Page 10
“Forgot how much you like that,” Matt muttered, and did it again, slapping Aiden’s other thigh, palm flat, fingers spread. Not as hard as Aiden knew he could do it, but it still stung.
“Matty— please .”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No—come on, do it again, do it again, harder—”
Matt kept slapping him, his hand slamming against the same area of Aiden’s thigh—twice, then three times—until his skin was flushed and stinging and Aiden was straining against the tie again. The breath hissed from his mouth, muscles trembling, holding himself back.
“Do you want me to stop?” Matt asked, voice completely wrecked. Like Aiden, tied and helpless and sweaty, his skin red from Matt’s hands, was somehow taking him apart the same way.
“Matt—”
“Do you want me to stop? God , look at you.”
“Please—”
“Tell me, you have to say it.”
“ Hit me , come on —”
The blows rained down, shifting so he wouldn’t know where they’d fall, harder and harder. He couldn’t help whimpering: it hurt , even if he had never liked to admit it. His legs were on fire with the force of trying to keep himself still, with Matt’s relentless hands hitting parts of him that already burned. He burned with the way Matt talked to him, a constant stream of nonsensical words and endearments, and then the wet heat of Matt’s mouth on his dick, knocking the breath from his chest. The way Matt’s fingers pressed inexorably inside of him. The noise Aiden made was obscene, but he couldn’t care.
It was all too much: the effort of holding himself back, the effort of trying not to come. At this rate, Aiden was going to shake himself apart despite the anchor of Matt on top of him, trembling in counterforce.
“Matt, I can’t .”
“You can, I know you can, you always do—do you really want me to stop?”
He was beyond words at this point, making desperate noises every time Matt touched him, every time his mouth moved or his fingers twisted. He was outside of himself, beyond himself, the only way he’d ever found to get there.
“I’m going to fuck you now,” Matt managed, “you can move for that, you can come, you can come whenever—”
Aiden was still restrained and blind but that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was how good it felt when Matt was inside of him, when Aiden rocked up to meet him, when Matt alternately stroked and slapped him and he never knew where Matt’s hands would fall, whether it would be a caress or a sting.
Matt’s hands on his stomach and biceps, softer places where it didn’t hurt as much; harder places where the muscles were already straining, where Aiden cried out, overwhelmed. Matt’s hands gentled him, soothing down the ache, a tenderness that was almost more painful than anything else. Matt, relentless, driving up into him. And eventually it didn’t matter whether it was a slap or not, it all felt the same, it all rolled through him like an inexorable tide, blanking out everything else.
Matt was saying something, again, voice small and strained and pained, but Aiden couldn’t understand him at first. Matt’s hand on Aiden’s cock, and then Matt’s voice: “Come on, come on , Aiden, baby—please?”
The entire length of his body bowed in on itself, or it would have, if he weren’t pinned between the tie digging into his wrists and Matt’s weight on top of him. And then Matt: more of a gasp than anything, his head dropping so suddenly that his forehead bumped painfully against Aiden’s. They lay together like that for what seemed like a long time; Aiden still shaking, the aftershocks sparking all over his skin.
Eventually, Matt pulled out and sat up, started to untie the restraint. Aiden still couldn’t see him, just felt the shift of his bodyweight and the sting and burn as he could finally lay his arms down and the blood started recirculating. Matt tugged the blindfold away, too, revealing Aiden’s face. It must have been blotchy from exertion, his eyes watering, lip red where he’d bitten it.
He felt lightheaded, brain empty, didn’t even bother moving as Matt dropped back down on the bed next to him, breathing hard. This is what he’d been looking for: just a time of quiet. It would be over soon enough.
“Thank you,” he said, still shivering. Matt rolled over on top of him and the weight was welcome. Aiden’s wrists ached, but his body slowly stilled as Matt rubbed the circulation back into his arms.
“Your birthday,” Matt murmured into Aiden’s ear. “Not that I’m complaining. You’re—god, you’re something fucking else.”
Aiden was too tired to say anything, just rubbed his face against Matt’s cheek.
“Don’t fall asleep yet, Aidy.”
“Mm,” Aiden agreed, already drifting off.
