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Jack tells Kent he doesn’t love him because it’s the easiest way to hurt him.
For months, his parents catch him watching Aces games, and assume it’s because he’s mourning what he missed, and he doesn’t tell them that it’s because it’s the only way he gets to see Kent’s face, now.
(They’d been friends because nobody else wanted them, at first. Kent was the only American on the team and didn’t speak a word of French—Jack did, and could understand the way the others talked about the both of them.
“Good workout,” Kent had said once, cheery as ever, and that’s how it started.
When they were roommates, Kent would go to the bathroom and call his sister on the phone. “Maybe I should just come home,” he would say shakily, “I don’t think I’m good enough to be here. I don’t think I’m going to make it. And the guys, they don’t want me here.”
Jack had made him good enough that they wanted Kent, and Kent had made Jack normal enough that they wanted him, too.
They made playoffs the first year, and after that, all the guys were nicer.
Jack worried about the draft for months, and Kent always told him, “Whatever team gets you will be so lucky.”
The week before they won the Memorial Cup, Jack heard him crying in the bathroom. “I don’t know if I can be strong enough for both of us, mom,” he’d said. “I’m scared and I don’t know if we’re going to be okay.”
When he’d come out, face wet and eyes red, he’d smiled brightly at Jack and said, “Ready for lights out, Zimms? Big game tomorrow.”
They’d lifted the Cup together, and Kent had murmured “Love you, Zimms,” where none of the cameras could see and had kissed him when they were alone in the locker room.
I never loved you, Jack sent a week after the draft, because it was the quickest way to get Kent to move on.)
By the time Jack falls in love again, it’s been long enough that he’s convinced himself that he told the truth that day, when he broke Kent’s heart.
It’s become a habit of his, pushing Kent away.
…
Woody volunteers to house the rookie because he’s the captain and because the brass likes to keep an eye on the new franchise stars and make sure they don’t go too wild in Vegas and because Woody is married with three kids and is old and boring enough to keep them in line.
Of course, at the time he agreed to it, they all thought it would be Jack Zimmermann, but things change.
Kent Parson makes it onto the regular roster, to nobody’s surprise. Cecile puts clean sheets on the bed and they tell him that they can do whatever he wants to the room, but he doesn’t touch a thing—he moves around like a ghost, like he’s afraid to touch anything.
He does help with the kids, though, even though Cecile tries to tell him time and time again that he doesn’t have to work for his keep as a babysitter.
“I like them,” Kent says earnestly, letting Kayla gum happily at his shirt.
Woody’s more worried because he’s the same way in the locker room. He’s not afraid to make a mark on the ice—hell, he’s putting up franchise record numbers—but he seems withdrawn around the guys.
They all like him, is the thing. He’s a likable guy. He’s good with the media, great during the games, and when he does speak, he’s quite the little chirper. It’s not even that he’s shy, really.
He just seems sad.
Woody is pretty helplessly fond of him in a way he might not have been five years ago, but Kent is his rookie, and fatherhood has made him pretty fucking soft.
(They lose a rivalry game to the Aeros and Kent refuses to come out with the team. He’s had a rough game, gave up a turnover late in the third that let the Aeros break the tie, and Woody can understand wanting to sleep that off. Kent can’t drink with them, technically, but he’ll usually make a fair shake of going out for team bonding, anyway.
When Woody gets home, Cecile is still up, reading in bed.
“I’m worried about him,” she says softly. “I think he thinks if he’s not playing well, none of you will like him.”
“Shit,” Woody says, and rubs a hand over his forehead.
Kent watches cartoons with Eli the next morning, holding him tight on his lap, and he seems so young. He calls his mother religiously every week, texts his sister before every game, but Woody thinks he must be lonely. It’s a shame, because he’s like part of the family, now—on the rare occasions that Kent skips family dinner, they all miss him at the table. He plays ball hockey with Victoria and lets Eli drive his cars over Kent’s back for hours and teaches Kayla new words.
“We all have bad games,” Woody says, sitting next to Kent. “Nothing to worry about.”
Kent startles, like his mind has been a million miles away. “Sure,” he says, tightly.
Woody claps him on the knee and his throat burns with a hundred other things to say. Instead, they both watch Elmo.)
Kent doesn’t often fight on the ice, because he’s almost always the smallest one there.
