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“I don’t know Lardo… it’s been like 2 hours now. Are you sure it’s gonna be worth it?” Bitty groused.
Lardo’s disapproval was audible even over the phone. “Eric. Richard. Bittle. This is Yayoi Kusama. This exhibit is ICONIC and you know that if I weren’t stuck dealing with Shitty’s ridiculous family, I would be there with you right now.”
Bitty grimaced. He and Lardo had been planning this spring break road trip to Toronto for months, when Shitty’s grandfather had called in all the Knights for a command performance at the family compound. Bitty knew that Shitty needed Lardo more than he did at the moment. But he also knew that he had a non-refundable ticket to an art exhibit that would have been a lot more fun with someone who knew more about the artist than what he had found from scrolling Instagram.
“I know. I’m just wishin’ you were here. Say ‘hi’ to Shitty for me, and remind him that back-school Kegster is only a couple of days away.”
In the background, Bitty heard an excited whoop, and Lardo chuckled as she replied, “Shitty says ‘hi’ too. I should go and corral him into a tie for bunch at the club.” She paused. “God, ‘bunch’. ‘At the club’. What kind of white nonsense is this? I’ll talk to you later, Bitty”
With Bitty’s last resort of an actual, honest-to-god phone call exhausted, he was at a loss for what he else he could possibly occupy himself with while standing in line. He had already scrolled through all of his feeds, and tweeted as much as one human reasonably could in two hours. Plus, his phone battery was running perilously low and he was a little doubtful at how far the data on his roaming package was going to stretch.
Honestly, Bitty was about to strike up the conversation with the elderly couple in front of him, when he heard an attendant yell out from the front of the line, “Who’s here by themselves?”
Bitty’s grateful hand went up, and budging past the next couple of groups, he ended up at the front of the line where the attendant was waiting with two men that Bitty could only think to describe as regulation hotties.
One had the sort of handsome-ness that inspired a million clichés: tall, dark, and handsome; eyes like blue ice chips; a jawline so sharp it could cut glass. But he also had a charmingly dorky giant camera/fanny-pack combo that gave off a distinct tourist vibe and made him seem ever-so-slightly more approachable.
The other man was closer to Bitty’s height and seemed like he had been ripped right from a spread in GQ. His floral snapback was perfectly angled on top of artfully tousled blond curls. His shoulders were carefully relaxed (but not too relaxed), and his hands were tucked into the pockets of his extremely-well fitting jeans. Bitty was able to glimpse the speckling of freckles across his nose and a curious glint in his green-ish, blue-ish, grey-ish eyes.
The attendant smiled a little nervously at them at said, “So, we generally send patrons through the exhibit in groups of three or four. Would you guys be willing to form a group? I can send you in right now.”
The two strangers turned to face Bitty, eerily in synch, then gave each other a silent glance after sizing him up. A slow smile spread across the blond’s face as he replied, “Yeah, sure. Sounds like a great idea, right Zimms?”
Bitty must have been mistaken because for a second he thought he saw a blush spread across the taller man’s cheeks as he mumbled his assent with a little nod.
Guess this exhibit got a little more interesting, Bitty thought as he followed the two into the museum in a daze.
--
As they waited to enter the first room of the exhibit, Bitty managed to pull himself together, just enough to make some polite introductions. These were just some regular old museum patrons trying to enjoy the exhibit – it wouldn’t do to spend the next two hours drooling.
“Thanks for letting me join y’all,” he started. “I’m Eric, but friends call me Bitty.”
“’Cause you’re short? Doesn’t sound to friendly to me,” the blond retorted with a grin as he adjusted his snapback. “I’m Kent, and this lunk over here is Jack.”
Well, this was off to a rocky start. Eric resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and in as civil a tone as he could manage replied, “Nope. Just a nickname from the team – my last name’s Bittle.”
“A team, huh? What sport do you play?”
At a glance, Kent and Jack were obviously in shape – chances were they played some kind of sport themselves. Though if Bitty were to take a bet as to which, he would have pegged Kent as a lax bro without question. Jack was a bit more of a mystery, seemingly more focused on fiddling with the settings on his camera and taking photos of the museum displays leading up to the first room. But there was something familiar about them…
“I’m on the Samwell hockey team. Team captain this year, actually.” Bitty couldn’t help but let a tinge of pride infuse his voice on that last count. He had come a long way from his high school co-ed rec league and he knew it.
