Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Kip Grady/Scott Hunter

Characters:

Kip Grady, Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Matti Jalo, Maria Villanueva, Elena Rygg

Additional Tags:

Not Canon Compliant, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Mild Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Smut, Sex, Grief, Big Adult Feelings, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Kip Grady Dogwalker

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-03-26 Completed: 2026-04-07 Words: 50,665 Chapters: 12/12

through the high noon sun

Summary

“What makes him your best client?” Kip asks.

“He’s nice, his dog is well behaved, the apartment is insane, and he has a very set schedule. It’s not a daily gig, it’s kind of random. You have to stay at his place in the Upper West Side a few times a week, but again, the apartment is amazing. He’s some kind of athlete? So the schedule is also nuts. But he gives, like, six months of dates in advance.” Maria answers.

A set schedule of dates works for Kip, who is, these days, trying to make his own schedule.

“And,” Maria smiles wide, “I think you’ll like him.”

That beatific expression will come back to him, five days later, when he meets Scott Hunter for the first time.

---

Kip Grady is a PhD student who takes a side-gig walking Scott Hunter's dog. Along the way: the precarity of academia vs hockey; keeping something good at arm's length despite an innate desire for safety and love; gratuitous metaphors about both.

Notes

What happened here is that I wondered, "What if Scott had a dog! And what if Kip was his dogwalker! Fun!" Then I fell down a series of wells and wrote fifty thousand words about it.

I would be remiss if I did not emphasize: nothing happens to the dog in this story. The dog sits on a couch and watches two idiots fall in love.

This fic is complete; I'll be editing and publishing this one chapter every day (to every other day, giving myself some wiggle room).

Chapter 1: SEPTEMBER 2016, KIP

Chapter Notes

Hark, our heroes become acquainted.

For Kip Grady, perpetual student, September is the start of the year. It’s a rainier-than-usual month—today the rain is coming down even though the sun is shining. None of this is visible in the permanent dark of the Kingfisher. Kip and Maria are celebrating Maria finishing nursing school. Kip met Maria a little over three years ago, when he was in the early stages of his PhD program, still readjusting to New York after a tumultuous year away. 

Kip and Maria are at a crossroads, in a sense. Kip has finished his coursework and is now facing down the uphill battle of writing a dissertation, researching, and staying relevant to faculty and peers. Maria, meanwhile, is moving on to the plans she told Kip about the day they met. 

Their first meeting three years ago was in one of those strange liminal city spaces, only accessible through a series of unremarkable doors. They met in the hallway of an office building that hadn’t been renovated since the ‘50s, whose Mad Men charm had long faded. The uncomfortable chairs in a wood-paneled hallway were as good a place as any to befriend someone, and Kip was a sucker for making a new friend. They were in that hallway for the same purpose: the first round of interviews for a high-end, invite-only pet-care service for rich people. Or as the website said: “clientele who require security and discretion.” The company required a background check, an interview, and multiple references. 

In that hallway, they bonded over their long-term goals and plans for that summer. Maria was coming off a side job as a personal assistant but told Kip she’d rather “deal with dog shit.” Their interviews went well; Kip invited her to the Kingfisher for drinks afterwards. She’d quickly installed herself amongst Kip’s non-grad school friends. 

Today, they’re back at the Kingfisher, sharing a plate of stale fries, toasting Maria’s future and commiserating on Kip’s present. Kip is still, technically, on the roster for the dog-walking agency. The tension of his comps, language exams, and then a research trip in France cleared his schedule. He has no current clients, and Maria, kindly, is handing out her client roster to friends. Because Kip is one of her best friends, she has offered up her best client. Kip is cobbling together an unbalanced writing schedule that a single, regular dog-walking client could fit right into.

“What makes him your best client?” Kip asks. 

“He’s nice, his dog is well behaved, the apartment is insane, and he has a very set schedule. It’s not a daily gig, it’s kind of random. You have to stay at his place in the Upper West Side a few times a week, but again, the apartment is amazing. He’s some kind of athlete? So the schedule is also nuts. But he gives, like, six months of dates in advance.” Maria answers. 

A set schedule of dates works for Kip, who is, these days, trying to make his own schedule. 

“And,” Maria smiles wide, “I think you’ll like him.”

That beatific expression will come back to him, five days later, when he meets Scott Hunter for the first time. 

✶✶

One of the perks of being a high-end dog walker is getting to see the inside of buildings Kip would otherwise have no access to. He greets the doorman in a shiny lobby of a luxury new build in the Upper West Side, informing him that his name is Kip Grady and Mr. Hunter should be expecting him. The doorman consults something on the other side of the counter, calls up, speaking in a hushed voice to someone on a landline telephone. A moment later, he nods and waves Kip to the elevator. 

The elevator has no buttons: just a smooth black panel for an electric key fob. When the doors close, the elevator automatically delivers Kip skyward, no buttons needing pressed. He cannot tell what floor he’s being sent to, but the ride lasts a good minute or two as he is sent hurtling straight up. When the doors finally open, it’s onto a small, plain foyer with a single door straight ahead labeled PH. He steps out of the elevator: the only things in the white-walled space is an umbrella stand and a tidy pile of deconstructed cardboard boxes on their way out. There’s no doorbell, but Kip assumes it was Mr. Hunter on the phone with the doorman. He knocks and cracks open the notably heavy door, calling “Hello?” as he does so. 

From somewhere farther in the apartment, a deep man’s voice calls out: “Come on in, sorry, I’m behind schedule today.”

An adorable dog barks twice and then rushes to greet him. She doesn’t jump: she twists her little body around him three times, sniffing, and then she backs up to watch him from a few feet away, keeping her head low to watch him.  

“Hello, Blue,” Kip says to the dog. This is the extent of the information he has. Address and names. Owner: Mr. S. Hunter. Dog: Blue. He expected a blue heeler, but she is some kind of unidentifiable mutt with a short dense coat of red-blonde fur, dark black around her nose and mouth, with one ear that stands straight up, the other with a slight flop forward, like she’s halfway through asking a question. Kip holds out his hand, palm up. Her head stays low, between her shoulder blades, back paws firmly in place on the threshold between the entrance and the rest of the apartment as she leans slightly forward to sniff him but doesn’t advance any further. 

“Shoes on or off?” Kip calls into the apartment, no sign of the occupant. Most of the apartment is blocked by an enormous, expensive-looking built-in, through which sunlight, unobstructed by any nearby building, is filtering through on this rare sunny September morning. 

“Off, please,” says the voice, getting closer. Kip is taking off his shoes when the man rounds the corner into the entryway. Kip’s brain skitters to a sudden stop. He has had a vague mental image of “professional athlete” per Maria’s description—thick-necked jock who looks right through him. Very notably, not Kip’s type. The man rounding the corner is athletic, tall, muscled, with big, sad eyes. Probably the same age as Kip. Show-stoppingly handsome. More pressingly in this exact moment is the fact that this future client has just returned home from some kind of exercise. 

He is wearing skin-tight athleticwear, pasted to his body with sweat. Kip’s Art History brain jumps to a memory of Corradini’s veiled sculptures: the curves and contours of a breathing human body visible through clinging diaphanous fabric, impossibly carved out of stone. The kind of statues that seem like they will flutter alive with breath in a second. His brain jumps to a lecture about eroticism in art: that concealment is more provocative than full reveal. Put another way: the sluttiest thing a man can wear is not nothing, but a skintight shirt that tells you exactly the height of his nipples and the shape of his abdominal muscles. Kip realizes his mouth is open. He closes it, pretending to be distracted by taking off his sneakers. 

Scott has also come to a sudden halt. One hand on the wall divider, the other hanging loosely at his side. Blue is now behind his legs, staring at Kip and using Scott’s legs as a shield, head still below her shoulders. 

“Hi,” Kip says, into the awkward silence, raising to stand. “Kip Grady, nice to meet you, Mr. Hunter.” 

He puts out his hand, and Scott does a half shake of his head, like a dog knocking the thoughts around in its head. Recomposed, he extends his hand to shake Kip’s. It is warm, calloused. 

“Please, call me Scott. Sorry, I was expecting… someone else?” Scott says. The expression on his face is unreadable. 

“Did I get the time wrong? I double-checked,” Kip goes to fish out his phone. 

“No. No. I looked at your profile on the website. Chris G?”

Kip laughs. Chris G, another dogwalker, is an older guy who looks like Santa Claus. “Oh, I’m also Chris G. But I’m listed on the site as Kip, to avoid confusion.”

Confusion that is Maria’s doing. She must have given Scott Kip’s full name. Her saintly, pleased face from the other day floats into his mind. Kip is going to kill her. 

“Is that a problem?” Kip asks.

“No, no, sorry. Come in, come in. Can I get you anything? Water, coffee?” 

“A glass of water would be great,” Kip says, finally rounding the corner into the apartment. Blue watches him with interest, still just out of reach. As Maria promised, it’s an incredible apartment, a huge open-plan space; the view and sunlight are startling. A healthy, green monstera plant in the living room proves how much daylight the place gets. The apartment has a corporate attractiveness. It nice but not beautiful, decorated neutrally with hotel-like blandness. It’s an apartment that tells Kip exactly nothing about Scott Hunter, who is now pouring Kip a glass of water, other than that he is properly wealthy. Rich enough to have hired someone to decorate and furnish the entire place all at once. The finishing and furniture are in matching tones. Everything, from the counters to throw blankets, looks as though it was delivered in the same order. New, unscuffed furniture, a gleaming kitchen. The art looks like it was picked out of a catalogue for someone who would barely look at it. A coldly beautiful space without any grit to make it memorable. 

Standing at the fridge, the space’s most interesting feature: the defined muscles of Scott’s back flex as he places a Brita filter in the fridge. Scott’s face, his contemplative expression, has all the intrigue that the space around him is missing. Task at hand, Grady, he thinks, digging a nail into his palm. 

“Thanks,” Kip says aloud, accepting the glass of water, careful to avoid touching Scott’s hand for a second time. 

Scott leans a hip against the counter as Kip sips the water, typing rapidly on his phone. The room is silent. Kip forces himself to stare anywhere else but Scott. Blue is standing between them, watching with her head cocked, the bent ear flopping straight in her interest. Kip sips his water and turns to the rest of the apartment. The large built-in has some traces of personality: a handful of family photos, a stack of well-worn airport thrillers, and then several generic sculptural objects that fill the space without conveying any meaning. It’s been six months since Kip's last dog walked for anyone. He’s trying to get his bearings again. The typical setup for dog walking: be quiet, unobtrusive, and an invisible hand to make life easier for a person with the wallet to pay for the help.  

Scott interrupts his snooping: “Oh, here you are,” he says, holding his phone up. On the screen is Kip’s listing and photo on the dog walking service website. 

“Oh. Yeah, sorry about that. But, proof I've been vetted, background check passed,” Kip says. 

“Glad you’re not here to kill me. Thank god, it would be embarrassing to have invited a serial killer in,” laughs Scott. “Blue is not a good guard dog.”

“I—what?” Kip says. 

Scott closes his eyes and does that same half shake of his head, before opening his eyes and smiling apologetically, “Ignore me. Too many podcasts.”

“Oh, I get that,” Kip answers. Scott’s eyes are distracting. Kip swallows and says, “So, tell me about Blue.”

“She’s a pretty easy dog, honestly,” Scott says fondly. Blue is standing pressed to Scott’s leg. Scott goes to pet her, and she lifts her paw in the air and looks up at him expectantly. He scratches behind her ear.

“Does she know any commands?” Kip asks. 

Scott holds up a finger to say wait a second. He turns and brings out a bag of dog treats from a kitchen cabinet. The counters are otherwise spotless, a decorative jar of unused kitchen utensil next to a spotless gas stove. Scott opens the treats and demonstrates a series of basic commands: sit, stay, leave it. He looks sheepishly up at Kip and says, “Dance,” and Blue jumps on her back legs. “Spin-o-rama,” he says, and she does a full turn. He puts his hands down by his side and says, “Hat trick!” and Blue taps her nose on his left, then right, then left palm again. Scott stands, looks proudly in a dorky way, and then he tosses a treat underhanded, and she catches it mid-air. 

“Here,” Scott says, and holds out the bag of treats to Kip. 

Kip walks over and accepts it. He takes out a treat and holds it out to Blue, who takes it gently, still staring at Scott. 

“She’s a little shy,” Scott says. “But yeah. She’s pretty low maintenance. She gets walked twice a day. She’s good at home for up to eight hours, as long as she has a good run in the morning. I take her out myself when I’m home. I travel about six, seven days a month during the season, but we usually fly straight back after games. It’s all on the schedule.”

“Right, Maria said you’re… an athlete?” Kip asks.

“I play for the Admirals, yeah,” Scott says. 

Once again, Kip thinks of Maria saying, “an athlete or something,” and feels personally victimized. His dad was watching the Admirals’ pre-season game last night. The data point that there’s a Hunter on the team registers somewhere in the back of his mind, like learning the answer to a round of trivia after the fact—not helpful, maybe more frustrating than anything. 

“Oh, okay, cool,” Kip says, deeply uncool. 

“I know it’s kind of a crazy life to have a dog,” Scott says with a laugh. “But I didn’t mean to get a dog. She sort of chose me.” 

“Oh yeah? What’s the story?” Kip asks and glances at the edge of a very white, very pristine couch, unsure if sitting is appropriate. He notices another stack of books on the coffee table, the white label of the New York Public Library on their spine. Another thriller, and books he cannot recognize. Something that looks like non-fiction. 

Scott crosses the apartment to the farther branch of the large sectional, sitting down heavily. Blue hops onto the couch next to him, circling and then lying down in a donut shape next to him. She rests her chin on Scott’s knee and stares into the middle distance, pointedly ignoring them both. Kip can only imagine the cleaning regime that allows this dog on such a white couch. 

“I was on vacation in Mexico two years ago. She kept hanging around, coming to me every day. Like a vacation buddy. One day she showed up and was really sick. I took her to a vet, and everyone said I was crazy. Turns out, she had gotten into a smoothie stand on the beach and eaten almost an entire crate of blueberries. By the time I paid the vet bill, I was looking up the paperwork to bring her back.”

“Blue, short for blueberry?” Kip asks. 

“Her official paperwork name is Blueberry Hunter,” Scott says, sounding a little embarrassed to reveal this detail. The expression on Scott’s face when he looks at his dog makes Kip feel a little crazy—like looking at something so charming scrambles the emotions in his brain and turns it into near anger. 

Scott cracks his knuckles loudly and then pivots into logistical details: diet, routine, and expectations. Blue, Kip learns, has free rein of the place. Kip makes a joke about her enjoying the view, and Scott laughs. It’s a great laugh, and Kip is immediately desperate to hear it again. It is becoming clear to him that he needs to get laid because he is clearly going a little crazy. 

Scott, on the other hand, needs someone to walk Blue for all his game days, evening walks on home games, at least one overnight a week. On top of that, occasional weeklong dog sitting for something Scott calls “roadies.” 

“I know it’s a crazy schedule. Would that work for you? I have a calendar of dates that need to be covered, which evenings, which nights, and which mornings, from now until the end of April.” Scott says, and smiles with a wince. “Sorry if that’s intense. I’ve only worked with Maria, so I don’t really know what’s normal with this. But she recommended you.”

“No, that’s fine,” Kip nods. “My schedule is… well, it’s not flexible. I’m studying at Columbia, and I live in Brooklyn. If you need additional coverage, we can work something out as long as I have 48 hours' heads up.”

“Sounds good to me,” Scott nods. “What are you studying?”

Kip digests the fact that he’s been asked a personal question and tries to place Scott’s interest somewhere neat and orderly in his mind, not to be overanalyzed or misunderstood, before he answers, “I’m doing a PhD in Art History.”

“That’s so cool,” Scott says with total earnestness. “I didn’t finish college, but my favourite classes were history. You have to write, like a book for a PhD, right?”

“Yeah. Ha, sort of. A dissertation, so a really long essay. Multiple chapters. That’s what I’m working on most days.”

“What’s it about?” Scott asks. He leans back, giving the distinct impression that he is more comfortable once he is no longer the one answering questions. 

Kip is unsure how the answer will land. There are multiple ways to answer the question: long-winded, boring, the full spiel of his area of interest and specialty. There’s the answer he wants to give, the one that pushes ever so gently into the space between them, provokes him. Scott does not seem like a stereotypical athlete, the kind of guy who made gym class miserable. Like a dare, Kip goes with the pithy answer: “Queer aesthetics in Baroque painting.”

He watches for the reaction on Scott’s face. Kip cannot get a read on him at all. Scott’s jaw flexes, like he’s swallowing the words down, and then he nods in reaction. “Oh, okay.” There’s a whole journey happening on his face, which then clears into a friendly, maybe pretend casual smile as he says, “Can you explain what that means in dumb jock?”

Without thinking, Kip laughs and says, “You don’t seem like a dumb jock to me.”

Scott holds Kip’s gaze a half beat too long after the compliment. The eye contact registers in some deep, animal part of Kip’s brain, rewiring some data points. 

Kip breaks first, saying, “Baroque, that’s an art style from the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Do you know the Three Musketeers? I'm sort of studying that era, in France but—paintings from a specific artistic influence, and the, uh. Sensibilities of that artist. The paintings are very dramatic. Sublimated sensuality and desire. The colours are stark, really dark shadows that tell your eye where to look. And then the subject matter is always moving, doing something. Not just a person posing for a portrait.” 

“Oh,” says Scott slightly edgily. “That’s really interesting.”

“Thanks,” Kip says. “I hope it is, it’s basically my life’s work at this point.” 

“Do you write about any, any artists I would have heard of?” Scott asks. To his surprise, Scott has brought his phone from his lap. 

“The most famous is Caravaggio? He inspired the style of art I’m studying.” Kip supplies. 

“How do you spell that?” Scott asks. Kip spells it, and Blue lifts her head and turns to look at Kip, slowly blinking her big brown eyes, cat-like. Kip watches Scott, his lips are unconsciously parted as he scrolls the screen. 

“Oh! I’ve seen this one,” he says, interrupting Kip’s thoughts as he turns his phone to show Kip the painting Judith Beheading Holofernes. 

“That’s him, he has a lot of beheadings.”

“Gruesome,” says Scott with a wide smile, closing his phone. 

“Yeah, he can be,” Kip laughs. The flattery of Scott’s attention settles warmly in his stomach. 

Scott smiles unguardedly and says, “Well, it sounds like Blue will be in good hands. Maybe she can learn something about art.” 

✶✶

Before the doors even shut on the elevator, Kip pulls his phone from his pocket.

K: so. 

K: why did you not tell me your client is the hottest man i’ve ever seen?

M: Oh…. whoops, I guess I forgot.

K: girl

K: i could have used a warning

M: Hmmm thought you needed a surprise tho

M: You’ve been so busy 

M: How did it go? 

K: i start next week 

The elevator brings Kip back into the lobby and back out into the street. He rolls his shoulders on the walk to the train, headphones in for the hour ride home. Many of his childhood friends live with their parents, and at least one of his grad school acquaintances. It is the logical result of living here and making compromises. He thinks about this compromise during tedious transfer times, or when his train is delayed, or when service is down to 20 minutes at a time, or when he has to find somewhere free to read a book between events because it is absolutely not worth it to go all the way home. So: every day. Certainly now, more acutely, having been spat out of a luxury penthouse of a man not much older than him. For a moment, on the couch, Scott’s interest, the lingering attention of his big hazel eyes, made him feel invited into Scott’s world. 

The humming satisfaction of Scott’s questions stays with him almost halfway to Brooklyn as he zones out, book in lap, watching the lights blur in the subway tunnels. By the time Kip is transferring trains on the last leg of his commute home, navigating jostling shoulders and running down the stairs past slow walkers to make his train in time, the real world has kicked in: deadlines, emails to answer, and bills that Scott’s money will help cover. Don’t be an idiot, Grady. He settles into a seat for the last leg of his trip home, staring out the dark train window, remembering the cold apartment and the contradiction of Scott’s warm laugh. 

Chapter End Notes

This is Corradini sculpture Kip is thinking of, apparently modeled after the artist's mother. Neat! This (warning for stylized violence) is the Caravaggio painting Scott smiles at. Neat!

Art history, hockey, and New York City are represented here via vibes-based Google-searching. The title of this fic is from a little-known Canadian band, Wolf Parade and their song You Are a Runner and I Am My Father's Son.

An eternal word of thanks to woodenducks for making this better, my friend [redacted], who made it worse, and latestfeature for answering questions about academia; everything I got wrong is my fault.

Comments feed the little validation hamster in the hamster wheel of my mind run. Please feed him, he could starve.

Chapter 2: OCTOBER 2016, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

Kip walks the dog. Scott looks at an orange peel.

Chapter Notes

In any normal circumstances, Scott would never let a man who looks like Kip Grady into his apartment. His apartment is his escape from the world, the place he lets himself use the full capacity of his lungs to take a deeper breath of air. The only gay things in his apartment are the porn on his phone and some well-hidden sex toys in his wardrobe. Oh, and Scott himself. 

But Kip walked right in, and Scott let him stay. 

He saves the number as Kip - Dogwalker and then does something else he really shouldn’t do. He Googles Kip, finds his profile on Columbia’s website. In it, Kip is wearing a pair of glasses, and he has a closed-mouth smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. Scott idly zooms into the photo, and his brain fills in the idea of the same face at an anonymous club where it would be safe to invite him somewhere: a bathroom, a hotel room. He shouldn’t assume but—he Googled ‘queer aesthetics’ after Kip left. He’s only ever heard that word used as an insult, and he didn’t want to assume. 

Scott looks at the profile again. The page has an embarrassing number of words he’s never heard of before, followed by awards Kip has won, articles he’s written, and jobs at museums, mostly in New York. He goes back to the photo and zooms again, the face filling his screen. Scott’s lips feel dry: his mouth has been open too long. He closes the tab and then deletes the search history for good measure. It is a good thing that he did not see Kip somewhere anonymous. 

The hockey season begins a few days later, the ultimate distraction. Scott has a good feeling about this year, but he doesn’t want to jinx it by imagining details too clearly. Planning doesn’t usually go that well for him. The team has shored up inconsistencies in their defense with a last-minute, pre-season trade that brought Matti Jalo up from Tampa. On his end, the conditioning work Scott did over the summer has paid off: he’s skating fast and light, with the energy he’ll need to make it through the long grind ahead. Maybe it’ll be a good year. 

Their first away game is New Jersey. A distinct advantage of the Metro Division is how often he returns to his home after a game–two rivals in driving distance, more within an hour flight of New York. For someone who spent six years sleeping either on bed sheets and pillow cases that had his name written in full in Sharpie on them lest they be stolen on laundry day, or in a cramped spare room at his grandmother’s house, it means something to him to sleep in a bed no one expects him to give back. 

Playing New Jersey tonight means Newark–he’ll be home by midnight, no need for an overnight dog sitter. But it will be Kip’s first time covering Blue’s evening walk. 

They go back and forth to arrange a time between Scott’s practice, when he needs to leave, and the class Kip is teaching in the afternoon. Technically, Scott could leave the fob with his doorman, but it’s easier for Blue if a stranger doesn’t just show up unannounced and take her out. Kip has only met her once. 

The first time Kip dropped in, Scott was embarrassed to still be in his workout clothing, looking like a sticky maniac. He had immediately made a joke about serial killers and then asked too many questions. Bad first impression, and he isn’t very good at making a second one—he does not have a lot of experience in that department. Most people he meets already know who he is, but Kip didn’t seem to. And most of the strangers he interacts with, he doesn’t need to impress with a second meeting. Another thing Scott and his dog have in common: a wariness of novelty.

This time, he’s ready in his game-day suit when Kip arrives. Kip looks different than last time: more formal, a crisp button-down shirt tucked into jeans (trim waist, broad shoulders, his brain adds). He has a messenger bag strapped to his chest as well as a plastic bag that brings with it the smell of food. 

“Sorry,” Kip says as he slips off his shoes, “I came straight from class and missed lunch.” 

“Please, eat,” Scott says, with a wave of his hand. In the entryway, he points out Blue’s harness and leash. Reminds Kip where the food is kept, the routine of getting in and out, the route he usually takes, and the spots nearby that have treats that mean she’ll try to go in. 

Kip, meanwhile, has pulled out a sandwich and an orange. While Scott talks, Kip carefully unpeels the orange in one long, unbroken twist of pith and skin. He sets it on the counter and begins to split out the segments, eating one as Scott finishes his explanation. 

“Want a piece?” Kip asks, holding one out. 

Scott hesitates, the ease of the ask and the unexpected intimacy of it runs straight up him like he’s a zipper being pulled shut. He takes the slice and says. “Thanks. Gotta watch my pre-game diet, but a slice can’t hurt.” 

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Kip says. “New Jersey, right?” 

“Yeah, we’re going to crush them,” Scott says confidently. 

“Well, hopefully the orange didn’t interrupt your pre-game rituals,” Kip jokes. “I know athletes are very strict about that.”

“No. Well. Yeah, totally true.”

“What are yours? Am I disrupting them right now?”

“No, I’m not strict about them or anything. I do have the same lunch every game day,” Scott confesses, “And a couple of songs I always listen to in the locker room. And, um, I have to say goodbye to Blue, properly. But that’s normal—there’s a science to it. Can’t be too much or it’s hard to maintain, can’t be too little or it’s random, and you’ll lose.”

“Oh, that sounds scientific,” Kip laughs. “What’s on your playlist? Or is it a secret?”

Scott shakes his head, “No, I play it for the whole team, so definitely not. I can tell you, but don’t reveal my secret to winning on any hockey podcasts.”

“There are hockey podcasts?” Kip asks with total seriousness.

Scott laughs out loud, “Yeah, yeah, there are a lot.” 

“So what’s on the playlist?” Kip asks again. 

“Nothing groundbreaking. Metal, punk, that kind of stuff. Eye of the Tiger. There’s a Rage Against the Machine song the guys always want to hear,” Scott says. 

“Oh, nice, some classic Tony Hawk Pro Skater music,” Kip says, a laugh sharp in his voice. 

Scott nods, “Yeah, basically. I should just search that on Spotify. We need to change it up.”

“The Admirals are welcome for my contribution,” says Kip.

Scott glances at his watch, realizing his car will be here soon. Normally, at this point, the half hour before his car arrives, he is all focused, distracting himself by going over plays, checking his notes. It feels surprisingly good to let himself breathe—his notes will be waiting for him when he gets into the car waiting for him downstairs. 

“Well, I should go,” Scott says. “Text me how the walk goes.” 

“Of course! I always do,” Kip calls. Scott waves goodbye. Blue follows him to the door, and he kneels down to nuzzle her head for good luck, whispers his usual: goodbye sweet girl, wish me luck, to which she licks his forehead, right by the hairline. He steps out into the foyer and summons the elevator. Blue watches as the door closes, Kip indistinct on the other side of the divider. 

✶✶

K: walk went well! she made us go to the bar on the corner, they were happy to see her

(Image: Blue in elevator, mouth open in an anxious pant, Kip’s feet are visible in the mirror) 

(Image: Blue sitting patiently by the counter of a bar)

S: Thanks for the updates! 

K: crazy goal in OT

K: congrats on the win

Scott is in the back of his town car with Matti Jalo. They’ve been riding up to Tarrytown together for the whole pre-season training and exhibition games, and Scott is used to being trapped with a chatty Finn. But Jalo had sat in total silence on the way out to Newark, telling Scott that his pre-game ritual was some kind of meditation. Scott wasn’t sure if this was a joke, but appreciated the quiet. 

Now, though, Jalo is as chatty as ever. The transfer was sudden, and he’s wound up renting a place a few blocks south of Scott, which means they’ll be seeing a lot of each other this season. 

Scott is not even aware of his face when Jalo says, “Oh ho, something has got you smiling at your phone!”

“Oh, my dog walker just sent me a photo,” Scott looks up, surprised, and answers. 

“You have a dog? Can I see?” Jalo says, already craning his neck. 

Scott clicks into a photo and shows it to his teammate. Jalo nods appreciatively, “Good dog. I want a dog, but I think I will have to wait until I have settled a bit.”

They talk about how Jalo is doing with the move, their neighbourhood, living in New York after moving up from Tampa, how the two cities compare, until Jalo is dropped off. Scott pulls out his phone again as the car snakes slowly up Broadway. 

S: Didn’t realize you watched! Thanks

Scott hopes he isn’t being weird. He never really texted Maria when she was walking Blue. 

The car pulls up to his building, and he clambers out, a little stiff. This early in the season, he finds it hard to get to bed after a game and press—too much energy, brain racing late into the night. He decides to do some stretching before bed, shake it out. At his door, Blue greets him with her usual enthusiasm, gentle whines of joy, winding around his legs. He steps out of his dress shoes and sinks to his knees, greeting her, enjoying the relief of being home, being welcomed back by a creature so happy to see him. Her cold nose presses into the side of his temple as he rubs their foreheads together. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket. 

K: caught the end with some friends

K: seems important to support blue’s dad!

Scott goes through his post-game routine: suit off and hung up in the dry cleaning bag for his housekeeper to take out. He finds part of a torn notebook page in his suit pocket, smeared with ink and unreadable, and sets it aside. He washes his face, flosses, brushes his teeth, and changes into old basketball shorts, no shirt. At the end of his routine, he carries the paper to the kitchen, pulls out the drawer that contains both recycling and trash. 

On top of the trash, coiled neatly, is the orange peel. There’s no other indication that someone else has been here: Kip took his sandwich, the place is otherwise spotless. 

Scott takes the orange peel out, holding it aloft in the dim glow of his kitchen’s under-cabinet lights. He admires the perfect helix of skin, pith. The only sounds in his modern, glass apartment are the distant muffle of traffic outside and the scratch of Blue’s claws against her dog bed, as she dreams inside. Under the kitchen lights, he spins the orange peel, watching the way the lights shine off the dimpled skin. Then he drops it in the trash, ready to stretch out the aches of the game.  

✶✶

Scott’s next away game—the Islanders, just outside the city—is close enough that he doesn’t overlap with Kip at all. Kip lets himself in, walks Blue, and leaves without a trace. He sends Scott an update about the walk, how it went, and another photo of Blue, sniffing a flower pot. 

Scott plays a home game in between, which they win. He wonders if Kip watched. 

A few days later is their first true away game, a quick overnighter against the Arches in St. Louis—they’ll fly in the day before and fly home late that night. Scott is trying to decide if he should send Kip a lengthy text covering what he needs to know about staying overnight. He tries to remember everything he told Maria, or anything she asked over the years. Or, is it reasonable to coordinate another visit and just explain in person? That would be easier. And then Kip texts. 

K: what time do you leave friday? I’ll be done with class at noon, if it’s easier for me to swing by before you head out 

S: My car arrives at 1. If you can make it over before then? Can show you around etc. 

K: that works! see you 12:30 saturday 

Scott is sitting on his couch, mid-afternoon on Thursday, after practice and before a game. Kip will also come tonight, while he is out. He could leave written instructions now. There is not really half an hour of “showing around” he can do in a one-bedroom apartment. But he won’t argue the point. Between wondering if Kip watched the game a few days ago and overthinking the overnight instructions, he has been thinking about Kip too much. 