Matt came home from practice to find Aiden frowning at his phone. “Hey, you okay?”
“It’s fine. It’s just Gabe asked me how Montreal was.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“The truth. It’s okay.”
Matt snorted. “I hope I’m doing better than okay, huh?”
“Sometimes,” Aiden said, with a brief, sly smile that reminded Matt of the early days again. It faded to a creased frown again. “It’s just that he misses me.”
“Do you miss him?” Matt asked carefully. Aiden had said he and Walker weren’t romantically involved, and Matt believed him, but it wasn’t... Aiden had been here a few weeks now, and he hadn’t seemed to really talk to anyone else except for Matt. He had spent a year seeing Gabe almost every day, had taken him under his wing.
“I mean, yes,” Aiden said. “He’s a good kid. Training him was kind of the only thing that kept me sane that last season.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was something else to focus on. I didn’t have to think about retirement. All I had to do was make sure Gabe was doing okay. It was always easier, you know? With a distraction.”
Matt had the brief, uncomfortable realization that he was in the same place: preparing for what could be his last season, focused solely on the rookies. “And then when you retired anyway?”
“He still wanted to see me all the time anyway, so that never changed. We were really close, Matt. Closer than Wardo and I ever were, but that was probably because Wardo had his kids, and I had...well, nothing.”
Matt held out his arms, and Aiden came to him easily. Matt inhaled, the familiar smell of him, the familiar way he could just barely tuck his chin against Matt’s head. “Why did you have nothing, Aiden?”
“You know me. I’ve never been very good at people.”
Matt wanted to laugh, but it was true. The beginning of their relationship had been full of stops and starts: it was amazing they’d ever been able to make it work in the first place.
The first time had started after that handshake line, when Matt had gotten Aiden’s number from Duncs and spent the next three months pulling his pigtails over text until things had started to shift into something more companionable. And as soon as it did, Aiden had immediately pulled away and told Matt they had to stop talking because it was a distraction.
Matt hadn’t even known he was queer yet, and still remembered how weirdly, inappropriately crushed he’d been by the sudden end of something that hadn’t even really started, something he couldn’t have even begun to label. How relieved he’d been when Aiden approached him at the All-Star Game a few months later and told him, it’s not working, not talking to you, I’m still distracted.
“You were better than you think, baby. We made it work for almost five years, huh? And Gabe clearly loves the shit out of you.”
“Gabe looks up to me as a mentor,” Aiden mumbled into Matt’s hair. “The same way your rookies look up to you. But outside of the rink, it’s just been...since you, I haven’t really had anyone. Not the same way. Eventually it was just easier to stop trying to look for that.”
Matt’s head was spinning. That they’d each spent all of this time suffering, and now that Aiden was here again, in his arms, he couldn’t help wondering if they could have avoided all of this altogether. Was it insane to think that maybe Aiden was just meant for him, that all of this time apart had just been time they’d spent growing up, so they could find their way back to each other?
He had to get it together.
“What are you thinking about doing once the season starts?”
“I... I don’t know,” Aiden mumbled. “I don’t want to think about it now, Matty. Please?”
Matt sighed—this was just pushing off the inevitable, the same way they’d done back when they were trying to figure out what the future looked like for them. But Aiden was so fragile, he just didn’t know how else to handle it. “Whatever you need, Aiden.”
“Thank you,” Aiden said, and looked down at him with those big brown eyes, and Matt realized he was still just as much of a fool as he’d ever been.
The end of August came to Aiden with a series of punches to the gut.
“Let’s try something else,” Dr. Gauthier said, “let’s not even consider your profession. If you could have any life that you wanted, right now, what would it look like?”
“I’d be playing—”
“If you weren’t playing.”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Why do you think you can’t picture even this? Is it that you aren’t comfortable admitting to yourself the things you do want? Or do you feel that you don’t deserve them?”
His mouth felt dry. “I don’t know.”
“You can think about it,” Dr. Gauthier said, firmly, and Aiden knew he probably spent the rest of the appointment both unable to participate the same way he had been, and unable to look Dr. Gauthier in the eye. Instead, he spent it staring at a spot on the wall a few feet to the left of her head, and mumbled stuff like, I don’t know and I don’t really have anything else to say about this today.
