Chapter Four
Elliot
“Ithought you were coming back to Tampa?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry bro, I just…didn’t.”
“Aight, well, a heads-up woulda been nice.”
“I know.” Elliot sighed and put his forehead to the hotel window. “Sorry about the airport.”
“I sat there for like an hour waiting for you,” said Diego.
“Yep. Again. Disculpa. I’ll make it up to you.”
“Yeah? You gonna put me on the team?”
“Ha! Claro. Equipment manager.”
“Fuck you.”
Elliot pulled his head off the glass and turned to survey the room. Clothes climbing out of his suitcase. One sneaker under the bed, the other – he looked around – …somewhere.
“So what are you gonna do all summer?” said Diego.
“Same thing I’d be doing there. Just training.”
“Uh huh. ‘Just training’. Right.”
“What?”
“I see you bro. You’re fucking someone.”
Elliot swung his feet up, crossing them on the bed.
“Ha! Yeah, you got me.” The Ha! came out too loud, and his voice overcompensated through the rest of the lie, but it was easier to let Diego think he was fucking someone than to explain that he just…
liked it here. Diego wouldn’t get it: his Tampa pride was strong.
“Can’t hide from me,” said Diego. A screen door banged closed on his end as he went out to the patio. “She hot, at least?”
“Claro, broder. I’m not standing you up at the airport for some cuero.” Elliot bent one arm behind his head.
“Aight, aight, that’s my boy.”
“Long as I got your approval, dog.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got you.” His sister’s voice in the background, and Diego yelled something back, then came back to the phone. “I gotta go. Renata’s at me.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Tss, I don’t know, man. She’s on her own thing.” Another shout from his end. “Yeah, I said I’m coming.” Quieter: “I gotta go.”
“Aight. Tell her I said hi.”
“Seguro.”
“Bye man.”
“Cheque.”
He hung up and tossed the phone onto the night stand. Then he reached over and snatched it back, opened Instagram, and paused with his thumb over the search bar. He was looking for Leah, but he didn’t have her handle. Or even her last name.
A notification slid into the top of the screen. You planning on going to Force today?
Bennet. Elliot had planned to go – he wasn’t scheduled, but he could use a day on the bike – and he didn’t appreciate his gym days being monitored like he was still in regular season training. He jabbed a message back with his thumb. why? you wanna rematch on the ladder old man?
He almost sent it.
But an image came into his head and stopped him: Bennet, sitting in the recovery room.
Ten point nine nine on the ladder was fucking rough.
Or maybe not, for where Bennet was at with recovery, but…
Dustin Bennet wasn’t a guy who felt good about ten nine nine.
And on your home turf. In front of your people.
He remembered the call with his mom, and winced.
Shouldn’t’ve gone into the recovery room – he didn’t need to ice his leg; he was just trying to show solidarity to Bennet, because watching him get reamed by that bald guy was tough.
Elliot had a clip saved in a YouTube playlist of Bennet getting brutally checked into the boards a few years ago, and then waving everyone off as he got up and skated away, bleeding from the nose.
It was tough to watch. Watching the bald guy call him out on the agility ladder was worse.
Sighing, he got up and went to the window. Across the street, six stories down, people in sun hats were drinking cocktails on a restaurant patio. He deleted the message to Bennet, typed, nah chillin dog. get at it, sent it, pocketed the phone, and went down to the restaurant.
The waiter brought a cocktail and Elliot tapped the next profile. He squinted at the picture. Not Leah. Sighing, he went back to the list and tapped the next one.
Why was he even looking for Leah? He wasn’t interested in girls like that: Shameless.
What Uncle Sal would call ‘descará’ — not for anything serious.
The girl you were looking for, the one you married, wouldn’t act so desperate.
Sal had told him that fucking that girl would be like ‘a religious experience’.
Honestly, the thought of that made him nervous.
But as long as Diego thought he was fucking someone, he figured he may as well be. Leah would do for now.
The server came back with the menu and Elliot told him to wait while he ordered. He skimmed the front page and chose a panini. The waiter went off, and Elliot sipped his drink and went back to the phone.
He couldn’t look at any more Leahs, so he opened TikTok and idly scrolled: Hockey, woman screaming in her car, dog at a day spa.
A familiar face appeared and he stopped.
Nic Arsenault – a defenseman from Canada.
One of the best in the league: he’d won gold with the US at the Winter Olympics this spring.
