Chapter One
Cheryl Vanderbilt [dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz]: We’re filming this live at Tom Crowler’s house! Check out his beautiful back yard! [panning shot of a spacious garden decorated for Halloween with a dog and several children running around]
Cheryl Vanderbilt: And as you can see, Mike and I had some stiff competition for best costume, but we won it anyway.
Howie: [waves at camera in a Peter Pan outfit complete with tights and body glitter] Hey, Cheryl’s Insta followers! Vote in the comments and prove you have better taste than the heathens here! [he blows a handful of glitter at the camera while Cheryl laughs]
Top comments:
Olivia Starling: Great to see the Sea Lions having fun off the ice!
stickstickpuck: Howie is the cutest. I don’t care that he is six feet tall and the worst rodent in hockey, every time I see him I just want to boop his nose.
(From Instagram live reel, posted by Cheryl Vanderbilt, 10/31/2025)
On November first, Kilian Howard woke up feeling like shit.
This was by no means a new experience for him. In fact, he would term it his natural habitat. Some people called themselves early birds or night owls. Kilian was whatever avian felt like a piece of gum stuck under someone’s shoe no matter what time of day he woke up.
November first was especially bad. He woke up at nine after five hours of restless sleep and lay in his bed, reliving an exceptionally humiliating night.
He’d been so excited for Halloween too. When he was younger, on the rare mornings someone else fed the chickens and he got to sleep in, Kilian would lounge around scrolling through his favorite players’ Insta accounts.
The Halloween parties always looked epic.
Everyone dressed to the nines, immaculate decorations, and, he assumed, rampant debauchery behind the scenes.
Getting to plan the San Francisco Sea Lions’ Halloween shindig himself started as a dream come true. At least until Jax vetoed any decorators in his and Tom’s house, leaving it up to Kilian to do all the heavy lifting. He’d watched hours of TikToks on cool, dog-safe Halloween decorations.
And he’d thought maybe, just maybe, if the party went well, he could tell everyone.
It was risky, but Kilian hated keeping secrets, and he hated even more that he’d said a stupid, homophobic thing in the locker room.
A year on, he still thought about it when he couldn’t sleep.
He had a burning urge to exonerate himself and prove he wasn’t evil or anything; he was confused.
Well, confused might as well be his new middle name, because instead of getting his moment, he’d found out he wasn’t the only gay guy on the team. And none of them had told him. They’d let him stumble around blindly while chuckling at his idiocy.
At least, Kilian assumed they must have.
Had they suspected about him? Or worse, had they seen him in the Castro on a weekend night, rocking something in mesh or a crop top, and laughed about him behind his back?
Kilian could picture it: Jax snorting into one of his overpriced, fancy drinks going, “Look at Howie. He thinks he can pull that off, but it just makes him look like a bull in a china shop.”
The thought was so humiliating Kilian pulled his pillow over his face and screamed into it.
When he took it off, he’d gotten body glitter all over it. Of course. He hadn’t showered last night when he got home from the humiliation of a lifetime.
Body glitter. He’d gone to a team event dressed in tights and body glitter.
Sure, it matched his costume, and plenty of people went as they weren’t for Halloween.
But imagining how his teammates would react to finding out it wasn’t a joke—that Kilian genuinely enjoyed the look, that it made him feel pretty—the thought propelled Kilian out of bed and into his tiny shower.
He turned the water up as hot as he could stand and scrubbed last night off his skin until he was pink and tender all over.
It didn’t do anything to lessen the humiliation, but he wouldn’t be spreading glitter around his apartment.
Kilian had a full day off to mope around, which was not ideal.
Skating hungover sucked, but at least it would take his mind off what had happened.
On the other hand, in the privacy of his apartment, no one could see him sulk.
He watched reality TV in bed for four hours straight, all the while scrolling through Instagram and examining each new reel from the party last night for more signs of the obvious.
There was Breezy in his dumb Chewbacca suit, giving Kilian a bear hug. Breezy gave great hugs. Shame he was a faithless backstabber who’d sat for months on the information that Kilian wasn’t alone.