Later that day, Ellie emailed him. The message was a little difficult to parse, between a five-year-old’s spelling and what was presumably Jessica’s autocorrect, but Ellie told him that she had been allowed to pick out her pads and try the position if that was what she really wanted. Would Aiden still be interested in talking to her and answering questions?
He wrote back, of course, whenever you’d like , and Ellie replied with a smiley-face emoji.
The Royal’s training camp was due to open soon.
Aiden woke up early so he could run from Matt’s condo to the summit of Mont-Royal and back. It wasn’t the most challenging run, but it was long enough to clear his head a little before they went to the gym together. Sometimes Matt was awake by the time he got back, and he came home to find coffee and toast already made; sometimes he wasn’t and then Aiden could get back into bed and laugh at Matt’s sleepy, disgusted protests when Aiden got sweat all over him, spooning up against his back.
Aiden went running.
His hair was long enough now that he had to pull it up in an awkward ponytail or topknot, so it didn’t stick to his face once it got sweaty. His feet pounding the pavement felt good. A tangible accomplishment. The park, this early, before the sun had even come up, was quiet and peaceful. No tourists, no families, just Aiden’s sneakers on the asphalt and the completely empty feeling in his head. He could pretend he was the only man in the entire world. He could forget anything except the burn in his lungs.
At the summit, he paused to catch his breath and look down at Montreal. The building lights were still on, picking out the windows like stars against the midnight blue sky. Matt was in one of those houses, probably still tangled up in the blankets and sprawled out over three-fourths of the bed where Aiden had left him.
Aiden exhaled. If he was being honest with himself, alone in the thin sliver of time when night hadn’t quite shifted into sunrise, this was the scaffolding of his ideal life. However he thought about it, it ended up coming back to this: Matt waiting for him when he ran home.
Aiden still didn’t know what he could really do with that, especially with the season starting, especially when there was only so long he was going to be able to fool Matt into believing Aiden was getting his shit together.
Aiden ran from the summit.
Training camp was right around the corner, and Matt’s teammates were finally all back in one place. The group chat buzzed as guys made plans to catch up, talked about how their summers had been, compared personal records they’d hit in the gym. It was nice to see it, even if he was distracted and distant himself. He’d built a good culture here over the years, and if this was the last season, it was a good legacy to leave behind.
Instead of texting, Saari called him the way he always did. It wasn’t a request: “Get lunch with me.”
“Sure, when?”
“Tomorrow. Today I have to finish helping Aino unpack all of our shit for the season, but I wanna catch up before camp.”
“Yeah, sure,” Matt said, and then hesitated.
Saari immediately knew something was up. “Safy?”
“So...there’s something I have to tell you.” There was a long silence, as Saari let him figure out how to say what he was trying to say. “Aiden’s been staying with me this summer.”
The answer was quick and decisive, exactly the thing Matt had predicted he’d say. “Safy, the fuck you doing ?”
“I know. I know, it sounds bad. But it’s different this time. We’ve been—we’ve been reconnecting, and it’s been really, really nice.”
Saari was silent a long time. “You’re a big boy, Safy. And I trust you know what you’re doing. You’ve probably heard it from everyone else, anyway.”
“Jesus Christ, have I,” Matt said, and he must have sounded so exasperated that Saari started laughing.
“You know we all just want the best for you. Your family, me, the team. I’ll be here for you no matter what.”
Matt’s throat felt thick, clogged with too much emotion. The two of them had had each other’s backs on and off the ice for years now, and maybe he wouldn’t have Saari at his side next season, if the team didn’t want to re-sign him, or decided to trade him. It was strange to think about, having to start all over again on a different team, with guys who didn’t know him at all.
“So yeah,” he said, instead of what he was thinking. “Wherever you want to meet, tell me the time.”
“And...you know, you can bring him if you want, huh?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Saari said, and then laughed again. “Haven’t seen that prissy little asshole in years, anyway. Be good to catch up, I guess.”
“Hey,” Matt said, warning.
“Ohh,” Saari drawled, “you got it this bad already?”
Matt hung up on him.