Last year, in a vague bid toward play well-being, the league conducted some kind of general mental health survey. He’d been asked how often he felt certain emotions. He’d struggled to answer them: he didn’t really think about his feelings like that, like things he could name and conduct into a countable order.

One of the questions had stuck out: how often do you feel alone? He’d answered honestly, which was not very often. During the hockey season, he rarely goes more than a few waking hours without someone needing to talk to him. Practice, games, Admirals management, his personal management, team meetings, team obligations, social events, endorsements, philanthropy, press. Like every similar attempt before, the survey had not amounted to much. Some vague promises of more resources, links in an email no one opened. The survey had been integrated into running jokes for a little while: do you often dream about different outcomes—yeah, having better defense on our third line. Within a few months, it was forgotten entirely. But the question about feeling alone lingered. 

He isn’t alone a lot, but he is lonely all the time. 

With two hours to go before the game, Scott fills the time answering emails, plays a video game, and jerks off to a guy who looks nothing like Kip. He throws the tissue in the trash and takes the whole garbage out. He does his last-minute rituals, saying goodbye properly to Blue. He arrives in his lobby a full five minutes before his car, where he makes small talk with his doorman, who has, as always, put a bet on the Admirals to win. 

✶✶

On Friday, Kip arrives at 12:30 on the dot. Scott has no practice for this travel day: he has a long call with a brand PR team and then works out, this time with enough time to shower, tidy, and change. Kip has a key fob now, no need to notify the front desk, but Kip does anyway, giving Scott an extra moment to prepare. He has a moment of panic—where should he stand? Should he greet Kip at the door? What did he do with Maria? Almost certainly, he never thought twice about it. He should have given himself something to do. Is it weird if he’s just sitting here when Kip walks in? Blue watches him pace with her head wary, eyes tracking him. 

“Sorry girl,” he says to her. “I’m being an idiot.”

She turns her head sharply, and the elevator has arrived. Scott doesn’t need a doorbell because Blue greets every visitor; she is his living alert system. Kip walks in, and Scott is pleased to see how much more excited she is to see Kip, even after a week. She does her usual excited greeting, and then stays by Kip’s side, near but not touching, as he walks into the apartment. 

“Hey, welcome. You must be giving her a lot of treats,” Scott says from the couch where he decided to sit, casually. 

“I’ve been taking her to all her favourite spots. I think I’m her favourite chauffeur now,” Kip says. He’s dressed similarly to last time, this time with a small canvas duffel bag on a long strap, the opposite side of the messenger bag. The two bags form an X across his chest, highlighting how broad his chest is. He’s also wearing the glasses from the university website listing, which is even more of a problem. 

Scott stands to greet him. 

“Oh! That makes sense, she thinks you’re her town car,” Scott says with a laugh as Blue skitters across the apartment back to him. She jumps up on the couch next to where he’s standing, her bent ear flopping, like she’s telling Scott that a friend has arrived. He scratches her chin and says, “Just like your dad, huh? Got your own fancy car service.”

“I guess you take a lot of those?” Kip asks. He’s carried the duffel into the apartment with him and sets it down by the couch. 

“Half my life is spent in the backseat of a car someone else is driving. We practice about forty minutes out of the city, so I’m going up there and back five days a week—sometimes I drive but more often I just take the car and nap. We fly out of Westchester, and I always just get the lift there. So a lot of town cars.” Scott explains. “Games, at least I can just take the subway.”

“You take the subway to games?” Kip asks. 

“Do you want to drive to the Garden during rush hour?” Scott says. 

“I guess not,” Kip agrees. “I just figured you’d be… well, noticed.”

Scott shrugs, “Yeah, but that’s part of the trade off. Most of the guys live outside the city, closer to practice, and the airport. But I,” he pauses, unsure of how to articulate it. “I like living in the city. Even if it means extra travel.”

“Hey, I get it,” Kip says. 

“Sorry, that was a big info dump. I’m not complaining about all the fancy cars!” he says defensively. “It’s an amazing life, and we are privileged to have it.”

Kip blinks at him and crosses his arms, “I feel like I just watched you slip into press mode. Impressive. How do you feel about your chances against the Arches, Hunter?”

“Ha. Sorry, old habits,” Scott says and runs a hand through his hair. It has happened again, Kip making him feel totally unmoored, like Kip talking about his work and telling him he doesn’t seem dumb, cutting straight through his defenses. “Okay, well. I guess you’ve seen most of the place already.”

Scott gives Kip the tour, as much as there’s left to give. He tells Kip he can use anything in the kitchen, use any pans or plates he needs, eat any snacks in the cupboard, and anything in the fridge except for the stack of meal prep containers. There isn’t much, anyway.  

“Wow, organized,” is all Kip says when he flashes the cupboards and the fridge. 

He shows Kip the bedroom, tells him where the towels are, and not to worry about the sheets; his housekeeper has flipped the bed and will come at 10 am the day after the game to clean up. He motions to the en-suite, saying, “You can imagine,” which makes Kip laugh. 

He tells Kip he can use the building’s gym and shows Kip his TV, how to work the expensive sound system he had installed one bored winter a couple of years ago.

“This is where I play my Tony Hawk music,” he jokes. 

“Oh yeah? How did that go over in the locker room? You guys won that game, right?” Kip asks. 

Scott laughs, nods. They’re standing in the living room, and he crosses to the kitchen, saying, “Tony had something to do with it. Do you want some water?”

Kip agrees and comes to stand on the other side of the counter. Scott asks about the class he just came from, and it turns out Kip was teaching it. Scott tries not to quiz Kip, but Kip is happy to talk about it. He regales Scott with a story about his undergrad students’ enthusiasm, the anxious questions they keep emailing him about bibliography formatting. Scott finds himself comparing it to the rookies on his team, who are the same age. Scott is not really teaching them anything, but he can feel the weight of their expectations on him. The conversation feels light, easy. Soon, they’re joking about how Kip can help his students using the same techniques for young hockey players. 

“Who knew we’re both shaping the minds of the next generation,” Scott says. 

“Ivy league undergrads and the young millionaires of the MLH have more in common than I thought,” Kip says. He says it warmly, a laugh in his voice, but Scott can feel the barrier of it: they are not the same. They’re standing in an apartment Scott bought with the absurdity of athletic luck, and Kip is being paid to be there. 

“I should head out,” he says, putting his glass in the dishwasher. His carry-on bag is by the door already. “Text me if you need anything at all, or have any questions.”

He goes to the door, and hidden behind the shelf divider, says goodbye to Blue and takes the elevator down into the ocean swell that is his life: car waiting for him, flight to St. Louis, mediocre hotel and morning skate followed by a game where the Admirals lose by one point.

In between, Kip texts him quick updates about Blue. Confirming her evening and morning walks, a photo of her sitting in her dog bed, looking up expectantly. Scott gets back from St. Louis to a spotless apartment again. 

This time, however, there’s a scrap of paper on the kitchen counter: a surprisingly good drawing of Blue, a stylized illustration of her riding a skateboard. No note with it. Scott admires it for a long minute and then carries it to the desk and carefully places it in the drawer where he dutifully keeps printouts of legal documents and important papers. 

Chapter End Notes

For dog visual reference I'm picturing a dog that looks vaguely like this, maybe smaller.

Comments will feed me like a perfectly peeled orange. Reblog on tumblr if you're having a good time.

Chapter 3: OCTOBER - NOVEMBER, KIP

Chapter Summary

Friends mock, boys walk.

Chapter Notes

Nursing a crush on a straight guy feels like something Kip should have gotten over in his early 20s. He has friends who always seem to fall for unattainable straight guys, which is only half of Kip’s usual operating procedure. The straight part is new. Unattainable, Kip has a history with. 

Kip has, obviously, Googled the hell out of Scott. Read the profiles, clicked through photos of him all the way back until he was a floppy-haired rookie with a smug smile. Kip was abstractly aware of the Admirals, but never stayed long enough to watch with his dad to learn specific players or their names. Now that the Admirals’ schedule directly affects his own, he is unlikely to watch a game with his dad for a while. 

For the last month, when Kip has finished walking Blue, he’s been going directly to the Kingfisher to watch home games before the schlep back home. When the Admirals play away games, he has the disorienting experience of watching it in the Captain’s living room, on his television, overseen by his dog. 

“You can teach an old dog new tricks,” he tells Blue from across the couch, where she sits. Approving but not close. 

At 30 years old, he now has a vested interest in New York’s hockey team. He should tell his dad who his dog-walking client is, his dad would be thrilled—but he doesn’t. His dad would have a million follow-up questions, and Kip is not entirely sure he’d be able to answer them normally. His dad has an uncanny way of seeing between the gaps of what Kip is saying. 

Kip is learning the patterns, gaining Blue’s trust. Just as Scott promised, Blue is an exceptionally easy dog to take care of. She does not tug on walks, staying neatly by his side, checking in regularly, her black nose constantly in the air to sniff the surroundings and assess Kip. 

One evening, on the hunt for an evening coffee to fuel his reading, he takes Blue to a small bar and coffee shop, more of a dive than Kip would expect in this neighbourhood. One of the regulars is a woman and her dog, a small long-haired chihuahua who has his own seat. As is always the way, Kip learns the dog's name without learning his owner’s. Kip has always texted his clients updates for each walk. In the past, some just wanted reassurance that the walk happened, others occasionally asked questions, and a majority just thumbs-up reacted to his text. 

For the first few weeks, Scott sends quick answers, never reaching out first. But, it starts with Sammy Pepperbeans. 

K: evening walk done! blue was great. she introduced me to a local celebrity, sammy pepperbeans, down at the pearl 

K: ate all her food, napping when i left. good luck! 

(image: Blue, sitting calmly, loose leashed and staring at the camera. Next to her, on a barstool, is a blond, long-haired chihuahua, staring up at the person in the next stool, ignoring the camera. Behind him, on the bar, is a plate of toast.)

S: Wow, you’ll have to introduce me sometime. Sammy’s never there when Blue takes me to the Pearl, we must run on different schedules

Scott has lived in his neighbourhood, Kip has gleaned, for a little over three years. But he hasn’t explored it all that much. His schedule, he says. He’s tired in the evenings and makes up for it by taking Blue on runs in the morning. The day after Kip tells Scott about the bar, Scott texts him unprompted for the first time. 

S: Met Sammy Pepperbeans. While I was there, someone set up a shell game with solo cups and treats, and he got it right on the first try. 

S: I should teach Blue how to do that, right? 

They start texting back and forth, just about Scott’s neighbourhood. Kip has never had to set rules with clients because it’s never come up. His clients have mostly been families and busy couples. He gives Scott a few recommendations, and Scott tells him his favourite cheat day meals. They compare notes on bagel places, routes to walk Blue. 

Scott tells him about his game day rituals, the excitement, and the stress of it. Kip tells Scott about his work, the fellowship he is applying for at the Met, and the stress of it. 

Near the end of the month, the Admirals have an away game in Raleigh. Kip spends the whole day at Scott’s apartment, relishing in the quiet to make notes on an incredibly dense philosophy text his advisor suggested he incorporate into his fellowship application. It feels indulgent to be in this space so long, like he’s stealing it away, even though it would be empty otherwise. It’s a little nicer than his office, which is convenient, but it has the threat of students, his officemate, and a persistent radiator damp. It doesn’t come with a full kitchen, bathroom, or a dog whose affection he has slowly won over. His slow laptop doesn’t even bother him here; he can be at peace with how long it takes to move between tabs and his notes. 

Working here, he has the hazy feeling of long study, like his body has disappeared and he’s been transported right out of the city by the time he’s done. It’s one of his favourite feelings, total concentration—losing himself to learning. 

He takes Blue out for her evening walk, doing their usual rounds, Kip turning his notes over in his mind. The walk returns Kip to his body. It is peak fall, the trees are brilliant orange and red, but still clinging to the trees. Cool enough for a light jacket, warm enough to not need a hat. By the time he’s done their loop, has fed Blue, and even petted her for nearly a whole minute, Kip is in a good mood. He takes the subway down to the Kingfisher, where Shawn and Maria are already waiting. 

“Good evening, princess,” Shawn calls as he arrives, looking up from his phone. “We’re ordering dumplings, are you in?” 

Kip agrees, settling into the stool next to Shawn. Maria leans forward and asks, “Coming from Scott’s?”

“Yeah, just finished walking Blue.”

Shawn puts his phone down on the counter and says, “Is this the hockey player we’re forced to watch now? You know, Maria took care of his dog for two years, and she never made us watch hockey.”

Kip rolls his eyes, “Okay, I’ve made you watch half of one game. And also, this is a sports bar.”

“Once upon a time, Kyle,” Shawn says, turning away from Kip and speaking to Kyle, trapped behind the bar. “That television was only used for its intended purpose—Drag Race and music videos straight people forgot.”

“It’s literally on ESPN right now,” Kip counters. Kyle shakes his head and places a beer in front of Kip. 

“Is it?” Shawn says, not turning around. 

“It’s been a month now, right?” Maria asks, ignoring Shawn. 

“Yeah, just.”

“This is the dreamboat, right?” Shawn says. “The client Maria trapped you with, in all his sweaty glory. Quote, ‘a jock with sad cow eyes,’ unquote?”

Kip, flustered, regrets that he reported all of this to his friends the day he met Scott. 

“How are the sad eyes? Still tragic?” Shawn asks. 

Kip takes a long sip of his beer. 

“He wouldn’t know,” Maria answers. “I barely saw Scott. He’s always gone by the time you arrive because he’s always traveling,” Maria tells Shawn and then sighs, “Ships in the night.”

“How many times did you guys—overlap. Like, how often was he still home when you got there?” Kip asks. 

“Calculating when your ships can reunite again?” Shawn says, eyebrows up. 

“Not much,” Maria answers. “Maybe, four or five times in two years. Not much time for your rendezvous. But he does give a very generous Christmas gift. I’ll miss that.”

In the last month, aside from their introduction and that first house-sitting call, Scott has been there when Kip arrived twice, just for five minutes or less. Do not overthink this, Grady.

His friends, however, are sharks who smell blood in the water. 

“Why? How often have you overlapped?” asks Shawn, stressing the last word like an innuendo. 

“Uh. Our first introduction. And the first walk, and first overnight. But that was just to show me around. And then, uh, twice on home games,” Kip finally admits. 

Shawn’s eyebrows shoot up further, “Maria, you’re a scientist—” 

“I’m literally a nurse—” 

“Is twice in one month more than five times in two years?” Shawn asks like he’s laying a trap.

Kip rolls his eyes and says to Kyle, still at the other end of the bar, “Puck drop is in five minutes.”

“At the rate you’re going, puck drop is in a few weeks,” Shawn jokes.

“Maria, save me,” Kip says. “He’s not even gay, and I do not go after straight guys.”

Maria sips her drink and hums, “I don’t know.”

Shawn spins on his seat to face her, back to Kip, “Oh? Intel?”

She shrugs, “I never saw a sign of anyone else there. He never hit on me; he was very respectful.”

Shawn turns to Kip now and says, basically wagging a finger at him, “And Maria is very hot.”

“That is not proof of anything. He plays hockey; he’s a total jock. And besides, I work for him.”

“Sounds hot,” Kyle chimes in. 

“Not helpful!” Kip cries. “Okay. Please. When are the dumplings getting here?” 

Shawn checks his phone, “Ten minutes. Kyle, put Kip’s hot boss on television!”

“It’s already on ESPN!”

✶✶ 

Kip shoves all thoughts of Maria and Shawn’s jokes to the farthest back corners of his mind: ready to be taken out and examined only an hour into a long walk or run, when his body is too exhausted to turn them over and see too many details that weren’t there. Kip is not, as a general rule, good at compartmentalizing. He’s better at catastrophizing, but he doesn’t have time for that now. He’s committed to getting a draft of the first chapter of his dissertation together (if he can swing it), to finishing the fellowship application for next year, and to submitting funding requests for another research trip for next summer. 

Most of his cohort have the luxury of time, bought by parents who can subsidize the gap between stipend and reality. Kip feels like he’s running against a lot of things: time, his own ego, funding that will end in a few years. Catastrophizing is a fast track to losing that race, and he has no interest in blowing up his life a second time. 

✶✶ 

At the end of the first week of November, the Admirals have their first road trip–one of many hockey terms Kip is learning. Scott will be gone for five days, bouncing across Canada. Kip spent the entire evening prior reading an exceptionally tedious monograph and cross-checking a translated source against the original. This morning, his mind is a swirling mess, so he gets out at Columbus Circle and walks thirty minutes to Scott’s apartment. 

Kip lets himself into Scott’s apartment. Blue comes trotting out as usual, and Kip says his usual greeting, the sing-song voice he reserves only for dogs: “Good morning, Bluetifer.” She’s dancing around him as he drops his bags and goes to the closet for her harness. “Oui, oui, on s’en va,” he tells her. 

“Kip?” calls a voice from inside the apartment. Kip stills and stands straight up. “Did you get my text?” 

Kip takes a step into the apartment and sees Scott on his couch, the muted TV showing a rerun of Bernie Sanders’ presidential victory speech. Scott is tucked in the corner of the sectional with his feet under him. He looks like a totally different person. Other than the notable workout gear encounter, he has been in a game-day suit every other time they’ve crossed paths–an armour of formality, public presentation. Today, his hair is stuck up on one side, one cheek bears the red mark of resting on it too long; he is rumpled and cozy in sweatpants and a worn sweater. Kip wonders how warm his body must be in that giant hoodie. His brain is still scrambled, despite the walk.

He grabs for his phone. On his lock screen, right below a text from yesterday arguing with Kip about the best breakfast order after a hangover, is one from just 30 minutes ago: 

S: Hi, flight delayed! No need to cover morning walk. Sorry for last minute notice, I was just told myself. Walk still covered, of course. 

“Sorry,” says Scott as Kip reads the text. “Some kind of issue with our plane, we’re leaving two hours later, so my pick up isn’t until 11.” 

“Oh,” Kip says, unsure of what to do. 

“You can… go if you want?” Scott says, “Come back later—like I said, the payment is still scheduled, we’re obviously not in the forty-eight-hour cancellation window.”

“Right,” Kip says absently, trying to look somewhere else and finding himself looking at the worn cuffs of Scott’s sweater. He does not want to leave. More distinctly, his scrambled brain wants to indulge, wants the forbidden fruit, wants to see more of Scott. Not the man in a suit, or the one on TV. But this Scott, cozy and human. “I don’t mind, I’m already here. I can just take her out—I was looking forward to my weekly corn muffin.”

Scott laughs and says, “Do you mind if I join? I was going to head out in a minute anyway.” 

“Sure,” Kip agrees. “I mean. You’re paying for the walk.”

“I need the fresh air,” Scott says, and turns around. 

Blue watches Scott walk away, confused. Kip is still holding her leash. He leans over and slips the harness over her head and mumbles to her, “You tell me, girl, I don’t know.”

Scott reappears a second later. He has changed into a slightly more fitted hoodie and put on socks, still wearing joggers. It is not a particularly sunny November day, but he grabs sunglasses by the door. 

They board the elevator in silence. Blue, as always, sits calmly and stares at the closing elevator doors with the energy of a barely contained bird. Into the silence, Scott says, “Were you speaking French?”

“Oh no, you heard me?”

In his peripheral vision, Kip can see Scott smiling and nodding. 

“Yeah—I didn’t know you spoke French.”

“Not that well. I can read it better than I can speak it, according to the kind people of France on my last research trip,” he laughs. “My German is even worse. But I know both well enough to have passed my language exams.”

“Your French sounded pretty good to me.”

“You speak French?”

“Also, not that well. I lived with my grandmother for two years in Quebec before I moved back to New York for high school.”

“Right,” Kip says. This information was not online, not part of the tragic backstory included in every profile of Scott Hunter. “The French is pretty different there, isn’t it?”

“That’s what the people of France also told me on my last trip,” Scott jokes as they get off the elevator. 

They exit the lobby, and Scott calls “Good morning, Al”  to the concierge as they pass.

On the street, Blue glances up, between them, unsure of who is taking her where. Kip has her leash in hand and makes a right. He says, “I spent three wonderful months being mocked during a research trip to Paris. Where did you go?”

There’s a lingering silence as Scott opens his mouth, makes a choked sound, and then says, “Oh, the south. Really beautiful beaches. What were you researching there?”

“I was doing an intensive French class and doing some archival research. Documents from the era I’m studying, or people writing about it closer to the time. Centuries-old gossip.” Kip explains as they walk down the long block east together, the half-risen sun peaking between buildings, Blue sniffing as she leads the way. 

“Anything juicy?” Scott asks. 

“A surprising amount of men bragging about the gifts they were giving to their wives and mistresses. Sometimes the same gifts. Not very creative,” Kip says, and gestures to the coffee shop where he usually stops Blue. Scott laughs and follows him into the coffee shop. Kip orders a muffin, Scott gets a coffee, black, and refuses to let Kip pay. Scott turns to Blue and tells her spin-o-rama right as Kip is going for his wallet—Kip is caught wrangling her while Scott taps his credit card. 

Out on the street, Kip tucks the muffin into his jacket pocket and turns to Scott, “What about you? What drew you to southern France?”

“Oh,” Scott makes the same choking noise as before, covering it with a sip of his coffee, which also seems too hot; he winces. “The pictures looked beautiful. I like going somewhere… different during the off-season. Change of pace.”

“Right, that makes sense,” Kip says. His classmates are constantly talking about this idea: changing pace, changing the scenery, something to be done to refresh the mind without the need for a funding. He does not say this to Scott. Southern France feels off-book for a hockey player, and Kip is once again surprised by the depths of what he does not know about Scott. 

They wander towards Central Park, Scott explains his usual route, the sights he sees every day, comparing notes with Kip. The conversation drifts easily toward Scott’s flight—Calgary, a city Kip has never heard of—and what Scott likes about all this travel (different arenas, the way the game changes when playing away games), what he doesn’t (everything else). Kip confesses that he has started following the games, but that his dad is a serious fan. 

“Would he want to go to a game?” Scott asks, “I have two tickets to every home game. I don’t really have anyone to give them to, most of the time.” 

Kip is startled by the honesty of this. He’s starting to get a gauge on Scott: he’s curious and funnier than he expected. Kip has now watched enough post-game interviews to see the vast gaps that make up Scott Hunter. In interviews, he answers with the same hockey platitudes as anyone else and never asks questions. 

Out of a suit and off the ice, he is drier and a little meaner, readier with a real opinion and a follow-up question. When Kip told Scott that he had briefly rooted for the Islanders when he was a kid, just to annoy his dad, Scott rolled his eyes and said, “In the ‘90s? They were shit then, and they’re even worse now. They’d stand a better chance if they gave the Yankees’ starting line skates.” 

To the moment at hand, Scott’s offer of tickets. Kip has no reason to say no, so he says his dad would love to go to a game. Some part of his brain, the one nursing a crush, the part of his brain that has any shred of self-preservation, feels danger on the horizon.

They turn to walk back, and Scott asks, “So what made you choose art history? Wait, sorry, is that a boring question?”

Kip shrugs and returns, “What made you choose hockey? Do you get asked that a lot?”

“No one really asks me that and means it. I think it’s a given that every player chose it a long time ago, considering how hard it is to, y’know, make it. There are a lot of off-ramps before the MLH.”

“Do you feel like you chose it? I thought hockey players were basically born into skates,” Kip says, trying to glide past the fact that he has read Scott’s entire life story online. 

Scott pauses; they are wandering down a cross street, yellow morning light slanting through red-leafed trees, hitting the warm face of the brownstones. The world feels charmed and golden on this balmy morning. Blue stops to sniff at the steps of a regal home. In this dramatic autumnal lighting, it feels a little too much like a date. Kip reminds himself: you are being paid for this walk, and Scott Hunter just wants company to pass the time. 

Scott answers, defensively, “Yeah, I was young, but it was still my choice.”

Kip nods, Scott sounds like he has more to say. 

“I’m guessing it seems crazy to you,” Scott says. “I don’t, uh talk to a lot of non-hockey people. I never really have to explain this part. But–when it’s good, which it usually is, it’s the best feeling in the world. Like getting paid to win. It’s my whole life,” he lets out an awkward laugh. “And it’s not something you’re doing alone–I played baseball a little as a kid, and you’re alone for most of the game. Hockey is all teamwork; it only works when you’re doing it together, so it’s like. I can’t compare it to anything because it’s my whole life, but there’s nothing like feeling in sync on the ice. You’re part of this larger thing, but with other people.” 

They both watch Blue for a second, and then Kip says, “It’s funny. I guess parts of that are the same for me. Like, when it’s good, like when I’m really enjoying what I’m researching and it doesn’t feel like an obligation, when two ideas come together that didn’t quite fit before, that’s the best feeling. Not quite the same, of course. You don’t get the same adrenaline rush making a bibliography.”

“That’s the thing at the end with all the names, right?”

Kip opens his mouth; he can’t tell if Scott is kidding. Scott cuts in, “I’m joking, I know what a bibliography is.”

Scott makes a lot of jokes about being dumb. Kip wants to point this out and ask why. But to demonstrate that he’s observing Scott is definitely crossing that date-like boundary. Instead, he continues, “But it’s mostly the total opposite of what you’re describing–everything is all me. My ideas, my deadlines, my timeline. If someone has a question or doesn’t agree, it’s me alone on the, uh, proverbial ice.”

“That doesn’t sound great,” Scott says with a strained smile. 

“No, but. The good parts outweigh the bad,” Kip says. “It’s also my whole life, at this point.” 

Back in Scott’s apartment, Kip eats the muffin he bought while sitting at the kitchen counter, while Scott eats, what seems to Kip, an insane amount of eggs. Kip asks Scott about the road trip, even though he knows the cities already. 

“Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver. Western Canada, basically,” Scott says. 

“Is it different, playing in Canada? Like, where people care about hockey a lot?” Kip says without thinking, the feeling of putting his foot in his mouth for the second time today registers like mild nausea. 

“Hey, people care about hockey in New York,” Scott says, defensively. “We sell out Madison Square Garden multiple times a week!” 

“There’s always someone looking for something to do on a Tuesday night,” Kip jokes. “Sorry, sorry. I don’t mean to downplay your job. Again.”

It’s Scott’s turn to laugh. “You’re good. It’s valuable for me to be humbled,” he says, smiling with his hand over his chest.

Kip’s stomach flutters, and he prompts: “So, Canada?” 

“Oh yeah. It’s always different playing in someone else’s home turf, you’re the enemy. And, in Canada, a little more so,” Scott laughs. “I assume. I’ve never played for a Canadian team, so maybe it’s different when you’re a Canadian team showing up against another Canadian team. But coming in as New York? They’re never happy to see us,” Scott laughs. 

“Sounds… motivating?” Kip asks. 

“Honestly, yeah.” Scott agrees. “Don’t think too badly about us that getting yelled at makes us play better—but it does.” 

Scott, Kip notices, relies on the plural—us, we—instead of his singular self when talking about hockey. He laughs at Scott’s admission. Scott asks, “What about you? What are your plans while you’re trapped here?”

“Hardly trapped,” Kip shakes his head. “I have tried to clear my social calendar to spend five thrilling days making it through some tedious books and while also taking advantage of how much closer I am to campus.”

He nods towards his bag, and Scott follows the movement of his head, and Scott says, “Well, I hope you’re able to get in the zone. Like you said.”

“You too,” Kip smiles. 

Scott leaves, doing the same ritual by the door with Blue that Kip has seen every time: kneeling down to her level, mumbling something to her, letting her lick his forehead. The foyer doors close as the elevator dings. 

Kip throws himself on the couch. Blue joins him, curling up a respectable few feet away. Kip rubs a hand over his eyes, trying not to overthink. Compartmentalize, not catastrophize. 

He puts his feet on the coffee table, where the stack of library books sits. The stack has changed over the last month: thrillers, true crime, pop history books, books about hockey, sports medicine, and wellness. Today, he notices a slimmer book, out of keeping with the rest. He pulls it out and sees that it’s a small book, maybe seventy pages total, of Caravaggio paintings highlighted to explain their meanings. 

Chapter End Notes

Kip says, in French, yes, yes, we're leaving. This is an AU in which a man named Scott Hunter from Rochester is half Québécois.

Comments take me on a walk that is definitely not a date. Reblog or follow me on tumblr if you want.

Chapter 4: NOVEMBER 2016, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

Scott's lonely November: texting, television, tired and tempted.

Chapter Notes

Scott has dedicated his life to a game of split-second decisions. Decisions that have knocked out four of his teeth, given him more stitches than he can count, and are fucking up his knees one season at a time. Every second he’s off the ice, in a world not governed by manageable rules, he’s cautious. He is never reckless and almost never acts on impulse. 

Going for a walk with Kip was a split-second decision. He feels like he should regret it, regret the recklessness, but it had felt so good to talk to Kip in person and not just over text: easy, new, and safe.

He arrives in Calgary in the early evening. It’s the farthest away game they’ve had this season. He feels, in his bones, that the team plays better the closer they are to home. Or maybe it’s just that they play badly in Alberta. He needs all the good feelings he can get. They have won five of their last six games, and they’re in Edmonton the day after Calgary. 

Routine kicks in: they bus to the hotel, check in, an hour of alone time, and then the whole team goes out for dinner at the place they always go in the city, a steakhouse, Alberta beef. Near the end of dinner, after hours of being buoyed along by the collective, part of the team, Scott glances at his phone and sees a text: 

K: hey, do you have hbo? was going to watch westworld 

S: I do! Channel 500 something. 

Holding his phone under the table surrounded by his teammates, he is dropped out of that buoyant team feeling. He rode the wave, and now it has broken, checking a text like it’s a secret. There’s no secret to be kept here. He’s just texting his dog walker. They’re friends now, maybe. Unbidden, his brain supplies an image of Kip on his couch right now. It then corrects the image and makes Kip shirtless. Scott reflexively shakes his head, closing his eyes. He puts his phone away, concentrating on the strategy Carter and Jalo are arguing at his elbow. The text from Kip has drawn him out, no longer in the room with his jubilant team, one Admiral among many, but himself, the man, the odd one out. 

Scott excuses himself from a second round of drinks. 

S: Heading back to my room to watch it myself, actually. What do you think is going to happen? 

Back in his hotel room, he turns on the show and texts Kip. They text back and forth for almost the whole runtime of the episode: commenting on it and sharing theories. Scott has his phone out the entire episode; they text almost the whole way through it. 

After, they keep talking for almost another half hour, speculating back and forth about what will happen next. By 10, they start to taper off. Scott wants to text goodnight, but stops himself. He started the day walking with Kip and ended his day by talking to him over text. Once more, his brain betrays him: the image of Kip, now, in his bed. 

He changes the TV to a true crime documentary and falls asleep. 

✶✶

The Admirals win against Calgary: 4-1. They’re leading the league, and Scott has scored eight goals already this season. The hot streak feels warm under his heels. They leave Calgary and fly straight to Edmonton after the game, everyone in a good mood, crowding to the left side of the plane to watch the Rockies as they recede into the flat Canadian prairies.