But some asshole keeps chirping at him, and by the third time he calls Kent “cocksucker” just out of hearing of the ref, Woody is half ready to go at the bastard himself.
Kent drops his gloves, and the crowd roars because it’s a rare occurrence.
(“I like being underestimated,” Kent had said, when Woody had tried to talk to him about handling the pressure. “It makes it easier to beat them.”)
It doesn’t go well. Kent is herded off the ice, bloody, and the smug bastard only serves a minor roughing penalty, but Woody personally makes sure they win the game.
He stops by the trainer’s, afterwards, and Kent is sullen, holding an icepack to a cut on his cheek and sporting what’s sure to become a beaut of a black eye.
“Sorry,” he whispers when he looks up to see Woody.
“Oh, kiddo,” Woody says, and pulls him into a tight hug. This is a kid who needs to be held more. “Maybe we should practice boxing, huh?”
(Cecile’s cousin, Alan, comes to visit and is starstruck by Kent, who blushes and bites his lip over dinner.
Woody and Cecile look at each other, and in the same moment, they realize.
“It must be so hard,” Cecile whispers in the dark that night, and Woody pulls her closer.
“Yeah,” Woody says, and thinks of the way Kent always studiously looks at the wall in the dressing room like he doesn’t want to be accused of anything, even when the other guys are slapping asses and rough-housing half naked. He thinks of the way he’d asked Kent not to bring any girls home, at the beginning of the season, the way the guys always point out hot girls at the bar and chirp Kent when he doesn’t go to talk to them and feels foolish and insensitive.
The next time Smallsy points at a blonde up at the bar and says, “Parser, that girl has been staring at you all night. Perfect ten, totally stacked, looks up for anything,” and Kent blushes and shakes his head, Woody snaps, “Leave it, Smalls,” before any of them can chirp Kent about it.)
Kent Parson wins them a Stanley Cup—Woody’s first—and he feels no shame about crying on the ice. He’s getting old, for a hockey player, has put in sixteen full seasons and has finally won the trophy he’s been chasing since childhood. He’s worn out. His joints ache in the morning and his right knee hasn’t been the same since ’06 and he’s ready to take his family back home, back up to Canada where they can be near his parent’s and Cecile’s and raise their kids like they were both raised.
Leaving the Aces is going to be fucking hard, though, and leaving Kent Parson is going to be harder.
They’ll give him the C, probably, and Woody wishes he could find the right words to tell Kent that he could lose every fucking game wearing it and still be worth something, but he’s a hockey player and not a fucking English teacher and so he only says, “you’ll be great, Parser,” and slaps him too hard on the back.
Cecile helps him find a nice apartment and the kids go with him to adopt a cat that Victoria names after Kent and Eli asks to have a sleepover with him, the last night.
“You’re family, Kent,” Cecile says, and Woody is so glad that she told him because he would never have been able to.
All the kids cry when they have to hug him goodbye, and Kent keeps blinking hard when Kayla won’t let go of his shirt.
Hockey’s always been a fickle mistress, and Woody’s ready to settle down with his wife and children. It doesn’t make it any easier to see the uncertainty in Kent’s eyes, when they’ve finally loaded the car up and Cecile has gently pried Kayla from his arms.
“Keep in touch, kiddo,” Woody says around the lump in his throat. “We’ll always be your biggest fans.”
…
Sometimes when Jess is neck deep in coursework, she thinks that her brother must have it so fucking easy, being a professional athlete, raking in millions without a care in the world.
Of course, then she gets on the internet and is quickly reminded that she’s wrong.
She tries to stay away from Kent’s press because it pisses her off, mostly—it’s nice that he has fans, but thirty-three teams in the league hate him and that means that so do millions of other people.
He used to read me a bedtime story every night when mom was working late, she sometimes wants to snap at them all. He took me to Disneyworld when we were both way too old for it because he knew I always wanted to go and it was the first time we could afford it. He learned to cook so that he could keep me from getting scurvy that one summer when he was twelve and we made mac-n-cheese for two weeks straight.
Usually when that mood strikes, she just calls him instead.
(“I think you’re the only person who really knows me,” Kent told her once. It was probably meant to be flattering—instead, it made her deeply sad.)
They have a lot in common because they’re the only ones who know what it was like growing up in the Parson household. Kent is quite honestly Jess’ favorite human being and she misses him every day, but she wishes they didn’t live in a world where he brought her as his date to everything because the other options were either bearding or destroying his career.
