#*omgcp

-

Do you remember?

Jack whispers the words against the back of his neck, jaw rough where his morning shave has given way to stubble, and Kent presses his forehead more firmly to his arm as it braces against the back of the couch. He bites his bottom lip, forcing himself silent, denying Jack the answer.

Let Jack wonder. Let Jack have to ask.

But his body is easy to read, opening so readily under Jack’s touch, welcoming him back without reluctance. Jack kisses the knob of his spine and palms his hip, and the familiar, ever-present ache eases away for the first time.

-

Old letters

His mother has a box in her closet—ornate, wooden with intricate corner joints, shiny with shellac—that she takes out in February. The notes in his father’s handwriting, on card stock and on the backsides of receipts and on tattered-edged loose leaf, are weathered with age, but they bring a tender, misty-eyed smile to her face.

The box Jack has isn’t a box. A stained drawstring bag lives in the shadows beneath his bed, heavy with an old puck, an unworn novelty snapback, and an undeveloped disposable camera. It smells like sweat. He tries to forget it’s down there.

-

First frost

Jack stays facing the wall after the door clicks shut, taking long, deep breaths. The silence prickles after so many hours of overlapping voices.

“It’ll be worse next time,” Kent warns. He kicks off his shoes and sprawls across the couch, untucking the hem of his shirt. When he rests a heel on the coffee table, he knocks one of Jack’s oversized books askew. Jack turns to fix him with a flat look.

“You could have just eaten the pie.”

Kent shakes his head, unyielding. "Not in my nature."

Jack sighs, coming close and bending to kiss him. “I know.”

-

Faded Polaroids

The shapes overlap in his vision, afterimage and reality in a standoff to see which can last longer. One has decidedly more practice. He rocks in his skates and sees double, one phantom twin miming the other, moving not quite like he remembers, moving exactly as he expects.

Gradually, the world clears like a focusing lens.

The arena noise rumbles. The lights and cameras swing. Jack wears a sweater that matches his own, again, finally, and it means nothing—a clown show, a cashgrab. But for ten minutes, in answer to an unspoken prayer, Jack is back on his line.

-

A song you haven’t heard in years

When Jack first rouses, he groans in his throat, a husky, rough sound. He doesn’t speak again until after he brushes his teeth. Kent watches, half-tangled in the sheets, as he scratches his hipbone on the walk to the bathroom. He leaves the door open as he plucks his toothbrush from the holder and lathers a thick foam against his molars. He hocks and spits.

On his way back, he catches Kent’s eye and stutter steps, soles squeaking. His knee cracks as he crawls onto the mattress. When he bends low, arms bracketing Kent’s hips, his lips smack against skin.

-

The kitchen light at 2 a.m.

A warm yellow bulb over the sink and the mechanical hum of the dishwasher are a homage to his mother’s mother, whose house always felt like a cozy Rockwell painting after dinner, two cookies on a thin silver tray as Jeopardy slid seamlessly into Wheel of Fortune.

“Leave it,” he tells Jack when his hand reaches for the switch plate.

City light bleeds across the room from the wall of windows and paints him in red and blue shadows. There are no cookies, no trays.

Jack’s brow lingers on confusion before settling into bemused indulgence. When Kent beckons, he follows.

-

Forgotten birthdays

Kent shrugs and says, “In Jack’s defense, mine’s easy.”

“Don’t help,” Jack warns lowly, hands resting in tense fists on the edge of the table. His knuckles brush the edge of his dinner plate. Conversation around the table dies deferentially, and he presses his knee into Kent’s thigh.

Kent cuts a pointed glance in his direction and arches a challenging eyebrow before saying, “National holiday and all.”

“Don’t,” Jack repeats with equally sharp edges, “help.”

“Well,” Bittle says, all teeth and lemon juice, “isn’t that nice. He just had to remember mine.”

Kent sips his drink. “Or, you know. Not.”

-

The sound of your name

They're a matched set of short, hard consonants.

Jack’s tongue softens the vowels sometimes, lilting them rounder and changing them to something endearing, something that exposes the soft underbelly. Only sometimes, and largely by accident.

Kent says his name like it’s a knife, something to slip under his chin or between his ribs, something to slice through the noose or to carve initials into his chest.

