Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandom:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais & Shane Hollander

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais, mostly original character caleb berkes, Patrice Drapeau, Gilbert Comeau, Theriault (Game Changers), Wyatt Hayes

Additional Tags:

Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros Being Assholes (Game Changers), Shane Hollander Leaves the Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros, Homophobic Montreal Voyageurs | Montreal Metros (Game Changers), Hockey players reevaluate their homophobia, Shane Hollander Needs a Hug, POV Outsider

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-08-29 Completed: 2026-10-02 Words: 23,328 Chapters: 7/7

conversion therapy

Summary

Caleb Berkes just wanted to play hockey, and now Shane Hollander was gay. Now Caleb is confused, and some his teammates are pissed off, but Hollander is still Hollander, and Caleb is wondering whether everyone, himself included, should just calm the fuck down.

Notes

Before you come at me: the title is ironic. I do not support actual conversion therapy. I wish I did not have to make this so explicit, but alas.

I've been thinking a lot about how people actually go about changing their minds, and the role that representation and visibility play counteracting bigotry. So for every unrepentant homophobic asshole Shane has to deal with, maybe there's another player who has just never met a gay person in real life, and doesn't know anything about them other than what he has heard in the locker room. Maybe that player is uninformed, or narrow-minded, and Shane's bravery helps to nudge him into the light.

This might not be for everyone, and listen: if you don't give a fuck about some random OC and whether or not he is cured of his homophobia, I get that. Don't read this. Maybe read 'Lights, Camera' instead, which has no patience for this sort of bullshit. This is just where my brain is going these days, because I'm devastated by the state of the world and how immovable everyone seems, and I want to believe that we can all become better if given the chance.

Chapter 1: we all have to start somewhere

Gay?

Shane Hollander was gay?

Caleb had only been half listening as the captain started his announcement after practice. He was tired, and hungry, and wanted to get home to call his girlfriend. But then…

Hollander was just standing there like it was any other day, wearing his compression shirt and a backward baseball cap and chatting with Pike and Boizeau like nothing insane had happened. 

“I knew it,’ Comeau hissed under his breath. “I knew he was a fucking fag.”

Wait—he did? Caleb frowned. Because he was really fucking shocked. Not only was Hollander the best player in the league, except for maybe Rozanov, but he was just a regular guy. Sure, maybe a little quiet, and he didn’t really like to party or anything, but it’s not like he was…you know, gay gay. He didn't, like, talk like that, or wear brightly colored clothes or anything.

“Remember when he did that underwear ad? Should have known,” someone said.

Caleb didn’t really understand that connection. His girlfriend had showed him some of the chatter on the WAG chat about those ads and it didn’t seem very gay to have a bunch of women losing their shit over your abs like that.

But Caleb was also from the middle of fucking nowhere, North Dakota, where there was nothing to do except skate on the pond and go to church. They weren’t particularly fond of gay people at the Berkes’ church, but it wasn’t as if the pastor gave you a field guide and told you how to spot them in the wild. It was more about perversions, and damnation.

His parents would be so pissed. His mom had had lots to say about sin and temptation when he moved to Montreal, and she’d been a little bit right, seeing as Caleb was definitely doing a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to, like drinking alcohol, and smoking a little weed sometimes, and having premarital sex. But the pastor had warned him that the city would be full of sodomites who would want to corrupt him, but Caleb hadn’t even met any.

Or at least, he hadn’t realized that he’d met any. He stole a glance at Hollander, whose eyes were darting nervously around the room now. Pike and Boizeau were still standing on either side of him, and JJ’s hand was resting on Hollander’s shoulder.

Were they…? No. No way. Boizeau never shut up about the women he was infatuated with. Unless…

Goddammit, Caleb just didn’t know anymore.

He reached for the hem of his shirt, and had it dragged halfway up his torso when he turned and caught Hollander’s eye again.

He froze in place. Should he, like, cover up? I mean, Jesus, had Hollander been, like…looking all this time?

Hollander must have seen something on Caleb’s face, because his lips twisted in a bit of a sneer as he turned away. 

*

Comeau lifted his pint glass. “To real men!” he announced.

Caleb lifted his own glass and took a sip while Comeau chugged half of his beer down. There were a few of them out tonight after Comeau had set up a separate group chat from the team and named it No fairies. The name seemed a bit corny to Caleb, like something his U14 teammates would have dreamed up when they were all accusing one another of being gay in the locker room for laughs.

But it was kind of nice to be out and not have to worry about saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way. Officially, everyone was supposed to be okay with the Hollander thing. They’d gotten an email about it from the HR woman, and Theriault had already had a talk with Comeau about not being so fucking obvious or he would get them all sued. I mean, Caleb figured Theriault wasn’t any happier about it than the rest of them; he was old school and wasn’t above calling someone a cocksucker when he was riled up at intermission.

Had that bothered Hollander? Caleb wondered. But then he started thinking about Hollander…doing that, and it grossed him out a little. He really didn’t get the gay thing. 

“Disgusting,” one of the guys spat. He’d just been traded from Vancouver, and was from Russia or Poland or something. Caleb didn’t know how to pronounce his name. “Shouldn’t be allowed.”

Caleb nodded absentmindedly at first, but then stopped. Sure, it was weird in the locker room. Caleb knew he’d be sneaking some peeks if everyone in the locker room was a hot girl, even though his mother would slap him upside his head about it. But it was Shane fucking Hollander, and it seemed kind of weird to say he shouldn’t be allowed to play when he was basically the best hockey player in the world.

Drapeau, who was sitting next to him, nudged his shoulder. “All these young guys around, like Berkes. It’s a bad influence.”

Caleb frowned. Bad influence like Drapeau thought Hollander would turn him gay?

That seemed unlikely. I mean, Hollander was obviously handsome, but that was a widely accepted fact. He wouldn’t be on all those billboards otherwise. Caleb still didn’t want to fuck him.

Comeau slammed his glass down and pointed at Drapeau. “Exactly. What kind of league do they want this to be? Just a bunch of fucking fags sucking cock in the locker room?”

Wait—what? That seemed like something out of gay porn. Straight people worked in offices together, and Caleb didn’t have the impression it was all orgies all the time. He looked around the table to see if anyone else was confused, but they were all laughing and nodding.

He didn’t actually know why he was in the group chat that Comeau had set up, which was a handful of guys a little older than Caleb, one rookie who hadn’t shown tonight, and a couple international players. He usually hung out with a couple of the other younger guys, even though they didn’t do much other than play video games at one another’s apartments.

Comeau had sort of tried to take Caleb under his wing last year, and was always saying stuff about Caleb being a real hockey player, like we used to make them, which he guessed meant that he was big and Midwestern and…hairy, or something. Maybe that kind of comment was a shot at Hollander all this time, or Boizeau because he was Black, or even Jennings, who’d actually finished college and listened to history podcasts when they were traveling.

Caleb had obviously appreciated having someone to help him figure shit out in his first season in the MLH, but Comeau used a lot of Quebecois slang Caleb didn’t understand, and frequently referenced Caleb being from Saskatchewan even though he wasn’t even Canadian.

Caleb’s little brother, Nate, had once called Caleb’s hockey friends troglodytes. Caleb had to look up what it meant, and then he’d renamed his group chat with his juniors friends Trog nation.

Caleb tuned back into the conversation. They had stopped talking about Hollander, and now Drapeau was telling a story about getting really drunk and taking a woman home and realizing when we woke up that she was uglier than he’d remembered.

He laughed along, even though he couldn’t help but think to himself that Drapeau was no prize either.

Chapter 2: education is the kindling of a flame

Chapter Notes

OK, so I know literally nothing about hockey, North Dakota, or growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household. Maybe one day I will write a fic where these boys dick around with Excel spreadsheets in a corporate office, and everyone is Jewish and from Seattle, but today is not that day. So if a lot of this is wrong, just close your eyes and pretend otherwise please.

The locker room vibe was weird now, and Caleb was sort of annoyed at Hollander for coming out and changing everything. It was quiet and tense when they were dressing for practice, basically the opposite of the loose, sort of gross guys-only vibe he had come to expect after nearly two decades of competitive sports. He’d only ever really been able to relax with his teams, when his parents weren’t around to disapprove of everything, and no one from the church was watching to make sure that his collar was buttoned all the way up and that he wasn’t looking lustfully at any girls.

But now it was like everyone was tiptoeing around Hollander, and Hollander was tiptoeing around them. Would it really have been so bad for him to keep it a secret until he retired? He hadn’t mentioned having a boyfriend, so why did they even need to know?

Things eased up a little when they got on the ice. Caleb was a professional, and their job was to be good at hockey and win the fucking Cup, and Caleb could put his head down and do that. He wasn’t interested in screwing up his gig and ending up back in North Dakota. Nate got into college in Minnesota, because he was smart, but without hockey, Caleb would certainly end up back in North Dakota, driving a forklift in a warehouse somewhere and cramming into an uncomfortable church pew between his parents on Sundays.

The skating coach had been on him about losing time on his right turns, and it so happened that the drill they were running today had Caleb peeling off to the right, over and over, and he could feel the drag as he pivoted. He tried a few things that only seemed to make it worse, and eventually he tore off his helmet and skated over to the boards to get some water and try to shake it off.

“Berkes,” Hollander said over his shoulder.

He startled a little, because he hadn’t heard him skate up behind him, then blushed and felt ridiculous. Would Hollander think he was, like, afraid of him? He took another gulp from his water bottle, and thought he might have seen Hollander’s eyes roll a little.

“You’re tipping in too far on the cross over, when you turn. Then you have to rebalance before you speed up. That’s why you’re slow coming out of it.”

Caleb blinked at him. Hollander had spoken to him maybe three times, and never more than a couple words.

“Oh—uh, ok.” He didn’t know why felt so flustered, except maybe that he’d had a poster of Hollander up in his room senior year, and maybe he still worshipped him a little, aside from the gayness. He also couldn’t shake the feeling that, even though Caleb obviously hadn’t said anything, Hollander still knew he wasn’t, like, entirely okay with the whole situation.

“Go again, and I’ll show you?” It was what Caleb had begun to think of as a Canadian question—not truly an option, only framed as such to seem polite.

He ran the drill again, and then one more time, and then on the third go Hollander nudged Caleb’s shoulder with his glove right as he leaned into the turn and Caleb went down like a sleeping cow.

Hollander stood over him. “See?”

Caleb glared up at him, and he wanted to be mad. He really did. But Hollander was looming over him with his polite, neutral expression, and Caleb would sound insane if he told anyone that he was certain, totally one hundred percent fucking certain, that there was a little bit of mischief dancing in the captain’s eyes.

He clamored up. “Right. Got it.”

Hollander slid back a few inches. “One more time, slow it down a little.”

Caleb thought back to the juniors coach who had recruited him after his first high school hockey game, and then spent the next year dragging him out to the rink twice a week at 5am so Caleb could clean up his technique. Caleb had learned to play hockey with his friends and cousins on the frozen pond. He was big and fast and had great reflexes, but the rest of that juniors team had been in elite hockey programs since they were seven or eight years old. They had expensive equipment and private skating coaches and Caleb was just a hulking country boy who was a natural, a term the coach delivered with equal parts reverence and condescension.

Hollander was from Ottawa. He probably played on the best juniors team and had all the best equipment, and went to hockey camps over the summer while Caleb was working on his uncle’s farm for fifty bucks a day. He’d probably never scoured Facebook marketplace for lightly used shoulder pads.

Damn, he was distracting himself thinking about this bullshit. Hollander didn’t give a fuck about the chip on Caleb’s shoulder—he would have had his own problems, anyway. Caleb had only ever played with one guy who wasn’t white before he got drafted. The guy was from Michigan and his parents were from Pakistan or something, and a few of the guys always called him Osama even though his name was Omar.

Caleb started again, slower, and he could feel it this time when his balance started to falter. Hollander just stood off to the side, nodding slowly as he set himself up again. This time he made sure to keep his hips low on and go a little shallower on the turn, and he felt it immediately, the way his momentum carried him all the way through and spit him out the other side of the turn nice and smooth.

“Good, yeah?” Hollander said. He was smiling a little now.

Caleb nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Hollander patted Caleb’s shoulder with his gloved hand and skated away.

*

Caleb liked the Friends & Family skate. Who wouldn’t? There was free pizza, and a lot of cute kids. This year, he brought his girlfriend, Emma, and he liked the soft way she looked at him while he played with the kids on the ice, shuffling around with a few of the more wobbly little ones clinging to his pants, directing the older group in a silly game. 

He liked meeting everyone’s people, getting a sense of their lives and personalities outside the locker room and off the ice. Comeau had introduced Caleb to his son, a sullen ten-year old whose mother Comeau referred to as my bitch ex wife, and he’d enjoyed a rousing game of ice tag with Hayden Pike’s terrifying twins, Ruby and Jade. A few of the WAGs made their way over and introduced themselves to Emma, and Caleb took the opportunity to drift toward the drinks table and grab himself a Sprite.

“Berkes,” Hollander said at his shoulder. He started, again, and dropped his soda can on the table.

“Jesus, Cap. You gotta stop sneaking up on me.” Caleb’s mom would be upset about that Jesus. He hadn’t told her about all the weird religious curse words they had in Quebec.

Hollander muttered, “sorry,” and peered at the assortment of cans on the table. “Do they have ginger ale?”

Caleb spotted a lonely can in the corner and handed it to Hollander. “Here you go.”

“Thanks,”

“Hi, babe,” Emma said, having made her way back over from the WAG huddle.

“Hi,” Caleb said. “Cap, this is Emma, my girlfriend. Emma, this is Shane Hollander.”

She held out her hand and giggled. “Caleb, I’m Canadian. I know who Shane Hollander is.”

Hollander shook it, smiling. “Nice to meet you.”

“My brother is going to lose his mind when I tell him I met you.”

Hollander’s cheeks turned a little pink. “That’s, uh, nice. Metros fans are the best.”

“Who did you bring today?” Emma asked.

Hollander froze in place, and his blush deepened. Caleb could feel the panic emanating from his skin. “Oh, just my parents.”

Emma smiled. “That’s nice.”

