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Trevor’s daughter reads the starting line up before their first preseason game. It’s her sixth birthday, and she does well, but it still takes everything in James to smile at her when she says his name, because she said Holden Chase’s first.
James knew this was coming, the way they kept getting shoved together in practices, scrimmages, knew that despite what he said, Chase was going to be on his line, at least to start. Knew this was coming, but still held out hope until a six year old lisped her way through Chase and Erickson.
James could sabotage the line so easily; all it would take is playing less than his full potential. He wouldn’t even have to play badly: mediocre would be enough for the coaching staff to decide that tried and true was the way to go.
He can’t do it. He isn’t even someone who can think about it, not seriously — the idea makes him blanch; he feels like less of a player for even considering it. Feels like he’s been tainted, somehow, that mere proximity to Chase has made him less of a professional. He’s played on lines with people he hasn’t liked, people he hasn’t had anything in common with, people who have opinions he disagrees with, bigotries he finds offensive. This isn’t any different. It shouldn’t be, at least.
Chase stands beside him during the anthem, shifting his weight from foot to foot the entire time, flashes of movement in James’ peripheral until he shuts his eyes, tucks his chin into his jersey, empties his head during the final verse, and when his eyes open again, everything is clear and bright and very very quiet as he skates to center for the the first puck drop of the season.
They’re hardly more than six minutes into the first when Chase scores. It’s a beautiful goal, the kind that James watches over and over when they’re his, until they’re worn in, more old footage than memory. A beautiful goal, and Chase isn’t modest about it at all.
*
“You look pretty grumpy for someone who had a great game and is currently hanging out with their best buddy,” Finn says.
“I assume you’re not talking about yourself,” James says. That would be uncharacteristically self-aggrandizing, to say the least.
“I know Cheezit’s replaced me,” Finn says. “It’s okay, I get it.”
Such an offensive name for such a good dog. James has trouble forgiving Finn’s brother for naming her that: she’s a living being, not a over-processed cracker. She looks up at her name, and James pets her until she relaxes back onto his knee.
“The game doesn’t even count,” James says.
“A good game is a good game, Jamie,” Finn says. “What’s up?”
“I’m going to be stuck on a line with Chase going forward, aren’t I,” James says.
“Well,” Finn says. “Yeah, bud.”
“Do you think there’s any way to avoid it?” James asks. Barring throwing games, which he’s already nixed, though he knows Finn would never suggest it. Wouldn’t even think of it, unlike James.
“Come on,” Finn says. “They literally got him to play on your line.”
“They could have asked first,” James says. “And then I would have told them I had no interest in playing with him, and that they could get me someone else.”
Finn fiddles with one of the bracelets on his wrist, the kind kids make for one another out of string. Probably from a young fan. They like making them for him, knowing he’ll wear them until they break, that they might have a chance to see it on TV.
“I know that’s not how it works,” James says. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Okay,” Finn says.
“They could have consulted me,” James says. “They should have.”
“Yeah, probably,” Finn says. “But they didn’t, and now he’s our teammate, and you not liking it isn’t going to change that.”
“I know,” James says.
“It’s just going to make shit awkward,” Finn says.
“I know,” James repeats, and he does. He knows all of this.
If the Whalers front office didn’t bother to check he was comfortable with their choice of winger for him, they certainly aren’t going to be willing to trade said winger at his request. Chase may not spend the entirety of his contract here — though that’s a foolish thing to bet on — but he will be here for some time, and the sooner James regards that as an irritating but inevitable fact of nature, like clearing snow off his car in winter, or mosquitos always finding him first in summer, or the allergies he gets in spring, the better.
He’s an adult. The captain of his team. A role model, not only for young fans, but also for some of the younger Whalers, who are going to pick up on the animosity, if they haven’t already. The path ahead could not be more clear. All he needs to do is walk it.
The problem with that is simple: he doesn’t want to.
*
“Why does he talk like he’s in some stuffy Victorian novel?” Chase asks from the next table at team breakfast in NYC. He says it so loudly it must be intentional. “I feel like I’m reading Jane Eyre or some shit whenever he talks.”
James doesn’t talk like he’s in a Victorian novel, but he knows Chase is referring to him. He doubts Chase has ever read a Victorian novel in his life. He seems like exactly the kind of person who read the SparkNotes edition of whichever novel they were reading for high school English, if that. Probably bribed or bullied someone into writing his essays too.
“Sometimes we think he time travelled,” Georgie says. His laugh sounds good natured, at least, a joke involving James, not at his expense. James notices the difference, has plenty of experience with both. Usually teammates mean well enough. They crack jokes, but they’d bristle if anyone else said the same thing about him.
