Chapter Seven #2
Kilian peered out the window. The sky was still mostly dark, but city lights illuminated the landscape in tiny pinpricks.
The sight took his breath away momentarily.
To all those people living and working and loving in those miniscule patches of light, Kilian was just another tiny human in another city in another job.
His problems were even tinier. It was time for him to apologize.
Maybe the epic orgasm had caused the revelation, but when the plane landed in San Francisco at dawn, Kilian felt, if not optimistic, at least at peace with himself for the first time in weeks.
Sure, the guys on the team weren’t the friends he wanted them to be, but they were good people, and if he managed to keep playing less shittily, he could salvage something.
He checked the team’s event calendar and found a way to start.
After an extremely necessary half-day nap, Kilian caught an Uber out to the Tenderloin and met up with the other volunteers at the Pot of Gold shelter.
“Howie!” A wide smile split across Mooney’s face. “You came!”
“Yeah, figured I should show my face around here again.”
“Awesome.” Mooney clapped him on the shoulder. “You want to play goalie or ref?”
Kilian shuddered in mock horror. “Ref all the way. Ryana’s got a vicious slapshot.”
“Ugh, you’re right. Remember my beautiful face when I lose all my teeth.”
Kilian squinted at him. “Are they real? They’re so white.” Kilian had been lucky enough not to lose any teeth playing hockey yet, but he had four fillings.
“It’s called dental hygiene, bro.”
“Sexy,” said Mara, the shelter’s coordinator and Mooney’s girlfriend. She must have snuck up behind them while they were talking.
“You know I save the flossing talk for you,” Mooney told her. He turned around to hug her and press a quick kiss to her lips.
Kilian wrinkled his nose. People in relationships were the worst.
“Hey, guys!” Jax called, jogging up to them. Tom’s dog, Artemis, followed hot on his heels.
No, not Tom’s dog. She belonged to them both because they were a couple—an established enough couple to share a house and a pet. Anger and embarrassment simmered once again in Kilian’s stomach, but he thought of a tiny little light turning off and clamped it down.
He pasted on a smile. “Hey.”
Jax said something in response, but Kilian couldn’t hear it because Tom joined them at the same time.
“Jax, did we pack her water dish? I can’t find it in the trunk.”
From his pocket, Jax pulled a flat, rubbery disk and pushed at the center until it became bowl-shaped. “I got it. Worrywart.”
He said it with such affection that Kilian’s stomach hurt.
Tom smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I missed her while we were gone. She can’t start thinking the dog sitter is better than we are.”
Jax rolled his eyes. His arm brushed against Tom’s, and Tom hid a smile poorly by wiping his sleeve across his mouth. How had Kilian missed this? They couldn’t be more obvious if they tried, not if you knew what to look for.
He kept his eye on them all through the street hockey game they played with the shelter kids.
In hockey, “chemistry” was a central tenet of a well-functioning line.
Team events got planned specifically to build chemistry; different lines got tested in practice to find who might work well together.
For Kilian, it emerged slowly. He and Mooney played well together as a consequence of frequent practice.
Kilian had a sense for what plays worked, how fast Mooney could move, and where to expect him on the ice.
Kilian had thought the same held true for everyone: chemistry actually meant hard work and repetition.
From the first game Tom and Jax had played on the same line, their chemistry had been on the tip of everyone’s tongue when people talked about the Sea Lions.
As Kilian watched them in an informal setting, he realized it wasn’t the same as the hockey chemistry he was used to.
Undeniable finesse governed the way they both moved, with puck-handling skills they’d practiced for hours.
But their chemistry didn’t rely on talent or practice.
It emerged in the way their eyes trailed each other, in the way every moment they weren’t on the puck themselves, they found each other as if drawn by magnetism.
In lesser players, it might have killed their focus and worsened their play. In Jax and Tom, it made them unstoppable.
At least when they played on the same team. In a casual game of street hockey with a bunch of teenagers, they captained opposing teams and kept screwing up by passing to each other. Small mercies.
“Come on,” Tom told Kilian when the game ended. “We’re going out for sushi.”
Jax and Mooney had already begun cleaning up the pucks and sticks left on the ground unceremoniously by the teens. The kids were closer in age to Kilian than Tom was, but Kilian couldn’t imagine leaving his gear lying around. Dad would have killed him.
“Don’t you need to wait for Jax?”
“Nah.” Tom smiled as easily as Tom ever did.
He held Artemis’s leash wrapped around his hand, and the dog waited patiently by their feet, having tired herself out running back and forth during the game.
