Page 68 of Two for Holding
Afterward, Breezy passed around a sign-up sheet with dates for visiting the kid’s shelter.He’d marked the dates PR would be with them, filming content for the team’s Instagram, with a sparkly purple gel pen because: “I don’t know, it seems kinda fitting.”
“Why do you even own this?”Luca asked.
Breezy muttered something indistinguishable.Next to him, Mooney choked on a laugh.
Luca’s eyebrows shot up.“I’m sorry.Could you repeat that?”
Letting out an aggrieved sigh, Breezy said, “It makes writing grocery lists more fun, okay?”
Tom used the ensuing mass hysteria to sign up for dates when no one would be filming him.For most of them, he’d be working with Dmitriyev and Abrahamov.Tom was pleasantly surprised they’d signed up.They’d spend the whole time talking to each other in Russian and only speak English when spoken to, which Tom could live with.It might even be nice, he thought guiltily, to get through his time at the shelter without much conversation.Only two of the dates he picked were at the same time as Jax, but maybe it would be good for him not to spend too much time in public with Jax.Sitting next to Jax in the locker room, pretending he hadn’t seen him naked, pretending he didn’t know what Jax looked like when he came, made Tom break out in a sweat he had to blame on practice.
Good, was the answer.Jax always looked good, but when he came, his eyes went wide and shocked, and his lips parted, and Tom wanted to see it again.Maybe after practice.
After practice, it turned out Jax had to talk to PR about a video series of him and Breezy at the shelter.
Tom tried to ignore the surge of guilt for not doing his part.It wasn’t only that Jax was doing something good for people like him—like them—he’d also been right about it being good for the team.Even the guys who blustered about not being able to remember all the letters in “LGBTQIA+” were checking timeslots with their friends and asking Jax what PR would expect during filming.No one questioned it, and no one opted out despite it not being mandatory.
To have somewhere to put the feelings caused by this realization—feelings Tom neither understood nor had words for—he hit the spinning bikes in the team exercise room after practice.When Jax asked where he was headed, he called it a “cooldown.”But he ended up going for so long that his posture, hunched over the bike, worsened his hip from a mild twinge to an ache.He forced himself to slow down and stop.He really needed to find a way to get out of his head without doing more damage to his body.Long walks, maybe.But walking around town alone just to get out of his apartment seemed like the kind of thing a seventy-year-old would do.He could go with someone, but Phil wasn’t up for it, and asking Jax would be futile.The shelter project started in nine days.Only nine days until Tom couldn’t go on walks with Jax, or invite him over, or…
“Hey, uh, Cap?Tom?”
“Hmm?”
Howie edged around the corner of the bike.“Hi.Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.What’s up?”
Howie cast an anxious glance toward the free weights, where Hayes and Vanderbilt spotted each other for deadlifts.“Maybe somewhere, uh, private?”
They ended up in an upscale sushi bar on the main drag in Palo Alto.During his time with the Sea Lions, Tom had tried nearly every sushi place in the area as the food met their need for large amounts of healthy protein and little to no dairy.Howie eyed the prices suspiciously, which reminded Tom he was still on an entry-level contract.He resolved to pay for them both.Good seafood didn’t come cheap, but the sooner Howie learned how worthwhile those macros could be for his conditioning, the better.
“So what’s going on?”
Howie sighed and pushed his sashimi around with the fork he’d asked for specially.Someone had to teach him how to use chopsticks, and Tom was afraid he might be the someone.“Um, so Vanderbilt was talking to me before.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, uh, he said all this stuff about how the project Breezy and Jax are doing is only for show, and if I want to make it in the NHL, I need to, um, pretend to be into that sort of thing?”
Tom dipped his sushi into the low-sodium soy sauce.“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, what he said was more ‘you need to talk the talk; you don’t need to walk the walk.’But I think he meant the shelter thing is all for show.And then he said I should go clubbing with him and Hayes sometime, just the three of us.”
“Do you want to?”
“I—” Howie peered around the restaurant as if anyone here cared about ice hockey, let alone about intra-team gossip.“I don’t know?Like, I don’t think the shelter stuff is about image.I’ve been researching this all week, and if we wanted to look good, we probably should have gone with a children’s ward in a hospital or an animal rescue center or something.Did you know the shelter takes in trans kids too?A lot of hockey fans could get pissed about this.”
Tom hadn’t because Tom had been trying very, very hard not to know anything about the shelter.
Howie picked at his sushi.“But Vanderbilt has been one of my favorite players since I was twelve.I watched all his interviews, and I even bought this water bottle he did a sponsorship deal for.It cost me three months’ allowance.”
Christ, Tom felt old.Vanderbilt was a rookie during Tom’s third year in the league.It did make sense.Vanderbilt played a fast, physical game similar to Howie’s.It was why Vanderbilt rounded out their first line so well while Howie played on the second with Mooney.Vanderbilt couldn’t reach the same speeds as Tom nor make the intuitive leaps Jax did, but he was fierce and relentless, and sometimes those were necessary skills.
Unfortunately, he was also a dick.
“But, um…all the stuff we talked about on the plane is also really important to me.”
Tom breathed out a sigh of relief and stuffed some sushi into his mouth to avoid saying as much.As captain, he had to at least playact at being vaguely neutral.At least, he thought he did.The NHL rulebook and the CBA had no helpful insight on how a captain ought to react to homophobia when he himself was gay.He chewed and swallowed and took his time collecting reasonable words.