In the video, Arsenault was behind a press desk with about a thousand mics pointed at him, and beside him, a player Elliot knew, Riley Webb, was sitting with his arms folded. It was a week old, according to the date on the video.
Elliot angled away from the sun to read the subtitles.
–was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. It felt like there was a lot at stake – not just, uh, you know, for me, but for the – for other guys in the league who might also be queer.
Elliot’s stomach jumped. Queer? Did he read that right? He turned up the volume, then glanced around and lowered it to barely audible and put the phone against his ear.
“But Vanity Fair was great about giving me a lot of control over what was written in the piece when I came out,” Arsenault said.
“Naomi Vasquez, who did the interview, turned out to be a great resource for navigating the uh, you know, the media. And Rick Gallagher has been a great agent and supportive ally. He’s uh, he’s taking on new clients, if any…
you know, if any other guys are…interested in coming out.
” He chuckled nervously, and off-screen, the assembled press did the same.
Elliot pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it.
Arsenault was gay?
“–wasn’t a decision I made lightly,” Arsenault was saying.
Elliot turned it up one notch. “And I guess… I don’t know, I feel like sometimes, because it’s mostly okay to be queer now, some people kind of assume that it is an easy decision.
But like…even if you have support, and even if you live in a place where it’s accepted, it’s still hard.
You know? Like…before you even decide to tell other people, there’s a lot of – of soul-searching, and questioning, and denial and, ah–” He glanced at Riley.
Riley looked caught in headlights for a moment, then leaned forward.
“Imposter syndrome.” Cameras flashed.
Hold up…
Elliot’s heart began to beat fast. Was Webb gay, too?
Riley Webb? Who’d come up three years ahead of Elliot in juniors?
Who’d asked to borrow Elliot’s phone at an event once, and Elliot had handed it over before he remembered he had Grindr downloaded on the home screen.
Elliot was fifteen. He’d only downloaded it because he was curious.
It wasn’t like he’d actually used it. It wasn’t like he actually needed it, because he wasn’t actually…
Webb handed the phone back after his call and walked away like he hadn’t noticed, but the moment was seared into Elliot’s memory, because he’d been so fucking terrified Webb had seen it.
What if he had? What if he’d noticed and said nothing, because – because…
Elliot came to the edge of that sentence and couldn’t get across to the other side. His stomach went horribly sideways, and he swigged his cocktail and leaned in to block the sun on the screen.
“–and then you worry about, like, if you’re queer enough, which is, like, a whole other crazy – uh…” Arsenault smiled and cleared his throat. “Sorry…what was the question?”
Elliot pinched to zoom in on his face. Arsenault was usually pretty good at media – Elliot had a playlist of his clips on YouTube so he could study how he handled questions. But this was like…it looked like he’d never done press before.
The clip ended and the next video auto-played. Elliot went back to the press conference and watched it again.
How the fuck had he missed this?
A plate appeared in front of him, and he said, “Gracias,” automatically, and then, “Thanks.” The server asked if he wanted another cocktail. He glanced at the half-empty glass in his hand, downed it, and held it up. “Yes.”
Pushing the plate aside, he put his elbows on the table and went back to the phone.
When he typed Nic Arsenault gay into TikTok search, a bunch of videos came up.
All within the last two weeks, from communities Elliot didn’t follow – which explained how he’d missed it.
QueerTok, mostly, and some from something called BookTok, which Elliot didn’t even know was a thing, but who all seemed very interested in gay hockey players, for some reason.
The official NHL account was slower to pick up the story.
They’d probably waited to see what the internet did to figure out how to play it.
He tapped a QueerTok video and learned that Arsenault wasn’t gay, he was bi, and that he’d come out in an interview with Vanity Fair a couple of weeks ago in June.
Elliot had been decompressing in Miami after the season – which mostly meant getting shitfaced with Diego, which was another reason he probably didn’t see it.
He opened the browser and found the article.
The New Guard
Nicolas Arsenault is bisexual. The NHL would prefer he wasn’t.
He read it down. It wasn’t all about Arsenault – it was more about how sports in general kind of sucked at letting people come out.
As the first player to ever come out in the NHL, Nic Arsenault was the focus, but there was also an interview with a skier from Norway called Emma Nilsen, and Riley Webb, which was just, like…
He sent the link to Reef. Did you know about this?