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Kip likes to draw in between games.
Sometimes, when the games are just too far away from New York City or when there are just not enough tickets to go around, Kip would settle for staying behind in Scott’s apartment. He’d play housekeeper or and sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly bored he’d play pet-sitter to some dog that doesn’t exist.
Really, if we do get to live together, we should probably get a dog.
Scott had mentioned long ago that it never made sense to get one. After all, he was gone half the year.
He’d commented just a while back, before he’d left for Buffalo only a few days ago.
This is the first time the apartment had ever felt like ‘home home’
Home Home.
And this is the first time he’d ever considered getting a dog.
If you’re willing to take care of it?
Me?
Yes, you, Kip. I’ll be gone for half the year. I can help when I’m here, but I’m not putting a dog through the misery of neglectful fathers.
Fathers.
They’d had that conversation a while back, and he’d said the word fathers. Fathers… as in Kip is more than welcome in this house right? Like they're partners of sorts.
Yet, Kip still feels like a guest. This is still Scott’s place. He’s all alone, and sometimes he feels like a ghost.
So he’s learned to just…draw for the distraction of it all. He draws men that may or may not be Scott Hunter. He’s drawing jerseys that may or may not be Scott Hunter.
Or he’s drawing…them. He’s left a sketch pad in Scott’s living room, a set of charcoal pencils—-one of those expensive ones from those specialty stores, courtesy of the big fat New York Admirals pay check of star player Scott Hunter.
Maybe one day, he’d be able to add some water color to it, when he’s worn the pencils to a stub or he’s gotten sick and tired of plain old human poses and still-lifes.
It’s the first time he’s drawn two people pressed against each other, one notably taller than the other. Two men at that.
Kip bites his lip as he starts on the outline after the rough sketch. He’s only past one curve of the two heads pressed against each other at the forehead, all beefore he decides that…
Nope.
He erases the whole thing.
The game at Buffalo ends prematurely. When Kip’s brain is only half at the game, he doesn’t mind the stoppage of play at first, and he chooses instead to finish the outline of his latest drawing.
He’s playing with the ears on the drawing—two of them, then a grin plays at his lips. His dreams are a lot more attractive than reality, so for a moment the world is dead to him, the static of the speaker, the howling of commentators are nothing but static and white noise.
Until suddenly, he hears everything.
“Scott Hunter’s down!”
Scott Hunter.
It’s like a switch had turned on inside him.
“They’re giving him space.”
“He’s a big man. He’s got an athletic build. People like him are used to hits like that.”
“Man, Sammy if that were me, I’d probably be dead.”
“...I don’t think he’s getting up from that one…”
There’s a line to the conversation between the commentators, but it’s damn difficult to follow, all because they seem a little too calm for people discussing an emergency stoppage of a game.
They’re talking with serious reverence, but it’s a stark contrast to the blaring alarms that had taken over every part of him.
Scott Hunter crumpled on the floor. Paramedics have entered the rink, and the rest of the players are nowhere to be found.
His throat is dry. His coat is on the rack. His legs are lead. There are flights to Buffalo from LaGuardia and overnight buses.
He doesn’t give the charcoal drawings a second look.
He takes those one hundred dollar one-hour long plane rides to Buffalo. It stings for his wallet, but it isn’t like Scott hadn’t shelled out a few thousand dollars for him anyway. The art materials alone had already cost him a thousand.
Here’s the difference though. This quick trip to Buffalo might have just been a fool’s errand. After all, of all places, he doesn’t even know which hospital they’d taken Scott too. It’s out of the media.
There were at least twenty hospitals in the city center of Buffalo alone, and as embarrassing as it is, despite being born and bred New Yorker, he knew nothing of what lay upstate.
Buffalo is colder than New York City, and the chill of late fall bites. It’s like winter still dressed up in a red and orange coat of autumn.
His first guess had been Buffalo General, because that’s where most people would go, right?
Here’s the difference. Kip is desperate, and he sits at the Buffalo Airport entrance and he digs through a discord server of all things, into some New York Admirals discord server of all things. There’s a thread that pops up called ‘Scott Hunter is ok….?’ There’s a conversation about the incident, something about a concussion and finally, some user introduces herself as a Buffalo native.
There’s some speculation on the hospital they’d taken him too.
Mercy Hospital. One of them says.
One hospital out of around twenty potential ones. This random person on the internet could be all wrong about it, but a shaky lead is better than no lead at all…right?
