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Patrick wakes up absolutely positive that yesterday had been the day.
It’s just a feeling, this out-of-body, dreamlike and surreal realization, like you’re not quite you. It’s hard to swallow as he sits up, his mouth incredibly dry, and it feels like something is settling back into him as he starts to move.
There’s no other explanation. His soulmate must have turned twenty-two yesterday.
He’s pushing his comforter off, sliding to the edge of his bed, when he notices that he’s naked apart from his boxers. He doesn’t even know if he should be embarrassed or amused or what, because he always, always, sleeps in his pajamas. He gets too cold otherwise, and that means that yesterday, whoever had been in possession of his body had seen fit to, well… take his clothes off.
Which, some people would probably find that morally dubious, but seeing as whoever had done it was Patrick’s soulmate, he’s feeling pretty generous about it. If he’d been the one to turn twenty-two first and woke up in somebody else’s body, his soulmate’s body, he’s pretty sure he’d have taken a peek at the goods too. Like, who’s going to resist that?
He grabs his phone off the end table, notes that he has a few texts and two missed calls, but resolves to call Sharpy back later, after he’s read his soulmate’s note. He casts a look around the room, trying to see if it was left anywhere in the vicinity, maybe on the side table or taped to the wall or something, but he doesn’t see anything on first glance, and he’s too impatient to look more when it’s probably in the living room, or the kitchen.
Patrick’s dad told him and his sisters that when he’d turned twenty-two and woke up in Patrick’s mom’s bedroom, surrounded by flower-patterned blankets and rugs and curtains—his mom still has a thing for flowers, even now—he’d decided to buy her a bouquet of roses and leave his phone number for her in the card. Patrick had always kind of liked that; thought it made for a good story.
He’s not hoping for a bouquet of flowers or anything specific like that now that it’s his turn, but it is tradition to leave a note, a sign of who you are, of how your soulmate can find you after the day is up and you go back to being… well, you.
Patrick’s thought about what he could do for years, if he turned twenty-two first: like, he could tape a bunch of post-it notes around her apartment with comments about her life, or get a bunch of strawberries and then leave his phone number traced out in, like, chocolate sauce or something. Something stupidly cliché and romantic and awesome. Not that that matters anymore, since he obviously didn’t turn twenty-two first, and he’s the one searching his apartment for a note.
A note he can’t find.
There’s nothing on the counters, or taped to the TV, or even on the bathroom mirror or front door, and he’s moving around the couch cushions, just in case, getting a little more desperate as he goes, because—it has to be somewhere. There has to be something.
“Fuck!” he yells, still empty-handed, a few minutes later, living room half turned over.
His phone starts ringing, and he answers it, but keeps looking. Maybe it was in his bedroom and he’d walked right past it. He says, “Hey,” into the phone as he pushes through his bedroom doorway and bends down to pick up the comforter strewn on his bed, checking to make sure he hadn’t dislodged a piece of paper when he’d woken up earlier.
“Peeks?”
He gets on the floor, checking to make sure it didn’t, like, get pushed underneath the bed or something.
“Yeah, hey Sharpy,” he grunts, reaching a hand out. It’s a little dark, but all he finds are two dirty pairs of socks and an empty water bottle.
“Are you still puking? I’ve been given orders to make sure you aren’t dying.”
Patrick pauses, and then says, “Wait, what?”
“You skipped practice because you were sick yesterday?”
Patrick fumbles with his phone, saying, “Uh, wait a minute, Sharpy,” and looks back at his outgoing messages. Yeah, there it is, sent at nine in the morning, yesterday.
Can’t get to practice today. Sick.
There’s a bunch of texts answering, wanting to know how sick, if he’ll be good for the game tomorrow—today—or if he needs anything, but she hadn’t answered any of those. Patrick doesn’t know why she didn’t just come out and tell them it wasn’t him. It’s not like this doesn’t happen all the time, to everybody.
“Yeah, I wasn’t sick,” he says, sitting back against his bed. He’s kind of cold, and grabs for the comforter, pulling it around him. “Yesterday was the day, man. My soulmate was here. I can’t find a fucking note though. What if it got lost or something?”
It takes a second for Sharpy to catch up with the conversation, but then he says, “Holy shit, Peeks, congratulations. And, uh, have you checked your computer? I don’t know, I just left one for Abby in her textbook. Took her five seconds to find it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Patrick grumbles. He knows; he’s heard the story a thousand times. It’s never irritated him quite as much as it is right now though, so he says, “Shut up. Come over here and help me look. It’s probably somewhere obvious and I’m just missing it.”
“Wouldn’t put it past you,” Sharpy muses, and then says, “Yeah, I’ll head on over. Text Coach that you’re good for the game tonight.”
He hangs up, and Patrick does text Q, because he doesn’t want to get scratched from the game or anything, and then forces himself up to find some jeans, just so he’s not practically flashing Sharpy when he shows up. That turns out to be a smart plan, because when the doorbell rings and Patrick pulls it open, Sharpy’s got Burs, Duncs and Seabs with him too, all grinning and grabbing him around the neck to say, “Kaner, man, congrats! You’re growing up. Find the note yet?”
“No,” he says, and he knows he’s whining, but he’s looked everywhere, and he’s starting to think she just hadn’t left one.
“Alright,” Sharpy says, clapping his hands together. “Let’s find this fucker.”
They search everywhere Patrick’s already looked, and all they manage to find is another empty water bottle in the living room where Patrick trips over it, falling on his ass. He doesn’t even know where it came from, because he recycles his shit, like normal people, but whatever.
He throws it angrily in the trash bin, and then sighs when the guys give him looks like they’re starting to feel sorry for him. He throws himself back on his couch, covering his face with one of his arms. Why wouldn’t she have left a note?
“I’m not that bad looking,” he mutters, and Burish says, “Nah, just a little weird. Totally easy to get used to after a few days. She’ll come around.” Patrick throws a couch pillow at him, feeling a small bit of satisfaction when it hits him square in the face.
“Do you want something to drink?” Sharpy asks, and if Sharpy’s being nice to him, he really is screwed.
Sharpy heads towards the kitchen anyway, and Patrick goes back to trying to suffocate himself with the couch cushion. He’s been thinking about this day for years, when he’d find out who she is, where she is, how to find her, just be with her—
“Maybe she took your phone number, plans on calling you,” Seabs says, after a minute.
Duncs makes a face though, and shoots that idea down before Patrick can even feel hopeful, by saying, “That’d be a dumb idea on her part. It’s always hazy when you wake up again. Details like phone numbers, they can’t stick. I’ve read about it. It’s why people leave notes.”
“She could have, uh, e-mailed it to herself?”
Patrick’s computer is password locked, but she could have used his phone. He drags it out of his pocket and peers at it, but if she had gotten on to e-mail herself, she knows how to erase the internet history. Patrick’s got no trace of her other than the one message she’d sent off to Sharpy yesterday—except, yeah. She’d visited his wikipedia page, ‘assault and theft charges’ and all.
Patrick groans into the couch, and doesn’t look up when Sharpy comes back from the kitchen, saying, “Uh, Peeks?”
“What?” Patrick asks, annoyed, when nobody says anything. He looks up, and sees that Sharpy’s holding a beer out for him to take. The bottle is wet from condensation, and a post-it note is barely managing to stick on. Sharpy fucking found the note. He scrambles up and grabs at it, ripping it from Sharpy’s hand, and then stares at the words scrawled across it.
The script is kind of messy, written in pencil, and all it says is you have crappy taste in beer. No phone number, no name, no x’s or o’s or e-mail addresses.
Just fucking you have crappy taste in beer.
“What the fuck?” he says, staring at it, and Sharpy shakes his head, before he says, “Sorry, Peeks.”
