Chapter Text
Bernike was nervous. She thought most people probably would be, at least a little bit. But it was worse for B, because she just wasn’t a party person.
Honestly, she wasn’t much of a very social person, period: lots of books, lots of parking her butt in the window seat back home with tea and a project, and especially lots of sitting with her friends while each of them did their own thing independently. Parallel play, her friend Jeri called it.
Or at least, that’s what Jeri had called it, back when she still talked to B regularly. Moving to Ottawa had been great for B academically—her degree program was top-notch—but none of B’s friends were here, and it was so hard to make new friends... Jeri was in California, studying computer science; Mai was in Vancouver, trying to make a break in acting; and Billie was back home, taking care of her chronically ill parents instead of going to school because all of Billie’s older siblings were shitheads who didn’t pull their weight.
Old news; didn’t matter now. What mattered now was that Bernike was an introverted, isolated geek being invited to hang out with a whole collection of (presumably) beautiful, socially successful women, and she just wasn’t sure she could handle that.
And she really didn’t want to embarrass her new boyfriend, especially since he was really sweet and really, really hot, but... This was not B’s scene.
Like, at all.
There were way too many very pretty people here, the women slim and blonde, the men tall and well-muscled. B grabbed Jesse’s arm like he would vanish if she didn’t and followed behind him as he was led through the house to the enormous back patio. She felt mousy and drab, and also angry about feeling mousy and drab. It wasn’t a good set of feelings.
But the statuesque woman with too-perfect wavy blonde hair who had greeted them at the door and led them through the house—she’d introduced herself as “Cassie,” and B was already dysmally aware she was going to forget half the names she heard tonight—deposited them right next to a positive smorgasbord of food, and the air smelled like summer: charcoal and meat, beer and water. There was a pond in the back yard, and B could see two athletic young men and a handful of kids playing some kind of game in the grass next to it.
Even as nervous as she was, B could still feel the afternoon sun melting some of the tension out of her shoulders.
“Gunny!” a handsome black man called to them from next to the grill, and B had to blink all over again at just how damned big that grill was. That grill was bigger than her dad’s old herb garden. Between it and the landscaping and all the patio furniture and umbrellas and all, they must have spent more on this patio than she was going to pay in rent all year. “Hey, welcome to the team, rook! Who’s this?”
And, damn, B might be stuck in this hellish lifestyle, because she would put up with a lot worse than too many pretty people if it meant she got to see Jesse beam at her like this some more.
“This is Bernike,” Jesse said—bragged, honestly. “My girlfriend.” B pulled herself more upright and waved, trying to pretend to be friendly and outgoing like everyone else here.
“Hey, welcome,” the guy introduced himself, a little less effusively than he had for Jesse. “I’m Zane, call me Bood. Looks like you met my wife Cassie. I hope you came hungry!”
He gave them a whole run-down of the food situation, which was coded by meat type and platter shape; he had to stop halfway through and go back to the beginning, because the explanation was long enough that, before he got to the end, two more guys showed up and he had to tell them, too. It was a lot of meat.
The two new guys—B had already forgotten their names, she was terrible at this—grabbed plates, buffed Jesse on his arm, and ran down shouting towards the guys by the pond. B and Jesse made their own plates and then stood awkwardly by the spread, not sure what to do now.
After a second, B tugged them a few feet to the side, so they weren’t blocking the way to the food.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a short, bearded, cheerful-looking man arrive carrying a couple of crates; he was directed over towards the drinks. Another man came out of the house behind him, but B had a hunch this one wasn’t newly arrived; he probably just came out of the bathroom. She wasn’t sure why she thought that... something about the way he was tucking his phone into his pocket, maybe?
She watched as the second guy bent for a beer from the cooler, then straightened, caught sight of them, and brightened. “Gunny!” he called, heading towards them with his beer. “Good! Who is this?”
And, maybe it was the hint of an accent, maybe it was the charisma that was positively pouring off of the man, but B suddenly, incredulously, knew exactly who this guy was.
“Cap!” Jesse was beaming, he was beaming, and looking at that face B knew she was so doomed. “Meet Bernike, my girlfriend! She is so smart, Cap, she is just crazy smart, you’re gonna love her!”
B blushed and reached out a hand. She was talking to a millionaire, a celebrity, and quite frankly a total hottie if you liked them broad and angular-faced—which, judging by how much she liked kissing Jesse, B definitely did. But even with all that, the part that made her blush was Jesse describing her as smart.
She was smart; no arrogance, it was a simple fact. But she still glowed to hear Jesse say it.
Doomed. She was so doomed.
The doomedest.
“Call me B,” she managed. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Rozanov.”
“Ech! No! This is terrible,” the captain complained immediately with a dramatic wave of his arm that threatened to slop beer everywhere. “I am only Mr. Rozanov to police; you must stop this at once. I am Rozanov—or Roz, since we are doing nicknames, yes?”
And he gave her a big, audacious wink.
