Chapter Text
Gay?
Shane Hollander was gay?
Caleb had only been half listening as the captain started his announcement after practice. He was tired, and hungry, and wanted to get home to call his girlfriend. But then…
Hollander was just standing there like it was any other day, wearing his compression shirt and a backward baseball cap and chatting with Pike and Boizeau like nothing insane had happened.
“I knew it,’ Comeau hissed under his breath. “I knew he was a fucking fag.”
Wait—he did? Caleb frowned. Because he was really fucking shocked. Not only was Hollander the best player in the league, except for maybe Rozanov, but he was just a regular guy. Sure, maybe a little quiet, and he didn’t really like to party or anything, but it’s not like he was…you know, gay gay. He didn't, like, talk like that, or wear brightly colored clothes or anything.
“Remember when he did that underwear ad? Should have known,” someone said.
Caleb didn’t really understand that connection. His girlfriend had showed him some of the chatter on the WAG chat about those ads and it didn’t seem very gay to have a bunch of women losing their shit over your abs like that.
But Caleb was also from the middle of fucking nowhere, North Dakota, where there was nothing to do except skate on the pond and go to church. They weren’t particularly fond of gay people at the Berkes’ church, but it wasn’t as if the pastor gave you a field guide and told you how to spot them in the wild. It was more about perversions, and damnation.
His parents would be so pissed. His mom had had lots to say about sin and temptation when he moved to Montreal, and she’d been a little bit right, seeing as Caleb was definitely doing a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to, like drinking alcohol, and smoking a little weed sometimes, and having premarital sex. But the pastor had warned him that the city would be full of sodomites who would want to corrupt him, but Caleb hadn’t even met any.
Or at least, he hadn’t realized that he’d met any. He stole a glance at Hollander, whose eyes were darting nervously around the room now. Pike and Boizeau were still standing on either side of him, and JJ’s hand was resting on Hollander’s shoulder.
Were they…? No. No way. Boizeau never shut up about the women he was infatuated with. Unless…
Goddammit, Caleb just didn’t know anymore.
He reached for the hem of his shirt, and had it dragged halfway up his torso when he turned and caught Hollander’s eye again.
He froze in place. Should he, like, cover up? I mean, Jesus, had Hollander been, like…looking all this time?
Hollander must have seen something on Caleb’s face, because his lips twisted in a bit of a sneer as he turned away.
*
Comeau lifted his pint glass. “To real men!” he announced.
Caleb lifted his own glass and took a sip while Comeau chugged half of his beer down. There were a few of them out tonight after Comeau had set up a separate group chat from the team and named it No fairies. The name seemed a bit corny to Caleb, like something his U14 teammates would have dreamed up when they were all accusing one another of being gay in the locker room for laughs.
But it was kind of nice to be out and not have to worry about saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way. Officially, everyone was supposed to be okay with the Hollander thing. They’d gotten an email about it from the HR woman, and Theriault had already had a talk with Comeau about not being so fucking obvious or he would get them all sued. I mean, Caleb figured Theriault wasn’t any happier about it than the rest of them; he was old school and wasn’t above calling someone a cocksucker when he was riled up at intermission.
Had that bothered Hollander? Caleb wondered. But then he started thinking about Hollander…doing that, and it grossed him out a little. He really didn’t get the gay thing.
“Disgusting,” one of the guys spat. He’d just been traded from Vancouver, and was from Russia or Poland or something. Caleb didn’t know how to pronounce his name. “Shouldn’t be allowed.”
Caleb nodded absentmindedly at first, but then stopped. Sure, it was weird in the locker room. Caleb knew he’d be sneaking some peeks if everyone in the locker room was a hot girl, even though his mother would slap him upside his head about it. But it was Shane fucking Hollander, and it seemed kind of weird to say he shouldn’t be allowed to play when he was basically the best hockey player in the world.
Drapeau, who was sitting next to him, nudged his shoulder. “All these young guys around, like Berkes. It’s a bad influence.”
Caleb frowned. Bad influence like Drapeau thought Hollander would turn him gay?
That seemed unlikely. I mean, Hollander was obviously handsome, but that was a widely accepted fact. He wouldn’t be on all those billboards otherwise. Caleb still didn’t want to fuck him.
Comeau slammed his glass down and pointed at Drapeau. “Exactly. What kind of league do they want this to be? Just a bunch of fucking fags sucking cock in the locker room?”
Wait—what? That seemed like something out of gay porn. Straight people worked in offices together, and Caleb didn’t have the impression it was all orgies all the time. He looked around the table to see if anyone else was confused, but they were all laughing and nodding.
He didn’t actually know why he was in the group chat that Comeau had set up, which was a handful of guys a little older than Caleb, one rookie who hadn’t shown tonight, and a couple international players. He usually hung out with a couple of the other younger guys, even though they didn’t do much other than play video games at one another’s apartments.
Comeau had sort of tried to take Caleb under his wing last year, and was always saying stuff about Caleb being a real hockey player, like we used to make them, which he guessed meant that he was big and Midwestern and…hairy, or something. Maybe that kind of comment was a shot at Hollander all this time, or Boizeau because he was Black, or even Jennings, who’d actually finished college and listened to history podcasts when they were traveling.
Caleb had obviously appreciated having someone to help him figure shit out in his first season in the MLH, but Comeau used a lot of Quebecois slang Caleb didn’t understand, and frequently referenced Caleb being from Saskatchewan even though he wasn’t even Canadian.
Caleb’s little brother, Nate, had once called Caleb’s hockey friends troglodytes. Caleb had to look up what it meant, and then he’d renamed his group chat with his juniors friends Trog nation.
Caleb tuned back into the conversation. They had stopped talking about Hollander, and now Drapeau was telling a story about getting really drunk and taking a woman home and realizing when we woke up that she was uglier than he’d remembered.
He laughed along, even though he couldn’t help but think to himself that Drapeau was no prize either.