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Will Smith banks a pass off the wall, overcooks the reception, and the puck skitters away like it’s late for a bus. He groans and chases, laughing at himself.
“Handles like a dream,” Mario Ferraro calls, grinning as he glides by. “Just gotta catch the dream first, Smitty.”
Will points his stick like a sword. “It’s called flair, Captain Chaos.”
“Flair is when you score,” Fabian Zetterlund singsongs from the circle. “Everything else is cardio.”
“Flair is when Fabes chirps and still misses an empty-netter,” William Eklund chirps back, cheerful.
Eklund’s laughter is infectious. Mack hears it and smiles without meaning to. He’s mid-turn, toes fanning out, when Will slides in beside him for a water break. They stand too close because they always stand too close.
“Your edgework looks stupid good today,” Will says, breath making a small cloud in the cold.
“Yours looks like a baby deer learning how to walk,” Mack says, deadpan.
“Hot,” Will replies with a smirk. “That’s my brand.”
Mack tilts the bottle back and watches Coach Warsofsky gesture them into a regroup drill. Ryan Warsofsky’s voice carries in that even,
“Quick up, quick up,” Warsofsky says. “Hit the middle with pace. Pucks moving, heads up, support underneath.”
Toffoli taps his stick on the boards as a metronome. It’s weird how easy he is to hear even when he doesn’t say much. Presence, people call it. Mack calls it Dad Energy with a slapshot.
Logan Couture glides past them, cutting a lazy arc. He looks like comfort disguised as a hockey player: captain’s calm without the C stitched on that day. He nods at the rookies. “Eyes, fellas. Scan before you get it.”
“Yes, sir,” Will chirps, theatrical.
Couture shakes his head, amused. “Sir? Kid, I’m thirty-six, and i’m not a cop.”
They cycle through reps. Zetterlund threads a pass that should’ve been impossible. Ferraro hammers a point shot that rattles the glass in front of Barracuda fans who’ve wandered in to watch. Eklund toe-drags an imaginary universe into existence and still finds the seam. Mack keeps hitting Mack — quick mitts, crisp releases. Will keeps being galaxy-brained and then goofy within one shift.
On one regroup, Will feathers a saucer that’s an inch too high; Mack has to reach, corrals it off the blade, and snaps a shot off-balance that pings the far post. It sings like a bell. A couple of guys hoot.
“Pretty,” Ferraro says.
“Pretty lucky,” Mack replies, flushing.
“Luck is skill is luck,” Zetterlund declares solemnly. “Round and round.”
Will bumps Mack’s shoulder with his own. “You’re welcome for the dime, superstar.”
“It was a loonie at best,” Mack says. “Maybe a toonie if I’m feeling generous.”
“God, Canadians,” Will sighs happily, like it’s a slur and a love letter.
Scrimmage time. Warsofsky sets blue against white. Ferraro pulls on a pinnie with theatrical disgust. “This color makes me look like a highlighter.”
“You are a highlighter,” Eklund says. “It’s the skating. Zoom, zoom.”
“Zoom is old people video chat,” Will tells him. “We’re more… FaceTime.”
“FaceTime is old people video chat,” Eklund counters, eyes bright.
They’re insufferable, all of them, and it’s perfect. The pace climbs. Mack and Will find each other the way magnets do, even on opposite lines. Quick looks. Quiet taps of the stick. Small nods. It’s not telepathy; it’s familiarity sprinting toward more.
On a backcheck, Mack hears Toffoli’s voice like gravel rubbed smooth: “Good stick, Celibrini. Early read.” Praise from Toff is light in your bones; it lingers.
Shift ends. They glide to the bench and lean against the boards side by side. Will’s breath is quick-close to Mack’s ear. He smells like ice and spearmint gum and laundry detergent. Mack studies the lines in the ice instead.
“Post still ringing?” Will asks.
Mack shrugs. “I like to make music.” He dares a sideways glance. Will’s cheeks are flushed. He’s smiling. It does something unhelpful underneath Mack’s sternum.
“Alright,” Warsofsky calls, “one more quick game situation, then we’re into PP/PK looks. Details. Details win.”
The drill ends with Will half-cellying a practice goal before Ferraro bear-hugs him off his feet. “Save some for the Sharks game, kid.”
“Practice like you play,” Will huffs, upside down and delighted.
“Play like you score,” Zetterlund amends, poking him in the ribs with a stick blade.
They hit the room buzzing. Tape flies. Sticks stack. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker cycles through two acceptable songs and seventeen crimes. Couture scrolls a phone the way dads do — efficient, unimpressed, warm when it counts.
Mack peels tape from his shins. Will flops onto the bench beside him and sighs at the ceiling.
“You okay?” Mack asks lightly.
“Yeah,” Will says. “Just thinking.”
“Dangerous.”
“Extremely.”