The superstitious part of him, the one that wants to find reason and logic in the chaos of hockey’s random chance, tells him: Maybe Kip is a good luck charm. It is a safe way to think, an additional way to categorize his crush on his dogwalker to make it wholesome, removed from want. 

K: (Image: Blue looking back over her shoulder on the sidewalk), (Image: Blue in the elevator, Kip’s shoes and shins visible in the reflection)

K: miss perfect was perfect, good walk. leaving for late-night library now. 

K: ran into sammy at the bar, he says hello

S: What’s waiting for you at the library? 

K: a thrilling evening with a book on georges de la tour 

Relatedly: they win again in Edmonton. He scores twice in a hard-fought game with a brutal third period that has him needing an ice-cold bath in his hotel room afterwards. Wrapped in the hotel robe and a towel with the TV on mute, he Googles the artist Kip tells him he’s reading about now. A different artist who was inspired by the last artist Kip mentioned, the one Scott took a book out about already. 

Kip texts him that this is one of his favourite artists, that he loves how simple and striking his paintings are. There’s one of his paintings in the Met he likes to visit. Kip tells him how hard this painter is to write about, having been forgotten by history for centuries and only recently celebrated. 

Sitting in the dark of his hotel room, Scott looks at the strange, melancholy paintings of this long-dead artist: portraits of people lit dramatically by candlelight, faces turned to the side, yellowed by light, the edges disappearing into darkness. Scott doesn’t know anything about art, but he’s struck by how quiet the paintings feel. The glowing profile of Mary Magdalen in candlelight, skull in her lap, her neck, chest, and blouse the focal point. Scott feels a kinship with the paintings as he lies in his hotel bed, simmering with hope, alone and on the road, face lit up by his phone. And also a kinship with the artist who faded away into oblivion, only rescued by historians three hundred years later. Will someone save him if he isn’t good enough to be remembered? 

He falls asleep to the thoughts of those dark paintings, wakes up, and flies to Vancouver. He sends Kip the painting in the morning, his favourite. Kip agrees. Scott goes to practice feeling good, the drills are hard but satisfying. The Admirals win 7-2, pure offense, every line in sync. They’ve won every game on this road trip. Sometimes when they play well, Scott just feels like a piece of machinery, grinding gears. In this last run of games, Scott feels like the team captain, clear-sighted and intentional. 

✶✶

Scott is on the flight home, reading a congratulatory text from Kip, when Jalo throws himself into the seat next to him. 

“Always smiling at your phone, Hunter,” he says. 

Scott flushes and shoves his phone in the seat pocket in front of him. He clears his throat and says, “Nah, just happy to be heading home.”

“Anything good waiting for you at home?” Jalo asks, cranking his seat to lean back. 

“My dog and a long fucking nap,” Scott answers. “You?”

Jalo grins, “Extra-large pizza. You joining us at Nebula tomorrow?”

“Oh, probably not,” Scott says. 

Carter’s head pops over the seat and says with a dramatic sigh, “Cap has retired from nightlife.” He looks at Jalo, “Once, long ago, he used to be fun.”

Scott laughs, “Can’t keep up.” 

He taps the screen to find a movie. Once, long ago, Scott used to make an effort, but turning thirty and going out with rookies in their twenties got old fast, especially when the evening always ended the same way: a wordless exit. 

They leave the night of the game, late Vancouver time, even later in New York. Between the five-and-a-half-hour flight, the time difference, and the drive back to his apartment, all of which Scott nudges a sleepy Jalo through like a baby, Scott arrives home just after 10 am the next day. 

Five days away is five days of constant movement. He is thrilled to be home, feels bone-deep relief when Blue runs out to greet him, her whole body swaying with the movement of her wagging tail. Still in the doorway, Scott drops his bags and nuzzles his face into his dog. She whines happily, licking at his jaw as he wraps his arms around her. Home. Once the relief has settled a little into his bones, he stands back up and drags his bags in. He shucks off his jacket and throws it over the back of the couch. He takes off his layers: shirt, undershirt, belt, pants, dress socks. He leaves it all in a pile to be dealt with later, right in the middle of his apartment. 

As he walks into the kitchen, he realizes that his housekeeper won’t come for another hour: it’s Saturday. The apartment is not particularly messy, but it is clear someone else has been here. Kip has cleaned up after himself. Scott grabs one of his pre-portioned egg and vegetable bites from the fridge and eats it cold, with his hands, standing in the kitchen. He surveys the surroundings: there are small traces left behind—the dishwasher is going, there are water spots on the counter by the sink, and signs of use on the stove. Kip actually cooked in the kitchen, probably made more use of it in five days than Scott does in a whole month. 

Scott is tempted to keep investigating, take stock, but he’s tired. He chugs a glass of water messily, wipes his mouth. He is usually more precise in the whole process of arriving home after travel, but he’s too tired to care. 

He drags himself to his bed and crawls into it, under the covers. Eyes closed, his body registers the thought before his brain does. The sheets have not been changed yet. He is lying half on his stomach, face to the side, under the top sheet. He turns his head into the pillow: the scent of a different body recently lying here. Someone else’s cologne, shampoo, and something else. He tilts his head down, deeper into the pillow, a tired animal smelling sheets. There: the unfamiliar musk of someone else’s skin, sweat. Scott reaches a hand out onto the empty bed next to him, flexing his fingers against the mattress. Kip left hours ago; it is cool to his touch, but he imagines what it would feel like warm from someone else’s rest. 

Scott flips over onto his back. He is too tired to think through what he’s doing: he’s hard already. He shimmies out of his boxers, crawls to the nightstand for lube, and starts to jerk himself off. Slow at first, and then increasingly fast. He opens his mouth and pulls some of the top sheet into it, filling his mouth, the fabric pressing against his tongue and the top of his palate. Mostly cotton, but the faint musk of something else. Kip stayed long enough to leave his smell behind. During his four-night stay, did he do the same thing Scott is doing? Did he find Scott’s lube? The same one he is slick with now? The thought of Kip jerking himself off in this bed makes Scott moan out loud, alone. 

His brain is as frantic as his hand, creating the image of it, adding more: Kip, nosey, Kip, snooping around, Kip finding the box in Scott’s wardrobe, the dildo, Kip on his knees, Kip fucking himself with Scott’s dildo in his bed, the same dildo that Scott has used in the past, using it here, where Scott is now. Needy, just like him. Wanting, ready, desperate, for him. Kip’s face, his hands—Scott comes, harder than he has in recent memory, a full body quake. The sheet is still in his mouth, wet with saliva. 

He is panting for breath as his brain slowly comes back online. 

Shame, like the sheet he is under, settles over him. Cold and unyielding, like a switch turned off, burning the pleasure out of his body. Shame for thinking of Kip like this. Shame at making a mess all over his sheets. Shame that the next time he sees Kip, he will have to know that he jerked off to the smell of him, to the idea of him. Scott has crossed some kind of boundary and Kip does not even know. 

He slinks to the bathroom and showers. Changes into new boxers, sweats, and strips the bed, folding the sheets neatly, ensuring that his shame is hidden in the middle, and then putting the sheets in the washer he rarely uses himself. He tidies up his suit and his luggage and falls asleep on the couch, waking when his housekeeper begins to vacuum around him. 

✶✶

He does not text Kip that day, and the next is a practice and rest day, no game. The day after is the home game he invited Kip to last week, before. Kip texts him in the morning. 

K: hey! my dad can’t make it - is it okay for me to bring a friend instead?

Scott has the sinking realization that he just gave Kip a really great date: expensive tickets near center ice with some other guy. But he has no reason to back out, so he tells Kip it’s fine and pushes the whole thing out of his mind entirely. 

His day passes as usual: he takes Blue on a different morning route, toward Riverside Park instead. Car up to Tarrytown with Jalo, urging him to talk about his day off in detail. Car back, same lunch, nap. He leaves early for the subway to the game, no chance of overlap. 

By the time he’s in gear, has watched tapes and attended meetings, he has too much on his mind. They’re holding steady, but it’s way too early in the season to get comfortable. 

It’s only when he’s on the ice that he remembers that Kip is here. He knows where his seats are. Sometimes he gives them to former teammates who are visiting New York, sometimes they’re given away at charity events. Most of the time, he doesn’t use them, and they’re sold to strangers. Scott is out of breath following a 15-minute high-intensity drill back and forth across the ice when he chances a glance up at the seats.

Kip is already seated—it’s early enough that the seats around him are mostly empty. Sitting next to him is a beautiful woman, laughing and throwing popcorn in her mouth. She catches Scott’s eye and says something to Kip, and points directly at him. 

With nowhere to hide, Scott skates over to the boards and waves at Kip. There’s a pause, and Kip waves back, looking happy, amused. The friend says something. Scott doesn’t think it’s a date. He goes back to running passes and then, for good measure, skates by to wave at Kip again. Kip came to the game: it’s the friendly thing to do. Kip waves again, as does his friend. 

It shouldn’t, but it does, fill him with a warm sense of relief to see Kip in the stands. He is definitely crossing some kind of line, but it feels so good to have someone in the stands for him. He has a game to win. It would be embarrassing to invite Kip to watch the team lose. 

They take the win against Columbus 3-1. Scott scores twice, clean and easy goals. Scott skates off the ice, jockeyed on all sides by the excitement of the team with an easy W. He’s called back out as the first star of the game, reveling in the glory of it, how pure hockey can feel when he’s having fun. The thing he tried to describe to Kip a week ago: the best feeling in the world, like everything has winnowed down to this, his body and mind in sync with one purpose, for once. He glances at the stands, but he is too far to see anything but the movement of faces and bodies in the crowd. 

Back in the locker room, post-game rush still crackling through him like an electric current, he breaks his usual post-game routine and grabs his phone first, hands still sweaty from his gloves.

K: amazing game, thanks for the invite - my friend elena says thank you as well

K: say hi to blue for me and tell her the score, no one was at your place to show her the game tonight 

Scott texts back a formal: thanks for coming! and goes back to his post-game routine. 

✶✶

Scott is walking home from lunch with his agent and an interested sponsor when he hears his name, a single shout: “Scott Hunter!” 

Without thinking, he turns around to see a man walking towards him. Sometimes he pretends not to hear, on days like today when he just isn’t in the mood. Doing his job means always being in a good mood, because two forgettable minutes of his day will be a story someone tells for years.

“Hello?” Scott says, as brightly as he can. 

“Thought that was you!” the man says cheerfully. “You guys are playing well this season.”

The man does not introduce himself or say hello. So Scott goes into hockey mode and says, “Yeah, we’re happy with how we’re playing, being able to play in tough buildings and beat some good hockey teams is a great feeling.”

“Keep it up,” the guy says with a nod, “Think you’re gonna take the Cup this year or are you gonna pussy out another year?” He says it with a feral grin, a joke they’re both supposed to be in on.

Scott does not react. In addition to all the parts he likes, this is part of the game too: being a commodity and not a person. ”Well. Keep watching,” he says, turning a half step away. 

“Can I get a photo?” the guy calls.

Scott looks down at his dark phone and says, “Sorry, I have to take a call. Tell your kid thanks for cheering us on,” and power walks away. His best strategy has always just been to say something random, hope the guy has a kid, and keep moving. He holds his phone to his head and is away before the guy can say anything else. 

✶✶ 

Two days later, another away game, and the Admirals lose their winning streak. It’s not a big deal. They can’t keep it going forever. And it’s not a brutal loss—they go into overtime, and then Florida takes it in a shoot-out. 

Kip has been quiet, sending little more than updates about Blue since the home game he came to. He mentioned something about an application, and has been quieter for the last week and a half. Scott had a game during the most recent episode of Westworld. Kip texts him more theories and Scott responds with a simple “I agree!” A stark contrast to earlier in the month. 

And now, the loss in Florida. Scott, always ready for a sign from the universe, texts Kip while he’s sitting on the tarmac outside Fort Lauderdale, his back against the side of the plane to text in private, his phone screen hard to read from the sunlight streaming in from the window. He has a lifetime of calculated choices to back him up on this: accepting a little good luck when it’s offered. He reaches out. 

S: Have you ever been to Florida? 

K: yeah, a lot actually 

K: my grandparents had a condo in boca raton

When Scott gets home, the apartment is once again empty, sheets changed, fresh. Blue is waiting for him, whole body moving with the wag of her tail. On the counter is a drawing of a Florida palm tree with Blue under it. Scott carries it to the desk and adds it to the other drawing. Scott scoops Blue up, easily flipping all forty pounds like a baby, and carries her, paws up, to the couch. 

Chapter End Notes

Remember season one of Westworld? What a time.

This is the Georges De La Tour painting Scott contemplates.

What is Kip’s PhD on? Broadly speaking: a series of paintings that I, your humble typist, wanted to look at. Or, French Baroque painters after Caravaggio. This fact is not plot relevant in the slightest, I just wanted to give Mr. Christopher Grady some modicum of specificity beyond. Well.

Scott'ss generic hockey platitude is a direct quote.

 

All comments are platonic good luck charms to me. Reblog or follow me on tumblr, if you are so moved.

Chapter 5: DECEMBER 2016, KIP

Chapter Summary

Growing like a winter weed, Kip checks his phone.

Chapter Notes

“So, who are you texting?” comes a voice over Kip’s shoulder. Kip has carved out exactly one hour to see Elena, who agreed to meet him at the Kingfisher before he has to go up to Scott’s. 

Kip puts his phone down and stands to hug Elena before she slides into the booth. He says, “Good to see you.”

“Not an answer to my question, Christopher,” she says, shrugging off her coat. “Scott?”

Kip shakes his head, “No, I was following up on a student question, Elena.”

“Are you still texting, though?” 

Kip hums, “Yes.”

“How much?” Elena says, tilting her head.

“A normal amount.” 

“Let’s put some numbers here. When was the last time you texted Scott Hunter?”

Kip does not have to look at his phone, “Uh, half an hour ago.”

“How much have you been texting since I crashed your date?”

“It was not a date!” Kip says, whispering it. “He’s, like, my boss, and he has free tickets; it was a… perk.”

“You did seem perky,” Elena says, smiling. “What’s the plan here?”

“There’s nothing to plan!” Kip says defensively. “We’re just sort of.. friends? I kind of get the sense that he’s lonely.”

“Christopher, you have like, a million friends and basically no free time. Do you need another friend? What do you even talk about?”

Kip looks at his phone and tries to put it into words. What do he and Scott talk about? Nothing, really. Somehow, in the last month, they have started chatting on and off most days. Scott has been updating about his day, and has joked that Kip now has enough information to place some very valuable bets. Kip has done the same, sharing gossip from his dad, telling Scott about the state of his research, the class he’s teaching, complaints about his advisor. Their mutual workout schedules—not that Kip’s daily hour in the gym can compare. Nothing and everything. 

“Just life, it’s nice talking to someone who has nothing to do with academia, who hasn’t known me for a million years.”

Elena puts a hand over her chest in mock indignation. “What’s wrong with people who have known you for a million years?”

“They don’t let you get away with anything.” 

“Well, it sounds like you are trying to get away with something.” A look passes over her face, a recognizable pity that Kip has seen before, and it makes him wince.

“It’s not like that,” Kip says, “I am not repeating patterns. He’s not an asshole.”

“Okay. Not an asshole. So, which is it: boss, friend, straight guy stringing you along? He’s not blind, he knows you’re gay, right?”

“Uh, he has to. I mean. Monday, he told me he was watching Point Break on a plane, and I said Keanu in that movie was a transformative experience and my first crush.”

“God, you’re predictable. What did he say to do that?”

Scott had not responded directly, just sent a “ha ha” and then gone silent until the next day, which was not unusual, given his schedule. “Nothing? We don’t text constantly.” 

As if a divine punishment from the universe, Kip’s phone, face down, buzzes. Elena has a skeptical, judgmental smile, “Gonna check that?”

“Can we please talk about something else?”

“Well, I’ve known you for a million years, so I know when you have a crush. But fine. We’re probably out of things to talk about…” Elena mocks. 

They spend the remainder of the hour catching up—Elena’s work, Kip’s work, gossiping about mutual friends. Kip makes a point of not checking his phone, sliding it face down into his pocket. Finally, as they leave, he looks at it: a text from a friend of a friend who received the same grant Kip is applying for, advice on the process. A text from another friend inviting him to an opening later in the month. An alert from his bank about a loan payment, and two notifications from his to-do list app about deadlines this week. 

✶✶ 

Scott is away for back-to-back games—Winnipeg, Chicago, hockey cities where the stakes are high. It is a mild, damp winter as Kip buckles down, deep in unpleasant edits and suggestions from his advisor he’d rather not address. He spends days holed up in Scott’s apartment, alone and unbothered.

The feeling of December sweeps in, cloudy, short days and long, cold nights. Christmas lights go up, the semester ends, tourists swarm. One of his students gives Kip a handwritten holiday card, loopy calligraphy and a stylized drawing of a Vermeer painting on the front, which he uses as a precious bookmark, carrying his stuff back and forth to Scott’s, campus, professional and social obligations. 

It feels like being friends with a ghost. Kip is in the walls of Scott’s home, watching food arrive and disappear in between his visits, but so little else changes that it’s almost eerie. 

The temptation to breach the threshold is growing. It would be inappropriate to stick around when Scott is scheduled to come home. Instead, Kip watches his games with Blue now resting her whole weight against his side on the couch. 

Over the course of the first three weeks of December, it’s like trying to break into an alternate dimension. Every time he takes the long commute from home, he’s farther and farther away. Kip leaves behind a book, one that he doesn’t need to read yet but may soon. Scott doesn’t mention it: it’s neatly squared next to Scott’s library books on the coffee table. He doesn’t clear out the fridge when he’ll be coming back in two days, leaving behind some yogurt and some leftover stir fry. They’re there on his return, tucked neatly next to Scott’s stack of pre-made meals. 

Emboldened, he takes a cup from the kitchen and puts it in the en-suite, next to the empty charging stand where Scott’s electric toothbrush must sit when he’s home.

It is Scott’s second road trip of the month: Dallas, Nashville. Kip has not seen Scott in the flesh since the home game with Elena, a hundred feet away, through plexiglass, waving at Kip and making his stomach flip. Since their conversation at the beginning of the month, she has stopped teasing him about Scott because he has stopped bringing Scott up to his friends. He has stopped watching games at the Kingfisher, not wanting to open the invitation. What felt like a joke, something silly, no longer does. Kip has not seen him properly since their walk. And yet, they are still texting almost every day. 

It’s mid-December when he places the toothbrush in the cup. Kip will be back soon; it makes sense to keep a toothbrush here. But it is also Kip’s only toothbrush; he will have to go and buy another one if he leaves this behind. Impulse is growing like a winter weed, straining toward the sunlight, wanting to push the door open, between them, just a little.

Scott doesn’t say anything about it. The toothbrush is still there when Kip comes to cover Blue’s evening walk the following day. But Scott is not. 

✶✶

All the while:

[Dec 5th, 1:06 AM]

S: How the hell did you guess who the Man in Black was???<

[Dec 11th, 8:01 PM]

S: I beat Carter’s time getting through security, so that’s something. Sorry to hear about the train—did you get there in time? 

[Dec 14th, 7:12 AM]

S: Have you tried Pearl’s winter special? Mocha is great. 

[Dec 14th, 2:01 PM]

S: Yeah, totally, I keep seeing him too 

[Dec 17th, 3:04 AM]

S: Have you heard of the movie Grand Budapest Hotel? Watched it on the plane. 

The last half of the month is a blur: he has a small birthday party—takeout at Elena’s, dancing afterwards. He is 31 years old, he has officially crossed the threshold into his early 30s. A December birthday means the celebration is crowded with other events: meeting up with friends in town for the holidays, a mix of high school and undergrad friends. A formal, more networking faculty party. 

Later, when he thinks back on this time, he remembers its fragments: cleaning apple sauce off his niece’s little fingers; cleaning mud off Blue’s paws in the foyer; shouting over an overly loud jazz band playing Charlie Brown’s Christmas at a bar; texting Scott outside a bar at 2 AM, a back-and-forth exchange as Kip walks to the subway and Scott’s car carries him back from Westchester Airport to his apartment. 

Kip walks Blue on the 23rd and finds a cheque for one thousand dollars sitting on the counter. Staring at it, he remembers Maria’s comment about the Christmas bonus. And yet—he feels cheap with the paper folded crisply in his pocket, next to the phone where Scott is asking about his holiday plans. The texts and the cheque are two strands of a dangerous helix wrapped together, not touching. Pulling one may undo the other. 

On the 24th, Kip goes to his mom’s in Westchester for the first night of Hanukkah (text to Scott: we’ve traded places). The next day, his dad’s for Christmas. His dad does the house up, as always, and fills it with cousins, neighbours, and people Kip only sees once a year because his dad invited them to Christmas a decade ago, and they still come. It is a big, loud Christmas tradition that lasts from 5 pm until well into the next day, always ending with some very drunken caroling. Kip spends a long day cooking and cleaning beforehand, and then a long night telling people over and over again, “Yes, still in school—Yes, for art history—Yes, still.” 

Scott is quiet over Christmas. 

On the 26th, his dad has the fireplace channel on the television. His dad is sprawled across the couch, a final load of dishes running, a book open on his chest, unread, as they chat. They are talking about the next year, and Kip mentions the graduate student fellowship at the Met he is hoping against hope for, his plan to return to France in the summer. His dad asks, “How are things going in the financial department?” 

“Dad,” Kip says warningly. 

“What? You can’t blame me for worrying!”

“There’s nothing to worry about, I’ve got it sorted.”

“Good, good. Are you still doing all that extra stuff? Walking the dogs of Wall Street?”

“Yeah, it’s easy money on the side,” Kip says, lying by omission. 

“Any juicy stories? Maybe we can do some insider trading and pay off some loans.”

Kip laughs, “Nothing juicy, no.”

“Fine, fine,” his dad says. “Keep the money to yourself. Buy me a nice watch, at least.”

“I promise,” Kip says, “Right after my loans and a place of my own.”

Kip is looking at the crackling image of a log falling to cinders on the TV that’s shoved into the corner of his childhood home. The corner of the frame is slightly blocked from view by a tacky plastic reindeer and the edge of a lampshade. His brain conjures an image: the fireplace in Scott’s sterile home—is his place paid off? Surely. 

“Sounds like a plan,” his dad moves the book from his chest and swings his legs off the couch. “Gonna reheat some turkey, how much do you want?”

✶✶

On the 27th, he walks Blue again. He sends a photo of her in her winter jacket, looking annoyed on the sidewalk across the street from Scott’s (text to Scott: “same girl”). The haze between the holidays and New Year's settles in: the desire to do nothing, unstructured days where no one is around, and it doesn’t feel worth it to try and make plans. The 27th is a home game, and Kip stays after the walk to watch it at Scott’s, putting off leaving. He distracts himself with a sketchbook, his laptop open on the coffee table for reference photos. He draws from a life model seated on a stool, a series of little looping flower vines, and a woman in front of a candle. The world feels incredibly small on this dark evening, hovering in the apartment like a spectre, the loud hockey game crashing through it all. He packs up his things, leaving behind a drawing of Blue in a Santa hat. 

He goes back to Scott’s the next day, the third road trip of the month, Arizona, Colorado, which will take Scott away until New Year's. Kip is making himself dinner when his phone rings. It’s Scott. They have never spoken on the phone before, so he answers it hesitantly. 

“Hello?” 

“Hey, sorry to bother you, just figured it’d be faster to call,” says Scott. It sounds like he’s walking somewhere.

“No, no problem. I’m just cooking,” Kip glances at the clock. It’s just after 7 in New York, which means it’s 5 in Arizona. “What’s up?”

“Nothing urgent—Will you be at the apartment for the next little bit? My meal delivery had to be rescheduled, and they’ll be there in half an hour. Can you put it in the fridge for me? It’s not supposed to sit out too long.”

“No problem at all,” Kip says, relieved it’s something as minor as this.

“Thank you. Sorry, I hope that doesn’t interrupt your plans,” Scott says. 

“Nope, I’m in for the evening.”

“Not going to that gallery opening in the end?” Scott asks.

Last week, Kip mentioned offhand that a friend had a gallery opening tonight. Kip still feels like his life is small and busy, a bustling anthill, compared to whatever the hell Scott’s day-to-day looks like. Kip only has the slightest sense, seeing it through their texts, through coming and going into his empty apartment. Scott’s life is not an anthill that can be so easily disturbed, easily bailed upon like Kip deciding against going to this opening. It’s a giant mechanical beast. He’s surprised Scott has the capacity to remember a single detail of Kip’s schedule.

“Oh, no, I decided against it. That end-of-year malaise,” he answers. It sounds like Scott is walking through a hallway, so Kip asks, “Where are you going?”

“Back to my room, had a team meeting,” Scott yawns, a muffled noise he tries to hide, the clicking of his jaw in Kip’s ear. 

“Figuring out those breakout drills for tomorrow?” Kip asks. He has not been paying as close attention. 

Scott barks a laugh, "Something like that.” In the background, there’s a beeping sound and the whoosh of a door. “Team dinner in a bit.”

The sound has changed, Scott’s voice is clearer, no echoes. 

“Back in your room?” Kip asks. 

“Yeah,” Scott says. The noise of fabric, Scott laying down on his bed, maybe. 

“Must be a relief,” Kip says, his voice coming out strained. He clears his throat. “Finally getting to be alone.”

“Definitely. Long day,” Scott says. His voice is softer, he’s closer to the microphone. 

Kip is standing in the middle of the kitchen. One hand planted on the cool counter. He taps his fingers on the surface: thumb, index, middle, ring, and then pinky against granite.

“I was cooking dinner,” Kip says. Half a thought. 

“Oh, I’ll let you get back to that,” Scott says. The quiet of his voice makes it lower, a rumble. 

Kip chews his lip. A breath of silence between them. The sound of Scott’s exhale. Kip’s voice comes out a matching quiet as he says, “Goodnight.”

“Night,” says Scott. 

Kip blows out a long breath out of his mouth as he puts down his phone. He moves through the mechanical process of finishing cooking his dinner. The sound of Scott’s voice, the deep timbre of it, is still in his ears as he carries his plate to the dining table. He puts music on, loud, to drown it out.

✶✶

Kip spends New Years Eve at the Kingfisher. He has spent all day trying to get back into work, trying to focus. He writes several bad pages that he’ll have to rewrite, but at least he got some words down. He’s meeting Maria and Shawn there, along with some undergrad friends who are in town for the holidays. The game is on, the first one he’s made them watch in weeks, and everyone makes fun of Kip for paying attention as they sit at the bar eating a spread of food pilfered from Shawn’s gig earlier in the day, a lavish luncheon fundraiser that spoils them with fried food they slather in hot sauce and eat over the bar. 

The Admirals win, and Scott scores a hat trick, his first in two seasons. The Admirals are leading the Eastern Conference, and Scott has the second-highest points in the league. Kip feels almost lightheaded, trying to reconcile the man on the phone two nights ago, the soft voice in his ear with these numbers. The game dwindles down, announcers and spinning lights. Kip is a few drinks in, in the middle of an argument about A Little Life, when Shawn shouts, “Kip’s hot boss is on the TV again!”

Scott is doing post-game press. He’s standing in a hallway in a compression shirt, hair wet from a shower, face alight. Scott is nodding along and, in a flat, unfamiliar voice, says: “Obviously offense was going, we're doing some things we talked about, so there's some building blocks in that game we can build off going forward."

Kip laughs out loud. Shawn turns to Kip and says, “What does that mean?” 

“They’re not allowed to say anything specific after a game. The whole point is to be generic,” explains Kip.

“I’ve been forced to watch hockey for months,” Maria says, “and I have no idea what he just said.” 

Kip pulls out his phone and texts Scott.

K: if offense is going, r u  also doing some of the things u talked about?

K: congrats on the hat trick 🎉

k: you looked thrilled. maria & shawn says congrars too 

The lightheadedness trickles down his spine as he considers the fact that somewhere behind the man nodding on screen in front of him is the phone receiving his texts. 

They put the TV back on mute, switch over to CNN’s New Year’s broadcast and return to the evening. Midnight rolls around. They ring in the new year with a shot of something Kyle made and called the Hat Trick, with three kinds of liquor, a bright red float on top. It’s tropical and too easy to drink. 

At the stroke of 2017, Kip kisses all of his friends, sloppy and shouting. They pour out of the bar and go somewhere with music loud enough to dance, a bar with a dance floor and a comforting rotation of pop music from ten years prior. 

Sometime after 1 in the morning,  Kip checks his phone. There’s a text from Scott. 

S: Thanks, felt fucking lucky tonight

S: Happy New Years! 

S: I’ll be back at my place at 2. Will you be there? I forget schedule rn. 

Kip stares at it for a long minute. Kip has never once stayed the night when Scott is flying directly home. There is no reason he would be there. He texts: i’m not on schedule. He hesitates and then adds: should i be there anyway? It’s the middle of the night, strobe lights, resolutions being passsed back and forth. The bass of music matches Kip’s heartbeat. 

The response is immediate. 

S: Yes. 

Kip is on the edge of a purple-lit dance floor, his breath high and tight, conscious of every nerve ending in his body. 

He cannot see Shawn, just Maria. He touches her arm. He shouts over Rihanna that he’s leaving. She waves him off. Kip steps out into the street. It’s late. It’s New Year’s Eve. The air is crisp, wind against his skin. The walk to the subway clears his head. The ride uptown wakes him up. The overnight doorman is not at the front desk. No one sees him enter. 

Blue startles at his return. She nudges his hands with her wet nose. Kip is empty-handed. No bag. He checks his watch: 1:35 am.

He turns on one lamp. Goes to the kitchen. Pours a glass of water. Drinks it over the sink. A second one, the same. Water drips from his chin. Leaves the cup in the sink. Goes to the couch. Sits. Looks at his phone. Nothing interesting. 

He smells of fried food and stale sweat. Still a little drunk. Anticipation races from his hands to his heart. Can feel the veins between. One good way to clear his head. He goes to the ensuite. Turns on the punishing light. Showers thoroughly. Scrubbing everywhere. Not thinking about why. A maybe that sobers him. 

He gets dressed again. Back to the couch. Blue joins him. He turns on the TV. Late night broadcast. Doesn’t follow any of it. He remembers: Elena. They have breakfast plans. He texts. Cancelling them. Presumptuous. Just like the shower. Blue perks up. The door opens. She scampers to it. 

Scott arrives home. He is radiating adrenaline. Eyes bright and awake. Lit by the warm light of the lamp, Scott says, “You’re here.”

“Hi. We should talk,” Kip replies. Rises to stand. 

“You’re right, we should,” Scott nods. Takes off his jacket. Loosens and removes his tie. 

“What do you…” Kip starts. The words die in his throat. Scott does not break eye contact. He unbuttons the top buttons at his throat. And then every button of his shirt after. 

After three months of talking to Scott as a voice, a personality: the man and the body, lean muscle, bare skin in the gap of his white shirt as he unbuttons and untucks it out of dark suit pants. Warm, solid flesh. Scott breaks eye contact as he undoes the buttons at his wrists and shrugs out of the shirt completely. The same man Kip has been trying to tell himself is straight, too closeted to act, who just wanted the distant attention of a captive audience, walks across the room until his shirtless chest is within reach of Kip. 