“That’s all she wrote?” he asks again, not quite believing it. That’s all she wrote?
He looks at the guys, at their dumb, pitying faces, and thinks fuck.
Patrick kind of wants to spend the next few hours drinking, but he has a game, and drinking until he can’t remember the stupid note about his choices in beer isn’t really an option, as much as he wishes it was. Not that he thinks he’d really be able to forget. He channels his frustration into working hard on the ice instead, works his way up to a goal and an assist at the game that night, and manages two goals the game after that. Maybe it’s dumb, trying to prove something, to her, that he’s—that he’s worth a chance, at the very least—but, well.
He’s doing it anyway.
He keeps drinking the same kind of beer, too, if just out of spite.
The team barely manages to makes it into the playoffs, even with him and Sharpy both pulling double shifts to make up for Hossa’s injury, and they crash and burn out of their first series in just five games. He goes home to Buffalo frustrated and upset, and his sisters asking about his soulmate doesn’t make shit much better. He doesn’t know anything to tell them, except that she thought he had shitty taste in beer and apparently didn’t even want to meet him before giving up on him.
“So, she’s either not a hockey fan, or she’s a Canucks fan, right?” Jessica says, in-between bites of her cheerios.
Patrick sighs, looking at his own bowl. He picks out the strawberries and eats those, ignoring the cheerios themselves. Jackie makes a sound of agreement, but then says, “Or Detroit.”
“I hate you both,” Patrick bemoans, because seriously, not helping.
“Well,” his mom says, joining the conversation as she dips a spoon into Patrick’s bowl instead of making her own, “you’ll be turning twenty-two in a few months yourself. Maybe you’ll find out.”
Patrick doesn’t even know if he’s looking forward to it or dreading it. She’s still his soulmate, but if she really doesn’t care about him at all, seeing what her life is like is just going to suck. Maybe she already has a boyfriend, and he’s way better-looking than Patrick. Or smarter, like, maybe he went to college and everything, is some hotshot lawyer or doctor. It’s dumb; he shouldn’t be jealous of somebody he doesn’t even know for sure exists, but he’s self-aware enough to recognize the hot, hurt and angry feeling he gets when he imagines it.
Maybe there’s not a boyfriend. Maybe she just thought he wasn’t good enough for her, period. Maybe she hates hockey, or sports, or just athletes altogether.
It’s not entirely unheard of for soulmates to get rejected. It’s just incredibly rare, one in a thousand, and even then, they usually manage to work it out, because you’re soulmates for a reason. Patrick isn’t sure what he’ll do if he turns out to be the one person who’s soulmate straight-up doesn’t want him.
He tries not to even think about her for the rest of summer, because it’s not going to be an issue until November anyway. There’s nothing he can even do right now except wallow in his disappointment. Instead, he dives into getting ready for the next season after a few more weeks of just hanging around with his sisters and drinking his “crappy” beer.
By the time he’s back in Chicago and the season is starting up, he’s feeling good about the coming year. They win most of their pre-season games, putting the whole team in an equally optimistic mood for the regular season. They start off with a win, followed by a loss, but then follow it up with two more wins and a shut out for their new starting goalie, which makes everybody feel good enough to drag him out for drinks, at least until they all have to get cab rides home or risk passing out on the bar floor.
Sharpy pulls through, captain-wise, for once, and drags Patrick home with him, letting him pass out on his couch instead of risking the cab ride back to his own place, where he’d probably have stumbled around and woke up with a terrible headache. As it is, he gets aspirin and water courtesy of Sharpy’s miracle wife—and then wakes up to a newborn baby crying at two in the morning. He rubs at his eyes and walks to the nursery, where Sharpy’s already picking Madelyn up, sleepily asking her if she’s hungry, and yawning as he turns around and catches sight of Patrick.
“Hey,” he says, “feel like letting Uncle Peeks hold you while I warm up your bottle?”
She keeps crying until Patrick gives in and lets her try to eat his finger, and Sharpy, despite clearly still being half-asleep, somehow gets the bottle ready, and takes her back to feed her as soon as it is. Patrick fumbles back to the couch and lies down, but he can’t get back to sleep so easily.
The thing is, he wouldn’t mind having to get up at crazy hours to feed a kid if it was his, he doesn’t think. Not that he wants a kid anytime soon, but one day would be nice. It’s too bad that his soulmate doesn’t think he’s even worthy of trading phone numbers with; somehow, Patrick doubts she’d want to have a kid with him.
November comes weirdly quick, after that.
He goes to bed on the eighteenth, knowing he’ll wake up in the morning somewhere else entirely, and he’s sort of been waiting for it his whole life, so he doesn’t even know why he’s anxious. Well, no, he knows why he’s anxious. When his soulmate had done this, had woken up in Patrick’s body, in Patrick’s apartment, she’d found him so lacking that she hadn’t even left him her name, her phone number, hell, her e-mail address. Just—nothing.
When he wakes up in her body, surrounded by all her stuff, what, exactly, is he supposed to do?
He closes his eyes and breathes slow and even, but can’t fall asleep. He tries to count sheep, for a while, before groaning and climbing out of bed to go jump on his exercise bike, hoping to exhaust himself into sleeping. He takes a quick shower before falling back into bed, and by the time he gets comfortable, the clock blinks eleven forty-two at him, in bright red letters.
He closes his eyes, tries to relax, but when he opens them what feels like a minute later, the clock says eleven fifty-seven, and shit, he’s not going to fall asleep. He swallows, heart going a mile a minute, and waits as the clock clicks to fifty-eight, fifty-nine—
—thirty-two?
He blinks, hazy, and struggles to sit up under a dark blue comforter that’s much heavier than his own. The clock is blinking at him, eight thirty-two, and there’s light filtering in through the window, but it’s not his clock, or his window, and when he scrambles up, almost falling when he feels heavier than expected, he stares down at his hands, and then at his naked thighs, his calves and at his chest, which is, uh, very much lacking the breasts he was kind of expecting.
And if he looks down a little farther, he’s wearing a tight pair of black boxer-briefs that are definitely not doing a great job at hiding the tenting morning wood vying for some attention.
Right, uh. His soulmate is a guy, then. That’s… Patrick won’t lie, it’s pretty fucking unexpected.
There’s a door in the corner of the room, and he fumbles his way over to it, past a cluttered desk with all sorts of papers and books piled high, and a trash bin filled with empty water bottles and plastic wrap—his soulmate is kind of a mess, he thinks—and pushes his way through the door into the bathroom.
First thing he does is piss, and it’s weird as hell to do it with somebody else’s dick, but at least it’s a relatively good excuse for peeling the boxers off and getting to look without him feeling too skeevy about it. It’s not like he’s thinking about jerking off, or anything; he’s just looking.
Patrick’s never seen an uncircumcised dick outside of porn before. He’s surprised, to say the least, and kind of interested in figuring out how, exactly, that works, but he pulls his boxers back up and ignores the way his dick twitches at just the gentle pressure from that. God.
He backtracks to where there’s a large mirror, and he startles, seeing his soulmate there, eyes wide in surprise and looking right back at him. He’s clean shaven with shortly cropped hair and a big forehead, dark bags under his eyes and lines that shift when Patrick smiles, just to see what it looks like. His teeth are white, a little sharp, and he could probably do with a tan, but the whole thing is—
He’s stupidly attractive, is the thing, big ears and all. His adam’s apple visibly moves when Patrick swallows, and he feels his still-hard dick twitch as he stares at the face in the mirror.
Apparently fate wasn’t wrong after all, Patrick thinks. He’s definitely into dudes. Or, this dude, at least. Speaking of, Patrick really needs to figure out the guy’s name.