From astride Jack’s hips in the dark, body curled low enough for their foreheads to touch, Kent says it like a dagger drawn across two palms. Jack, in turn, says it like a salve.

-

Things you never said

“I wasn’t their kid,” Kent says stiffly as he drifts along the backyard ice. His blades grate against the choppy surface, unsteady in a borrowed pair of Bob’s old skates. Jack had sprung this on him, forgetting the difference in their sizes, and had to make do. Kent glances towards the house, towards the remnants of an awkward lunch. “I get it. It wasn’t happening to me.”

Jack bats a puck from side to side. Jealously lives along his spine, a strangling vine woven between the vertebrae. He imagines sinking his teeth into the meat of Kent’s neck and tearing.

-

Dust on a bookshelf

Jack reaches back and shoves at his hip.

“Slow,” he rasps. “It’s been— a while. You gotta go slow.”

Kent bites back everything else and asks, “He never wanted to fuck you?”

“Would it be better if he had?”

“Yeah,” Kent says, stroking a palm up the line of his back, “because then you’d remember how to take it.”

“I remember,” Jack says, voice snippy. “I’m just— hnnh.”

“Oh,” Kent says, nudging forward like an overeager kid on prom night. He curls his fingers over Jack’s shoulder and tugs. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jack breathes, head dropping low in supplication. “Fuck, yeah.”

-

A sweater that still smells like them

Camilla once sprayed perfume on a card before giving it to him. Bittle wore his hoodies, scented them with spiced cinnamon and the cloying sweetness of baked fruit. He kept them each, for a while, until he didn’t.

Just hockey, he lied once. Just hockey, he confessed.

There was no way to lose the trace, no landfill deep enough to bury it, no wash cycle strong enough to cleanse it. There was just hockey—just pads and plastic and blades and tape, just the boards and the crease and the zones and the box, just day, night, and everything else.

-

Lost numbers in an old phone

They come in from the evening air chilled and flushed to a delicate dessert—coffee, a bowl of fruit, a neatly-sliced pound cake cut thinly, a can of whipped cream—spread across the dining table. Kent washes his hands in the kitchen sink as Jack heads for the first floor restroom.

While his fingers are wet with foaming coconut-scented soap, Bob claps a warm palm onto his shoulder.

“It’s good to see you, kiddo,” he says, thick fingers squeezing. “Seems like just yesterday you were spending the summer here.”

“Yeah,” Kent says. He tips the faucet hotter until it scalds.

-

“It used to be ours.”

He worries his teeth on the edges of Kent’s Cup tattoo and traces the lines with the flat of his tongue. In fifteen minutes, he needs to be in the shower, so that in twenty-five minutes he can be in the lobby, so that in thirty-five minutes he can be in a taxi on the way to the airport.

They had days in June, once, that belonged to them. Ever before and ever since, life is a timetable.

“Gonna get me going again, Zimms,” Kent complains sleepily, fisting a hand in his hair. Jack grips him more tightly and inhales.

-

Empty train stations

“I hid in the coatroom too long,” Jack explains with a cough as the catering staff works, stripping tablecloths and stacking cloches.

Kent loosens his tie. “Seriously?”

“I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye. It was nice.”

“Yeah, we raised some good money.” He arches a brow. “The coat room?” When Jack shrugs, a slow smile creeps over Kent’s face. He laughs—exuberantly, infectiously, bringing Jack along—and says, “Zimms, you fucking weirdo—”

Jack pounces.

“You want to grab something to eat?”

“I just spent fifteen-K on catering,” Kent says, rolling his cuffs up his forearms. “Yeah, let’s go.”

-

Childhood

“So all that stuff Rans and Holtzy found about you two—”

“Don’t,” Jack says to his interlocked fingers as he rests his forearms on the railing. The night breeze ruffles his hair. He never comes up to the roof. It’s different from climbing out Shitty’s window and sitting on the Haus’ shingles. Higher.

“Brah.” A puff of smoke drifts out over the city. “The dude is sitting in your apartment, watching playoff highlights. He's eating on the couch.”

He’s wearing a pair of Jack’s sweatpants and a bruise on the inside of his thigh in the shape of Jack’s mouth.