Though Georgie didn’t bristle when Chase said that, just laughed along, and James didn’t get the feeling Chase was laughing with him.
“Since when is being articulate a negative?” James asks.
Finn sighs.
“What?” James asks.
“Bud, they tease you about your vocabulary daily,” Finn says. “How are you not over it by now?”
“I am entirely ‘over it’,” James says.
“Okay,” Finn says. “Good.”
“But—“ James says.
“You’re over it,” Finn says, less an observation than an order.
James sighs.
*
“Nice cravat,” Chase says when James walks into the arena. “Really elevates the whole ensemble.”
“I’m not wearing a cravat,” James says with a frown. It’s just a necktie, a simple blue one from his mother. She’s the one who picks his ties out, and if his teammates knew that it’d be another thing to make fun of, talk about his mom dressing him, so he keeps quiet about it. He’s learned that’s generally the best way to go about things.
“Of course you know what a cravat is,” Chase says.
“So do you, clearly,” James says.
“You know what?” Chase says. “Touché, Erickson.”
“Do you think littering your sentences with French words is a substitute for having a passable vocabulary in English?” James asks.
Chase barks out a laugh. “You know what, I’m going to give you that one too.”
“You didn’t give me anything,” James says, but he’s saying it to the back of Chase’s head. He bites back a childish ‘you need a haircut’, straightens his tie. It isn’t sitting well, like Chase puts things out of order with his mere presence. Unfair, Finn would say, but Finn isn’t here yet, so James has no one to say it to, no one to chide him for saying it.
“Nice tie, Sonny,” Georgie says when James walks into the locker room, and James looks at him warily, but Georgie looks sincere.
“Thank you,” James says, glancing over at Chase, to see how he reacts, but Chase isn’t looking, too busy laughing about something with Travis. “My mom got it for me.”
“Mom gifts are the best,” Georgie says — Georgie vocally loves his mom, which is why James told him in the first place. No one teases him about it, possibly because he’s big even for a hockey player, but likely more because sometimes she bakes the locker room cookies — and James smiles at his stall as he takes off his tie, setting it aside carefully so it doesn’t bruise.
“You think I could pull off a cravat?” Chase asks loudly, and James blows out a breath through his nose and counts slowly in his head until he’s no longer tempted to tell him exactly how ridiculous he’d look.
*
Here’s the thing. The thing James can’t get past, the thing James knows no one is going to let him get past.
The thing is that a hockey game could be played with the exact same personnel night to night – players, team staff, league officials – and the results could still be wildly different from one game to the next. Hockey isn’t just unpredictable, it actively resists forecasting. Input all the data, run all the simulations, and the algorithms, the statisticians, they’re still wrong about the results almost as often as they’re right.
The intangibles that have such an impact are technically impossible to measure – it’s in their very name – impossible to even truly define. And then there are complications to any mode of prediction: how do you measure luck versus skill? How does one measure deserving to win versus actually winning? How do you account for a hot goalie, or game management, or personnel changes? What does chemistry look like?
It’s frustrating, the uncertainty, the resistance to prediction, the refusal to fit into neat categories. Absolutely infuriating. Probably the reason James is still playing, over twenty years after his first house league game. The reason it still has its hooks in him.
What does chemistry look like?
Whether James likes it or not, it looks exactly like how he plays with Holden Chase.
*
James doesn’t believe in telepathy, obviously. He believes some people can anticipate one another’s thinking patterns, and he suspects in the case of long partnerships, close sibling relationships, those thought patterns can follow the same track. Sometimes Finn answers James’ questions before he even asks them, but that’s familiarity, closeness, Finn’s tendency to pay attention to how others are feeling.
James doesn’t know what this is. He doesn’t know how else someone could describe it. When he needs Chase to be somewhere, that’s exactly where Chase is, and he’s not there a second later, or earlier, he’s just there when James needs him to be.
There’s no explanation for it. He’s seen it sometimes in siblings who grew up playing together, or longtime linemates. D-partnerships: Georgie and Finn, at their best, play like they’ve known each other their entire lives. But James has only played a handful of practices with Chase, even fewer games, none of which count for anything.
James doesn’t believe in telepathy, but he doesn’t know how else to explain any of this. Doesn’t even know how to try.
*
Chase is talking again. James wouldn’t even be remarking on it were it not the final minute before the second, because talking appears to be Chase’s natural state. Talking between drills, on the bench, saying who knows what to opponents, and, now, once again, talking through the entirety of intermission, a rapidfire patter even Chase must have a hard time keeping up with, though he doesn’t appear to be having any difficulties right now.
