Chapter 5
five
Olivia Starling [off-screen]: Are you looking forward to seeing your old team?
Jax: Oh, yeah, it’ll be great to see the guys. I’m meeting Fulls—that’s Tyson Fuller, Philly’s captain. We’re going out for lunch before the game. Wish I could get a cheesesteak, too, but my nutrition plan says I can’t.
Olivia Starling: Do you think it will be an advantage or a disadvantage, facing your old team?
Jax: Wow, you really want me to stay something stupid now, don’t you?
Top comments:
grant16rules: We miss you in Philly, Jax!
seelionssaylions: @grant16rules—Please take him back lol we will take a competent D-man and a tub of hair dye in his place
(From post-practice media availability, Sea Lions @ Magpies, posted to YouTube on 11/20/2024)
While the team flew to Carolina and the Twisters, Phil caught a commercial flight back to SFO and a waiting regiment of physical therapy. He told Tom to stop worrying; he told Tom it wasn’t his fault; he told Tom he’d be rehabbing his knee and sleeping in his own comfortable bed.
Tom did not stop worrying.
It was as if Phil didn’t know him at all.
He texted Phil from the team’s charter plane to see if he’d made it okay.
The team had sprung for business class for Phil, but the seats still wouldn’t fully recline, and a six-hour flight was rough on a knee with a possible ACL tear.
God, if he’d torn the ACL again, Phil would be out for at least the rest of the regular season, if not more.
It could mean surgery. It could mean retirement.
Phil was only two years older than Tom. He’d hoped they would play together for a while yet.
To distract himself, Tom toggled to the text from his mom.
Mom: What on earth did you get into a fight for? It’s a good thing you still won!
He imagined telling her about the idiot on the Arches who had made a crack about Jax getting on his knees and then shuddered.
If he thought about those awful words for too long, he’d get angry all over again.
Lacking an explanation for his behavior beyond white-hot rage, he responded as he always did.
Thanks, Mom.
In the time it took him to write to his mom, Phil gave Tom’s message a thumbs-up but didn’t reply otherwise.
Tom texted Camille next. She didn’t even bother reading the messages.
He was debating whether he ought to text the team’s physical therapist, asking to be kept in the loop, or whether that would be too much, when Jax slid into the seat beside him.
“So, Breezy’s pumped, terrified, and sad he’s been promoted to first D-pair.”
“Sad?”
“Well, yeah, it means East is out.”
Tom swallowed heavily. If he hadn’t been so stupid, Phil wouldn’t be out.
He shouldn’t have reacted to hearing someone talk to Jax that way.
But the words were so casually hateful, and he could tell they bothered Jax even if he tried to play it off as nothing.
Tom hadn’t heard homophobic chirps on the ice in a long time.
Hockey players talked plenty of shit, but no one had said anything so vulgar to him since Juniors.
Naively, he’d thought the NHL better. Maybe he let himself be swayed into a false sense of security because people pretended not to be dicks when someone in their vicinity wore a microphone.
But he hadn’t heard such offensive language from his team, either, not even in their locker room.
Maybe he hadn’t heard it because he didn’t talk to them enough.
Maybe they said hateful things all the time, and he’d never stepped up enough to stop it.
“Do other players say things like that to you a lot?”
“What, homophobic shit?”
“Yeah.”
Jax shrugged fluidly. His team-branded zip-up hoodie, one of the thin ones made from jersey cloth, no fleece, made his shoulders look obscenely broad. “Sure. You know how it is.”
Tom swallowed. “What about from our guys?”
“I mean, they’re not trying to make me lose face-offs most of the time.”
“But do they say—”
“Yeah, Tom. Of course they say homophobic shit. Howie thinks the f-slur is funny.”
“But you still hang out with him.”
Jax sighed. “What am I gonna do, ignore every player who says ignorant shit? That’s most of the league.”
“Most of the league,” Tom repeated dully. “Really?”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
Tom had stopped listening, actually. At some point in his twenties, when other players started chirping his lack of success, he’d stopped hearing their words, focused inward on his own struggles and failings.
It was easier to put his head in the sand than to hear everyone else calling him a failure when he could cut out the middleman and tell himself.
Jax shook his head at whatever expression Tom was making. “Half of them probably don’t mean it. It’s what they’re used to hearing, so they say it too.”
“Doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know. But you don’t need to worry. They don’t know about me. I don’t fuck hockey players.”