-

Echoes of laughter

The house has three wings, so when Kent pulls him into a room—a library, lined with history, choked in shadows and mahogany—the rest of the party falls away. Nobody will miss them so long as the groom and the beer and the strippers are around.

“I’m negotiating my contracts all wrong,” Kent says against his mouth as they stumble into the edge of a desk. Jack’s fingers dig into the backs of his thighs. “This place is insane.”

“Who cares?” Jack mumbles back. “It’s in fucking Minnesota.”

Kent laughs, and the trailing noise of heavy base is eclipsed.

-

Unsent postcards

“What if I hadn’t been as good as you?” Kent asks, water beating against his shoulders as the skin pinks.

“You’re not as good as me,” Jack chirps with hard-won casualness.

“Fuck off. I’m serious. Would it have been different if I was just some guy going into the draft?”

A frown blooms. “Parse.”

The conversation is old, already rehashed too often. Jack wipes the lingering drops of water from his face with an equally wet hand, and Kent waits.

“I don’t know,” Jack finally says, taking a damp step forward. “But this would be different. It wouldn’t be this.”

-

Ghost towns and hometowns

“People live here,” Kent objects. Jack tilts his crown back against the headrest and waves his arm out the open window as though to use the desert landscape as his entire argument. The tires chew up the open road, a retracting tape measure carrying them back towards Vegas. “Just because your ass can’t appreciate the beauty—”

“You’re embarrassing yourself, Kenny.”

The hand cupped loosely around the gearshift darts over and slaps Jack’s chest. Jack catches the fingers before they can retreat.

“It’s mainly tourists,” Kent concedes as Jack puts his mouth to the dip between thumb and pointer and sucks.

-

Shadows on the wall

They take turns making assurances—nobody is going to care that it’s catered; that shirt looks fine; I can play nice, Jesus Christ; it’s not a big deal, you’ve met them before—from the moment they open their eyes in the morning. Ten minutes before anyone even arrives, Kent slumps tiredly onto an island stool with a headache.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Jack declares.

Kent stares at the neatly-set table, the folded napkins. “It looks fine. This is for a guy that once tried to serve me alcohol out of an old bathtub. I think it’s fine.”

-

“I thought I saw you.”

“Single and ready to mingle again, huh?” Kent greets when Jack joins him at the high top, squeezing his plate beside Kent’s own and shuffling around the narrow base until their shoulders touch. “I should’ve seen this coming.”

“Tell me to leave if you’d rather be alone,” Jack challenges.

Fire catches in the pit of his stomach and licks up his spine. Quietly, he reaches out and snags Jack’s neglected champagne. Jack’s eyes track the movement of the flute to his smirking mouth and the bob of his throat.

“Any good?” he asks.

Kent licks his lips. “Tell me later.”

-

Abandoned houses

“Not as many as you’d think,” Kent says, fingertips strolling the curves of Jack’s shoulders. “Mostly other athletes. It helped when it felt like mutually assured destruction.”

Jack keeps his head still so he can’t be accused of digging his chin into Kent’s stomach on purpose. “Anyone I should know?” he asks. He plucks at the fine hairs on Kent’s thigh, golden-white in the morning sun.

“Keep dreaming. I’m not giving you names.”

Jack protests, “You know about my ex.”

“And he knew about me,” Kent says, a blunt instrument against Jack’s temple: accusation, indictment, judgment, and sentence. Jack winces.

-

A voice from the past

Kent’s invitation—gaudy, embossed, too thick—comes with a plus one. Jack gets nothing.

“Can you blame him?” Kent asks, not entirely gently but not entirely maliciously. It’s a fine line he walks with grace lately, but Jack feels ungenerous as he stares at the mini-itinerary now hanging from the refrigerator. Somehow, it feels like a failing report card, red ink and single-digit performances displayed for guests to tut over. “When’s the last time—”

“I know,” Jack bites out. Nobody from the Q would have made his wedding invitation list either. He only ever really had the one friend anyway.

-

The last photograph

“I guess putting your shrine to yourself in the guest bedroom is technically a power move,” Kent says, dropping his duffel onto the floor. Jack nudges it aside with the toe of his sneaker as Kent crosses to the shelves and begins inspecting.

