either David or his mother had fished out of storage hung dangerously low on his hips. His hair, soaking wet from his shower, almost looked like its original jet black under the weak lights in the bathroom. An old Samwell Men’s Hockey sweatshirt and the same gray Roots sweatpants Kent remembered from the Olympics sat neatly folded on the edge of the bed with almost military precision. 

“What about him?” Jack tilted his head back to drag the razor along the last long line of his neck. Without his usual spring scruff, he looked almost a carbon copy of his father.

Kent threaded his fingers together. “He’s having a kid.” 

Jack shrugged as he shut the door slightly. There was the sound of ruffling and still wet feet slapping against the tile. Jack soon emerged in a haze of steam and a cloud of Kent’s cedar soap in nothing but a pair of boxers that looked old enough to be something he bought in college. Kent swallowed instinctively. Sure, Jack lacked the vanity six pack of their youth, but he was still a professional athlete in peak condition. At this point in the season, he was almost all muscle, and it showed everywhere - from the strong curves of his shoulders and back to the neat ‘V’ of his hips. 

“Like what you see, Parse?” He smiled caddishly as he pulled his sweatpants up slowly. The top line of his boxers, a blue and green plaid, peaked out as Jack crawled up the bed to hover just over Kent. He could feel the heat rolling off of Jack’s bare skin. He fought off the impulse to sink his teeth into Jack’s thick deltoid. He watched as a stray drop of water rolled down his neck and onto his chest. Kent squirmed under the gaze of Jack’s piercing blue eyes. The backlighting from the hallway bulb painted a warm halo around Jack’s head. His lips, still a little sensitive from the scalding hot water that he always insisted on using, looked a few shades closer to cherry red.

From the absolute bottom of his heart, Kent thought, fuck this stupid guest room.

“You’re trying to distract me from this conversation, Zimms.” Kent playfully pushed him off to the side. Jack fell back onto the other side of the bed, which groaned under their combined weight. He heard Jack exhale frustratedly.

“You’re right. I was. Clearly, it didn’t work.” Jack rolled over on his side until he was almost nose to nose with Kent. “They’re adopting a kid. I don’t know. Something about a distant cousin and an unplanned pregnancy, and I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening. Bittle rambles.” 

Kent rolled his eyes. His social faux pas earlier in the evening didn’t do anything to blunt Jack’s candidness.  “Remind me not to keep you on the phone too long.”

“You’re different,” Jack smiled softly as he ran a hand through Kent’s hair. If he were smart, Kent would have spent the time Jack was in the shower in his room, changing out of the now crumbled button-down and slacks. Instead, he sat on the bed, the sound of Jack’s playlist going on one side, and the sound of his family milling below him, and thought. 

“He was, too. Once,” was Kent’s muted response.

Jack stiffened on his side of the bed. There was a pregnant pause. “Yeah, once. Not anymore.” 

“How long did you know about this?” 

“A week or two.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Kent pushed further than he ought to. It was an enduring, terrible habit of his.

“I didn’t think you’d care this much,” Jack ran a hand through his wet hair. “You and Bittle aren’t exactly fans of each other. I didn’t think you’d care what he did with his life.”

“I don’t care.”

Honestly, he didn’t. Out of mind and out of sight was how he liked to keep Eric Bittle. It was just...annoying. It was annoying to think that he was always, in all the ways that mattered, ten steps behind the kid.

“Seems like you do, bud.” Jack practically snorted.

“I don’t.” Kent snapped again.

“Kent, we agreed to take this at your pace. We want the same things.” Jack pressed in closer and dropped a kiss on Kent's forehead. It was an achingly soft and tender thing. Part of the anger that burned in his chest dissipated. “Besides, you’re not even thinking straight. Would you really want a kid while I was still playing? While we’re unmarried? That would be a lot on your plate.” 

Right. That.

For all that he wanted, it would be completely absurd and unreasonable. Kent couldn’t even handle the mere thought of coming out, let alone hosting probably one of the most highly publicized weddings that the hockey world, and much of the regular world, would ever see. He frowned. 

“Not like I have much else going on,” Kent answered in a huff, never one to admit defeat. The pillows on the guest bed smelled vaguely of the detergent his mother used when he was a child and dust from the closet. 

“Well, you could start by giving me some feedback on the game today. That would be helpful.” 

Leave it to Jack to circle it all back to hockey.

It took everything in Kent not to jump off the bed, zip down the hallway, and lock himself in his room for the rest of the night. Maybe, if he went to sleep, he would wake up and realize this miserable day had been nothing more than some terrible nightmare. 

Instead, he looked at Jack and offered him a small smile. “It was a good showing. You won. What else do you want me to say?” 

Jack was undeterred. “Our third line. We’re going to need to get them in better shape before the playoffs. What do you think?”

“Ugh, fine.” Kent rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hands so hard that he saw stars. He had spent half of the game frantically searching for Jack in the bowels of the stadium, so he was hoping he had enough material from the rest of Jack’s televised games to pull this off. “The rookie on the wing -.”

“Tremblay,” supplied Jack. 

“Him. Sure. He’s speedy, but he’s also scared shitless. He can’t give up every single puck he gets when the other team puts a little pressure on him. Get one of your big guys to go one-on-one with him during practice. Don’t let them go easy on him.” Kent remembered, fondly, practices like that with Rocky when he had been a rookie. He spent many an afternoon getting absolutely painted across the boards by a guy sixty pounds heavier and twenty years older than he had been. Over time, though, he eventually was able to outskate Rocky. Then he was able to outthink him. Then, before they knew it, Kent had found his groove, and they had won a Cup. “He’s gotta shake the fear, or he’s going to get absolutely eaten alive in the first round.” 

“What about Ahlqvist?” Jack tapped his fingers against the faded ivory bedspread. If Kent had let him, he could have gone on like this all night.

“Who?”

“One of our defensemen. He’s number 73 and paired up with Gregs, number 13.” 

Kent squeezed his eyes shut. It took him a minute, but he could remember him from one of the games that he caught last week. It was the Falconers down in Carolina. #73 was the defenseman who, upon realizing that he’d never catch Aho, simply gave up. Kent didn’t know how Jack hadn’t killed the guy yet. 

Kent slowly blinked his eyes open. Stars still danced around his vision. “He’s lazy. That’s a bad trait for a d-man to have. Maybe talk to your front office and drop some hints about the upcoming trade deadline.” 

“What about -?” Jack continued.