“Saari’s back in town,” Matt said, as he helped Aiden with the dishes after dinner, “he wants to get lunch.”
“Okay,” Aiden said, blinking. He set his dish in the rack and thought, focus on the things you can control . “I mean, I can keep myself busy, it’s not a problem.”
“You should come. I told him you’re here.”
“You...you did? How did he...”
Matt laughed. “Well, first he said, ‘Safy, the fuck you doing ,’ but that’s pretty much everyone, right?”
Saarinen was one of the first teammates Matt had let in on the secret, back during their first go at this thing. It had been McCall first, of course, and then Saarinen and Grenier, all four of them inseparable back then. But McCall was playing in San Jose now and Grenier had retired.
Still, Matt’s closest teammates had been surprisingly chill about the idea of their friend falling in love with a rival goalie and it had been fine when he’d come to Montreal, although Aiden had to assume that after things flamed out, their loyalty to Matt had won out over any positive feelings they may or may not have had toward Aiden. Of course, not everyone could hold a grudge like Miles Safaryan. He hoped.
“Are you sure?” Aiden asked, still skeptical.
“Yeah.”
Which was how Aiden ended up at a crowded bar on Saint-Laurent, seated across from Aatos Saarinen. He still looked exactly the same, huge and broad-shouldered but baby-faced as hell. There were laugh lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, but that was really the only discernible difference; on the ice, the only discernible difference was that he wore an A.
Matt stood at the bar putting in their drink order.
Saarinen and Aiden looked at each other for brief seconds from the corners of their eyes, and the rest of the time, literally anywhere else.
“Soooo...” Saarinen said, drawing out the word into multiple syllables.
“So,” Aiden agreed.
“Here we are.”
“Yes.”
“Sorry about the concussion.”
“Water under the bridge,” Aiden said, although he had an immediate flash of memory at the words. Saarinen crashing the net and into him; opening his eyes and realizing he was on the ice and had lost at least a couple of seconds unconscious. “Sorry about knocking you out of the playoffs four times.”
“Water under bridges.” They both glanced down at their hands. Then Saarinen looked up at him slyly. “You going for the peikko look, buddy? You don’t have the Amirov charisma to really pull it off.”
Aiden didn’t know what a peikko was, but he could guess from context. His old teammate had had the wild hair and beard of a mountain recluse, a little like some sort of supernatural forest demon. Aiden managed to keep from touching his own hair, although he was suddenly conscious of it in a way he usually wasn’t. The table was shaking a little, the plates and glasses rattling in time with his bouncing knee.
“I haven’t had time to get it cut,” he lied. He had nothing but time.
Saarinen glanced over at Matt at the bar and sighed. His English was fluent at this point in his life, barely a hint of an accent. “Look, I’m just gonna ask you, Campbell, like, whatever you’re doing here, to please don’t fuck it up for Safy. This is maybe his last season here, and I want to make it a good one.”
“I’m not—I’m not trying to fuck it up. I’m going to be gone by the time the season starts, anyway. He’ll be fine.”
Saarinen’s eyebrows shot up and his mouth opened, but whatever he was about to say was cut off when Matt came back, a pint glass in each hand and another one balanced precariously in the crook of his arm.
“Safy,” Saarinen said brightly, “what you drinking?”
“Oh, I don’t know, whatever Dieu du ciel they had on tap.” Matt set the glasses down on the table. He looked from Saarinen to Aiden, who both looked back at him, studiously expressionless. “How’re you boys doing?”
“One hundred percent,” Saarinen said. “Totally sick.”
Aiden wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but he didn’t argue. He took a deep breath and settled in for at least an hour of trying to act normal for Matt’s sake, smiling when he didn’t feel like smiling, and trying not to think about the fact that Saarinen probably hated him.
As they walked home later that afternoon, Matt said, “It was really good to see Saari again.” It wasn’t a short walk, but Montreal summers weren’t as humid as New York, and it wasn’t uncomfortable. “Makes the season feel real, you know?”
“Yeah,” Aiden mumbled.