He heads back out into the bedroom, taking in the messy desk and hastily-folded looking piles of laundry on the dresser, and yeah, water bottles all over the place. He heads for the desk first, hunting through the papers and books for something with a name on it: a letter, a picture that was stamped, an ID, anything with a name.
He looks on the dresser next, and ends up distractedly re-folding some of it and putting it away, both in the actual dresser drawers and in the closet. Hilariously, when Patrick opens the closet door, a pile of shit falls out onto his feet, and he has to sit back on the bed and laugh for about ten minutes about how his soulmate is apparently a teenage boy that still cleans his room by throwing all his shit in the closet and shoving the door closed.
He manages to find a cellphone, but it’s locked and doesn’t help Patrick by revealing its owner’s name even when he starts pushing random buttons, pointlessly hopeful that he’ll luck into pressing the right combination and unlock the damn thing.
Patrick eventually leaves the bedroom, dressed in a pair of jeans and an old Mets t-shirt that’s pretty faded and well-worn. The living room is much neater, and all Patrick can see that’s a disaster is the collection of DVDs in the corner. The kitchen is clean too, and there’s a note set out on the counter—don’t drink my root beer.
Patrick snorts; this guy is just an asshole altogether.
His heart thumps a little, though, when he opens the fridge and sees a case of beer—the same beer this guy had previously dubbed ‘crappy’ when he’d seen it In Patrick’s fridge—with another post-it that says this is for you, the this heavily outlined. There’s a case of fancy bottled root beer in the back, like he’d tried to hide it from view, with another post-it that just says seriously. Patrick starts to pull a bottle out just because he can, but then puts it back in exchange for the half-empty carton of milk instead, figuring he should go for cereal first.
After breakfast and another stretch of healthy searching for a letter or picture or something with this guy’s name written on it and coming up with nothing, he settles on the couch with the unhappy realization that for some reason, whoever this guy is, he’s intentionally hiding any sort of… way to identify him, from Patrick. He doesn’t want Patrick to know who he is.
He doesn’t want Patrick to contact him at all.
He stares aimlessly at the empty screen of the television for a while, but then gets an idea when his eyes catch on a ring of keys hanging from a nail by the front door. One of them, he’s pretty sure, has to be a mailbox key. If the guy’s gotten mail yet today, Patrick could get his name off of it.
When he opens the door after slipping on a pair of flip flops—and Jesus, this guy’s feet are huge—he realizes that he’s actually in an apartment building. A pretty nice one, sure, but he hadn’t noticed before. He’s not even sure what floor he’s on, and takes care to mentally note the information when he climbs into the elevator.
Four, apparently.
The bottom floor has the mailboxes all set up in a row against the wall so that Patrick doesn’t even have to head outside, although he can see through the clear glass doors that it’s snowing. Idly, he wonders where he is. A city, from the looks of it. But then he doesn’t have to wonder, because he’s unlocked the mailbox with 419 stamped to the front, and there are three letters inside, all of them with the same recipient name and address printed.
Jonathan Toews
#419 Suite 4Fl-185 Carlton St.
Winnipeg, MB R3C 3J1
“Jonathan,” he breathes out, slow and evenly, still looking at the letter. His soulmate’s name is Jonathan. It’s a good name. It fits, weirdly enough, and Patrick ends up sort of slumping up against the mailboxes, relieved and unable to look away from the name.
He startles when someone comes up from behind him and says, “Good morning, Jon,” before passing by and leaving through the front doors. He manages a, “Uh, morning,” and his voice is—Jon’s voice—is rough and scratchy.
He heads back over to the elevator and presses a hand to the upward arrow. When the elevator opens again, it’s empty, and he can climb in without worrying about people talking to him, thinking he’s Jonathan. Jon. Jonny?
He uses the keys to get back into Jon’s apartment, and then leaves the three letters in a pile on the kitchen counter. After a few minutes of thinking, he grabs a sticky-note and writes, i got your mail for you, JONATHAN because two can play at this game.
He chews on the end of the pen for a second, before he says, “Fuck it,” and he grabs the whole stack of post-it’s and sits down at the table, writing YOU and ARE and A and DICK on four different ones and sticking them to bathroom mirror so that Jon won’t be able to miss them tomorrow.
He means it too. Patrick doesn’t get it; everybody wants to meet their soulmate, at least just for the sake of meeting. There are some pictures hanging on the walls, family and friends as far as Patrick can tell, but he doesn’t see any obvious wives or girlfriends (husbands? boyfriends?) in them. There’s no reason for Jon to just not want to meet him.
And the thing is, it doesn’t seem like that at all. Jon bought Patrick his own case of beer, left post-it notes for him when he didn’t have to. Maybe it’s the guy thing; maybe Jon woke up in Patrick’s apartment, in his body, and freaked out. Patrick could understand that. Or maybe he thinks it’d be an issue because of the whole professional hockey player thing? Patrick couldn’t care less. He’s pretty sure having his soulmate would be worth whatever mess the fact that they’re both dudes would dredge up, anyway. Or maybe Jon’s just not interested in dating a hockey player. Except he’s, you know, Canadian. The odds seem against it.
Spitefully, he goes back to the fridge and pulls a bottle of root beer out, and drinks it so fast he has to stop to gasp for breath. But then he leaves the empty bottle on the counter, and sticks a note with it: Thanks for the root beer. It was great!!
After a second he adds a smiley face.
He ends up going back into Jon’s bedroom, just because it seems like the most lived in space, and jerk or not, Patrick wants to know more about him. This might be his only chance. There’s a pile of dirty laundry pushed behind the door though, and Patrick is annoyed by it enough that he grabs at it and starts shoving shit into an already pretty full hamper.
The laptop at the desk is password-locked; Patrick had tried it earlier, but nothing worked. There are papers everywhere on the desk though, spilling over every available space. He ends up going through them, organizing, while he nurses a second root beer much slower than he had the first one, and amusingly enough comes across some documents and sheets of lined paper that have Jon’s name scrawled in the top corner. There’s a list of names and allergies, and then what looks like a half-labeled lesson plan for a fifth grade writing course, if Patrick’s reading it right, that he manages to find too.
Patrick doubts Jon’s a teacher. The guy is only twenty-two, so if he is, he must be brand spanking new at it. Patrick doesn’t know if Jon was supposed to head into work today or not, but it’s not like he left Patrick any discernible way to actually call them, so he’ll have to deal with that himself when the day’s over. And he’d seemed to be expecting Patrick, so hopefully the dude forewarned people he’d be out of touch for the day.
Half of the papers he straightens up at the desk are in French. Patrick can’t understand them at all, but there’s a few flyers and what look like permission slips for a kid’s hockey club that he finds hiding in a drawer, and he leaves them on top of the desk with another post-it stuck to the top: you like hockey?
After he finds the washing machine down the hall and dumps in a load, he comes back to start searching for an ironing board, if Jon even owns one. Some of his clothes desperately need it, and Patrick figures he can do that—prove he’s not as useless as Jon must think he is. What he finds though, is a stash of hockey sticks hidden in the back of the closet behind a box of old jerseys and pucks, and whatever guilt he might have felt about going through Jon’s shit without asking first dissipates fast.
Jon plays hockey. Or played, at least, at some point. Patrick slumps down on the bed, shaking his head.
Maybe Jon’s just afraid to make the first move.
It’s dark by the time he’s finished his newly-decided mission to hide post-it notes all over Jon’s apartment—under the comforter of Jon’s bed, and a more obvious one left on the pillow; stuck to the milk carton in the fridge, and hidden in various pockets of jeans and sweatshirts, on the screen of his laptop and television, helpfully letting Jon know both Patrick’s e-mail address and what channels he can find the Blackhawks games on.
The notes are all simple little things—one on his newly folded and ironed pile of laundry reminding him to actually do his fucking laundry once in a while and comments on how terrible that Habs jersey in his closet looks.