At that, Kent’s eyes brightened and Jack’s head whipped around, seemingly attentive to the conversation for the first time. Kent turned to Jack, and with a grin in his voice said, “Did you hear that, Zimms? He plays hockey.”
Jack’s face broke into the first smile that Bitty had seen so far, and in a voice that was softer than expected asked, “So what brings you all the way to Toronto? Samwell’s in the States, right?
Bitty explained his dashed spring break plans and his solo trip, leaving out the part where he had spent the afternoon the day before awkwardly wandering around by himself. Not to mention how he had forgone most of the usual tourist sites (what was a Casa Loma, anyway?) in favour of bakeries that his followers had recommended.
Kent threw an arm around Bitty’s shoulder, and gave Jack a playful elbow to the ribs, “Well Bits, I can’t promise we know as much about art as your friend, but it’s now our mission to make this stop of your grand tour as fun as possible. Trust us – it’s gonna be great! Right, Jack?”
Jack raised his camera and took a quick candid of the two of them as he replied, “Right.”
‘Bits’ - he kind of liked that. Almost as much as he liked the warm weight of Kent’s arm around his shoulders.
--
Finally at the front of the line for the first ‘Infinity Box’, the three poked their heads through small circular peep holes to peek inside “Longing for Eternity”. Bitty saw Jack’s small withheld smirk refracted a thousand times as he took a picture of Kent’s head, illuminated by multi-coloured lights shining kaleidoscopically on the floor and ceiling.
It was a strangely giddy experience they were sharing, like little children at a carnival, entranced by the shimmering lights and the shifting patterns. Bitty caught Kent’s eye and saw a broad smile break over his face, his eyes glimmering with the psychedelic colours. Bitty stuck out his tongue and crossed his eyes and Kent snorted, his freckled nose crinkling as he laughed.
The two men had been remarkably friendly to Bitty, with Kent crackling jokes and Jack pointing out different facts and quotes from the exhibit they were able to read as they waited in line. Bitty felt like he had been absorbed by their easy camaraderie, like he fit with them in a way he would never have expected from two absolute strangers. Unlike in the line outside, the time seemed to fly by, with smiles and laughter and playful chirps.
Maybe all the waiting had been worth it after all.
--
“It’s called ‘The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away’,” Jack whispered as they stood in the next room.
Bitty wanted to say that it was beautiful, but that didn’t seem to cover it. They were all three of them together in this tiny room that seemed to stretch on to eternity, standing shoulder to shoulder. Tiny multi-coloured lights were suspended in the darkness, like stars.
Jack had finally put his camera down and as Bitty stared at their reflection, it looked like the three of them were floating in the centre of a galaxy, in infinite space, suspended. Together inside the silent universe.
In a flash of thought, it occurred to Bitty that this was kind of… romantic; like a scene out of a movie. He could picture himself standing inside the same room, his hand held tightly by another. Seeing those lights reflected in someone else’s eyes. The cinematic camera pan as held hands turned into an embrace.
With a sudden shock of sensation, he felt Jack’s hand brush against his.
But that could only have been a coincidence.
It’s a small room. They were packed in pretty tight. Hands touch. It’s a thing.
Too soon, they heard the knock from the museum docent. But, as Bitty was turning to leave, he could have sworn he caught Jack and Kent sharing another secretive gaze in the mirror’s reflection.
The plainness of the white museum walls was almost jarring after being inside the Infinity Room, and it felt like Bitty was waking up from some kind of dream as they carried on to the last room of the exhibit.
But his hand was still tingling.
--
As they entered “The Obliteration Room”, each of them was handed a sheet of stickers by the museum docent at the door, and were encouraged to add them to the rest of the stickers speckling the completely white facsimile of a typical living room.
Kent peeked his head over Bitty’s shoulder and reached a hand around to stick one of his brightly-coloured circles on Bitty’s cheek. “Look, Bits – you’re art now!”
Bitty rolled his eyes a little, but couldn’t suppress a grin as he stuck one of his own stickers right on Kent’s freckled nose.
Kent struck a comical pose, flexing his not un-muscular arms and shouted at Jack, who was carefully his own stickers along the spine of one of the books on a bookshelf, “Hey Zimms! Get a pic of a couple of masterpieces!”