They were both full from lunch and a little buzzed: Saarinen had had a lot to say about training in Lappeenranta over the summer. He and Matt had almost sixteen years’ worth of history and in-jokes built up between them. Aiden had felt strange watching them talk, the easy way Matt smiled, the way they had that casual trust and camaraderie a captain and his alternate had. Lunch took them almost to dinner, drinking the whole time.
It hadn’t been as awkward as Aiden had thought, although he would sometimes catch Saarinen looking at him when he thought Aiden wasn’t paying attention, like he was trying really hard to figure something out.
Aiden was quiet on the walk home, thinking about Matt going back to camp, with his team, with purpose, and how it was going to feel on that plane ride home.
“What’s up?”
“Just thinking,” Aiden said.
“Don’t do that, come on.”
Maybe it was just because they were both a little drunk, but Matt reached out and brushed a strand of hair away from Aiden’s eyes, and Aiden didn’t stop him. After a second, Matt dropped his hand like Aiden burned him, and started walking a little faster. “Come on. It’s getting late.”
“Right behind you.”
Aiden blinked when he received a text from Allison Kuhn, the Libs’ beat reporter at the Times. She wasn’t so bad as far as reporters went, but he hadn’t spoken to her since she had done the long piece on his retirement.
It had been a career-spanning retrospective interview that was so difficult to get through he’d had to excuse himself in the middle of their conversation, go into the restaurant bathroom and puke up the lunch they’d been sharing. Stared at himself in the mirror for a long time before tilting his mouth down to the sink to try to rinse the taste out before going back out.
He unlocked his phone to see what she wanted.
Hello, Aiden, I hope retirement is treating you well. Do you have a moment?
I’ve got nothing but moments.
Would you care to confirm a story for me?
What do you mean?
Sources say you’ve been living in Montreal. I’d love to talk if you have time for a phone call.
Aiden set the phone down on the table. He felt—not as bad as he thought he’d feel, given everything. He was honestly surprised it had taken this long, given the nature of social media and the Montreal hockey market and the fact that he had just been going about his business like everything was normal, when it wasn’t.
Ten years ago, he would’ve panicked.
Today, he thought, Nobody cares. Nothing really matters. We’re all going to die one day. The thoughts he had always had in the net, during a bad game, when he’d let in too many bad goals and needed to reset himself so he wouldn’t get pulled. The thoughts he’d had after he had ended things with Matt, when he was searching fruitlessly for something he had never been able to find with anyone else.
Today, he just felt tired.
He had to talk to Matt.
When Matt got home, Aiden told him what had happened, asked, “What do you want to do?”
Matt shrugged. “She’s your beat reporter. It’s your life. It’s up to you, buddy.”
“I mean—” Aiden wasn’t sure how to phrase it appropriately. “You’re the one who’s still playing; it’s your city. I don’t know what she’s planning to write, but if you don’t—uh—want everyone to know about us, or to make assumptions...”
Matt just looked at him for a very long moment. If you didn’t know him as well as Aiden did, it looked like a very bland, unreadable expression. But Aiden did know him. He knew him well enough to immediately recognize that Matt looked tired and a little annoyed.
“Aiden, I never cared about anyone knowing. The fact that you did is at least half of the reason we broke up the first time.”
“I—” Aiden started to protest. But Matt was right, of course. He looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“Like I said. I understand why you weren’t ready. But I would have done it. And I don’t really care if you do it now.”
“You’re still going to get so much shit on the ice—”
“Baby, you really think I can’t handle that? I’m thirty-six fucking years old—some kids chirping me isn’t going to be the end of the world. It never was.”
“It’s not always just chirping,” Aiden said, thinking about some of Gabe’s stories about juniors, about the way he’d been ready to fight anyone and everyone when he’d first come up to the show. “Even now, it’s not.”
“I’m a grown-ass man. I can handle it.”
“So you want me to—?”
“I’m saying, Aidy, you can do whatever you want about it. Confirm, deny, I don’t care. The puck’s always been in your zone on this one.”
“Okay,” Aiden said, and exhaled a breath that felt shakier than he was expecting.
“So think about it.”
He watched Matt, still in only his basketball shorts, folding laundry on the couch. It was one of those weird moments where Aiden could see how life could be, if he just let it keep going like this, if he didn’t fuck it up.