“Jack,” Kent interrupted him, exasperated, “last time I checked, I am not on the coaching staff of the Providence Falconers. I  am not the GM. I’m not even your teammate anymore. Lay off.”

“But -.” Jack protested. 

“I do not want to keep talking about the game, Jack.” 

Kent’s phone, tossed on the old and scuffed bedside table, started to ring violently. The opening chords of the Elvis and Britney Spears remix of “Viva Las Vegas” that had been released alongside the movie years ago started blaring. Kent had changed it after he had seen the movie’s premier in Vegas. He and the rest of the Aces, along with some of the Raiders, had been guests of honor that night. Jack practically jumped out of his skin before Kent scooped it up and smashed the green ‘Answer’ button. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, what?” He practically barked into the receiver. 

“If you’re in that kind of mood, you’re really gonna hate what I have to tell you.” Despite the less-than-friendly greeting, Swoops’ voice remained strained but upbeat. 

“What?” Kent’s gut seized. 

“I checked your house like I do every Saturday. The A/C unit blew. It’s like 120 in there right now.”

Vegas was having an unseasonal heat wave for this time of year. It was less like a bleak midwinter and more like Christmas in July. Kent had gotten dozens of messages over the past few weeks from former teammates and friends about how miserable the heat index was, how nervous people had been to let their children and pets go outside. Kent had, unhelpfully, sent pictures of the foot of snow that Buffalo got the previous week.

Now, the inside of his house was like an oven. Cool. Apparently, the day could indeed get worse. 

“I don’t have time to deal with this. Can’t you just, I don’t know? Call the repairman.” Kent sat up in the bed and ran a hand through his hair. Jack, too, pushed himself to the seated position. He lunged for his sweatshirt and threw Kent a concerned glance. 

“What?” All of the friendliness has drained out of Swoops’ tone. 

Kent shook his head in irritation and disbelief. “Call the repairman. I have his number on the fridge.” 

“I’m not your assistant, Parson.” Swoops snapped uncharacteristically. Jack stood up to pull his sweatshirt over his head, and he remained standing, arms crossed. “Either call them yourself or come back home and deal with this shit. I’ve already done you a favor by checking on your house every week for the last year.”

“Jeff, I can’t come back to Las Vegas.” Kent rose to meet Jack.

“What are you talking about?” Swoops was confused and still angry over the phone.

“I just fucking can’t.” He reached down to adjust his belt, which was cutting into his hip bone, and pulled his shirt out of the partial tuck he had created when he hastily shoved his shirt into his pants as he had gotten out of his car. It wouldn’t lie right, and Kent tried to fumble with the buckle as he pressed the phone between his ear and his shoulder. His frustration mounted. He tried to yank at it. 

Jack, without saying a word, carefully removed the belt and wrapped it around his palm in a tight circle before carefully laying it on the bed. 

“Listen, man, I love you like a brother. I just can’t talk to you right now. If I keep this up, I’m going to say something that I regret.” Swoops stated with finality. “Good night, have fun with Zimmermann, call your own fucking repairman.” 

The line clicked dead, and if Jack wasn’t here next to him, Kent was sure he would have smashed his phone against the wall. 

“Not being able to play, being retired, it bothers you, doesn't it?” Jack asked slowly, thoughtfully, as he moved up to unbutton Kent’s shirt. He pressed out the wrinkles on the white t-shirt underneath as he went. 

“Gee, Jack, what gave it away?” Kent turned his head to the side to stare at the open bathroom door. Jack hadn’t pressed the faucet all the way down, and there was the periodic drip, drip, drip of water. The sound was nearly driving Kent insane.  “Of course, it bothers me!” 

“What happened to all the shit you said last year? Everything you spouted off about being at peace with it?” Jack pulled the shirt off of Kent and carefully folded that too. His hands were steady as he rested them on Kent’s shoulders. 

“That was a lot easier to do when I was staring down a gold medal and a five-year contract extension. Shockingly, it’s way harder after getting drilled into the boards.”

Kent batted Jack’s hands off of him and started nervously pacing around the room. Downstairs, the kitchen timer went off. The lasagna was done. It would need fifteen or twenty minutes to set, and when that was over, everyone expected them downstairs for family dinner. Out of the frying pan, so the saying went, and into the fire.

He raked his hands through his hair again. “It just seems like nothing in life lately gets to be my goddamn choice. Excuse me for having a hard time with it.” 

“I get it, okay?” Jack stood there quietly as Kent continued to rant and rave. “I had an amazing career, one that I’m so grateful for. I’ve had to say that over and over and over again. But what am I supposed to be outside of this?”

“What are you talking about?” Jack stepped in front of him, bringing Kent to a screeching stop. The two of them nearly collided, but Jack grasped Kent around the shoulders again. This time, he dug his thumbs in. It would take much more of an effort for Kent to weasel his way out of this. 

“Nobody gets it, okay?” He said as he struggled to meet Jack's gaze. “If I go back to Vegas, it means all of this is real.” 

“What’s real?” 

“My career is over,” whispered Kent. 

Jack shook his head. “That doesn’t mean your life is over.”

“Yeah, it kind of fucking does.”

Jack took a slow, intentional breath and squeezed his shoulders even harder. There was a slight tinge of pain. Jack’s hands started to shake. “Kent, I want you to stop talking like this.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. Only Jack Zimmermann gets to be upset about shit,” Kent bit back. 

Jack finally released Kent, his hands falling limply to his side. With his hair still dark from his shower and his college sweatshirt, he looked to be fifteen years younger. “No, Kent, because I know where this feeling leads, and you’re starting to scare me.”

“Zimms, you don’t get it.” Kent zipped around Jack with a shocking speed he didn’t know he still had and positioned himself on the other side of the bed. “You were a coach. You have a degree. You have two parents who, probably, no offense, could help you get any job in the world. You have friends with normal, boring nine-to-fives and 401K plans. What do I have? Nothing. I have no job, not really. I have no marketable skills. I barely finished high school. All my friends are hockey players. I’m a thirty-six-year-old loser who lives in my parents’ house.”

“You’re not a loser, Kent.” Jack stood his ground and spoke softly. 

“Easy for you to say.” He hated the way his voice warbled, thick with emotion. 

“Yeah, it is actually.” Jack took a few cautious steps toward him. “I was a loser for a couple of years when I went from one of the top prospects in the world to living in my parents’ house with no job and a crippling addiction, remember?”

“I didn’t -. I didn’t mean it like that.” Kent almost recoiled in shame. His face felt as if it were on fire. “You weren’t a loser. You were sick, Zimms.” 