“What do you want to talk about?” Scott asks. He hooks a finger into Kip’s belt loop and tugs. 

Kip should be stopping this. He shouldn’t risk it for one night of horniness. He should keep Scott as a friend. Kip has bills to pay, a life to finance. Kip has a history, Scott has obligations. He should keep Scott at arm’s length. 

Kip takes a step forward, into Scott’s space, close enough to reach, and breathes, “I forget.”

Just past two in the morning, on the first day of the new year, the thrill of crossing from platonic to physical surges through Kip, an electric whip. After the veil between them—months of texts, weeks of Kip in the apartment like a ghost—Scott reaches out and grabs him by the front of his shirt. Scott pulls him across the last few inches until there is no separation. Kip tilts his head up and kisses him. 

Chapter End Notes

Once again, Scott’s hockey platitude is a real quote, from the real New Years game these teams played. I feel fine and dandy taking the hat trick and win away from the Avalanche, who were once the Quebec Nordiques.

Did you know that the Avalanche won the Stanley Cup the year after they were relocated from Quebec to Colorado in '96, just a short year after the 95 referendum in which Quebec voted to stay in Canada by less than a single percentage point? I assume this is what you're reading the notes for: Quebecois history. One of five hockey facts I knew before December 2025.

Comment to answer the text while Rihanna is still playing. Shout over the music, I can't hear you. Reblog on tumblr if you'd like.

Chapter 6: JANUARY 2017, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

New Years Eve, sex, a variety of compromises, and decisions good and bad.

Chapter Notes

Scott is a live wire after playing an amazing game. And now, Kip, who answered and waited. Kip initiates, kissing him softly, tentatively. Scott doesn’t want to rush, but he can’t stop himself. He’s on a breakaway with just one chance. He deepens the kiss, cupping Kip’s face with both hands, stubble scratching beneath his palms. They kiss standing in the middle of the room for a long minute. Kip’s hair is wet against his fingers. 

Scott presses his face into the crux of his neck, where his throat meets the sharp angle of his jaw, his nose right into the soft spot where it hinges. Kip smells clean like body wash and the warm smell of him. He kisses him there, the stubble a welcome gift against his lips, a reminder of the vitality, reality of the moment. 

“Come to bed with me?” he asks, not moving his head, giving Kip an out while he speaks into his skin.

“Please, yes,” Kip says, his voice registering as a rumble against Scott’s mouth. They stumble toward the bedroom together. Scott discards his pants along the way. Kip pulls off his shirt and then Scott grabs him by the hips, steering him backwards into the bedroom, not kissing, just smiling at him in the dark. 

Scott does not always want to lead, but tonight, he cannot help himself. The boos and cheers of eighteen thousand people are still in his bones—the hat trick, the party of the flight home, easy interviews with gimme answers. The warmth of a man who knows his last name in his bed. 

He steers Kip to the edge of the bed and pushes a palm into his chest, following him down onto it. Horizontal, he unbuttons Kip’s jeans and pulls them off with a lift of his hips. Scott is rewarded with the sight of his thighs: muscle under hair, strength. Another win. He hooks his fingers into Kip’s boxers and pulls those off too, undressing him completely. He hovers around Kip’s waist, Kip looks down at him, glassy-eyed in the lamplight. Kip has the body of a statue, broad and muscular, the kind of body that is worth carving into marble to be admired for centuries. Why are you studying art history, Scott thinks, they should be making art of you. 

Scott straddles him to kiss him again, messy and open-mouthed, while he runs his hands up and down the sides of Kip’s chest, to record for memory the feeling of his muscles under his hands, to have something he can keep. Kip has a hand in Scott’s hair, and then, unexpectedly, the hand at the back of Scott’s head tightens, grabbing Scott’s hair and pulling. Scott groans. Too slow. He has a tailwind, a rush to keep. 

He doesn’t just want to fuck Kip; he wants to feel him, taste him, make him come undone—shine the burning star in his chest without needing to find the words to do so. He wants to keep winning. 

Scott slides down the bed and takes Kip’s cock in his mouth. It has been too long, he tries to measure enthusiasm against restraint. He uses his hand, mouth, working his jaw open until he has Kip nearly to the back of his throat, until Kip is arching off the bed into him, until he is near gagging.  

Scott pulls off and pushes Kip’s knees up, lapping with his tongue the underside of his cock, his balls, lifting and spreading his legs. Kip is breathing in short little pants of air as Scott peppers his thighs in kisses, sucking at the skin right where it creases, and then lavishes attention on his rim, licking him slowly and deliberately. Kip squirms in pleasure, his legs shifting against Scott’s hands where Scott is holding them. Scott uses the point of his tongue against Kip and is rewarded with a buck of Kip’s hips and then a sigh of pleasure. 

He takes a hand off Kip’s thigh and runs his finger in a circle, pressing it softly against where his tongue has just left. Kip moves his hips down against the pressure, and Scott looks up at him. Kip has an arm across his face, and Scott pushes just a little firmer and asks, “Yeah?”

“Please,” Kip chokes. 

Scott shifts, grabs the lube from the bedside table, and drops some carefully onto Kip, a short intake of air as the cool lube hits warm skin. Scott slicks his finger and pushes it to the first knuckle into the heat of Kip’s body. Kip moans, and Scott moves slowly, pushing in one joint at a time as Kip relaxes into him. He holds there, a long beat, and then begins to fuck him with just the one finger crooked until Kip jolts in response. Scott grins against his thigh and keeps going. He works a second finger in, and Kip groans in a way that ricochets through Scott’s body. Kip moves a hand toward his own cock, and Scott knocks it away.

“Just wait,” Scott says, as firmly as he can. Kip makes a high little noise of agreement. 

Scott relishes the trembling, little noises in response to every movement of his fingers. He bites gently against Kip’s leg, which gets a breath of air close to a laugh, a twitch of Kip’s hips against the fingers inside him. Scott may never get this again, has no idea the next time he will ever feel someone he likes this much under his hands. When he’ll next devote his body to something so novel; something that feels so perfectly good; something he alone can win, every motion telling him so, how much Kip is enjoying it. 

He establishes a rhythm with his fingers, a gentle come-hither, and adjusts so he can take Kip in his mouth again. It’s overwhelming to feel Kip in his hands, mouth. Greedy, he still wants more. He grabs Kip’s hand, pulling by the wrist from where it has been clawing at the sheet. He guides Kip’s hand to his head. Kip gets the idea: he runs his fingers into Scott’s hair and tugs again. Scott’s own neglected dick twitches in response; the pleasure of being used and useful. 

Kip shoves Scott’s head slowly at first, an insistent rhythm, while Scott fucks him with his fingers. Scott moans, rutting into the mattress. Kip’s dick stiffens just a little more in response, and Kip’s grip shifts, pushing Scott’s head more intensely, fucking his face, deep to the back of his throat. Scott moans again, overplaying it, intentionally letting it reverberate through his full mouth and echo into Kip: overwhelming need, a lust so deep it feels unquenchable. 

“Please,” Kip says, but it sounds more like a whine. Scott isn’t sure what he’s asking for, but Kip gasps, “I’m close, Scott, fuck,” and Scott pulls back. Kip’s hands release Scott’s head. He pulls off, mouth and chin wet with saliva, and uses his free hand to jerk Kip off, watching his face as he comes apart completely with a string of sounds. Scott stills the fingers inside him, pressing softly so Kip jerks against him, over-sensitive. Scott mouths the tip of his flagging dick and Kip trembles like he’s coming in from the cold. 

Scott knows he’s smiling like an idiot when Kip looks down at him and says, “Oh my fucking god.”

Scott gently pulls his fingers free, draws his knees up to kneel between Kip’s legs, guiding Kip’s legs back down. Kip pushes himself up onto his elbows to look at Scott and says, breathily, “I’m gonna be useless for a bit.”

Scott hopes he doesn’t look too smug. Kip continues, voice husky, using a foot to tap Scott’s thigh for attention, “Let me watch you.”

Scott shuffles forward and flops on his back next to Kip, who turns over onto his side and hooks one of his legs over Scott’s thighs to pin him in place. Scott runs a hand over the cum cooling on Kip’s stomach and jerks himself off with it. Kip’s thigh presses him down with force, as Scott begins to stroke deliberately, not wanting to wait a second, not wanting to linger. He keeps his eyes shut, focusing on the feeling. The bed shifts as Kip adjusts to be fully on his side, leg still holding Scott down, and then the weight of Kip’s arm settles heavily across his chest as Kip reaches up to place a hand at his jaw. Kip hooks a thumb into Scott’s mouth, opening it wide.

Kip pins him in place: it feels like being held and being exposed all at once. It won’t take long. He is gaspingly close when Kip turns Scott’s head to the side to face him. Scott opens his eyes and comes. It feels like a knot has been undone that was strung up tightly from the top of his head to his ankles. A knot that has been holding him together for some time, loosening all at once, dropping him out of the universe entirely. 

He comes back to functioning thought with Kip’s hand rubbing at his jaw, still looking at him. 

“Gimme a sec,” Scott says, holding up a hand. His heart is drumming in his chest: that burning star of feeling has not gone anywhere; it has gained a pulse. He needs to breathe before he does something stupid. He swings shakily off the bed. He stumbles to the en-suite to brush his teeth. He turns around, mid-brush, to see Kip joining him naked, hair a mess. It’s so profoundly intimate, wanting made flesh. 

He’s reminded how often Kip has been here without him when Kip easily leans past and grabs a hand towel from the open shelf beneath the sink and wets it, cleans himself off. Kip wordlessly steps into Scott’s space and wipes Scott’s stomach clean. Scott spits the toothpaste out of his mouth and kisses Kip chastely, standing together in the overhead lighting of his big, austere bathroom. Kip deepens the kiss, tentative to slow and searching. 

“Will you stay the night?” Scott asks, breaking apart.

Kip looks up at him, a sarcastic smile, “It’s already the night.” 

“So, yes?”

By way of answering, Kip takes his toothbrush from the cup he left a week ago, the one Scott has stared at every day, trying to interpret its meaning. A test, a dare, an accusation? Scott leaves him to it, crawls into bed, nervous to sleep next to the man he has just had his fingers inside. Kip turns off the lamp and walks through the dark to the other side of the bed, crawling in next to Scott. He grabs Scott with unexpected force, hooking an arm over him and pulling Scott in as the little spoon. 

Into the back of his neck, Kip says, “I can’t believe I told myself a straight guy had a bidet.”

Scott laughs in surprise, and says, “You thought I was straight? I thought I was being pretty obvious.”

“You were,” Kip laughs. “But I was afraid—I thought it might be an experiment thing? Or just, enjoying the gay guy’s attention.”

“Is that a thing people do?”

“Yeah, it is,” Kip laughs. “I’m glad to be wrong. And I have gotten the distinct impression that that was not your first time hooking up with a man.”

It feels easier to confess in the dark: “Uh, no. I’m discreet but I’m not a virginal monk over here. I usually wait for the off-season. But… I’ve never brought anyone back here. Ever. It’s probably been two years since I hooked up with anyone on American soil,” Scott says, with an inward cringe. He hopes Kip doesn’t think this is a hookup. 

“Jeez,” Kip says, a breath of air into the back of his neck. And then, in a smaller voice, quiet enough that Scott can only hear because they’re so close, “I can’t believe you’re into me.”

Scott tugs the arm across his chest closer, “I’m so into you I’m breaking all my rules.”

“Same here,” Kip says.  

Scott remembers that Kip wanted to talk as he sinks into sleep. 

✶✶

The light in the morning is cold: the clouds have whited out the sky, and snow is falling thick and fast. Scott wakes to an empty bed, the covers returned to order. He takes a steadying breath, returns to reality. He turns to find his phone and then hears the sound of a dish being settled in the kitchen. 

Kip, in the kitchen, in his boxers, smiles at him, a warm sun. 

“When do you have to go?” Scott asks. 

“Not for a couple hours,” Kip says. 

Scott crowds him against the counter. They didn’t kiss nearly enough last night. He makes up for lost time, kissing him slowly, tenderly, sucking his lower lip into his mouth and stroking behind one ear with his finger. 

“I have to walk Blue,” Scott says, finally. 

“Okay,” Kip replies, softly. “I’ll be here when you get back.” 

Scott dresses quickly and takes Blue out. The snow is falling heavily, melting as it hits the ground. A thin white coat for the new year. Blue, a summer dog, is skeptical—a perfect excuse for a short walk. Back up the elevator and into his home: Kip is waiting there for a second time in less than twelve hours, still in his boxers, sitting at the counter. Scott takes a beat to register the sight of him at the counter. Storing the memory for later. 

Kip turns and swivels off the stool. Scott grabs his own breakfast from the fridge and microwaves it. As the machine’s ambient noise fills the empty apartment, Scott says. “Talk?”

“Yeah,” Kip replies. “I… I work for you. Is it a bad idea if I keep walking your dog? And we just—keep it separate?” 

“Do you want this to be a one-time thing? I can forget it. We can go back to before. If you’d rather,” Scott lies. 

“I don’t want that,” Kip says, simply. 

“Me neither,” Scott admits, relieved. Scott started breaking his rules the second Kip made him laugh. But he’s realistic about what he can offer, and it doesn’t go very far. The microwave dings. Scott pulls out his breakfast and looks at it. He is not hungry yet. “What about now?”

“Now?”

“Let’s not make it a one-time thing,” Scott says, walking around the kitchen island and carrying Kip back to bed. 

His breakfast gets cold on the counter. They have sex in a way Scott cannot remember having for years: slow, honest, and easy. Everything Scott is not. 

✶✶

The next day, at practice, Scott is in such a good mood that four different people comment on it. 

“Damn, we should let this guy get a hat trick more often,” Carter calls to Scott as he skates by after dominating a practice scrimmage. 

“Set up more shots so I can take them next time,” Scott shouts. 

Practice is intense, and their debrief meeting is long ahead. This year is the MLH’s very first bye-week: five whole days off in the middle of the season, for the first time ever. Some of the guys complain that they’ll lose momentum, or that they’ll have to spend time with their kids. 

Scott is getting dressed as two younger defensemen are talking about their first game after the break against Toronto, the one they were just watching tape for. He overhears Gardner, a cocky twenty-two-year-old at risk of being sent down to the farm team, talking about Toronto’s right winger. Gardner says something like, “Hard to catch that guy, he skates around like a fucking fairy, follows Kent around the ice like he wants to suck hi—” 

Scott has let so much slide to get here. He’s heard worse, a dozen times this season alone. He was in such a good mood. He turns around and cuts in, “Hey Gardner, cool it with that shit. Talk like a fucking adult and not like you’re in your mom’s basement streaming Call of Duty for twelve of your friends.”  

Too mean. Gardner, caught like a kid in class, mumbles, “Uh, sorry, Cap.”

Scott turns back to buttoning up his shirt. The conversation behind him starts back up, awkward.

✶✶

Kip quiets over text for the next week. He has some work he’s catching up on, of which Scott can’t exactly follow the details. Kip mentions something about “making it up” to his friends. Hungry, Scott wants to know more, like a meal that doesn’t fit his diet plan—and there are a lot of meals that don’t. Before Kip left on the first of the month, they agreed: nothing over text. After months of activity, the text chain goes slack.

Scott fills his free time with the usual: meetings, obligations, calls he doesn’t want to be on. He goes out for dinner with Jalo, who tells him about his apartment hunt. He’s not looking to buy—his contract is not that steady—but he wants something less temporary than the furnished month-to-month place he’s renting now. 

“Do you want my real estate agent?” Scott asks, “She was good, didn’t pressure me into anything. She does rentals, too.”

“You are a very good welcome committee,” Jalo says. “Thank you.” 

Days later, he calls Kip from his hotel room in Columbus, the night before the game, when Kip is in Scott’s apartment again. Scott’s worries over Kip’s quiet are abated: Kip fills him in on a series of tedious meetings he had for the student union, asks for Scott’s opinion about something his advisor said, and makes allusions to seeing his friends. 

Scott, full of nerves, entreats: “So, you probably saw on the calendar that I have next week off.”

“I saw that, yeah,” Kip acknowledges, tone shifting. 

“I was wondering… are you free? This is the first time we have those days off, and there are no practices. Honestly, I’m not even sure what to do with that much time off in the middle of the season,” he laughs awkwardly. “Even if you stay over for a day? No obligation, obviously, about Blue. You can bring your work, you can do whatever, we can just—”

“Yeah,” Kip cuts into the ramble that seems to be pouring out of Scott, “That sounds good, I’ll adjust my schedule. Let’s do that.”

“Okay, great,” Scott breathes out a sigh of relief. He feels like he has asked for something huge, something beyond just the request of time, which is the biggest thing, the only thing he can ask for or that he can give.

“You’re back Sunday, right?” Kip asks. “I can come on Monday. I have dinner with my dad before.”

“Right,” Scott says. Kip talks about his dad a lot. “Do you have dinner together often?”

“Once a week, in theory, we make sure our schedules overlap. He works nights a couple times a week and I’m in Manhattan so much.”

“You’re in Bay Ridge, right?” Scott asks. They have talked about so much, the frivolous details of their day-to-day, but Scott stopped himself from getting too personal. Afraid that his interest would reveal itself—too late now. 

“Yeah, still in my childhood home. Saving rent, and my dad is a good roommate,” Kip pauses, “I can’t imagine you’ve spent much time in Brooklyn?”

“No,” Scott admits. He has lived in New York for most of his adult life, but most of the city remains unknown to him. 

“You grew up in Rochester, right?” Kip asks. “We’re on an uneven playing field here—I looked you up months ago.”

“Yeah, Rochester,” Scott says. “I tried to research you, but there wasn’t nearly enough.”

“You did?” Kip asks. 

“Yep. Have you ever considered giving a few dozen interviews that ask the same questions over and over again? It would make my life a lot easier here,” Scott says. 

“What do you want to know? I think you’ve got the basics—grew up in Brooklyn. My parents divorced when I was nine. It was messy. My dad kept the house, and my sister and I stayed with him. Mom moved out of the city. Public school. Undergrad at NYU. Took some time off to work and save money. I lived in Chicago for a year, and then I moved back to New York and applied to Columbia, which is what I’ve been doing for the last three and a half years. That’s … the whole story.”

“I have a lot of follow-up questions,” Scott confesses. 

“Shoot, Woodward.”

“Woodward?”

“Sorry, ignore me, what else did you want to know?”

“I didn’t know you lived in Chicago.”

“Just for a year,” Kip repeats. 

“Did you like it? I’ve never really seen much of it.”

“I really liked the city. Cleaner. A little less, I don’t know, dramatic. I got a taste of Midwest Nice.”

“Let me tell you, the fans are not nice,” Scott jokes. “What took you to Chicago?”

Scott can hear the sound of lips parting to speak, Kip’s mouth closing again, before he answers, “School, but then I decided to come back to New York and do it at home. Kind of a cliché, that way.”

“Hey, I get it. I took a lower salary to get a no-movement clause in my last contract. Stuck here by choice.”

“Lower salary, huh?” Kip says, the sarcasm obvious in his voice. 

“Sorry,” Scott grimaces, “Comparatively.” 

“That did also come up on Google.” 

“I bet it does,” Scott says drily. It is not the time to bring up the brand deals and endorsements that pad out the rest of a portfolio managed by his financial planner. The distance between them feels wider than the miles back to New York. “It’s a cliche, but it’s still weird to me, too. I grew up middle class. My parents bounced between jobs—youth hockey coaches don’t make a lot. And then. Well, you know the rest, I think.” 

“Yeah, I do,” Kip says softly. Scott closes his eyes: he has played the orphan card to offset the money talk. He screws his whole face up in embarrassment, glad Kip cannot see, glad he does not have to explain. 

“We got heavy there,” Scott says, desperate to change the subject. “Can I go back to interviewing you?”

“You’ve got five whole days to interview me!” Kip cries.  

“Not sure that’ll be enough,” Scott says, going for honesty, for once. “I have to start now.”

“Capitalizing your chances?” Kip asks, the cliche hockey phrase makes Scott laugh. 

“Something like that,” Scott says, curling onto his side to cradle the phone against the pillow. 

✶✶

Kip arrives on Monday morning after Blue’s walk, just after 10 am. He has his usual duffel bag, along with a tote of books and his laptop in a messenger bag. He walks into the apartment and drops it immediately, pushing Scott into the couch. 

Kip murmurs into his neck, “I’ve been thinking about this for days,” and Scott feels his heart sing.

Five days: they barely leave the apartment. Scott cancels all his personal meetings and requirements, cancels the housekeeper. Kip uses the gym while Scott walks Blue. He does not ask Kip to walk her, given. Well. He is still paying Kip for that, and Kip is not on schedule to do so. Scott has no idea how to negotiate that. A million problems, a million ways to undo everything, but those exist on the other side of the glass, concrete, and drywall that separate the cocoon of his apartment from the world. 

Kip does leave to go up to campus to teach on Tuesday, a freshman seminar that he comes back with complaints about—it’s a boring required course with unenthusiastic students. He sits with his feet in Scott’s lap and explains the concept of legacy admissions. 

They have sex everywhere, no matter how impractical, condom wrappers in every garbage can. Scott wants to rewrite the whole space and make memories that will leave a mark to overwrite the decisions of his interior designer. He ushers Blue into the other room and presses Kip into the kitchen island, takes him against the granite. Scott confesses that he jerked off to the thought of Kip in his bed, and Kip blushes, revealing that he jerked off in the shower every morning he stayed over. They repeat the performance, better for the company. He asks a surprised Kip to fuck him, and Kip takes his time prepping him until he’s whimpering and then fucks him hard enough to feel the next day. Liking men, wanting them, the pleasure of sucking cock and being fucked—Scott has squared these joys into a locked room, into his bed alone. He lets them out, just the smallest amount, like sunlight from a closed blind, into the rest of the apartment. That glowing star of feeling in his chest leads the way, leads him to Kip’s arms over and over again. 

As much, maybe even more, than the sex, he enjoys Kip working in his apartment. As promised, Kip brought his work with him. He spends several hours a day at his laptop, headphones in. On Wednesday morning, Kip has his back to him, curved unergonomically over the computer before him. The desk is a showpiece, not designed for long-term use. Scott is on the couch, doing all the boring emails and scheduling he avoided the last two days. He looks up and sees Kip, and thinks that he should replace the decorative chair with something more practical, a chair with back support. 

Scott feels something unnameable bloom in his chest. The companionable silence of them working in the same room together is a soft glow to take the chill off the winter morning. 

When Scott gets a chance to speak, he avoids what he cannot name and fills the silence with more questions, more grasping. He wants it all, wants to know what Kip thinks about everything; what he’s working on this minute, this year; where he was when major events happened; his favourite things; what his friends are like. It feels like his lust: unquenchable and terrifying. Too big to give over. If Kip knew, he would run. 

On the last day, Thursday, Kip leaves for a quick meeting he says he couldn’t move. The idea that Kip moved meetings for this makes Scott’s lips feel numb. When Kip returns, Blue comes dancing toward him, and Scott realizes something he has somehow not noticed yet: Blue is long past the fear she usually has with strangers. She leaps up, just as excited to see Kip as Scott is used to her reacting to see him, not just her usual greeting to his housekeeper or the hockey friends who have met her. She weaves in and out of Kip’s legs, leaning her back hopefully against his shins. She says what Scott cannot: you’re back, you’re back, please stay.

Chapter End Notes

They were too busy to talk about art these two weeks. Next up: the rest of January.

Comment to maintain a financial relationship against your better judgement. Reblog, follow me on tumblr if you'd like.

Chapter 7: JANUARY 2017, KIP 

Chapter Summary

Kip gets paid, Kip does not go for a walk. Separately.

Chapter Notes

Payments from the dog-walking agency are bimonthly: once midway through the month and then again at the end. The payment from the first half of January is drawn automatically from Scott’s expansive bank account to the agency and then autodeposited into Kip’s more meagre one.  

Over the five days they spent in the cozy bubble of Scott’s apartment, Kip indulged in everything he’d kept at arm's length: Scott’s obvious interest, his body, and the ready emotional warmth that radiates off him like a furnace. 

After, Kip is ushered back into the bleak fact of January in the real world: short days, salt turning to dirt on the sidewalks. Scott leaves for an away game in Toronto. Kip is surprised, somehow, to turn off the lights and find Scott’s apartment largely unchanged after the five days they spent together, Blue watching from her dog bed, no longer wary, but waiting for his return. Kip leaves the toothbrush.

A notification buzzes in his pocket as he walks to the train with both bags. He checks it, expecting a last-minute email from his advisor, and instead sees a banking alert. He stops and steps to the side into an office building’s awning. 

Kip clicks the payment notification, which brings up his banking app. The money appears as a line item, one source of funds in instead of the rest out. It is the standard rate for the first half of the month, lower than usual, because Scott walked his own dog for five days. No need for Kip to do so—except of course, Kip was there. He did not offer and Scott did not ask. Kip also cashed the Christmas cheque. Kip looks at the money and then swipes over to his calendar. It’s colour-coded. Today: advisor appointment, the freshman seminar he’s teaching, and some administrative follow-up.

Kip gets on at 79th Street near the front of the train. In the fluorescent light of the subway car, he attempts to divide everything clearly into two. Information he has to keep separate: the money on one side, and everything he learned over the last week on the other. Scott is handsy, a cuddler; he eats anything but has weird food requests if given the choice; his underwear drawer is a stack of 20 pairs of the same style; he likes making Kip laugh when they have sex. Just after 116th St, the subway emerges overground, filling the train compartment in the bright light of a clear winter sky. Above ground, Kip’s phone reconnects: the expected follow-up from his advisor, a follow-up from a conference listserv. The other thing, separate from the last five days: his life. He swipes the notifications away and puts his phone in his pocket, watching the city rise into view as the train crests the hill, the opaque glass of apartments, each hiding its own life. 

His advisor, at least, is happy with him. They discuss the revisions she sent over, and Kip takes notes. He then spends the better part of an hour speculating why her emails to a titchy collections specialist last week are unanswered and then reading each email to reassure her that they were not overly familiar. He leaves with a new to-do list. 

Kip rides the hour home listening to music. Back in his childhood bedroom, he waits for his laptop to turn back on. His laptop is still drastically low on RAM, it takes long whirring minutes to start. He lets the laptop struggle and goes to microwave dinner. 

✶✶

S: Landed in Montreal, couple of hours to kill. I’ve never been to the art museum and it’s just down the street. 

K: go!! never been. say hi to this painting for me (link) 

S: Will do. 

✶✶

Scott gets back from Montreal and has a home game immediately, the crush of back-to-back games. Kip arrives at the apartment to find a postcard of the painting he sent Scott in Montreal waiting on the counter. Kip pulls out his sketchbook and draws Scott’s red Admirals sweater. He takes the sweater and the postcard with him when he goes; just barely snapping shut his messenger bag. He leaves Scott the drawing.

He meets some grad school friends for dinner. They catch up, complain about their work. There’s a TV in the corner of the restaurant, and when he goes to the washroom, he asks if they can put on the game. He watches the screen with one eye, doing his best not to divide his attention too much. The Admirals lose 3-2, Scott gets an assist but no goals. Kip splashes pho on himself when Scott has a near miss goal, and plays it off as an accident. Kip texts Scott, after, quickly and discreetly. 

After, he goes to the show he promised to see after ditching the opening last month. Keeping himself busy, keeping himself compartmentalized. He texts his friend, one of the co-curators, compliments and praise, dragging an overstuffed messenger bag back to Brooklyn.

Back home, he sleeps in Scott’s sweater. He changes out of it in the morning, so his Dad won’t ask questions.

✶✶

“Can’t win them all,” Scott says to Kip, two days later. Kip consoles him the only way he knows how: undressing him in the middle of the afternoon after practice. Kip has come early, on schedule to walk Blue. Scott has an enormous bruise, bad luck on a collision. A dark plum blooming across his right thigh, green at the edges. Kip stifles a gasp at the sight of it. 

“Not my first or last of the season,” Scott shudders as Kip touches it lightly. “Don’t worry, I’m not made of glass.”

“Do you get these a lot?” 

“Hazard of the job,” Scott admits, his eyes tracking Kip's face. 

“That’ll take getting used to,” Kip says, still, absently running a hand along Scott’s other, untouched thigh. 

Scott smiles widely and pulls him in for a kiss. Despite the admonishment, Kip is careful with him. They make out until they’re out of breath, like teenagers who might get caught. Kip kisses around the bruise along Scott’s thighs and takes Scott in his mouth. Giving in, indulgent. 

Later, they put on Robocop on the shockingly large TV in Scott’s bedroom. They lay in the bed at an absurd angle so they can watch it spooning, every laugh or comment from Scott a comforting murmur in Kip’s back. Scott falls asleep easily, a decade of perfecting his afternoon naps, breathing soft air into the back of Kip’s neck as Kip joins him, dozing in and out. 

Later, he sits, a little bleary from the unexpected nap, watching Scott get into his suit. It’s almost mechanical: Scott doesn’t look through the closet, he just takes the first  of a row of starched suits:, pants and jackets hung together neatly on the same hanger. Scott ties the knot of his tie without a mirror, and still ends up with a perfect knot and even lengths. 

“Do you have to be on campus tomorrow?” Scott asks, game-day suit returning him to the stranger Kip met months ago. “Do you want to stay the night?”

“Sure,” says Kip, his resolve weak. Another night, more stolen creature comforts: Scott’s giant shower, his luxury kitchen, a space quiet enough to think and too rich to afford. 

“Great, I’ll… see you after my game,” Scott says. The happiness is so bright and clear, it washes away Kip’s guilt. Why not, why not, why not. Scott bends, stiff in his suit, and pulls him in for a rushed kiss. “See you soon,” he repeats.

Scott leaves as he always does: he says goodbye to Blue, asks for her luck for the game, and then he disappears into his private elevator. Without him, the apartment is quiet again, just the soft clipping of Blue’s nails as she walks sadly back into the apartment from the foyer. Kip is on schedule to walk Blue. It is the first time they have overlapped whatever they are doing together with the transaction that underlines their relationship.

It is bitterly cold outside, mid-winter has settled in, the time of year when being a dogwalker no longer feels worth the effort or the commute. It’s hard to say if it feels better, coming all the way uptown to get paid and to fool around with Scott. Two separate facts, twisted together like a knot. Kip has remained friendly with people he’s slept with in the past—Shawn is one of his closest friends after a three-week trial hook-up in undergrad that led to boredom on either end. He is not so foolish to think he could do that this time. Not when he sees texts from Scott and feels like a lit sparkler is crackling dangerous light in his chest. 

K: I didn’t say good luck, good luck. 

Kip falls asleep on the couch after the walk, waiting for Scott after the Admirals lose again. Blue joins him on the couch, fast asleep between his knees. He is awoken not by Scott’s arrival, but by the feeling and sound of Blue’s tail thumping against the couch. Scott is standing over them, on the other side of the couch, looking down at Kip. He is lit by the city's ambient glow through the window; Kip doesn’t have his contacts in, and his glasses are on the table, so Scott’s face is an indistinct blur. 