They grin at each other. Eklund drops onto Will’s other side like a cat. “You two coming to dinner later? Z banned me from choosing the place after last time.”
“I said we are not eating in a gas station again,” Zetterlund protests from across the room.
“It was a food truck,” Eklund says, scandalized.
“That parked at a gas station,” Z clarifies.
“Food was good,” Will offers.
“Thank you,” Eklund says. Then, to Mack with a squint: “You are quiet.”
Mack shrugs, blows a strand of hair off his forehead, and lies: “Just tired.”
“Rookies,” Ferraro says, fond. “Tired is good. Tired means you worked.”
Will leans closer, dropping his voice. “You sure you’re good?”
Mack nods too fast. “Yeah. Promise.”
He isn’t. He will be. He hopes.
Will’s apartment is quiet, the only noise being the Refrigerator hum and some Distant traffic.. Will lies on his back and watches the red dot on the smoke detector blink every thirty seconds. Every blink feels like a metronome marking time between stupid brave impulses.
His phone is already open to the contact he renamed without irony: Toff — Dad Mode 🦈👴. The emoji feels like a talisman. He types and deletes, types and deletes, then finally forces his thumbs to move faster than his doubt.
hey, uh, can i ask you something kinda personal?
He stares at the screen. If it doesn’t deliver, he gets to pretend the universe intervened. It delivers. Of course it delivers. Tyler Toffoli is a grown man who answers texts like a tax-paying citizen.
sure kid, what’s up?
Will sticks the bottom edge of the phone against his front teeth and winces. He types.
idk, it’s about… someone. like relationship stuff
The typing bubble appears, disappears, appears. For a horrifying second Will imagines Tyler walking over from a hotel room in full dad pajamas to give a lecture in person. The reply is mercifully normal.
oh boy.
come by after practice tomorrow. we’ll talk.
Will groans into his pillow, then texts back a thumbs up because words feel like a lot. He flips the phone face down and stares at the ceiling again, pulse in his throat. He tells himself he’s being dramatic. He tells himself that’s his brand.
The next day, Mack can’t quiet his brain. He goes through reps like he’s doing hockey in a dream — everything fractionally delayed. Zetterlund chirps him about missing a tap-in. Eklund bumps his hip with a skate blade and says, “Wake up, Prince Canada.” Coach Warsofsky gives him a look that says, you’re young, you’ll figure it out, and then puts him back in for more reps because that’s how you figure it out: you keep going.
Practice ends. Mack is half out of his gear when Toffoli plants himself against the wall a few feet away and raises two fingers in a casual “come here.” Toff’s posture is always extremely “I’ve seen everything and I’m not mad,” which is worse than anger.
Mack walks over, stomach in his shoes. “Yeah?”
“Everything good?” Toff asks, voice even, chin pointing at nothing in particular.
“Yeah,” Mack says, too fast. Then, because silence is worse: “I mean — yeah, it’s just — tired.”
Toff watches him. He has those little crow’s feet that appear when he’s amused or trying not to be. “You’re nineteen. Tired is the job. What else?”
Mack swallows. He hears the stupidest possible sentence forming in his mouth and can’t stop it. “I like this girl.”
Toff’s eyebrows go up a fraction. “A girl.”
“Yeah,” Mack says, committing to the lie because it’s safer. “She’s — I don’t know. She’s nice. Pretty. Funny sometimes.” He is doing MadLibs with a crush he doesn’t have, and he hates himself a little bit.
“You sound convinced,” Toff says dryly.
Mack groans, scrubs a hand through damp hair. “It’s just… dating with this job, you know? People talk. Guys in the league get chirped for everything. I don’t want— I don’t want it to be a Thing.”
Toff’s expression softens in that dad way. “Kid, everything is a Thing to someone. You can’t control that part. You can control whether you’re kind, honest, and safe.” He tips his head. “And whether you pick someone who actually likes you, not the logo.”
Mack nods, throat tight. “Right.”
Toff claps him on the shoulder. It’s solid, grounding. “You’re overthinking it. That’s normal. Breathe. Whatever’s supposed to happen? Will.”
“Yeah,” Mack says, and hopes the universe forgives the lie.
As he heads back to his stall, Eklund pops up like a jack-in-the-box. “You get detention?”
“Just Dad Talk,” Mack says.
Eklund points two fingers at his own eyes and then at Mack. “Be good. Or be interesting. I support both.”
“Go away,” Mack mumbles, smiling.
Two days later, after a practice that feels like flying — the good kind, where the feet get light and your edges sing — Will almost loses his nerve. He’s halfway to the parking lot before he pivots and jogs back in skates-on clatter to catch Toffoli near the equipment room.
“Toff? You got a second?” Will’s voice cracks exactly the way he begged it not to.
Toff pauses, turns. “Yeah, kid. What’s up?”