“It was nice to meet you,” he said, still sounding tense. “I can sign something for your brother before you go, if you want.”

“Oh thanks! That’s so…nice…” Emma trailed off as Hollander skittered away.

“Babe,” Caleb hissed, “why did you ask him that?”

She thought Caleb was making too big a deal out of the gay thing. I get that it’s a surprise, but it doesn’t really affect you at all, she had said.

Emma looked up at him, exasperated. “Right, and? What if he has a boyfriend or something? Maybe that’s why he wanted to tell everyone.”

Caleb thought about this for a second. He’d liked introducing Emma around, showing off her pretty face and sweet personality. And he liked meeting everyone else’s partners, too, and the way it was usually so obvious why they were together. But if Hollander did have a boyfriend, would he feel the same way? He probably wouldn’t be comfortable based on how things were going in the locker room. If he had come out so that he could bring his boyfriend around, it hadn’t really worked.

That must suck a little.

“One of my brother’s roommates is gay. I wonder if he’s single? He’s super cute.”

“Emma, I’m sure we don’t need to set him up. He’s Shane Hollander.”

“Sure, but you didn’t think he looked a little sad?”

Caleb looked across the rink to where Hollander was talking to Jackie Pike. He was holding the Pikes’ youngest, a chubby-cheeked little girl named Amber, and he looked completely at ease. If he was honest with himself, it was sort of hard to think of Hollander as a human being. Not just because he was such a phenomenal player, though there were times when Caleb would watch from the bench while Hollander did something truly preposterous on the ice and wonder if he was an alien from some far away hockey planet, but also because he was so self-contained. He never yelled, or even laughed very loud, and even assholes like Ilya Rozanov didn’t seem to get under his skin.

Just last week, Caleb was sure he’d heard Dallas Kent call Hollander a fag during a face off, and Hollander hadn’t heven blinked, though he had shoved right by Kent and scored about eight seconds after he got the puck.

But now Caleb was wondering if Hollander was cool and calm like that naturally, or if he had to be like that? Because fag or some variation thereof was more or less the worst insult in a hockey locker room, and at some point Hollander must have realized his teammates and friends were…talking about him?

Caleb’s mom would say that Hollander could choose not to live a life of sin. But Emma had seemed a little horrified when they’d been talking about it and Caleb had suggested that Hollander could just, like, ignore it. He wants who he wants! You won’t even date women who are taller than 5’6”. He probably shouldn’t have told her that in the first place. It wasn’t like it was a rule; truthfully, Caleb had never had enough women interested in him to be all that picky.

Toward the end of the party, the group gathered to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of the kids, who grinned as Marguerite Drapeau produced a blue and red cupcake with a “7” candle in it. Hollander said a few goodbyes when the song was over, obviously getting ready to leave, when Comeau shouldered his way into the group. “Hey Cap. Bring anyone special today?”

It was the same question that Emma asked, but for some reason, it was clear that Comeau’s question was mean. Hollander’s mom glared from her spot a few feet away, and he noticed Boizeau inch in a little closer to Hollander. 

Caleb didn’t know why Gil had to be like this. Sure, Caleb had been thrown off by Hollander being gay, and he wondered sometimes whether a gay guy was really the right person to lead a team in a violent sport like hockey. But the cat was out of the bag, it’s not like if they were mean enough, Hollander was going to say you’re right, this was a bad idea, I’m not gay after all. It was starting to feel like Comeau was just enjoying the opportunity to be a prick.

“Nope,” Hollander said. “Just my parents.” He didn’t make a move to introduce them.

“Shame,” Comeau said, smiling like a shark. He had something orange stuck between his two front teeth, and a five o’clock shadow, and he looked particularly slobbish next to Hollander, who trained like a maniac and was always clean-shaven (though maybe this wasn’t a grooming choice; Hollander’s playoff beard had been a pretty sad affair, not that it had stopped them from winning the Cup last season). It occurred to Caleb that Comeau reminded him a little of some of the guys he’d gone to school with in North Dakota, the ones who had never figured out anything to do other than hang around the high school football practice, or drink at the strip club down I-94. 

“Right,” Hollander said. “See you tomorrow, then.”

Just wait, Emma said. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. There are lots of gay people out there, babe.

Sure, but not in hockey. Or so he’d thought. Caleb still thought it was kind of a big deal; it was weird in the locker room, and weird to think about gay guys playing hockey. But as Hollander walked away, he found himself thinking that if he was asked to pick between a team of guys like Hollander and a team of guys like Comeau, he’d probably end up picking the former.

Chapter 3: turnaround is fair play

Caleb was watching the Great British Bakeoff with Emma when his phone started to buzz like crazy on his nightstand. He silenced it, because it was the end of the episode and Noel was just about to tell some poor English granny that she was out, but he could see the notifications blooming on the screen out of the corner of his eye. Once the credits rolled, he picked up his phone and saw that Comeau’s group chat was going off with some new outrage. The messages were coming in so fast he couldn’t even keep track of who was sending them.

WHAT THE FUCK?

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS SAYING

THAT FAG CAN’T BE TRUSTED

HE’S A FUCKING TRAITOR

Baffled, Caleb scrolled up until he saw the link at the top of today’s messages. He clicked it and was confused to find Hayden Pike talking at the camera, wishing some guy named Brad a happy birthday.

Right before the video ended, he spotted something odd in the background, an image reflected in the glass behind Pike. He started the video from the top, and realized what he was looking at: Shane Hollander going to town on some guy.

He slammed the phone down on the blankets. He had never seen two men kiss outside of a quick peck on the lips in a PSA about Pride month. The sight of it made him wildly uncomfortable, like his parents’ pastor was going to burst down the door and damn him to hell for watching two guys make out, and also probably for being in bed naked with a woman who wasn’t his wife.

“It’s so gross that they send porn on that group chat,” Emma mumbled, scrolling on her own phone.

Caleb agreed with that, in general. He opened his mouth to tell her what was in the video, but she spoke again before he could say anything.

“Oh, holy shit,” she whispered. “Is that Shane Hollander?”

“You’re seeing it too? That’s the video Comeau sent.”

She looked over at him, her expression careful in a way Caleb was coming to realize meant she was tiptoeing carefully around a topic she thought would upset his country boy sensibilities. When they met, Emma had told him I’m from a town outside Toronto, only to confess later that the town was a pretty wealthy suburb that was a 20 minute train ride away from the center of the city. She had always asked about his childhood with sincere interest, and never talked down to him. But there were things that obviously surprised her, like the fact that he hadn’t tried Indian food until they met, or that his mother was only 45.

“He’s not like, out out, right? He just told the team?” she asked.

“Yeah he said he wasn’t going public yet,” Caleb murmured. He was fidgeting with his phone in his palm, debating whether to watch the video again.

“Oh man, poor guy. He must be freaking out,” Emma said. “Wait, these replies are saying the other guy is a hockey player, too?”

Oh shit. Caleb scrolled through the screaming group chat again, his eyes settling on the word “traitor.” He steeled himself, and opened the link to twitter again.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he whispered as he watched.

Emma giggled next to him. “Must be a big deal if you’re taking the Lord’s name in vain. Who is it?”

Caleb started the video again. Because it couldn’t be, but it obviously was.

“It’s Ilya Rozanov.”

“Wait, I know that guy. Isn’t he like a big deal?”

Caleb laughed, sort of frantically. “Yeah, he’s like, the biggest deal. Well, tied for biggest deal.”

“Tied for biggest deal with Shane Hollander?” Emma asked. Caleb nodded and she gasped. “And they’re boyfriends? That’s amazing!”

Rozanov. Goddamn. Caleb was going to have to reevaluate this whole can gay guys be tough enough for hockey question. Hollander didn’t fight that much, as far as hockey players go, but Rozanov was a beast. Caleb had watched him spit a bloody tooth directly into Comeau’s face last year after they fought on the ice. Rozanov had nearly gotten him in the eye.

“But they hate each other…” Caleb mused as the video started again. Shane had one of his hands in Rozanov’s hair, his fist closed around a hunk of the light brown curls.

Emma snorted. “Doesn’t seem like it. This is like a movie kiss.”

“Maybe it’s a prank?” Caleb said, mostly to himself, but he already knew that was unlikely. He’d seen guys joking around about being gay—though in hindsight, maybe that was pretty gay, too? Fuck, he didn’t know anything anymore—and it never looked like this.

These two were—they had to be—I mean, holy shit, they were obviously in love or something. He knew he should probably be grossed out, or outraged, or whatever, but the longer he watched them kiss the less weird it seemed, somehow. He wasn’t wondering whether they were going to hell, or whether Hollander would turn him gay, or whether gay guys could check hard enough on the ice. He was mostly wondering if he needed to step up his kissing game. Emma was watching too, she would have expectations.

He could hear Comeau sneering at Shane again. Hey Cap. Bring anyone special today? 

Caleb looked at the video one last time, and thought about Comeau suggesting, unknowingly, that Shane Hollander should have brought his secret boyfriend, Ilya fucking Rozanov, to the Metros Friends & Family skate. He started to laugh, and he couldn’t stop.

*

“We don’t need Hollander,” Comeau spat. The room murmured in response, some in agreement but others obviously skeptical. “He wants to go play with his boyfriend in fucking Ottawa, then let him! Let him fag it up with Barret and whatever other degenerates they have over there. We’re the fucking Metros! We’re real men, and we’re going to blow right by those pansies, straight to the Cup!”

Caleb turned back toward his stall to finish dressing. He wasn’t so sure about the Cup, based on the preseason games. The rookies were a little rough—no Hollander to skate by and drop his wisdom during practice—and Boizeau and Pike barely spoke to anyone else, and nothing had really come together in training camp. He’d already overheard a few of the coaches muttering about ‘rebuilding’ in the tunnel, and was sort of hoping he’d end up getting traded for a draft pick or something. Emma had left for grad school in Boston the month before; maybe the Bears needed some help on offense, or even the Admirals.

His parents would flip out if he moved to New York. Not that it mattered; he hadn’t spoken to them since he took Emma home to North Dakota in June. His mother had been awful to Emma, needling her about whether grad school was “a good use of her time,” and suggesting that she didn’t know how to cook or do laundry. Emma had finally snapped and said something snarky, and his mother had retreated silently into her bedroom and then Caleb and his father had ended up in a big screaming fight about how he wasn’t the young man his father had raised him to be, and they were right about hockey and the city and the money, and Caleb had lost his way because he didn’t go to church anymore. 

This was also how he’d found out that Nate, who had just finished his freshman year of college, hadn’t spoken to his parents in six months, and wasn’t coming home at all that summer. He and Nate texted sometimes, but they weren’t all that close. Nate had been a quiet kid who spent most of his time reading, and he had no interest in hockey, which is most of what Caleb had to talk about. But he still felt bad that his brother hadn’t told him about whatever had caused the rift.

Caleb had been mortified by the whole thing, and even more mortified by the way Emma had snuck concerned glances at him the whole way back to Montreal. When they were finally back in his apartment, Caleb had gotten in bed beside her and read through the schedule for training camp and preseason that the team had sent out the day before, because hockey stuff was great when it came to drowning out family stuff. He’d fallen asleep easily, exhausted after nearly week sleeping on his too-soft, too-small childhood bed, but he’d woken up at some time in the middle of the night fretting, and couldn’t go back to sleep until he grabbed his phone and sent his brother a text that said, just got back from mom and dad’s, do you want to talk.

The next morning he got a text back: its fine

He didn’t even know why he was thinking about all this bullshit now, except that Comeau’s weird obsession with Hollander left him with the same feeling he got when the pastor started to drone on about sin, because who were either of them to fucking judge? Comeau, who had married his second wife the summer before Caleb got called up from the AHL, spent the entire season cheating on her, and then got divorced for the second time after barely a year? Or the pastor, who never shut up about temptation and the devil but still managed to impregnate one of Caleb’s classmates during their junior year of high school. (It was okay, though, they said, because he married her as soon as she turned eighteen, just after the baby’s first birthday.)

They played like shit, and lost the game. The room was subdued after, most of the guys just trying to get out of there as fast as possible. Comeau’s stall was a few down from Caleb’s, and he swaggered in from the showers with a big smile on his face, as if he’d played in an entirely different hockey game than the rest of them, and dropped his towel with a flourish. He turned to Caleb, smiling, and said, “So nice not to worry about some cocksucker drooling over my junk anymore.”

Caleb couldn’t put up with this shit anymore.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he snapped. A few of the guys nearby froze in place. “We just embarrassed ourselves out there and you’re still hung up on Hollander being gay?”

The room was even quieter now, practically silent. Comeau’s face fell into a mean glare. “It’s just the first game, Berkes. We’ve got time, we’ll sort it out.”

Caleb scoffed. “We had it sorted out! We had the best player in the fucking league!”

Comeau took a few small steps toward Caleb. “We don’t need that fucking fag.”

“Obviously we fucking do! But instead we chased him off to Ottawa, and now he and fucking Rozanov are going to wipe the floor with us and the rest of the fucking conference.”

Caleb looked up and caught a glimpse of Boizeau over Comeau’s shoulder. He was grinning

Now Comeau was really getting in his face. “I can’t think of any reason you’d miss Hollander so much, unless you’re a homo, too. Is that it, Berkes, do you miss your fucking boyfriend? Did you let him and Rozanov double team you?”

“Jesus Christ, Gil, we’re not thirteen anymore! Who fucking cares what Hollander is doing with his dick? Who fucking cares what anyone is doing with his dick! You look like such an idiot, trying to convince everyone that Hollander isn’t the best player in the fucking league just because you found out he’s gay. You’ve got three rings, thanks to him. Just, like, mind your own fucking business. No one is asking you to be gay, or even to wear the goddamn pride tape. All you had to do was shut your ugly fucking mouth and leave him alone.”

“Tabernak, Berkes. Get him!” Boizeau shouted from across the room.

Caleb was suddenly very aware that the entire team was staring at him. Comeau’s mouth was hanging open, and everyone was so still that it felt like they’d all been suspended in time. Caleb yanked a clean t-shirt over his head, shoved his pads haphazardly in his stall, and started toward the door.