The kind of life where he could come home to someone folding laundry on the couch, half-naked, completely at ease with Aiden’s presence there during this mundane moment. The kind of life where he’d have clothes to fold, too. The kind of life where he wouldn’t have to worry about someone getting the wrong idea if, when they went out for dinner after, he wanted to touch Matt in public. The weight off of his shoulders that would be. To be able to live the kind of life that he actually wanted to live.
He was retired. He wasn’t playing anymore.
He had nothing to lose except Matt.
Again.
I think I’m going to come out, he said to Gabe, a little later.
uh what? now? i mean congrats but. wow?
I mean, I think there’s probably going to be an article no matter what I do. So I wanted to do it first. And I guess I wanted to tell you first.
oh...so this IS about safaryan then.
Aiden stared at his phone. He always had trouble interpreting tone, and it was worse when it came to text messages. Yes. Indirectly.
Gabe took a while to respond, but finally said, lmk if u want advice on how to *handle* it. ive been doing this for like 7 years.
Thanks, Gabe.
yeah. ur welcome. tell safaryan he better not fuck this up.
I’m not sure what there is to fuck up. The season’s starting soon and I don’t think he’ll want me to stick around, so I’ll probably be back in New York by then anyway.
soupyyyyyyyyyyy...jesus fucking christ man
Aiden didn’t know how to answer that. So he didn’t.
The phone call with Allison wasn’t as awkward as he thought it would be. Unlike some of the Libs’ old beat reporters, she’d always had a way of phrasing her questions that didn’t sound antagonistic, and she knew when to stop pushing when it was too much.
Aiden was honest about living in Montreal with Matt, although he was vague about their actual relationship. He still didn’t know what to call it, and the last thing he needed was to humiliate himself in the local paper. He said something like, “Now that I’m retired, it’s a good opportunity to see friends I haven’t caught up with in a while and warn them off of retirement, you know?”
“You’re friends with Safaryan? I wouldn’t have guessed.”
Aiden hesitated. “We started off on the wrong foot, back in that first playoff series, but we’ve been good friends for a long time. He was at my first Cup day.”
Allison paused but didn’t push back too hard against that explanation. They chatted a little bit about Montreal, about various things Matt and Aiden had done and seen together, how much he liked running in Mont-Royal and the Lebanese bakery. About skating again. They talked about retirement, and how it was difficult to feel like you had a purpose, and that Aiden still didn’t know what he was going to do with the next chapter of his life. The entire conversation only lasted about half an hour.
Aiden felt jittery during the whole thing, wondering if and when it would come up, but it didn’t. He could probably just let it go, end up with a puff piece about how he was spending his retirement puttering uselessly around Montreal, doing the sad major junior reunion tour with various buddies from the past.
He thought about how tired Matt had looked when he’d said, The puck’s always been in your zone.
Nobody cares. Nothing really matters. We’re all going to die.
“Uh, Allison...”
“Yes?”
“So there is something else, uh, I should probably tell you.”
He’d done this a number of times throughout the years. First to one of his teammates, accidentally; then to his parents and Hannah, on purpose; then to various other teammates, as the need arose. He hadn’t realized, when he was a kid, that it was going to be such a continual process. And when he’d started coming out, he’d thought it would get easier each time, but that hadn’t been the case at all. Sometimes it was pretty easy but mostly it just sucked . This was one of those times. He’d always hated being the center of attention, even though by nature of his position, he ended up there anyway.
Aiden cleared his throat. He could feel his leg practically vibrating, the hand that wasn’t holding his phone clenched in a fist, his fingers twisting together. “Because I’m retired now, and I’m kind of tired of, you know, keeping that aspect of my life secret, especially since I’m fairly sure that it’s why you reached out to me about this in the first place.” Allison, true to form, waited for him to continue. “I’m gay, and, ah, if you want to include that in your article, you can.”
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” Allison said, in her pleasant, nonjudgmental reporter voice, and immediately pivoted into follow-up questions.
Aiden wiped his sweaty palms on his shorts and did his best to answer them.
She didn’t ask for details about his relationship with Matt, and he didn’t offer any. People could assume what they wanted to assume. And they probably would.