“Hi,” Kip says. “You played well. I’m sorry about the game.” 

Scott doesn’t say anything. Kip is heavy with sleep, fighting through disorientation, he asks, “Everything okay?”

Scott, still quiet, pads around the couch. He’s wearing stiff suit pants and an untucked dress shirt. Careful not to disturb Blue, Scott climbs over Kip’s legs and curls up on top of him, nearly in the fetal position around his chest, his weight in his knees and elbows. Scott buries his head into the small space between Kip’s head and the couch. Into that muffled space, he says, “I’m good.” 

“Tough loss?” Kip asks. 

“No, not that,” Scott says, squeezing Kip between his arms. “It is nice to find you here after the game.”

“You asked me to stay,” Kip murmurs.

Scott doesn’t respond, just leans back and kisses him: slow, soft. Adagio, the opening chords to a new song. 

✶✶

They sleep in, a day off for Scott, a full schedule for Kip, but no need for an alarm. He wakes up with the light anyway. This morning, the cold winter light pulls him awake just after seven. They rise together, get ready slowly. Still the early phase of incomprehension, getting to know patterns: they shower, dress, eat, start the day. Scott goes to the door to walk Blue. 

“I’ll join you, I could use the walk,” Kip says, standing up.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Scott says, rushed. 

Kip, halfway to the door, stops. “What? I wasn’t going to charge you.” 

“What? No.” Scott breathes loudly through his nose, sounding strained when he says, “I can’t be—obvious.”

“Oh, well. I know that,” Kip says, softly. “We did… walk her before?”

“Yeah, but. It’s different now.”

“Do you think people can tell we’re fucking just by looking at us?” Kip asks bewildered.

Scott’s whole face looks crushed, head tilted and eyes looking up at Kip, whites visible. Kip feels awful, instantly. 

“It’s not that simple,” Scott says, sounding pained. “I can’t take risks. It’s not about me. It’s about—too many many people depend on me. It would fuck everything up.” 

Kip hesitates, taking this in. Who, he wonders, are these people? Since October, he has never seen anyone but his housekeeper or a courier in Scott’s apartment. With past clients, he is usually the staff, and he is used to coming in and out of a busy person’s life, changing spaces. There is never any sign of life in Scott’s apartment. Scott has friends on the team; he has mentioned having them over. Who depends on Scott? Whose expectations is Scott carrying? His teammates? The staff of the Admirals? Every single fan of the team? The city itself? Do they all have their weight on Scott’s shoulders to keep him in the closet? Kip shudders. He only has his own expectations, and those feel like enough to bury him. 

Kip walks to Scott, runs a hand on those broad shoulders and up the side of his neck, “It’s fine. I get it, I am not asking you to do anything risky. I don’t need to walk Blue with you for free,” he says, trying to make a joke. 

Scott grimaces instead. “I want you to join me. It’s not about the one walk—it’s getting photographed with you once, and then two, three times, and then the questions people would ask.”

There’s something in the argument, in the implicit compromise Kip is making that hurts. That will be a splinter under his skin, even as he agrees to it. Even if the secret is kept for good reason, even if Scott has all the reasons in the world to keep it, even if Kip knows that being seen together is not about him, Kip, but about the vast consequences that could unravel Scott’s whole world. It still feels like a wedge of wood under the soft flesh of his palm. 

He agrees to the sliver: “Right, I understand.”

“I really like you,” Scott says, looking at him wide-eyed. “It’s just… the second I leave here, I can’t expect to be alone. Like, ever. That’s my reality. I know that it’s a lot to ask of you. So, I’m just following your lead, on what you’re comfortable with, within those… restrictions.”

The restrictions being the walls of this apartment. 

“I’m going to lay my cards on the table,” Kip says. The way Scott is looking at him makes his heart race, nullifying the compromise. “I like you, too. I’m not seeing or sleeping with anyone else. And, if you’re asking me what I want given the circumstances… I want to keep seeing you. Even if I can’t be seen with you.” 

“Okay,” Scott says. His face is a little blank, like he’s digesting this. “I’m not sleeping with anyone else either, but you probably knew that.” 

“I would be impressed with your time management if that were the case,” he says, relieved to slip back into something lighter, to close the door on the part of this that feels bad. 

“You already have my whole calendar until April—where would I find the time?”

“Who knows,” Kip jokes, “On the road? Maybe your drives to Tarrytown are multitasking.”

“I sleep on so many of those rides that now I almost fall asleep in the back of any car. So really, there is some multitasking going on.”

“Pavlovian response to the West Side Highway,” Kip laughs.

“What’s that? Pavlovian?”

“This Russian doctor, Pavlov, every time he fed his dogs, he would ring a bell. Eventually, if he just rang the bell, even without any food around, the dogs would start to drool, because they associated the sound with food.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that!” Scott says, enthusiastically, the way he always does when he’s learned something new. “Speaking of dogs, I do have to walk her,” he nods toward Blue, who has been watching them from the shelf near the door. 

“I have to go up to campus in an hour, but I’ll be here when you get back,” Kip says. Scott, who has access to anything in the world, still seems to like it when Kip reassures him, and when Kip is there when he comes home. That Scott could want him this much, when he has done nothing to merit it, makes him dizzy. The imposter in him feeds on the flattery all the same. 

✶✶

Despite the cold, Kip walks the half hour to campus. He’s layered up: good winter jacket, sweater, hat, mittens. He arrives at his group study session pink-cheeked and feather-light with happiness. It fades slowly in the drudgery of his day: administrative work, rewrites, dwindling motivation, a conversation with someone a year above him who is taking a brief sabbatical to recuperate. The funding for this sabbatical is unsaid, despite how much Kip wants to ask, but the Moncler jacket implies an answer. 

After school, he takes the subway to see his friends on his way home. No game, no Kingfisher: he and Maria are at Shawn’s place to help him pack. 

“Moving up in the world,” Maria says.

“Arguably down,” says Kip. “14th floor to 2nd?”

“I will not miss waiting for an elevator,” Shawn says. “Until one day I have my own, obviously.”

“Speaking of private elevators,” Maria grins, turning to Kip. “How is our favourite client, Scott Hunter?”

“Oooh, does the hot boss have a private elevator?” Shawn says—Kip is grateful for the moment to figure out an answer.

“Yeah, he does,” is all Kip can say. 

“You haven’t been bringing him up as much,” Shawn points out, as if realizing it. “Or at all?”

Kip flips over a cardboard box. Shawn is reusing boxes from another friend’s move, making them fragile for their second use. Kip reinforces the box on the bottom, just to be safe. The loud rip of tape drowns out the possibility of an answer. He turns the box right side up. Finally, he says, “Not much to say.”

“No more overlaps?” Maria asks, sadly.

“Nope,” Kip lies. 

He has not brought Scott or the Admirals up with anyone because he does not want to start outright making things up. It has been easy so far: it has only been two and a half weeks, one of which was spent almost entirely with Scott. He has not asked Scott who he can tell, but Scott was afraid that people might be able to tell they’ve slept together based on the way they walk side by side. There’s the sliver in his palm, a dull ache. 

The conversation moves on: gossip about mutual friends, a couple from undergrad finally breaking up, a lengthy argument about what music to play. It turns to their love lives—Shawn begins to describe a guy he and his boyfriend took out on a date. Some complicated connection: his boyfriend's ex’s former roommate. 

Kip has zoned out completely when he hears Shawn ask: “What do you think, Kip?”

“What?” Kip splutters, “Sorry I missed the last part of the story.”

They both stare at him. Shawn says, “Ugh, head in the sky over his hot boss.” 

“I’m helping you pack!” Kip cries, hefting the box he just labeled. “I was focused!”

“And I’m very grateful you read all those books to help you focus and that you lifted all those weights so you could move boxes,” Shawn says. “A man of many talents.” 

“What were you saying?” Kip asks. 

“I was saying you’re too busy pining to give me advice,” Shawn pivots. “What about you, any noteworthy dates? You’ve been silent for months.”

“No dates,” Kip answers, a half truth. He’s getting around lying to his friends on a technicality. 

✶✶

The rest of the month passes in a blur of similar days. Timing his trips to campus with days he has to walk Blue, visits to Scott’s apartment, where more often than not, he stays the night, even on days he does not have to. Late nights, Scott returns from games just before midnight. Fooling around in bed for as long as they can stay awake, they both have schedules to maintain. 

He fudges his schedule to his dad. His school friends don’t know enough about his personal life to ask. The fact that he’s showing up with an overnight bag is not out of the ordinary enough to comment on. He is avoiding Elena, the one person who will see right through him, until the last weekend of the month. 

It is the All-Stars game: Scott is in Tampa, Florida. He is annoyed out of his mind over the team dynamics. Two guys on “East Coast” team Scott is assigned to have some kind of complicated rivalry that Scott tells Kip to Google, but Kip keeps forgetting to. 

S: I have never been in a more awkward locker room in my fucking life. Someone is trying to kill me. They put my cubby between them. The league dug a new level of hell and put me in it. 

Stuck in the Upper West Side, Kip meets up with Elena. She treats them to dinner, celebrating a promotion at work. He knows, within five minutes, that he is being weird. He is cautiously steering the conversation as far into safe territory as he can, which means being vague about his days, his month, what he’s up to, what his plans are. He tries to keep them on light topics, on her life, but as usual, Elena sniffs it out. 

“You’re being weird, Christopher,” she says plainly. “What happened?”

“What?”

She tilts her head, assessing him, “You’ve avoided like, three questions about your life. You keep telling me about school, for some reason. What happened with Scott. Did the ‘crush on a straight guy’ thing run its course?”

He answers evenly, “Yes.”

Elena crosses her arms and says, “Why are you lying to me?”

Innocently, he tries again, “It ran its course. Crush over.”

She leans across the table, reading his face like a book, and she says: “Oh. Shit.”

“What?” he says, now incredulous. 

“What happened?” she asks again, 

“I, I can’t tell you,” he says, in a whisper. They are seated so publicly. “Not here.”

She looks at him and says nothing. She turns to her right, flags the server, and says sweet as candy, “Cheque please.”

Five minutes later, they are outside in the bitter cold, and Elena has her arms crossed once more. “So, he’s not actually as straight as you kept insisting, is he?”

“You can’t tell anyone, please.” 

Her big eyes look pitying again. “Kip,” she says in a soft voice.

“Don’t,” he begs. “I know what you’re thinking but—he’s not hiding me away. We’re friends and also,” Kip pauses, “Sleeping together.” 

“But you’re still working for him?”

Kip grimaces. One of the downsides, he has realized, about having so many friends who love you, is that you cannot get away with shit for very long. It hasn’t even been a month. “Yes?”

“Kip,” she says, more forcefully. “Why are you still working for him then?” 

“It’s like, totally separate. Two completely separate events. And it’s a good excuse to be there so often. There’s no secrecy needed.” He puts up a hand and adds, for the second time, “Don’t.” 

“Does it feel totally separate?” she asks. 

Kip weighs the answer and says, honestly, “Yes.”

“So just so we’re clear here: you’re sleeping with a closeted millionaire who is also paying you, on the side.”

Kip massages the middle of his forehead and answers, “Okay. I know how that sounds.”

“And how it looks,” Elena offers, skepticism obvious.

“I’m being cautious.”

“How, exactly?”

“I have my own life, my work. You. I’m not getting swept away in a fantasy.”

She stares him down and crosses her arms. The cold wind whips her hair across her face, and she says, “There aren’t any other nice guys out there?”

“Not like him,” Kip answers, and he can’t help it; he’s smiling hopefully at her. 

She looks at him and rolls her eyes, “Oh, Kip, you idiot.”

“Shut up,” he says. “Walk me back.”

✶✶

Three days later, the final January payment comes in. He’s walking home from the train in the early hours of the day, a grey winter morning when the sun hides behind low white clouds, completely obscured from view. Six hours earlier, he sucked a hickey into Scott’s inner thigh, high enough no one would see. Now, the buzz of a transaction. 

Two separate events.

Chapter End Notes

Does this make two separate Quebec easter eggs in a row? It does, dear readers. In my defence, Montreal's art gallery is very close to the Bell Centre. Realistically, the painting Kip sent is absolutely not on display nor in the shop. However, you should go.

Blink and you'll miss it Hollanov driving Scott crazy.

Comments to avoid compartmentalizing, it's bad for you. Reblog on tumblr if you're having a bad time.

Chapter 8: FEBRUARY 2017, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

Scott buys a gift. Boundaries crossed, boundaries formed.

Chapter Notes

Most years, the shortest month is the most brutal. It’s the time of year when the season starts to pivot. Early energy has waned. The anxious stretch where the question of the playoffs gains enough weight to cast a shadow over their heads. The points have been adding up, and now they begin to be measured. All of their early-season experimenting with lines and new strategies has paid off. The Admirals are comfortable in their division, a playoff spot seems possible but not guaranteed. Scott knows not to take anything for granted, especially now, two-thirds of the way through the season. 

Scott will be 32 this summer. He has been playing with the Admirals for twelve years. Not a lucky number.

It has been a good year. Maybe the best he can remember. He feels like he’s on a tightrope–if that tightrope was electric and he was wearing a pair of lucky rubber boots. It’s not a perfect metaphor, he thinks, because the fall on either side is not that far, and it’s not unfamiliar. He knows exactly what is waiting for him if he falls, and has no idea at all what happens if he does not fall at all, if he makes it to the other side of an unsteady walk. 

This point of the year is the mental game, the put-your-head-down game. Most years, it’s a battle against monotony. Another game day, another rink, another drive, another flight, all leading up to the only three hours that matter that day. This year: the other hours matter, too.

After months of texting nearly nonstop, it feels fake to keep texting now in the same vein. As it is, if someone were to hack into his phone it probably looks odd how much he is texting his dogwalker. Over the phone, they come up with a code.

S: Can you stay for the courier?

K: Yeah, may be late but I can.

Kip tells him that he has a deadline to meet, a conference he’s hoping to attend the following autumn, which means he’s pivoting to work on a proposal unrelated to his current work. For his part, Scott needs extra time at the practice facility and the rink. Stretching, massage, recuperation. They do not overlap during the day at all, as much as Scott would like to. Kip is on campus, at home, at some obligation, during the day too close to when Scott needs to leave for four straight home games with an arduous practice every morning in between. 

The Admirals win all four games. Every night, Scott comes home to find Kip waiting for him. Sunday, after crushing Anaheim, he comes home to Kip fast asleep in bed. He curls around Kip, his face against the middle of his back. Scott presses a kiss right into the center of it, into the broad muscle and warmth. They do not have sex, they just sleep. The same on Tuesday, Thursday: a beautiful man resting in his bed to take into his arms and sleep soundly. 

In the mornings, Scott’s breakfast is mid-season misery, made lighter by Kip making them both coffee, telling him about whatever real-world, non-hockey news he has in his own life before Kip slips out, off to his own mess of obligations. Finally, Saturday—Kip arrives mid-afternoon, before Scott’s pre-game nap. He has his work—laptop, books, and notebooks. 

“Can you work from the bed?” Scott asks, “Just keep me company? It’s bad for my back to nap on the couch.”

Kip agrees, and Scott is lulled into an easy nap to the gentle clicks of Kip’s keyboard. Scott wakes an hour later, Kip is still sitting up, now reading. Scott rolls over, Kip accepting his head onto his lap. 

“Hi, sleepyhead,” Kip says. He has his reading glasses on, and he is looking down at Scott with a private little smile, tongue between his teeth. Scott rubs his head blearily into Kip’s lap. Eyes closed, he feels Kip’s thumb rub along his eyebrow as he yawns back into consciousness. 

✶✶

After a six-game hot streak, they lose to the Islanders in an away game. After press, debriefings, a half-hearted speech to the team, stretching, and a massage, Scott and Jalo throw themselves into their car back like a pair of old socks hitting the hamper. 

Scott checks his phone: no word from Kip other than the dog walk update. He is at a department event, phrased vaguely, and when Scott asked about it, Kip had said just  “it’s boring, a journal launch.” In the past, Scott would have asked follow-up questions: what kind of journal, what Kip’s involvement was. But his hunger for Kip already feels so much that he is forcing himself to be satiated by the fact that he has him in his bed several nights a week. 

Scott plays better the lighter he feels. The closer he can get to the feeling of playing shinny as a kid, now with the knowledge (and joints) of a 32-year-old. He pushes his phone and feelings into his suit jacket pocket. Jalo, next to him, says, “No phone smiling tonight? Dog okay?”

“She’s good!” Scott says, intentionally adding a cheerfulness to his voice. It has been nice having Jalo in his neighbourhood and as his car buddy. He has enjoyed the company. But now, Scott doesn’t just have the passive secret he has guarded like an oath for decades; he actually has something, someone to hide. The disadvantage of being in a car with the same guy multiple times a week is that he cannot get away with shit. 

“Pictures?”

Kip sent two: one of Blue, sitting politely under the awning of a store, looking miserable in the winter. Another, in the elevator. He sent many like this in the fall, but now the photo is a wider angle, capturing Kip’s face in the elevator's mirrored walls, a small smile. Scott didn’t ask him to do this, but it feels like a little bridge to hang his tightrope off: Kip wants to send him photos, and Kip knows to be discreet. Mostly, the photo is of Blue. 

Scott clicks into the photo of Blue under the awning and holds it up, not letting the phone out of his hands in case Jalo swipes. Jalo leans across the backseat and smiles at the photo: “Cute dog.”

They sit in companionable silence for a moment, just the noise of the highway passing under wheels and the air whistling. Jalo sighs, “By the way, Cap, did you catch Charb rimming on the breakaway this morning?”

Scott blinks, his mind decidedly not on hockey for once. He laughs and says dryly, “Matti, can I take off the C for a minute, and ask that we talk about literally anything but hockey?”

Jalo laughs a full-throated ha, and agrees. He tells Scott, instead, about the apartment he has just signed a lease on. It’s a little farther uptown, but still on the same route. They end up comparing meal delivery services, Scott has been using the same one for years. Jalo has a new one, with more options, Jalo tells him all about his summer plans back home in Finland. Scott leaves the car in a good mood. 

K: any deliveries sunday before the game? happy to swing by early to sign for them

S: Yeah. Does 1 work?

K: yep, can do. 

✶✶

When Scott was younger and still anonymous enough to make it even possible to consider, he used to think it was a bad idea to try and hookup before a game. Now, he is not young enough to deny himself. By Sunday, it has only been three days, but Kip has been quiet for all of them. When Kip walks in the door, what Scott wants to do is talk. But he’s afraid of answers, so he crowds Kip into the foyer, kissing him unambiguously, slotting their legs together, pushing his hands up against the wall to pin him in place. Kip murmurs happily as Scott skates his hands up his side. 

Kip breaks free, shoves playfully at Scott, manhandling him into the bedroom. Kip is strong, and Scott lets himself be led, lets Kip push him to the bed and shove his arms up, bite softly into the flesh of his chest. In return, Scott takes his time, stripping Kip, opening him up with one, two, three fingers—the all-consuming pleasure of overwhelming Kip, making him melt around his calloused and slick fingers will never get old. The response in kind: Kip pushes him down onto the mattress, straddling and sinking onto him slowly inch by inch, the tight heat of him. 

After their conversation a few weeks ago, Kip came back with a clear health panel. Scott, of course, already had a full pre-season screening on record. And now, something Scott has never had: the intimacy of sex without protection, with nothing between them. Feeling Kip completely, of Kip moaning, “Let me have you, fuck me slow, fill me up, just like that, more.” Kip, on top, riding him and leaning forward to get the angle right, chests close, moving hips together. So far gone, his brain can only process half moments as his thrusts grow erratic at the promise of come inside me, I want to feel you. And then: Scott comes so hard he sees stars. And then: jerking Kip off while still inside him, overstimulated and overwhelmed. And then: Kip, bracing an arm against the headboard, coming messy onto Scott’s fingers; Scott licking them off while Kip watches. And then: the frankness of showering together, letting Kip wash him carefully, tending to the mottling of bruises across his shoulder, worrying about the ones on his shins, lifting and kissing his horrible ankle. 

Scott asks Kip to work from bed next to him as he naps again. He’s drifting off as the gentle tapping suddenly becomes frustration: Kip hitting his keyboard. 

“What’s up?” Scott asks groggily. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Kip grumbles. “My stupid laptop froze again.”

“Mm, what’s wrong with it?” 

“Ugh, what isn’t wrong with it? It’s a few too many years past its sell-by,” Kip groans. “But it works.”

Scott opens his eyes, awake now. “How old is it?”

“Oh god… Probably eight years? Which shouldn’t be too old. And yet, here we are.”

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Scott says. 

“They do not,” Kip agrees. “The computer in my parents’ living room would never betray me like this. I could talk to strangers on AOL all night long on that thing without issue.”

Scott laughs, “You too, huh?”

“AOL chat rooms?” Kip asks.

“Yeah,” Scott grins up at him. “You think we ever talked?”

“We’ll never know. I never used my real age. Did you?”

“God no. I think I said I was a twenty-year-old normal guy in Michigan. But I didn’t have my own computer. I used the one in the computer lab, but I was dumb enough to still use it to talk to strange men on the Internet.”

“The folly of youth,” Kip says, looking at him with a complicated expression. “You knew you were gay already, in high school?”

Scott yawns, “Yeah. I never really had a big… questioning phase. I shared a room with three other guys at age fourteen—Not like that,” he laughs. “They were gross. But they talked about girls all the time, and it was like they were learning a foreign language I couldn’t understand. What about you?”

“Yeah, maybe a little younger. I told you—Point Break. Very informative.” 

“When did you come out to your parents?” Scott asks, resting his face against Kip’s thigh. 

“To my dad in high school. It wasn’t a big deal; he definitely knew already and made a big show of telling me about his friend Liz’s girlfriend whenever he had the opportunity. I got the message,” Kip laughs. “My mom… later. It was fine.” 

“Mm, that’s nice,” Scott says. “I never got to. Obviously.”

Kip’s hand threads into his hair, hand flexing around the crown of his head. “Do you—can you tell me about them?”

Scott stiffens, feeling awake. “Can it wait? I really need to nap.”

“Yeah, babe, of course,” Kip says. 

The endearment lands like a kiss, sweetness and light, covering up Scott’s deflection. The tightrope is too taut for that. One of the most important skills a hockey player can have is the ability to sleep on a dime, and Scott is an expert. He pushes the question out of his mind and sinks into sleep. 

✶✶

Scott places the order two days later from his hotel room in Toronto. He doesn’t overthink it, just buys the best, most powerful version according to online reviews. He has it ordered to his apartment, set to arrive just twenty-four hours later. They have been using deliveries and couriers as a code word, so. Why not get a real delivery? 

When it arrives, Scott takes it out of the shipping box, leaves it in the sleek white manufacturer’s box on the counter. To make it unambiguous, he leaves a note that says: K: For AOL and other uses. - S

✶✶

Scott is expecting the apartment to be empty when he gets home from Toronto. They haven’t texted, and Scott has been run too ragged to check in. He realizes, only later, that Kip did not even send his usual update about the walk. He walks in at one in the morning to find the lights on and Kip awake in his living room. Kip stands. Blue leaves her bed, coming between them and doing a bow yawn. 

“Hey, what are you doing here?” Scott says, yawning to match Blue. 

“What is that, Scott?” Kip says, and points with his whole arm to the 2017 Macbook Pro, sitting in an unopened box still on the counter.

Scott is suddenly bolt awake, confused. “A laptop? You said yours is old.”

“That—okay, yes. But why did you buy it for me?”

“What do you mean? You need a new laptop, you said that!” 

“You can’t just… buy me stuff,” Kip says, crossing his arms.

“Why not?” Scott demands. “I have the money.”

“I obviously know that, but. It’s not fair.”

“Fair?’ Scott blusters. He was two steps from sleep, and now he is on an alien planet, unsure of his footing. The tightrope is shaking, and he has no idea why. “What does that mean?”

“I can’t do the same; we’re not equals, in that way,” Kip says, hurt obvious in his voice. 

“I don’t need you to, I already have too much.”

“Too much—Jesus,” Kip moans. 

“You know what I mean. I… I want to make your life easier, because I can.” 

Kip is silent, staring at him, still angry. 

“If you want to talk about fair, none of it is fair,” Scott says. “I know that. I didn’t start out like this. I know what it feels like to have to choose between two bad choices because of money,” says Scott. “And now I make too much money to spend in a lifetime, and it’s never bought me anything I really want.”

“It pays for me. It brought me here.”

Scott blanches, “Is that how you feel—about this, about us?”

Kip winces, “No. No, that came out wrong.” 

Scott runs his hands over his face, “I don’t get it. You cashed the Christmas bonus.”

Wrong thing to say—Kip flinches, “That was before. When I thought… when I didn’t know. I can give the money back.”

Scott crosses the apartment in a few strides and grabs Kip’s wrist, bringing his hand to his chest, “Please don’t. Please take the laptop. I can’t… fuck.” His eyes feel sharp, like tears are on the verge of being cut out. It has been almost three years since he last cried. “Sorry, shit. Wait.” 

He drops Kip’s hand and turns away. “Damn it. Give me one second. Hear me out.” 

Scott relies on old tricks: rolls his eyes up to the ceiling and pushes the heels of his hands into them. Focuses on the pressure of his hands against his eyeballs and nothing else, takes a deep breath and turns back. 

Kip is watching him with an expression Scott cannot read. Finally, he grits out, “I can’t make it fair, the money stuff. It won’t be fair. But god, Kip, let me do this. It’s a laptop. Not a payment. Use it.”

Kip’s mouth twists, “Please don’t … surprise me. Like that.”

“Okay,” says Scott. He can feel his cheeks heating with embarrassment, “I like surprising you.”

“I’m learning that,” Kip says. “It just… It doesn’t feel fair.”

“Okay,”  Scott says again. “Fairness, noted. I can do that. There’s just not a lot I can offer you, otherwise.”

“That’s not true,” Kip says, his eyebrows bunching. “Is that why you bought the laptop?”

“No, I bought the laptop because you told me you needed one.” 

Kip rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“I don’t,” Scott insists. 

“Did you buy me a laptop because we can’t leave the house together?”

Scott jerks his head back, as though struck. “No?” He pauses. He had not put this into words—he wanted to make Kip feel good, the way every moment they spent together seemed to be pulling Scott out of the divided loneliness he’d been in for so long. He wanted fairness: he wanted to make it up to Kip, to repay him. 

“I already told you, I’m not going to pressure you. Your job is important to you,” Kip says. 

“It’s more than a job,” Scott says, defensively. “It’s the only—my job is my family, it gave me everything—the money to buy that laptop, this place.”

Kip blows a long breath out of his mouth, “Scott. Family can’t be on payroll.” Kip says it delicately, but Scott flinches; the words land like a fist to the jaw. It’s a good thing he learned to take a punch at eight years old. 

It must show in his face, because Kip quickly says, “I’m sorry, this is too much for right now. Let’s leave it. I’ll take the laptop. In the future, can we make it a conversation, if you want to help?”

“Yes,” Scott agrees, happy to stop fighting. They go to bed, and Kip sleeps with his head on Scott’s chest, an arm lazily across his sternum. His breath ghosts the hair on Scott’s chest. For once, Scott has trouble falling asleep. He calculates: there is a week left in the month. A week until the next dog walking payment. After all, Kip is on payroll as well. 

✶✶

As promised, they leave it. Scott folds all the messy feelings of their argument into something manageable, something to be swallowed alongside his meds in the morning. Kip unwraps the laptop, and Scott makes breakfast. For himself: protein shake, egg bake, half a filet of salmon, and oatmeal, along with a roster of supplements. For Kip, two eggs over easy on toast with a rash of bacon on the side. He leaves the laptop on the dining table and eats at the counter, not wanting to get food on the brand-new machine. 

To Kip’s continued horror, Scott eats his breakfast in a large bowl, all the parts mixed together. Kip has taken to calling Scott’s food the protein wars, joking that Scott is in a battle and often losing. His food does not so much resemble a meal so much as a joyless, multi-step nutritional strategy. 

“Please,” he tells Scott. “Take the war to the kitchen; this laptop is an innocent, she doesn’t need to know about your breakfast slop.” 

“The laptop is a woman?” Scott asks, calling over his shoulder to hide his plate from Kip at the table. 

“Anything trustworthy is,” Kip says, as the laptop makes a sunny noise to signal it has started. “Just like every plant is a he,” he nods to the monstera by the window, “Because you have to take care of it.”

Scott laughs, “Good to know.” 

Scott finishes his breakfast, eating inelegantly like a kid in the cafeteria, without Kip watching. He pulls out the chair next to Kip and puts his chin on Kip’s shoulder to look at the screen. Kip tilts his head against Scott as he imports files and sets up programs. Seeing Kip accept the laptop and watching him use it makes whatever landmines they laid out last night feel worth it. 

✶✶

The month closes out with a win on the road—the team heads into the first game in a good mood. Kip calls him in his hotel room, unprompted, to celebrate getting the fellowship for next year that he applied for in the fall. It will keep him in New York, it’s at the Met, he is overjoyed.

“That’s amazing, you’re amazing,” Scott says, dazzled at the chance to speak so openly, overwhelmed with happiness for Kip, sitting on the floor of his hotel room, stretching out his hips. 

Slowly, gradually, they are texting more. After the call, Scott carefully, tenuously, texts to ask when the fellowship actually starts. Kip answers, asks how the team meeting Scott mentioned went. From there: they’re off. 

At the next game, during the first period, Scott is skating free to the corner, focused on nothing but the puck, when a Blue Jackets defenseman throws himself full-contact into Scott from an unexpected angle. Scott is sent crashing into the boards. The hit of plastic on plastic reverberates into his skull through the helmet, sending shocks into his always tense jaw. But the brunt of the hit is on his right, dominant shoulder, slamming with force into the boards at 20 miles per hour.

It’s hardly his first hit of the season, but the angle and force send him off the ice to catch his breath. The other player gets a two-minute minor for charging, and Scott is left scowling on the bench. He plays through it, but the Admirals still lose. 

The next morning, despite the ice, specialized stretching, and attention, his shoulder is still stiff. Another injury, but not one worth complaining about. He’s kept after practice for a battery of tests by medical: no breaks or tears, just a deep contusion and soft tissue damage. His movement is limited, he can lift his arm tenderly but not quickly. Luckily, there are only a few hours a week when it really matters if he can move his arms. Medical adds some supplements and physio, advice on how not to move his arm during rest. 

More importantly, the loss hasn’t knocked them out of playoff contention. 

✶✶

The end of the month is the trade deadline. Scott learns that Matti Jalo has been transferred to the Miami Cougars from Carter in the Admiral’s group chat, who breaks the news before Scott can hear from management. 

C: @Jalo I’m sorry to see you go, bud. Hell of a player, great in the room. I’ll miss you on the road! Kippis!!!

Scott has a stomach-dropping double-take when he sees the text on his phone: the confusion of what it means, the word at the end. Suddenly, he recalls Jalo passing around conciliatory shots on some losing away game, making the entire team take shots and teaching them the Finnish word for cheers. His role on the team since the start of the season has been easy camaraderie, never putting anyone on the outs, always checking corners for the quiet ones. 