He’d left a wet towel and his sweaty compression shirt on the floor. He felt a little bad about leaving a mess for the facilities people, but he could make it up to them later. When he finally climbed into his truck, his heart was racing a mile a minute. His phone had been buzzing the whole way to the parking lot, but he hadn’t dared to look at it. He pulled it out slowly, dreading what he might see in his message app.

The team group chat had 25 new messages. The first was from Hayden Pike.

Hayden Pike: Just want to make sure everyone knows that Berkes is right

Hayden Pike: I should have laid out every guy that was an asshole to Shane 

Hayden Pike: not just because he is my friend or a generational talent, but because he is a good man and he was our captain and he doesn’t deserve to get shit from of a bunch of toothless, smelly losers because he happens to be gay

Hayden Pike: I’m going to text him right now to say sorry again

A series of replies and memes followed, some of them flippant, some of them in earnest, and none of them critical at all. Caleb removed himself from Comeau’s other chat, which had remained silent.

He needed another minute to calm down, so he texted Emma.

Yelled at Comeau in the locker room, kinda worried I’m going to hear from Theriault later

He closed his eyes and took a couple deep breaths while he waited for his phone to ping.

Emma: fuck that guy. You’ll be fine.

Man, he loved her.

He took another shower when he got home, not really because he needed it but because he liked the smell of his own soap better, and needed to put lotion on since his skin got really dry after games and he’d always felt self-conscious slathering it on in front of the other guys.

Huh. He’d think about why that was tomorrow, he was too tired to sort it all out tonight.

It was nearly two AM by the time he felt tired enough to sleep. Coach hadn’t called, though that didn’t mean Caleb wouldn’t get his comeuppance tomorrow. Just as he reached to turn the light off, his phone buzzed again. It was a message from his brother.

Nate: Is this real?

Caleb clicked the link, which opened on Twitter. It was a shaky video taken in the Metros locker room. The camera was pointed at Caleb and Comeau from a weird angle, like someone was holding it at their hip and trying to be subtle. The sound wasn’t great, but you could hear Caleb screaming in Comeau’s face: Who fucking cares what anyone is doing with his dick?

He heard a few muted chuckles on the video; he’d been too riled up to notice the guys laughing in the room.

Fuck, now Theriault was going to be furious. He’d been apoplectic when the FanMail video had come out, red-faced and screaming in Quebecois, and he hadn’t been much happier about all the negative press the Metros had gotten after Hollander was traded.

But hey, Caleb had been itching for a trade anyway, right? Maybe it was for the best. Hey, maybe Ottawa would take him, if he was going to be famous for defending the gay hockey players.

Caleb: Yeah that’s me. Comeau is an asshole.

Nate: He was a dick to that guy Hollander?

Caleb was about to type yeah, but his conscience got the better of him.

Caleb: A lot of the team was, kinda. It was dumb.

Nate: were you a dick to him?

Caleb paused. He couldn’t remember the last time Nate talked to him for this long. He’d always made himself scarce when Caleb’s teammates were around and rolled his eyes whenever conversation turned to hockey.

Caleb: ngl i was kinda weirded out at first. I didn’t say anything to him but maybe he picked up on it? Like I said, it was dumb. I regret it, and I meant what I said to Comeau tonight. He wasn’t hurting anyone and now his new team is going to destroy us.

Nate: lol so you all got what you deserved

Caleb: 100%

Caleb watched the three dots come and go a few times, then they stopped altogether. He knew there was something hiding in those three dots, so he sent another message.

Caleb: What did you fight with mom and dad about? They wouldn’t tell me.

The dots did their thing again. Once, twice. Then the screen lit up with an incoming call.

Caleb swiped to answer and said, “Nate?”

“I’m gay.”

“Holy shit,” Caleb said, before he could think of something better.

Nate laughed a mean sort of laugh on the other end of the line. “Come on, you’re really surprised?”

“Well…yeah?” Caleb said.

“Dad wasn’t. He said I’d always been abnormal.”

Caleb snorted. “Yeah, well. Did you tell him it’s abnormal to polish off two six packs on a Sunday afternoon?”

Nate chuckled a little, then he paused. “Are you mad?”

“What? No!”

“Come on, Caleb. I know you left a while ago but I remember what you and your friends were like. Gay this, faggy that. That guy definitely takes it up the ass.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, cringing at the memories. “That was just…stuff we said, though. It didn’t mean anything.”

Caleb checked himself: was that true? He thought yeah, mostly. He just said the stuff his friends said, made the same kind of jokes so everyone would laugh. Maybe if someone had asked him Do you think gay people are bad? He would have given some answer about the Bible saying it was wrong. But even then, he’d been kinda meh on the Bible stuff by the time he was fifteen or sixteen. It had begun to seem like people were mostly picking and choosing when it came to the rules, which he thought sort of undermined the whole deal.

“Are you sure?” Nate said, like he was reading his mind.

“Yeah. I mean, I was dumb. All I ever thought about was playing hockey and getting the fuck out of North Dakota. If I could go back and not say that stuff, I would.”

“Okay,” Nate said softly.

Caleb glanced at the clock. His sleep schedule was going to be fucked, but that didn’t seem very important at the moment.

“So…do you have a boyfriend?”

Nate sighed. “I did. That’s why I told Mom and Dad. But he broke up with me after exams, said he couldn’t handle the weird family stuff. He’s already dating some guy from his internship in New York.”

“That’s bullshit,” Caleb said, thinking about Emma and her careful concern after his blow up with his dad. He’d gotten pretty lucky.

“Are you going to go beat him up for me?” Nate joked.

“What else are scary hockey brothers for?”

There was another long pause.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” Nate said.

A lump started to form in Caleb’s throat. Did he seem like a hateful person? Ignorant, yeah—he’d cop to that. Closed-minded, okay. But had he been so much of an asshole that his own brother felt he had to hide from him?

“Like, ever?” Caleb asked.

“I don’t know, Caleb. You were always just in the middle of that bullshit, and now you’re in the fucking NHL. You guys aren’t exactly famous for your allyship. Or at least, you weren’t before.”

“Yeah, I know. I guess I’d never really thought it through before. Then when Hollander told us he was gay it was like, oh, well, he’s still just a guy. You know?”

“Isn’t Hollander bi? I thought he dated that movie star.”

“He said he was gay. What do they call that—a beard?”

“Aw, look at you with your terminology,” Nate teased.

Caleb laughed. “I’m glad you told me, bro.”

“Well, you’re a hero now. My friends are losing their shit about your video.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. One of them wants to make the motto of the school’s LGBTQ alliance to who fucking cares what anyone is doing with his dick.”

“Not shut your ugly fucking mouth and leave us alone?”

Nate laughed again. The lump in Caleb’s throat was getting worse.

He swallowed past it and spoke again. “Do you want tickets for the next time we play in Minneapolis?”

“Caleb, I say this with love: no I do not.”

He laughed. “Maybe we can hang out though, when I’m there. Or you could come visit sometime, when you have a break.”

“Sure, yeah. How is your girlfriend?”

“She’s good. She’s in Boston now for school but we’re going to try long distance.”

“Maybe you’ll get traded there.”

“That’s the dream.”

“I should let you go,” Nate said. “It’s late there.”

Calev smiled to himself. I should let you go—Midwestern for I am ready to end this conversation. “Yeah, I should try to sleep. But Nate…”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. Like, really sorry.”

“Thanks for saying that, Caleb.”

“Let me know about your next break, okay?”

“I will, I promise.”

They said goodnight and hung up, but Caleb didn’t go to sleep for a long while after.

Chapter 4

Chapter Notes

okay i was wrong about the chapter count.

It was a weird season in a lot of ways. Theriault had been furious about the video, at first, but the initial wave of bad press—mostly hockey-specific, Metros falling apart in the room and on the ice kind of stuff—had given way to think pieces about young players pushing back against old hockey culture. Then, in a remarkable turn of luck for the Metros PR team and for Caleb personally, Comeau fell hard in a scuffle with one of the Admirals in their first regular season game, tore his labrum, and went on LTR. In their first game of the season against Ottawa, Shane Hollander skated up to him during warm ups and shook his hand, while Ilya Rozanov glared at him from across the ice.

Not long after the video of him screaming at Comeau got out, his dad had called and tried another approach: I’m sorry we fought, we’re worried for your soul, that place isn’t good for you, maybe it would help if you found a nice church. It hadn’t worked, and they’d fought again, this time about Nate. He hadn’t spoken to his father since, though his mother called on his birthday and on Christmas, talking softly like she didn’t want anyone to hear. She asked him if Nate was okay, and it gave him a little bit of hope.

He’d spent Christmas with Emily’s family in Toronto, only after Nate had assured him a dozen times that he was perfectly happy going home with one of his friends who was from Wisconsin. In January, the Metros played in St Paul and Nate reluctantly asked Caleb for tickets because he’d started dating a hockey fan.

Now the trade deadline was only a week away. Caleb told his agent he was looking for a change, but he figured it was a long shot, since the Metros weren’t making a push for the playoffs or anything. The team had been better off without Comeau; it wasn’t that there were no assholes left, but with their mouthpiece out of commission, it was easier to ignore them.

Unfortunately, Comeau was coming back, mostly to test out the repair on his shoulder. Caleb was dreading it, not because he felt awkward about yelling at him, but because he would have to look at Comeau in the locker room almost every day, and remember that a lot of people, his own brother included, had looked at Caleb and thought, yeah he seems like a Gilbert Comeau kind of guy.

It had haunted him for months now. He knew he wasn’t worldly, or cultured. He knew he had some ideas about the world and how people should be that others might consider ‘old fashioned,’ like the way he was always scandalized when one of his teammates offered him cocaine at a party or a club, or the itching, puritanical urge he had to throw his coat over the girls whenever his teammates dragged him to a strip club. But he’d always thought he was a good person, deep down. He wanted to believe that the sin he had committed was one of obliviousness, rather than malice.

He still fought the urge to roll his eyes at some of the stuff Emma told him about grad school, but he tried to listen to her while she explained, and even ended up listening to an audiobook about the private prison industry that had really shaken him up. He asked Nate to call him out if he said anything awful by accident, and signed his name to a petition about inclusivity in hockey that Scott Hunter was passing around.

Nate had given him a little jar of pride pins for Christmas; the card said to share with your hockey friends, don’t worry just kidding. He took one—the biggest one—and pinned it to the strap of his gear back. When Comeau ambled in for his first practice back with the team, he paused and spent a long minute staring at the bag where Caleb had dropped it on the bench in front of his stall. Caleb waited to see if Comeau would catch his eye and say something nasty, but Comeau dropped his gaze to the ground instead, and brushed by him with nothing more than a grunt.

A week later, there was a rainbow keychain hanging from the zipper of Pike’s travel bag, and a pin on the lapel of Boizeau’s suit jacket. It was a small victory, and more than enough for now.

*

His mother called early in the morning after Easter Sunday. He was only awake because the team was flying down to North Carolina at ten, and he wanted to squeeze in a quick workout before he left for the airport. He checked the clock: 6:15.

“Is everything okay?” he asked, before he even said hi.

“Yes, everything’s fine. Well, no. No I guess it’s not.”

“Mom, what’s wrong? Is dad okay?”

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Probably.”

Caleb pinched the bridge of his nose. “What happened?”

“We had an argument last night. I…left. I slept at Abigail’s.”

Abigail was his mother’s closest friend. She had left the church when the news about the pastor and his now-wife had come out, and never looked back. His father had attempted to order his mother to end the friendship, but she had refused. Caleb had returned from practice in the middle of their argument, and remembered with perfect clarity the way his father had skittered to the other side of the room, fists clenched and reeking of beer. Caleb had three or four inches on him by then, and at least forty pounds. He stood quietly next to his mother until his father went up to bed.

“Did he hit you?” Caleb asked through clenched teeth. It wasn’t a regular thing, but it wasn’t like it never happened.

“No, not this time.”

“What did you argue about?”

She sighed. “He was angry because I walked out of the Easter service.”

“What?” Caleb sat down on the edge of his bed.

“The pastor’s sermon was about the sin of…of homosexuality.” She said the word quietly, like someone would scold her for it. “And how young people were being corrupted all over, even in small towns like ours.”

At first, Caleb didn’t understand. The pastor preached about that shit all the time.

“It was about us. About you, I mean. He was looking at your father and I the whole time. And I just…with your brother. I couldn’t listen to it.”

What the fuck? The pastor was lucky Caleb wasn’t there; he would have laid him out in front of the whole flock without thinking twice.

She continued, “But then I got home and I was thinking that Pastor Dean was sort of right?”

“What? No, what are you talking about?” He felt kind of bad about his snappish tone, but he was going to be really pissed off if she’d called just to lecture him again about his fall from grace.

“Well, he was saying how they get you to accept sin in others by calling it tolerance, and then it's like a plague in the community. But that’s what happened, isn’t it? Nate, and then you, and—you’re my sons. I love you. I thought you were good men before all this and I still think that you are, even though—” She cut herself off, and Caleb heard a frustrated little huff over the line. “So now I think to myself, how could that be? Someone is wrong about something, and I don’t—I don’t think it’s me.”

Caleb couldn’t recall one time when his mother had questioned a single thing she’d learned in church. When Nate or Caleb would ask the sort of questions kids asked about God— how does He know everything, why is there the devil if God created everything, why doesn’t God feed the starving children—she would answer with a smile and assurance that we can’t always understand His ways. She was a good Christian woman, who showed up with a casserole or some cookies when asked, and didn’t like to make a fuss.

“I don’t think it’s you either, Mom,” he said.

“Do you think—do you think Nate will forgive me?”

“I guess…I guess it depends,” he said tentatively.

There was a long pause. “This is the only place I’ve ever lived,” she said eventually.

Caleb’s breath caught in his throat. He had assumed she was hinting at a half-measure of acceptance: sneaking a few phone calls, gritting her teeth at church, apologizing for their father every other sentence. This was something bigger: not a few ripples, but a tsunami sucking the water from the beach.

“I make good money, you know,” he said, trying to keep his voice light. “You could live wherever you want.”