Jack snapped a quick couple of pictures, pausing to readjust the focus of his lens, when Bitty saw the dawning light of an idea in Kent’s eyes.
“This ceiling looks a little blank to me… what do you guys think?”
All three of them stared at the ceiling that, true to Kent’s word, was one of the only areas of the room not fully covered in colorful stickers. However, even Jack’s height stretched to its full extent (Jack on his tiptoes, Bitty noted, was a charming sight) wasn’t enough to reach the ceiling.
“Zimms, come on – give me a boost!” Kent pouted, stretching his arms out like a kid hoping for a piggyback.
Jack rolled his eyes and sighed something in French before saying, “No way am I giving you a boost after what happened last time.”
“That was just one mannequin! The store wasn’t even that mad!”
“Tais-toi,” Jack gave Kent a playful shove that nudged Kent closer to Bitty.
Which, unfortunately seemed to give Kent another bright idea.
“Bits can do it! Just get him up on your shoulders and it’ll be cake.”
Jack’s eyes met Bitty’s consideringly, and for a moment Bitty thought about pushing down all his better instincts and just going along with it. If he was going to die, it might as well be in the arms of a frankly ridiculously handsome man with arms the size of tree trunks.
“Nuh-uh Kent, no way. My mamma raised me to be many things, but a damn fool was certainly not one of them.”
“C’mon! Zimms is super strong, I promise. Jack, tell him about that time you literally deadlifted Tater at family skate.”
Ignoring Kent, Jack was still staring at Bitty, his eyes intense and warm. “I wouldn’t drop you. I promise.”
Between Kent’s over-exaggerated pout (which Bitty refused to call adorable) and Jack’s eyes boring into him, Bitty found himself powerless to resist. As he approached Jack cautiously he muttered to himself under his breath, “Okay Bity, it’s just another practice with Katya. Those girls got lifted all the time and they were flying around the ice at the same time.”
With one last check of Bitty’s face, Jack knelt down at Bitty’s feet and looked up as he said, “It’d probably work best if you got on my shoulders.”
Bitty tried to reassure himself that the his rapidly beating heart and the drop in his stomach was due to nerves and not from the sight of Jack, kneeling before him, close enough to touch.
Gingerly, Bitty hitched himself up on Jack’s broad shoulders, praying to every god he could think of that he wasn’t about to make a ginormous ass of himself. Jack seemed to stand effortlessly, and in a moment, Bitty was close enough to reach up and place a single blue dot on the nearly spotless ceiling. Then, the next instant, he was back on the ground, with Jack’s arm slung around him and Kent’s eyes bright with admiration.
--
The hilarity of the moment clung to them as they left the room and the exhibit, with one of them bursting into laughter again just as the giggles seemed to be tapering off. Kent was wiping tears of mirth from his eyes when Bitty noticed Jack throwing Kent yet another significant look.
“Okay, that is IT. Why the heck have you boys been staring at each other like that? Do you have some sort of telepathy I don’t know about? Are y’all planning to murder me or something?”
Jack blushed and reached a long arm up to scratch at the back of his head sheepishly. “No, of course not. We just… I…” He let his arm fall and turned to Kent with a crinkled brow. “Kenny, should we-?”
Kent smiled at Jack softly, fondly – in a way that made Bitty’s heart squeeze a little in his chest. But when he turned to Bitty with that same look, Bitty’s heart just about stopped.
“Look Bits, Jack’s never been good at the whole ‘asking for what he wants thing’. I mean, it took him a solid 3 years to get around to asking me out. But I think what he’s trying to say is that we’ve both had fun with you this afternoon. Like, a lot of fun. And we don’t want the day to be over quite yet.”
With that, Kent grabbed Bitty’s hand. “Do you want to grab some coffee? With us?”
Every word that Bitty had ever known seemed to fly out of his brain all at once. There was so much to process – Kent was holding his hand. Jack wanted to ask him out. Jack and Kent were dating. Kent wanted to ask him out? He was what Jack and Kent wanted?? KENT WAS HOLDING HIS HAND.
The silence was charged, and Bitty was just opening his mouth to say something (he wasn’t quite sure what yet), when someone timidly clearing their throat from behind them interrupted. At the appearance of the short, brown-haired girl, Kent dropped Bitty’s hand, reaching his own up to tug at the hem of his shirt.
