Chapter Fourteen
Tom [reading from a notecard]: Teammate who’s best at a sport not hockey. Hm, interesting. A lot of us, myself included, are one-trick ponies. Hayes is a pretty good golfer, I think.
Mooney: Does street hockey count? Howie’s vicious at that.
Jax: Can’t believe no one has mentioned Phil’s “fishing is a sport” stance yet.
Tom: Does Phil still count as being on the team?
Breezy: No one’s mentioned Luca yet? He’s the obvious answer.
Hayes: Hate to admit it, but who smokes us all at sewerball before warm-ups every darn game day? Mazetti’s a really good soccer player.
Top comments
calabreezy: the most Italian thing about Luca so far: secret mad soccer skillz
amazetti: @calabreezy—football
seelionssaylions: Hayes looks like he’s in physical pain admitting Mazetti’s got talent. Did something happen there?
(From “San Francisco Sea Lions Call Each Other Out For Fun, Part 3,” posted to YouTube on 09/28/2025)
By the time they got on the plane to Montreal, Dmitriyev had been placed on LTIR.
The team’s mood, which hadn’t been good to start with after three losses in a row, was catastrophic. For once, Luca couldn’t blame Hayes. After Halloween, he’d accepted the new status quo with much more equanimity than Luca would have expected, better than Howie at any rate.
Still, Luca had to take his anger out on someone.
“You can stop glaring at me,” Hayes muttered to Luca from across the aisle.
Vanderbilt, next to him, was dead asleep with noise-canceling headphones on.
Mooney, on Luca’s other side, texted Mara furiously while listening to reggaeton with the volume turned up so high Luca could hear the beat through his earbuds.
Luca examined Hayes—a typical straight, white man, doing the bare minimum in an ugly suit, acting as if everyone ought to thank him for showing up at all. “Old habits die hard.”
Hayes huffed out an aggrieved sigh through his nostrils.
“You’re better than me, okay? Your talent pisses me off.
It’s possible I didn’t react in a super mature way.
I’m not ready to slip down the lineup and lose my ice time yet.
But I’m not—” He glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “—a bigot or whatever you think.”
“You are a racist though,” Luca pointed out.
Hayes closed his eyes. “I made one dumb comment in the heat of the moment. I don’t even really believe the whole ‘Mexicans are stealing our jobs’ bit.”
“Only being racist when you are angry doesn’t make you less racist.”
“Well, I’m sorry I said it. I can’t help that no one believes me.”
Luca opened his mouth to tell Hayes he was sorry because it had gotten him in trouble with the team but not sorry he’d said it.
Then, he thought better of it. Luca had come a long way this season in terms of no longer believing the worst of everyone on this team just because his Juniors team had been full of idiots who bullied people for fun.
It had made him a good enough person to admit to Chris, albeit obliquely, how he felt.
Living with the consequences—Chris not meeting his eyes for all of yesterday; Chris not talking to him on the way to the airport; never getting to touch Chris or kiss him or feel his arms around Luca again—felt like it would destroy him now, but he hoped it would bring him closure. Someday.
So, he asked himself, again, what would Chris do?
He wouldn’t continue to play the blame game.
He’d try to find a way to connect instead.
The thought of connecting with Hayes made Luca’s lip curl in disgust, but he studied the man to find a way in.
Hayes had bags under his eyes and his suit was rumpled.
Luca wouldn’t term him a stylish dresser, so he hadn’t noticed before, too busy turning his nose up at the drawstrings on his suit pants.
But now, as Luca looked, he could see a hundred signs that Hayes wasn’t doing well.
“Are you all right?”
Hayes’s eyes widened, and he looked at Luca, aghast.
Luca sighed. “I do not like you either, but I will admit you have not been a shithead for the past week when I expected you to be, and you look as though you could use…help.”
Looking down at his lap, Hayes said, “Thank you.”
He didn’t elaborate immediately, and Luca thought perhaps he had been saved from an emotional interaction with a man he didn’t respect. But then, so quietly Luca had to strain to hear him over the hum of the plane’s engine, Hayes said, “Allie had a miscarriage right before the season started.”
Oh God. What would Chris do, what would Chris do, what would Chris do?
He would give Hayes a hug.
A shudder ran down Luca’s spine. Absolutely not.
“I am so sorry,” he said instead.
“Yeah. Me too.” Hayes scrubbed aggressively at his eyes with the base of his palms. “It’s just been hard, you know?
