24. Brandon
TWENTY-FOUR
brANDON
The Florida sun blinded Brandon after spending so much time in the upper Midwest. The hotel they were at was on the beach, and the beach was their expected activity.
“Just get in the water,” Gabe said, voice in Brandon’s ear as he looked out his hotel window.
His eyesight wasn’t good enough to pick out all of his teammates, but Matty had a full back piece, and he could make educated guesses about the other guys around him as they played like puppies in the water.
“I don’t want to hang up on you,” Brandon complained. By now, everyone knew what had happened to Gabe, and Brandon’s teammates were being kind to him. Gabe said Ryan and Jackson sent him flowers.
“I’ve been told Wyatt is taking me to the mall to get me out of the house, so I have to go.” After a consult with an orthopedist, Gabe hadn’t been casted. He just got a custom-fitted splint.
“Are you going to be okay in a car?”
“As long as I’m not driving it, I think I’ll be fine.
” Gabe’s voice didn’t sound confident. Brandon had been in a car accident as a teenager, in the back seat of a car driven by a teammate that got T-boned by a drunk driver.
He escaped without injury, but his teammates both took some time to heal from theirs.
Getting back into a car for a while after that was not fun.
“Gotta do it sometime. Wyatt drives a Volvo, and they’re really safe. ”
“I want to wrap you up in Bubble Wrap and never let you out of my sight. The part of my brain that is always waiting for a call about Ashley is now always waiting for a call about you.”
“I promise I’ll be safe. I’ll text you when I get there and when I get home.”
“Okay,” Brandon agreed reluctantly. It was out of his control regardless. “Make him get you a Cinnabon.”
Gabe laughed that bright, beautiful smile. All Brandon could picture were the little cuts he’d gotten on his face.
“I can tell you’ve never had Duncan’s cinnamon rolls or you wouldn’t be suggesting that, but yeah, that does sound good.”
They hung up, and Brandon sent him a couple hundred bucks for whatever he wanted at the mall. Then he went to see if Jackson was still in his hotel room. He’d gotten sunburned on the beach the day before and had mentioned taking it easy.
Jackson opened his hotel room door with his laptop open in his hand.
“It’s Rando,” Jackson announced.
“Hi, Brandon,” Ryan’s voice said, coming out of the laptop speakers.
“What’s up?” Jackson asked.
“Looking for advice, I guess.”
“Okay. Hey, Ry, I gotta go.”
“No, uh, actually both of you could be helpful, I think. ”
Jackson waved him into the room and pointed at the neat side of his king bed, then climbed into the messy side. He balanced Ryan on a pillow facing the two of them.
“What’s up?” Ryan asked. He was also stretched out in bed, resting against their headboard.
Lola was cuddled on his chest. “I texted Gabe earlier today to see if he needed anything, and he apparently has an entire army of caretakers. Tell him I’m here, though, if anything comes up. Even if he just wants to see Lola.”
“I’ll tell him. His cat has been doing a good job of being a nurse, it sounds like.” Brandon wasn’t sure how Ryan got Gabe’s phone number, but he was resourceful. “Uh, I need to fess up about something.”
“Okay...” Jackson said, older-brother concern oozing out of him.
“Gabe and I…um…are not dating.”
“I don’t know what that means. Like, a situationship? Is that what you kids are calling it these days?” Ryan asked.
“We host young players so Ryan can learn all the new slang,” Jackson said, rolling his eyes.
“It’s weirder than that. When I came out to you, I told you I had a boyfriend because it felt easier than just saying ‘I’m gay.’ Like I had a reason to come out.”
“Being gay is enough of a reason,” Jackson said.
“I get it,” Ryan said. He hadn’t come out publicly until he and Jackson were married. “Sometimes it feels like too much of a ‘you’ thing otherwise. Like, why would people care?”
“Exactly. So I told you I had a boyfriend. And then you invited Gabe to the gala, and I asked him if he’d be my fake boyfriend.”
Jackson nodded along, not weirded out yet.
“And he said yes because he’s a sweetheart. And maybe also because at that point I had started…uh…paying for things for him.”
“Like…”
“I bought him an iPad. For art stuff. And the meal subscription, because I couldn’t keep knowing that he was eating ramen and peanut butter for all his shift meals at the grocery store he works at. And I paid his tuition for this semester. So maybe he felt obligated?”
“Like a sugar daddy,” Jackson said.
“Maybe? I want to say it’s complicated, but I’m not sure it is.”
“He’s your sugar baby-slash-fake boyfriend,” Jackson clarified. Ryan was quiet.
“Yeah. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s complicated,” Brandon decided.
“You said he visited you in Iowa?”
“And I compensated him for the time he was missing at work for it. And paid his way down. And…bought him some other stuff.”
“I don’t want to shatter your sugar daddy dreams or anything, but that’s pretty normal behavior. If you talked to half of your teammates, they’d report the same fucking behavior when they were trying to lock down their partners,” Jackson said.
“Really?”
“You’re young and hot and have a bunch of money. What else are you supposed to do with it?”
“Get some investments going,” Ryan said. “I’m going to have our financial guy call you.”
Brandon laughed. He didn’t exactly have “a bunch of money” yet, but the NHL money was starting to pad his bank account that he’d been draining at a faster-than-normal pace. “Okay. Well, we’re still not together. ”
“Then ask him,” Ryan said.
“He’s convinced that I only like him because he’s the only gay person I know.”