B giggled—giggling? Who was she?—and had the pleasure of feeling Jesse’s hand come to rest at the small of her back. Rozanov eyeballed her and guessed, “You are student?”
“Yes, at the U of O,” B told him, starting to grow more confident in the face of Rozanov’s overbearing charm.
“Tell him what you’re studying, B!”
“Biochemistry and linguistics, pre-med,” Bernike said obligingly, fighting the urge to look down at her plate.
“Ah,” said Rozanov, his face going blank. “Biology and language, these I know... But what is ‘pre-med’?” He said it a little wrong, like it was one two-syllable word instead a shortening of pre-medical, so B was pretty sure he wasn’t having her on.
“She’s gonna be a doctor!” Jesse bragged. He was practically glowing.
B squirmed happily. She was sooooo doooooomed!
But, “Ah,” Rozanov said, nodding, “then I know who you must meet.”
He tugged them across the patio towards one of the umbrella-shaded tables, where two men and a woman were lounging with drinks and mostly-empty plates. “Rage Box!” Jesse greeted from over B’s head. “And Hazy!”
These nicknames were going to be the death of her.
“Our goalies,” Rozanov explained at lower volume for B. “Rafe is our backup goalie, our starting goalie is Wyatt Hayes.” And then, raising his voice again, “And Doctor Lisa!”
“Oh!” said B, now seeing why he had brought them over here.
Doctor Lisa was a handsome woman, rather than pretty. She had a strong chin and a sensual mouth, dark hair in a chin-length Karen cut, wide shoulders, and large, high breasts. She was also older than a lot of the women there; most of them looked to be in their twenties, and early twenties, at that, but Doctor Lisa was in her thirties at least, and probably the back half of that decade.
“What kind...?”
B was looking at Lisa’s face, because Rozanov had just introduced her as a doctor and that was interesting, so she saw what happened to the woman’s expression as soon as B started to ask what kind of a doctor she was: the head tilted down, the eyes widened and blinked, an innocent smile spread across those well-curved lips.
“Oh,” Doctor Lisa lied, “I’m just a pediatrician.”
“Okay,” B said, not sure how to avoid calling her on that. She looked at the two guys uncertainly. Wyatt Hayes was probably a few years younger than Doctor Lisa, early thirties and with blond curls that made him look even younger. He had a fond impatience on his face, like this was not the first time he’d heard his wife lie about her job. The other one—Rage Box, apparently?—was older, with gray sneaking into his short dark hair, and didn’t seem to have noticed anything strange.
“Bernike here is ‘pre-med,’” Rozanov told them like he was giving them all a present, and it seemed to work: Doctor Lisa sat up again, and the mask pulled away, leaving her an interesting woman again.
“Oh, wonderful!” she said, seeming genuinely pleased. “What year are you? What’s your major?”
It was a lot less scary after that, sitting at a table with four other people, one of whom was Jesse, instead of out in the middle of the gathering of forty or so. B was able to relax and enjoy the admittedly excellent food; both the grilled items and the cold salads which had been set out as sides were delicious. She answered questions about her major and her schooling approximately as politely as Lisa was asking them until that conversation had led them down to a dead-end, at which point she cast around for something else and found it on Hazy’s chest. She pointed at his shirt: “I take it you’re a Blue Beetle fan?”
Rage Box burst out laughing and Lisa sat forward, watching.
"Hazy’s a big fan of comics in general,” Jesse explained, and considering he’d only known these people a few weeks that was probably an understatement.
“Okay,” B said, and decided to let a little of herself show through. She turned and blinked up at Hazy with faux innocence. “But why would you go with the shittier Blue Beetle, and not Jaime Reyes?”
“Oooooh!” cooed Lisa, grinning at the oncoming conflict. “Are you trying to pick a fight?” She asked it like she was highly in favor of that idea.
Hazy just waved a chicken wing at her, though. “No, no, I like Ted Kord because I’m a big fan of the Beetle/Booster team-up, but Jaime Reyes has a lot of good things going for him! She might have a good argument!”
The topic carried them until Cassie and a couple of other women brought out a cascade of desserts, placing them on the now-partially-cleared buffet table with the rest of the food. There was a clink of silver on glass and a good-looking older man (“Wiebe,” Jesse whispered to her) gave a brief speech, welcoming everyone to the coming year of “damned good Centaurs hockey!” (No one called him on the oxymoron.)
Then the tunes were pumped up again and yet another gorgeous young woman threw herself down on the bench seat beside B with a wine bottle. “Almost done,” she said, pouring into Lisa’s glass without asking, then into her own rather more heavily, and then, with a mimed wiggle of the bottle to ask first, into B’s, too. Then she frowned. “Wait, who are you?”
“Damn, Nic,” Lisa laughed. “How much have you had?”
“I have a night off with no driving and as soon as we get home my mother-in-law will be taking the twins,” Nic said with a grin. “So, not as much as I’m planning to, actually!” Despite however much she’d had, Nic turned and was able to sink the wine bottle into the wide-mouthed trash can twelve feet away. “Two points!”
