Chapter 1
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 on Thanks, 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’t that old 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.
Instead, Tom loitered around the buffet, pretending to decide between turkey sausage and turkey bacon for a good five minutes before Phil showed up.
“Up at dawn again, old man?” Phil asked jovially, reaching for the sausages and drowning them in maple syrup.
“You’re one to talk.” Tom loaded up on bacon and reconstituted egg scramble, which was both soggy and crumbly and tasted of wet cardboard. Protein-laden cardboard.
They both stopped by the cereal station for bowls piled high with Greek yogurt, oats, and raisins before finding a table close, but not too close, to the coaches.
“Have fun with the rookies last night?” Tom asked.
Phil groaned. “I went to bed at ten. Left them out there to experience the bright lights of Edmonton all by themselves.”
“Phil.”
“I know, I know.”
“The A is for alt—”
“Fuck’s sake, Tom.” Phil thrust out his stupidly expensive watch. “It is 7:08 a.m. Do not tell me about the responsibility of being an alternate captain. So the rookies might have gotten a little wasted. We’re in fucking Alberta. What’s the worst they could do here?”
“I don’t know, crystal meth?”
Phil gave him an unimpressed look. “Breezy seem like the kind of guy who could get a dealer at the drop of a hat?”
Chris Calabrese, a twenty-two-year-old defenseman, absolutely didn’t seem like that kind of guy, and the rookies tended to follow his lead.
“You know they always let loose in Canada,” Tom said. “They’re all legal to drink here.”
“Jax was there. It’s fine.”
“Jax was there,” Tom repeated to himself darkly. As if his presence meant anything.
Sure, Jax had an A as well, but more as a PR move than a statement about his role in the team dynamics.
Tom had to admit Jax could make the team look good; Kayleigh Williams from the media staff practically salivated the minute the call came in from the general manager about Jax joining the team.
Having a personable, friendly guy would be a blessing for postgame media segments, even if he spoke a little too openly with reporters if you asked Tom (which no one had).
Tom was awful at media.
Kayleigh, the bubbly, friendly sort of person who actually enjoyed making phone calls and using social media, never told him so. But the longer she worked with them, the less well she hid her beleaguered sighs every time Tom clammed up when someone pointed a camera in his direction.
But PR gold or not, the A hadn’t only been given to Jax for the team’s sake.
He wasn’t a responsible senior member of the leadership group, and based on his media personality and the way he always seemed to be wearing the most expensive designer clothes he could get his hands on, Tom doubted he ever would be.
Breezy might worship the ground Jax walked on, but who knew what Jax might talk the rookies into?
Rumor had it Philly dropped him like a hot potato because of all his partying.
San Francisco’s general manager invited Tom to a special meeting to explain that a shiny new letter on Jax’s chest would “rehabilitate his image,” as if at some point on the six-hour flight from one coast to another, he’d turned over a new leaf and become responsible, making him fit to wear the letter.
No one needed the rookies to get into whatever he did in his wild, crazy parties.
Unbidden, the image of Jax standing in the doorway of his hotel room, with his sweats slung low on his hips and his hair a mess, paraded across the forefront of Tom’s mind.
Phil flicked at Tom’s forehead, drawing him back to the here and now. “You’ve got to get over your problem with him.”
Tom coughed up half his orange juice. “I don’t have a problem with him.”