He wants to leave more than just some random scribbled post-it notes though. Partially those are just to annoy the fuck out of this guy, because he deserves it, and a little more maybe to… to remind Jon of him when he least expects it. He could reach into his pocket, looking for a wallet, and end up with an old note from Patrick that says Habs? Really?
Maybe Patrick can wear him down.
What he ends up doing though, is sitting down at the kitchen table with a pen and an actual piece of paper he’d had to pry from the printer, and he writes a letter that ends up being filled with too many insults, but it’s the best he can do. He signs it, adds his phone number and e-mail address just in case, and then lets his head drop to the table with a solid thunk.
He’s left traces of himself all over the apartment, left notes and a letter taped to the now half-empty case of root beer in the refrigerator. He drinks a bottle of the corona Jon had bought for him before he climbs into bed, and he’s just warm enough that he can’t resist slipping his hands down, feeling the strong play of muscles in Jon’s thighs, in his abdomen and chest.
He’s never really been into guys, but fuck if he doesn’t want to touch this body with his hands, get his mouth on it while Jon himself shakes underneath. He closes his eyes, feels his dick twitch and start to harden up. He ignores it and lets his head fall back to the pillow that smells like some kind of shampoo Patrick vaguely recognizes, and lets himself fall asleep instead.
When he wakes up, he’s back in his own bed.
He scrambles up and out of bed and grabs a pen, trying to remember whatever he can. It’s blurring together, the way dreams do, but he remembers the name John, and – he was Canadian, yeah. Patrick remembers that. But where exactly in Canada was he yesterday? He stares at the pad of paper under his hand, but can’t – British Columbia? Saskatchewan? Manitoba?
Fuck if he remembers.
He thinks that John must have liked hockey. Something about sticks, hidden in the back of a closet. And he remembers the – apartment? condo? – was a mess, clothes and papers and dishes all over the place. He thinks something was blue. The carpet, maybe.
Not that the color of the carpet is what matters.
He shakes his head, trying to remember a name, a place.
The easiest thing to remember is looking at himself, at his soulmate, in the mirror. He remembers tracing with calloused fingertips over his skin, stopping at freckles, moles, and curling his hand into a fist just before his fingertips could touch the scraggly dark hair at his groin.
He remembers wanting him – them, together – so badly it hurt.
He sits back on the bed, heavy, and stares at his hands, shaking.
The frame creaks under his weight, and the clock next to his bed reads 10:17 AM. Morning skate starts in forty minutes, and everybody’ll be expecting him today. He’s going to get peppered with questions about where he woke up yesterday – about how he spent the day, about who his soulmate is.
All he knows, really, is the same as it had been when he was still twenty-one. Whoever his soulmate is, he isn’t interested in knowing who Patrick is.
When Patrick gets to the practice rink, he ducks past some of the management crew and heads straight into the locker room. The guys are hanging around, half suited up and talking about something that happened yesterday while Patrick was at home in bed, knocked out – or in Canada, whichever way you look at it.
“Peeks!” Sharpy yells, face breaking out into a grin when he sees Patrick walk in.
Patrick gives a small smile back, before sitting in his spot along the wall, tugging down the practice jersey hanging in the stall. Sharpy sits down next to him a second later, right as Patrick tugs his t-shirt off and throws it on the bench behind him.
“Not a good day then?” Sharpy asks, and Patrick shrugs.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember much.”
“Maybe she’ll call. You left your number, right?” Bicks asks from a few stalls away, bending down to tie his laces at the same time. The whole team is listening in, and Patrick sighs.
“Yeah, I guess,” Patrick starts, “but I don’t really–“
And then stops, because his pocket starts to vibrate. “Uh,” he trails off, and reaches for his phone. By the time he pulls it out of his pocket, it’s ringing loud and clear. The display reads unknown caller, which Patrick would usually ignore – fans and reporters get a hold of his number sometimes, often enough that he saves the number of everyone he’d even remotely need to talk to.
Seabs says, “Kaner, answer it,” after it rings for the fourth time and he just keeps staring at the display.
“Yeah,” Patrick says, shaking his head, and he sweeps the arrow up with his thumb before lifting the phone to his ear. “Uh, hello?”
“Hey,” someone says, after a second, sounding almost as hesitant as Patrick feels. He swallows past his nerves, past the way his teammates are staring and the way his entire body is trembling.
“You’re, uh…”
“Jonathan Toews. You left your number for me.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, raising his voice. Of course he fucking left his number. Of course he— “Yeah, that’s because that’s what you do when you turn twenty-two and wake up in your soulmate’s house, in their fucking body! Why the hell didn’t you? What, you woke up and saw me in the mirror and decided I wasn’t worth it?” He wants to add fuck you, wants to yell it loud and clear, but he thinks he might cry if he goes that far, and his teammates don’t need to see that.
Jonathan Toews doesn’t need to hear it.
“No! Jesus, no, I just wasn’t expecting to wake up in Patrick fucking Kane’s body, alright?” The voice is a little rough through the phone, but Patrick closes his eyes at the sound anyway.
"That’s not a fucking excuse," he says, gripping the phone so tight he accidentally pushes a button he didn’t mean to, and Candy Crush pops up on the screen, irritating circus music and all.
Patrick curses and presses down hard at the exit button, trying to get rid of it. He hears Jonathan clear his throat, still on the line, and ask, “Are you seriously playing a game on your phone right now?”
"It popped up on its own, give me a second," Patrick mutters, just as he gets the game to stop. Or at least mute.
Seabs is laughing silently by his locker, and Duncs gives Patrick a thumbs up. Everybody is still listening in, fuck.
“Should I hang up?” Jon asks, and Patrick can practically hear the grin.
“Don’t be an asshole, no.”
It shouldn’t be making his chest hurt from how hard his heart is pounding in response, but he can’t help it.
“Then stop yelling at me. Look, I have to go to work, you messed with my alarm when you decided to rearrange my entire fucking apartment, but, just – you have my number now, right? So we’re even.”
Patrick vaguely remembers picking up some trash and folding laundry, not rearranging an entire apartment, but whatever. “Yeah, I have skate, too. But, uh, can I ask you something?”
John’s voice sounds warm, if a little annoyed, like maybe he’s rolling his eyes, and he says, “Sure, yeah.”
“You’re not a Canucks fan, right?”
John laughs through the line, and he says, “Fuck no. I’m from Winnipeg, dumbass. Jets all the way.”
He doesn’t even wait for Patrick to sputter at him before he hangs up, and Patrick’s phone cuts out, going back to the main screen. He stares at it, open-mouthed, and then looks up to see Sharpy still watching him, grin on his face.
“So, Jonathan, huh? You left out an important detail there.”
“Shut up,” Patrick says, but laughs. He feels giddy and ridiculous, because that was his soulmate, just now, that was—and they argued, sure, but it was fun, for the two seconds that they were on the phone, and he feels a lot better now that he knows he’s not just going to be ignored, passed over and rejected by his soulmate, the one person he’s meant to be with.
"Fuck," he says, breathless, and slumps back onto the bench in his locker. Jonathan Toews, Canadian, Jets fan.
His soulmate.
Patrick’s parents like to laugh about how Patrick’s dad had started looking for houses the minute he woke up after turning twenty-two. He hadn’t wanted to wait, he always says, stubbornly, when anybody brings it up. His mom had managed to hold him off for four months before they got married, mostly because Patrick’s grandpa insisted she finish out her last year of college.
When you find your soulmate, you’re supposed to want to be with them, aren’t you?
He and Jonny have been texting for two weeks, and they’ve talked on the phone exactly four times, and that’s – that’s it.