Well, leads don’t matter, because it isn’t like Kip has any idea what to say.
“You’ve got a name?” the nurse asks.
Kip takes a deep breath.
“Scott…Hunter.”
The nurse raises one eyebrow. She’s got these sleepy eyes that are almost catty and this expression that’s almost fox-like, like she could lash out at him at any moment. “Listen. If this is just some fan concern, you take it with the fanclub or the manager. Even the media aren’t allowed here.”
At least he knows he’s here. Kip opens his mouth, then he stares back down at his phone. He’d considered sending a message to Scott, but admittedly, that had been the most harrowing part of this whole ordeal.
To put it simply, he’d never even sent a message. But it’s not like Scott would have wanted him there either.
Hey, I’m Scott Hunter’s secret gay lover.
He’ll either get arrested or Scott’s career is ruined, depending on how the public takes it, the former more likely than the latter. And if Scott bails him out, his career will also be ruined.
Double whammy.
“No funny business. We won’t hesitate to call the police.”
At first glance, it sounds like the nurse is letting him in, so he follows her, only to find that she’s guiding him to the main lobby, and right beyond it is the main exit.
Right, at this point, he looks like nothing else but a creepy fan. He takes the judgment in stride. He flashes the nurse a ‘thank you’ muttering some promise about how he won’t be causing any more trouble.
And he realizes, he has no choice but to keep it—to at least keep doing whatever it is they’re doing, because as demeaning as it feels at times, Kip is stupid.
He likes this thing between them.
It’s a balancing act. He’s worried sick about Scott, but he’s also hyper aware that he could get arrested if he stays here any longer.
He starts with a message “You okay?” He sends the message and he decides for himself, as soon as Scott answers, he leaves.
But the message is sent at ten in the evening, and Kip has nothing with him but a phone at 40% battery, a wallet and a coat that’s barely doing any work to keep him warm.
Kip can’t sleep, but he feels completely naked just standing by the lobby entrance, so he takes a walk past the cafeteria, the coffee shop and the gift shop—all closed.
There’s still some life in the hospital, especially around the area that leads to the emergency room. He decides against going anywhere near that. Now that might actually get him arrested. Instead, he walks the hallways nearer to the windows, closer to the outskirts of the hospital, so if anything comes up, he could at least say he’s on his way out.
He reaches the end of the hallway, and the other side of the hospital where there are a few small chairs, some crayons and some bond paper.
In partnership with Roswell Park
Shades of Hope
Roswell Park, that’s some cancer institute nearby, but his brain’s only half into what exactly the initiative of the hospital is. All he knows is there’s a bulletin board nearby with drawings made by seven year olds, of flowers, doctors and upstate New York autumn colors.
If he ends up sitting down here and drawing… is he supposed to be tacking it on the bulletin board too? He hopes not.
He takes his phone out of his pocket and checks the lock screen. No new messages. Scott is probably asleep.
He checks the latest news. Scott Hunter’s condition is stable, and the coaches are with him.
As far as anyone knows, he’s got no close family members.
The media doesn’t say that last part. In fact, Kip had gotten that when he’d checked the discord server, because sometimes the fans tend to know things and talk about things that the media wouldn't ever say.
Like…
Hey, who knows? He might have some secret gay lover?
Hunter is not gay.
Kips phone is at 15%, so he decides to close his phone. He pockets it with a reminder to buy a cord at some convenience store. First things first, he should find a way to pass the time.
He takes the black crayon and a white crayon, and some stubby yellow-peach one. He closes his eyes and he thinks back to the charcoal drawing he’d left at home, floppy ears and these almond-shaped eyes.
Back at home, even the happenings on the TV were dead to him, the commentator all white noise. Maybe if draws again like he’d drawn back then, he could pretend it isn’t so damn cold so late into autumn, that the hospital silence isn’t so deafening and the
Maybe he could pretend he isn’t completely alone in this silence, that he isn’t an almost-fugitive, and it’s been two hours and Scott Hunter still hasn’t replied.
Kip would have wanted to pick Scott Hunter up at the lobby, but despite being on his way to recovery from a bad concussion and missing the next two weeks of games, he refuses to get any more help.
If anybody finds out what’s happening between us…
“We’re dead,” Kip reminds himself, every time he finds himself wanting to insist he helps him up, or every time he feels that twinge of regret at taking the first bus out of Buffalo only a few days ago.
