🧡🤍🩷

A 3 Troy Harris Comic: Why does this brooding hockey player keep giving me coffee? Inspired by Role Model by Rachel Reid

and troy smiles, “right, because you were with roz the whole time.”

“i mean, yes, but also because you and dallas kent spent years calling me and jj ‘rush hour’ and asking hayden if his wife was his beard to cover up his big gay relationship with me.”

the rest of the centaurs blink. harris puts his head in his hands and groans.

Hence the feelings chart.

The idea is that he can put words to the sensations that he feels in order to better communicate. Instead of “shitty”, he can say something more accurate. Empty, lonely, exhausted, all the things that “shitty” can possible describe. Troy gets the idea of it, but he cannot get over his pride that he shouldn’t need it. He’s an adult. There’s nothing more infantilizing than having your partner say, “can you show me how you’re feeling?” like you’re a fucking toddler.

It comes in handy when something happens and he can’t explain what he needs because he can’t figure out what the fuck he’s feeling and what is actually wrong. He storms into the kitchen and snatches the feelings chart that he hates so much and his hands shake as he looks over his old scribbles until he finds the one that looks right and he’s scared? Why the fuck is he scared? What does he have to be scared about? (Something seemingly unrelated to anything triggered you babe) but it gives him a direction, lets him figure out that happened.

He picked up on certain things and researched them more thoroughly, so now he just has a very random collection of crime facts.

Which comes in handy when Ilya makes vague threats, that Troy can then support with facts.

Like:

Ilya to a player that just called Shane a slur: How much of blood do you think you can lose and still be this annoying?

Troy completely nonchalant nodding next to him: An average person can lose about 50% of their total blood volume before death occurs. The exact number of course depends on the size of the person.

Troy brings up that his first time was maybe less than ideal. Nothing dangerous or traumatizing, exactly, as long as you ignore how scared he was at being caught. He and Harris are chatting and he brings it up off handedly. That’s when Harris starts to cook.

A few weeks later, after Harris has figured out exactly what he wants to say and how he wants to approach it, they’re basking in the afterglow. Harris asks a bit more about it, and Troy is just blissed out enough that he’s not self conscious.

“It wasn’t bad. It was, I dunno, normal? Awkward, maybe.”

“Would you…be interested in a do-over?”

“Oh? Have you invented time travel without telling me, babe?”

“Ha ha, no, I haven’t. I meant like, pretend. Role play.”

Troy is quiet for a second, then, “Do you want to?”

“I think it would be really fucking hot, honestly.” Troy shrugs.

“Okay, I guess.”

(Okay, I guess is not the enthusiastic response Harris had been hoping for, but it’s enough to work with for now.)

A few more days pass, Troy has completely forgotten about the conversation, and Harris brings it up again. “How would you have wanted your first time to go?”

Troy continues unloading his meal prep containers into the fridge. “What, like rose petals and candles and shit?” Harris rolls his eyes but hops up on the counter.

“I mean, did you? Want rose petals and candles and shit?” Troy looks over at him and realizes that he’s serious. “I’m just curious.”

“What was your first time like?” Troy asks suspiciously.

Harris laughs, big and loud. “It was probably bad, but I just remember having my first real boyfriend and I was completely in love with him. Y’know, normal college freshman shenanigans.”

“I don’t, actually,” Troy points out, just to see Harris huff and roll his eyes.

“Well, most of us weren’t getting drafted at 18, so.” Troy finishes his chore and comes to stand between Harris’s knees.

“I am willing to admit that my life experience is not the normal,” Troy says with a shrug. He leans in and they spend the next few minutes just making out like teenagers. “It would have been nice, I think. To be able to explore that: the boyfriend, thinking the sex is the best thing ever because you don’t know any better.” Harris shoves his shoulder.

“Well, what if I want to…” Harris leans forward and wraps his arms around Troy’s shoulders to pull him close. Troy can feel Harris’s breath on his lips. “Make an evening of it?”

“Of what, role playing that I’m a virgin?”

“We don’t have to, it’s just a thought. I can drop it.” He starts to pull back a bit but Troy follows him.

“Hey, now, let’s not be hasty,” Troy says against Harris’s lips. “Do you wanna make it special for me, babe?”

“Yeah, I kind of really do.”

“Okay. What do you have in mind?”

and the truth is that the team was playing against someone ilya and/or shane ESPECIALLY hates, which means shane was dropping the most vicious, lethal reads known to man and making ilya crack tf up to the point that they were attracting attention and the coach was just afraid of someone reading lips and getting them all in trouble

and signficantly, the three person buffer between them just keeps shane from SAYING his comments

But I feel like this is the point of connection that gets Shane to actually accept Troy as a guy he can vibe with. They make the mistake of putting Troy as one of the guys in between Shane and Ilya only for Shane to keep muttering things and Troy to pick right up where Ilya left off on dragging people. Troy may have been a homophobic menace for a while but not he’s a homosexual menace and Shane can very much so get down with that. Ilya has almost as much fun listening to them banter as joining in.

Is this not how the end of chapter 13 of role model went?