“Let me think about it,” she said. “Will you tell Nate that I’m thinking about it?”

“Yeah, of course. Are you going to stay at Abigail’s for a while?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” There was another long silence. “I know I’m just a hockey player, but I think you did the right thing walking out.”

“Thanks, honey.”

They exchanged I love yous—not a regular occurrence among the Berkes—and hung up. Caleb scratched his gym plans and immediately called Emma, who answered groggily and forgave him for calling so early, then said holy shit when he told her about his mom’s glimmer of rebellion.

After thirty minutes of strategizing, Emma had to get up and get ready for class. They hung up and Caleb immediately called his agent and left a voicemail saying he wanted to add Minneapolis to his list of preferred teams.

*

The trade deadline came and went, and Comeau’s shoulder appeared to be completely fucked. Caleb tried not to enjoy the way Comeau winced whenever he got checked, but failed, and then felt guilty enough about it to mutter a little prayer under his breath asking the Lord for forgiveness.

Early in April, the day after Montreal lost the game that officially put them out of playoff contention, Caleb got an email from the Game Changers hockey camps, inviting him to coach that summer. He’d heard about the camps, of course, and had filed them away as camps for gay hockey kids, but reading through the PDF brochure, he learned that the camps’ goal of inclusivity was much broader. They provided all the equipment, so no kids would be singled out for not having shiny new stuff, and offered scholarships for families that couldn’t pay the full fees.

He responded yes immediately.

After he completed his annual post-season ritual of collapsing into a heap on the sofa and watching Star Wars movies for three days straight, Caleb went to Boston to visit Emma. She had a few final papers due, and was grading exams for the two undergraduate classes that she taught, so she was heads down in her dedicated desk at the library for most of the day. He met her there one day, and she found him staring up at the columned facade of the library like the embarrassing fucking rube that he was, wondering what the hell Emma saw in a lug like himself. Inside, she walked him through a couple of high-ceilinged rooms which he found confusing, because there was not a single book in sight. But then she scanned her ID at a little door in the corner and they entered what she called the stacks.

The library in Caleb’s hometown was a squat, one-story brick building that was about half children’s books and half ancient copies of Tom Clancy novels. This place went on forever, just row after row of books, and Emma said this was one of ten stories in the stacks. It was hard to stand in there and not think about all the things he had yet to learn.

He stayed until her last paper was turned in, and agreed reluctantly to have drinks with her friends from her cohort—that’s what she called them, because apparently they were too old to be a class. He tried to beg off with a number of weak excuses, until Emma called him out for being scared and he had to admit that he assumed they would all hate him and think he was an idiot.

“You know, it kind of sucks that you think I would have terrible friends. Do you think I never talk about you? Or that I do, and they’re mean, and I just let it go?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s one thing to say my boyfriend is a pro athlete and another for them to, like, talk to me. I don’t know any of this shit,” he said, waving his arm in the direction of her bookcase. “I barely even finished high school.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Don’t be a pussy, Caleb. Let’s go.”

Man, he loved her.

And her friends were fine. Maybe a little…baffling. Someone talked for ages about some guy named Hegel, until someone who might have been his boyfriend tapped him on the forearm and said “OK, Kai, that’s enough.” and they all laughed. There was a person named Taylor, who Emma said used they/them pronouns; Caleb had no idea what that meant, but had a spirited debate with…them about whether the Star Wars prequel movies were as bad as everyone thought. Emma’s friend Isabel asked him a series of questions about hockey, and managed to seem sincerely interested when Caleb went into a lot of detail about how line changes worked.

“Are you one of those enforcer guys?” someone asked, after a few drinks.

Caleb clenched his teeth. “No, uh, I’m on offense.”

“So you don’t fight?” someone else asked.

Caleb blushed. Luckily, it was dark at the bar. “Well, yeah. I mean…everyone does. It’s part of the game.”

“So you, like, punch guys in the face?”

“Every once in a while,” he mumbled, hoping that would end the conversation.

“That’s vicious, man,” the first guy said, grinning in a way that made Caleb profoundly uncomfortable.

“Oh my God, Aaron,” Emma snapped. “Stop fetishizing him. You’re being weird.”

Caleb blushed again, this time because of the word fetishizing. 

“Sorry, bro,” Aaron said, reaching up to pat Caleb on the shoulder. Caleb tried not to shy away from the touch, even though the way Aaron said bro had sounded sort of oily and mean. “We just don’t meet a lot of guys like you around here.”

The girl standing next to him, Caleb thought her name might be Hannah, rolled her eyes. “Come on, Aaron. Your roommate is from Minnesota.”

“Yeah, but he’s not like—” Aaron made a gesture that Caleb thought was supposed to be some sort of reference to his size. “You know, like a jock.”

Caleb let out a surprised little laugh. He had no problem with being a jock, but Aaron was still pissing him off. “It’s not like I’m on the high school football team.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“At the pro level, kind of a different thing. Hockey’s a really difficult game to play well, and it’s not just about being big and strong. The guys I play with all take their job really seriously, it’s a lot of hard work and there really is no such thing as a vacation, at least not until you retire.”

“What do you mean?” Hannah asked, though her question sounded sincere. “Isn’t it the off season now?”

“Yeah, but the conditioning and the diet stuff never stops. And a lot of guys spend the offseason rehabbing injuries or doing skills training.”

Emma beamed next to him. “He’s coaching at those camps that Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov set up this summer.”

“It’s so great, what they’re doing,” Isabel said.

Aaron rolled his eyes. “Sure, but I don’t know how much progress they’re really going to be able to make.” He looked over at Caleb like Caleb was personally responsible for every slur that got thrown around in a locker room. “Like the culture is self-perpetuating, you know?”

Emma glared at him. “No, I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“Well it’s like, everyone knows what it's like at a certain level in sports. So the guys that stick with it are going to be people that are okay with that, right? They don’t have any incentive to change.”

Caleb didn’t always understand the conversation with this group of Emma’s friends. There had been plenty of times that night when they’d been talking about books or history or whatever and Caleb had no clue what was going on, but just because he hadn’t studied all this stuff didn’t mean he was stupid. He knew an insult when he heard one.

“I think that’s overly simplistic,” he said. All the eyes in the group landed on him at once, and for a moment he was frozen, and a little terrified. But Emma squeezed his hand, and he felt better.

“I mean, the town I grew up in has like, 800 people. No one has very much money. Everyone I went to school with talked about getting out, but not very many of us did. When my juniors coach found me, that’s what he said—we’ll get you out of there. The locker room stuff was just…was what it was, right? I played with a lot of guys who were assholes but I wasn’t about to make a thing about it. I mean, you have talent, and you work so hard—like, so hard. I was playing or practicing maybe thirty hours a week by the time I was fifteen—and you have a kid with a shot to do something crazy, that like no one gets to do, and not a lot of those guys are going to put everything on the line to speak up.”

All the eyes were still on him, but he had momentum now. He could not remember the last time he’d said this many sentences in a row.

“And you’re assuming that everyone who sticks with it is a part of the problem, but I’m not sure you understand the level of obsession we’re talking about. These are people who play whole hockey games with broken ribs and sprained ankles. Someone like Scott Hunter or Shane Hollander, they are not going to just stop and go do something else because their feelings get hurt. And they shouldn’t have to, right? You can’t just give up on the whole thing, and write everyone off as a monster. I mean it’s not going to be easy, obviously. But playing professional hockey isn’t easy, either, and we all figured that out. So.”

He knew that change was possible, because he had changed, hadn’t he? He didn’t like to think back to some of the bullshit he participated in before, when his idea of a gay person was closer to a mythical bogeyman than any living human. Sometimes you just need the real thing standing in front of you—in this case, Shane fucking Hollander, best hockey player of his generation—to make you second guess yourself. If it weren’t for Hollander’s announcement, Caleb wouldn’t have ended up yelling at Comeau and going viral, and Nate would never have told him he was gay, and their mother never would have….done whatever she might be working up to doing.

Sure, there were guys out there like Comeau. But there were jerks literally everywhere, and sometimes decent people were jerks because they had a moment of weakness, or because someone was a jerk to them first. Writing a whole group off as a lost cause because some of them were assholes some of the time (or a few of them were assholes all of the time), didn’t seem all that much better to Caleb than the pastor announcing that this group or that was an abomination and damned to hell.

If Caleb had held on to one thing from all those years at church, it was that most people wanted to do the right thing, even if they made a lot of mistakes because of ignorance, or fear. Jesus was always talking about forgiveness, and grace, wasn’t he? Even though it seemed sort of hard for everyone to remember that.

Aaron’s eyes had slid away toward the floor; Caleb thought that he may even be a bit embarrassed.

“Preach,” Hannah said, nodding.

“Right?” Emma answered, squeezing his arm again.

Hannah leaned in toward Emma, but she was drunk enough that she didn’t bother lowering her voice when she said, “And he’s got those biceps.”

Emma, giggly and probably also a little drunk, answered back, “And his legs, girl. Jesus Christ.”

Chapter End Notes

Caleb has a propensity for speech-making, I guess.
I'm not specifying a university for Emma because I don't want to get sucked into all that. But the library I'm describing in this chapter is Widener, at Harvard. It's beautiful and immense and I needed something to embody Caleb's anxiety about his lack of education.

Chapter 5: the kids are alright

Chapter Notes

I don't know what's happening to me, this chapter is 4k+ words and it turns out I'm still not done. This whole thing was supposed to be three chapters and like 6k words, max. help me! free me from this prison!

I promise news about Caleb's future is forthcoming in chapter 6.

On the first day of camp, Caleb was nervous. Possibly more nervous than he’d been on his first day in the Metros locker room, sleepless and buzzing barely eight hours after getting the phone call from the GM calling him up.

He couldn’t account for it. He knew how to play hockey, and he knew how to deal with kids—he’d supplemented his paltry AHL income by teaching kids to skate at the local public hockey rink in Laval, and he had always enjoyed watching their faces light up when they finally started to feel it in their feet and ankles.

It was kind of the same way he’d felt his junior year of high school, when one of his teachers had signed him up for honors English without asking anyone, and he’d sat in the back of the class feeling like a moron, even though he’d always liked to read. He knew he’d been paid a compliment by the invitation, and also worried that everyone would look at him and sneer.

He wanted to do something good, but he wasn’t an activist. He was just a guy who wanted to play hockey, and happened to have a gay brother. A pin on his bag didn’t make him, like, a crusader. Maybe the adults had been fooled by his little social media situation, but surely the kids would know. They’d look at him and think, what is this guy doing here? He’s the enemy!

The other thing making him nervous was that the first day was a coaches’ orientation, starting with a welcome breakfast at Rozanov and Hollander’s actual fucking house in Ottawa. Caleb wished he could travel ten years back in time and tell his younger self that in a decade he would be clutching a plastic cup of orange juice while Shane Hollander’s mom rattled off a laundry list of issues with his line, all while they stood a few feet from the fireplace mantle displaying Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov’s wedding photo.

So it was kind of weird, at first. But there was a cute dog to play with, and Pike and Boizeau had come to say hi, and then he’d been cornered by a very sociable bearded man wearing an apple-shaped pride pin and coaxed into taking a few pictures and recording a short video for the foundation’s social media accounts.

After the breakfast, they’d gone to the rink where they’d been shown an introductory powerpoint about the style of instruction expected at the camps, and language and methods that were deemed unacceptable. They did a walkthrough of the facility, then broke up into their assigned groups to prepare. Caleb was paired with Wyatt Hayes, whom he’d never met before and who greeted him by saying I hear you have opinions about Star Wars. 

It turned out that Hayes was married to a doctor, which piqued Caleb’s curiosity. He’d been thinking maybe a little about whether Emma would agree to marry him one day (not one day soon, she had a lot of thoughts about the way hockey players tended to get married so young), but it was not very common for the WAGs to have careers of their own, even if they had college degrees. Maybe if he kept doing these camps, he would get to know Wyatt well enough that Emma and his wife could be, like, special employed WAG friends.

It was a good day, but he started to fret once he was back at his hotel. He kept thinking about the introductory presentation, and how serious they were about creating a welcoming environment for all the different kinds of kids that would be attending. What if Caleb fucked it up—said the wrong thing and made someone feel bad? He skimmed through his info packet again, his eyes landing on the last line of the first paragraph: above all, our goal is to ensure that every child attending camp is having fun on the ice.

He took a deep breath. Caleb could do that. He read through a few more of the guidelines, then took a shower and got in bed, Emma was on a girls trip with her older sisters, so he sent her a goodnight, have fun, love you text, and looked to see if there was a bad action move to watch on the hotel cable. 

HIs phone dinged, and he picked it up expecting to see a reply from Emma. Instead, he had a direct message on Instagram from an old friend of his, a guy he’d played with in juniors named Colton. After high school, Caleb had gone pro and Colton had gone to vocational school, and they’d kept in touch intermittently since, mostly exchanging hockey memes on Instagram.

Colton had forwarded him a photo from the Irina Foundation’s Instagram account, a group shot of a handful of the camp coaches at the breakfast that morning. Caleb was standing in a line with Troy Barrett, Zane Boodram, Scott Hunter, and Hollander and Rozanov. Barrett, Boodram, Hunter, and Caleb were smiling at the camera; Hollander and Rozanov were laughing with their heads together, caught in an in-joke, looking like they adored one another. The accompanying message just said holy shit.

Was this holy shit, why are you hanging out with all the MLH homos, or holy shit, you’re standing next to Shane Hollander?

He racked his brain trying to remember if Colton had been an asshole about that sort of thing. He had, kinda—but so had everyone. So had Caleb, probably. Maybe Colton had just been saying what he thought he was supposed to say, too.

Crazy right? Caleb answered, choosing to be optimistic. Hopefully Colton would respond with something that showed a little more of his hand.

So you’re in with this crew now?

Caleb stared at the message. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but it felt combative, and it got his hackles up a little.

I guess yeah. It’s my first year doing the camps but everyone’s been really cool, he answered. If he’d learned one thing from his mother, it was that a person could diffuse a lot of uncomfortable situations by being aggressively, obliviously nice.

Come on, it’s not weird? Look at them.