They won’t literally be dead, but he can’t help but wonder. If they did find him, and Scott Hunter had to kick him out of the house… would he have time to clean up the pencils, the art materials, and the sketches he’d kept on the coffee table.
Probably not.
He’d had glimpses of the discord server.
There’s no way Scott Hunter is gay.
Kip is cooking dinner when he hears clitters and clatters then the click of the door. He’s mixing pasta sauce, and he was damn close to dropping the wooden spoon in the sauce when Scott enters the apartment.
“I’d thought I had a bit more time.” Kip flashes Scott a sheepish grin as he casts an awkward glance at the drawings on the table. “I would have cleaned up.”
Scott shakes his head. He’s paler now and rugged. He looks almost like a veteran who’d just come back from war. “When I said make yourself at home, I meant it,” he says. “I still mean it.”
But it’s still Scott’s home, and it’s like Kip’s walking on a tight rope now. He wants to leave the boiling pasta for just a moment, just to clean up the papers on the table, but if he leaves the pasta now, it could spill, it could explode, it could make a bigger mess. Instead, he’s settling for shifting his attention from the pasta then to the mess at the table then the pasta again, only to realize he’s picking up no information at all.
Until…
“Roswell Park… Mercy hospital…Funny, isn’t this a hospital in Buffalo?"
How did he—
Oh. Kip gets it now—now that the wooden spoon fell into the damn pasta bowl. He’d taken the paper from him in the hospital, and all the papers from the Shades of Hope Community Initiative had the seals of both hospitals.
“I just…had…paper from there… and it’s pretty good scratch paper.”
“Didn’t know you drew with crayons?”
“I don’t—” I don’t. “I mean I do, when that’s all I have.”
“You draw pretty well with crayons,” Scott says, and he takes the paper with him to the kitchen, and Kip, in his panicked state, gives up on the pasta sauce. He turns off the stove.
“I needed a distraction,” Kip admits.
“You went to Buffalo?” Scott asks. “When I was in the hospital?” There’s no anger in his voice, no judgment. In fact, his expression shifts quickly from surprise to comprehension…then something else. His brows are furrowed, his eyes all seeing yet still curious, as if he couldn’t fathom for himself why this little ghost at home would drop everything for him.
“They… wouldn’t let me see you,” Kip explains. “Said, if I did any funny business, they’d call the police.”
“Kip…” Scott bites his lip. “I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t have to be, because I shouldn’t have been there… It’s just, they weren’t telling me anything. I was worried sick.”
“You could have messaged.”
“I did.”
“I saw it in the morning,” Scott answers.
But by then, by that morning, Kipp was already on the bus back to New York City. “Scott, if I did text you that evening, and you responded. Would I have been able to see you? Or would everything have been for nothing?”
“It…” The whiskers on Scott’s beard twitched as he trails off. He’s staring at everything but Kipp, as if to buy time. “It wasn’t for nothing.” He covers the last few feet from the entrance to the kitchen to the stove, and he holds Kip in one tight embrace. “The coach was there, but someone else… actual family would have been nice.”
“I’m not family.”
“You’re the closest one to it.”
The closest one to family. In Scott’s apartment, he can believe it, but everywhere else, in a hospital of all places, Kip is faced with the jarring reminder that whatever they have between them might just be the equivalent of a ghost.
After all, ghosts are one of those tiny creatures that could only exist in a few places. In the outside world, this thing between them doesn’t exist, and Kipp’s reminded as he switches on the stove again and finishes up the pasta—maybe they should end it.
How long has it been already? Three years.
Scott’s doing his part. He’s setting the table despite Kipp’s insistence that he should probably rest.
The equivalent of an olive branch maybe? Yet in Kipp’s eyes, it isn’t like Scott did anything wrong.
With two thick oven mitts, Kipp takes the bowl of pasta to the table. “Dinner’s ready.”
Scott has the chair next to him, and he’s looking through the drawings. “You really should be in art school.”
“Because I’m bad?”
“Because you’re good… And I'm a bit curious. You’re drawing lots of people… lots of still-lifes and landscapes, but back in Roswell…why did you draw a dog? Part of their program?”
Kipp shrugs. “Wishful thinking,” he says.
“What does that mean?”
Kipp doesn’t answer. It’s better not to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
After all, it’s nothing but a ghost.