“What’s it like to—” Will makes a vague rolling gesture with his wrist as if he can mime the concept of “romance.” “—date. In the NHL.”
Toff leans against a cinderblock wall that’s probably seen more crisis talks than a therapist’s couch. He thinks a beat. “It’s… it’s work if you want it to be good. A lot of people are into the idea of you. And the idea is shiny. They want the pictures and the post-game and the story that starts with ‘I dated a hockey player once.’ That’s fine if that’s what you want too.” He shrugs. “But if you want someone who knows who you are when you’re tired and pissed and you go minus-three on a Tuesday? Those exist. Some of them are girls. Some of them aren’t girls. The point is: find someone who’s there for the human, not the headline.”
Will’s relief is so sharp he feels a little dizzy. He latches onto the safe part of the sentence. “So… there are good ones.”
“Yeah,” Toff says, smiling crookedly. “And you don’t have to pick right now. You can say no to the whole circus until you’re sure.”
Will nods, breathes. “Thanks.”
“Anytime,” Toff says, and then, softer, “You’re allowed to be scared without it meaning you’re wrong.”
That last part sits heavy and kind in Will’s chest. “Noted.”
Tyler makes dinner like a man who knows one meal perfectly: grilled cheese and tomato soup from a can doctored within an inch of its life. He’s mid-flip when he tells Kat about his conversations.
“They both came to me,” he says. “Mack was weird about it. Said he likes a girl and then got very ‘people will talk.’ Will asked about dating in the league like I was gonna hand him an instruction manual.”
Kat leans against the counter, hair in a messy bun, eyes warm. “Did you hand him an instruction manual?”
“Page one: don’t be an idiot,” Tyler says. “Page two: be an idiot sometimes but carefully.”
Kat laughs. “Ty, I love you, but you are a raccoon in a cardigan.”
“Thank you,” he says, because she makes insults feel like compliments.
She thinks for another second, tapping a spoon against the stovetop. “What if they’re asking because they like each other?”
Tyler is a grown man and still somehow chokes on oxygen. “What? I— no, I mean— they’re kids, they—”
“Exactly,” Kat says gently. “They’re kids who spend every minute together. They light up around each other. They both tiptoed around ‘someone’ with you. I’m not saying they are. I’m saying… what if.”
Tyler pictures it. The way Will gravitates to Mack like a moon. The way Mack’s eyes find Will in a crowded bench like it’s involuntary. He exhales slowly. “If I’m wrong and I say something, I nuke a friendship. If I’m right and I say nothing, I leave two scared babies to suffer.”
“You send a text that says you support them,” Kat says, like it’s simple. “No names. No assumptions. Just… I love you both, go be brave.”
“You are very wise,” Tyler says.
“I am,” she agrees. “Now don’t burn that.”
He flips the sandwich, chastened.
Tyler stares at the message box for a long minute. He keeps it short.
I support you. Go for it.
He sends it to Will. He copies it to Mack. He puts his phone face down and immediately picks it up again like a raccoon in a cardigan might.
Responses land like synchronized swimmers.
Will:
???
Mack:
go for what
Tyler types and deletes twelve versions of “life” and settles on nothing. He doesn’t need to steer. He already pushed the boat off the dock.
What he doesn’t know — what he won’t know until much later — is that at that exact minute, in two nearly identical apartments in the same building, two boys open a different chat.
Will:
can we talk later?
Mack:
i was gonna ask you the same thing. come up?
Will:
be there in 5
Mack stares at the screen, then jogs around his apartment with the urgent need to fix nothing and everything: straighten the throw blanket he never uses, move the empty Gatorade bottle from the coffee table to the trash, switch the Springsteen poster so it hangs two millimeters straighter. He washes his hands for no reason. He breathes.
There’s a knock.
Mack opens the door, and there Will is: hair messed from a hoodie, cheeks pink from the cold and the sprint up two flights, eyes big in that way that says “I will joke until I fall apart.”
“Hey,” Mack says. His voice does that soft thing he can’t fix around Will.
“Hey,” Will says, standing there like he isn’t sure he’s allowed in anymore.
“You coming in or what?” Mack asks, stepping back.
“Yeah. Sorry.” Will walks inside, hands in pockets. He looks around like the apartment might answer the question neither of them has asked. “You’ve got like four sticks against the wall.”
Mack shuts the door with his heel. “Backup, backup, backup, and the one that will betray me at the worst possible time.”
“Science,” Will says solemnly.
They stand. They don’t sit yet. The silence is not empty; it is waiting. Mack gestures toward the couch; they sit with an entire cushion between them like it’s a moat. It lasts thirty seconds. Will shifts closer until their knees could touch if either of them breathed wrong.
“So,” Mack says.
“So,” Will echoes.
Mack swallows. “Tyler texted you too?”