It’s not like Patrick has tons of time; he’s a professional hockey player – he’s got games, and flights, and practices, sessions with trainers, gym time requirements… Still, he’s not the one that’s always too busy to talk, or skype, or answer a couple texts. Patrick’s asked if they could skype, maybe, a couple times, and Jonny always says sure, yeah, not tonight, not right now, I’m busy.
Patrick’s even brought up the idea of flying Jonny out to Chicago, since his own schedule is a little too crazy to manage him flying out to Winnipeg, but he got shut down hard and fast. Patrick got the message. He hasn’t brought it up again. But is just hooking up a damn webcam so much to ask for?
“We have a break coming up,” is Sharpy’s advice, eyebrows moving like he’s trying to imply something.
Even if Patrick did use his two days off to fly out to Winnipeg, he’s not sure he’d be welcome. Actually, no, he’s pretty sure Jonny’d take one look at him and say, “Go home, Patrick.”
But by the time they’ve lost to the Predators, the Red Wings, and the Wild, all in that order, an hour or two, face-to-face, is all Patrick really wants. Just – anything, at all, and if he has to fly something like eight-hundred miles to get it, then fine.
He’s an hour into the flight by the time he remembers he doesn’t actually know Jonny’s address.
He’s tired when he gets off the plane, but he only brought a carry-on, so at least there’s that. The problem now, of course, is what address to give the taxi driver. He’s debating on just getting a hotel or calling Jonny and trying to trick him into telling him his address–if he even picks up, it’s past midnight–when he notices there’s two missed texts on his phone.
One is from Jessica, asking if he’ll give her her birthday present early this year, and he writes back NEVER, all caps, with a demented emoticon at the end, before he looks at the other one. And, huh, it’s from Jonny, a little over two hours ago.
way to avoid the tough areas. that was a nice wrist shot in the third though.
Patrick bites his lip, pleased Jonny apparently watched the game. He doesn’t all the time, has admitted he doesn’t have the time and really isn’t a fan of Chicago. Patrick had promised to change that, and Jonny’d laughed over the phone, sending warm flutters through Patrick’s chest, just because of the sound of his voice, all deep and attractive.
He presses the call this number button on the text, and raises his phone to his ear, adjusting his grip on his bag and leaning back against a wall to get out of the way of the crowd moving through the main hall of the airport.
“Hey,” he hears after a few long rings, and Patrick sighs in relief. A yawn comes through the line though, and Patrick says, “What, you’re sleeping already?”
Jonny actually sounds moderately guilty when he says, “No, I was – reading.”
Patrick doesn’t believe it for a second, but lets it go anyway.
“So, hey, I’m at the airport.”
He kind of needs Jonny to be a in a good mood for this conversation to go well.
“… so you need to let me go?” Jonny asks, clearly confused.
“No!” Patrick yells, quickly. “No, uh, actually I was kind of just hoping you’d, uh, give me your address.”
Jonny is silent on the other end of the line, and Patrick cringes. He should’ve called before leaving Chicago, fuck. He’d just been thinking he could surprise him, and even if Jonny wasn’t crazy about the idea, it’s not like he’d turn Patrick away right away, and they’d get dinner or something, at least, and –
“You’re at the Winnipeg airport?”
“Flight just landed,” Patrick admits. “I was going to surprise you.”
He can’t tell if Jonny is annoyed or pissed or what, but after a minute, and a long exhale, Jonny says, “Yeah, I’ll—just wait at the Timmies on the first floor. I’ll come pick you up.”
“I can get a taxi,” Patrick protests, quickly, “you don’t have to…”
“It’s fine. I was awake anyway,” Jonny says, and Patrick can hear him grabbing his keys, and a door opening and closing in the background. “Give me twenty minutes, alright?”
“Alright,” Patrick says, breathing out slowly. “I’ll, uh, be waiting.”
He hangs up, and then looks up at the ceiling. Obviously, he’ll be waiting. Jonny just told him to – oh, God, he’s waiting in the airport for Jonny to come pick him up. He’s about to see him, face-to-face, for the first time. He doesn’t even remember what he looks like. Tall, he thinks, and brunette.
It’s fine.
Patrick’s fine.
He hitches his bag up over his shoulder and starts heading for the nearest escalator that leads downstairs. He stops twice—once to give a kid with a hockey bag an autograph, and again for a group of teenage girls who stalk him for a minute before he turns around and gives them a look, and one of them bravely comes up and asks if they can get a photo with him.
The Tim Hortons is pretty close to the front, though Patrick has to squish through the crowded baggage claim area. It’s next to a bathroom, so he heads in there first, and stares at himself in the mirror after washing his hands. His hair is a mess; he didn’t bring any gel with him, doesn’t even have a comb in the hastily packed carry-on he’d grabbed.
It’s stupid, this is why he came to Winnipeg. But somehow, for some reason, it’s just now hitting him that he’s actually going to meet Jonny. Jonathan. His soulmate. The guy he’s meant to be with, who’s been dodging him for months, and now he has to prove that they’re supposed to be together, and he has a day, maybe two, to do it, and he doesn’t even have a fucking comb –
He runs his hands through his hair after wetting them in the sink again, doing his best with what he’s got, but eventually has to concede defeat and head next door to the packed Timmies. He used to get the mixed Timbits bags all the time when he played in London, but he hasn’t had them in a while. He ends up ordering some just for nostalgia, and munches on them as slowly as he can manage while he waits for Jonny to show up.
Somehow, it doesn’t even take all that long, and when he hears, “Patrick?” in that familiar voice he’s been hearing over the phone for the past couple weeks, he snaps his head up, practically falling off his seat.
“Sorry,” Jonny says, raising an arm to scratch at his neck, “it’s only about a twenty minute drive, but I hit traffic on Notre Dame.”
Patrick swallows, looking at him – fuck, how did he forget this? His heart feels like it’s about to pound its way right out of his chest. “It’s fine,” he manages, finally, and then almost chokes on the donut he was eating. Jonny claps a hand on his back, and Patrick coughs and swallows.
“Fuck,” he says, finally, and Jonny grins at him.
“Come on, let’s go. It’s past midnight. You could’ve given me some fucking warning.”
“If I’d told you, you would have made up some excuse and told me not to come!” Jonny’s leading the way out of the arrivals exit, out onto the street, and Patrick follows obediently if just because he doesn’t know where Jonny would have parked, but he argues back anyway.
“I would not–okay, yeah, probably, but I wouldn’t have made up an excuse,” Jonny says. “I really am busy. It’s the middle of the school year, dumbass.”
Yeah, sure, but Patrick’s pretty sure even real teachers get time off, and Jonny’s just a teacher’s assistant, as far as he knows. “Two days is all I’m asking for, man.”
Jonny glances at him, and then stops when they reach a car in the parking garage. It’s a pretty standard black sedan, and Jonny says, “This is mine. Uh, get in.”
They don’t argue about Jonny’s avoidance techniques anymore, just because Jonny changes the subject by asking how the Hawks are doing. Patrick’s pretty positive Jonny knows already, but he lets it go anyway, and they argue about hockey instead all the way back to Jonny’s apartment, which does actually look vaguely familiar when they cross the snow-covered sidewalks and street and get inside the lobby.
“This is so weird,” Patrick mutters, looking at the wall of mailboxes, and then hurries to follow Jonny into the elevator.
“Yeah,” Jonny says, “like a dream, right?”
“Yeah,” Patrick agrees. It is a lot like remembering a dream, like grasping at smoke; something there, you just can’t quite reach it. “Except I won’t forget everything this time.”
“Good,” Jonny says, firmly, and the elevator dings before Patrick can say anything else. He drops his bag when they get into Jonny’s apartment; everything looks familiar, somehow, and there’s a post-it still stuck to the wall where Jonny hangs his keys, Patrick’s own handwriting saying, hey asshole, call me.