“You know us. And Burnsie,” Jackson said.
“Yeah, I know. He thinks that I only feel like this about him because he’s the first person I came out to and the first person I’ve talked to about any of this stuff.”
“He seems pretty into you.”
“But what if it’s only for the money?”
“Does it feel that way?”
“No.” It didn’t feel that way at all. In fact, if Brandon stopped sending Gabe money, he would survive. He knew Gabe appreciated the money, but Brandon wouldn’t infantilize him by pretending he needed Brandon in order to get by.
“The best advice I can give to you, as a person with a history of being a fucking idiot about this stuff,” Ryan said, “is to have a conversation with him. When you get home, bring him flowers, get him a bag of cat treats or something, and tell him how you feel. You want to be serious. You already are serious about him, if anything I’ve seen from you is halfway true. ”
“Okay,” Brandon said. “And what if he says no?”
“Then you’ll know,” Jackson said. “If you want to be friends, you can give that a shot. And if you don’t, you can both move on.”
Brandon let out the breath he’d been holding. These were things he didn’t want to look at, didn’t want to worry about. But pushing them to the side wasn’t doing him any favors.
“You being an idiot about this stuff…it wasn’t about Jackson, right?”
“It was absolutely about Jack. I hate telling this story because it makes us both look like we didn’t have even one brain cell to share, but we used to think hooking up was just…good luck?”
Jackson covered his face with his hands and Brandon laughed hard enough for Jackson’s laptop to slide off the pillow he’d balanced it on.
“You can sleep well tonight knowing that your fumbles have made me feel better about my own.”
“And tell Gabe, when he agrees he wants to be your real boyfriend, that we want to meet his cat,” Ryan said.
Brandon loved playing hockey. The ice, the puck, the stick in his hands, the feeling of control, the battle, the victory, the hope, the challenge.
The game had his heart, for better or for worse.
But aside from actually playing hockey, he loved being on a team.
He loved this group of guys. Few had the same trajectory into the NHL, but most understood the process of bouncing up and down from the AHL, and they immediately made Brandon feel like one of them.
“Gabe updates?” Matty Alexander asked, sitting in the stall next to Brandon.
He’d stayed with Ryan when he’d been called up too, back when Jackson was also staying with Ryan “temporarily.” Now a veteran, Brandon thought of him as the person in the room in charge of fun.
His playlist was currently pumping him up before the game, and he already had a hip bar picked out for their post-game, no matter the outcome.
“His roommate took him to the Mall of America today. They went to the aquarium. His roommate bought him a Build-a-Bear.” He smiled, thinking of the photo Gabe sent him of him sitting on his couch with Otis and a stuffed frog on his lap with the caption my sons .
His roommates had signed his splint in silver Sharpie, and Brandon felt a sharp stab of jealousy at it. “He didn’t need surgery.”
Barely an hour before, he’d given Ashley the same update. She felt terrible that Brandon had ended up visiting the ER again. Even though he was worried sick about Gabe, he was grateful Ashley was feeling stable lately.
“Glad to hear it. My wife went into labor early when we were on the road. That was miserable.”
“Fuck.”
“Thankfully, they let me go home early. I still missed it, though.”
“Imagine if they made you play,” Brandon said, thinking about how hard it was to get on the ice the day of Gabe’s accident.
“I would have been a liability. I think they understand that to a point. But you still have to compartmentalize. There’s nothing you could do for him at home. The best thing you can do is play well and stay up here. Stay close to him. Make that NHL salary.”
On a two-way contract like Brandon’s, he got paid a much lower rate for the AHL games he was playing than when he played NHL games. He was grateful Gabe hadn’t had to have surgery, but there was still a lot of money he was planning on spending on that boy.
“Focus on your face-offs, remember to back check. We’re all out there together, yeah?”
Brandon nodded and pulled his helmet on, ready to head out for warmups.
“And if you score, you’ll know he’s watching. And it’s a lot more fun to go home after scoring a goal.”
Brandon had a lot of reasons to focus on his game out there.
Everything Matty outlined, of course, as well as the entire future of his career.
He wanted to display his skill. He wanted people to talk about the plays he was making and the goals he was scoring.
Not his potential, but the reality of his skill.
He had a rough first couple of shifts before he got himself focused. That was something he made a mental note to work on. He couldn’t afford to start every game losing face-offs like that.
Then, instead of trying to push Gabe out of his mind, he focused on him. On the hope in his heart. Gabe was okay. He was safe, he was taken care of. Matty was right. Brandon wouldn’t be able to do anything if he was in Minnesota. He’d still be on the ice.
Once he addressed his distractions head-on, he started catching passes, clearing their D-zone, posting up in front of the opposing net. He drew a penalty when he caught a stick in his skates, and the Northern Lights scored. He felt like he was contributing even if he wasn’t on the power play unit.
He skated hard, his breath hot in his chest as he chased the puck into corners and finished checks.
And in the second period, his hard work paid off.
He caught a pass from Walker, who sold his shot to the goalie, leaving half the net wide open for Brandon to tap the puck in.
He blew a kiss, knowing Gabe was watching, and yeah, it was cheesy, but he was riding on full adrenaline.
He couldn’t heal Gabe’s hand, but he could score this goal.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Matty yelled at him when he skated past the bench for the fly-by high fives.
When he got off the ice, he had more photos from Gabe waiting for him. Ones that made him slam his phone face down in his locker cubby so no one else would see them.