“Yeah.” Will huffs a laugh. “I thought I was special. Turns out he’s a mass texter.”
“Coward’s nudge,” Mack says, fond. “But… helpful.”
They’re both staring at the TV that isn’t on. The reflection in the black screen looks like two ghosts waiting for a cue.
Will speaks first because he’s always better when there’s a precipice. “Can I be honest?”
“You— yeah,” Mack says, heart climbing his throat. “Always.”
Will fidgets with the seam of a throw pillow and then drops it like it burned. His voice is steady anyway. “I think I’m falling for you. Like, actually. And I hate that that might be the stupidest thing to say right now, and maybe I’m misreading everything, and I don’t want to screw up what we are because it’s my favorite part of… all of this. But if I don’t say it, it’s going to live in my mouth forever and rot.” He winces. “That was a gross metaphor.”
Mack lets out a breath like he’s been underwater. He feels unbearably young and impossibly old in the same second. He thinks about the lie he told Tyler and hates it even more now that he can see what the truth looks like sitting next to him with hopeful eyes.
“I told Toff I liked a girl,” Mack says, shame staining his cheeks. “I panicked. It felt safer to say that than the truth, which is— it’s you. It’s been you for a while.”
Will’s eyes go bright at the edges. He laughs, a small disbelieving sound. “Really?”
“Really,” Mack says, and now that the door is open the air rushes in. “You’re the easiest part of my day and the part I overthink the most. I’m— I’m scared how people will react. I am. I don’t want to be a headline before I’m a hockey player. But I also—” He swallows. “I don’t want to pretend it’s not happening.”
Will nods too fast, eyes shining. “Okay. Okay. Same. I don’t— I’m not trying to make it a whole thing either. We could— we can keep it just ours for a while. Or longer. Or— we don’t have to label anything. Or we can. I’m talking a lot.”
“I like it when you talk a lot,” Mack says, smiling without meaning to.
“Tragic for you,” Will says. “I’m a chatterbox.”
They sit there looking at each other like the answer might write itself across the other’s face. It kind of does. Will shifts again, this time closing the last inch, letting his knee nudge Mack’s. He doesn’t look away.
“Can I—” Will starts, and then doesn’t finish the sentence because Mack leans in.
The kiss is slow like they’re learning a language they already speak in their heads. It’s careful and a little shaky and entirely right. Mack’s hand finds the hem of Will’s hoodie, anchor-light. Will’s fingers curl into the edge of Mack’s sleeve like he’s afraid of floating away.
They pull back an inch but not more. Will’s smile is small and stupid and perfect. “Okay,” he whispers, a little breathless. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Mack echoes, forehead almost touching Will’s. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Will says, laughing softly.
They breathe in the same space for a long time, letting the adrenaline turn into something quieter. The apartment makes apartment noises. Outside, a siren wails and fades. Inside, two rookies sit too close on a couch and don’t move because moving would break a spell they aren’t ready to test yet.
“Can I be equally honest?” Will asks after a minute. “I’m terrified. Like— not of you. Of… everything else.”
“Same,” Mack admits. “I don’t want to hide you. But I don’t want… I don’t want it to be public consumption either. Not yet.”
“We can set rules,” Will says. “Of our own. Like — we don’t tell anyone until we want to. And if we do tell, we choose who.”
“We already accidentally told Tyler,” Mack points out, amused and fond.
“Tyler told us,” Will counters, grinning. “We’re blameless. In a court of law.”
Mack laughs, and something in his shoulders unclenches.
“Okay,” Will says. “One more thing. If this doesn’t work, I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t,” Mack says, and means it with a steel he didn’t know he had. “We’re us. That doesn’t go away. It just— we add chapters.”
Will nods. “Good. Because you’re my favorite chapter so far.”
Mack makes a face. “That was so corny.”
“Yeah,” Will says, delighted. “Hate how much you liked it.”
“I liked it a normal amount,” Mack lies, smiling so hard it hurts.
They don’t move for a while. They talk instead — low and easy, like a secret campfire.
Will tells him about the first time he noticed it was not just “best friends” in his chest — a stupid team stretch when Mack laughed at something Eklund said and Will’s body categorized the sound as “important.” Mack tells him about the way his fingers almost reached for Will’s wrist on the bench in a preseason game because keeping him close felt like the most natural thing, and how he stopped because it felt like a lot.
They talk about practical things next because it helps: no hand stuff in the rink, no weird vanishing acts that make it obvious, yes to movie nights at each other’s apartments, yes to letting it be light even when life is heavy.
“We’ll mess up,” Will says finally. “But we’ll fix it fast.”
“Deal,” Mack says. He reaches out and threads their fingers together just because he can. “Also, for the record, I never liked ‘the girl.’”
Will squeezes his hand. “For the record, I never believed you.”
Mack huffs. “Rude.”
“Correct,” Will says, and leans in again.