They did those shots somewhere in the Midwest, maybe, the memory has grown vague. Scott remembers sitting in his hotel room afterwards and texting the word to Kip, in the fall, when he was looking for any excuse to do so. Obvious, in retrospect, how much he wanted this tightrope. 

And now, Scott calls Jalo to verify the news. It’s a responsibility he assigned himself as captain and his duty as a friend. He places the call sitting on the floor, cooling his shoulder. 

“Back down to Florida,” Jalo confirms.

“Shit, man. I’m really sorry, it was fun having you as my car buddy and having you around practice.”

“You are a good car partner,” Jalo says. “You don’t even snore.”

“Can’t say the same for you,” Scott jokes. 

“Don’t tell the Cougars!”

They chat for a little longer: Jalo had just signed a lease on a place in New York, which he has to break. He seems resigned but accepting to be moving again, “just part of the love of the game.” He wishes Scott well, tells him to keep smiling at his phone, and to say hi to his dog. He closes out with a wistful, “Hope to get a dog one day!”

Blue is sitting next to Scott: one of many signs of his luck. Being transferred is not part of the love of the game, even though it is for almost everyone else he has befriended and played with over the last twelve years. He’s made and lost more friends than he could count—their Christmas cards sit in a box on the shelf. Their texts fill his phone on his birthday. He gets drinks with them when he’s sent to their city for a game. But that’s the extent of it. 

He scratches under Blue’s chin, the dog he has because he does not have to worry about being transferred. He worries about being hurt badly enough to not play, yes, but not forced to pack up his life. 

Like a worm in an apple, Kip’s words come back to him, wriggling and sickening: most of the people in his life are on payroll. Not even on a payroll he controls. A payroll that has given him more money than he can spend in a lifetime, the only protection he has, because in a few good years, the money will be all that’s left. 

The next day, he gets into an empty car to Tarrytown for practice. 

Chapter End Notes

No easter eggs to report on here, just solid communication between two unafraid adults.

Comment to accept the laptop. Or don't. Reblog on tumblr if you're having a bad time.

Chapter 9: MARCH 2017, KIP

Chapter Summary

Two conversations with different endings.

Chapter Notes

Kip started weightlifting in his early 20s in the uncertain years between undergrad and his first attempt at grad school. He was living at home, working in a smoothie shop, and the YMCA was conveniently between the two. He put on muscle surprisingly quickly, adapted his diet accordingly, and has worked out five days a week ever since. As a teenager and in his early 20s, his body was just the vehicle moving his brain around. He thought very little about bodily awareness, and then suddenly, he was aware. 

He felt his posture improving as the muscles of his back learned to stand, compensate, and correct. He was conscious for the first time of the twist and feel of his body, the way every muscle moves together, the way he moves in space. He learned new things of which he had never been conscious: how he lets his quads take over, his tendency to lean on one foot while standing, the roll of his shoulders when he is stressed. The numbers go up as he gains muscles, the amount of weight, and the amount of time he can stand stress. 

Being with Scott reminds him of that early phase nearly a decade ago: aware of himself, his body. When they’re together in the same space is the easy part. When he’s out in the world, he has found himself thinking of Scott when he pays for small things, wondering how many dollars of each transaction is coming out of the dog walking pay. 

The advantage of keeping whatever they are doing to the confines of Scott’s apartment is that he can keep the sex, the happiness, the feeling lodged way up in the sky, not down in the real world where he walks Blue and spends Scott’s money. The problem is that the feeling won’t stay in the sky: it’s right in the center of his chest, in the middle of a body that feels brand new. 

Kip thinks he’s in trouble when he gets bad news, and the first person he wants to text is Scott. It's a small annoyance: a book he needs gets lost in an interlibrary loan, and he will have to wait another couple of weeks for it to come in, which means he can’t finish the revision he thought he’d get to. Scott is angry on his behalf when Kip inevitably complains to him. 

Kip knows he’s in trouble when he gets good news later that same day—a contact at a museum whose archives he wants to access emails back—and the first person he wants to text is Scott, again. 

He’s in trouble with Scott’s name at the top of his Messages app. It’s not the first time Kip has fallen in love with someone who will never choose him first. 

✶✶

“You got a new laptop,” observes a friend in his study group. “You’ve been complaining about that thing for ages, thank god.”

“Yeah,” Kip says sheepishly. 

“Are you coming to the e-flux talk tonight?” she asks.

“No, I can’t. Work,” Kip shrugs. 

“So busy these days,” jokes another classmate.

Kip stares at his screen and forces a smile, “Yeah, that’s me. Busy.”

He is busy. He has social, professional plans nearly every day. But the real truth today is that Scott has a road trip coming up, and Kip doesn’t want to miss a chance to see him before he’s gone for most of a week. 

When he leaves the study group, it’s an unseasonably warm March day, so he walks down to Scott’s apartment through the mostly pleasant smell of wet concrete and slush under dead winter trees scrabbling up through the sidewalk. At Scott’s, he takes Blue out for a walk through the park, letting her sniff everything. He uses the time to call Elena, who tells him a long story about one of her coworkers that takes up most of the call. 

She does not ask about Scott, only asks, “Are you on the Upper West Side right now?”

He confirms it, and she makes a little noise that sounds like a huff. 

“Is that still good?”

Kip reflects: on one hand, the secrets, the compromises, the money, the gift, spending his money as a trade-off for time together, the looming fear of an end. On the other: every minute he spends with Scott is better for it. The rest of his life is still on track and he’s still meeting deadlines. He has a place to work, a person who admires him for it and an excuse to be there. Being around Scott makes him feel like his body has fallen into harmony, like the world has delivered to him a long-held promise. So he answers honestly: “Yes, it is.”

✶✶

Scott is on the couch when Kip walks in. Blue is dancing at Kip’s feet. Scott puts his phone down and reaches his arms up in an almost childish, beckoning gesture. Kip drops his stuff off and crawls onto the couch, pressing his weight into Scott. Scott hisses and says, “Sorry, mind the shoulder,” when Kip tries to get up Scott holds him in place, without as much weight on his right shoulder. He wishes he could stay like this for longer. But he has already put this off for too long. 

“I have to tell you something,” Kip says. He sits back and sees Blue, curled up and watching. 

“That doesn’t sound good,” Scott tenses. 

“It depends. My friend Elena, she knows about us.”

Scott doesn’t react for a moment. He just stares at Kip. Kip watches his jaw visibly flex, like he’s chewing and swallowing this information. He nods, “Oh. Um. How? Did you tell her?”

Kip swallows. “I confirmed it. She’s the only person who could tell I had a crush on you in the fall. And now, she’s the only person who knows. She’s the one who came to your game. She can always tell when I’m lying. Everyone else I blew off, but she sees right through me.”

“Everyone else?” Scott asks, strained. 

“Like, Shawn and Maria. Kyle. The friends I’ve told you watch your games with. They know I work for you. They, um, call you my hot boss, but that’s it. No one else—like people at school, all my other friends, none of them even know that I know you.”

“Maria, right,” Scott repeats with a shake of his head, a tic Kip has come to think of as shaking the bad thoughts away. “What about your dad, after I invited him to the game?”

Kip grimaces, “He doesn’t know. I never told him.” 

Scott blinks, taking in this information. “Oh.”

“I knew I couldn’t be… normal about you, basically right away. And he is a fan, he would have asked questions. He thinks I’m working for a banker or something who travels a lot.” 

Scott is staring straight ahead, and he says, “Can you give me a second to process this?”

“Of course,” Kip says, standing. “Elena hasn’t said anything. You trust me, you can trust her.”

He takes his duffel to the bedroom and unpacks a few things, brushes his teeth, and washes his face, to give Scott time alone. He looks up and finds Scott standing in the doorway of the bathroom, one arm across his chest like he’s holding onto himself. 

“How long has Elena known?”

“Since the end of January.” 

Scott's arm falls to his side, and he says with unexpected sadness, “And you’re just telling me now?”

“Yes?” Kip answers, embarrassed. “I know it’s not great. I know how big a deal this is. This is not a great reason, but I kept expecting you to… stop? Decide it wasn’t worth it? And then with school, work, travel. I didn’t want to ruin it,” He says while waving vaguely at the space between them. “You have every right to be mad.”

Scott’s expression is unreadable. “I keep thinking I should feel mad, but I,” he scratches the back of his head. “I don’t like that you didn’t tell me. I hate that you think I don’t think you’re … worth it.. Did I do something to make you think that?”

“No,” Kip admits. “That’s just usually how these things go for me?” His voice rises at the end, trying to make it a question. 

“I can’t imagine any universe in which that’s true,” Scott says, shaking his head again. 

“Well,” Kip says. He can’t think of anything else to add. He thinks about a phrase his advisor is constantly repeating to him: out of scope, Christopher. His chest is heavy with emotion, “Like I said, it’s just Elena, and she would never tell, I promise.”

“It’s not her knowing about us. The idea that she knows about me is… terrifying.”

Kip pulls Scott into his arms and kisses his cheek under the harsh bathroom lighting. Up close, he can hear the shallowness of Scott’s breathing. He tries for honesty as he says, “Are you scared right now?”

Scott says, like a confession dragged out by force: “Yes.”

“I’m sorry for making you scared,” Kip says. He puts his hand on Scott’s neck and feels the pulse. His heart rate is up. Scott closes his eyes and angles his head into Kip’s hand. 

“It’s fucked up that I get body slammed for a living and this scares me so much, isn’t it?” Scott asks, his eyes still closed.

“No, it isn’t,” Kip says, most of the truth. “You have good reason to be scared,” he adds, a whole truth. 

He rubs his thumb into Scott’s jaw, as Scott breathes. They stand there in silence while Kip waits for a sign from Scott. 

“Okay,” Scott says finally, opening his eyes. “It’ll be fine. It has to be fine. I can be fine.”

The words come out like a litany. Kip is reminded of a few weeks ago, when they fought about the laptop and Scott ground the tears out of his eyes instead of letting them fall. “Being scared is normal. You can be scared.”

Still in the bathroom, Kip pulls Scott to his chest, feeling the shaking in Scott’s body: heart beating fast and trembling in the limbs. Kip clutches him tight, folding Scott’s arms into his own chest, so Kip can wrap his arms entirely around Scott, squeezing him tight like a vise. Scott slumps into him. Kip listens to his breath deepen, feels the shaking slowly subside like waves going out. 

Finally, into Scott’s clavicle, Kip says: “Do you want to have dinner? How many chickens are being sacrificed to the protein war tonight?” 

Scott’s laugh is wet and short. 

“It’s a free day,” he answers. “Let’s order in.” 

They order Korean food from a place that specializes in healthy, clean meals, eating at the dining table with the lights dim and music playing over the sound system Scott uses so infrequently. It feels almost like a date. Scott eats two servings of rice, beef, vegetables, and a whole container of kimchi to himself. It turns into an explanation of gut biomes, by way of his nutrition specialist, that involves a surprising amount of numbers and math. Kip tells him about a half-remembered article he read about the use of food in still lifes. 

Scott pulls his chair close, arms around Kip as he shows Scott sumptuous Dutch paintings of food arrayed mid-use. They are mannered, polite, unlike the style he usually focuses on. He points out the way the artist hid a self-portrait amongst the finery. And then, his favourite, austere paintings of hanging peasant food from Spain, strange geometries in the dark. They joke about what kind of still life they could make of the protein war, Scott leaning into Kip’s side, his hand idly stroking Kip’s hip in the dim light of a cozy evening 

In bed, Kip eats him out like dessert, until Scott is trembling under his hands. The easiest way to apologize. 

Kip is halfway to sleep, later, when Scott’s voice breaks out in the dark to ask a complete non-sequitor, “Have you been talking about us to Elena?”

“Not really,” Kip says, shifting to sit up. She thinks this is a bad idea and I don’t want her judgement, is not a truth to bring to the table right now. “Would it bother you if I did?”

“I guess it would bother me if you’d spent the last month talking about me without talking to me.”

“That’s fair. Normally… I would talk to my friends about something like this,” Kip admits. Normally covers a lot of things. 

Scott, on his side, in the quiet dark: “It’s stupid, but I hadn’t considered how many people you’re not telling. You talk about all your friends a lot, and you have so many of them. I’m just… in my own world, and we don’t talk about that kind of stuff. Or, I don’t. Obviously.”

The last word comes out as a grimace. Kip is quiet; he turns onto his side as well to get a better look at Scott in the dark. He has the blanket tucked around his face. They are close enough that Kip can see his expression, even without glasses: sad eyes, worried mouth. 

“I wish you had people to talk to,” is all Kip can think to say. He knows how isolated Scott is, has seen it in every inch of his apartment, but Scott has never put a name to it, like this. His days and his texts, the stories he tells Kip, are full of other people. And then, unbidden, the question: what would Scott tell people if he had someone to tell? 

“Have you been thinking about this? Telling other people?” Kip asks. 

“No,” Scott answers quickly. “I don’t want to make more people lie for me.” 

Kip looks at Scott’s shadowed face. He wants to reach into Scott’s life, pry his fingers into the walls, and tear them down. He is already lying for Scott. He has been keeping Scott close to the chest: letting money act as a guard, letting the secret be enticing. 

In the place of these thoughts, he just says, “They would probably think it was worth it. If you give them the chance.” 

✶✶

K: so this is your first game against Jalo since the transfer? 

S: Yeah, just part of the game to be friendly with a guy one day and then playing him the next. Feels weirder this time because we spent so much time together off the ice

K: i can’t imagine! 

K: good luck! 

Kip spends two straight days in Scott’s apartment while he’s on a weeklong roadie through Florida, Carolina. He spends two day inside, working on a conference proposal until he starts feeling a little stir crazy. He brings his laptop down to the Kingfisher. Shawn, thankfully, has not seen his laptop enough to notice the change. Mercifully, Shawn is there filling Kyle in on his ongoing relationship saga. 

“Nothing to contribute?” Shawn says to Kip, who is half listening over his laptop.

“Do you want to hear about Valentin de Boulogne?” Kip asks, looking up from his laptop. 

“I do not,” Shawn responds. 

“You can keep speaking French, though,” Kyle says with a cheerful smile across the bar. 

“Tu m’énerves,” Kip tells Shawn affectionately. 

“Do we think that was something nice?” Shawn asks Kyle. 

That splinter he accepted, that small fragment in the palm of his hand, aches. 

He finishes formatting his document in time to go back to Scott’s to watch the Admirals defeat the Miami Cougars 5-2. 

Most weeks, the Kingfisher is his most indulgent personal expense: he spends as little as possible on things that aren’t transit, groceries, school, and conferences. Tonight, just one beer with the friend discount. He drank it slowly over the course of the game, until the condensation was gone and the beer was nearly warm. 

Scott calls him from his hotel room that evening, Kip puts him on speakerphone, and curls up next to it in bed. Kip tells him about the bar and some gossip. Scott tells him about the travel, the game, and seeing Jalo. It’s late, Kip falls asleep at some point while Scott is talking. He wakes an hour later: the call is still connected, Scott’s even breathing on the other side tells him that Scott is now asleep. 

He keeps the call up and listens to the sound of Scott breathing: faint and distorted through technology, before hanging up. 

✶✶

Scott returns from the South in a good mood, but physically drawn. They won two of three games, and they lost the last game only by a single point. Kip has gotten to know Scott’s movements, his body, and has learned to map the changing landscape of bruises that come and go like horrible constellations on a cloudy night. Scott is favouring one shoulder and hiding it. Kip is unsure of what his role is here or what constitutes crossing a line into overly worrying. Scott has more medical care than Kip’s mediocre insurance could dream of. 

In his battered state, Scott is needy in ways that rewire Kip’s brain: they fool around in the shower, Kip fucking Scott’s thighs, slick with water and lube. Kip uses his own strength to hold Scott. Both arms wrapped tight around his chest, letting Scott relax his face on the tiles, whiney and untouched until Kip comes between his thighs. He drags a worked up Scott to bed and blows him until he comes down Kip’s throat. 

Sated after a week apart, he catches up on the work with Scott distracting him from bed, a bad habit—he should go to the desk. But, there is Scott, in bed and cozy, face turned in toward him.

In the morning, Kip is sitting on the couch when Scott goes to take Blue for her morning walk. He notices, out of the corner of his eye, Scott going into the coat closet after he has his coat on, after Blue’s harness is already on. Scott gets out a waist leash, which he straps around his waist. Blue dances in the hallway, her usual pre-walk excitement. Realization dawns.

“Why are you using that?” Kip asks.

Scott turns around, looking sheepish, “Oh. To save my shoulder.”

“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

Scott looks past him, his jaw flexing in thought, “I didn’t want to ask more of you?” he says, like a question. Blue is still staring between them. 

Kip looks at Scott, the shame in his face. “If I were your regular dogsitter, like if I were Maria, would you have asked her to just take on more shifts while your shoulder is recovering?”

“Probably,” Scott confesses.

“And instead you’re risking injuring yourself?”

“The leash works,” Scott says, defensively. 

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Kip says, and stands. “Let me walk her.”

Scott crosses his arms, moving gently, Kip can’t help but notice, and says, “I don’t… You’re not scheduled?”

“Jesus, Scott, I’ll walk her for free,” Kip says, for some reason angry about the question. He takes the regular leash and clips it onto her harness, then grabs his jacket. Scott stands there, watching but not arguing, his crossed arms have turned more into a hug around himself. Kip asks: “I’ll be back in half an hour. Will you still be here?” 

Scott nods, and Kip walks out to the elevator. 

Kip is glad for the air, for the movement. Blue looks at him, no different than usual, trotting along their usual path to the cafe, around the block, toward the park. And all the way, Kip stews. Anger, annoyance flares a hot bar through him. Scott has done nothing wrong, presumed nothing at all—and that is the point, he realizes. He wants Scott to ask for more: he wants to give more. He has kept a secret, kept himself safe, and he is nearing the end of his rope doing so. Scott has so much, and he’s scared to ask for anything. 

They are stuck in a holding pattern of Kip’s own devising, because he is the one who asked to keep things as they were; he asked to keep walking Blue, to stay as the help because it was easier and safer than to be the one who asked first. He has been waiting for Scott. Kip’s fear that Scott never will has bubbled into something messier, meaner, and dirtier. He wants to be clean of this feeling. 

These thoughts carry him through the morning walk, through the brisk cold, marching faster than his usual pace, Blue trotting along to keep up. He stops to let her sniff along the way, and slowly, the pulse of anger dims.

When he gets back to Scott’s apartment, Scott is not on the couch: he has changed into workout gear and is doing a series of stretches on a yoga mat Kip has never seen before. Kip feeds Blue and comes over to where Scott is lying on his back, one arm crossed in a stretch over his chest. 

“Hi,” Kip says, sitting on the couch near him and looking down at Scott, prone on the floor. “We’re in a big fucking mess here.”

Scott looks up at him, pained, “Yeah.”

“I like being your dog walker because it gives me an excuse to be here,” Kip starts. “It gives me a reason to keep showing up, so I don’t have to ask. We said we’d figure things out as we go, and I think that needs to change.”

“What does?”

“You can’t keep paying me to walk your dog and for us to keep sleeping together.”

“Which part do you want to stop?” Scott asks, warily, still on his back, his arms now collapsed on his side. 

Kip laughs, “Do you have to ask?”

“I want you to say it,” says Scott in a small voice. He rolls inelegantly onto his good side and pushes himself to sit, “I’m following your lead.”

“Are you? I’m coming and going on your schedule, on your dime.”

Scott’s face twists into something ugly and hurt, “Do you really think that?”

“That’s how it feels,” Kip says, spreading his hands for emphasis. 

“I don’t want that,” Scott says emphatically. “You wanted that. You told me you wanted to stay on as Blue’s dogwalker. I agreed because you asked.” 

“This is my fault?” Kip feels incredulous, unsure of how he got there. 

“No—no,” Scott emphasizes the second word, “I’ve never done… this before. I don’t know how it works. You could walk away at any time. I’m just waiting for that to happen.”

Kip laughs, rueful and painful, like the laugh is scraped out of him. “Scott, I’m in love with you, and you have a job that you would choose before you chose me.”

“You—what?” Scott looks like he’s been struck. “Kip, I. What the hell?” He shakes his head to clear his thoughts. “You haven’t even given me the chance to choose you.”

“I’m not going to give you an ultimatum; that’s not fair. Your job is your life. I really do understand why you can’t come out, I’m just… protecting myself.”

“From me?”

“From when you choose hockey over me.”

Scott stares at him, open-mouthed. The apartment is silent. Kip can hear his heartbeat in his ears, a whoosh of sound like a drum that threatens to take him somewhere bad. He has just spat something bloody on the perfect white couch between them, like he’s seen Scott do on the ice. He choked out the horrible, red truth like a thick, shining clot into the gap they’ve left between them by not speaking. He crosses his arms over his heart to protect himself, keeping the rest of his blood inside his body before it gets worse. 

“You jumped six steps ahead before I can even take one,” Scott says, petulant, hurt. His eyebrows are furrowed, and his eyes are wide and wet. “Can we just… take it one step at a time instead of assuming the worst?”

It’s Kip’s turn to shake his head to knock out the bad thoughts. 

“It sounds like we’re both doing that,” Kip says, defensively. He is too angry, too hurt to talk. Nothing Scott has done is meant to hurt him, but this does not make it hurt any less. 

With the easy movement of a lifelong athlete, Scott rocks back and stands up without using his arms at all. They’ve switched positions, and he is now looking down. Kip looks up at him, feeling like his heart is on his sleeve, on his face, visible in his eyes, desperate and obvious. 

Finally, Kip says, “I have to go to a meeting. I’ll be back tomorrow to walk Blue before the game. Can I come early? I need to think.”

Scott scratches the back of his head. Those tragic eyes Kip texted his friends about the first day they met are worse than he could have ever imagined. Scott agrees all the same.

Chapter End Notes

Ready to hear about the references in this chapter?

Kip is putting footnotes together writing about Valentin de Boulogne, who painted both religious scenes and crowded nightlife. One of his largest commissions was from a diamond thief, his most notable commission hangs in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, and he died after falling drunkenly into a fountain. Now he's being referenced in hockey-based erotica. siri play Joni Mitchell - The Circle Game

Kip tells Shawn, in French, you're annoying me. But affectionately.

In the pause between high stake conversations, Kip shows Scott a series of food-based still life, first by Clara Peeters and then Kip's favourite, bodegón paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán. Scott and Kip are in a moment of quiet contemplation, so they are looking at quiet, mannerly paintings. And not these orgiastic Dutch banquet paintings. But you could.

This chapter takes place over the first two weeks of March. Onwards!

Comments help me jump the end instead of enjoying the middle. Wait, actually, let's not do that. It doesn't seem like a good idea. Reblog on tumblr if you're having a bad time.

Chapter 10: MARCH - APRIL 2017, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

Scott watches hockey at a bar. Kip makes some introductions.

Chapter Notes

Scott was drafted almost two weeks to the day before his 18th birthday. He turned 18 at development camp, where he was taken out by staff along with the rest of the roster. They ate Italian food at a restaurant fancier than anywhere he’d ever eaten. Not a chain restaurant on a team trip, a real restaurant with menus in leather covers. He remembers being shocked by the ease with which the other rookies ordered sides with their meals, without asking for permission to do so. Later, two of his fellow rookies showed up at his hotel room with a six-pack of beer. He was careful but glad for the company: drinking slowly and not letting his guard down, sitting in a huddled circle on the floor. His first adult birthday, and he didn’t have to spend it alone. 

Two years later, Scott officially signed to join the Admirals, a week after his 20th birthday. He’d done what he was pretty sure his parents wanted: two years of college at their alma mater in New Hampshire, NCAA circuit, four semesters of a sociology degree he enjoyed more than he expected. And then, finally, the big dream he knew they wanted. His 20th birthday in New York, out for dinner with his agent, a massive, signed contract under their belt. An even fancier meal, but by then, Scott had been wined and dined a few times. He ordered a coke and caesar salad with his steak without asking permission. He left the dinner with his fake ID in his pocket and not a care in the fucking world. Young, anonymous, money on the horizon: he shook hands goodbye with his agent outside the restaurant, turned around, and hailed a cab to go to a club. Made out with one guy on the dance floor and went home with another. He was careful, glad for the company. He hadn’t told him it was his first time. 

Those were the last summers, maybe the last time at all, he’d had choices to make. He made his NHL debut that fall. Every year after that has followed the same cycle. Hockey, smile, rinse, repeat. If you had asked him six months ago, he would have said this year would be the same. Another run at the Cup, another year to try for the goal that has guided every single decision he had made since he was twenty years old, signing a piece of paper with a borrowed pen someone told him was for good luck. 

It does not feel like a coincidence that the first time he’s making different decisions, acting completely against every tightly measured routine, he is playing better than ever. Scott’s impulse when Kip leaves after they fight is to watch game tape until he stops thinking. He goes against that: he finishes his shoulder physio. He grabs his headphones and takes some calls—medical update, short interview, board meeting for a safe driving organization—on a gentle treadmill walk, staring out the bank of windows. Then he watches tape until it’s time to walk Blue. He takes her on the usual loop, park and back. He fights the impulse to stay home, to wallow in the wreckage of the conversation that haunts the living room. Instead, he takes himself out on a walk through dark streets. Ignoring the glow of apartment windows, people watching instead. He does a circuitous zigzag through his own neighbourhood, bounded by the river, the park, and the fact that uptown is Columbia and downtown is work. He’s not so risky to adjust his strict pre-game meal plans and get food out. It’s enough to get a finger of whisky at a bar.  

There’s a panel of TVs behind the counter: three of them are showing basketball, the New York Knicks vs Detroit Pistons. One screen is showing hockey, New Jersey, a home game just across the river against Anaheim. The bartender eyes him, recognizes him and even asks for a handshake, but is otherwise unimpressed.

“Can I ask you a question,” Scott asks with a nod.

“Shoot,” the bartender says. 

“When we’re playing–how many TVs do we get?” 

The bartender laughs, “Big question, Hunter. What time of year? If you’re up against baseball or basketball, maybe two. This year, definitely two, at least. You’ve got a real shot.”

“What do we gotta do to get all four?” Scott asks. 

The bartender shrugs, “We’ll see in the playoffs.”

Scott laughs and says, “Thanks for the honesty.” 

He goes back to nursing his drink and watching hockey. The life that Kip is guarding against.

✶✶

Scott drags himself through another practice, his silent car rides there and back. He checks his phone, fruitlessly. There’s nothing they can say to each other over text. Scott wants to beg, but has the dignity to do that in person. Agonizing hours later—twenty-six hours after Kip walked away, but who is counting—Scott hears the elevator ding. Blue recognizes Kip’s footsteps and stops barking, starts wagging her tail. Scott stays on the couch. If he’s going to have his heart broken he may as well be seated for it. 

Kip arrives. He looks, Scott is oddly relieved to see, as miserable as Scott feels. They greet each other, and Kip sits on the other arm of the couch, crossing his legs. 

“I didn’t get to say it,” Scott says, “I love you. I’ve been in love with you since January. I’ve been scared shitless to say it.” If nothing else, he wants the chance to say it once, to have that. 

Kip, he’s relieved to see, smiles fondly.. He says, “I love you too. But listen. I need to tell you about something. I’ve avoided it because I thought I could just keep it separate from us and I didn’t want to seem like more of a fuck up.”

Scott laughs out loud, “Kip, from where I sit, only one of us is fucked up, and it’s not the guy with dozens of friends, a degree from an Ivy League school, and a fellowship at the Met next fall. Somebody else decided that I get to be rewarded for playing shinny for a living. That’s the fuck up part.” 

Kip rubs his forehead, “Nice speech. Okay,” he sighs. “Here we go. I’ll have to tell you eventually.”

Hope blooms in Scott’s heart at the promise of eventually. 

Kip continues, “Do you remember that I lived in Chicago for a year?”

“Yeah?” Scott asks, feeling like he’s discovered a puzzle piece under the carpet, one he didn’t even know was missing. 

“I was supposed to do a master’s program in Chicago. That was my first attempt. And long story short—I met a guy. He was a visiting professor in another department, he—it doesn’t matter. He was older, he was from Canada, but we were really serious, right away, despite what a bad idea it was. I liked him. I thought—I thought it was the real deal. The one, all that stuff. That’s how it felt. Near the end of my first semester, his husband showed up at this apartment,” Kip says with a grimace.

Scott can’t help it—he sucks in air too quickly. Kip has been looking away from him, and he glances back. His face is faraway, visibly embarrassed. Scott says, “How could you have known?”

Kip shakes his head, “I’m not done. He had told me he was separated, but that wasn’t true. His husband showed up all the way from Vancouver and was yelling at him. Leon, that was his name, convinced me to go. After, he came back to my apartment, and we fought, obviously. I broke up with him. And then—it was a mess. He convinced me he really was getting a divorce; he showed me all these texts he sent his husband. I was … cautious, but we kept seeing each other, even though I fucking knew better. Like, I knew, I have to be honest about that. He was getting cagier, and I could tell something was wrong, but I wanted to believe that I was right about those first months.”

Kip takes a breath of air and continues, “I figured out his husband’s name, and I called him. The texts were a lie. They were never separated, not even divorced. The most embarrassing part is that his husband wasn’t surprised at all? When I called him, he asked if I was ‘the American boy,’ and apologized to me for his husband. This was like, a pattern? And I was just a stop along the way. Afterwards, I was a wreck. I got—it doesn’t matter. I called Elena and she booked me a ticket to come home, just to reset. This was May, not even halfway through the program. I-I hadn’t really made any friends in Chicago, all my friends were here.” Kip pauses, looks toward the window, to the skyline, “But I spent a miserable month home and I just couldn’t… separate it. Chicago was a failure, I was a failure there. So I washed my hands of the whole city. Pretended like the year never happened. I took time another year off and reapplied, a new program, a fresh start. This was… five years ago. ”

Kip looks at Scott, finally, continuing, “I let the whole thing derail my life, and that’s the worst part.”

Scott is not sure what to say: he wants to ask more questions about this Leon guy so he can send some hockey players to beat the shit out of him. He doesn’t think Kip would approve. The anger will have to curdle like old milk. It sits, sour in his stomach, around the words ‘Leon, professor, Vancouver.’ Instead, he says, “It’s impressive that you picked up and started again. Your life seems on track to me.”

Kip throws up his hands and shrugs by way of answer and then says, “So. That’s background noise here,” Kip waves a hand between them. “I can’t let that happen again.”

Scott looks at Kip searchingly. “Have I made you feel like that?”

“Like what? Like he did?” Kip turns to him, and Scott can feel his eyes examine his whole face, taking him in before he continues, “Not intentionally. I don’t think you’ve ever lied to me.”

The answer feels like broken glass, sharp enough to cut. 

Kip continues: “At the end, with him, I felt trapped, like all my decisions had been wrong all along. You don’t make me feel like that.” 

Scott goes to him and sits next to him down, confidence growing. It feels like Kip is not leaving. He crosses the space between them, pressing his forehead to Kip’s, watching as his eyes flutter close. Every time Kip has withdrawn, stopped answering texts and then shown up and acted like nothing had changed, every boundary set, all cast new shadows. 