She approached cautiously, and in a hesitant voice said to Jack and Kent, “I’m so sorry to interrupt you guys and I don’t want to be a bother, but would either of you mind signing this for me? It would mean so much.”
Kent’s vibe immediately shifted back to how he had behaved when Bity first met them – friendly, but in a way that Bitty could now see was cultivated, practiced. It wasn’t the same Kent who almost snorted water out of his nose when Bitty made a ridiculous pun in line, or who had just been giggling so hard his eyes watered only moments before.
“Sure,” Kent drawled with a charming smile, “Jack and I would be happy to sign it for you.”
Jack nodded with a tight, close-mouthed smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and held out his hand for the paper.
With her signatures in hand, and giving a nervous wave, the girl ran back to a group of friends who were barely containing their own enthusiasm. Kent, Bitty, and Jack were left standing near the entrance to the AGO.
Bitty broached the silence with a tentative chirp: “So are y’all movie stars or somethin’? Or are girls just always linin’ up to to talk to you?”
Jack gave a little sigh, and Kent reached up an awkward hand to re-adjust his snapback as he looked to Jack questioningly.
“We’re hockey players,” Jack started. “Just like you, eh?”
“Well, sort of…” Kent interjected.
Jack and Kent. Jack and Kent. There was something about those names, those faces that had seemed so familiar, that Bitty couldn’t put his finger on. The realization came in a sudden crack, like a shattering glass.
Kent Parson.
Jack Zimmermann.
“Oh lord. Y’all must think I’m the dumbest NCAA captain in the whole league. What kind of hockey player doesn’t recognize the two best players in the NHL?” Another thought struk Bitty, “Oh God, you even called him ‘Zimms’. I just-”
“Well, to be fair, we’re pretty out of context.” Kent interrupted reassuringly. “And most everyone says I’m much handsomer in person.”
“We’re up here for some event they’re holding at the Hockey Hall of Fame and wanted to get out for a bit. A teammate mentioned that he wasn’t going to use his tickets, so we figured we’d give the exhibit a go,” Jack continued. “It’s… not always easy for us to get time away together.”
“I just feel like an idiot. I’m so sorry for interrupting your day out. I’m sure if the museum docents had known who you were they would have let you go through the exhibit without some random tag-along. I’ll leave you boys alone now.” Bitty turned to leave, when he felt a large hand grab his wrist.
“No,” Jack said, keeping his eyes on Bitty. “Kenny and I… well, we really did enjoy hanging out with you, Bitty.”
Kent reached out to grab Bitty’s other hand. “Seriously, Bits. I meant what I said before. This is the most fun we’ve had in a while. Hanging out with you – it felt like we’ve known each other forever. You felt it too, right?”
Too overwhelmed to speak, Bitty nodded. He had felt it. He had maybe even hoped it could lead to something more.
But there was no way that one, let alone two NHL superstars would want to keep hanging out with him, getting to know him. It had been a great afternoon, and Bitty could be happy with that. Heck, it’d even be a great story to tell to all the guys back home.
Bitty was about to pull away and make a polite exit, when Kent took a step closer to Bitty, pleading, “Look, we still have the rest of the afternoon free. We could grab that coffee and try to talk all this out over a double double.”
Somehow, the mention of the undrinkable Timmy’s concoction broke the spell, and Bitty whipped his head around to face Kent. “Mr. Parson, please tell me that you are not trying to seduce me with the world’s most over-rated coffee?”
Bitty’s look of incredulity must have been something to behold because it made Jack Zimmermann snort out a giggle. Kent’s face shifted quickly, from concern, to confusion, to a kind of cautious optimism, finally settling into a mischievous grin.
“Zimms! Did you hear this boy malign a true Canadian institution? Guess we’re just going to have to show him the error of his ways.”
Jack grinned, and laced his fingers through Bitty’s. “You heard the man. Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll even spring for some Timbits.”
Bitty grinned back. “I know what your salary cap is, Mr. Zimmermann. You bet we’re getting Timbits.”
--
Bitty had been to some of the best bakeries in Toronto over the past two days, and tried some seriously delicious desserts. But somehow, the sour-cream glazed Timbit he popped into his mouth while playing footsie with Jack and Kent under the table, was the sweetest thing he had tasted.