Caleb took a deep breath. It had been one thing to yell at Comeau, who was and had always been kind of an asshole. But Colton had been his friend.

They’re not hurting anyone.

He put his phone face down and prepared himself to receive no reply. There were no good movies, but he did find an old rerun of Law & Order, which would be fine. His eyelids were drooping by the time his phone dinged again.

I just don’t think that stuff belongs in hockey, the answer said.

Caleb chewed his lip and started typing.

I would have said the same thing a couple years ago, but it’s Shane Hollander you know? 

This time the message came back immediately.

It’s against nature and they’re rubbing our faces in it. I thought you got it bro

Caleb inhaled slowly.

Before you say anything else, Nate is gay.

He was wide awake again. The Law & Order ended with a big confrontation in a conference room, and another started with the discovery of a body and a corny one-line zinger by the older detective. Half an hour in, Caleb turned off the TV and the bedside lamp, and took a few minutes to arrange the pillow between his knees and behind his shoulder, so his back wouldn’t hurt when he got up.

Caleb didn’t have a ton of friends, and it didn’t feel great to cross one of the list. But he was pretty sure he was never going to hear from Colton again, and that he wasn’t going to mind.

*

He overslept by thirty minutes the next morning, which was a blessing in disguise, because he didn’t have time to be stressed out about the camp or about Colton in the flurry of getting ready and grabbing a few bites from the hotel breakfast. Thankfully there were bagels at the rink, too, because he was still starving when he arrived.

The kids started trickling in right away, and they were gathered for a group kick off in the stands near the entrance. Rozanov gave a little speech about how everyone was here to get better and have fun, and that all the coaches were available for all the kids if they had questions. Then they had the group coaches hold up signs with their group colors so the kids could find them.

He and Hayes had seven kids in their group. 

“Okay kids, today to start, we’re going to do some warm ups, then a little around the world. But first we want to get to know you a little. I’m Wyatt Hayes, I play goalie for the Ottawa Centaurs. A fun fact about me is that I didn’t start playing hockey until I was thirteen.”

Caleb looked at him. “Really?”

Wyatt grinned. “Yeah. I lived in Arizona before we moved to Vancouver for my dad’s job. My mom put me in hockey so I could make friends. Your turn.”

He cleared his throat. “I’m Caleb, I play left wing for the Montreal Metros. My fun fact is that I grew up in a town so small we only had one stoplight.”

The kids went around and said their names and facts. One of them answered in thickly accented English, and Caleb watched as Hayes asked patiently for him to repeat his name, to make sure they could all pronounce it correctly. 

Finally, it was time to get on the ice. Caleb held the door open, and one of them paused to look to look up at him before he skated through. “Are you related to Thor?”

Caleb chuckled. “Not to my knowledge, no.”

The kids were a little scattered at first, overexcited and showing off for one another, but they settled down soon enough and the group fell into a solid rhythm. The lunch break snuck up on them, and they ushered the kids off the ice where everyone left their skates and pads in a big unruly pile before filing out to the cafeteria area where a spread of sandwiches was waiting.

After he’d eaten—the kids had stared agape while he finished his first sandwich in just a few bites—he made his way to the bathroom. But he must have passed the door because he ended up rounding a corner and ending up in a dead end, where there was a little office. He was just about to turn around when he heard a sniffle.

“Hello?” he asked tentatively.

No answer. He waited, and heard another sniffle, and some shuffling. He poked his head inside the door and looked around, his eyes catching on a small, mostly navy blue ball curled up against the wall.

“Hey, are you okay?” he asked.

He couldn’t tell how old the kid might be, or even if they were a boy or a girl. But whoever it was nodded their head weakly and said yeah, which was obviously bullshit.

Caleb sank down into a squat a few feet away. “Can I help you at all?”

“No,” the voice came softly. “I’m okay.”

“Sorry but…you don’t really sound okay. If you don’t want to tell me, maybe I can get someone else for you?”

No answer.

“Listen, you gotta help me out. This is my first year as a coach and I can’t just leave a crying kid in a secret hallway.”

That earned a reluctant chuckle. Finally, the kid raised their head. He had long-ish brown hair, with sweaty bangs hanging in front of his eyes, and looked like he might be Asian. Caleb thought he recognized him from the oldest group, which was Hollander’s.

“I can go find Hollander?”

The kid made a strangled little sound in his throat. “No, no, please. I’m fine. I will be fine.”

Caleb got the impression he was mostly talking to himself.

“What’s your name?”

“Phillip.”

“I’m Caleb. You’re in the 13-14 group, right?”

“Yeah, even though you wouldn’t know it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m like, four and a half feet tall.”

“Is that short for thirteen?” Caleb genuinely didn’t know. Though now that he thought about it, he did remember being several inches taller than his mother at the start of seventh grade.

“You don’t have to pretend. The kids I play with in juniors never let me forget it. And my mom made a big deal about how I would feel better if I came here because it wouldn’t be the usual hockey kids and I’m still like six inches shorter than everyone in the group!”

Caleb paused to take it all in. He hadn’t been expecting to get the full story quite so easily, but at least Phillip wasn’t crying anymore.

“So what?”

“So what?” Phillip snorted. “You don’t get it, you’re a giant.”

“Yeah, but lots of hockey players aren’t giants. What about Troy Barrett?” Barrett was a little smaller than average, but he was so fast on the ice that he almost never got hit. He’d always reminded Caleb a little of one of those crafty, long-armed monkeys at the zoo, who flitted gracefully around the fake branches and looked out at you through the glass like they were plotting something.

“Let me explain: Barrett is short, but he’s a white guy. Hollander is Asian, but he’s only half, and he’s jacked and like the best player in the world. But I have to be short and Asian—full Asian, 100% Vietnamese! Like you can have one thing, you know? But not more.”

Caleb let out a long breath, trying to follow Phillip’s discrimination math. He wished he had his orientation packet with him for reference. It wasn’t like he had personal experience to go on here, judging by the number of coaches and scouts who had taken one look at him and said things like now that’s a hockey player! But he could do this; one thing at a time.

“Okay, I get what you’re saying. But lots of the coaches here have more than one thing. I mean, Barrett and Hollander are both gay, too. That’s not, like, a walk in the park for a hockey player.”

“So what? I could be gay, too. Triple whammy.”

“Are you?” Caleb asked, feeling a little bit panicked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Caleb couldn’t help but laugh a little, and the kid laughed, too.

“Do you like playing hockey?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, a lot? Like you want to do it every day?”

“Yeah.”

“And is anyone here giving you a hard time about being short, or Vietnamese?”

“No.”

Caleb knew there were probably right things to say here. The orientation packet had been very long, and full of information about the right words to use, and the importance of learning about other people’s lived experience, which is a phrase that Caleb was certain was redundant, but Emma had promised him was legitimate terminology for some reason.

But hockey was Caleb’s lived experience, and Phillip was going to play most of his hockey miles away from this camp and its well-meaning instructional packet.

“Okay, so here is what you’re going to do: you’re going to play hockey all week with the only hockey players in the world who won’t chirp you about your height. And at some point, you’re going to find Rozanov and tell him you need help with checking. Then you’re going to go home, and you’re going to smoke anyone who rags on you for being short or Asian with your new skills. And if you do that enough times, they’ll shut up. And not because they’re afraid of you, but because they want to win, and you will be the reason they are winning.”

Phillip leveled him with that stare again. “Aren’t you supposed to say something about playing for the love of it, and being myself, or something?”

Caleb shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. Would that have worked?”

“Coming from you? No way.”

Caleb groaned as he stood up and stretched his legs, then he reached down and helped Phillip to his feet.

“What are your things?” Phillip asked as they walked into the narrow cinderblock hall.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, what did you have going against you?”

“Oh,” Caleb said, feeling his cheeks heat a little. “Well, I don’t know if I have any? I guess I didn’t have any money growing up. Always had to scrounge for used equipment, beg off tournaments that were too expensive, that kind of thing.”

Phillip looked down at the floor. “Oh.”

“And I, uh, pissed some people off last year. By yelling at my teammate for being homophobic. Now I’m kind of hoping to get traded but I’m worried other teams won’t want me if they think I cause trouble.”

That was probably too much information for Phillip, whose eyes had grown wide as they arrived at the cafeteria. “That sucks. What would you do if you didn’t play hockey anymore?”

Oh man, Caleb hadn’t even thought about that. It’s not like Montreal had put him on waivers. He blinked away an image of him driving a forklift in some godforsaken warehouse somewhere.

“I don’t know. Probably this. Coaching. I like kids.”

“Are you going to tell Hollander I was crying?”

“Not unless you want me to.”

“No. No. Don’t.”

“Clear. Now you should eat, really. Back on the ice in twenty minutes, I think.”

“Fine.”

Caleb held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Phil.”

Phillip took it and nodded. “Caleb.”

Caleb grabbed himself another sandwich, too, and he had just shoved a third of it in his mouth when Hollander appeared at his side. “Is Phillip okay?” he asked. “He seemed upset when we broke for lunch.”

“Yeah,” he said, struggling to chew. He held up a finger until he managed to swallow. “He thinks he’s too short.”

“That’s it?” Hollander said.

Caleb raised his free hand to rub the back of his neck. “He thinks it's worse because he’s uh, Vietnamese, too.”

Hollander blinked a few times, then looked down at the ground. “Yeah. There still aren’t a lot of Asian kids that play.”

“I, uh, told him to ask Rozanov for help with checking.”

Hollander’s eyes widened, and Caleb was certain he was about to get fired from this volunteer job. But then Hollander’s lips tipped into a smile and said, “That was a good idea. Ilya will love that.”

*

By the end of the first week of camp, Caleb was exhausted, but a good sort of exhausted. He knew right away he wasn’t going to be able to just parrot all the stuff he’d heard his own youth coaches say, either because it didn’t suit the vibe of the camp, or because, in hindsight, it was borderline misogynistic, or just plain mean. So he was thinking on the fly all the time, trying to focus hard on the kids and what they needed and what worked with them and what didn’t. 

He enjoyed the challenge, though. And it was pretty cool seeing kids of all sorts getting better on the ice, getting comfortable with each other and their coaches, egging each other on.

After they wrapped up on Friday, there was a happy hour event for the coaches at a local bar. Caleb considered begging off, but when it was time to leave, Hayes didn’t really give him an option.

He watched a few of the guys play pool while he nursed a vodka and soda. He’d stopped drinking beer last season because it screwed up all his macros, and he didn’t miss it at all, but he still felt a little ridiculous holding the little cocktail glass in his big hand, and sipping from the tiny straw.

“Berkes! You want next?” Boodram asked, one or two shots away from destroying his latest opponent.

“Absolutely not, Bood,” Caleb said, smiling.

“Smart decision, Bood takes no mercy on his victims.”

Rozanov hadn’t spoken directly to him all week. Just now his accent had sounded thicker than it did when he addressed the kids at camp. Caleb wondered if he was tipsy.

“Roz, whatever you’re doing, stop,” Hayden Pike said, appearing on his other side. “Berkes is fine. You saw the video!”

Caleb looked back and forth between the two men a couple of times in confusion, until Pike took pity on him.

“Sorry, kid. Roz isn’t a fan of the Metros, for reasons you can understand.”

Caleb felt himself blushing. “It’s—it’s fine. I get it.”

“I gotta head out,” Pike said, holding out his hand for Roz to shake. “I’m driving back tonight so I can catch the twins’ volleyball game in the morning.” He shook Caleb’s hand next. “Really glad you made it this year. Roz: be nice.”

Rozanov snorted as Pike headed for the door.

“You don’t have to be nice,” Caleb said. “It’s fine.”

“No, Pike is right. I should not have been rude.”

“Uh, thanks,” Caleb said.

“That year was hard for us, for me and Shane. He didn’t tell me a lot about what was happening in the room.”

“Oh,” Caleb said, feeling panicked again. Was Ilya Rozanov about to confide in him?

“But I made Pike tell me, and he said you were weird, right after. Jumpy.”

Caleb started to feel a tightness in his throat, followed by a crawling tension under his skin. The first time Caleb had experienced this feeling was when he was sixteen, and he had snuck some cash from the ziplock bag of bills his mother kept buried in a tupperware container of brown rice. It took barely twenty four hours before his guilt had become so obvious to the whole household that his mother had demanded to know what was wrong. The second time he had felt it was during the phone conversation with Nate, when he had said he thought he would never tell Caleb he was gay. 

“Yeah, I was surprised,” Caleb said, hoping he sounded normal even though his heart was thudding against his ribs like he had just done a dozen bag skates. “And, uh, ignorant, I guess. I’m not proud of the way I acted. But I didn’t think—I didn’t think Hollander ever really paid attention to me?”

“Shane pays attention to everything. How did you end up yelling at Comeau?”

Caleb shrugged, still hot and frantic with shame. “I don’t know, it was just…fine, I guess? After he told us, I mean. It didn’t change anything at all, really, and I started feeling stupid for caring at all. But Comeau wouldn’t shut up about it, and he drove Hollander off the team and it just seemed like such a waste. I just want to play hockey, right? I really can’t do anything else, and I’m not trying to go back to North Dakota.”

Rozanov stared him down through narrowed eyes. “Right.”

Caleb squirmed. He wasn’t usually one to share with near strangers, but fuck it.

“After the video came out, my brother told me he’s gay. He said he had thought he would never be able to tell me.” Oh God, why was he still talking? Now he was confiding in Rozanov, who still looked a little bit like he wanted to punch Caleb in the face. “So, uh, I should say thank you to your husband, probably. What he did was really brave.”

Rozanov’s face softened a little. “Yes. He is very brave. You will stay with the Metros?”

“I have another year on my contract, then I want to get out of there. I told my agent I wanted a trade, but nothing yet.”

“Where would you want to go? Barrett says we cannot keep all the gays and allies in Ottawa, that we have to spread them around.”

“Uh, well. My brother lives in Minnesota, and my girlfriend lives in Boston. So those would be my top picks, I guess.”

“Ah, Boston. They are still so sad without me.” Rozanov’s face was more open now, his pale eyes twinkling.