“And you just had your entire ankle put back together. Do you see how stupid you sound?” Despite it all, there was a soft, self-deprecating smile on Jack’s face. He held out, for a moment, his arms. Kent rounded the corner and slowly walked into them. They stood like that for who knew how long, Kent’s face pressed against Jack’s chest, his arms around him. Together, their breathing settled, their hearts slowed. 

“But, I-.” 

“But nothing.” Jack leaned down and kissed Kent. He could feel the edge of Jack’s smile against his lips.  “Let’s go grab dinner, yeah?” 

“I thought you got lost up there.” Karly laughed as she set down the giant salad over Kent’s shoulder. He got a full whiff of the vinegar and oil dressing David was famous for and swallowed thickly. He didn’t have much of an appetite. “Not that I would blame you. It had been like two months since you last saw him.”

“We were arguing.” He whispered under his breath as Jack, dripping from his shower, slid into the seat next to him. 

“Great, Kent. I’m sure that’s really good for your relationship,” admonished Karly as she practically stabbed the serving spoon into the bowl of greens. The sound of the faucet running was loud as all six kids lined up to wash their hands before dinner. 

“Will you quit it? I know. Obviously, I know.” Kent bit back over his shoulder as Karly drifted to help Bryson scrub whatever mysterious sticky substance he had gotten into now off of his chubby hands. 

David popped in from the garage, where they kept their icebox. He was holding frigid bottles of Coors. The silver paper was bright under the cool kitchen lights. “Can I get you a beer or anything, Jack?” 

“Just water would be fine.” Jack held up his empty glass. “I, uh, don’t drink.”

“Anymore.” Linda materialized around Jack’s shoulder with the faded water pitcher that they had had since Kent had been in elementary school. Jack stiffened.

“Mom, this has got to stop. Jack is our guest.” Kylie slipped into her usual chair across from Kent and frowned. She had abandoned her clip altogether, and her hair was thrown up in a messy bun. A pen was stuck above her ear, and her pager was clipped to her collar. She looked stressed and frazzled. Around her, the youngest kids struggled to climb into their seats. 

“I’m not going to sit here and be lectured by my youngest.” Linda cocked her hip out to the side. “Stop talking about things you know nothing about.”

“Linda,” said David warningly. He took his usual spot and passed Kent one of the open bottles. It took all of the self-control Kent had ever possessed to not drain the whole thing in one go. 

“First off, I am thirty. I’m not a child anymore.” Kylie snipped back. Her voice took on a louder, more formal edge. Kylie was bringing out her doctor voice - the same one she used to kick unwanted relatives out of delivery rooms and admonish college students for their risky choices. “Second, Jack is a guest in our home, and he’s Kent’s serious partner. He deserves some respect. This is the first time both of them have been here in years. I’ve missed them, okay? I like spending time with them. I don’t want everyone to keep ruining it. I especially don’t want this absurd behavior and petty comments to keep happening in front of my children.”

“Kylie, come on.” David took a long swig of his beer. “Don’t you all think this is a little ridiculous?” 

“I am not the one being ridiculous, David.” Kylie retorted. Gone was her doctor’s voice; it had been replaced with the snippy sound of a teenage girl railing against the only father she had ever known. 

Kent watched as his mother fully turned to him. “Are things serious between the two of you, Kent?” 

There was a full beat of silence. Kent opened his mouth to say something, anything, but it felt like the words couldn’t come out. Something clawed at his chest, at his throat. The blood rushed to his face. He could feel the muscles around his ankle cramping painfully. He was acutely aware of everyone watching him. 

“Kent?” There was an undercurrent of panic in Jack’s voice.

“I’ve had a very long day today. I’m not interested in playing twenty questions with all of you.” Kent grasped the edge of the table. His knuckles were nearly the same color as the stark white lace tablecloth. “Can we please just sit down and eat dinner?”

David sighed and twisted towards the sink. “Come on, kids. Dinner time.” 

Chapter Text

The crazy thing is that no one follows him, no one calls after him. He simply plucked his keys off of the dish in the front entrance and flung himself out the door. Before it slams behind him, he can hear his mother shouting something and the low tight acid of the sound of Jack being truly and genuinely mad. Then the door rattled on its hinge, and Kent found himself shoving his keys, tiny silver spade keychain dangling in the moonlight, into the ignition of his Porsche. He squealed out of the driveway and was zero to sixty before he could even register what he was doing. 

He wasn’t entirely sure how he had ended up here. He needed a moment by himself, away from the lights and the noise and the constant arguing that seemed to follow him. He had wanted to go somewhere he knew that no one would know who he was. As he drove, his phone kept buzzing. He tossed it into the glove compartment and exhaled as the buzzing eventually slowed into a more manageable staccato pattern and then finally stopped. Almost as if by autopilot, he had found himself driving past a route he’d taken hundreds of times on warmer summer nights. Before he knew it, he found himself clicking on his turn signal to route himself down the familiar sights of the neighborhood from his childhood. It was a rougher side of the city, where only every other street lamp worked and the ground was dotted with a dozen charred cigarette butts. Despite the fact that he hadn’t set foot on this street in years, he still knew this park like he knew the back of his hand. He had eased his car into the dilapidated lot, weeds growing through the concrete, and stumbled over the first place he could find.  

Kent could feel the cold from the rock he had perched himself on seeping through his thin sweatpants. He wrapped his arms around himself in a vain attempt to ward off the chill. The air smelled densely of clean pine and the overwhelming brine of dead and dying fish. The darkness almost completely enveloped him. In the distance, he could hear the soft babbling of the little stream that weaved its way around the park. He had spent hours here, as his mom had argued with his father in those years before he left, picking at rocks and little salamanders on the shore. He had played ball hockey on the split concrete court just around the bend. He had lost a tooth on the rusting swingset. Across the little pathway, a naked lightbulb flickered over the tiny porch that led up to the front door of his childhood home. When they had lived there, it had been a cheery yellow color that always reminded Kent of the sun. Whatever new tenants lived there now had painted it blue. 

He ached for the clean burn of a shot or the sweet-smelling tobacco of a cigar despite the fact that he had neither for months. Instead, he carefully and methodically worked his way through the stretches that his physical therapist had given him. He had dutifully traced the entire alphabet with his foot, relishing the tight stretch in his ankle. He had no idea how long he had sat out there, watching that naked bulb flicker. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been two hours. 