“From this distance? Three.” Jesse sounded impressed.
“Thanks! Seriously, though, who are you kids? I don’t remember you from the last one of these.”
“They weren’t at the last one of these.” Lisa sipped her wine and looked at Nic with transparent fondness. “This is our rookie defenseman, Jesse Gunn, and his girlfriend Bernike—who seems to prefer being called ‘B.’ You two, this is Nicole Boyle. She’s a disaster at the best of times, but I would strangle a toddler to get an ass like that.”
“Slightly concerning coming from a pediatrician,” Rage Box observed equably.
“No, no, that means I’ve seen too many of them,” Lisa explained. “Toddlers, not asses. They’ve lost all their charms!”
Nicole snorted. “Doctor or no doctor,” she told them, “Lisa is the only WAG not allowed to babysit.”
“Child-free and proud, baby!”
Hazy cheers’ed them with a bottle of the cider half the group was drinking, but B had a different question: “What’s a WAG?”
She found out in short order. By the time they left for the evening, the sun catching the dust on the inside of the windshield as Jesse drove one-handed in his too-loud car, Bernike had given her number to Lisa, Nicole and Cassie, and the last of these had added B’s number to a group chat that had her phone buzzing cheerfully all the way back to campus.
That first night it was too overwhelming, texts and gifs coming in one after another for hours. Combined with too much stimulation at the party (and too much nervousness before it), B couldn’t handle even looking at it before the next morning. She set her phone on “do not disturb” and crawled into bed.
The next morning was Sunday, though, and B was able to lounge under the covers with Jesse’s arm thrown over her as the early-morning sunshine came through the window at an angle that snuck it past the shade.
Yeesh, good thing they hadn’t been that drunk! B had had mostly soda and Nicole’s leftover wine, and Jesse had had one beer and two ciders, seemingly without any effect at all. But most of the people there had been putting away a lot more than B or Jesse.
B looked at the texts rolling in, and tipped her head to contemplate the (gently snoring) form of her boyfriend. She leaned her face into him, gently nuzzling his shoulder—he didn’t wake—then turned back to her phone and started typing.
B laughed out loud, then tipped her head to the side at a stream of private messages that started to come in. She switched over to them and saw that Cassie had sent:
And then the rest of the messages were contacts for all of the various WAGs, organized by First Name, Legal Name if different, and then Player’s Name and Position. B took a second to be impressed at how organized it all was, set them all to import, then switched back to the WAGs chat.
B clicked on the attached image, and saw a handsome, slim older man standing near a fire in jean shorts and a t-shirt. It was sunny, where he was, but there was something odd about the daylight, and after an embarrassing number of seconds blinking at it, B realized what it was: that picture was taken significantly later than it was right now.
B huffed a laugh, loud enough that Jesse snorted himself awake beside her.
“Mmm?” He nosed into her hair, sniffing deeply, and B had a moment of being too fond to speak. “‘Sfunny?”
“Good morning.” She kissed his cheek and enjoyed the way it crinkled with his smile. Those lips... “WAGs chat.”
“Mmmf. They nice?” His eyes were already closing again.
“I have had these women for all of five minutes and if anything were to happen to them, I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.” That probably wasn’t the exact meme, but it was early and Jesse probably wouldn’t call her on it anyway. “Rozanov’s girl is vicious, I love her already.”
Jesse’s thick brows came together, and he blinked himself back awake. “Rozanov has a girl?”
B paused, thinking about it. She couldn’t remember having met Janie last night. And wouldn’t the Captain’s girlfriend normally have been in charge of something like that?
She looked back at the chat.
B clicked on the linked video. It opened to show the same slim man from earlier, now frantically dumping liquid on a much larger fire.
This didn’t seem to have any answers, so B switched over to individual messages and, after a minute of deliberation over her target, decided to send one to Cassie. Cassie seemed to be the most in charge of things, and nobody that organized would truly mind a few questions.
As B had learned last night, Mike Ellsworth was in his early thirties and therefore had been in the league for a while now. Like, at least seven years, probably more. If his fiancée didn’t know about Rozanov dating anybody, B wasn’t going to feel too bad about not knowing it, either.
B let her phone drop to the mattress and looked at the sun, now high enough that it no longer edged around the curtain. She thought about her aunties and the way they lured men around them, the way they used people; she thought about her dad, perpetually tired and worn. She thought about her determination not to become that, her promise to herself that she was going to stand on her own.
But, on the other hand... B tried to put herself in Jane’s shoes. It was difficult, because she didn’t know what Jane’s situation was, but... She did know Lisa, now, and Nicole, and Cassie. She knew they were close—the barbecue last night had been too friendly, too warm, for her to have missed that. And she could tell that the WAGs chat was all friends, too.
She tried to imagine being on the outside of that, wishing she could participate but having to keep herself separate.
It seemed... lonely.
She picked up the phone again.