Caleb smiled. “Yeah, they kinda sucked this year.”

“So did the Metros,” Rozanov said.

Caleb nodded and took the last, watery sip of his drink. “We sure did.”

There was a beat of silence during which Caleb could feel Rozanov’s gaze on him. Was he still mad that Caleb had been a dick about Hollander being gay? Rozanov didn’t seem like a forgive and forget kind of guy. Or did Caleb only think that because of his Russian accent, and the fact that he was so ruthless on the ice? Maybe he was a total softie. Maybe he was a total softie, and Caleb had just bought into the same dumb press narrative that had labeled Hollander and Rozanov sworn enemies when clearly they were something else.

“Do you think people can change, Berkes?”

Jesus Christ. What sort of hellish interrogation was this?

“Sure,” he said. Oddly, he was thinking about the church youth group he had been forced to participate in, where they’d spent a lot of time sitting in a circle and talking about bringing sinners back to the Lord. Of course, his pastor had been fucking a teenager for some of that time, so maybe not everyone could be saved. “I mean, some people, no. But that’s because they don’t want to, I think? But I think a lot of people try to get better, and then the trying makes them better on its own.”

Damn, that was some churchy shit right there. Apparently he was never going to shake it all off completely. Oh well, that would make his mom happy.

Rozanov nodded thoughtfully. “Phillip asked me for help checking today.”

“Oh yeah? How’d he do?” 

“He’ll go back to his team with some tricks.”

Caleb would kill to see some video of Phillip slamming some little jerk up against the boards, and skating away with the puck. He smiled, imagining a scouting report that said Great speed, agility, holds his own against bigger players. “Great.” 

“So you will you come back next year?”

“Oh yeah,” Caleb said. He’d already been thinking about whether he could find a cute AirBnB that Emma would like, and maybe set up a parallel trip for some of the WAGs. Wait, not—spouses and partners. “Definitely.”

Rozanov leveled him with another long, unsettling stare .”Good,” he said, finally.

Chapter 6: Escape

Chapter Notes

It's STILL HAPPENING. The virus is overtaking me. I cannot seem to stop. I'm sorry. That said: Cliff Marleau!

If you're not tired of my fiction baby Caleb, I am truly hoping chapter 7 will be it. Half of it is drafted, hope you're all ready for an awkward Thanksgiving!

By the middle of August, Caleb resigned himself to another year in Montreal. There had been a flurry of trades after the draft, but no news from his agent. He had at least talked Nate into letting him subsidize his rent in St. Paul, so he could get a place with an extra bedroom in case their mom ever needed it. Caleb had made peace with it; he only had a year left on his contract, he could stick it out until free agency. It would be a good motivator for this year—the better he played, the more teams would want him when he was up for grabs.

He and Emma went to a luxury hotel on the coast of Maine for the last two weeks before her classes started. On their second-to-last afternoon, Emma was at the spa and Caleb was sitting on the balcony of their room, staring down at the rocky beach and listening to a podcast about the Ottoman Empire, when his phone lit up with a call from the Metros’ GM.

“Caleb, hi. Glad I caught you. Having a nice summer?”

“Sure, uh, yeah. Hello.”

Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God

He stood and walked back into the room, looking around frantically, as if someone might appear who would freak out with him.

“I’m sure you can guess why I’m calling. We’ve got some rebuilding to do, you know that, and as a part of that work, you’ve been traded to the Boston Bears.”

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

“Um, okay. I understand.”

“You’ve got a few weeks to get situated before training camp; your agent will be in touch with details.”

“Got it. Thank you, sir.”

“Good luck, Berkes.”

He hung up before Caleb could reply.

Boston. Fucking Boston! He couldn’t wait to tell Emma. Unless—would that be too much? What if she was into the long distance thing, since she was busy with school and shit?

Did he know anything about the room in Boston? Not really. But Cliff Marleau was captain and everyone liked him.

Emma came through the door wearing a pair of shorts made of that towel-y fabric and a sweatshirt with a lobster on it. 

She took one look at him, dumbstruck in the center of the room with his phone in his hand, and said, “Oh my God, babe, what is it?”

“I’ve been traded,” he said.

She froze. “To where?”

Damn, he couldn’t read her expression at all. What if she was thinking please say Vancouver over and over in her head?

“Boston.”

There was an excruciating second of silence before her face lit up with an enormous grin.

“Boston!” She bounced up and down in place, and then threw herself into Caleb’s arms. “You’re coming to BOSTON!”

He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing probably a little too tight, and exhaled. “So you’re happy?”

She pulled back from the hug. “Of COURSE I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be? Wait, when does training camp start? You need to get a place! When were you supposed to fly back?”

“The team will help me find a place. I gotta go back to pack and stuff….” he trailed off while his phone started to ring again. He saw his agent’s name. “Sorry, it’s Jackson, I gotta—”

She made a ‘go ahead’ gesture, then jumped on the king sized bed and did a little celebratory dance while Caleb tried not to laugh.

Three days later, Caleb was back in Montreal and his brain was thoroughly scrambled. He’d spent the better part of the last forty eight hours in phone calls or on video chats, and it turned out he had about a week to get his shit together in Montreal before he had to head to Boston so he could depart with the rest of the Bears for a group trip to Cape Cod. Apparently Cliff Marleau was trying something new to get the team in a better headspace after a tough year.

I told the GM we needed new blood, decent guys who weren’t fixated on this Roz and Hollander stuff. And there you were, cussing out that lazy old fuck on my Twitter feed.

You asked for me? Caleb had asked, dumbfounded.

Eh, I put you on a list with a dozen other guys that I know not to be assholes. So we’re going to head up to this sick house I rented on the beach, do some fishing, drink some beers, play some cornhole. It’ll be great.

Caleb’s dad had dragged him around fishing when he was little, but stopped after a disastrous trip to Devil’s Lake when Caleb was eleven or twelve. Nate had spent the whole time reading a book he smuggled on the boat in one of the many pockets of his fishing vest, and Caleb had managed to get a fishhook lodged so deeply in the base of his thumb that they had to drive an hour to urgent care when they got back to shore. Caleb was happy to use his growing commitment to hockey as an ‘out’ when it came to family camping endeavors. He’d always reacted badly to mosquito bites, and really didn’t understand why anyone would want to take a vacation where there wasn’t any indoor plumbing.

This Cape Cod thing probably wouldn’t be that. Emma said a lot of the Cape was pretty fancy, and obviously the Boston Bears weren’t going to bond at some sketchy RV park.

As it turned out, Caleb was right about it not being some sketchy RV park, but had been wrong about his notion of pretty fancy.

The ‘house’ that Marleau had rented was more of a complex. There was the main building, which was huge, a ‘guest house,’ which was also huge, and a ‘pool house,’ which was not huge but was still bigger than the house Caleb grew up in. The team divided evenly into little cliques: older guys and health maxxers in the pool house, so they could go to bed early, a group of younger, louder guys that Marleau referred to as the Animal House in the guest house where Cliff said the damage can be contained, and everyone else, including Caleb, the captain, and a handful of other new guys, in the main house. Caleb dropped his bag in a room on the ground floor that had an ocean view, and three different paintings of boats on the walls.

The Bears vibe was pretty familiar to Caleb: they were a bunch of guys focused on having a good time. They chirped each other and cursed and farted and laughed about it, and were unabashedly dude-ish, in a way that certainly would have made Emma roll her eyes. It wasn’t all that different from the Metros room, except that somehow, with the Metros, it had curdled into something mean-spirited.

Twenty-four hours into the trip, Caleb had only heard one cocksucker and two pussies (derogatory). Not bad for a hockey team.

The fishing was scheduled for the third day, and they set out an ungodly hour. Caleb had never been on a boat in the ocean, and was viciously seasick within minutes. He spent the first two hours of the trip hanging over the back of the boat, along with one of the new defenders and Charmichael, the left wing on the first line, until one of the other guys appeared and gave them all little white pills courtesy of his fiance, who was a nurse. Compazine he said, they give it to people on chemo!

Caleb choked it down with the tiniest sip of water he could imagine, and felt better within the hour.

That afternoon they lounged by the pool, and the guys teased him and the other newbie and Charmichael about their weak stomachs. It was hot and humid, even with the breeze blowing over from the beach. Emma had warned him that the summers were hot but he hadn’t figured it would be quite so tropical as this. Once the sun went down, though, the air was warm and delicious and everything was less sweaty, and one of the guys even produced a guitar which everyone gave him a ton of shit about, even though they all seemed to enjoy the few songs that followed.

On their last night at the complex, Connors and St Simon built a huge fire. Frankly, it was probably irresponsible given the size of the fire pit and the adjacency of some of the landscaping. But it roared away as they sipped their drinks—though by that point, Caleb had switched to Coke Zero because he didn’t want to be all bloated for the start of training camp—and at some point Marleau snuck back into the main house and emerged with a huge platter of s’mores fixings and they got to work.

An hour later, when everyone was covered in melted marshmallow and the fire had dwindled to a more manageable size, St. Simon said, “Do you think LeClaire’s going to be on the warpath this year?”

Marleau scoffed. “Oh yeah. He was furious when we didn’t make the playoffs.”

“But without Roz—” Hammersmith started.

“That’s no excuse man, you know it,” Cliff interjected. “We’ve got a lot of good guys.”

“I heard LeClaire is kind of a hard ass?” one of the new additions asked.

St. Simon shrugged. “He’s old school, but he’s not, like, a dick. You know?”

The new guy stared at him from across the fire, his brow furrowed. He clearly did not know. St. Simon put his empty beer down next to his chair and scooted to the edge of his seat. “You know, like, I had a coach in high school who would make someone wear this practice jersey that said loser on it for a week if you fucked up during a game. LeClaire is tough, but not like that. Not mean.”

Marleau laughed. “Yeah, I had a juniors coach that gave me a black eye.”

“What?” Caleb said. “For what?”

Marleau shrugged. “I was late to practice. You know what? No—that’s bullshit. It was because he could, you know? He knew that my dad was a drunk and my mom worked two jobs, and that I couldn’t say shit because he was my best shot out of there.”

Marleau paused. “Who here had an asshole coach at some point?”

Everyone raised their hand.

“What about an asshole captain?” Marleau asked. About half the hands stayed up. Caleb kept his up in honor of his first captain in the AHL, who had loved to brag about all the sex he had even though it was an open secret that he tended to set his sights on women who were so drunk they could barely stand up.

“We’re not doing that shit anymore on the Bears, okay? A lot of stuff has gone down in the league recently and it’s given me a lot to think about. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m not trying to sell my soul to the devil for one or two more Stanley Cups, right?”

Lots of hums, and a few nods. Caleb smiled to himself, thinking that he should text his mom: you don’t need to worry anymore, new team captain is officially anti-eternal damnation! 

Marleau continued, “I started playing with Ilya Rozanov in 2011. We were babies. He wasn’t even twenty years old when I met him. And I think about the number of times he heard guys saying fag this, cocksucker that in the locker room and I’m like, fuck man. Even if they didn’t mean anything by it, you know? So we’re just not going to do it anymore. Not because HR said we couldn’t, or because we want to make a statement, but because….because Berkes will destroy us on the internet like he did Gil Fucking Comeau.”

Caleb broke into a grin while the others laughed. “Sure will.”

Someone patted him on the shoulder, and Hammersmith started to tell a story about a coach who used to run speed drills by shooting at the team from the stands with a BB gun.

When he got back to his room, he texted Emma to say goodnight, and that he had a good feeling about the Bears. She texted back immediately, saying how excited her friends were that Caleb would be around more, and he thought to himself how nice it was of them to humor her like that, to welcome her big lug of a jock boyfriend with open arms when he could never join their conversations about whatever was in The New Yorker that week, and was still fighting not to snort when someone starting ranting about the tyranny of patriarchal systems.

If Emma’s friends wanted to know about patriarchal systems, Caleb could certainly educate them. I mean, Christ—he’d just spent two hours with a bunch of guys trading stories about coaches on power trips, adults who got their rocks off terrorizing teenage boys in the name of toughness, as if punching someone in the face had ever helped him learn to shoot the puck. But they stuck it out, maybe because they loved hockey or maybe because they didn’t feel they had a choice, and instead of calling it trauma and leaving it all behind, they laughed together around the fire and said, about the really bad stories, that’s fucked up, man.

Caleb thought that a few more well-placed that’s fucked up, mans could probably do a lot more to improve the culture than a bunch of articles online, or chatter on Twitter, or whatever bullshit diversity marketing the MLH came up with next. Change had to come from inside, from the guys who wanted to play, who knew how bad it could be and still wanted to hang around the locker room, and chirp and curse and fart and laugh about it, just without all the other bullshit. From guys like Hollander, who endured ten years of homophobia and finally said fuck it, I’m the best, I’m going to do what I want, and kids like Phillip, who would cry when they had to and then grit their teeth and do what they needed to do to stay in the game.

Marleau said we’re not going to do that shit anymore. Amen to that.

Chapter End Notes

Many moons ago, when my now-husband and I were young and fun, we ended up in a limo SUV on a wine tour of Long Island while my husband was hideously hungover. Now, at the time, he worked at a cancer hospital, and one of his friends, who was a nurse, leaned over like ninety minutes into this hellish ride and said to my husband, "hey I have a Compazine if you want it?" and readers, he was fine within MINUTES. That said, it is ME who has been felled by many a boat bobbing around off the coast of New England; I have yet to try to Compazine on seasickness but also have every intention of staying on dry land for the rest of my life, if I can manage it.

Chapter 7: Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

i would say that this chapter is too long, but I'm in the middle of reading something with a single chapter that's 47k words so I guess I'm probably fine

They weren't perfect coming out of the gate, but the Bears were starting to get their shit together by the end of November. As luck would have it, they were playing in Minnesota the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He got Nate and the hockey fan (now his boyfriend) tickets to the game, and flew Emma out from Boston. The plan was to have a modest holiday dinner at Nate’s apartment on Thursday, and Caleb would fly out late Friday to meet up with the team in North Carolina.

Caleb had insisted that Nate give him a job, and had been assigned pumpkin pie.