Abstractly, Kilian could understand that Breezy hadn’t wanted to out Kilian, but surely he could have dropped a hint.
Breezy could have said something, anything, to let Kilian know his angsting about his sexuality made him look pathetic.
Watching a dozen reels of Breezy bounding up to teammates with his wide-open, guileless smile curdled Kilian’s stomach.
Where Breezy went, Luca followed in his skintight, leather Han Solo outfit.
In every reel of Breezy mingling and talking with other teammates, Luca was nearby, drinking the gin and tonic Howie had mixed for him or throwing in sarcastic commentary on whatever Breezy said.
He was everything a hockey player at Halloween was supposed to be, wearing a silly costume but looking sexy thanks to his athlete’s physique.
Nothing about the way he acted or spoke revealed his bisexuality.
Of course it didn’t.
Kilian had spent a long couple weeks last season after he had thoughtlessly called Luca “queer” in the locker room researching first the term “queer” and then the whole umbrella of identities behind it.
Having a project to occupy his brain had kept him from reliving the disappointment on his team captain’s face and the mortifying conversation Tom had with him afterward.
Kilian’s research project had revealed slowly and surely that he’d spent years accepting, and sometimes making, homophobic jokes to avoid looking too directly at himself.
As soon as he began looking up what terms were homophobic in what context, he fell deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole about various sub-identities and groups.
Serious interviews with LGBTQ+ athletes gave way to documentaries about drag shows and YouTube supercuts of scenes from Queer as Folk.
Kilian was used to working his way into new topics by way of a research spiral; as a teenager playing in the WHL, he’d done a lot of independent study projects to make up for missing classes.
But the hunger with which he’d consumed each new snippet of media had made it impossible to avoid the truth forever.
Homophobic jokes were comfortable because surely if he were gay himself, he wouldn’t make them.
Avoiding learning anything about the LGBTQ+ community was easy because as soon as he did, Kilian wouldn’t be able to uphold the lie he’d been telling himself for half his life: that he would be the perfect hockey player.
Ever since Kilian had accepted that his technique was too shitty to be a figure skater, he’d dreamed of making it into the NHL.
Hockey was fun, it required a lot of skill and brains to keep up with the fast pace and create plays, and it would make his family proud.
Plus, making it to the pros meant everything about himself that made him insecure would magically disappear.
Sure, he was Kilian Howard—awkwardly tall and not yet used to the amount of muscle he had; ginger, but not in a cute way; terrible at talking to girls. But he was headed for the NHL.
None of that mattered in the NHL.
In the NHL, Kilian would be in the top 70th percentile, looks-wise.
And he was practically hip for a hockey player from the Canadian countryside. Half the NHL players Kilian followed on social media as a bored, lonely teenager listed Nickelback among their favorite bands. Kilian knew the NHL was full of Canadians, but there had to be a limit to national pride.
Even the guys who had the personality of a wet blanket on camera and a face only a hockey puck could love ended up married to gorgeous blonde women. So surely it didn’t matter that Kilian had neither the time nor the interest to meet any girls? Hockey would take care of it for him.
And then it didn’t.
It had been stupid and egocentric of him to assume no one else had gone through the startling realization of not being the perfect archetype of a hockey player: straight, bland, and dumb.
He was definitely dumb, or it wouldn’t have taken until he was nineteen to realize that he was neither straight nor bland.
Kilian watched Luca on Instagram, the mild irritation ever-present in his expression unless Breezy forced him into sociability.
The injustice choked Kilian. He’d gone on a fucking epic journey of self-discovery after calling Luca “queer” and being put in his place for it, and then it turned out Luca was queer after all?
On consideration, it was good Kilian hadn’t known.
If he’d gone on his clubbing expeditions with Luca and had to watch Luca hit on guys, Kilian would probably have to live in a cave for the rest of his life because it would have made him go feral.
Luca was too handsome and smart; it wasn’t fair to the rest of them, let alone Kilian.
He had a hard enough time getting himself hyped up to go out alone, knowing he would stick out like a sore thumb before getting behind the safety of the club entrance.
Trying to find a guy to hook up with while Luca was right there next to him would be an exercise in futility.