4. Brandon
FOUR
brANDON
Brandon couldn’t wait to make it to the NHL, if only to have his own hotel room. The Iowa Stars were in Manitoba that night, and Brandon’s apartment mate, Skylar, had gotten reassigned to be his road roomie too.
On good days, he and Skylar could share the intensity of focus that their goals required. When they were on the same page about hockey, things were frictionless. They got each other. On days like today, however, Brandon wanted to push him out the window.
“It’s like coaches aren’t even seeing when I score goals,” Skylar complained, sprawled out on his bed near the window.
Their captain, Beck, sat on the desk chair in the corner of the room, his feet up on Skylar’s mattress.
Skylar’s “platonic other half” had been sexiled that evening.
His own roommate had a regular hookup in Winnipeg, and from experience, he thought he’d probably be without a hotel room for a couple of hours.
Brandon looked at his watch. It had been 18 minutes.
Skylar and Beck passed one brain cell back and forth to each other.
With 22-year-old Skylar’s maturity level (minus his whining) and 32-year-old Beck’s youthfulness, the two of them met somewhere in between their ages.
Back home in Iowa, they had the decency to hang out at Beck’s place primarily.
It meant the rhythm of their conversation didn’t leave room for Brandon.
They didn’t expect Brandon to participate, and he would take advantage of that.
He sat in his own bed after a half hour of stick-handling practice, teeth brushed, under the covers, his laptop on his lap.
He had a Word document open with his story idea at the top and some of the thoughts that his classmates had underneath it, but he didn’t know how to write a story—or even how to start.
His professor had given a handout with a basic plot arc.
Your main character needed to want something.
They worked toward that goal. At the climax, they achieved it or they did not, and then the story was over.
Sounded a lot easier than it was turning out to be.
He needed to think up something specific, a specific experience that his main character could help his little sister have, but with Skylar yapping in his ear, the same five complaints as always, he couldn’t think.
Brandon enjoyed being in school. He needed something outside of hockey, something to think about—a place his mind could go that wasn’t hockey or worrying about Ash.
But he was easily distracted from it that night.
Beck and Skylar decided to watch TV, and Beck crawled into Skylar’s bed as Skylar took charge of the remote.
Brandon wondered if Skylar had a crush on Beck sometimes, but other times they did the most platonic-ass shit in the world, even for a homoerotic sport like hockey.
Skylar grabbed one of his pillows and shoved it between him and Beck, telling him to stay on his side.
If there was romantic intent there, the vibes were undetectable.
Instead of watching TV along with them, Brandon pulled out his phone and opened it to the Instagram DM he had with Gabe.
He’d been thinking about Gabe in the days that had passed since their small group meeting.
Gabe was beautiful. He had this rusty-auburn hair that was short and piecey, as well as a face covered in freckles, including one on his lip right by his cupid’s bow.
The bags under his eyes that he’d been rocking during the meeting were present in a lot of the photos he shared on Instagram.
In the days that had passed since the meeting, Brandon had watched his stories every day. He saw more than one job at the weirdest hours, classes, a bunch of roommates. His house looked fun. In the photos posted on his feed, he always had the biggest smile on his face.
Brandon kept investigating. Gabe had an art account linked in the bio of his personal account, and Brandon clicked on it, not expecting much, but Gabe drew some incredible shit.
He had a four-panel comic with little characters that recurred.
He posted what probably was work from assignments, in many different kinds of media.
The most recent posts of his comic strip were hand-drawn, while older posts looked digital.
Brandon wondered if that was an artistic choice.
Regardless, Gabe was incredible at what he did.
Brandon scrolled back up to the top, hit follow, and noticed he had a link in the bio for a Patreon.
One click revealed why he had content behind a paywall on a subscription site.
There were a few preview images in the same general style it seemed Gabe favored—an eclectic mix of colored pencils and what looked like paint pen.
The art style was beautiful, but the images were explicit. Gay, and explicit, and superhot.
Subtly, Brandon tilted his phone away from Skylar and Beck, even though they weren’t paying attention to him at all.
They were watching Jurassic Park and arguing during the commercials.
Neither of them saw the extremely graphic sexual drawings.
He signed up immediately, using an email address that didn’t have his name in it.
He could spare the three dollars a month it cost to view Gabe’s uncensored art.
The entire account was drawings of body parts, varietal penetration, dripping liquids, and blissed-out faces, and every single person was a man, whether cis or trans. If Gabe wasn’t gay, Brandon would have to rethink every fact he knew about human history.
Most of these drawings were loose colored pencil sketches, a light blue initial sketch with line work in a darker color drawn over it. It looked somewhat casual, but always fun. This was where Gabe’s joy was.