She doesn’t want to come to team stuff because there are always kids and babies and dogs running around, she’s been moping around the house alone.
I can’t make it better for her. I don’t know what to do. ”
Experiencing sympathy for Jimmy Hayes, who had done his best to make Luca hate him for the last year or more, was not on Luca’s bingo card for the day.
“I have no idea how you must feel,” he began, wishing, once more, that his teammates spoke Italian so finding the right words would be less of a chore.
“But I do not think that is a situation you can fix. Being there for her, and perhaps encouraging her to talk to other people and go out sometimes, might be all you can do.”
Hayes’s lips twisted in an approximation of a smile. “Yeah. Thanks. I know it’s my own fault, but I’ve missed having friends on the team, you know? He’s great—” He jerked his head at Vanderbilt, which, debatable. “—but he has a new baby.”
Luca recoiled. “We are not friends.”
Rolling his eyes and shaking his head, Hayes said. “No, I know. I know it might not mean much to you, but I’m trying to do better. I can support the shit out of every guy on this team who decides to be gay, even if I don’t get it.”
Where to start explaining every wrong thing Hayes had said?
It would be easy to begin with “decides to be gay,” but Luca did love ripping into idiots about bisexual erasure as well.
Would it be too audible for the rest of the plane if he did though?
Would it remind Chris of how uncomfortable Luca’s unrequited feelings clearly made him if he overheard?
When Luca felt down, decimating someone comforted him, but for some reason, today, the mere thought made him picture the disappointed face Chris would make.
At least Hayes was trying. Luca had expected less.
He patted Hayes once on the shoulder and let him go on believing he was trying hard enough.
When Hayes eventually nodded off, Mooney pulled out an earbud and shot Luca a quizzical look.
“He wasn’t giving you shit again, was he?”
“No, he needed to talk.”
Mooney snorted in disbelief.
It was a strange comfort for Luca. Mooney could never be put in the position Luca placed himself in, forced to find common ground with Hayes.
He’d been truly harmed by Hayes’s racist statement last year.
Making nice or educating Hayes, no matter how hard a time he was going through, should never be Mooney’s responsibility.
Better for Luca to do it. He had less to lose, and he might make Mooney’s life easier if he could somehow force Hayes to pretend that he had learned the error of his ways.
They descended on Montreal through a thick, bumpy cloud cover, which satisfied Luca’s need to externalize some part of his misery.
He had only been here once, last season, and though they’d won against the Wyverne, it wasn’t a fun time.
This road trip promised to be more of the same, though perhaps without the winning, given the goalie situation.
As soon as they arrived at the hotel, the coaching staff made clear they needed to abscond for a strategy session.
What exactly they could strategize about needing a better goalie remained a mystery to Luca.
Today’s game began at 3:00 p.m., and their flight to Ottawa was scheduled for the following day, so they had no practice and just enough time for a nap before they were expected on the team bus again.
“And remember,” Lindy trilled before she took off with Phil and the remaining coaches. “Curfew at eleven!”
Phil turned, halfway through the door. “Oh, Breezy always uses his exemption in Montreal. That’s okay, right?”
“Of co—”
“Don’t need it today,” Chris said.
The memory of the smile crinkling the corners of Chris’s eyes when he said he would rather spend time with Luca than his family warmed Luca from the soles of his feet to the tips of his ears.
It had been too much to hope that confessing his feelings to Chris and drawing a boundary between them would be enough to jumpstart the process of getting over him.
Luca was beginning to fear there was no getting over him.
They took the elevator up with Mooney, but he had his earbuds in and his nose in his phone once more.
Luca shook his head. “He likes her a lot, doesn’t he?”
“Loves.”
“Hm?”
“He loves her. They’re in love.” Something weighed down Chris’s tone, a heaviness Luca hadn’t heard from him before.
Perhaps it was envy. Chris wanted a relationship, Luca remembered.
Someone to come home to. Someone to hold and touch and kiss.
He just didn’t want it with Luca, at least not the way Luca wanted.
He wondered if Chris was ready to call a spade a spade and reveal himself as asexual.
Maybe if he did, Luca could move on. Knowing Chris had reached a better understanding and a greater acceptance of himself through their “coaching” would be a paltry comfort, but it would be a comfort.
After all, Chris had done the same for Luca, albeit unknowingly.
From somewhere in the pit of his stomach, he dredged up a smile. “That will be you one day.”
Chris laughed.