On the list of things bothering him about this conversation, that hadn’t even crossed Tom’s mind. He opened his mouth to say so, but before he could, Jax barreled on.
“And I don’t need you out there protecting me or some shit. If you do, people will realize there’s something to hide. Just keep your head down and play hockey.”
“Stick to what I’m good at.” The words left a bitter taste in Tom’s mouth.
He wasn’t good at being team captain; he wasn’t good at stopping all the hurtful, prejudiced words from being hurled at Jax; he wasn’t good at keeping his best friend from getting injured.
He was only good at hockey, and not even enough to win anything significant.
Jax nodded, pleased. “Right.”
Despite the heaviness the exchange left in the pit of Tom’s stomach, he played some of the best hockey of his life, decimating the Twisters 5–2 in Carolina and earning a shutout for Dmitriyev in Nashville.
Morris seemed cautiously pleased, inasmuch as he ever showed human emotion on the ice.
He kept them running more balanced drills during practice, more hands-on than he’d been before.
Trout chafed against it. He stalked around the rink as the team completed a drill he hadn’t chosen, eyeing Breezy and Hayesie and the other D-men as if they were his property.
There was no arguing the results though.
With defense tightening up, the penalty kill did better than it had in years.
Young as he was, Breezy stepped up for the team, showing he could handle the responsibility.
In Philly, a call-up from the AHL team in San Diego finally joined them for practice to cover the gap left by Phil.
With a defensive core used to being worked to putty every practice, they’d managed admirably to keep up the energy for two games by subbing in one of the forwards who sat in the press box most games as a sixth D-man, but it was time and past they were given a little relief.
Luca Mazetti, a slim, fine-featured twenty-one-year-old, had nothing in common with Tom’s mental image of a D-man.
He was almost comically handsome, with wide dark brown eyes and long eyelashes, full lips and thick dark hair.
With a few more years playing hockey, when his straight nose had been broken a time or two and he’d lost a few teeth, maybe he’d be less incongruous in the locker room.
Until then, Tom had an educated guess as to why he’d been languishing in the Italian league for two years after being drafted.
He stole a glance at Jax, who gave their newcomer an approving once-over.
Of course, Jax would approve. He didn’t fuck hockey players, and Luca looked nothing like a hockey player.
Breezy bounced up to Luca, interrupting Tom’s thoughts. “Hi! Mazetti, right?”
The differences between the two young men were shocking.
Breezy’s appearance matched Tom’s image of a picture-book defenseman to a tee, his stature tall and thick.
His floppy brown curls and big brown eyes made him seem so harmless, but on the ice, he could take a man down.
Next to him, Luca appeared elfin. Waifish.
Other adjectives Tom rarely had cause to use about a hockey player.
“Yes, that’s me.”
God, even his voice was handsome, low and musical. He had an accent.
“Awesome! I’m Chris Calabrese, but everyone calls me Breezy. Anyway, it’s so cool you’re Italian! So am I!”
Luca studied him. “You…are?”
“Oh, yeah, my great-grandparents on my dad’s side are from this town near Cosenza, and my mom’s mom is from Vibo Valentia. Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
“Cool, cool, yeah, me neither. But now I’m earning NHL money, I can totally go.”
“Right.” Luca gazed around the room as if trying to establish if they were all insane.
Tom walked over to interrupt before things could get worse. “Hi, Luca. I’m Tom.”
“I know,” Luca said. “You are a little famous.”
Breezy cracked up. He clapped Luca on the shoulder. “Man, it’s great to have you on the team.”
So much for Tom’s authority.
With the ice broken, the rest of the team introduced themselves in fits and starts. Hayes had been in the weight room with Trout, poor man, so he only met Luca when they got out on the ice, though he and Luca would definitely be working together on the D-core.
Jax was particularly welcoming. Tom couldn’t help watching him shake Luca’s hand enthusiastically and clap him on the back.
Did they need to be touching so much? Or was Jax just being himself?
He had certainly treated everyone else on the team with open friendliness.
Tom had gotten off on the wrong foot with Jax for reasons of his own making.
He shouldn’t assume a romantic interest on Jax’s part just because Luca was objectively gorgeous in a way hockey players usually weren’t. Neither of them could help it.
He did wonder why Jax didn’t sleep with hockey players though. Was there something wrong with them? Or did he prefer men who were as skinny and blonde as the women hockey players tended to date?
Jax was blond.
“Crowler! Joining us today?”