Page 2 of Two for Holding
They absolutely should.They would be spending the next seven to ten months sharing a locker room and a charter plane and a team bus.What did they do, sit quietly next to one another, not talking?Jax wouldn’t survive for ten minutes, let alone eighty-two hockey games.
Breezy could definitely see his trepidation.“Here, come meet East.He’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
Twice now, someone had referred him to Easton for guidance, though he wasn’t the captain of this team.As Breezy led him across the locker room, Jax peeked out through the door.On the fresh, empty ice, Crowler drew circles around and around, all by himself, skating faster and faster as he went.
He was so good.Why was he so alone?
one
Tom: Person on the team most likely to be in bed by nine?Oh, that’s, uh, probably me, to be honest.Not much of a partier.What’s next?Person on the team who’s worst at video games.I’m gonna have to say me again.Person on the team with the least-cool ride— Kayleigh, are these all just me?
Top comments:
bethanyjones: I went to high school with Tom Crowler.Yes, he is exactly that boring.
SFCLions: watching Tom talk about how he goes to bed at nine makes me want to lick him all over and then tuck him in.
(From “San Francisco Sea Lions Call Each Other Out For Fun,” posted to YouTube 10/15/2024)
It was four in the morning, and Tom was awake.
His hip twinged again.It wouldn’t stop no matter how many stretches he did and arnica compresses he used.He had a fool’s hope that rotating it the right way for long enough would make everything click into place the way it ought to, so he hadn’t brought the issue up with the trainers yet.As he lay awake in bed examining the play of shadows across the ceiling as lone cars passed through Edmonton’s otherwise dead nightlife, Tom had to admit that he was, in fact, a fool, and the hope was probably for nothing.
With a groan, he leveraged himself out of the too-soft hotel bed and down the hall to the ice machine.He probably wouldn’t get back to sleep anytime soon, but he might as well do something productive about the hip.He’d be spending hours cramped in an airplane seat to San Francisco soon enough.
He was limping back up the corridor when he heard it: the telltale sound of a door clicking open and the whoosh of someone leaving their room.
Assigned as captain ten years ago at all of twenty-two years old, Tom had been touted as one of the most promising players the NHL had seen in years.With three ninety-point-plus seasons behind him and no history of significant injury, everyone thought he’d be the one to take the Bay Area’s brand-new expansion team all the way when they drafted him.It was a lot of pressure for a guy whose most pressing worries included helmet acne and whether he’d be able to grow a playoff beard.
One of the first lessons Tom learned as captain was to keep his nose firmly out of his teammates’ business when it came to extracurricular activities.He did not need to know who had cheated on their wife, who had crossed the very shaky line between acceptable and unacceptable drug use, and who had a penchant for waifish, potentially underage prostitutes.When the inevitable press conference about the divorce or the lawsuit came, he wanted to be able to say, as honestly as possible, that he’d had no idea and was as shocked as everyone else.
What compelled him to turn and look this time was anyone’s guess.
In a series of events not unlike bearing witness to a particularly heinous traffic accident, Tom noticed three things in quick succession.
First, the room number.He’d handed the keycard for 2247 to Jaxon Grant some twelve hours prior.
Second, the person exiting.A dark-haired, dark-eyed man in his mid-to-late twenties in gray sweatpants and a rumpled number 16 Grant jersey (not even a navy-and-sage San Francisco Sea Lions jersey, but one of the old, hideously orange Philadelphia ones) slipped through the door.He wore the shirt knotted at the waist the way Tom had seen some guys’ girlfriends wear them.
Third, Jaxon Grant.He stood in the doorway, shirtless, his blond hair tousled, with his hand on the other man’s bare hip.
Tom turned tail and explicitly did not run back to his hotel room.He did walk fast enough to make his hip twinge more than it already did.
He didn’t think about what he’d seen while he lay in bed with ice slowly melting on his hip through a fluffy white hotel towel, concentrating instead on going over last night’s penalty kill.Maybe they could experiment with switching out Phil Easton for Chris Calabrese.Calabrese might have been younger and less experienced, but Phil had been struggling with his knees this season.
Tom didn’t think about it while he did a half hour of stretching on the scratchy carpet to the dulcet sound of CNN.He had a policy of not watching any sports broadcasting before 6:00 a.m.to establish some sort of work-life balance.
He definitely didn’t think about it when he read the text from his mom.
Mom:Good game last night, sweetheart!I hope you keep winning!
It was a little too close for comfort, he typed in response and then deleted it.She wouldn’t care that Edmonton almost had them when they’d equalized in the third, and only Jax Grant on a breakaway had saved them from overtime.No wonder Jax had gone out to celebrate, leading to— But no, Tom wasn’t thinking about it.
We can’t win every game, he tried next.On consideration, it seemed unnecessarily defeatist for the third game of the season.
Finally, he settled onThanks, Mom.
Tom kept up his streak of not thinking about it during breakfast.At seven sharp, none of his teammates joined him, because he’d been one of the only ones who hadn’t gone out last night.Tom debated sitting with the coaching staff, but he wasn’tthatold yet.Although he supposed the new head coach, Morris, had barely ten years on Tom.He carried an air of exhaustion about him that spoke of having been around the block which made him seem older.And he brought his own homemade salads to work like a real adult.Tom still lived in the high-rise apartment right by the practice rink he’d bought with his first big contract, and while technically capable of cooking, he was in no way organized enough to do meal prep.He had no idea what he’d talk to Morris about over breakfast.Morris had a wildly different life than Tom’s despite seeing him every day; up until this season, Morris had worked in the Utah college hockey circuit, which was why no one in the show had ever heard of him until the GM gave him the head coach gig.Tom didn’t know anything about life outside the NHL and couldn’t make small talk about much else.He doubted the man would appreciate his thoughts on the penalty kill before having his morning coffee.