He can’t help it; he cracks up.
“Oh, shut up,” Jonny says, noticing what he’s laughing at. “You left them all over the damn place. I found one in my jacket two days ago. You owe me a case of root beer, by the way. You can pay up while you’re here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Patrick grins, when he stops laughing. “I—thanks, for picking me up.” And letting him come over, to stay for however long. Patrick really had thought he might end up at a hotel or something.
Jonny shrugs, and looks a little awkward, standing there in his jeans and winter jacket. He takes it off after a second, like he’s just remembering, and Patrick has to swallow at the sight of his shoulders, t-shirt material stretched taut around them. Patrick takes off his own, throwing it on the armchair where Jonny had dumped his, and then kicks his shoes off too, belatedly remembering Canadians do that sort of thing when he sees that Jonny already has.
“So, uh,” Patrick starts, because sure, Jonny had said he was awake when Patrick called, but it’s just now occurring to him that it’s a Wednesday, and Jonny’ll have work in the morning.
He’s interrupted when Jonny says, “Oh, fuck it,” and crowds him up against the wall.
“This alright?” he says, and Patrick’s not sure if he means the blocking him in, or the way they’re pressed all up against each other now, or something else entirely, but he nods, and just gets out a breathy, “Yeah, of course—” before Jonny’s dipping his head down and kissing Patrick right there against the wall, hand lifting to cradle his neck.
Patrick twists his hips and presses up on the balls of his feet to get closer, and kiss back, a little hard and too frantic, but fuck, fuck, not even in his wildest—okay, no, yeah, he’d wanted this, thought maybe, but he didn’t actually think—
Jonny’s kissing him, like he’s been wanting to just as badly as Patrick has this whole time. Score one for unexpected flights to Winnipeg in the middle of the night.
They end up cuddling after getting off together, huddled under Jonny’s huge comforter and wrapped around each other so well that Patrick’s eyeing the window as a possible solution to the overbearing heat. “No,” Jonny mumbles, when Patrick makes to reach over and grab at the long latch that would open it. He grabs at Patrick’s hip, keeping him close. “Heat’s on.”
“So turn the heat off,” Patrick complains, and then starts laughing when his stomach grumbles.
Jonny lifts his head from where he’d been breathing on Patrick’s neck, and he asks, “You hungry? I can make something real quick.”
Patrick would say no, if just because it’s rude to show up uninvited in the middle of the night and demand to be fed, but he’s starving, actually. He’d played a game earlier, and he hadn’t eaten before getting on the plane. Rookie mistake.
Besides, he wants Jonny to turn the heat off so that they can keep cuddling without also dying of heatstroke.
Jonny climbs out of bed, says, “Keep the bed warm, I’ll be back in a second,” and leaves the room. Light filters in through the open door, and Patrick pads out after a minute, because Jonny’s taking longer than he said he would.
He’s at the stove, stirring something in a pot, and Patrick huffs. “You didn’t have to actually cook anything.”
Jonny shrugs, looking back at him. “I’m just re-heating ravioli.”
“You’re a disaster,” Patrick says, when Jonny pours the ravioli in a bowl and acts like he expects Patrick to go back into the room and eat it in bed. He eats it at the counter instead, because the table has papers strewn all across it.
“Exams,” Jonny explains, when Patrick eyes them.
“Sounds terrible,” Patrick says, and then rubs his toes against his left calf, because they’re freezing now that he’s not underneath all those blankets with Jonny to warm him up properly.
“I turned off the heat,” Jonny smirks, when Patrick shivers, and puts his arms around Patrick’s waist from behind. His chest is warm against Patrick’s back.
“We should get back into bed then,” Patrick says, finishing his ravioli and reaching over to drop the bowl in the sink, though Jonny hasn’t let him go yet.
“Yeah,” Jonny says, mouth coming down to suck a bruise into Patrick’s neck, “we should.”
Patrick wakes up to the feeling of a hand on his back, trailing slowly down his spine. He curls into it, mumbling, and cracks open an eye to peer up at Jonny, who moves backward as soon as he does. Patrick says, “Why are you awake?” but since he’s half talking into a pillow, it might not come out that way.
Jonny rolls his eyes, anyway. “I have to go to work. Go back to sleep. I bet I’ll be back before you even wake up.”
Patrick wants to deny that, but by the time he gets up the energy to lift his head from the soft, fluffy pillow, Jonny isn’t even in the room anymore, and the clock blinks out that it’s ten in the morning—a few hours since Jonny would have left. He shoves his face back into the pillow, making a stupid noise and grinning so hard his mouth hurts, after.
Fuck, he’s happy.
He forces himself to get up, yawning and grinning at the same time, and has a weird sense of dejavu when he plants his feet on the ground. The room’s still a mess, and Patrick thinks he should be cringing at the dirty laundry building up over the edge of the hamper, and the stacks of paper next to the desk, he just feels affection all over.
His soulmate’s a dumb, cluttery mess, and it’s awful, and Patrick doesn’t mind in the least, because it’s his soulmate.
When he yells, “Fuck yes!” and pumps his fist in the air, there’s nobody around to be embarrassed but himself, and he’s too happy to care.
He comes by the address of the school Jonny works at by accident. It’s on an envelope that’s been left on the kitchen counter, along with several others. Patrick’s halfway to pouring out a bowl of cereal, but… it’s ten now, so lunch is probably in an hour or so, right?
Maybe they’d let Jonny leave for lunch, or maybe Patrick could just hang out with him in a classroom for half-an-hour, eating with all the kids. He thinks Jonny’s in charge of third graders, but he isn’t sure.
He can definitely find out though, and he stuffs his feet into his shoes after throwing on his pants and stealing a shirt from Jonny’s closet—it says something in French on the front; Patrick has no clue what it means—and heads out of the apartment, locking it as he goes.
It doesn’t take long to find a taxi, and the driver apparently knows where Westdale School is, because he doesn’t even need the address Patrick had copied down. Patrick’s been to Winnipeg before, obviously, for hockey, but he looks out the window as they drive through the city anyway. Snow still covers pretty much everything but the roads and big sidewalks, and it looks a lot like Chicago or Buffalo mid-winter.
He pays the taxi driver with the Canadian monopoly money he has in his pocket—really, who decided different colors for different bills was a good idea, a five year old? It’s hilarious—and hops out in front of the school.
It’s a really nice looking neighborhood, trees everywhere, but the snow hasn’t been cleared, so he has to take big steps through it as he heads for the main doors, wincing as it gets into his sneakers, all cold and wet. He ducks through the entryway, stomping a little on the rug to knock the snow off.
The lady at the front of the main office looks up, smiling, and says, “Hi, what can I do for you?”
"Uh," Patrick starts, because he’d actually thought he’d just be able to sneak in and find Jonny. That’s probably a bad idea though. "Yeah, I’m here for Jonathan Toews."
"Jon?" she asks. "He’ll be in class right now, but lunch is in about twenty minutes. Is he expecting you?" She’s reaching for a visitor’s badge, and gives it to him as she taps a clipboard that says Guest Sign-In Sheet. “You’ll have to sign in.”
Patrick scribbles in his name and slips the lanyard and badge over his head, and then sits around for fifteen minutes messing with his phone. There’s a kid that’s sitting there in the office, mostly turning in a chair like she has nothing to do, who gets sent to let Mr. Toews know he has a visitor in the office.
Apparently Jonny works at a middle school, not an elementary school like Patrick had been thinking. The bell rings, and Patrick’s only sitting there for another minute before Jonny comes in, looking—actually, kind of looking pissed off.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, gritting his teeth as Patrick stands up. He’s quiet enough that the front desk lady probably doesn’t hear, but Patrick frowns and looks at her anyway, to check.
