10. Gabe
TEN
GABE
Gabe didn’t hear about Parker and Mac’s parents much.
They were ultra conservatives who were butthurt about their kids going no-contact; even though they didn’t appear to like their children, they still wanted something to post on social media.
To brag about. And every once in a while, their mom got a wild hair and would try to convince Mac to marry a woman and have babies, or she’d ask Parker if he had “gotten over his gender thing” and was ready to become the beautiful young woman she raised.
“This woman expects me to wake up one day and be an entirely different person. I haven’t worn a dress since I was six. She genuinely wants Mac to settle down with the right girl so he can have grandbabies. She wants kids that she can post on Facebook for clout, and not the queer weirdos she got.”
They were in the kitchen and Parker was angrily washing dishes while Gabe drew him on his iPad.
The sleeves of his cream Henley were rolled up to his elbows as he ranted, and Gabe loved that he’d drawn Parker enough to know how the slope of his nose changed when he angled his head differently, the soft bow of his lips.
There was intimacy there, the safe familial kind that had always been hard for Gabe to access.
He’d been raised by a single dad who’d checked out when Gabe got independent enough to take care of himself. He didn’t think his dad was homophobic the way Parker and Mac’s parents were, but Gabe didn’t feel loved and supported either. They all knew they had to get their familial bonds elsewhere.
“And then my dad goes in on Mac, because he thinks Mac needs to get a ‘real job,’ and says stuff like ‘even Parker figured it out,’ and I want to scream. Don’t you fucking dare pit us against each other.
” Tension that Gabe only noticed because he was drawing Parker rose in his shoulders, and a soapy mason jar slipped out of his hands.
“I should never answer their phone calls and I know it, but they bait me by telling me someone is sick or injured, knowing I’ll answer and— fuck,” Parker said as the glass shattered in the sink.
Gabe tossed his iPad onto the little kitchen table and rushed to help Parker, easing him away from the sink to assess the damage.
“No cuts?” he asked, trying to see any red through the suds on Parker’s hands.
“No. Just a waste of a perfectly good jar.”
“The next time I go to the thrift store, I’ll grab you a new one, how ’bout that?
” Gabe asked, knowing Parker wouldn’t want him to buy him anything new.
What would the point of that be, when the thrift store always had a stock of the wide-mouth pint jars Parker preferred for both drinking glasses and food storage for only 79 cents?
Parker nodded stiffly, and Gabe pulled him back to the sink to rinse his hands off, then made him sit at the table while Gabe cleaned up the glass in the sink. When he finished making sure he got all the shards, he started in on the dishes, even though it was Parker’s dish week on the chore chart.
“I always love when you draw me. You make something that I don’t hate looking at.”
When Gabe looked over his shoulder, Parker was looking at his iPad screen, the sketchy mess of Parker doing dishes far enough along to be recognizable.
“Not to toot my own horn here, but that is what you look like.”
“The level of abstraction is nice though. Oh, you got an email from the registrar.” Gabe saw a notification slip away at the top of the screen but couldn’t see what it was. Probably another tuition warning, counting down to the deadline for paying for spring semester.
“Read it for me?”
“Attention Mr. Langley, this letter confirms the receipt of your tuition for spring semester of this academic year. We appreciate the on-time payment. Keep your eyes on your email for news on course selection. A meeting with your advisor is required before you can access the class portal. Please reach out with any questions…blah blah blah. Sick, man. I didn’t realize you figured out how to pay for next semester. ”
Gabe put the bowl he was scrubbing back into the sink so he didn’t cause another dish casualty. “I didn’t.”
“Huh. I am reading this email off an expensive—and heavy, why is this thing so fucking heavy?—piece of technology that a certain hot hockey player bought you so you could continue your artful drawings of dicks, so I dunno. Maybe he did it?”
“Brandon didn’t even know—” Gabe paused to think about whether he’d told Brandon about his tuition. He complained about it loudly and frequently. And he and Brandon had been talking a lot lately. “Okay, maybe he knew. But he wouldn’t?—”
Parker raised an eyebrow at him and looked back at the iPad.
It wasn’t just the iPad. It was Venmoing him money for takeout or groceries.
He’d sent Gabe two hundred bucks when he’d told Brandon the shoulder seam on his winter coat had given out.
Gabe borrowed Duncan’s sewing machine to fix it and pocketed the cash.
He didn’t know if that was allowed, but they didn’t have terms and conditions. He never outright asked for anything.
Plus, he didn’t know if Brandon didn’t know how much things cost or if he always sent money with a huge buffer, but even when Gabe spent the money as intended, he was left with enough to have a cushion in his bank account for the first time in months.
Maybe years. He felt a bit weird about it, but the financial relief was worth it.
He wasn’t going to make plans based on Brandon’s money.
He would continue his life the way he was living it now: busting his ass at two (sometimes three) jobs, saving what he could, and trying to figure out how to make money off of art.
But when Brandon asked him how he was doing a couple of days ago, and Gabe said everything was fine, he still got a Venmo notification that Brandon had sent him $100.
The doorbell rang, and Gabe dried his hands off to go answer it. It had been years since the doorbell had made a normal sound. Now it made a distended, warped approximation of a ring, and they had trained everyone they knew to knock. The bell meant this was a stranger.
When Gabe opened the door, it was a delivery person.
“Hi, I have a delivery for Gabe Langley.” The box he held was big, but not gigantic .
“I don’t think I ordered anything,” Gabe said, mind immediately going to Brandon.
The guy shrugged. “It has your name and address on it. I have to leave it for you. If you have questions, contact the sender.”
He handed the box over. Gabe closed the door and went back inside, shaking his head in disbelief.