“Kent! Is that you?” Kent could hear the sound of rubber-lined slippers cracking against the pavement. He didn’t turn around, didn’t move at all, as Karly rushed up behind him. She had looped her arms around his neck so tightly that, despite his miserable mood, he couldn’t help but let out a mock choking noise. Karly was unmoved.  “Thank God I found you. What kind of idiot runs out of the house in the middle of winter without his coat?” 

Karly slid into the empty space next to him. She looked like she had fled the house in a hurry. Her sweatpants were muddy and damp around the cuff. Her slippers seemed to be soaked all the way through in the chilly Buffalo dew. From the waist up, she was decked out in Steven’s clothes. Her husband’s coat practically enveloped her, and his neon winter hat made her hair look a sick shade of green. She held Kent’s Team USA parka in a bundle in her lap. Hanging precariously out of the corner of her mouth was a neon pink vape that looked like it was straight out of her teen years in the late 2010s. The overpoweringly sweet scent of an artificially flavored cotton candy cartridge flooded his nose.

“This stupid USB stick is going to give you cancer.” Kent held out his hand expectantly as Karly took one last drag. She carefully let out a stream of smoke.  

“Don’t tell Steve.”

“If you don’t tell Zimms.” 

“Deal.” 

Karly passed him the vape and his jacket. Kent put it between his lips and sucked deeply. The smoke burnt his lungs, and he did everything in his power not to start hacking a lung out in front of his younger sister. He hadn’t smoked - a vape, a cigarette, or anything else - since Scraps’ retirement party seven or eight years ago. One of the bottle girls had stepped on his Juul, and he never bothered to replace it. It was a horrifically bad habit for a professional athlete anyway. Not that he had to worry about that now, he thought, as he took another hit. The two of them sat in a hazy cloud, the pale smoke reflecting the bright moonlight. 

“I thought you quit,” remarked Kent as he passed her the vape back. Karly took another drag and pursed her lips. He couldn’t be bothered to stand up to put his jacket on, so he settled on wrapping it around his shoulders. From any of the townhomes across the sidewalk, Kent and his sister looked exactly like the unsavory characters that lurked in this park that their parents used to warn them about. 

“I did,” Karly shrugged before tucking it into the pocket of the coat she was wearing. She pulled out her phone to tap some kind of quick message. The searing blue light burnt Kent’s eyes. “Or at least, I thought I did. That was until Mom and Zimmer had us all convinced that you took the car and drove it into a lake or some crazy shit like that. Something about your life being over? I don’t know. When I left, the two of them were about five seconds from starting a city-wide manhunt.”

Being a feature on the nightly news was the last thing that he needed. He still hadn’t spoken to his publicist, hadn’t figured out a strategy to tackle this stupid picture. He didn’t need to draw more attention to himself than there already was. 

“Oh, Zimms thought I was going to kill myself? That’s pretty rich coming from him.” Kent’s laugh was bitter and hollow. Someone’s car stalled a few blocks away. There was one silent beat before he was knocked off balance as Karly shoved him. He landed, hard, on his left wrist. Little stones pressed into his hand. Not hard enough to cut him, but certainly hard enough for him to wince. 

“What the hell was that for?” He hissed as he rubbed the stones off his palm. He ran a finger over the indents. 

“I need you to knock this diva shit off, Kent.” Karly drove her hands into her pockets and huffed. “Jack and Mom are on the verge of a collective mental breakdown, and you’re being a sarcastic dick. How dare your serious boyfriend and your own mother be worried about you? You’re right. Their audacity, I can’t believe it.” 

Kent could feel the blood rush to his face. He pressed his feet harder into the gritty ground. He could feel the sharp angles of broken concrete under his worn sandals and woolly socks. A lump of emotion got stuck in his throat, and he swallowed thickly. “How’d you find me?”

“It took me a minute to remember it existed - I wasn’t exactly in the best frame of mind - but I’m still the only one who has you on ‘Find My Friends.’”

“Right, St. Thomas, I forgot.”

It had been Kylie’s twenty-first birthday. Kent had taken his sisters, their boyfriends, and some of their friends to the Caribbean to celebrate. It hadn’t been particularly expensive to fly in October, right before pre-season wrapped up, and what was the point of being a multi-millionaire if you couldn’t actually put your money to use? It’s not like they took these kinds of vacations when they were kids. 

Kylie and her friends enjoyed themselves - quietly. They slept in late in the mornings and spent the afternoon tanning next to the crystal blue water. Kylie caught up on some of the latest novels that she had wanted to read. She enjoyed going for long runs with Zach. She and her friends had wine and dinner on the beach. They took historical tours and went to farmers’ markets. 

Kent, on the other hand, spent most of his vacation following Karly, newly postpartum after her second baby, around the island doing damage control. The second they had stepped into a bar, she was off in a platinum colored flash. Karly danced on tables and sipped blended drinks out of coconuts. She took taxi rides from one part of the city to the other, chasing the next party, dusty high-heels hanging precariously from her hand out the window. She and her friends left after dinner and wouldn’t return until lunch the next day, hungover, starving, but laughing harder than he had heard her in months. 

After two nights, he had given up. Karly was twenty-three. He had just turned twenty-nine. He was deluding himself if he thought he could keep up on this ten-day bender with her. Instead, he just stole her phone while she slept off a massive forty-eight-hour hangover and shared her location with his phone. His evenings were much more peaceful when he could watch Karly party her way across the island, a tiny dot on his cell screen, instead of doing his best to chase after her. 

“Kenny, what the fuck is going on with you today?”

“Don’t you think Mom’s being a touch, I don’t know, intense with Jack?” Kent shrugged. He picked at a frayed edge on his sleeve. A thin white thread started to unwind. 

“I want to make sure I have this straight. You run out of the house without a word and then disappear for three hours because Mom doesn’t like your boyfriend ?” Karly laughed with the exact same pitch as their mother. Her shoulders shook in her oversized jacket, making the entire thing rattle as if possessed by a ghost rather than just his sister. “And Kylie always accused me of being the drama queen.”

“It’s been three hours?” Kent asked, shocked. “What time is it?”

“After ten. Jack and David are at the house in case you came back, and Mom, Kylie, and I have been driving around. We’ve been searching for you for literal hours.” 

“Where are the guys and the kids?” Kent inquired, still pulling at the thread on his sleeve. 

Karly pulled her jacket tighter around her midsection. “Zach and Steven took the kids home. You scared them. They don’t live in the kind of world where adults just disappear when they get pissed off.” 

