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Like Jared expected, being eighteen? Not making much of a difference in his life right now. He’s obviously not going out to the bars he’s suddenly legally allowed in: there’s playoffs. There’s literally — that’s all there is. All Jared can focus on right now.
The Hurricanes defeat the Tigers in seven, which is good in that at least Raf moved forward, but bad because now he’s got to play Raf. Which is bad for two reasons: one, it sucks to play a friend, and two, and way more importantly, Raf is really fucking good.
The Hitmen are better.
“Sorry, man,” Jared says in the handshake line. “You were a giant pain in the ass to play, if that helps.”
Raf manages a smile. It’s not a big one, but it’s probably more than Jared would have managed if their roles were reversed. “Go the rest of the way, yeah?” he says.
“Yeah,” Jared says, and pulls him into a hug before he moves down the line, mumbling “Good game” and “Good series”, and, his one other exception, “You were fucking crazy good”, to the Hurricanes goalie, who had them all doubting themselves for awhile, even though they were the better team. He was the only guy who was more of a pain in the ass to play than Raf was. Jared likes Raf tons, but honestly he hopes they don’t get drafted to teams in the same division, because if this is Raf at eighteen, what’s he going to be like when he hits his peak?
The Hitmen don’t get a breather like they did after the first round, Brandon taking their series in six, same as them, so Jared’s got all of three days to work on all the other shit that isn’t playoffs, like, oh, not flunking twelfth grade. Every minute he isn’t sleeping he’s juggling a bunch of work, to the point where school feels like an unnecessary break into like, all the fucking homework he has to do.
Bryce gets back to Calgary right in the middle of that. Jared’s slammed, and wiped, but he hasn’t seen Bryce in almost two weeks, Bryce in Kansas City when Jared played at home, Jared heading to Lethbridge when the Flames came back (down 2-0 in their series but Jared is emphatically not thinking about it) and it’s just —
“I won’t bug you or anything,” Bryce says, when Jared reluctantly mentions the shitton of work he can’t just ignore after Bryce invites him over. “I’ll let you do your thing. I just kind of — want you to be near me, y’know?”
Jared has about zero illusions that if he goes over there he’ll be able to get any studying done with Bryce right there, being hot and within touching distance and something Jared missed a stupid amount, but —
“Yeah,” Jared says. “My mom’s got the car today, but I can catch a —”
“I’ll pick you up,” Bryce says.
Bryce picks him up in his ‘boring’ car (his word, not Jared’s, it’s a pretty expensive looking sedan), which is way, way better at facilitating frantic makeouts than his convertible. Tinted windows are basically the love of Jared’s life right now, and only horrific past experience of the last time they got carried away outside Jared’s house keeps Jared from getting a hand around Bryce right then and there.
“Ow,” Bryce says, pulling back with a wince right just as Jared’s debating whether he should pull back and ask Bryce to drive home, speed limit no object, and hikes his t-shirt up a little to display a livid bruise when Jared frowns.
“That from Kirby?” Jared asks. Bryce took a brutal hit from him last game, and Jared couldn’t even blame him — for once — for the penalty he took right after for retaliation. Jared might have done the same. Honestly Bryce is lucky it’s just a bruise — Jared, heart in his throat, thought it was something a lot worse for a second.
“Yeah,” Bryce says.
“Fucker,” Jared says, succinct, and Bryce smiles at him a little. “Your place?”
“Yeah,” Bryce says, and drives him there at a reasonable speed — AKA a totally unreasonable speed, because Jared wants to stick his hand in his pants where there’s no chance of anyone catching them at it. Also there’s the whole homework thing, but that can wait a couple minutes. Endorphins probably boost cognitive function. They definitely don’t hurt.
Jared can bench press his own weight, easy, but he swears his backpack feels like it’s full of rocks, heavier than he is, as he lugs it up to Bryce’s. The weight of unfinished work, he guesses, but he lets it thump onto the floor and reaches for Bryce basically the second they get inside. Bryce pulls away, and Jared scowls and tries to pull him back in.
“You said you had to do homework, I don’t want you getting behind—” Bryce starts.
“This’ll take like five minutes,” Jared interrupts.
“Hey,” Bryce says, sounding offended.