The Bears won, but Caleb was able to cheer up Nate’s boyfriend, Daniel, with an invitation out to the bar where a few teammates were celebrating, mostly Canadians and international players who weren’t trying to get home for Thanksgiving. It took Daniel about thirty minutes to stop being star struck, after which point he ended up listening gleefully to a handful of guys complain about the All-Star selection process. Meanwhile, Emma got into a heated debate with St. Simon about misogyny in the Sopranos, so Caleb and Nate had a chance to talk.

“So you really like Daniel, huh?” Caleb said. “How many hockey games have you gone to this season?”

“Four, if you count his rec league,” Nate groaned. “How did this happen to me? But he’s coming to this reading one of my favorite authors is doing at the queer bookstore in my neighborhood, so it’s okay.”

“I’m glad you met someone nice.”

“Yeah, ditto, bro. How did you land Emma anyway? She’s so cool.”

Caleb looked over at her, flushed and gesturing vigorously at St. Simon, and shrugged. “I really don’t know. She says that I’m smarter than I give myself credit for.” He blushed a little when he said the last part, because it was basically the best compliment he’d ever gotten. 

When Caleb was sixteen or so, before it was a sure thing that he’d be able to enter the draft out of high school, he’d daydreamed sometimes about playing in college. He thought it would be interesting to take the classes you wanted to take, to have professors who knew what they were talking about, to sit in classes and talk about stuff, rather than read a chapter in a text book and answer questions on a worksheet. But when he’d hinted to his father that he was interested in the offers being dangled by the college programs, his dad had scoffed, why bother? What are you going to do with more school?

Nate tilted his head and said, “Awe. She’s probably right, even though I’ll never admit that I said that.”

Caleb grinned, then felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He pulled it out and frowned. “It’s Mom.”

Nate’s face fell. “Pick it up!”

They shuffled over toward the hall to the bathrooms, where it was a little quieter, and Caleb swiped to answer. “Hi Mom, what’s up? I’m with Nate, can I put you on speaker?”

“Oh, sure, honey.” He didn’t like the way her voice sounded, sort of tight and fake. He shot Nate a look and pressed the speaker button.

“Can you hear us?” he asked.

“Hi, Mom,” Nate said, to announce his presence.

“Oh, hi, sweetheart.” Christ, was she crying?

“Mom, is everything okay?” Caleb asked.

“Well, I didn’t mean to interrupt you two, I thought you would be at home by now…”

“Mom. What is wrong?” Caleb said, maybe a little sharply, but a thousand terrible answers were swirling in his head—I’m in the emergency room, your father got drunk and fell down the basement stairs, they tarred and feathered me in the town square for calling Nate on his birthday last month—and he needed to know how bad this was.

She exhaled into the phone, a rough sigh, like she was trying to pull herself together. “Well, I’m at the airport.”

“Which one? Fargo?” Their town was about halfway between Fargo and Bismarck.

“Well, uh. Minneapolis. I’m in Minneapolis.”

Caleb and Nate stared at each other, jaws dropped.

“Okay, do you want me to come get you? I can call an Uber—”

“You don’t have to—”

“I will. Nate, how far is it to the airport?” Nate was already looking down at his phone, where he already had his ride share app open.

“Caleb! No. I can get myself a cab. I just need Nate’s address, if that’s okay. Nate, honey, if you want I can stay at a hotel, I just thought I could see you both either tonight or tomorrow, you let me know what’s best—”

“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Nate said. 

“Nathan Berkes,” she snapped.

“Okay, sorry. But of course you can stay with me. I’ll text you my address. It’s probably a thirty minute drive once you get in the car.”

“We’ll head back now,” Caleb said. “Text me when you’re in the cab.”

They said goodbye and then Caleb and Nate looked at each other.

“Holy shit,” Caleb said.

“What do you think this is?” Nate asked.

Caleb shook his head. “No idea.”

Caleb told Emma they had to leave. Daniel decided not to meet his boyfriend’s mother for the first time in the midst of whatever this was, which Caleb thought was very smart, and announced that he would stay and finish his beer with the guys. Nate kissed him goodbye right there, in the middle of a circle of hockey players, and no one batted an eye, which, well….holy shit.

It was quiet inside the Uber until Emma asked, “do you guys think she’s okay?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb said, honestly.

Nate was tense on the other side of Emma, who was squeezed in the middle. Caleb recognized the tightness of his lips and the line between his eyebrows: this was the face he would make when their father was badgering him about signing up for football, or when Caleb’s friends were teasing him. Caleb usually saw it right before Nate disappeared into their shared bedroom and holed up in the permanent pillow fort he had fashioned for himself in the corner, half inside the closet, as cloistered from the world as he could get in their cramped, drafty house.

Since Easter, Nate and his mom had spoken on the phone a handful of times. When Caleb asked him about it, he brushed it off with a joke, Caleb wasn’t so convinced by his flippancy. The face confirmed it: Nate was angry.

Barely a minute after they got inside Nate’s apartment, Caleb’s phone buzzed with a message from their mother: I’m here. The buzzer was broken, so Caleb went back down the stairs to get her. He wondered as he jogged down whether he would find her standing there with an overnight bag or the two huge family suitcases, improbably won in a church raffle when Caleb was little.

He found her waiting with nothing more than a purse, a small tote bag, and a bottle of water. They hugged, and he hoped it was the harsh gray light in the hallway that was making her look so old and pale.

She hesitated at the top of the stairs, a few feet from Nate’s door.

“It’s just here,” Caleb said. 

She nodded. “Sorry, I just—I feel bad surprising you like this.”

“It’s fine, Mom. You’re here. It’s good to see you.”

He opened the door and she greeted Emma with a tentative hug. Nate hugged her too, briefly, then grumbled something about checking on the guest room and shuffled down the hall. Caleb’s mom looked after him, her brow furrowed in a mirror image of her younger son’s.

They sat at the small table next to the breakfast bar.

“Mom, did something happen?”

“I just wanted to see you boys, and you were so close…”

Caleb gritted his teeth. Had she always been like this, unable to state a preference or opinion or even a fact without a handful of qualifiers? Maybe he’d just been away from North Dakota too long, all of his memories of good Christian women supplanted by that of Emma’s unapologetically brash friends.

“Mom.”

Before she could say anything in response, Nate emerged.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, honey.” She smiled, but it was wobbly and watery, and Caleb reached his limit. He was exhausted, his body aching and spent from the game, and he could not do this tonight. Digging information out of his mom, sorting through whatever was going on with her and Nate, worrying whether Emma would run screaming in the other direction when she saw what twenty years of Berkes men did to a woman—he just didn’t have the energy.

He stood from his chair.

“It’s really late. Maybe we should all get some sleep? Emma and I will bring breakfast over tomorrow. What do you think—like, nine?”

“You don’t need to—” his mom started to say, but Nate interrupted her.

“Mom,” he said, just like Caleb had.

Nate sighed and rubbed a hand over the rust-colored scruff on his chin. Caleb was a little jealous; his own beard was patchy and mousy brown.

They said their goodnights, and he and Emma took another silent Uber ride back to the hotel, a ten minute ride back toward the city center.

As they climbed into the hotel bed, Emma asked Caleb if he was okay and he said yes even though they both knew it wasn’t true. Emma pushed herself up on the pillows and held her arm out until Caleb crawled underneath and nuzzled into her ribcage. She scratched her fingernails gently over his bare back and didn’t ask anymore questions, until his eyelids were drooping. God, he loved her.

The next morning they found a bagel shop and headed back to Nate’s apartment. When they arrived, his mother was sitting alone at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and doing a word puzzle on her phone. Nate’s door was open, and Caleb could hear the shower running.

“Good morning,” he said.

His mother grabbed the bags of food before she even responded and carried them to the kitchen. She took down a large plate and spread out the bagels, got a knife for the cream cheese and took the butter and jelly out of the refrigerator, Emma watching her with pursed lips. Why doesn’t anyone help her? She had asked Caleb after the first meal they ate at his house. Your dad just sits there.

Nate came in with wet hair, and they dove right into making plans for cooking. His mother seemed a little put out that they weren’t using any family recipes, and weren’t eating a full-sized turkey.

“Mom,” Nate finally snapped. “This is the menu. This is what we have the groceries for. Daniel and I cook all the time, I know what I’m doing, and I have backup ice cream if Caleb screws up the pie.”

“Hey,” Caleb said, while Emma giggled.

But his mom was frozen, the line sitting heavy between her eyebrows again. “Is Daniel your—”

“My boyfriend. Yes.” Nate said, his cheeks flushed.

“Right.”

Caleb wondered if his Mom was going to ask any more questions, but the conversation ended there. His mom and Emma were deployed chopping while Nate prepared a tray of bone-in chicken breasts and Caleb started on the custard for the pumpkin pie. The cooking was an excellent distraction, especially for Caleb’s mom, who corrected Emma’s chopping technique no more than three times, and looked over Nate’s shoulder with a sort of confused awe while he prepared the stuffing from scratch.

Dinner was respectable. Maybe not the sort of feast they used to have with all the aunts and uncles at home, but it was enough. Caleb’s pie was delicious, and he was offended by how surprised everyone seemed about it—even Emma, the traitor.

Things started to deteriorate while they cleaned up. First, his mother summoned Emma to help do the dishes, but not the boys, and Caleb watched gratefully as Emma gulped down whatever snide comment had been on the tip of her tongue. Then she made a few sweet-sounding but frankly unkind comments about Emma not knowing this or that housekeeping fact, like what temperature water to use while she scoured a frying pan, until Emma justifiably snapped and said, “I know how to clean, come on.” 

Caleb thought the outburst had been fairly tame, but his mother dissolved into tears. Emma’s face fell in horror as his mom threw a soapy sponge into the sink and sank to the floor in front of her, and he might have laughed at Emma’s panic if he weren’t panicking, too.

Nate tensed up where he was packing leftovers away by the refrigerator, then took a long stride around his mother and left the kitchen in silence.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Berkes,” Emma said, pleading. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s okay.”

Caleb squatted down on the floor next to his mom.

“I can’t do anything right,” she said.

“Mom, no,” he said. He was desperate for her to stop crying, even though somewhere in the back of his brain he was wondering whether she’d noticed the way Nate had cleared out from his own kitchen, his nice holiday meal more or less forgotten now that they were all fussing over her.

“I shouldn’t have come here. Nate doesn’t want me here. It’s too late.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I waited too long, Caleb. He doesn’t want—but I can’t stay there with your father. He’s so angry, about everything. Nate went away for school and there were we together and I just—did I ever even like him? But Nate won’t forgive me, and you have your big life with the team and your—Emma. Where can I even go?”

Caleb was frozen. His mother never complained, not about anything. Not when his dad’s brother got roaring drunk at Christmas and knocked over her painstakingly decorated tree, not when Caleb’s friends had come over after school and eaten two batches of cookies she had made for a church bake sale, not when she had to hide in the house for three days after the last time his dad hit her, until the bruise faded enough to be covered by makeup. Maybe she should have complained; maybe she’d saved them all up over all these years, and now they were spilling out all over Nate’s kitchen floor.

“Oh my God, stop it,” Nate said from the other side of the breakfast bar. “You were just as bad as he was when I came out, you cried and said you failed and I was damned, and you didn’t say a word when Dad said don’t call us until you’ve come to your senses.”

“I told you I was sorry,” she whispered.

Emma stepped gingerly out of the kitchen area and managed to disappear somewhere into the apartment.

“Right. You said sorry once. You’ve called me like three times since then, and you never ask about my life! Not even my classes. I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways! You can’t be sorry and come here for Thanksgiving and smile and cry that I won’t forgive you if you still can’t stand that I’m gay.”

Caleb rubbed his forehead with his thumb and index finger. “Mom, come on. I can’t stay on the floor like this.”

He held out his hand and drew her up to standing with him.

“I can stand it. I can stand that you’re gay,” she said. 

Nate crossed his arms. “So you don’t think I’m going to hell anymore?”

She sniffled. “I don’t know what I think about anything anymore. I feel like—everything I ever learned about life was wrong.”

Nate blinked at her. “That’s probably true.”

“Nate, come on,” Caleb said, hoping to turn the temperature down a little.

“No, I’m sorry. You don’t get it, Caleb. You were always exactly what everyone wanted you to be.”

He opened his mouth to object, because he couldn’t remember ever feeling like he was doing so great. But then he thought about how no matter how much he squirmed or fidgeted or slept during church, his dad would stand next to him afterward, patting him on the shoulder while people approached them to talk about his stats, or the scouts who’d come to watch him.

“Okay, you’re right,” Caleb said. “Maybe Emma and I should go so you guys can talk?”

“No,” Nate and his mom said in unison.

“I don’t ask you about your life because I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing,” his mom said, barreling through in an uncharacteristic show of stubbornness.

“I get that,” Caleb said, earning a glare from Nate. Caleb held his eyes and continued, “But Nate has been really patient with me.”

“I’m gay, Mom,” Nate said. “Not, like, an asshole. I’m not going to get mad at you for trying.”

“Language, honey.”

“Sorry, Mom, but this is my house,” Nate said, half a grin peaking through the scowl on his face. Caleb chuckled, but he stopped when his mom shot him a look.

After a long pause, Nate asked, “How long are you staying?”

“My flight back is on Saturday,” she said.

Nate sighed, his shoulders sagging, and he rubbed his forehead with his fingers just like Caleb had a few minutes earlier.

“If you change it to Monday, you can meet Daniel. He’s at his parents' house a few hours away for the weekend but he’ll be back on Sunday afternoon.”

His mother’s eyes widened into a deer-in-the-headlights expression, and before she could answer Nate said, “Okay, nevermind—bad idea, I guess.”

“No, no. I want to meet him.” She said this with the conviction of someone who had psyched herself up to try an exotic delicacy. Caleb had probably made the same mulish face when Emma teased him about being too scared to try her grilled octopus when they went to dinner for her birthday.

Nate’s face settled into his angry expression again. “I’m not going to introduce you to him unless you can be normal.”

“I can be normal,” she said, obviously offended. “Have you met his parents?”

“Yes. They have no issue with his being gay at all, and they were really nice to me.”