He’s won two Stanley Cups, now, and an Olympic Gold Medal, but he still somehow looks the happiest when they’re sharing a couch and breaking his meal plan and watching bad reality TV.
(The first time he’d won the Stanley Cup, it had been so surreal Jess still can barely remember anything but confetti and endless cameras.
The second time, he’d hoisted the Cup first and then skated over to hug mom. Jess had looked around at all the other celebrating Aces—almost all of them had had a pretty girlfriend or a beaming wife on their arm. There were babies being posed in the Cup, children being gleefully swung around. And then the Cup had come back to Kent and it was just him alone at the end of a hard season, holding a fucking hockey trophy while everyone else kissed their wives.
Jess has a degree in English—she knows a metaphor when she sees one.
She’d hugged him, and tried desperately to be enough.)
Jack Zimmermann is a dirty word in their family. Jess is reminded why when Kent calls her near Christmas, tells her fake-cheerily that he’s coming home for the holidays after their Boston game and grudgingly confesses that he went to Samwell.
Again.
They’re close—had to be, when mom always had to work and dad decided they weren’t fucking worth it sometime around Jess’ first birthday. Kent had offered to try to find him, once, and Jess had said she’d rather just see him in hell. The last time dad had reached out, it was because Kent had been drafted into the Q and he thought he could profit off that.
Kent had told him to fuck off, and Jess has never been so proud.
When Kent comes to their mom’s new NHL-funded house, he knocks on the door like he’s a guest.
They sit on the same chair and Jess tucks her cold toes under Kent’s thighs and they giggle with each other just like they used to until Mom comes home with dinner.
(Later, Kent knocks on her door and collapses onto the other side of her double bed and his breath hitches and he hides his face in one of her spare pillows.
”There aren’t monsters in your closet, Jessie,” he used to tell her. “But I’ll stay here until you fall asleep.”
“Kenny,” Jess says helplessly. She wants to make him a world where he doesn’t have to be afraid to be in love. She wants him to have someone who can put him first, for a change. She wants to remember what it looks like when he really smiles.
For now, they have a world where they curl together on a mattress and their mom can stroke his hair, sitting on his other side, and they can just be the Parsons, a family who loves each other and the Buffalo Bills and The Titanic, and Jess can hold her big brother’s hand on Christmas Eve and pretend like it doesn’t kill her to see him so heartsick.)
“I love you,” Jess says on Christmas morning, when Kent sneaks some Peppermint Schnapps into her cocoa when mom’s on the phone with her sister in Florida. She snugs her head up under Kent’s chin, because she has a dissertation to write and he has a season to finish and they don’t see each other enough. He still wears the aftershave she bought for him three years ago, broke on a college student’s budget even though he was paying her tuition, having made him promise to not spend too much money on a gift for her.
(He’d bought her plane tickets to San Jose for spring break and protested that it didn’t count because he had a buddy on the Sharks who would let her and her friends use his house while he was on a road trip and the tickets were from frequent flyer miles. The house was a mansion, and Jess learned her lesson about Kent’s generosity.)
The angel on the tree is the same one Jess made in second grade, and it looks more lackluster every year. They both watch it list dangerously to the right.
“Love you too, Jessie,” Kent says, and kisses her hair.
…
Alyosha grabs the first black jersey he sees and hoists a player out of the scrum and swears loudly in Russian. Too late, he realizes that it’s Kent Parson, and Zimmboni shoulders them both aside as he stands up angrily.
“I’m sorry, I slipped,” Kent says to Snowy once Alyosha puts him down, and Snowy growls at him.
The call on the ice stands—Alyosha stalks off, trying very hard not to think of how hard Kent went down, four grown men on top of him, helmet rolling away.
Alyosha is already in his suit when Kent comes out of the visitor’s training room, still in his gear.
Off the ice, it’s easy to remember what color Kent’s eyes were in the dim light of the Nashville bar, the sound he’d made when Alyosha had kissed him in the elevator, the way his mouth had parted around a gasp, the sound of his giggle when they’d talked themselves to sleep in a city that belonged to neither of them.
The terror in Kent’s eyes when Alyosha had threatened him, just thirty minutes ago.