"I thought we could do lunch?" he says, slowly. They’d had a pretty good time last night. They slept together, Jonny pushed him against the wall and kissed him, and held him while they slept and—
What the fuck is wrong with dropping by to do lunch together?
Except, yeah, that’s when the office doors open again, and three kids file in, eyes wide and mouths open, and one of them says, “See, I told you Patrick Kane was in the office!”
Right, because this is Canada, and he walked into a middle school.
He says, “Hey guys,” and raises his eyebrows when one of them makes a choking sound.
"Will you sign my hat?" another asks, less nervous, and Jonny starts rubbing at his temple.
"Sign," he says, resigned, "and then we’re leaving."
"Mr. Toews," the sole girl says, "how do you know Patrick Kane? Why didn’t you ever tell us?"
Patrick bites back a laugh, and steals a pen from the woman at the desk to sign a hat, a shirt, and a hastily torn piece of paper from what looks like a math notebook.
"It’s a new thing," Patrick says, grinning. Jonny scowls.
The woman at the desk stands up, eyes wide as she looks between them, and says, “Is he…? You didn’t show up for work a couple weeks ago—”
She’s cut off when Jonny yells, “No! Fuck.”
He gets a ringing endorsement from the kids for cursing in the office, and, red-faced, grabs Patrick’s elbow and starts dragging him out, through the hallway and the entrance doors, and out into the cold.
Patrick pulls away from him, hard, when they get through the doors.
"What, am I a secret?"
He’d been more or less ready for this yesterday, when he’d landed at the airport, and then Jonny had picked him up, and it’d all gone so fucking well, like he’d been worried about nothing, but if Jonny’s straight up lying about him—if he hates the idea of his soulmate being Patrick Kane so much—
"I’m not blabbing about it, no," Jonny says, harshly. "This is where I work, did you want to cause a scene? Fucking hell."
"I just wanted to meet you for lunch.” Patrick clenches his hands into fists in his pockets.
Jon throws a look back at the school, sighing. Patrick looks too, and sees that there are kids starting to press their faces up against the glass of the windows, probably to see if there’s really an NHL player arguing with their teacher in front of their school.
Maybe Patrick really shouldn’t have come after all.
Instead of saying anything about it, he crosses his arms and looks back at Jonny’s face. His cheeks are already turning red, and his nose too. Patrick hates that it’s still a good look on the guy, that everything in him is telling him to lean up that extra inch, and press his mouth against Jonny’s, and kiss him until they’re both warm again.
He can see it when Jonny sighs, hot air meeting the cold in a swirl of white, and Jonny says, “Let’s just go, alright? My lunch break is only twenty minutes.”
"What the fuck kind of lunch is only twenty minutes?" Patrick throws back, but he follows Jonny to his car.
There’s a fast food place five minutes away from the school. He sighs when they park, but at least it isn’t all that crowded when they walk in. Jonny holds the door open for him, and Patrick snorts, pushing past him.
He tugs off his coat, dumping it on a chair as he sits, but then hears a choked off laugh and blinks up at Jonny as he settles into the seat across from him. “You went through my closet again, didn’t you?”
Patrick looks down at his t-shirt, the one he’d stolen from Jonny that says Nous jouons tous pour le Canada on it. Random French words, although now that he’s thinking about it, that phrase sounds vaguely familiar.
"That okay?" Patrick asks, warily, after a minute of trying to remember if he knows what the words mean or not. Something Canada, obviously, which is alarming all on its own.
Jonny shrugs, but he still looks like a smug asshole. ”It’s fine, just don’t let any Americans see you in it,” he says. “They might kick you off the team next time you play internationally.”
Patrick stares at him.
“Nous jouons tous pour le Canada is a Canadian Tire, uh, marketing thing. It means ‘We all play for Canada’.”
"Ugh," Patrick groans, "gross."
He almost wants to put his jacket back on, but manfully resists the urge because it’ll make it that much colder when they go back outside, and he’d end up sweating in the meantime.
Besides, it’s still Jonny’s shirt, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, Patrick likes that he’s wearing it. It’s soft, and it even kind of smells like him? Or like the laundry detergent he must use? It’s just, it’s nice.
Jonny orders for them, getting up to do it, and Patrick stares out the window at the snow, fiddling with his fingers. It’s started snowing again, naturally, but it looks pretty light.
His phone makes a beep and vibrates in his pocket, and he digs it out, seeing a message from his mom, and one from Duncs, checking to make sure he’s alive and will be back in time for morning practice before their next game. Apparently he doesn’t trust Sharpy, which, nobody could fault him for that.
Jonny sits back down across from him, and Patrick taps out a, y b on a pln tmr mrng before shoving his phone back in his pocket.
"So, hey," he says after Jonny’s opened the box of chicken strips and fries and pushed it halfway across the table, for them both to grab from, and slid Patrick’s plastic cup of coffee over to him, "are you really…"
He trails off, because he doesn’t know how to ask. How do you, really; it’s not like are you ashamed of me? is going to go down well if the answer is yes, and it probably wouldn’t be much better even if it’s no, because that’d mean, what, Jonny’s just plain not interested?
They eat their food mostly in quiet. Patrick’s frustrated and confused, because it was going so fucking well last night. But now it feels like he’s just wasting his time.
Jonny must feel it too, because he sighs and drops his chicken strip back down onto his plate, crumbs flying everywhere. “Look, Patrick, I’m not—” He stops, looking frustrated, mouth drawn in line and eyes all scrunched up. He drags a hand through his hair, messing it up.
"What, gay?" Patrick takes a gamble. “Who cares? I didn’t think I was either until I woke up in your body. You have no idea how hard it was not to just give in and jerk off, it—“
“Stop talking,” Jonny hisses, eyes darting to the nearest group of people, over five feet away. It’s not like they could have overheard. “God, your mouth, Patrick.”
Patrick smirks, because, “Hey, you like my mouth.”
“Shit I say when you’ve got a hand on my dick doesn’t need to be repeated at a family friendly restaurant, alright?” Jonny whispers angrily.
His face is pretty red, Patrick notes, but he’s still too irritated to properly tease him for it.
Instead, he hisses back, “You like me in private, but not in public. That what you’re saying here?”
“Just because I—”
“This has nothing to do with talking about our dicks, okay, you’ve been blowing me off ever since this thing started.”
And that, at least, is something Jon can’t argue with. Patrick’s chest hurts, and he hates the idea that this might be one of those cases, the ones you hear about, where soulmates just don’t work. The connection is there, but it’s not strong enough for a tether, or it’s one-sided, and try as they might, their lives can’t line up.
Jonny doesn’t say anything.
"Fine, whatever," Patrick says, holding everything back, every fucking feeling he has. The hot shame pooling in his belly, the hurt of rejection, the disbelief that he’s so fucking awful, his own soulmate doesn’t want him.
He has to get out of there before he starts to cry.
"Patrick," Jonny says, grabbing his wrist as Patrick gets up. "It’s complicated, okay? I never thought—"
"What?" Patrick bites out. "Never thought your soulmate would be a fuck-up? Have shit on Deadspin? Well, too fucking bad, Jonny. You don’t get to choose.”
"I never thought you’d wake up in my body, okay?" Jonny says, voice hushed. "Can you just wait back at my apartment? I’ll explain, okay, just not here.”
Patrick’s fed up. He only needs to be rejected once.
He wants to laugh, or cry, or both, at the idea of it. Getting rejected by your own soulmate—of course, Patrick would be the one in a thousand.
You’re supposed to be perfect for each other. He’s been waiting for it for so long, and it was worse than he thought it would be, back when he’d still thought Jonny was a girl, when he hadn’t been left a note, except for that stupid post-it that started everything. Because he’s met Jonny, and he’s talked to him, and laughed at him, and made fun of him, and kissed him until it was hard to breathe—
It’s not a question, for Patrick.
