mack, is the kind of guy who doesn’t really do long term relationships. he doesn’t have time and while it sounds bad he doesn’t really care enough to try. he had the one long term girlfriend and that ultimately didn’t work out because mack didn’t want to put in the effort and neither did she (also they were teenagers, so none of it was ever going to matter, thankfully and unfortunately). yes, he’s lame and embarrassing, but that does not stop him from his parade of bad to mediocre sex
will, on the other hand, does not know when to take his claws out of something. he is still carrying around the dead weight of childhood friends, and college almost-love affairs. there is a reason he has a collection of miscellaneous hockey guys who he can call up for dinner in any city. he does not forgive, and he does not forget, including all of his own misdeeds, it stays locked in his mind. and yet he’s found that so much of living with people is forgiving, again, and again, and again. but mack never says he’s sorry, not even about things like a broken windshield. mack is difficult very often, on the first impression and the sixtieth, but not to will. it’s like mack has his softest spots on near constant replay, and will would much rather change himself, bend to cover all the areas of mack where light leaks out, than have some other, easier, version of him.
but it remains that will owns this very thin intricate web of every person he has ever met, the guys he grew up with, the people at BC who he spoke to for the first and last time, the mother he takes after, the sister he shares a face with, the father he can’t find an opening for, the sharks, the neighbors he no longer lives next to, and macklin. he doesn’t understand how mack, who has lived in so many places, in vancouver, in chicago, in the bay, is not carrying a similarly heavy box labeled: do not touch, do not touch, do not touch. will makes himself keep this terrible, horrifying, balancing act that he is constantly failing at, trapping everyone he has a sliver of a connection with, even the people he doesn’t talk to anymore, even or especially leno. there is some gaping wound in will’s gut that he has been stuffing people into for as long as he’s been alive, and he’s deeply afraid that he is still empty on the inside, that the rumbling is coming from him after all. or worse, that his stomach is distended, people breaking their fingernails through the drum like surface of his skin to escape, and will needs to learn how to pick out the right people.
but will takes after colleen, knows how to manage the people around him, the friends who butt heads and the ones who can’t carry a conversation. will needs it all so bad, needs his people to like his other people. and he doesn’t always get it, not with leno and gabe at first, and not with leno and mack ever. but anyways, there are a collection of people out there that mack has been with in some way or another, and will doesn’t know how he lives with it. it’s not about the sex, anything close enough to pain can feel like penetration, will knows that. sometimes, talking to the bartender feels a lot like will is giving up some piece of his rib, and sometimes it doesn’t. but it’s all in the same web, but mack doesn’t have a web, that’s what will’s trying to get at. if you don’t have some long weathered string leading you back to the long disintegrated umbilical cord than how do you get back at all? will wants to know