Caleb thought that was a bit of a low blow, but he kept his mouth shut. His mom couldn’t help where she’d been raised, what she had learned from her parents and her church and literally every person in her direct vicinity. But Nate must have known something Caleb didn’t, because apparently the prospect of another family being kinder and more welcoming—having better manners—got under her skin enough that she straightened her back, put on her best church lady face, and said, “I would love to meet him.”

*

Christmas was a whole weird thing. Caleb had three days off, but Daniel had invited Nate to go with his family on their annual holiday trip to Florida, so Caleb had psyched himself to go home and endure a terrible holiday staring contest with his dad. But then his mom called him and said she didn’t want to do the whole tree and dinner and gifts thing anymore, now that he and Nate were grown up. One of his aunts was hosting and his dad was going there, and his mom was going to spend the holiday with Abigail, watching movies and eating frozen pizza. She sounded happier about it than she had sounded about anything in years.

Emma insisted that Caleb go to Toronto with her, instead. Truth be told, he was still intimidated by Emma’s parents, who were well-educated and talked about books and politics and stuff at the dinner table. Her mother was a lawyer, a fancy one who had argued in front of the Supreme Court of Canada, and her father was a doctor, and one of her older sisters had gone to fucking Princeton. Emma’s dad was a big hockey fan, so there was always something for Caleb to talk about, but other than that he was usually pretty quiet around them, and he knew it bothered Emma. She always said, I just want them to get to know you better.

He was going to try harder this time; he was even listening to the New York Times daily news podcasts, so he might have something interesting to say.

They ate a big family dinner on Christmas Eve. The meal was catered because while Emma’s parents liked to cook, neither of them were interested in spending a holiday toiling over the stove. He peered into the kitchen for a minute on his way back from the bathroom, watching as the private chef diced up an enormous pile of fresh vegetables and the assistant peeled potatoes, and tried to remember if he had ever once helped his mom and his aunts prepare dinner. Almost definitely not, though he and Nate were always expected to help clear the table and do the dishes.

He’d bought his mom a dishwasher with his signing bonus.

On Christmas morning they opened presents and ate cinnamon rolls with gooey cream cheese frosting. In the afternoon, they went to the movies, filling up on popcorn and movie theater hot dogs for dinner.

It was a nice few days, and Caleb felt more comfortable than he expected. He had managed several credible contributions to a conversation about the Ottoman Empire, and talked for thirty minutes about investment strategies with Emma’s mom, who had done a heart-warming amount of research on financial planning for pro athletes. One of Emma’s sisters had a new boyfriend, who was cool and also agreed that the Star Wars prequel movies were underrated, and the other sister, the oldest, elbowed her husband pretty violently in the ribs when he said, sort of out of nowhere, I would never let our kids play a violent sport like hockey. Emma had leaned over and said in his ear, she played field hockey in high school and college.

But he still felt uneasy as they made their way to the airport. The holiday felt incomplete, like a missed homework assignment, and he realized that he felt guilty about not going to church. He’d gone to church twice for Christmas for his entire life, and though he had complained about it every single time, it was probably the only time of the year when the pastor usually talked about love and forgiveness and grace rather than who was sinning the most, or all the things wrong with the modern world.

Emma asked what was bothering him, then grew quiet when he explained. She wasn’t religious at all, nor was her family, except for one Quebecois grandmother who had been upset that none of the kids were baptized. Most of what he had told her about his experience in church had certainly been terrible, so he didn’t blame her for being confused by his weird mood. He chalked it up to a little bit of homesickness, the whiplash of his mother moving on so gleefully, and maybe a some anger that fate, or whatever, had scattered their fucked up little family all across North America when everyone else got to be together.

When he got home from Toronto, a package from his mother was waiting for him. Inside was a tupperware container full of ginger molasses cookies, the big chewy kind that had always been his favorite. His mom only made them once a year, for the annual Christmas market that was held in the church basement. He sent her a text to say thank you, and had already eaten four by the time his phone pinged again with her response.

Two days later, when Nate got back from Florida, he texted Caleb a photo of his own box from North Dakota. His tupperware was full of sugar cookies, crackly on the sides and coated in a thick layer of rainbow sprinkles. 

Nate: what did you get?

Caleb: molasses, but I only have three left

Nate: gross. Do you think this is like a bribe?

Caleb: what are you talking about, it’s a Christmas present

Nate: She offered to pay for my books for this semester. Does she think money is going to make everything okay?

Caleb: i hope not, since she doesn’t really have any

Nate: she told me she had some money stashed away from dad, and then she asked if there are any lutheran churches in my neighborhood

Caleb: huh

Nate: what if she tries to move here

Nate: like into my apartment

Nate: i can’t really say no, that’s why you’re paying for the second bedroom

Caleb: you can definitely say no. if that’s what she wants I will get her her own apartment and you can move somewhere smaller

Nate: so it’s YOUR money that’s going to make everything okay?

Caleb: i mean, not everything. Maybe one thing. What else am I going to use it for?

Nate: cookies?

Caleb: lol maybe - when you visit I’ll take you to this bakery at the seaport where everything is like $10

Nate: do you think it’s terrible that I’m still so mad

Caleb blinked at his phone screen. Despite his escape to college and his coming out and everything, Nate was still a stoic midwestern guy, just like Caleb. He said he was fine even when he was obviously not, and never cried, at least not in front of Caleb. 

Caleb: no. also you can’t just stop being mad, right?

Nate: I know that she’s trying. But she always tries to make it like everything is so normal, even though I haven’t spoken to dad in almost three years

Caleb: well, dad sucks

Nate: lol. Did you talk to him on Christmas?

Caleb: yeah for like 8 seconds

His father had said Merry Christmas and then scolded him for getting a five minute penalty in their game against Toronto. Caleb hadn’t gotten five minutes since his first season in the AHL, but Dallas fucking Kent had been chirping him the whole game, and Caleb had managed to keep his cool through all sorts of bullshit, right up until the point where he’d heard Kent call one of Boston’s rookies a faggot right before he tripped him. Caleb wasn’t some sort of avenger, all the gay guys he knew in the league could handle Dallas Kent just fine on their own, but what if the rookie realized that Caleb heard and thought his silence was, like, an approval? This is what Marleau was talking about at the Cape (Caleb called it the Cape now, because he was in Boston and felt like a loser whenever he called it Cape Cod). If everyone just let this shit happen, nothing would ever change.

So he’d maybe driven Kent a little hard into the boards. He still thought the ref had overreacted, and Marleau had tried his best, right up until the ref threatened him with a penalty, too. But it didn’t even matter, because Toronto fucked up the power play, and Boston still won the game.

Nate: do you think she would ever divorce him for real?

Caleb had talked about this with Emma, too, after she told him about Christmas. He’d thought maybe, at first, when she had called him about walking out of church on Easter. But then she’d stuck around and he figured he’d gotten all excited over nothing. He hadn’t asked and she hadn’t volunteered, just kept dropping these little tidbits about the extra space she was putting between herself and their father. Emma had said, you won’t be able to force it.

Caleb: i don’t know, the Christmas thing was weird. Maybe eventually?

He wondered what his mom would do if he bought a little house in a town outside Boston, mailed her the key, and said, “come whenever.” If she didn’t have to worry about getting a job, or taking anything with her. But he knew it wasn’t just about money, or about stuff. Her whole life was there. She would be walking away from everyone she knew, her whole family, all of her friends.

Nate: okay I ate six of my cookies, I shouldn’t have judged you

Caleb sent back a smiley face.

*

By the end of February, the Bears were on fire. It had been a bit of a slow start, but things really started to gel after Christmas, and then they went on a tear after the All Star break. Caleb was having the best season of his career; LeClaire had even hinted about him moving to second line if he kept it up.

The locker room was fun. Easygoing. The guys still chirped each other relentlessly, told tasteless jokes, and gossiped like the old biddies that ran the church raffle. But Marleau was working hard. He was everywhere, listening to everyone, slapping guys upside the head if they went a little bit too far, calling out the ones who truly crossed the line. His weapon of choice was ridicule, which Caleb saw right away was far more effective than lecturing. 

St Simon and Connors were on top of it too, and sometimes, watching them, Caleb felt a little ashamed. He thought about all the times he’d heard a joke or a comment and thought to himself, wait a minute, but not said anything because he figured it wasn’t a big deal. Or the things he’d heard and laughed along with for so many years because it was normal. Emma told him to give himself a break, and even suggested that he was hesitant to scold his peers because of his experience in a church where everyone was constantly scolding everyone else for everything. But he thought she was letting him off easy.

In the first week of March, they beat the Admirals and took the top spot in the division. It was a home game with a day off after, so the team went out to celebrate. Emma came along, and after two vodka sodas Caleb dragged her to the dance floor, where they stayed until Emma had lifted up onto her tip toes and whispered something uncharacteristically dirty in his year.

Two days later, the team was getting ready for practice and the conversation turned to who had pulled at the club and who had gone home alone. Caleb always felt smug during these conversations, because he had Emma, who was brilliant and funny and super hot, and if he had his way, he would never have to fret about talking to a stranger at a bar again.

“Did anyone see Berkes and the Brainiac going at it on the dance floor?” Hammersmith said, grinning maniacally in Caleb’s direction.

“Yeah bro, where’d you learn to dance like that? Aren’t you from North Dakota?” someone else said.

Caleb shrugged, blushing furiously. He’d always loved to dance, ever since his mom started taking him to the Wednesday night line dancing classes in the church basement whenever his dad refused to go.

“How’d you get her to go out with you, anyway?” Connors teased.

“Come on, Connie,” St. Simon said, “you’ve seen the guy’s dick.” Hammersmith held his hands out at least two feet apart in front of his chest.

Caleb blushed even hotter.

“Finnegan, you should get some pointers from our boy here,” Hammersmith said. 

Caleb let out a breath, relieved to have the attention diverted to some other poor soul, though he felt sort of bad about it being Finnegan, who was one of the quieter guys on the team.

“Yeah I saw you with that hottie on the dance floor. What happened, bro, she was all over you at first!”

Finnegan shrugged silently and fidgeted with his tape.

“Finnegan always blows it,” the goalie chimed in. “Remember in Chicago, when we went to that comedy club and the bartender was into him?”

“Yeah what’s the deal, man? Are you using that all natural deodorant or something? Shit never works.”

Finnegan glanced across the bench, his eyes meeting Caleb’s for a split second. The kid was squirming, a splash of red across his freckled cheeks.

“Oh! Maybe he’s a virgin!” someone else said.

“Don’t worry rook,” Marleau said, “Connie’s got a book he can give you. Has all sorts of diagrams and shit.”

Finnegan stood up straight, finally, said, “I do fine, okay?”

There was some laughter. “Oh? Have you got a girlfriend in Canada?”

“I don’t like women, okay?” Finnegan blurted. He looked immediately over to Caleb, eyes wide with shock at his own outburst. 

The room fell totally silent, just like it had that day Hollander made his announcement. Caleb remembered the way the silence had given way gradually to whispers and grumbling, how everything had felt so rotten afterward. Had it been quiet like this when Nate came out to their parents? Had he waited through a few painful moments of quiet, just for their dad to say something awful, or for his mom to say oh, Nate in that same voice she used when Caleb failed his math tests?

“Oh ok, got it, bro,” Caleb said. He didn’t think about it very hard, he just knew he had to fill that silence with something decent. Finnegan’s face was still pale, his body frozen in place like a squirrel who had been spotted by a predator, so Caleb reached over and gave his shoulder a solid pat. He glanced up and caught Marleau’s eyes across the room. Then Marleau made a point of adjusting his pads like nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, and for a few seconds it seemed like it might become no big deal.

A few cubbies down, the center from Caleb’s line snorted. “Are you fucking serious, Finn?”

The silence returned, and Caleb’s stomach dropped. Marleau and Connors were all the way across the room—had they heard? Maybe Caleb was overreacting; maybe the guy was just surprised. But…no. Caleb could feel it, it was the tone. The same snide, angry sound as Comeau when he had spat out the word fag.

“What was that, Sanderson?” Caleb had always been on the big side for a winger, and he drew himself up to his full height. “You have something to say?” 

“I mean, come on,” Sanderson said, making a weak gesture toward Finnegan. “We’re supposed to act like it’s normal?”

Caleb stared him down. “Yes.”

Sanderson’s face started to redden, and he raised his hands in surrender. “Sure, okay, whatever guys.”

“Don’t worry, Finn,” St Simon said from across the locker room. “Sandman is just bitter ‘cause he can’t get women or men to touch his dick.”

Most of the guys laughed, and the mood in the room snapped back to normal, fast enough to give Caleb a bit of vertigo. His heart was still beating pretty hard, so he sat down on the bench and took far longer than necessary to pull on his socks.

The room started to quiet as everyone finished getting ready. Sanderson yanked his sweater on and practically ran from the room, with Marleau close on his tail. When the room was mostly empty, Finnegan turned to Caleb, cheeks still flushed, looking small and young even though he and Caleb were basically the same size and only a few years apart in age. He gripped his helmet to his chest and said, “Thanks, man.”

Caleb nodded, and followed him out to the ice.

Chapter End Notes

So I’m finally done here. Some last bits, to help resist the temptation of building out a whole Berkes family universe:

* Caleb and Emma get married, obviously. Aaron is not invited to the wedding.
* It takes a few years but Caleb’s mom does leave his dad, and Caleb does ultimately buy a little house for her and Abigail (take that as you will) in a picturesque town on the North Shore
* Caleb attends church with his mom occasionally after she moves (it’s congregationalist, the pastor is a woman, there is more than one rainbow flag on the premises)
* Nate hosts Thanksgiving forever, and is extremely possessive of it. He never makes a turkey
* Caleb goes to college after he retires, because fuck Caleb’s dad

 

I’m dedicating this story to my husband and his gym friends, who are decent men that love a brutal sport (not hockey - it rhymes with schmu shi tsu, if anyone else’s partner fell down a bottomless combat sports rabbit hole right before their first child was born. No? Just me? nervemind). Especially this last week, they help me remember that it isn’t actually all men; that there are lots of men out there who want to be good, and who make each other better.