Brandon was getting as horny as the drawings were. He exited Patreon and swiped back to the original drawing account. He’d revisit Gabe’s horny art when he was not with his teammates.
The other link in the bio of his art Instagram was to a shop, and when Gabe opened it, he saw two dozen art prints for sale.
Not all of them were the classy, appropriate drawings from this account.
Many were the sexy, explicit drawings that he’d been so interested in initially.
He remembered Gabe’s joke about needing a sugar daddy, about seeing how much he worked, based on Instagram Stories.
He thought about the bags under Gabe’s eyes, and selfishly, he wanted to be able to look at those explicit illustrations anytime he wanted.
He went through the shop and added one of each of the prints to his cart and checked out.
It was a few hundred dollars’ worth of art prints.
There were a couple he could send to Ashley, that she’d like, and he’d keep the explicit ones for himself .
His phone remembered his credit card number, and while he was excited about receiving the prints, he was also weirdly excited at the idea of making sure Gabe had some extra money in his bank account this week. He couldn’t buy Gabe a Ferrari, but he could do this.
The next morning, Brandon woke up early enough to grab coffee at the coffee shop down the street from their hotel. There would be coffee at team breakfast, but it was never any good. Plus, the short walk gave him the chance to call his sister.
It was frigid in Winnipeg, but thankfully not windy. He knew his nose and cheeks would be bright red by the time he made it back to the hotel.
“Hey, Ash,” he said when she answered. She must not have had class this morning.
“Good morning. Canada today, eh?” His family tracked his schedule closely, like most guys’ families did. Regardless, he still appreciated it.
“Game tonight against the Wings. Gotta get some redemption from last time.” The last game they had played against the Wings had made Brandon pray for a mercy rule in the AHL.
“You got it. Are you getting any hints from your coaches that you might get sent up?”
“Depends on someone either sucking hard or getting injured. It’s hard to hope for that.”
“But hope we do.” The hardest part of living far away from home was that Ashley used to come to all of his games, and now she could only come when he was in town.
Because of strong peanut-related anaphylaxis, she couldn’t fly.
Especially not just for a hockey game. Utah didn’t have an AHL team, so making the NHL was his best chance of Ashley getting to go to a game.
“We can hope. What’s going on over there? How are beef trials going?” Expanding Ashley’s diet was a priority since her immune system had been fairly stable lately.
“Slow and steady. It’s been a little over a week of eating a tiny, tiny bit every day, and my doctor said I could start increasing.”
“Sick,” Brandon said. “How’s that needlepoint going?”
“It’s cross-stitch,” she said. He could hear the eye roll in her voice. Brandon could never remember the difference. Was needlepoint a real thing?
“Send me photos of your progress.”
“I also have…actual news,” she said, a lightness entering her voice.
“Oh?” Brandon racked his mind for what she could be telling him. He didn’t think she was moving out. She was getting her degree online like him (except taking a full course load), and he knew she was still two years away from finishing. She had a pet dander allergy, but maybe she got a fish?
“I started seeing someone.”
“What?” he asked, genuinely surprised. Happy surprised, but still surprised.
“You sound like I told you I went to an all-you-can-eat buffet or something.”
“Just wasn’t expecting it. Tell me about it.” Brandon had made it to the coffee shop, but now was not the time to say goodbye. He took a seat on a frigid bench outside.
“His name is Logan. We met on an app.”
“And he…gets it?”
“He gets it. He believes it’s actually real.
” The number of people who didn’t think Ashley was “actually” allergic to so many things was disheartening and alarming.
“He has this little notebook he’s been carrying around to write down all the shit he’s learning.
My lore. It is fucking exhausting to have to communicate all of the little things that keep me alive that are second nature for me now, but he’s trying. It’s nice.”
“Is he cute?”
She laughed. “I’ll send you a photo.”
It was a selfie, and regardless of whether or not he thought his little sister’s boyfriend was cute (not his type, thank god), he only saw how big the smile on her face was.
He and Ashley had looked more like each other when they were kids, but when Ashley’s bangs were out of her face, he could see the resemblance.
“Speaking of sending stuff, I bought some prints online. I’m going to send you a couple.”
“Footprints? Fingerprints? I don’t know what you mean.”
“Art prints. Prints of…art.”
“Now it’s my turn to be a dick for being surprised. Why did you buy art prints?”
“One of my classmates is an artist. He’s got a bunch of stuff online. Figured I’d support him. Plus, they’re cool. You’ll like them.”
“Thanks. I’ll be waiting by the mailbox.”
Brandon laughed. “All right, I gotta go. Love you.”
“Score seventy goals so you can come see me next month.”
“Doing my best,” he promised.
He realized after he hung up that he didn’t tell her about the story he was writing for class.