“Should I put it in the living room like you do?”

“Only if it’s worth looking at.” Kent runs a finger down the side of a frame. When Jack steps closer, he sees the many faces of their Rimouski team smiling up at him. “We were so fucking young,” Kent says in an exhale. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

-

“I kept it, just in case.”

Poolside, Kent's sprawled on the lounge as he flicks through his phone. The deck is mobbed, so Jack ends up behind Kent’s chair, looking down at the humidity-frizzed hair of his temporary, one-weekend captain.

“It wouldn’t kill you to read a book,” he says.

Kent barely blinks. “But then what would you get condescending about when we’re together?” Leaning over, he tugs the towel off the unoccupied chaise to his right and nods at it. “All yours.”

Jack sits.

At the tail of a deep, meditative breath, Kent asks, “Should we have talked about this before today?”

Jack shrugs. “Probably.”

-

Coffee and quiet mornings

“I forgot you were funny,” Kent confesses in a syrupy whisper, his eyes a deep forest green in the shadowed hallway. Jack drifts too close for deniability, loose ends of his tie swaying forward, cross-contaminating their space. Over Kent's shoulder, the sharp corners of his front door loom, a threat and a promise. His cowlick curls up beneath the carefully layered gel, and he shrugs. “I don’t know how, but I did.”

“It’s four in the morning,” Jack reminds him, “and you’re crashing.”

“I’m not,” Kent says. He stops, and Jack shuffles into him, and they domino through the door.

-

Old handwriting

Jack runs his fingertips across the notepad, tracing the ridges where the pen has dented and stained the paper.

“I remember you practicing,” he admits, lingering on the harsh points of the K as they cross the guide lines. Constantly, he had looked over and found Kent scribbling his name onto the edges of newspapers, across the backs of junk mail, and in the margins of to-do lists. Dread had sat in his stomach like a stone.

Kent taps the pen on the counter. “I remember you making fun of me.”

“It felt like bad luck,” Jack says. Kent winces.

-

Fleeting summers

The notification slips onto Kent’s home screen while he’s in the shower, and Jack stares at the cheerful reminder from Jet Blue with sourness on his tongue.

When it fades to black, he’s left staring at his own bitter expression. A moment later, the reminder dings again.

“Are you going through my phone?” Kent asks, voice twisted with amusement. Water clings to his chest as he holds the too-small towel to his groin in the bathroom doorway. “I swear, that prince messaged me first, and he really needed the money.”

He acts surprised when Jack tows him in and down.

-

Left behind

“It’s embarrassing,” Jack says, thumb hooked into the hem of his shirt and holding it to his shoulder to expose the bruise on his pec to the computer. “I had to cover it with a gauze pad for practice.”

On screen, Kent lounges against his headboard and drags his thumb over the very teeth that burst the blood vessels in the first place. “What did you say it was?”

“Nobody asked,” Jack says, tugging his shirt back down.

“What were you going to tell them it was?” Kent rephrases, smirking. “Curling iron? Cut yourself manscaping?”

Jack frowns, caught. “Dermatologist appointment.”

-

“We were happy once.”

Sometimes, and that turns out to be the key word, they are a toothache: a dull, throbbing pain that radiates, that makes it impossible to sleep, to eat, to breathe. They are phantom limbs, too: amputated and exorcised, still so real that the feeling clings to the mind like a scar on the gray matter. They are blisters—raw, open wounds—and ulcers—holes punched though, drowning in acid.

But not always, Jack reminds himself as he watches Kent dangle a leg off the hammock as he reads. His glasses sit low, and his mouth moves absently, shaping the words.

-

Home

They make it as far as the couch. Night has circled back to pre-dawn outside, spilling an odd blue glow through the windows and shadowing their faces as they tug each other free of their suits with eager fingers.

“Do you remember?” he breathes against Kent’s neck, decades unfolding themselves as his calloused palms drag against flushed skin. He tastes all the bitter words and broken promises along his spine, the lingering tenderness just behind his ear. “I used to wish I didn’t.”

Kent says nothing, head hard to his forearm, but he melts like warmed-over wax under Jack’s hands.