Scott says “I’m in the last good years of my career. You’re just at the start of yours. I don’t want to be… that. Am I an asshole to want both—you and hockey?” Scott says. 

“I’m trying to tell myself that that’s a false dichotomy."

Scott searches and then says, "I don't know what that means.”

“Like, the idea that you have to choose between either, or—two opposite choices. Maybe there’s a path in the middle that keeps you safe and doesn’t… well, feel like total shit for me. We can be discreet, as long as I don’t feel like something you’re ashamed of. I can’t go backwards. I want to feel like we’re moving forwards.” 

“What does that look like?” Scott asks.

“I have some ideas, but I can’t just be me calling the shots. You have to want to. What do you think it looks like?”

Scott considers the question. He wants to let Kip keep leading the way, to let Kip’s guiding knowledge of the real world tell him what is right and when. Scott has no idea what paths to take out of the woods. But making Kip lead the way is not fair—that word Kip keeps using. 

“I’ve been trying to think of ways to put you first,” Scott sighs. “I know you kept the job to make some money, and I know you won’t accept money for no reason—for the record, I would do that, right now, but I’m not going to try since that went pretty shit last time—so. Stop being my dogwalker, please. I think that’s what you were asking me to say yesterday, right?”

“Yes,” Kip admits, his voice quiet. 

“And,” Scott continues, like he’s in an odd-man rush and needs to keep going. “Tell your dad. Stay here, whenever you need. Come and go on your own schedule. Eat my food, save time getting to school. Let me make your life a little easier, however I can. I know it’ll also make it harder. Give me time. But. I’ll get a new dog walker to sign an NDA. My housekeeper, too, probably. This,” he waves a hand around the apartment, “Is yours to make use of, if you’ll have it. If you’ll have me.”

“I’m going to be honest: my dad is going to freak out and want to meet you,” Kip answers, finally. 

“I can do that,” Scott agrees. “I mean, that terrifies me. Wait—you haven’t agreed to what I said. Is that too much?”

“It’s not too much,” Kip says. “I mean, maybe it is. But it’s not too much for me.”

“I want to be your boyfriend,” Scott says, and it comes out shy. 

“I think you already are my boyfriend and we’ve just gone about this totally idiotically,” Kip answers. 

“You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Scott says, excited to praise Kip so openly. 

✶✶

Scott calls his agent and says he has an unusual request: he wants to use the lawyer the agency has on retainer to draft a non-disclosure agreement for his dogwalker. Scott’s agent, Todd, has made implications, in the last few years, about Scott’s status as a 33 year old bachelor who has refused any and all blind-date PR set ups. Scott tells him that the agreement should cover, broadly speaking, discretion around Scott Hunter’s personal life and that of any other persons living in his apartment. 

The silence on the other end is long and pointed. All his agent asks is: “Anything I should know here, Hunter?”

Scott considers and says, “I think you already know.”

“Hm,” Todd clicks with his tongue. “Well. Do I need to draft an agreement for someone living in your apartment as well?”

“No,” Scott says. 

“You sure about that? Lot of ways things can shake out here.”

“I’m sure,” Scott answers shortly. 

“Well. Be careful, kid. Don’t do anything rash. People are lining up to take your brand deals—they don’t hand them out like they used to.”

“I’ll keep that top of mind,” Scott says with no conviction whatsoever. 

✶✶

Scott drives to Brooklyn and meets Kip’s dad for lunch on an exhausted Sunday afternoon, coming straight off a flight from Minneapolis. His only full free day  that week. He is exhausted but alive with nerves to meet George Grady. He expects George to have reservations, questions, to make him earn his approval. But Kip’s dad hugs him like an old friend and welcomes Scott into his home. 

Kip adjusted the story: he walked Scott’s dog, they started dating in January. Now Scott is being told a long, winding story about how Kip broke his arm on a family vacation upstate, playing on a crumbling wood bridge Kip and his sister found in the woods near the cabin their families were staying in.

“We were being the Spice Girls,” Kip says to Scott. “In the bridge-jumping scene of the movie.”

“Never seen it,” Scott confesses. 

“That’s right. Which Spice were you again?” George asks. To Scott, he says, “It was always the same one. He and Megan had outfits.” 

“Sporty,” Kip says with a laugh. “Megan was Baby.”

“Of course,” George says. “They made me film them doing that song with the dance moves. I must have it somewhere.”

“I deleted the file,” Kip says stiffly. “In high school.” 

“They were good!” George tells Scott, “Well. They knew all the moves, and they really sold the dance.”

“Sporty Spice, huh?” Scott says. 

The whole lunch, there’s a buzzing under his skin. Nerves, happiness. Like someone turned on the lights at the top of the hill, and he has been in the smothering silence of the dark woods this whole time. 

✶✶

Scott still has his usual leaving ritual, crouching and saying goodbye to Blue. Now, if he’s lucky, Kip is there to say goodbye to. Kip is there before he heads to Pittsburgh. And then, his companionless car ride, followed by a tense flight. It's their last game in March, they're leading by enough points to potentially clinch a spot in the playoffs with this game, but no one wants to say it.  

Someone lightens the mood by playing a chaotic game of phone roulette. It quickly devolves into the expected—the hilarity of forcing each other to flirt with another man via text. The texts get worse and Scott puts his headphones in. Scott sits next to Bennett, who is in zen goalie mode, and pretends to nap long enough that he does fall asleep. 

Practice, hotel, meal plan, and meetings, all of it passes in a flash. The game is tense, long, they maintain a tie and a goalless third period and wind up in overtime. And then—Vaughn scores a messy goal off Scott’s assist, ricocheting off the Pittsburgh goalie’s helmet. It still counts. They are officially up enough points that, mathematically, they have clinched a playoff berth. The rest of the team pours out onto the ice in celebration; Scott is lost under a pile of bodies. 

The flight home is raucous, celebratory. He remembers, painfully, Kip’s words about family as Carter Vaughn takes a series of selfies and posts them one after the other. Hockey is the closest thing he has to family. But, mirroring that sentiment is the memory of the afternoon at George’s, the knowledge that Kip is in his apartment right now. It’s the difference between seeing a photo of the rain and standing in a downpour. 

Everyone is busy on the flight, calling families, shouting at each other. Suddenly, recklessly, Scott calls Kip. Mercifully, Kip picks up quickly, before Scott can overthink it. 

“You won,” Kip says, by way of a greeting. 

“We did,” Scott is smiling into his phone. Two seats behind him, someone shouts, “Another one!” while pouring shots. 

“Are you calling me from the plane?” Kip sounds incredulous.

“Yeah,” Scott says, suddenly smiling. 

“That’s new,” Kip says. Scott can hear the smile through the phone. “What inspired this?”

“I wanted to,” Scott says in a whisper. No one is paying attention to him at this moment. But still, his heart is hammering in his chest in a way it was not a few hours ago, on the ice in overtime in a packed arena. 

✶✶

Before, Kip brought food from home or made small meals. Kip is staying at his apartment long enough and without packing up every time: he has reason to cook, to make leftovers, to share food. The first time Kip beckoned him over to try something off a spoon over the stove—it was so domestic, so everything he actually fucking wanted, that Scott felt like he’d fallen off a cliff. 

Tonight, Scott walks in, playoff spot secured, tired from the flight and the drive, to find Kip lit only by the electric fireplace’s dancing lights and a single lamp, taking notes on the couch. Scott is momentarily distracted by Blue, her greetings, and her excitement. They’ve gotten a little less enthusiastic, now that Kip is here so much. He’ll take it. 

Kip joins them in the foyer, getting in between Blue to grab the lapels of Scott’s blazer and kiss him. 

“Congrats again,” Kip says. “Want to celebrate?”

Before he has a chance to say anything, Kip drags him sideways to the bedroom and shuts the door, pinning Scott against it. Not forcefully: Scott’s shoulder is delicate, his hip is bruised, and Kip is gentle with him as he untucks Scott’s shirt. 

Catching his breath, Scott says, “Hello, goodnight, nice to see you too, thank you.” 

“You made the playoffs,” Kip says. 

Kip’s face is inches away. Scott leans forward and nips at his nose and says, “We did.”

“I hear there’s a rule about no sex?”

Scott laughs and pushes a little against Kip, who pushes him back into place. “I tried the no-sex thing for every other playoff run and it didn’t work. I’m starting to think that’s bad science.”

Kip runs two fingers along Scott’s jaw, hard and deliberate, sending an unexpected shiver down his spine, “Are you going to stop shaving?”

“I have to. That is real science.”

“I’ll accept some beard rash for your playoff chances,” Kip says into his neck, his voice rumbling into Scott’s veins, the press and suck of Kip’s mouth right at his pulse—not enough to mark. Scott wants the mark, wants to push Kip’s mouth into his neck until Kip has made it obvious that Scott belongs to him.

“Still have the rest of the season to go,” Scott says instead, his jaw moving into Kip as he speaks. 

Kip uses his hand to turn Scott’s head to the side, his thumb and index finger cupping Scott’s chin, “I’ll enjoy the sight of your jawline while I can.”

Scott pushes back with enough force to dislodge them from the door. He is too tired post-game, post-flight, for much. For the first time he can remember, maybe in his whole life, past, present, and future feel united. The recent past of the win; the present of Kip grinning up at him; the promise of a future where these two happinesses coincide—wanting doesn’t feel like too much. It has a purpose and direction.  

They undress, efficiently. Scott pins him to the bed, forcefully. Sucks at Kip’s neck, the underside of his bicep, long enough to leave a bruise there. Slicks them both with lube, smearing it across them. They grind against each other, hands tangled above their heads. Bodies together; chest and arms form a long line. His good knee pressed into the mattress for leverage, slotting their bodies together, just so. Kissing, laughing into his mouth—until the tease of friction is too great. Scott peels back and straddles Kip’s thighs, to take in the sight of his second win for the day: the sight of his boyfriend saying his name as he comes. 

✶✶

Rounding the corner into spring, into April. The weather is inconsistent, all over the place. Scott’s flight is moved up by an hour to avoid unexpected hail. In the warmth of the bed—their bed—Kip tells him there’s a German expression: “April, April, der macht, was er will.” Roughly translated: April does what it wants. 

“Wish I knew that years ago,” Scott says.

Because April always does: it’s the end of the season when 80 games' worth of damage adds up. He’s hungry all the time, needing energy wherever he can find it to power through the last stretch, keep their points up and improve their seed order in the playoffs. The protein war has turned into what Kip now calls the carbohydrate bombardment. 

Meanwhile: the world keeps turning. For the last twelve years, April did what it wanted while Scott was purely dedicated to the playoffs. But this year, Kip has brought the unstoppable moving force of the big bright world. 

Kip sends a selfie—ostensibly of Blue, but he’s holding her up in his arms. Her little furry face is pressed against Kip’s, black nose against his cheek dimple. Kip is grinning widely, toothily, joy in his eyes. They are both haloed by a pink cloud backdrop of the cherry blossoms blooming by the reservoir in Central Park. It is the brief window when the trees are in full bloom, not yet blown away by the wind. 

A precious, temporary moment, sent to Scott on the way to practice. He thinks of Jalo commenting on how much he smiled at his phone. Realizes he never said: oh, that’s new; that’s just this season. I used to be sort of miserable and I didn’t even realize it. He imagines if Jalo were still here, showing this picture to him. The idea of sharing Kip like that is terrifying and suddenly, very real. 

Scott saves the picture to his phone: his first and only picture of his boyfriend. April isn’t just the playoffs this time: the world is in bloom after winter. 

Kip comes to their final game of the season. He’s in the stands with his dad. Scott skates by during warm-ups, just to make sure he can remember exactly where to look. They wave, enthusiastic, Scott nods, sure the cameras are not on yet. 

They win against Washington, 2-0. It’s not a particularly exciting game; neither side is fully present, and Washington is easy to beat this season. Scott scores on a wide-open net late in the second period. As he skates away, the buzzer sounding loudly, Vaughn hurtling toward him in celebration, his mind clears for a moment from his hockey concentration, from the puck and players, to the stands. Vaughn slings an arm around his neck, and Scott points broadly toward the side of the arena where Kip is. It doesn’t look like anything, he knows, just pointing toward the fans, but he hopes Kip understands that what he’s saying is: you saw that, right? 

Hours later, Kip is home in bed, working on his laptop, when Scott gets home well past midnight. Kip clicks the laptop shut when Scott flops next to him, shoves his whole face into the warm expanse of Kip’s side and falls asleep instantly. 

The next morning, he says: “I’m not going to be a very good boyfriend during the playoffs.” 

Part apology, part brag, part relishing the word boyfriend, like a kid who has just learned to swear and wants to test it out a hundred times. “But I’ll do my best. I’ll make it up to you in the summer.”

Kip is planning on going to France again in the summer; they have talked about it abstractly, only in the context of the fact that he is waiting to hear from the university about whether or not the trip will be funded. Kip has put it on a credit card and is waiting for confirmation about the expense. Scott wants to offer to cover his costs, and knows already that he shouldn’t. Getting Kip in this apartment, sharing his roof and his food, is somehow a compromise for Kip that Scott will never fully understand. 

“If I get the full funding, will you join for part of the trip?” Kip asks, speaking mostly into the crook of Scott’s arm. “To Paris? You’ve been before, right?”

“I’ve never been to Paris,” Scott confesses. 

“You were in southern France, right?” Kip pauses and sits up on an elbow, as a thought has just occurred to him. “Wait. Did you go to France to hook up?”

Scott blanches, caught out. “Yeah.”

“God, I remember you telling me that so clearly. I thought it was so unexpected,” Kip starts to laugh, a bubbling giggle that can’t be contained. “I thought you were being mysterious and cultured, this unexpected straight guy thing to go to France in the off-season. But you were just there to sleep around.” 

“Hey,” Scott says, mock-offended, “I was doing both, thank you very much.”

Kip is still laughing as he settles himself back into bed next to him, and Scott says, “I would love to go to France with you. To actually see the culture.” 

The thought is terrifying: what if he is recognized? There are many tourists in France. But the light spilling in from the doors that have cracked open in the last few months is too bright not to bask in. 

✶✶

The new dogwalker is named Pilar. She is affable and unfazed by the NDA. Scott isn’t sure she even knows who he is. Kip covers overnights, but they agree that she will do all the walks that Kip used to do, freeing Kip from the obligation. 

Kip is gone most days: library, working, writing, meetings, teaching. Kip can sit down at the end of the day and watch Scott’s job, but Kip’s days are filled with details that are hypothetical. Scott has the wild thought of how much he would like to just follow Kip around for a day. Just be his shadow, see the specifics of his life, all the people and places he has mentioned. Put names to faces. Stand in the middle of a crowded room and have Kip point him out to someone. 

The next morning, Scott is halfway out the door to walk Blue, when he sees Kip on the couch. Kip is dressed, looking at one of Scott’s library books. 

“Hey, I was thinking,” Scott says. “After the first round, can I meet Elena?” 

Kip grins, and says, “I’d love that.” 

The playoffs start in Montreal with away games. Shane Hollander has been taken out by a concussion, and reviewing tape, the team is in shambles without him. The schedule is a game every other day until they win, relentless. They knock Montreal out in six. Scott takes a brutal hit to the ribs in the final game and winces the whole flight home. 

They have four days off before the next round. Scott risks colossal head injury for a living: so why not invite Elena over during his rest and recovery period. 

Scott is lying on the couch, icing his ribs. It’s a cloudless sunny day, no need for any secondary light with the sun streaming through the windows. From his prone position, Scott says, “Do you think she’ll go easier on me, if I’m injured?”

“Probably not,” Kip says honestly. 

When the knock comes, Kip opens the door. Blue barks excitedly, running to the door as well. Scott hears a woman’s voice exclaiming, “A cute dog and a private elevator!”

Once inside, Scott winces to stand. He has seen Elena in photos and from a distance, months ago in the stands. 

“I’m not a hugger,” she says. “But shaking your hand would be weird.”

She hugs him, awkwardly, and continues. “So, you’re the man who finally moved Kip to Manhattan. He’s been complaining about the commute for three years, so I thank you for sparing us.”

“I haven’t moved here,” Kip cries. 

“That’s not what your dad says,” Elena retorts. 

“Why are you texting my dad?”

“Words with Friends has a messaging feature,” Elena sniffs, turning back to Scott. 

Scott’s stomach flips at the idea that other people are talking about his relationship, completely out of his control and line of sight. 

As if seeing it on his face she says, “We aren’t using your name. But also—can you imagine someone hacking Words with Friends,” she cackles. 

“What is that?” Scott asks, finally. 

“It’s Scrabble on your phone,” Kip offers. “She and my dad have been playing each other for like, three years straight.”

“I’m winning,” she smiles. 

Scott feels dizzy as he says, “I used to be good at Scrabble. No vocab but I’m good at, uh, rearranging things in my head.”

There was a dingy box at his grandmother’s house that they used to play in the summers, a hundred miles from here and a lifetime ago, when the only future was hockey. He hasn’t thought about it in years, all the tricks she taught him, two letter words and patterns, long afternoons at her dining table, part of his life he cleaved off to lighten the load. He’s not sure he’d be any good now. 

“I bet I could kick your ass too,” she says cheerfully. 

“Probably,” Scott agrees.

Chapter End Notes

Honesty is the best policy.

Comments are like playing scrabble with your friend's dad. Reblog or like on tumblr if you yearn for connection.

Chapter 11: MAY 2017, KIP

Chapter Summary

Kip and Scott look at bridges during the playoffs.

Also; art galleries, movies, and new steps.

Chapter Notes

This chapter contains major spoilers for the end movie In the Mood for Love. If you want to avoid that, skip from the mention of the movie title to the next section.

Kip believes in the evil eye. Speaking a dream out loud is good enough to curse it out of existence. In the past, he was vaguely aware of the MLH playoffs, watching them on and off with his dad. They seemed to stretch on for ages. All those years, it was just numbers, black and white. The Admirals did or they didn’t—mostly they didn’t. 

This year, against the natural order of the world and his place in it, Kip has an up-close view of what the playoffs mean. There’s a bruise spanning the entire left side of Scott’s body, purple and green across his ribs, hip and thigh. Every day starts with the most heinous meal Kip can imagine. And yet every day Scott wakes up with the belief that he will win. That belief, that tenacious enthusiasm in the face of constant brutality and smothering arguments otherwise, is the flame to which he has been drawn, moth-like. It underlines everything that Scott is, even the parts of him that are terrified and grieving. Kip is ready to build a life around it. They have been sleeping together for four months. They have been dating for just under two. 

Dating: making plans, building something, learning to compromise. Some compromises will have to wait. Others are more relevant: Scott is banned from loading his own dishwasher within a week of Kip having the confidence to finally tell him that he loads the dishwasher like a maniac, with plastic tupperware and mugs on the bottom rack. They get into a genuine argument when Kip comes home from a bar stinking of second-hand smoke and disrupting Scott’s very delicately balanced sleep schedule. 

When Elena met Scott, she did not grill him. She was nicer than Kip was expecting, joking with him, probing. Kip returned from the bathroom to find them in cahoots by the counter. They were both smiling. Late in the evening, Elena declared her readiness to leave, turned pointedly to Kip, and told him to walk her to her cab. 

They are standing in a mild spring, the canopy of Scott’s building lights Elena’s face when she turns to him and says, matter-of-factly: “I like him and I can see why you like him.” 

Kip lets out a long breath of relief, “I’m glad. I’m sure he’s bouncing off the walls, up there right now. What did you say to him, while I was in the bathroom?”

“I told him that I could see you were happy, but I asked what he was going to do to make you stay happy because no one is happy to be a secret,” Elena pauses and looks up the road for her cab before continuing. “He said… you were working together on that. And that the only real future he can imagine is with you.” 

Kip blushes so quickly he feels his whole face get hot, like a kettle flicked on. “Oh. Well.”

“It’s an acceptable answer. For now, at least. I’ll be watching.”

Her car rolls up to the curb, and Elena turns to Kip and says, “Take care of yourself, baby,” and closes the car door before he can answer. 

✶✶

Even with the semester over and some of his on-campus obligations for the year fulfilled, it is more convenient to live in Scott’s luxury apartment building in the Upper West Side, with its high-end gym facility, eucalyptus steam room, on-call concierge, and easier access to both his friends as well as campus just a few stops north. 

When Scott is home, Kip stays there with him, writing in his boxers at the desk that has slowly become his. The limits on their life together limit Scott’s ability to spend money on Kip—he buys groceries, meals in, and the whole apartment is under his name. A compromise to be deferred until there is space to make for it. The middle of the Admiral’s best chance at the Cup in two years does not feel like the time to do so. And maybe, just a little bit, Kip is starting to accept it. Money was the wall he could build between them. But now, in the warm bath of light from the designer lamp on the desk, in the current moment, where Scott is napping with the door open—maybe being taken care of by a man who loves him and who is changing before his eyes isn’t so bad. 

A week into May, before the next round of the playoffs, Kip comes back to find a large cardboard box, opened and broken down by the door that says Herman Miller. There is a brand-new ergonomic chair sitting at the desk. 

They go for lunch at his dad’s. His dad has the Yankees on as he cooks. Scott is exhausted, conserving energy before his next game. He valiantly tries to make small talk as they enter the mid-day period when he is usually napping. Kip takes pity on him and tells him to go use his bedroom, assuring him that neither of them will be offended. 

“You seem good,” George says, fondly. 

“I’m relieved to not have to lie to you anymore,” Kip confesses. 

“I’m relieved too. For both of you. I bet he’ll go far this year, honesty is a good motivator.”

“Hey, don’t jinx it.” 

He and his dad catch up for an hour. When it’s time to go, he heads up to wake Scott, nudging the door to his own bedroom open. He takes in the sight: Scott asleep, enormous in Kip’s twin bed, sprawled out in his sweatpants and no shirt on top of the covers. Something beyond a teenage fantasy. A sleeping Endymion, arms over his head, vast span of skin, bruises and muscles shadowed by the half-light of the window covered in an overgrown vine his dad still hasn’t had the time to trim back. Regretfully, Kip nudges him awake. 

Scott, blinking back into life, points at the framed posters on the wall across: a museum poster from the Louvre, a retrospective on Poussin; a poster for the movie In the Mood for Love that is nearly four-feet tall and drenched in red. 

“I was thinking. Do you want to bring those back? I know the apartment is a little… sparse. It could use some colour.”

“Have you ever seen the movie?” Kip asks. 

“No,” Scott confesses. 

They bring the posters home; they watch the movie, Kip sitting upright with Scott’s feet on his lap. Blue on the other arm of the sectional, napping and dreaming, kicking her feet. Kip rubs Scott’s ankles absently. It’s the first time he’s watched it in a few years, the soft flowing scenes of two people who find and lose each other. The ending lands differently this time. 

As the credits roll, Scott says, quietly in the dark, “So they don’t end up together?”

“No. They can’t make it work,” Kip says with a shake of his head, looking across at Scott’s sad face, gazing up at him. 

He falls asleep that night with Scott’s arm clenched tightly around his chest, the slow, steady beat of his breath as he evens out into sleep. 

They hang the movie poster in the living room, between the large windows and their unobstructed view. The museum poster goes over the desk. Meanwhile: Scott’s new dogwalker does not bat an eyelash when she finds him working at the desk, just waves a greeting and takes Blue out for her morning walk. 

✶✶

Meanwhile: the Admirals face Ottawa in the second round with two home games in a row. Kip brings Elena to the first, and his dad to the second. They win both—the crowd is electric, excited. The feeling in the arena is potential: New York fans who can taste a win. Kip spends both games half-watching the actual game and half-watching Scott alone. 

The way he moves on the ice, the back of his helmet, when visible, on the bench. The cut and movement of him in pads, the thrill on his face. Even on the Jumbotron, it is hard to see the details of his face. Kip has learned the difference between Scott the man and Scott the hockey player. Scott’s face, what Kip thinks of as his real one, is expressive—his eyes move when he thinks, his jaw twitches in reaction, he licks his lips when he’s about to grin. In interviews, his face is composed, intense; only the flex of his jaw remains when he’s digesting an interview question. But sometimes, Kip sees the flicker between. Scott keeps himself divided, but the boundaries between are increasingly porous. 

After a two day break, Scott flies to Ottawa, and Kip goes to work on campus. Kip is in his office when Scott calls from his hotel room in Ottawa, after practice. Scott has been skipping the many non-mandatory ones—a benefit, he says, of being so old the coach wants him to rest. Now he’s in a corner suite with room service on the way. Kip leans back in his chair, stretching out his back to the sound of Scott pacing in his hotel room. Scott is avoiding voicing his pre-game anxiety by describing his hotel room’s floor-to-ceiling windows instead. 

“What do you see?” Kip asks. 

“A big river, a bridge. I think it’s office buildings on the other side. Lots of trees. It’s nice,” Scott says. “I think it’s Quebec on the other side of the river.” 

“The part where you lived?” Kip asks, hesitantly. Scott mentions his family so rarely.

“No,” Scott says. “My grandmother was outside Montreal, closer to Vermont. It looked different than here, I think. Hillier, I think. I don’t remember it very well.”

Kip takes stock of what’s in front of him: the new laptop, his well-worn notebook with paper-frayed edges, chewed pens, and library books. He grips the laminate edge of the desk to bring himself to sit upright from his far lean. 

As if Scott can sense what Kip wants to ask, Scott continues. “I think about them a lot, this time of year. Every time we make the playoffs. This was their dream, and. I’ve come so close to it ten times.”

Kip doesn’t have to ask who them means. He puts his elbows on the desk, bracketing his head into the quiet space between his arms. “Can you—do you want to tell me about them?”

Scott does. He tells Kip how they met as college athletes. How they had him late after his dad tapped out from the AHL with a knee injury, his mom went into coaching, no options for her to play. That their birthdays were just one day apart, in August, and they celebrated the day in the middle. His memories of his dads day-job, manager at a sports equipment store. On days without practice, Scott would do his homework in the break room there. He tells Kip about how dedicated they were to his schedule, coming to his games, the cheers they came up with just for him. He tells the story of the day they took him out for ice cream after a scout from St. Thomas came all the way to Rochester to see Scott play when he was ten years old. His first time eating a banana split. 

He tells Kip about parents who loved him, hoped for him, filled him with the confidence and absolute conviction that he would make it when so few did. Scott had done all of it and more. 

Almost every story revolves around hockey. Scott has done such a good job living out the carefully laid dreams of the two people who will never see this plan realized. Kip does not ask: and what about you, your dreams? Where do they overlap, and where do yours stand alone? He just listens to how Scott talks about them with reverence.  

After an hour, in his quiet office that still smells of radiator dust in May, Kip tells his boyfriend in a corner suite a hundred miles away: “I love you. You’re going to be amazing tomorrow.”

He hangs up and packs up his stuff, too distracted to keep working on the tedious footnotes he was proofing. It is drizzling, softly, as he walks back down to Scott’s. A mild, misting wet. He has a jacket but no umbrella, and so he arrives home with his hair a mess, the damp frizzing his curls. He has plans to meet up with friends for a talk across town, and he’ll need to fix his hair. But it’s so much easier now, not having to kill time to avoid going back to Brooklyn. 

Instead, he walks back to where Blue yelps excitedly, skittering into the front hall, so familiar with Kip that she lets him pick her up and carry her back to the couch, licking his face as he goes. 

Over the next three days, the Admirals knock Ottawa out in a clean sweep. 

✶✶

Winning begets rewards. Scott has five days off while the other Eastern conference finalist is played out. He is instructed to take it easy—nothing that could strain his muscles. A mean feat, Kip knows, for a man used to burning five thousand calories every other day. Kip observes Scott’s daily call with medical and nutrition, the required supplements, and protein. The war to keep his body afloat continues. They have not been together long enough for Kip to voice his opinion on the matter, but that doesn’t stop him from having one. 

Kip, unfortunately for Scott, has a busy week. His advisor is traveling all summer. He knows from experience that this means she’ll be spotty in responding to any requests and annoyed about the time difference, so he is trying to get in meetings while he can. The meeting is, as always, fruitful and frustrating. After, he meets a friend for coffee to go over edits Kip sent her and his phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s Scott, calling, unexpectedly. It’s been three days of rest—Carter was supposed to come over for lunch. Kip doesn’t answer, texts back: what’s up? 

S: Where are you? Want to leave the house. 

K: i’m on campus still. does someone need to be there for a delivery? 

S: Oh, no, not like that. Can we go for a walk? I may die of boredom here. 

K: with a friend, sorry, then doing a favour for a friend at a gallery in chelsea - i’ll be done at the gallery at 3? you could meet me. there will be other people there. 

He sends the invitation as an offering, an open door if Scott will grab the edge before it shuts. 

S: Send me the address. 

Kip wraps up his meeting, finishes his lunch outside on a bench, and heads to the gallery. He’s been asked to help with installation, not nearly his area of expertise, but a friend of a friend requested another body strong enough to move the enormous crates the artist, who works largely in cement, has delivered. He tells everyone that a friend is going to stop by in an hour, which gets vague nods. He spends the hour moving a palette jack around under the watchful eye of the actual installation team. 

S: Here, I think? 

The window of the gallery is papered over, Kip opens the door to find Scott waiting. It’s sunny outside, and Scott is in a baseball hat and sunglasses. He pulls off the sunglasses, but not the hat. The thrill of seeing Scott outside in the world, in a brand new, context-free space. 

“Do you want a tour?” Kip asks. “Not too much to see.” 

“Sure,” Scott agrees, visibly nervous. 

It’s not a large gallery: the art is sculptural cement plinths, partially formed, jagged tops. The gallery isn’t large, it’s a former storefront with a small gallery space at the front and then a larger area in the back behind a wall. Scott loops the whole gallery easily. None of them recognize Scott when he nods a greeting. Kip had no way of sussing this out earlier. It’s a skill he realizes he will have to develop now: would bringing up the Admirals and gauging their reaction make it more obvious when Scott shows up, in the vague future where they do this again? 

He’s disrupted from this thought as Scott walks up to him, staying more than an arm’s width away. “So what’s the idea behind the art?”

Kip shrugs, “Not sure, honestly. I think it’s something about brutalism. What do you see?”

“It looks like a construction site?” Scott says, looking embarrassed. 

“Valid critique,” Kip smiles. He waves and says, “Let’s go.”

Kip says goodbye to the group and leaves with Scott into the bright afternoon light, blinking from the relative dark. They walk uptown, discussing the day. Kip doesn’t dare to walk shoulder to shoulder, when they cross paths with other people strangers brush easily between them. 

“Show me some art you do like,” Scott says. 

They gallery hop through Chelsea. Contemporary paintings, video work, conceptual sculptures. Kip points out what he likes about each: composition, craft, context. Scott is hesitant and asks Kip questions that make him laugh, because Scott expects that he knows the name of every artist and their history. The closest they come to touching is reading gallery placards at the same time. There are a few double-takes. In one gallery a man recognizes Scott and asks for a selfie. Kip stands to the side, watches Scott turn into a stranger, a mask slipping on, as he leans in mechanically for the picture.

