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The night the Falconers win the cup is, in all honesty, not one of Kent’s best nights. He listens to Carly’s bullshit at the bar, sees the looks some of his other teammates give him, but nobody tells Carly to shut the fuck up, and Kent wonders if they’d react the same way if Carly was talking about him.
“Sometimes I just wanna punch Carly in the fucking face,” Jeff says on the way back to Kent’s apartment. It startles Kent out of his racing thoughts and he stares blankly at Jeff while his brain struggles to process the sentence.
“I think you’d lose,” Kent says finally.
“I don’t want to pick a fight with him, I just want to deck him in the face so he shuts up for once in his g-ddamn life.”
“I’m pretty sure punching someone in the face is picking a fight,” Kent says, and Jeff waggles his eyebrows.
“Hey, I’m a one-hit man, it’s not my fault if someone takes that as an invitation for more.
Kent rolls his eyes, but he cracks a smile anyway. Neither of them say anything more about Carly and Kent finally breaks the easy silence while they’re stopped a red light. “Hey, you wanna just crash at my place tonight? I know it’s late and your neighbors have been really loud lately anyway.”
“You sure, man?”
“Yeah,” Kent says. He pauses, picks at the skin next to his left thumbnail. “I could, uh, I could use the company anyway.”
“Oh...are you okay? I know this night’s probably been a lot for you. With...that whole thing,” Jeff says.
“I’m - I’ve been worse,” Kent says. Even to his own ears he doesn’t sound convincing.
Jeff furrows his brow and opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but the car behind them honks and jolts him away from whatever he’d been thinking. They spend the rest of the short ride to Kent’s apartment in silence, less easy than before.
The silence continues while Jeff parks and Kent lets the two of them into the apartment, petting Kit and promising to feed her in just a minute. Jeff makes himself comfortable, rifling through the fridge to find a water bottle and a cheese stick while Kent lavishes Kit with kisses and attention. When Kent comes back into the living room Jeff is laying on the couch, scrolling through what’s probably Twitter. His brow is furrowed and he looks upset, furiously typing on his phone and bouncing his foot like he does when he’s thinking hard about something.
“What’s up man?” Kent says. He flops down on the couch on top of Jeff’s legs. “You look like someone just insulted your mom.”
“Some assholes on Twitter are talking shit about Jack. The usual homophobic shit.”
“And that surprises you?”
“No, just pisses me off.
“You keeping this friendly or is PR gonna be venting steam about you tomorrow?”
“PR’s gonna be venting steam about me no matter how friendly I am, you know how they get about this shit.” Jeff nudges his feet and Kent lets him pull them out from under himself so Jeff can move closer to him and show him the tweets he’s replying to.
jason endelmann
@j.endelmann
i really dont gaf abt ppls personal lives but its personal for a reason. i dont want to see that shit on ntnl tv
12:03 AM - 15 Jun 2017
Jeff Troy #47
@jeffrey.troy
@j.endelmann
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No one ever says this when they show footage of a player kissing his wife. All I’m saying is it’s interesting that people only talk when it’s two men.
12:21 AM - 15 Jun 2017
Eric Aberny
@aberny.e
I’ve been saying for years that the @NHL is going downhill, and this disgusting display of homosexual propaganda at the #SCF2017 is just further proof.
12:10 AM - 15 Jun 2017
Jeff Troy #47
@jeffrey.troy
@aberny.e
|
I’m very sorry you think that love and equality is proof of this organization going downhill. As someone actually part of this org, I would have to strongly disagree with you.
12:27 AM - 15 Jun 2017
“That’s...a lot more polite than I thought it was gonna be, actually,” Kent says as he passes the phone back to Jeff.
“Gotta take the high road or people will just say you’re being vitriolic,” Jeff says with a shrug. “There’s a lot of other things I’d like to say that would definitely get me in trouble with management, but it is what it is I guess.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Kent says. “You know, I was thinking about actually coming out soon. Like, publicly.”
“Wait, really? Last I checked you were firmly on the side of not coming out before you retired.”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. But then this whole thing happened, and it hasn’t even been a day and there’s all this negative response to it, and I don’t know. I knew there was going to be backlash like this, but I just...I guess I didn’t realize how bad it was going to be. And I just think about how I would’ve handled it if that had been me instead of...instead of Jack, and I hate that I’m gonna have to keep hiding now because I know I wouldn’t handle it well. I’m not handling it well already, and it’s not even about me. I haven’t stopped thinking about how press is probably going to ask me about all the speculation and bullshit about me and Jack from back in the Q days, and I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Hey, Kent, take a breath,” Jeff says. He rests his hand on Kent’s shoulder and when Kent looks up from where he’s been fixated on the coffee table, Jeff is frowning. “You don’t ever have to come out, okay? I know it really kinda sucks having to hide something that’s so personal to you - believe me, I know - but the world doesn’t deserve to know that part of you. Your family, your friends, those are the people who matter. You don’t have to tell the press or the fans a single damn thing because they don’t matter. Okay?”