“We did,” Kent chuckled darkly. “It built character.” 

Karly didn’t take the bait. Instead, she took another hit of her vape and blew a tight stream of smoke into the night sky. Kylie was too young to remember, but they weren’t. Their parents had fought nearly constantly when they had been younger, and it wasn’t at all uncommon for their father to duck out the side door and disappear into the night. It was a good day if he came back by morning, but as they got older, he was gone longer and longer. The months before their mother filed for divorce, their father was gone more than he was home. 

Shame burned in his guts. Where Jack wore his daddy issues on his sleeve, Kent kept his bottled up inside. Regardless, both of them hated nothing more than being compared to their father. And here Kent was - acting just like him. The blood rushed to his face. 

Karly drove her shoulder into her brother again, and Kent wobbled precariously. “Enough with the pity party. Now what’s really going on?” 

“No, it’s not just that. It’s -. It’s fucking everything.” Kent pulled at a thread on his shirt until it finally snapped off. In the distance, there was the sound of a small animal - a rat or a squirrel - bustling on the soft, wet ground. “I know it sounds stupid. It’s just the puck drop and seeing Sandström again and the stuff with Jack and my house and Mom and Kylie...”

“Oh, that whole argument between Mom and Kylie had nothing to do with you. Not really, at least.” Kylie cut him off. She paused to take another long drag on her vape before she finished her thought. “That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah, it was all their own stuff,” shrugged Karly. She shifted precariously on the rock until the two of them were knee to knee.

“What kind of stuff?” Kent rolled the loose string between his pointer finger and his thumb. 

“You never picked up on this?” Karly asked as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “If you’re six years older than Kylie, how old was she when you left for the Q?”

“Uh, nine. She turned ten in September.” 

Kylie still had bangs and a gap-tooth smile when he had left. When he came back for that precarious week or two before he shipped out to Vegas, she looked like a full-blown teenager in miniature. 

“Right. She hardly knew you before you left. It’s not like you were hanging out with your seven-year-old sister when you were thirteen," laughed Kylie acidically. “And it’s not like she could have offered you any support or advice when shit really hit the fan. You were eighteen. She was twelve.” 

“As opposed to the incredible support you offered me as a very mature fourteen-year-old,” responded Kent, gently shoving Karly. Both of them had tried to cheer him up, but it was undeniable he came home that summer changed. When he wasn’t spending most of the day sleeping, he sat on the back porch of the very house in front of him. He had a cold Coors in one hand and his brand new cell phone in the other. He did enough phone tag with Alicia Zimmermann in those two weeks that it had put him off phone calls for life. If you needed to reach him, to this day, text, don’t call. 

“Shut up.”

Kent shook his head in confusion. “I’m not following whatever stupid point you’re trying to make.”

“When I get home, I need to ask Steven if this is a guy thing in general or if you’re just particularly stupid,” Karly’s tone had taken on the slow, deliberate syllables she used to explain things to her children. “Let me break this down for you.”

“Think about it from Kylie’s perspective. She was little, but she wasn’t dumb. You moved across the country, and our lives completely changed. We moved to a better house. We moved into a private school. Unlike the two of us, she was always smart - so she loved it. Thrived there. It changed the course of her life. When we were teenagers, you paid for dance and gymnastics, and sleepaway camps. You paid for her college education. You paid for medical school. The lavish vacations, her husband’s bachelor party, the wedding, stuff for her kids - Kent, that was all you. She thinks she owes you. This is her way of returning the favor.” 

“All that was a drop in the bucket,” Kent waved his hand dismissively.

Karly’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead involuntarily. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were a drop in the bucket for you?”

“Honestly, yes,” Kent found another loose string to pull. His toes curled in his dress shoes. “I did it because I felt guilty. Dad left, and then I left, and I don’t know. It felt like I was failing at, ugh, I guess something important. Money felt like the only thing I could give you.” 

It had been part of the narrative that had built up around him in those first few years. If he wasn’t photographed wearing his Aces sweater, the magazines always seemed to deck him out in shades of red, white, and blue. Kent, with his blonde hair and light eyes and July 4th birthday and his practically single mom and Olympic medal and first overall selection, had come to claim what was never rightfully his, a Horatio Alger story for the ages. An American narrative to signal a new age of American dominance in this sport. What was always left unsaid was how it seemed that Kent had knocked off the Zimmermann dynasty and all it meant - legacy, nepotism, generational wealth. 

Karly’s hand was heavy and warm on his knee. “I mean, I was never going to turn it down - especially when I was twenty, unemployed, and pregnant - but you didn’t owe us anything. We were never mad. We understood, all of us. This was your dream. That was what you had to do to achieve it.” 

“Anyway, Kent. If Kylie acts that way because she thinks she owes you, Mom only acts this way because you’re her favorite.” Karly continued bluntly, taking a sneaky hit of her vape before shoving it back in her pocket. The smoke picked up the silver tones of the moon. “Besides, she feels guilty about the whole thing.”

Kent couldn’t help but snort. “Shut the fuck up. You and I both know that Kylie’s her favorite. She got perfect grades. She wasn’t always in trouble like the two of us. She never did anything wrong. She was prom queen and valedictorian. Oh, and right now she’s a literal doctor. I barely graduated from high school.”

When Kent left St. Joe’s to play in the Q, he was #137 in his graduating class. The freshman class that year only had one hundred and forty students. 

“Yeah, and doctors are a dime a dozen.” A pointed smile pulled at the edges of Karly’s mouth. It’s not every day that your firstborn and only precious baby boy also happens to be the second coming of Wayne Gretzky.”

Kent looked at his sister with a mock wounded expression. “Take that back. I’m not anything like that weird ass old man.”

He had met Gretzky more times than he would have liked, and he didn’t appreciate the comparison. 

“Sure, Kenny,” Karly rolled her eyes almost violently. “She feels bad, you know, that she wasn’t there for all of it.”

“All of it?”

Karly’s phone buzzed again against the hard surface of the rock. She didn’t answer. Instead, she just shrugged. “Whatever exactly happened between you and Zimmer. Listen, I hate being this person because it used to annoy the hell out of me before I had kids, but -.”

Kent laughed bitterly. “When did it have time to annoy you? You had kids before you could drink. When you were twenty, you were changing diapers. When I was twenty, I was winning games and getting hammered every night.”

“You know,” Karly marked quietly, “I always thought your drinking was a problem.”

“It wasn’t,” lied Kent. “Or at least, it hasn’t been in a long time.”