After a fourth gallery, Scott declares his favourite, were a group of bright, expressive paintings that he says makes him feel “like a bug on LSD.”

Kip goes into a bakery to get them a snack. He’s not sure what’s more dangerous: being out in public like this or Scott messing up his eating schedule. When he comes out, three people are crowding Scott talking about the playoff odds. After, he looks newly tired. 

They take the subway before they hit Midtown, standing a deniable distance apart. Scott leans on the bars by the door on his phone, Kip on the other side of the car. Kip watches someone take a photo of Scott, blatantly and not hiding what they’re doing. 

They spent the afternoon talking at a distance, and Kip is relieved to return to the safety of the apartment, where Blue is waiting, has been walked and fed and is happy to see them. Home, he lets himself think, fleetingly. He is relieved to be able to talk and breathe freely again, faced now with the reality that even if things were different, in the future when they are different, he has fallen in love with someone who will be observed like a zoo animal, no matter the secrets he is or isn’t keeping. 

✶✶

Change begets consequences. They arrive that evening. Shawn texts him: Were you out with your hot boss today???  There’s a twitter link below it. Kip feels his stomach drop, his hand sweat as he clicks the link. There: Scott in one of the art galleries. The photo is taken from around a wall, face on: Kip is in frame. They are far enough apart that they could, ostensibly, be strangers. Scott is mid-speech. 

The picture has been retweeted a few hundred times, commented twice as much. The messages are along the same lines: what the fuck is Scott Hunter doing at an art gallery in the middle of the playoffs? Who does he think he is? Why isn’t he locked in a hotel with the team? Is he trying to sabotage the team? Kip scrolls through: no comments are about him, but there are many, many comments he hopes Scott, who doesn’t have a Twitter account, won’t see. 

Kip’s heart is racing as he crosses the apartment to where Scott was watching hockey tape on his iPad in bed. 

“Hey. There's a photo of you, of us online,” Kip says. 

“I saw,” Scott responds. He is holding the iPad, but he looks terrified, like a trapped rabbit. 

“I’m sorry,” Kip says, tentatively. “Are you okay? Are you in trouble?”

“No, I’m not in real trouble. Carter messaged me, and Coach called me too. But it’s fine. It’s just fans having opinions. I should be used to that.”

Kip swallows, “I’m sorry,” he says again. 

“Don’t be. It was my idea. I wanted to. I had a good time. It was terrifying, but I was glad I went. Actually. Shit. I’m still glad I went,” he is speaking in short, shaky sentences.. 

He draws his knees up. Kip sits down on the bed, perpendicular to Scott, wrapping his legs around Scott from the side, one leg behind Scott’s back and the other across his stomach. He brings Scott in close and holds him, pinning Scott’s arms against his body to wrap the whole of him between his arms. 

“I’ve spent so many years thinking about all the bad parts. Obsessing over everything I could lose, my friends, my team. Fuck.” Scott says, leaning into Kip. Scott is crying—not hard, but tears streak down his face. Kip has never seen him cry, has only seen him fight against doing so. Now, his eyes dampen Kip’s shoulder.

Scott says wetly,  “The stupid thing is, the shit online, it’s not even about me being gay. It’s about me having a life at all. If we lose next week, it’ll be my fault.”

“That’s crazy,” Kip says. “You know that’s unreasonable, right?”

“I know. But that’s what they’ll say. And…I haven’t followed a single one of my playoff rituals this year, and we just swept a round for the first time since I joined the team,” Scott laughs. He turns his head into Kip’s shoulder, rubbing his face like a cat against him. Kip glances over and sees Blue, standing alert, framed in the doorway. Scott looks up from Kip’s shoulder, at the door and then at Kip, his face blotchy and red. There’s a glint in his eyes that Kip has only ever seen on TV, in close-up zooms of Scott on the ice. 

“You told me my family couldn’t be on payroll, and you were right,” Scott says in a hard voice. 

Kip sucks in air between his teeth and says, “That was harsh. I was angry at the time.”

“You were right,” he repeats. His voice isn’t small, it’s deep with confidence. 

Kip rubs Scott’s back. Scott continues: “Today was good. I’m glad we did it. I liked seeing art with you. I want to do more… stuff like that. In the world.”

“I want that, too. Even if,” Kip swallows, “it was real for me, today, how people watch you, how much that is part of your life.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if that’s too much,” Scott says. “We can figure out how to shield you, maybe?”

Kip shrugs, “That’s a long way off. One step at a time, remember?”

“Yeah,” Scott says. “I think I know what the next step is. The fans, I can’t tell them what to think. But I have to tell the people who actually… have my phone number to call me if I’m spotted at more, like, art stuff.”

“Had a great time at the galleries today, huh?” Kip jokes.

“Honestly,” Scott says, no joke in his voice at all. “It’s more the fact that Carter’s text was about how unexpected it was. But it didn’t feel unexpected to me.”

“What did you tell him?” Kip asks.

Scott looks embarrassed and admits, “That a friend was showing me around some art, because I needed some fresh air and was thinking of buying some.” 

All Kip can think to say is, “That’s okay. I don’t mind.” Another half truth, but one that’s easy to deliver. 

“I’m tired of being what they expect me to be,” Scott says.

Kip can feel his heart racing, hammering in his chest like a drum for a fight that he isn’t even part of. 

“Do you mind giving me a second? I have a call I want to make,” Scott says. 

“Sure,” Kip says with a nod. Scott is already dialing, and as Kip stands and goes to the door, he hears Scott saying into the phone, “Hey, Todd? You said to call you if I had news.”

Kip shuts the bedroom door. It is nearing sunset, and the hours until tomorrow feel long, dark, and new. 

✶✶

Later, Kip joins Scott in bed. Kip spent the rest of the evening reading halfheartedly. Scott is damp from a shower, in boxers, he welcomes Kip into bed and curls into him sideways, pushing up Kip’s shirt to rest his head on Kip’s bare stomach, cheek in the hair below his navel. Scott says his agent thinks he’s insane, that he tried to pretend not to hear Scott. That he’s going to tell the team and his coach after the playoffs. 

“About you, or me?” Kip asks.

Scott looks at him like he’s crazy, “Both?”

“Right,” Kip says, the word feels big on his clumsy lips. He spent a few months keeping Scott separate, at arm’s length, and now it feels like every intense feeling Kip has ever had is his for the taking. His grubby hands have cleaved their way into Scott’s life. 

“Can I tell Maria and Shawn?” Kip asks, daring to go tit-for-tat. “In private, obviously. They still ask about you, and I’m tired of lying.” 

Scott nods against his stomach, and then vocalizes: “Okay. As long as… yeah, okay.”

“The next few weeks are going to be crazy. It’s just going to be hockey and travel and almost nothing else, if I’m perfectly honest,” Scott says, his mouth hot against Kip’s stomach. He nuzzles in, his nose pressed into the hard line of Kip’s abs, grazing his teeth against skin. “Tonight, while we have the time, I want you to fuck me.”

He’s looking up from Kip’s waist, the same big eyes that tripped Kip up eight months ago, but now they’re shining up at him with a sparkling playfulness that makes arousal flip like he’s on a rollercoaster. Kip reaches down and pinches the shell of Scott’s ear. Kip curls up to sit, dislodging Scott. 

They haven’t had sex like this in over a month: too tired, too busy, too injured. But Scott wants it, was ready and prepped for it after his shower. Within a minute they’re undressed, Scott on his knees with a stack of pillows under his hips, chest to the mattress and head turned to the side. Kip is achingly hard before Scott is pushing back desperately into Kip’s hand as Kip easily slides a finger into him. Kip lines up and pushes his cock in slow to be gentle and slow to feel every inch as he sinks in, the angle deep with Scott’s hips so high. 

Scott is vocal and demanding right away, groaning out more, harder, yes, come on, give it to me, Grady, I can take it, I want it. Kip holds onto Scott’s hips with both hands, one against the bruise that just won’t go away. He fucks Scott with all the muscle power he can, driving into him deep and intensely. He adjusts Scott’s knees, his own hips, until he gets the angle right so Scott’s chatty demands fall away, until he is making sounds that are echoes of noise. Forceful, slick with lube, Scott surrenders to him completely, safe under Kip’s hands. Kip yanks Scott back off the pillows to give himself a gap to palm Scott’s dick, leaking and hard. Kip smears the precome along him, strokes once, twice, and then lets go. He slows his pace, letting himself feel the ache of it. 

“Don’t touch yourself,” Kip says, his voice rough. “Hands off.”

Scott brings his hands behind his back, and Kip takes them in his: tangling them together, more leverage. The muscles of Scott’s back, across his scapula, are retracted and compliant.   

Kip goes to the gym for the same vain reasons as anyone: to look good naked. But also: to give as hard as he can without getting tired, to fuck and not exhaust his core, hips, and thighs. Working out is one of the few ways he can disappear from his own thoughts, shut off his mind. This, here, is the other way to turn off his brain. It’s where those goals meet, his vanity and his desire. All his work, and obligations, the whole world disappears to render him just another body sweat in the search of pleasure, given, taken, and shared. 

Scott’s bravado, his insistence on harder fall away. Scott goes boneless under him, making little high noises, rutting into the pillows stacked to save his knees. Kip pauses to admire Scott so far gone like this,  putty, unformed clay ready to be remade, canting back for more. Kip catches his breath, rubbing his fingers gently across the palms of Scott’s loose hands. Kip rolls his hips deliberately to send a jolt into Scott’s back beneath their tangled hands. Scott is squirming, close, his skin hot to the touch. He is drooling into the sheets, a wet spot beneath his open mouth. Kip catches his breath, pulls almost all the way out of Scott, teases with just the head of his cock, and then slides back in, tension and need frantic in his skin, chest, everywhere. Scott makes a noise that sounds like, please, but doesn’t quite make it to a full word. Breath caught, Kip returns to the intense pace of before.

Kip is heady with the indulgence of intimacy, of knowing and having something just for him, given so freely, so needily, and earned with love alone. Pleasure unfurls from the base of him, building from the base of his spine roiling through him a simmer, opening like a leaf toward the sun, intense and hot, as Scott whimpers, “I’m, I, I love you,” and then comes untouched into the bed, contracting like he’s been shocked. Kip lets go of Scott’s wrists, lets him collapse. 

Scott’s voice is muffled as he pleads, insistently, “Don’t stop, come inside me, don’t go.”

Kip wraps an arm around Scott’s chest, tilts them back together, and fucks him greedily. His orgasm races through him with the possessiveness of mine. 

Laying there, side by side, in the damp afterward. Muscles spent, his spend inside his boyfriend, tired and warm like a promise finally delivered. In just a few days, Scott will be gone soon to the inexorable land of playoff finals: locked in a hotel with the rest of the team, and Kip will have the whole apartment to himself. He reaches out and pushes at the sweaty line of Scott’s hair, the growth of his playoff beard. Scott turns to him with a serious expression and says: “I have more bad news. We have to change all the pillowcases.”

Kip laughs so hard his stomach hurts. 

✶✶

He can’t coordinate their schedules, so he calls Maria and Shawn while he's cooking. Maria is eating her dinner, headphones in a hospital break room. Shawn is at his apartment, on his couch. 

The first thing Maria says, before hello is: “That’s Scott’s kitchen, right?”

“Yes,” Kip says, setting the phone against a bottle of olive oil. 

“Shawn,” Maria says. “What did I say?”

“Ugh,” Shawn groans, an annoyed dismissal at the back of his throat. He puts the phone down so he is not visible. Off-screen, his voice says, “Was it after New Years? At least let me have that.”

“Excuse me, I haven’t even said anything yet,” Kip yelps at the phone. 

✶✶

Kip has been slowly bringing more and more of his books back from his dad’s to Scott’s. From one of his homes to the other. Today, he makes a list of things he needs: an old course pack he’s pretty sure is in his childhood bedroom, warm weather clothing he’s lacking, a book he promised to lend a friend from his study group. He grabs the same bags he used all year to transport back and forth, the dingy canvas duffel and tote. They’re empty, to be filled at his dad’s and brought back to the desk at Scott’s. He tells Blue, be back soon, right into the scruff of her neck as she lazes on the couch, watching him whale-eyed. In the elevator on the way down: an email from his advisor with an out-of-character compliment about the first chapter draft he completed, followed by an expected litany of personal gripes and notes. But still, he’s on track. 

He takes the train to Brooklyn, transferring head down at Times Square. The car is empty enough that he can choose a seat on the side with the better view, sitting with his bags folded neatly over his lap. The train rushes out over the Manhattan Bridge into the bright late Spring mid-day sun, a perfect view of lower Manhattan, the skyscrapers and the Brooklyn Bridge, the vast city architecture, the flat glassy building panes that have reflected in afternoon sun, just like this, his whole life. 

His phone buzzes: someone from the study group he’s meeting later confirming the time. He reads the text and closes it. His lock screen has always been one of the generic preset ones, he never bothered to change it. His close friends, his dad, now know about Scott, but he’s still guarding a huge secret from almost everyone else he’s ever met or ever cared about. Everyone in the study group he is meeting later; his entire grad student cohort; all the students he taught for the last two semesters; his older friends; the rest of his family; the vast connections of a sociable, well-liked 31 year old. None of them know about Scott. And still: music loud in his ears, he clicks through on his phone, chooses a picture of Blue, lying on the couch, Scott’s hand on her belly. He sets that as his lock screen. The subway descends back underground.

Chapter End Notes

To the city of Ottawa, I'm sorry for sweeping you out of the playoffs. In real life, you beat New York in 2017. In this world, Scott needed to look at Quebec.

As for art: I didn't want to drag any real contemporary artists with the concrete pillars. Imagine what you'd like! The art that makes Scott think he's a bug on LSD is Shara Hughes. You can’t hear it but the album Kip is listening to as he crosses the city via subway is Explosions in the Sky - The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place.

Comments are like an emotional walk through an art gallery to test the pourous boundaries of your public and private self. Reblog, like, or follow me on tumblr if you too have come bursting overground in public transit and felt alive.

Chapter 12: JUNE | JULY 2017, SCOTT

Chapter Summary

Scott looks up at the lights and down at the camera. Kip joins.

Chapter Notes

Scott Hunter has made more reckless decisions this season than he has in the entirety of his life. He let Kip into his apartment, and then he kept letting him in over and over again until the sun bleached out all the worst parts of being honest and showed him the possibility that lay on the other side of fear. The fear isn’t wrong and it’s not based on nothing. Scott doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to spend the rest of his life answering the same question: what made you do it?

The answer is as simple as anything. It was the best moment of his life, and he wanted to share it with the best thing in his life. What more is there to say?

How can he quantify the moment he had spent more than thirty years earning, paid for with backbreaking labour and sacrifice, loneliness so deep it turned into white noise he couldn’t even hear? How can he measure and explain giving up everything in service of a goal only to discover that hollowing himself like a decaying Halloween pumpkin did not bring the goal any closer? The moment cannot be counted or contained. And yet, the question of what made him do it: he wanted to. So he did. 

✶✶

Before the questions, whole weeks before, Scott is being diligent about his cross-training. He is on a mat on the floor of the gym in his building. Kip has been going to this gym for months, and they’ve always carefully separated their visits. Today, Scott joins him. 

They scraped past Nashville in seven exhausting games. They’re facing down San Francisco for the finals, and the team is holing up at a hotel for their home games: no distractions. 

It is the last day he’ll see Kip in person until the gauntlet is over. Kip is doing his best to distract: staying on the peripheral, being easy. If Scott is honest, he has no idea what is happening with Kip’s research or social obligations. He should; that’s what a good boyfriend would do. Kip has reassured him that they will both keep practicing the boyfriend part on the other side of the playoffs. It’s nice to be reminded that there is another side to this. There always has been, but the other side has always been next season and little else. Now there is a man on the opposite end of the gym doing bench presses while Scott is doing yoga. 

He lays on the ground, headphones in, listening to a woman’s calming voice guide him through a series of breathing exercises: holding his breath for long counts and breathing out slowly, loudly through his mouth while stretching out his shoulder. When he opens his eyes between breaths, he is staring straight up into the strip of artificial light on the ceiling. When he closes his eyes, the echo of the lights mark his eyelids. They glow, impeding his vision as he tries to relax. The series starts soon. The last hurrah—it’s only the second time they have made it this far in the twelve years he’s been on the team. The first time was before he was Captain, young and hot headed. He doesn’t want to choke. Inhale, exhale, desperately trying to relax on the floor of the gym in the building where he is safest. He feels a body approach: he opens his eyes and there is Kip, standing over him between two smears of light, perfectly framed like a work of art. 

“Ready to go?” he asks.

Scott has to pack and go. “Yeah,” he agrees. 

✶✶

On the morning of the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final, he calls Kip from his hotel bed, just three miles apart. They’re tied 3-3 with San Francisco. He puts Kip on speakerphone, and listens to the sound of his boyfriend getting ready for his normal day. Kip is going, per Scott’s instance, to work today. Then he will come to the game. This is the centre of Scott’s life but not the world. No matter what happens, he’s going to end the day with the man on the other end of the phone.  

Scott has two tickets for the game via contractual obligations and he bought a third to make sure that Kip can bring both Elena and his Dad. Win or lose, at least Kip can commiserate or celebrate with people he loves. 

✶✶

And then, later that same day, hours after their phone call, hours of stretching and meeting and three hours of game play later: he is in the pile of bodies of his teammates—the buzzer still sounding as their helmets knock together. Declaring victory, unambiguous. Later, he’ll learn that the trophy process was nearly forty-five minutes long from buzzer sounding to the event that changed the rest of his life. 

Those forty-five minutes feel, to Scott, like five minutes at most. They shake hands, they take pictures. Each player on the team is given the cup to skate around with, hoisted above their head. It’s the victory lap. As he’s handed the cup, he is hit with the flash of memory: watching this ceremony the last time the Admirals won when he was a kid, five years old, pressed so close that the static from the CRT TV passed right into his nose, while his mom laughed. They weren’t even her team: she was mad the Metros had been knocked out.

Maybe it’s an invented memory, but he has kept it with him all these years, the sound of her voice behind him as the static crackles across the tip of his nose, saying, “See how easily they lift it? The Cup weighs more than you right now, but you’ll be much bigger when it’s your turn.”

He is much bigger now. It is easy to lift it overhead. The roar of celebration as he rounds the ice comes from the depths of his stomach, a primal noise of celebration. And then, it’s over, he passes the trophy onto Carter, moment done. He’s waved over by the media team for an interview, an obligation as captain. The questions are generic and still impossible to answer: how does he feel right now? What did it take to get the team here? 

And then a question he should have been expecting, should have prepared an answer for before the adrenaline was running through his body: “Hunter, the fans know your story—what do you think your parents would be feeling right now?”

Scott goes still. He feels the cool of the ice for the first time in ages, the physical presence of the people in the crowd. Less like the usual wall of sound and more like the eyes of eighteen thousand people. 

A smile breaks out over his face, simple and true as he answers, “They’d be thrilled. Yeah, they’d be ecstatic. For sure. This was their dream. I did it for them.” 

He has never believed his parents went anywhere, that he could talk to them and they would hear, but suddenly, he looks straight down the barrel of the camera, feeling for just a moment as though the reflective glass void of the camera lens can send a message to them, like the hulking mass of technology can transmit it to them, like they’re watching somewhere, “I love you, mom. I love you, dad.”

Scott closes his eyes for a long blink. Remembering, for just a moment, what it felt like to be hugged by them, fitting easily between his mothers arms. He’s much bigger now. It would feel different. He’ll never know. 

The reporter stares at him, expecting a longer answer. Scott cannot give one. He cannot perform his grief for an audience tonight. Most of the time, his grief is a rock that sits unswallowable at the back of his throat, a pressing ache of the trachea. In this moment, that grief is enormous, it is all around him. It is the air of the stadium, too big to name, too real to be a ghost, sharp enough to hurt, light enough to carry. The largest grief is the simplest: he wishes they were here. Just this once. He would trade every other moment he has wished they were there just for them to have this one. He did it, he did it, he fucking did it. 

He knows how they would feel right now: but he can’t name how he feels. The press team moves on, and the camera moves off him. 

The adrenaline is rolling off him in waves. Scott is out of his helmet; he threw it off when the buzzer sounded. Three years ago, the league mandated that all players wear visors to protect their eyes. Like any change that was meant for safety, players who weren’t obligated to—anyone who had played enough without a visor that they were grandfathered into not needing to wear one—rejected it. Visors were for sissies. Scott, in the smallest act of rebellion against the tough-guy bullshit he has been swallowing his whole fucking life, put a visor on. The visor is clear: it protects his eyes. It took some getting used to wearing all the time, to the fog and the edges of it, but it was fine. He can get used to change. But even if he were wearing the helmet, his visor does not protect from the glare of the overhead lights if you’re looking up. 

And Scott is looking up tonight: he’s looking up toward the stands to where Kip is. The lights of the ribbon displays, the long LED screens that circle the whole arena, burn into his retinas everytime he does. Throughout the rest of the ceremony, his teammates having their turn lifting and kissing the cup, the photos, the suits shaking hands, he keeps looks up into the stands over and over again. He doesn’t even realize how much he is looking up until the afterimage creates glowing lines in his eyes. His vision swims with the reverse glow of lights and the light of the last year: sunny mornings, cool afternoon light, warmth and possibility. It’s not enough, just the negative reflection of light, white shadows in his line of sight. He wants the real thing. 

Scott is not reckless off the ice. But he is still on the ice when his teammates' families fill the rink around him. He is still on the ice when he realizes he will regret it for the rest of his life, however long that will be, if he leaves Kip in the stands and stays here alone. He has no idea what anyone will think, but he knows with sudden clarity what he feels. 

He’ll have to answer the question for the rest of his life: what made you do it? He wanted to. He did. 

Later, much later, after Kip has climbed the boards, after everything that comes, the lasting image in his mind will be of Kip in front of him the moment before they kiss. All year—it hasn’t even been a year, but “years” to Scott are hockey seasons—he has been looking at art Kip has sent him. He has tried to understand all those dark, dramatic paintings Kip is writing about. Paintings with their stark black backgrounds, action giving way to shadow. 

The memory that sticks is the opposite, a negative reflection: Kip against the blinding white of the ice. Kip framed all around by the marred white rink, being led into the spotlight. Kip’s face of total shock, of love and hope. But Scott doesn’t think of this until much, much later. 

He isn’t thinking at all when he looks down at Kip and says, “We said one step at a time. But the universe gave us an elevator. Are you ready?” 

“Yes,” Kip says. 

✶✶

JULY 2017, SCOTT 

Scott knows better than most people: money doesn’t solve everything. It can’t keep tabloids from your front door or strangers from dissecting every decision he has made over the last twelve years, demanding to recalculate every loss and every win against him. Money helped him win a Stanley Cup and it accidentally brought Kip to his front door.

Money can’t keep them safe. It doesn’t stop Kip’s email from getting bombarded, from needing to change offices. It doesn’t help Kip explain why he’s sort of famous to his frazzled advisor, and it won’t help him write his PhD. But if Scott has anything to say about it, it’ll make it easier. 

It paid for a first-class ticket so he can bring Blue to Paris. The ability to buy a plane ticket for a dog, Kip had called “rich person bullshit.” Scott called his bluff, asked if she should stay behind in New York for two months. 

“No, of course I want to bring our dog with us,” Kip says with a smile, smug and daring, knowing exactly what target he was hitting. 

Whoosh—Scott is thankful his job has built strong ankles to stay upright because he feels, these days, like he could be knocked over with a feather. 

But, more importantly for Scott right now: it does pay for a new short-term rental after his proud boyfriend booked a minuscule chambre de bonne on the fifth floor of an ancient building. Scott spends the first three nights folding himself in half to fit into a single room with a visible toilet. The one nice thing about the tiny apartment is that the bed is about six inches from a large window that opens. Scott spends his first two mornings in Paris sitting on the bed with his tired feet wedged into the elaborate iron railing. He is down four toenails and up one Stanley Cup, a world away from hockey, from New York, watching the narrow street below. Taking it in. He has arrived somewhere new. But up here, in a pocket of the world away from everything, feelings come in waves. He expected, maybe, to feel nothing but joy. By every metric he has ever understood, he won. The big prize, the boy. But the feelings refract out in the kaleidoscope of an expanding life that no longer hides in his apartment. Phone calls, questions, unanswerable problems, the shock of everyone around him, the relief of friends’ pride. 

Some problems can be solved with money. Sweaty and miserable in the tiny flat, he books another one. He just blew up both of their lives: they can have a bathroom and a bedroom with a door. They’re still figuring it out: Kip’s flight was, finally, covered by a grant. Kip flew economy two days before him. Scott arrived in the early morning, bleary from a red-eye, from a month straight of press, parades, and more. Scott crawled out of the taxi, somehow lower to the ground than expected. His aching hips and knees, still recovering. Blue had hopped out on her leash, nose to the air to take in the rank smell of a new city in summer. He’d dragged his suitcase, packed in a rush, tumbling across the uneven sidewalk. Kip had come all the way down the five flights of stairs to greet him. 

They kissed on the sidewalk in Paris, like something out of a dream he wasn’t imaginative enough to make up. The future had always been amorphous to him, shapes undefined because he could not fill them out. Climbing the steps to their first shitty rental in Paris, swatting Kip’s ass he follows behind him up the steps, Blue skeptical of all the steps, here he is: in it. 

✶✶

Their second vacation apartment is a glorious two-bedroom apartment in Le Marais, crown moulding and parquet flooring for Kip, an enormous bathtub big enough for Scott to take ice baths and shiver in American-level air conditioning. He walks Blue in the mornings after Kip leaves for the archive he’s here to use, and then they meet halfway after work. At a restaurant, at a bar, in a park, on the street. The flexibility of no schedule. Scott gives himself another three days before he starts to go crazy with boredom. He agreed to this plan before learning that Paris closes ice rinks for the summer. He's here for two more weeks, Kip for another three. He figures he'll find a proper gym tomorrow, because calisthenics on the apartment floor have hit their adrenaline limit. Maybe he'll ask Kip for some art to track down in all the museums he's been waiting to see. Maybe he'll launch an entire new philanthropic organization in the next two weeks. Nothing's stopping him. 

After several weeks avoiding Todd other than absolutely necessary, Scott finally has a call with his agent once they settle into the new rental. He takes the call sitting at the kitchen island of their rental, staring out at the dormer windows on the building across the narrow street. Todd has a lot to say, and Scott processes it slowly as he takes Blue to meet Kip. 

They meet at a restaurant they have now been to twice, sitting on the terrasse, chairs lined up outside on the sidewalk, under a striped awning. Sometimes Scott can barely stand to sit like this, on display, even when they’re not touching. It makes his hands sweat and every old injury flare up, alive with primal fear. Once, they met up in a park and Kip had touched the small of his back to get his attention and he had almost thrown up in his mouth. Other days, like today, he wants to sit on the same side of the table, feed Kip food out of his hand, spend the whole meal with his head on his shoulder, no matter how impractical. Every day is different. He expected to just be over it, all at once, to be renewed in the light of honesty. But shadows still fall.

But today, it has been a hot, smothering sunny day. The warmth lingers. He can’t wait for Kip’s arrival: he wants to kiss each of Kip’s knuckles, take his glass without asking, drink his wine and pour it back into Kip’s mouth. Instead he waits, gets a half bottle to share along with steak tartare, which Kip keeps complaining he has been eating in “alarming” quantities. He ties Blue around his chair. She is also getting used to this: to being brought out to eat, to being out in the world with both of them. When Kip approaches, she nearly drags Scott’s whole chair out from under him. Kip sits, puts a hand on the table to test Scott’s mood. Scott takes his hand, brings it to his face to kiss the callous below Kip’s middle finger from weightlifting. If anyone sees, today he doesn’t care. 

Scott fills Kip in on his call: none of his brand deals have dropped him. 

“Todd says it would be a bad look.”

“Obviously,” Kip laughs. 

“They’re all basically… fighting for me to do a spot with them first. Under Armor, some of the smaller brands reached out too. Hugo Boss? Um. He said Nike reached out. That it’s basically free money.” 

Kip looks at him with profound skepticism, and says “Is it free money?”

Kip, in his own words, had been holding back. Scott has always registered the subtle judgement in Kip’s face about the material realities of Scott’s life. Over the last six weeks, he has given over to voicing those reactions without reservation. Scott came home from his post-season medical appointment checking in on the recovery of his bruised shoulder (mostly healed, still stiff), his bad knee (fine for now) and hips (also manageable). 

He gave Kip an abbreviated version of his recovery protocols. Kip squinted, asked if he could get a second opinion. Scott hadn’t even yet met Maria but the specifics of his health regime have never belonged to him alone anyways. Kip came back from an hour-long call with her with a list of feedback. His meds do long-term damage to his kidneys and he should not be taking them more than five days in a row despite what team staff tell him; he should get more than just imaging on his shoulder and ask for an arthroscopy; he should really, really get a personal doctor. None of this would have occurred to him a year ago. There was no one who cared enough. 

And a year ago, he would have said yes to whatever papers were thrown his way to make money, the one thing that he could use to safeguard himself against the lonely future that awaited him. 

Now, in the Parisian evening, hand on Blue’s head, Kip asks, “Are a bunch of brand deals what you want to do next?”

“Uh. Probably not, no.”

“What do you want to do next?” 

“Eat more steak tartare,” Scott answers, honestly. 

Kip laughs and hooks his foot around Scott’s ankle under the table. Easy, honest, slow—everything Scott can be now. 

“I want to make enough money to support you,” Scott says. “And I want to make a difference, I guess. I don’t know what that looks like.”

“You already made a difference,” Kip says. “And you’re already supporting me. I’m a cheap date. So, baby, you’re two for two already.”

Whoosh–the easy affection of it: Scott is featherweight and an easy cry. There are tears in his eyes before he knows it. Until a month ago, he hadn’t cried in years. Now he’s like unplugged a bathtub, emotions hit like a swirl and pour out with unexpected force. Nothing is going to be easy when they get back to New York: his life has always been a balance of the impossibly hard, the easily lost, and the mysteriously granted. He’ll have to get his guard back fast. 

“You’re the planner,” Scott says, finally. “I hear you’re on schedule to finish your PhD in two years. I’ll be there at the defense? So that’s what’s next. In between… one step at a time?”

“Okay,” Kip says, fondly.

“Enough about me. Tell me about your day.”

Chapter End Notes

Aaand that’s the end. I cannot believe this hit 50,000 words. This is the longest thing I’ve written in my life!? Send help, I'm still not done writing about these fools.

To get meta, the operant logic of this story was: can I get them from strangers to the Stanley Cup in a single season in a way that feels adult, authentic, and a little less insta-love. I got nothing else to say i wish to press Post.

Thank you to latestfeature for helping me realize we needed to end with Scott in Kip's cheap French flat. Luckily Scott is a multi-millionaire who can solve problems with money. Another thank you, kiss on the brain woodenducks for reading this. [redacted] named this and listened to me complain about it.

The little validation hamster in my brain is running on fumes. Feed him with comments, follow me on tumblr, or think positive feedback really, really loudly. I won't know about the latter but it'll feel nice for you.