“He has some stuff to take care of here, and Mara doesn’t want me around for official business. Apparently, I’m distracting.”
“Okay.”
Kilian followed Tom out of the gated fence enclosing the shelter’s outdoor area and past the car Tom and Jax had arrived in. They walked for a while until the graffiti density thinned out and the buildings got taller. Eventually, they stopped at a bus station.
“You know, my first kiss with Jax happened at a bus stop.”
“Romantic.” Kilian regretted the sarcastic tone as soon as it left his mouth. He couldn’t have sounded more like a petulant teenager if he’d tried.
But Tom laughed in response. “Yeah, it was…something.”
The bus came, and they got on, Artemis immediately curling up as small as possible by Tom’s feet.
“She’s good at that.” Kilian reached down to scratch behind her ears. “My dog could never.”
“You have a dog?”
“Well, not my dog. He’s an Australian Shepherd at my parents’ farm. But he’s always on his feet.”
“A working dog, then.”
“Yeah.”
The bus lurched into movement, and Kilian grabbed for the rail. He was preoccupied with finding a way to stand comfortably without getting thrown around for so long that he thought the conversation had ended when Tom spoke up again.
“I’ve been taking her around town on our days off. All the parks, checking out different neighborhoods, exploring the city.”
“Sounds…nice?” It sounded boring to Kilian, but Tom was old. Some switch in the brain must flip at age thirty to make people enjoy going on walks.
“It has been. I never used to get out much, and I didn’t really leave Palo Alto except for team stuff. But having her with me makes it easier to go out and do things.”
“Thought you had Jax for that.”
“Oh, he comes with us a lot. But it’s not his job to make me a functional human.”
Kilian glanced down at the dog. “Sounds like a big project. You sure one dog is enough?”
Tom laughed again.
They got off the bus in Ashbury Heights, near Breezy and Luca’s apartment. Equal parts of hope and dread filled Kilian that they would pop out of a side street for an intervention at any second, but the restaurant was only two more blocks away, and no defensemen appeared on their way there.
A waitress seated them in a semiprivate booth and explained how to order from the tablets stashed on a shelf under the table. She gave them each a glass of water, wished them a good meal, and Tom stared down at the tablet.
“I miss when waitstaff didn’t have to explain the restaurant’s concept,” Tom said.
Kilian clicked his way through a dozen or so types of nigiri and then added two crunchy rolls and a sake-based cocktail, because why not? The conversation was going to be awkward either way. “You’re a very old man,” he informed Tom.
Tom shot Kilian a dark look as he attempted to order.
“It could be worse,” Kilian said. “You could have to download an app or scan a QR code.”
“Don’t even joke. Jax wants me to go to some Argentinian-Korean fusion place by the bay that does that.”
“’S what you get for dating a younger man.”
A smile stole across Tom’s face. He tried to hide it, tucking his chin down as he set the tablet aside, but the pure joy racing across his face was unmistakable.
Envy hollowed Kilian’s stomach. Good thing he’d ordered something with alcohol in it.
“So,” Tom said, laying the tablet aside.
“So?”
“So, are you ready to talk?”
Kilian shrugged. Tiny light, he reminded himself. His problems were a tiny light. A tiny light that grew and grew and filled his lungs, and the words burst out like a shattering bulb. “What’s to say? The whole team is one big happy queer family, and I’m not part of it.”
“No one was trying to exclude you,” Tom said. “None of us knew you were…um. What do you identify as?”
“I’m gay, Tom.”
Silence fell between them.
The waitress brought over Kilian’s drink, a gargantuan masterpiece featuring a variety of fruits speared on a cocktail stick. He took a long sip, letting the sake settle in his empty belly. “Would you have told me if I came out to you first?”
Tom took a sip of his own water. “I don’t know.”
“Is it because of…what I said to Luca? When I called him queer?”
“Oh. No, not at all. Afterward, you were so worried about making up for it, about…researching the correct things to do and say. I knew your heart was in the right place.”
Kilian swallowed convulsively around his straw, draining half the cocktail. “So why didn’t you trust me?”
“It wasn’t about you. I knew about Jax for weeks before I told him about me. And that was the first time I ever told anyone.”
The waitress stopped by with two long platters full of sushi and set them down on the table. “Enjoy!” she said cheerily, unfazed by the sheer amount of raw fish for two people.
“You told Breezy,” Kilian pointed out as soon as she left. “Breezy! I mean, he’s the straightest person I know!”