He had been about twenty-two, twenty-three when it had happened. Wild Cup celebrations in his teenage years had been one thing, but Swoops and Scraps had started to take issue as time marched on. Any waking moment that Kent wasn’t on the ice, in the gym, or in a press event, the green glass of a Heineken bottle or the fizzy gray of a gin and tonic seemed to be his constant companion. On the ice, he was perfect. Off the ice, he said things he couldn’t remember, made phone calls he came to regret, and caused general havoc and chaos in just about every off-Strip bar in the greater Las Vegas area. 

Kent could still remember that fateful day in October. It was a few weeks before the start of his fifth season in the NHL. Rocky, older, grayer, staring down the barrel of the first NHL season in twenty-three years where there wasn’t some roster with his name on it, showed up at Kent’s house uninvited on a Sunday afternoon. At Jeff and Jason’s request, he said as he lowered himself on Kent’s sofa, invoking Swoops’ and Scraps’ real names. He had never called them that before, and Kent thought those syllables sounded strange in his mouth. Kent sat wearing a thick pair of dark sunglasses and a snapback pulled low over his eyes in his own house. Even the slight light peaking in through the blinds was enough to make his head pound.

He had one month to prove that he had his shit together, Rocky informed him. If not, he’d go to Management; as their inaugural Captain and the one who led them to their first Cup, he still had their ears. If Management knew, then NHLPA would obviously get involved. If the NHLPA was involved, it was clear that rehab would be Kent’s only option. 

This conversation took place in those middling years when he and Jack didn’t speak. The last memory Kent had of him was standing at the bottom of the Zimmermanns’ round staircase. Jack stood silently at the top of the stairs, less than twenty-four hours from his extended stay at some cushy rehab facility in northern Ontario. His eyes looked electric in the dying September light. The circles around them were so dark and prominent that it practically looked like he had been punched. He was so pale, nearly as pale as he had been on that stupid bathroom floor. Jack didn’t look like his friend or his teammate or his lover. He looked like a ghost that was haunting this house. That was where all this threatened to take him. 

Kent tried to swallow with his dry mouth. Message, he assured Rocky, fucking received. 

Not that he stopped drinking completely, but Kent was always aware that he was one or two big fuck-ups from a repeat conversation. Rocky, Kent knew, was not one to repeat himself. 

“You’re proving my point about why Mom feels bad.”

“Well, now I feel bad.”

“Good,” Karly said with certainty. “You know Ethan’s twelve. He’s in middle school. In two or three years, he’s going to be the same age you were when you moved out of the house. Rimouski is over ten hours away from here, you know? I can barely stand it when he goes to a weeklong Boy Scout camp at the campground thirty minutes from Buffalo. I genuinely don’t know how Mom handled it.” 

He had never thought about that either. His coaches had told him that the Q had some of the best players in North America. He had reached all he could do here in Buffalo. If he wanted to get better, to get someone to really notice him, he’d have to go north. So he did. No thought, no additional discussion.

Karly continued, fiddling with her cuticles as she spoke. “All those little things, she missed. Someone else taught you to drive. Someone else helped you with your homework. Someone else took you to the movies, to the mall, out to dinner. Someone else got to go to all of your games. Someone else got to hear about your first kiss. You were her first, and you left way before your time. That’s hard for a mom.”

The familiar cocktail of shame and guilt gnawed at his stomach again. 

“Plus, it’s easy to see that all this has been hard for you. She feels guilty that she doesn’t know how to help you. She’s trying to protect you the best way that she knows how. You can be mad at her for a lot of things, but you can’t fault her for that.” 

“I don’t need ,” Kent stressed, “to be helped.” 

“Kent, be for real right now. This isn’t you,” Karly’s hand reached out until she found his wrist. She squeezed hard. Kent could feel the sharp sting as she pressed on sensitive bones. He had sprained and bruised both of his wrists more times than he could count. “I couldn’t tell you the last time you went to the gym or went skating or spent any amount of time with people who aren’t in our extended family. Nothing is stopping you from doing any of those things, and yet all you literally do all day is hang out at home.”

Kent wanted to open his mouth to protest. He left the house. He had spent a week up north with Jack this past summer. He had a broadcasting job. He had started his own financial consulting firm. He didn’t have hockey, but he had something. Instead, what tumbled out of his mouth was - 

“ What’s the point? That’s what I don’t know. I don’t know what the point of working out and skating, and training even would be if I know that I’ll never get to that level again. Everyone has made it abundantly clear - I will never be as good as I once was. That kills me to think about it.” He balled his fists until his nails cut half-moon crevices on his palm. “And I’m not trying to humiliate myself. I really don’t need some random beer-leaguer who got cut from his high school JV team hopping online to brag about how he beat the late great Kent Parson.” 

“Christ, no one is holding you to that standard, Kent, but yourself. You are the only person who still expects you to play like you’re nineteen again.” Karly ground out. “The point of doing all of those things is that you love it. It’s like you don’t want to be happy.”

The accusation hung heavy in the air. There was the grating sound of someone dragging their trash bin in, plastic rubbing against asphalt, coming from a few blocks over. A bird cried. Jack , Kent thought idly, would know what kind of bird that is.

“No one heard about my first kiss until years later,” murmured Kent softly. He ran his thumb over his palm. The divots of both his nails and the tiny pebbles were dry and worn under his touch.

“What?”

“His name was Cameron. He was in my gym class. He was the first person I ever met who played rugby.” A small smile tugged at Kent’s lips. He could almost smell the oily scent of artificial butter and the sticky sweetness of spilled soda. “We went to see The Notebook in theaters. It was like a 10 AM showing on a Tuesday after school let out. I was leaving for Quebec later that week, and I guess, uh, we got caught up in the moment.” 

“I’m sorry.” The words slipped out of Karly, glum and quiet. 

“Christ, why does everyone keep saying that?” Anger coiled around Kent’s chest. “I’m so fucking sick of hearing that word over and over and over again. You don’t have anything to be sorry -.”

“Kent.” Karly stopped him.

“What?” He stared at her, wide-eyed and flushed. 

“It’s okay to be sad.”

“I’m not sad,” he shook his head almost violently. His blonde hair fanned out around his ears. “I’m pissed off.”

Karly’s brow wrinkled. “Why? At Mom? At Zimmer?”

“At myself!”

There it was. What Kent had struggled to articulate for months was finally out in the open in this stupid little park across from his childhood home. He was mad at the world, mad at the circumstances, but mostly, he was mad at himself.