“Dude, I haven’t seen you in weeks, it’s going to be a quickie,” Jared says. And it is, neither of them even getting much more than their dicks out, which is good from a speed standpoint, but also good in that they’ve probably both good a number of sore spots right now. Jared definitely does, at least, and that bruise of Bryce’s looked awful.
Literally like, ten minutes after they get in the door, Jared’s sprawled out with his math textbook on Bryce’s floor. The couch is too comfy for homework, and the dining room table too far from Bryce, so floor it is. There’s a carpet, at least, one that pads him under his stomach, and he kicks his feet up against the couch, so it works out to be just comfortable enough.
Bryce plays video games, TV thoughtfully muted, while Jared powers through trig problems. The only contact between them is Bryce’s hand occasionally dropping onto his ankle, thumb dragging over the knob of bone, and like, it’s kind of distracting, but Jared doesn’t want to ask him to stop, so he just does his best to simultaneously, like, ignore it and also bask in the contact? Which is basically impossible, so he fails.
Jared only breaks for dinner, and like, even then he just moves his work to the dining room table and eats one-handed, and by the time he has to head home, he’s actually gotten a surprising amount of work done. Like, more than he might have at home.
“Sorry I was the worst company ever,” Jared says.
“I told you,” Bryce says. “I just wanted you near me.”
Jared’s still smiling when Bryce drops him off at his front door.
*
Bryce is out of the playoffs before Jared, which, considering the WHL playoffs started over two weeks earlier, is —
It’s not good. It’s not a sweep, but losing in five is really not much better.
Jared’s in Brandon when the Flames lose. A bunch of the guys are watching it in someone’s room — Jared didn’t catch whose — but he can’t watch it with other people, not people who don’t know he’s a little more invested than usual.
They zoom the camera in on Bryce’s face after the final horn goes, a devastating 3-0 final on the books, and Jared silently swears to find that camera operator and kill them, because that look on Bryce’s face, cracked, vulnerable, heartbroken — it feels too personal for Jared to be seeing it, let alone thousands of fucking people who don’t know him.
I’m so sorry, Jared texts Bryce as soon as they cut away from him, though he knows it isn’t even close to adequate. Let me know if you want to talk, or if you want to wait until tomorrow.
Bryce doesn’t respond immediately, but like, of course he doesn’t, since he’s queuing for the handshake line, posture so crumpled Jared can see his slumped shoulders through his equipment, even zoomed out.
sorry bud his dad texts him as CBC cuts to the handshake line, then, he played really well, and Jared swallows hard, swallows again when they do another close up on Bryce’s face.
“Are you like, crying?” Tristyn asks when he comes in from wherever he’s been watching the game.
“No,” Jared says.
“Seriously?” Tristyn asks. “Dude, you—”
“Tristyn, fuck off, okay?” Jared asks.
“Okay, man,” Tristyn says, putting his hands up. “Just like — you didn’t honestly think—”
“Fuck off, Tristyn,” Jared snaps.
“Fine, if you’re going to be a bitch about it,” Tristyn says, under his breath but still loud enough to hear. Jared pretends he hasn’t. He doesn’t have the emotional fucking energy for Tristyn right now, feels emptied out.
He swipes his hands over his cheeks, goes to wash his face for good measure, and Tristyn, thankfully, doesn’t say shit when Jared comes out of the bathroom, face scrubbed red.
Jared’s phone rings at close to three in the morning, Central time — so fucking four in Manitoba — and Jared slips out of bed, takes it to the bathroom, casting a wary eye at Tristyn, though he seems sound asleep.
“Hey,” he says when he picks up, then, before Bryce can say anything. “I’m really sorry, Bryce.”
“Sorry it’s so late,” Bryce mumbles. “Had to get straight on a plane after. Losers go straight home.”
You’re not losers, Jared wants to say, but like. They just lost, so, by definition, they kind of are.
“It’s okay,” Jared says. “You—” he can’t really ask if Bryce is okay, because the answer’s obviously going to be no.
Bryce mumbles something Jared can’t catch, sighs loud enough that Jared can’t not catch it. Jared can’t tell if Bryce is drunk and maudlin or just sad and tired — Jared knows how it feels to be knocked out, and it has to be even worse when you’ve got the weight of the Flames fanbase on your shoulders, worse than that when you’ve got the pressure of designated ‘franchise saviour’ on top of that. He’s not going to ask. It’s emphatically not the time.
