Work Text:
“What are your plans for Tuesday?” Julie asks when Melissa gets to the bar for her shift.
“I’m not covering for you,” Melissa says, immediately. “Tuesday’s my only night off this week, and I’ve got a date with my DVR.”
“So you do have the night off! Do you wanna come to the Caps game with me? I have an extra ticket.”
“Nick cancel again?”
“Irrelevant,” Julie says, which means yes. “Come on, I’ll even get you your first drink.”
Melissa gets pulled away by an order at the other side of the bar and debates, but it doesn’t take her too long to make a decision. She’s friendly with most of her coworkers, friendly with her regulars, has friends from college who are for the most part still clustered in Northwest, and likes her roommate, even if she doesn’t see her all that much. But Melissa works nights and works a lot, and spends most of her days off vegging on the couch then going for a run around her neighborhood to make up for vegging on the couch.
Julie’s one of her favorite coworkers, though, probably the only one she’d actually consider being friends with outside of work, and in the end, it’s an easy choice.
“What time’s the game start?” she asks, and Julie smiles at her brightly.
Melissa goes to the gym after she gets off work, half expecting to see her gym buddy, but he doesn’t turn up even after she tacks an extra fifteen minutes onto her run, and she heads home, slightly disappointed.
Georgie’s always nice to look at when running on the treadmill gets tedious, with the stretch of his shirt over his broad shoulders and the way sweat builds at the small of his back. He’s nice to talk to too, surprisingly smart and easy to make laugh. Nice enough to talk to that she’s considered making the trek across town to the gym on her day off more than once, though she hasn’t yet and settles for never skipping the gym after work, even though his schedule is irritatingly difficult to pin down.
Melissa’s been thinking about asking him out for a couple weeks, weighing the fact that he’s hot and she likes him as a person against the possibility of him turning out to be a jackass and the hassle of finding another gym to avoid him. She doesn’t even know his last name after all, even if she knows a lot about him besides that.
But Melissa a pretty good judge of character, and she doesn’t think Georgie’s an asshole. She thinks, if anything, he’s probably a little too nice for her. Melissa doesn’t hide her sharp edges though, and if they bother him, he doesn’t show it. They get along really well, and Melissa doesn’t think he’d say no if she asked.
Next time she sees him, she’ll ask.
Melissa meets Julie outside the Chinatown metro stop for the game in a Nats shirt that Julie immediately zeroes in on.
“I should have brought you a Caps shirt to borrow,” Julie says, disappointed.
“At least it’s red,” Melissa says. “I almost wore orange.”
“You would have done that specifically to spite me,” Julie accuses, following Melissa as she joins the crowd heading to the arena.
Melissa regrets wearing a light jacket when they get into the building. Early DC winters are mild so it’s much colder inside, which in retrospect, she guesses makes sense with the ice and all.
Melissa’s not a fan of hockey—Nats through and through, baby—but she likes sitting down with a beer she didn’t grab from the fridge or pour herself, and she likes the intense energy of a crowd all focused on one singular aim. Their seats are a half step up from the nosebleed section, right beside a pair of fans in orange, so she ends up watching most of the game on the jumbotron. She gets pretty well acquainted with the dumb staged videos they pull out after each goal.
The Caps are a pretty good team from what she can tell, and based on the groans of the Flyers fans beside her, they probably agree. The Caps score twice in the first period and once in the second, the horn blaring each time and the crowd roaring as they get to their feet. One of them, a delicate-featured blond, scores twice, and she sees his too-serious face make the same grimace as he awkwardly holds his stick behind his head each time.
The fourth goal comes at the beginning of the third, and as the horn blares, the camera does a close up on the ice of the player who scored. By the fourth goal in a 4-0 game, the high of a goal must have worn off because the explosive hugs of the first two periods have faded away and #43 is only briefly sandwiched between two other players before the shorter one pulls away.
Melissa blinks. “That’s my gym friend,” she says, dumbly.
Julie looks at her. “As in the one you’ve been debating asking out for weeks now?”
Melissa elbows her sharply. “What other gym friend—”
“Man, I didn’t realize you went to Equinox,” Julie says, knowing full well that like half their coworkers Melissa goes to the $20/month gym near the bar. “Are you sure it’s him?”
On the jumbotron, the replay of the goal is replaced with one of the dumb videos she’s been seeing all night, this time with #43 GEORGIE DINEEN across the bottom and the same attractive guy she sees more nights than not at the gym these days taking a faux shot at the camera.
“I’m sure,” Melissa says, fury and something a little like disappointment pooling in her gut.
She googles him when she gets home. Of course she does. A lot of it she knows: born in ’92, a year younger than her; two younger brothers who look just like him to her three younger siblings; born and raised in Providence to her Virginia suburbs.
Two years at BU before dropping out to go pro, which she knew half of. It makes her furious to think about how she told him she dropped out because she was so unsure of what she wanted, and he nodded like he got it instead of having his future planned out for him since he was eighteen.
Like he wasn’t just fucking—lying to her the entire time.
Georgie had been vague about his job and the amount of traveling he did but she just thought, hell, it’s probably just really boring. It’s just as much about everything he wasn’t vague about, all the things she told him and she thought she knew about him and now—now she has no fucking clue. That’s the worst of it.
Melissa stews on it for a couple days. She considers skipping the gym after her shift when she knows the Caps are in town but she’s not going to change her life for him, and honestly, there’s a part of her itching for a fight, to see what bullshit he’ll come up with.
Georgie walks into the gym a little past midnight while she’s sprinting on the treadmill and she slams it off, that momentum pushing her forward. It’s gratifying when he takes a couple steps back, despite being 6’3”—thanks NHL.com!
She rolls her eyes when he pulls out some poor little rich boy bullshit about why he lied, not even original about it. She’s disappointed, she realizes, and god, that if she’s going to be really honest with herself, she was kind of hoping he’d have a good reason after all.
“I just liked you. I liked hanging out with you,” he says, then. He’s looking at her like he already knows what she’s going to say, exactly how it’s all going to end before it even starts. “I didn’t want to fuck that up.”
She squints at him. Melissa was too pissed to notice before but he looks genuinely exhausted, sallow instead of pale and blurry around the eyes. His voice was low and defeated when he spoke, and she thinks, suddenly, about the way he flinched when she called him a liar. She thinks if she asked him to leave, he would, and she wouldn’t have to worry about finding a new gym because he’d never come back.
“What?” Georgie asks.
“Do you want to go out sometime?” Melissa asks.
“I thought you didn’t date liars,” he says, with an unhappy twist to his mouth and something in his eyes she can’t figure out just yet. It surprises her that she really wants to.
“Don’t lie to me again,” she says, and trusts he won’t.
The smile on his face when he agrees melts away everything else, the exhaustion and the unhappy look in his eye. He has laugh lines around his eyes when he smiles, and Melissa wants to keep seeing them.