“What did you get, lover boy?” Parker asked when Gabe set the box on the kitchen table with a thwap .
“Let’s fucking see.” He cut the box open with a kitchen knife, and when he opened it, there was an insulated bag inside and a big frozen ice pack. “Food?”
He ripped the bag open and found a stack of premade meals. Good, balanced meals that looked like he just had to put them in the microwave.
“He likes you.”
“He…” Gabe couldn’t imagine this meaning anything else, right?
He could interpret the iPad as being self-serving.
The tuition, kind, but potentially impersonal.
This food? Brandon’s obsession with making sure he had something good to eat, the pained noise whenever he heard Gabe say the word “ramen,” that felt different. It felt like…caring.
“Just let him like you. It sounds like you’re the safe person he can talk to about shit.
Of course, he imprinted on you.” He knew Parker had a similar story.
Of finding someone right when he was struggling the most with his gender and sexuality.
Someone he’d felt seen and cared for by.
Of course, Gabe also knew that situation had gone south.
No one in the house brought it up, so Gabe zipped his lips.
Brandon was out here caring for him without being asked. The least Gabe could do was care back.
He and Parker loaded the meals into the fridge and freezer, and he invited Parker to eat some as well. Then he grabbed his iPad and headed upstairs to his room.
Gabe
Hey call me when you’re free. I work at 9 so if I don’t pick up that’s why.
It was two in the afternoon, but Gabe knew by now that hockey schedules had no gods and no masters.
It was nice to be forming a friendship with someone who had a schedule as weird as his.
Even Gabe’s schedule had a little more regularity than Brandon’s, which was a feat.
Brandon was on a roadie at the moment. Gabe wasn’t even sure what city he was in, but before he could thumb open his NHL app to check, his phone rang.
“Hi,” Brandon said when he picked up. His voice sounded tentative, like he was unsure about how Gabe received his recent money spending adventures. Gabe didn’t always accept gracefully. He was still working on it.
“I got an interesting email today. And an interesting delivery.”
“Oh?”
“All right, all right, Gatlin. You can spare me the mystery. The premade meals were from you.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “I know you don’t have a lot of time to cook, and the dinners you pack when you work a grocery shift make me want to cry, so… It’s a subscription. Every week, so tell me if that’s too many meals. Or your roommates can eat them too.”
Gabe sighed. There was a tangle in his chest. His fierce independence was fighting with how good it felt to have someone look out for him.
They were still so new to each other on one hand.
But on the other, even though Gabe had the love of his roommates who functioned together like a family and would always go to bat for him, they all had their own shit to deal with, too.
Gabe never wanted to overburden any of them.
It felt good to have someone outside of his household on his side.
“Thank you,” he finally said, emotion thick in his voice.
“It’s not a big deal. I got a meal service recommendation from one of my teammates, and I just thought…you need protein and nutrients, and this sounded like a good way?—”
“Brandon, that was incredibly sweet of you.” If he was there instead of…who knows, Florida? Canada somewhere? Gabe would have forced him into a hug.
“I hope they’re good. They’re made by a chef who admittedly started the business to feed athletes, so each meal might be a meal and a half for you?—”
“I really appreciate it,” Gabe emphasized.
“You’re welcome.”
“I also got an email from the registrar…”
“Oh,” Brandon said again, playing dumb.
“It sounds like someone paid my tuition for spring semester.”
“That was nice of them.”
“Brandon. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
“There is no way in hell I’m letting you miss another semester. You deserve to do your senior year all together.”
“I can finally start planning and scheduling my senior show,” Gabe said, the realization dawning on him now that he was thinking about it.
His advisor knew his situation. How he was in and out of school based on when he could afford it.
She had advised waiting to plan his senior show until his final semester. And now he had it.
“Really? That’s awesome. What are you going to do?”
“My figure drawing professor, who has taught pretty much all of my drawing classes because the art faculty is sparse since the school is so small, is trying to convince me to base my project around figure drawing, and that sounds pretty cool. It’s what I draw when I’m outside of class too, so it makes sense. ”
“What are your figure drawing classes like?” Brandon asked, and Gabe finally stretched out in his bed, relaxing into the conversation. Brandon was so genuinely curious about his life that it was easy to tell him about it. “Do you stand around in a circle and draw a naked person?”
Gabe laughed. “Pretty much exactly. Class is three hours long, and we get a break in the middle. We stand at easels or sit on drawing horses, which are these wooden bench things that you straddle that hold your drawing board up. They’re murder on your back, so I stand.
And we do different mediums and take different approaches.
There’s a new model every week, and yeah, they’re naked. ”
“Is it ever sexy?”
“So far, the models have all literally been women, so it’s not sexy for me,” Gabe joked.
When Brandon got his curiosity about figure drawing class out of him, he told Gabe about the road trip they were on (Southern California, tough life), and how nice it was to fly private.
They stayed in five-star hotels, which were a far cry from the hotels they got in the AHL, and he knew he would get sent down eventually—maybe soon, depending on the healing progress of the guy he was replacing or whether they wanted to change him out for a different AHL player to help with “development,” whatever that meant—and he wasn’t excited to go back to the bus and sharing hotel rooms.
Gabe was used to being stressed. He was used to running himself ragged and forcing his lifeless remains to still show up to work when he was spent.
He had moments where he wasn’t panicking about lack of time as school deadlines approached and bills came due, but he didn’t feel relaxed often.
But he was listening to Brandon tell him about how he’d been practicing on the power play recently, even if he hadn’t been on special teams during any games yet, and how Jackson and Ryan were helping him work on taking face-offs in their basement when they could find the time because his coach wanted to see improvement there, and for the first time in a long time, Gabe felt truly calm.