“For what?”

“Everyone told me not to do it. Everyone told me not to get back out there with an ankle that was partially shattered. They told me that I would be lucky even to walk again afterwards, let alone be able to skate. Everyone warned me that this was exactly what was going to happen, and I just didn’t listen. I thought - and I know I sound like a real ass right now, but I did genuinely think - no, I’m Kent Parson for God’s sake. The normal rules don’t apply to me. I thought I was going to be fine.” Kent breathed in deeply. His ribcage expanded so far it practically hurt. “Now I’m not, and I have to deal with the consequences. That’s what I can’t stop thinking about. I might still be playing if I had stopped when everyone told me to.”

That was what haunted his dreams. When he closed his eyes at night, he would dream that he was back on home ice, in his house, that it had all been nothing more than a nightmare. Sure, he would have had a sprain, but if he had taken a few months off, even the rest of the season, he had no doubt he would have been fine by the time October rolled around. With that kind of injury combined with his age, he wouldn’t have gotten the extension he wanted. Kent knew that, but he could have squeezed out another year or two. He would have had a whole season or two to come to terms with it.

“Then you might not have won that medal.” Karly reminded him unhelpfully. “Did you forget that you were the one who scored the winning goal? Let’s say you didn’t play. How do you know we wouldn’t be out here in this same stupid park watching you meltdown because you didn’t win the Gold? You are in your late thirties, dude. There were no do-overs for the Olympics. You saw an opportunity, and you took it.” 

That medal sat in a box in his room at his parents’ house. He wore it for press events, when it was required. When he was alone, he couldn’t bring himself to look at it. It made him happy and sad and angry in equal measures, and that cocktail of emotions felt like enough to strangle him. 

“Besides, Kent, you were just going to be delaying the inevitable. Your career had to end eventually. You finished doing something that is important to you. You made a name for yourself. You reached every goal you ever set for yourself. Not many people can say that. I can’t.” Karly looked so concerned, so earnest, that Kent could hardly stand to look at her.

“I didn’t want it to end like this.” Kent shook his head. “I knew it had to end, but I didn’t want it to end like this.” 

“I know, and I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his knee and squeezed. Her wedding bands bit into the thin skin sandwiched between platinum and the bone. “Listen, Kent, Bryson was watching this kiddie YouTube video one day, and - stop laughing - the presenter had this good point. She was talking to toddlers, but I do, low key, think you have the emotional capacity of one -.”

“Bitch,” he muttered under his breath. Although the words had no bite, there was, for the first time all night, a hint of Kent’s cocky self-assuredness back.

“Shut up. As I was saying, she said sometimes when we feel mad, there’s something underneath that. We feel mad because, in reality, we feel sad or frustrated or...” Her voice trailed off intentionally. 

“Karly, I’m scared.”

“About what?”

“Everything.”

Kent hunched over and cradled his face in his hands. “I’m scared because I don’t know what to do. This has been my whole life, and it was taken away from me just like that. I worked so hard for so long to keep my private life private and to keep my career in front of everything. Now it seems like everything is fucking unraveling.”

“It’s not even the stupid picture. It’s not even the fact that I’m gay. It’s that it’s another thing that everyone gets to take from me. What I do in my life should be my business.” Kent sat up straight and turned to his sister. “It’s the fact that everyone is always watching me all the time. I was sixteen playing in the Q, and I had grown men dissecting my strengths and weaknesses on online forms, and it just never stopped. I can’t even talk to people at the grocery store without worrying about seeing a viral story like ‘Hockey star Kent Parson wants animals to suffer because he bought non-pasture-raised eggs at the supermarket.’ You don't know what it’s like, Karly.”

Karly smiled softly, a knowing glint shining in her eye. “I don’t, but I did get pregnant at twenty with a guy I met two months before. I know what it’s like for people to talk about me, to criticize me, to talk about things they don’t know anything about.” 

“Okay, maybe it is about the gay thing.” Kent waved his hand dismissively. “I’m not ashamed or embarrassed. I’m irritated. I know it’s a big thing, but that in and of itself irritates the hell out of me that it is. I’m thrilled that Jack is embracing his position, or whatever, as a role model. I think it’s good for him, honestly. That’s not what I want, though. I don’t want to be the best gay hockey player. I want to be the best hockey player. I was the best hockey player. Period.” 

Karly shook her head. “It’s already true. I don’t know how you don’t see it. Sure, you’re the best hockey player. But if you’re the best hockey player ever, that also means you’re the best hockey player with blonde hair and the best from Buffalo and the best gay hockey player.”

Kent could feel his ire rising. “Those are false equivalencies and you know it.”

“You finally start dating a guy who went to college, and all of a sudden you’re whipping out the Scrabble words?” Karly laughed. 

“What are you talking about? George went to college. He won the College World Series.”

George had been a player with the As who had been sent down for a few months to rehab an injury in the minors. With nearly six inches on Kent and a scruff of a dark beard, he could hardly say no when he had snuck up behind him at the bar in one of Summerlin’s best steakhouses and offered to pay for his glass of red. Both of their parties had been late. Jeff had a cholicky baby. George’s teammate had to drop his girlfriend off at the airport, and traffic was busier than expected on a Wednesday night. By the time Jeff had shown up forty-five minutes later, Kent firmly wished he hadn’t shown up at all. 

“Going out for Raising Cane’s at the ripe old age of twenty-eight hardly counts as dating.”

“Shut up.”

That steakhouse had been the fanciest they had gotten over the course of those eight months before George headed back to Oakland. Most of their time after that was spent on takeout and mixed drinks with a heavy pour in George’s short-term apartment or at Kent’s house. Still, he was warm and funny and the closest thing Kent had to a relationship in years. 

“Kent, you’re going to let this ruin your life because you don’t want it to what? Ruin your legacy?” Karly pressed further. 

“I worked hard for what I earned,”  responded Kent haughtily.  

“No one is saying you didn’t!” His sister exclaimed. “Kent, please. I’m being serious. Kylie and I talk about this all the time. Ever since you’ve been home, we've seen how you look at us and the kids. We know it’s something you want - a family. Don’t let one chapter of your life ruin the rest of it.” 

His sisters had this way of looking at him like no one else in his life, save maybe except for Zimms in rare moments of clarity. They looked at him, and every so often, he realized, Oh, you see me. 

He spent so long policing what he did and didn’t want that it was embarrassing to think that he had been read so easily. Even as he held Harper this morning, her pleasant weight in his arms and Jack’s hand on his back, his thoughts betrayed him. All he could wonder was if he would be happier if all of this were his, if all of this was for real. 