Kent is a hockey player—he’ll understand that it’s not personal on the ice. It doesn’t mean that Alyosha likes that he truly scared him.
“You are okay?” He asks Kent, and he sounds too tender. Snowy is okay and the game is over, it’s easy now to let go of his fury at the way Kent had slid into the goal a second after the puck, to suddenly remember how small Kent had looked under a pile of hockey players.
“Fine,” Kent says shortly. “The trainers wanted to look at my knee, but it’s fine.”
Alyosha catches his arm as he tries to walk past, awkward on his skates over the rubber mats. “Kenny,” he says, and Kent freezes.
They don’t see each other often enough, and they too easily let hockey get in the way. But he’s seen the way Kent smiles when he truly means it, known the warmth of his body, heard the way his breath evens in sleep.
He bought Kent breakfast, watched him eat it naked in bed and tumbled him back down to kiss jam off his lower lip.
And here he is in his battle gear, guarded and rightfully suspicious, and Alyosha hates that he’s hardened him again unintentionally, after how long it took to get him to open up.
“I can buy you dinner?” He asks carefully, and Kent regards him for a moment before he says, “Okay,” and Alyosha doesn’t miss the way he blushes.
(Alyosha tells Kent he loves him a year later, and Kent exhales sharply, says, “No, you don’t.”
“Kent,” Alyosha says, brows furrowing. “Yes, I do. I say I love you, I love you. You cannot tell me how I feel.” He wipes a tear from Kent’s cheek. “Why you cry, Kenny?” He asks.
“Nobody’s told me that, before,” Kent says, and Alyosha can’t help but kiss him.
“I tell you enough for everyone,” he promises.)
…
(Karen often wonders if she’s done her best as a parent.
Being a single mother is hard.
Some days, that feels more like an excuse than others.
Her boy hasn’t lived at home since he was fourteen years old, and she lost too much time with him working enough to pay for his ice time and his team fees and his extra-calorie diet.
She sees his dream come true and his heart break on the same day in June, 2009.
He uses his first bonus to buy her a nice house, and she cries for everything she could never give him growing up and everything she wants for him that money can never buy.
She sees him go down hard from thousands of miles away and wonders what monster she must have been to let her baby boy play this violent sport.
She sees him hoist a Stanley Cup and wonders what monster she would have been to keep him from what he loves so much.
She sees him cry for a boy who’s never cared and aches to cradle him like she could when he was a small child, sees him hold someone else’s baby and wonders if she’ll ever get to see him hold his own.
He wins a second Stanley Cup, a third, and it never makes him any happier, and she thinks she would give up almost anything to see him with someone who could value more than his career.
He used to keep things from her when he was billeting, because he thought it would be too much for her to handle. Despite himself, he would call her crying, ask her if it was worth it, and she would bite her lip bloody so that he wouldn’t hear her crying, too, tell him that she wished she knew.
She still wishes she knew, if what this game took from her son will ever be worth anything it could give back.
He introduces her to Alexei Mashkov, who earnestly gives her flowers and makes her boy laugh and satisfies Jess, who’s always been hardest on those desperate for Kent’s attention.
Kent lets him loop an arm around his shoulder in public, and Kit lets Alexei feed her treats from his big hands, so Karen lets Alexei call her ‘Mama’ when he proudly shows her a full pot of coffee in the morning while Kent regards her nervously from the far side of the living room.
“Do you like him?” Kent asks her, when Alexei has taken Jess to the bookstore.
Karen smiles. “Do you like him, Kenny?”
“I think I love him,” Kent blurts, bites his tongue. The front door opens, closes, Alexei pops his head through to the deck where they’re sitting with their mugs.
“We find War in Peace in Russian!” He exclaims, and Karen sees the way Kent smiles helplessly at him.
“I already have an English translation,” Jess calls, and Alexei disappears, saying, “No, no, is no good!”
“I do like him,” Karen assures Kent. He’s always cared too much about what other people say—she wishes she could have trained happiness into him the way his coaches trained hockey into him, rather than seeing him worry about her and Jess and everyone else in the world. “I think he loves you very much.”
“I think so, too,” Kent says, surprised despite himself.
“Kenny!” Alexei calls from inside. “Come see books Jess buys for my English!”
“Coming,” Kent says, and pecks her on the cheek on the way into the house.
Karen smiles. He’ll be okay, her boy. He’s got all the love he needs.)