“Shut up,” James snaps, and Chase thankfully does, looking taken aback, before Georgie leans across Travis to say something to him, low. Probably something along the lines of ‘we don’t fucking talk to Erickson in the final minute of intermission’, because that’s when James shuts his eyes, gathers his composure for the next period — everything that’s come before a wash, fresh ice, clean slate.
He doesn’t know how Chase missed that, even after a handful of games. Wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t missed it at all, if he was trying something, though if it was, James doesn’t have the first idea what he was hoping to achieve, considering they’re on the same team.
But then, the games haven’t started to mean anything yet, and he wouldn’t put anything past Chase.
James doesn’t bother to close his eyes again, try to find his place. It’s ruined now, of course.
James is flustered, unsettled as they file back. Before the game he has the anthem, sometimes even two, not to mention whatever ceremony a team might be doing that night, though he’s obligated to get involved in the ceremonial face offs more often than not. But between periods he only has the walk down the tunnel to return to game readiness. That’s why he needs that final minute.
James gets thrown out of the face off dot, and when Chase comes in to replace him, he loses the draw. It’s a nothing shift, all neutral zone, the Islanders as sloppy as they are, but a better team could have taken advantage of his distraction.
“Don’t talk to me,” James says during the first commercial break, eyes on the Jumbotron rather than Chase, even though it’s the kiss cam, which he finds repulsive in a number of ways. “In the minute, I – just don’t talk to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that,” Chase says, waves it away with a flippant, dismissive hand. James had meant in the final minute, of course, but Chase doesn’t say a word to him for the rest of the game, barring a bark from behind him midway through the third, ‘Sonny’, that turns a no look pass into yet another highlight reel goal.
James has no explanation for it.
It’s completely maddening.
*
“I know you’re not complaining about having a liney read your mind,” Finn says over lunch the next day, then, “not literally,” when James opens his mouth to protest.
“I’m not complaining about that,” James says. “I’m not complaining at all.”
Finn raises his eyebrows. “You definitely had the complaining voice going there, Jamie.”
“I didn’t even want to play with him,” James says.
“Buddy,” Finn says. “Look at me for a moment.”
James sighs and looks up from his food to meet Finn’s eyes.
“I am begging you to talk about something other than Holden Chase for a minute,” Finn says. “For my sanity. But more importantly, for yours.”
James scoffs, looking down again. “I haven’t even–”
“Begging,” Finn interrupts.
James scowls at his grain bowl. He hates being interrupted, and Finn knows that.
“My begging will involve interrupting!” Finn says, like he’s, well —
James still doesn’t believe in telepathy. Or psychics. “He’s rubbing off on–”
“I am one second away from humming to tune you out,” Finn says, another thing James hates, particularly when someone can’t carry a tune, and Finn emphatically cannot. Besides, they’re in public — Finn wouldn’t just be annoying him with the off key drone.
“What do you want to talk about?” James asks, resigned.
“Want to talk about the Sabres?” Finn asks.
The Sabres are coming to town tomorrow, so James supposes they may as well.
“Fine,” he says.
He thinks Finn’s fist pump is a little dramatic. It’s just the Sabres, after all.
*
“You know,” Chase says, two minutes before the start of the third. James hopes whatever he has to say takes less than a minute. He also hopes this isn’t a pattern of behavior that will continue into the regular season. Considering this is the final game of the preseason, he has his concerns. “I think you’ve got to admit defeat on the whole ‘not going to be linemates’ thing now, considering we’re fucking killing it.”
“The preseason doesn’t mean anything,” James says automatically.
“The wins and losses, sure,” Chase says. “But they check to see who’s clicking. We’re clicking.”
“On the ice,” Chase adds, when James doesn’t say anything.
“I didn’t assume you meant otherwise,” James says.
“I’m just saying, you might want to backpedal,” Chase says. “I promise to only rub in how wrong you were a medium amount if you do it now. Wait until the regular season and it’s going to be much worse.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” James says, even though Chase is right. He knows Chase is right. They’re going to keep them on a line together, because it would be absurd not to. Playing them together is more likely to win hockey games, and that’s his job, his coach’s job, his GM’s job. Everybody’s just doing their job.
“Now’s your weirdo quiet time, right?” Chase asks, and then thankfully says nothing after that, just sits beside James as he tries to settle into the game. But it doesn’t work, with Chase beside him.
None of this fucking works.