"Yeah, whatever," he says, and tugs his wrist away from Jonny’s hand, marching out into the parking lot. He’ll get a cab or something.
If Jonny doesn’t want him, Patrick’s not about to hang around embarrassing himself.
He’ll get on a plane, and go back to Chicago, and pretend he was never stupid enough to fly to Winnipeg, forget he was fucking hopeless enough to sleep with Jonny, to kiss down his jaw and lick up his throat, to feel every muscle playing across his back while he was thrusting against Patrick, utterly fucking perfect and a completely disastrous mistake, because that’s not how this is going to play out, in the end.
That’s not how Jonny wants it to play out. So, fine.
He’ll go home.
He’ll deal with it.
He’s done.
The airport is crowded when he gets there. His flight doesn’t leave for another four hours, and it’ll have two layovers, but fuck if he’s sticking around Winnipeg – around Jonny – any longer than he absolutely has to.
He wanders through the gift shop for twenty minutes after using his phone to get his boarding pass all figured out, just trying to waste as much time as possible. It’s not like he actually wants to buy magnets or key chains or postcards that all say, “Welcome to Winnipeg!” and there’s a section for the Jets that’s all shiny and new, but hurts to look at on principle.
He ends up finding a seat in the waiting lounge, one of those hard plastic ones that are nailed into the floor facing the huge, open windows for take-off viewings, but after a few minutes of that he digs out his phone and starts messing around on it instead.
He can’t concentrate on any of the books he’s got downloaded, can’t focus on a game long enough to get through more than two levels. He’s got a few messages from the guys, all threatening bodily harm to Jonny, meaning Sharpy and Seabs have gotten around with the news that he’s heading back a day early because it didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped it would.
He ignores those, because they don’t fucking know; they don’t get it.
Jonny thinks it was a fucking mistake.
Apparently, it was.
He gets up after a few more minutes of pointless waiting, watching the clock on his phone count down, and finds the nearest bathroom. On his way back, he stops in at the gift shop again to buy a set of headphones – carefully determining there’s not a Jets logo in sight before putting them up on the counter and pulling out his wallet.
The girl blinks at him, but rings him up and says, “There wasn’t a game this weekend, was there?”
“No,” he says, after a second. “Just visiting a friend. Thanks.”
He grabs his headphones and gets out of there before she can ask who, or why. He tears the plastic casing off when he gets back to the chairs, but the fucking packaging is so strong that it just ends up tearing a cut through his thumb. It’s small, but it fucking stings, and the blood wells up quickly.
It just isn’t his fucking day.
He hangs his head, dropping the headphones and putting pressure on the cut, breathing deep.
Fuck airports, fuck Canada, fate and fuck having a soulmate—
Just, fuck everything.
It’s three hours later, or maybe more, he isn’t sure, when the headphones are tugged easily off his head from somebody standing behind him, and he jerks forward, twisting to yell at somebody about being rude—fans are crazy, sometimes, but there’s a limit to what he has to put up with.
It’s Jonny, holding his headphones, the digital Kanye beat soft and low but still playing through them.
Patrick stares.
Jonny drops the headphones onto an empty chair, and falls into the one beside Patrick, looking for all the world like he’s exhausted.
“You know how much it costs to buy a ticket to Chicago half-an-hour before take-off?” Jonny asks, finally.
“Uh,” Patrick starts, but then stops. He didn’t ask, earlier, when he did it, but it’s not going to break his bank account no matter what it cost to get to Winnipeg so fast. He looks back toward the security scanners, by the metal detectors and the escalators. He can hardly see them, because the lounge he’s in is pretty far down the ‘C’ Wing hall, but there’s no way they just let Jonny through.
“You bought a ticket to Chicago?” he hazards. There’s an announcement that Flight 374 is starting to board it’s first-class passengers. It’s Patrick’s flight, but he ignores it.
“More than I earn in a month,” Jonny says, leaning back.
His throat feels dry. He doesn’t understand why Jonny is even there.
“Why buy one then?” he asks, voice catching on itself.
Jonny twists in the chair to look at Patrick fully, and Patrick’s a little alarmed by how – angry, he looks.
“Because I fucking go home, ready to talk to you, and you’re not there! You seriously just, what, up and took off to fly back to Chicago? You came all the way here, and you’re not willing to stick around until I get off of work? Fuck you, Patrick.”
“You—“ Patrick starts, and his fury comes back ten-fold, “—self-righteous asshole, you didn’t actually want me to stick around! And I fucking get it, okay, I’m not everything you’d hoped your soulmate would—”
“Shut up!” Jon yells, expression panicked, “That’s not it! Okay, it’s me, alright? I’m not who you think I am, I’m not—God, I don’t know how to—”
People are watching them, blatantly staring like Patrick and Jonny are some daytime soap opera. Jonny either doesn’t notice, or decides it’s not important, because he keeps going even when Patrick puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “Hey, we should go somewhere else.”
“I got hurt, when I was fourteen. It was right before this hockey camp I was supposed to attend, and it’s—fuck, if I hadn’t been in that damn car, I would have met you there. We would have played together.”
Patrick stops tugging on Jonathan’s sleeve, stops trying to get his attention so that they can move somewhere more private. His mouth drops open, and he stares at Jonathan, who looks drained, maybe even resigned to whatever this confession is supposed to be.
“I don’t get it,” Patrick says, after a minute.
Jonny shakes his head. “We were supposed to be soulmates. If I hadn’t gotten hurt, we’d have been playing hockey together, Patrick. It makes sense. I’d had scouts watching my games, been invited to Canada’s training camp for Worlds, and I fucked it all up. And then I woke up in your body, and I knew.”
“I don’t—“
“How do you not get it?” Jonny yells, fists curling, “I’m not your soulmate! You might be mine, but I fucked up my chance at being yours.”
“What,” Patrick says, voice so low and calm that it even surprises him, “you think the universe screwed up? That it didn’t adjust when you stopped playing hockey? Jesus, Jon, hockey isn’t that important.”
Jonny scoffs.
“I’m fucking serious,” Patrick insists, and grabs Jonny’s hand, rubbing his thumb over Jonny’s knuckles. “It isn’t. It doesn’t determine who—I don’t care who you were supposed to be, okay, I care about who you actually are. You’re a fucking asshole, and I still like you! Shouldn’t that be a goddamn hint that the universe knows what it’s fucking doing?”
“I—“
“If you say something stupid right now,” Patrick yells, “I will fucking throw you under a plane.”
It’s quiet, for a minute, and Jonny’s throat is working, like he’s trying to come up with something to say, but can’t. There’s an announcement that Flight 374 is boarding the economy class.
“This might count as stupid,” Jonny says, finally.
“What?” Patrick asks, wary.
Jonny leans forward and drags Patrick’s face down, palm against the back of his neck. Patrick can hardly catch his balance before Jonny’s kissing him, right there in the middle of a crowded airport, where Patrick already knows people have recognized him, and are probably taking pictures that’ll be on twitter in minutes.
He sinks into it, and is left gawking when Jonny pulls back a second later.
“I’m scared of you deciding I’m not what you need,” Jonny admits, voice low and hand trembling, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you, alright?”
Patrick lets out a shaky breath, and then shakes his head hard and fast, because, “You’re right, that was stupid.” He doesn’t even give Jonny the chance to flinch before he’s kissing him again, practically climbing into his lap and laughing against his mouth when the intercom says it’s the last call for Flight 374.
“Feel like coming to Chicago?” Patrick says, grinning.
Jonny grips him tighter, and says, “I did tell you I paid for the ticket, right? And how much it cost? Yeah, I think I’m going to Chicago.”
Patrick grins, and pulls Jonny up.