“I’m not going to like, tell you it’s okay, because obviously it’s not, and I’m not going to do that whole like, ‘hey, next year’,” Jared says. “I know that’s bullshit. Just — I know this sucks. I’m sorry this sucks.”
“It really fucking does,” Bryce mumbles.
“And it’s like, no consolation, but you played awesome,” Jared says. “Like, even my dad grudgingly admitted you played well. You flipped Don Matheson. That’s how great you played.”
“Yeah,” Bryce says, not sounding very cheered up by it. Jared gets it. There honestly isn’t anything he can say that can help. If the Hitmen go out, there won’t be anything Bryce can say to help either. It comes with the territory. Only one team ends a season with a Cup, whether that’s Stanley or Ed Chynoweth, maybe a Memorial. Odds are stacked against it being your team.
“Go all the way for me, okay?” Bryce says, like he’s read Jared’s mind.
“I’ll do my best,” Jared says. “And like, I know it also doesn’t help, but I love you.” It still makes him feel a little squirmy when he says it, like he’s laying himself open, waiting for some kind of catch, but Bryce never seems to have the same problem, and anyway, he deserves to hear it tonight. He deserves to hear it most of the time, but especially tonight.
“I love you too,” Bryce mumbles, and when Jared goes back to bed he stays up too long, considering they play tomorrow — well, today — wondering how Bryce is, where he’s at, if he’s dealing with this with teammates or all by himself, feeling like this all alone.
*
Despite the assurances to Raf, to Bryce, Jared’s season doesn’t last much longer.
Jared doesn’t know if he wants the Wheat Kings to win the Chynoweth, to win the fucking Memorial, to prove that they were just an insurmountable opponent, or if he wants them to crash and burn in the Finals like the Hitmen did against them.
A sweep. A fucking sweep. They lost their starting goalie in the middle of game two after a brutal collision, but that’s no excuse. There’s no fucking excuse for this.
The only saving grace of losing in four is that at least they do it on home ice, get to lift their sticks and go straight the fuck home. Jared locks himself in the bathroom with a box of hair dye, can’t handle being blond a minute longer than he has to, especially since it didn’t do him any good. Well, considering everyone in the WHL does it, it’s hardly a guaranteed path to a win.
Bryce calls while the brown’s setting back in. He was at the game, but Jared didn’t see him after, and he didn’t seem too upset that Jared wanted to just head back with his parents the second he was dressed. A seriously good thing about dating a fellow hockey player: Bryce gets it. Anyone else would probably be offended, but Bryce gets it.
“Hey,” Jared says.
“You want to talk?” Bryce asks, “Or like, maybe tomorrow, or—”
“I wouldn’t have picked up if I wasn’t willing to talk to you,” Jared says.
“Right,” Bryce says. “Are you — what’re you up to?”
Sulking, Jared thinks, but that sounds bad. “Dyeing my hair back,” Jared says instead. “I made a shitty fucking blond.”
“I thought you looked okay,” Bryce says, which is basically confirmation Jared made a shitty fucking blond, otherwise he’d be saying ‘good’ or ‘great’ or something. “Better blond than me.”
“I don’t know if you’ve looked in a mirror lately—” Jared says.
“I mean when I bleached it for playoffs,” Bryce says.
Jared breaks out of his sulk just long enough to give himself a mental note to find a picture of that. WHL playoffs: the gift that keeps on giving. Except when it takes away. Like today.
Well, that wasn’t a long break from the sulk.
“The Wheat Kings are a bunch of fuckers,” Bryce says, when Jared doesn’t say anything.
“Bunch of talented fuckers,” Jared mumbles. One of their guys is slated to go in the top five, and Jared got an unfortunate first-hand example in why scouting reports were saying that. He’d been good all season, but this time around he broke their backs. Even with a healthy starting goalie, they weren’t going to get past them.
“I know this sucks,” Bryce says, literally the only guy not on his roster Jared wouldn’t bristle hearing that from right now. The wound’s still raw for Bryce, he knows. They haven’t talked about the offseason, Bryce insisting it wasn’t important because Jared was still in the playoffs, but — he’s not now. He wants to ask if Bryce will be sticking around. He wants to beg Bryce to stick around.
He holds his tongue, just says, “Yeah.”
“I know it doesn’t help,” Bryce says, an echo of Jared less than two weeks ago. “But I love you.”
“It does,” Jared says. “It does help.”
“I’m glad,” Bryce says.