“Everything you want is on the other side of this. How are you going to get married or move in with Jack or do anything that you actually want to do if you aren’t open about it? Do you want to be happy or do you want to try to constantly please thousands of people you’ve never met?” Karly let her question hang in the air as she tightened her grip on his knee. “Only you can answer that.” 

Kent could feel his whole body slump as he exhaled. “What if I fuck it up? I know I was good at hockey. I’m not so sure about everything else.”

“Are you sure you didn’t live on fucking Mars for the last twenty years? Earth to Kent: none of us know what’s going on. We’re just trying our best. Of course, you’re going to fuck it u,p” She punched his arm lazily. It contained none of the heat that the absolute slugs she used to whale on him as a kid. “I do every single day - as a parent, in my relationship, at my job. Did you know how to skate the first time you laced up? No. You practiced. You stuck with it. You made mistakes and got better.”

“I don’t have the leeway to make those kinds of mistakes.” Kent shook his head bitterly. 

Karly laughed, something bitter and unbelieving. “I hope you’re not sipping your own Kool-Aid, Kent. You’re a human being, just like the rest of us.” 

“I’m in my late thirties, Karly. I’ve already ruined this once. I’m not sure if there will be time to fix it if I mess it up again.” 

He thought back to the uncomplicated joy he had seen in that picture of the two of them that leaked earlier that morning. It had been so damning because they were so happy, so clearly in love. It had taken them almost two decades and a true effort to reach that point again. He didn’t know if he had it in him to do it all over, and he certainly didn’t want to find out. 

“Running out of the house isn’t exactly making things better, dude,” retorted Karly plainly. 

“I guess it just hit me tonight, the fact that I can’t go back.” Kent tentatively placed his hand over his sister’s. Both of them were freezing in the cool Buffalo air. “This house doesn’t belong to us anymore, and you know Mom and David’s place was more yours than it was ever mine. You know, my billet parents don’t even live in Rimouski anymore; they snowbirded it to south Florida. Mom showed me on Facebook. Vegas, my house there, that will never be the same if I’m not playing. What’s left? Moving into the townhouse Jack shared with Bittle? ” 

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“There’s nowhere I belong,” Kent whispered bitterly. 

Karly flipped her hand around and grasped at his with a strength he didn’t even know that she had. She nearly crushed his hand with her own. “With us. You belong with us.” 

“Karly, you were at dinner. Is this what I want to commit to for the rest of my life?” He ran his hand through his hair, exasperated. 

He wondered what had been said when he had left, what kind of new and fresh hell that his mother and Jack could come up with together. 

“I don’t know, Kent, is it?” Karly refused to let go of his hand. 

“What the hell does that mean?” 

Karly reached up and grabbed her brother by the cheeks. She tilted Kent’s face swiftly until he had no choice but to look her in the eyes, the same eyes she shared with their sister and mother. “Ken, you’ve had us for so long. You need to trust that we got you. You don’t have to be the captain of the team anymore or the man of the family. You can let us have your back. You don’t have to figure this out alone.”

He bit at the inside of his cheek as she blinked back welling tears. 

“You want to be with Jack? David, Kylie, and I will talk to Mom. You want to find a new career? We’ll figure it out. If you want to go back to Vegas or move to Providence or move somewhere else entirely? I’ll personally pack your stuff. You want to come out? I’ll be the first person cheering you on. You don’t? I’m still in your corner, one hundred percent. Tell me what you want me to do, and I swear to you I’ll do it. No questions asked. It’s the least I can do for you.” 

“But -.” Kent started to protest. 

“But nothing. Kenny, if you never even looked at an ice rink ever again, Jack, your family, your friends. All of us would still love you.” She squeezed his cheeks just like she had before he left for the Q, before he stepped on stage at the Draft, after he won his first Olympic medal. “If these stupid ass hockey players all turn their backs on you tomorrow, it’s their massive loss. You’re the best brother and friend I’ve ever had, and nothing, nothing , can ever change that.”

“I’m the only brother you’ve ever had,” Kent remarked wetly.

“Yeah, and we wouldn’t trade you for the world.” Karly wrapped her arms around her brother, and they sat there for a moment, wrung out and exhausted.

“All of you?” For the first time all day, Kent could feel a hot trail of tears carve their way down his cheeks. 

“Well,” Karly let him go to dab at her own eyes. “I think Taylor would be a bit upset that she doesn’t have anyone to play pick-up games with anymore. But between all the hockey players you and Zimmer know, we could probably find someone to take your spot. Although they probably won’t be as cool as Uncle Ken.”

“Thanks.” Kent finally stood up. His feet sank into the damp earth. Across the street, someone stirred in the window to what used to be his childhood bedroom. A kid, no taller than five feet, seemed to have drifted by. “Do you mean what you said, Karly?”

“Every goddamn word, Kenny.” She said as she launched herself upward. She took one last hit of her vape. “Let’s go home.”

“What about my car?” Kent gestured to the Porsche parked practically sideways in the beaten-down lot a few hundred feet from them. It shone in the bright moonlight. Steven’s work truck was sloppily parked next to it. 

“Leave it parked here,” Karly shrugged as she fished her keys out of her pocket. “We’ll come get it tomorrow morning.”

“You want me to leave my Porsche parked in this public lot?” 

“You’ve got insurance. It’ll be fine. Just get in the car and let me take you home.”

He was too tired to argue with her. Instead, he fell in line with her and climbed up into the passenger side of the truck’s cab. Attached to one of the air vents, clipped carefully with some crystal butterfly that he definitely didn’t pick out, Steven had a Polaroid of him and Karly smiling, baby Bryson in her arms, surrounded by their older children. It caught the cool moonlight. 

“I do love you, guys. I hope you know that.”

“I never doubted it. Not even for a second.”

Karly handed him her phone as she fiddled with the keys in the ignition. Their family group chat seemed to ping constantly. Jack’s contact, Zimmer Zimmer, chimed periodically too with a stream of nervous texts. Kent swiped them all away to scroll through Spotify. Karly put the car into gear and zipped away. Kent clicked on a song and leaned back as the open chords filled the cabin. Karly, picking up on what he had selected, rolled down the windows and turned the music up. Kent couldn’t help but smile as the frigid breeze blew over his face, and his favorite artist shouted from Steven’s pristine car radio, “It’s Britney, bitch.” The two of them sang along.