“I just...I wanna be proud, you know? I wanna be proud of who I am.” Kent takes a shuddering breath, hands shaking, and Jeff pulls him into a tight hug. Kent buries his head in Jeff’s shoulder and breathes in the familiar scent, tries to keep the tears contained.
“You don’t have to be out to be proud, you know that, right? People make a big deal about visibility, and yeah that shit is great and it’s important, but you don’t have to be that representation. Just because you don’t wanna tell the world about your private life doesn’t mean you aren’t proud of it. There’s a lot of straight guys who keep their lives extremely private, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t proud of them. Sometimes there’s just parts of yourself that not everyone deserves to see.”
There’s silence for a minute, the only things breaking the quiet are Kent’s poorly-hidden sniffles, tears soaking into Jeff’s shirt.
“Thank you,” Kent says finally, voice mumbled. He leaves his face pressed against Jeff, body shaking slightly as he clings to his best friend. Jeff just holds him a little tighter and drums out a familiar pattern on his back to help Kent focus on something besides his anxiety.
“There was this guy, Grant, that I met a few months after I moved here,” Jeff says after a few minutes, when Kent is starting to calm down. “I was kinda young and kinda stupid and I kinda let him be in charge of my happiness. We argued a lot about the fact that I wasn’t out, and didn’t want to be out, and eventually one day I guess he finally got fed up with it and broke it off, and he told me ‘If you were proud of who you were you wouldn’t fucking care who knew.’” Jeff goes quiet and Kent pulls away from him just far enough to meet his eyes.
“You never told me,” Kent says, voice soft.
“Grant was right when he said I wasn’t proud; he was just wrong about everything else,” Jeff says with a wry smile. “He fucked me up for a while though, I was stuck in this loop of ‘I’m proud of myself. But if I was proud I would be out. But I don’t want to be out. But I am proud.’ It took me a long time to figure shit out, but eventually I realized that pride isn’t about how many people you’re out to, it’s about accepting yourself, and loving yourself, and being comfortable saying ‘this is who I am’, even it’s just to yourself.”
“That’s….that’s really deep,” Kent says after a beat of quiet, and Jeff rolls his eyes.
“Well don’t go thinking I’m a deep and intellectual person, Parse. I learned all that shit in therapy.”
“You go to therapy?”
“Yeah, I’ve been going for like two years.” Jeff moves, adjusting them so they’re now sitting side by side with his arm slung lazily around Kent’s shoulders. “I started going just because of the whole Grant thing - my mom basically yelled me into it - and I kept going because it turns out I have a lot of anxiety. And it’s uh, it’s really helped. I’m a lot better than I was.”
“Wow,” Kent says; blinks once, twice, three times. “I never would’ve guessed you had anxiety.”
Jeff lets out a little huff of a laugh and squeezes Kent’s shoulder. “I didn’t even know I had anxiety. But that’s one of the reasons why I drank so much the first year or so that I was here. Literally I would be drunk every time one of the guys would have people over, and I was drinking before events to calm myself down. Front office actually pulled me in once because they were concerned about me.”
“Really? Is that why I’ve never seen you drink?”
“Yeah. Me and my therapist decided that it was best for me to stop drinking entirely because it’s like...my really negative coping mechanism. So I did, and it was hard, but I have healthier coping mechanisms now and I’m actually on some meds and shit’s a lot better than it used to be.”
“Huh.” Kent is quiet for a minute, chewing on the inside of his lip and thinking. “Not in like a bad way, but I never would’ve guessed any of this about you. Like, you’re kinda a bro. I wouldn’t’ve expected you to be so chill about mental health and stuff.”
“The bro thing is lowkey just a façade,” Jeff says with a wry grin. “I mean I’m kinda bro-y, not gonna lie, but it mostly just started as a front to hide my anxiety that I didn’t even know I had.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Kent says. He pauses, gears whirring in his head again. “Maybe I should try therapy.”
“Yeah?”
“My mom has literally been telling me for years to see someone. Not for like, the gay shit or anything, just some fun childhood stuff, but I feel like it might help to talk about being gay to someone like….confidential. And also the anxiety thing because I feel like I’m turning into my mother and as much as I love my mom, I am not trying to be her.”
“I can give you my therapist’s number if you want,” Jeff says. “If you don’t like her she can probably recommend other people that she trusts.”
“That would uh, that would be great,” Kent says. He’s quiet for a minute and when he speaks again his voice is soft. “Thank you. For trusting me with all this.”
“Thanks for being someone I can trust. Not a lot of people know this stuff about me but you’re my best friend, Kent. Like seriously, I love you. And nobody ‘deserves’ to know anything about me, but you uh, you definitely earned the right to know, I guess. So thanks.” Jeff trails off towards the end and darts his eyes away and then back, away and then back, away and then back.
Kent reaches his hand out and presses it against Jeff’s cheek, pulling his face gently toward him so they’re looking directly at each other. Jeff finally settles and locks eyes with Kent, and Jeff smiles - a soft, sheepish little thing that makes Kent’s heart skip a beat, and then he’s pulling Jeff’s head towards him, and then pressing their lips together, and Kent thinks that maybe, just maybe, he can learn to be proud of this.