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He was propped up on the bed with a mound of pillows and a book about tree frogs splayed open on his lap when the door opened.
Jeff had gone out for those shitty pre-made Starbucks drinks in the glass bottles that Kent loved, the kind that would give the team nutritionist a heart attack, but he was a good friend like that. A really, really good friend, Kent thought. Because it wasn’t just about the iced macchiato, but the fact that Jeff could read him like an open book. Always had. Right now, Kent was all bold print in a foreign language, the internal diatribe he was spinning threatening to make its way past clenched teeth and direct itself at the nearest person. Jeff had sensed this, like always; he was sometimes more in tune with Kent’s moods than Kent himself.
Kent had turned his phone off and laid it face down on the desk in the corner, flipped through some basic cable stations and then some premium cable stations before settling on an episode of Cake Boss, only to find that the narration about fondant technique didn’t drown out Kent’s yelling at himself in his head that not a single goal had gone in, he had bungled two passes, and his head hurt.
He had sighed, turned off the TV, and decided to take some solace in the company of a chapter dedicated to poison dart frogs.
(Kent had a running list of his favorite living things, all ranked. First was Kit, then Jeff, then his family- blood was thicker than life choices, he thought- then poison dart frogs. This, of course, varied based on the moment.)
When Jeff hoisted a straining plastic bag adorned with an ugly yellow smiley face, Kent beamed, and Jeff probably moved up to his first favorite thing. (Don’t tell Kit.)
Kent closed the book, sitting up on the bed as Jeff pushed the door shut behind him with his foot and toed off his shoes.
“You, um, might want to take a look at this,” he said, hesitant but also firm, like he was bracing Kent for bad news. He pulled a magazine from the bag and set it down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
Kent cocked his head. “Yeah?” Jeff handed him a coffee and grimaced a little as Kent popped the lid off, letting it fall to the floor, and taking a long pull. He smacked his lips and laughed at Jeff’s displeasure.
“Don’t know how you drink those fucking things,” he grumbled, but there was a smile pushing at the corners of his lips as he bent to retrieve Kent’s lid and plodded over the trash to throw it away- something the team would no doubt chirp him all to hell for (“what are you, Parser’s maid?”) if they were there, but, well. They weren’t. Kent allowed himself a smile at Jeff’s back before his eyes caught the cover of the magazine in his peripheral vision.
His stomach immediately tightened.
It was Jack, nothing abnormal about that at all, clothed in an unassuming grey button-down and dark-wash jeans, leaning forward on his knees and staring intently.
“Hockey star Jack Zimmerman comes out with it all!” the magazine exclaimed, in blocky white print. He picked it up. “Son of legendary ‘Bad Bob’ talks about life with anxiety, being queer in the world of professional sports, and his newfound love for pies,” reads some smaller print, just below the article’s title. Page 93.
When he looked up, Jeff was staring at him. There was concern written plain on his face. Jeff had never been particularly good at hiding anything. Then again, neither had Kent.
He averted his eyes. Back to the magazine, where Jack stared up at him. He sighed, closed them instead.
“You know about this?” Swoops asked. Kent grunted a negative.
“Thought you might want to see,” he said softly, and Kent could hear him coming closer. Suddenly, the bed dipped under the presence of an added weight.
“Look at me,” Jeff said, and Kent did. He reached his hand out, tender, and ran his calloused thumb over Kent’s upper lip. “You still had some stuff,” he laughed, gesturing at his own mouth like a perversion of sign language.
“Thanks for the drink,” Kent said, dripping with more sincerity than the words should even merit. Jeff suddenly looked sheepish, staring off at the door like it had become very interesting.
“I didn’t mean to upset you. Just thought, well. That you should see. He doesn’t mention you. I, uh, read the article in the store. Well, skimmed it. Sorry.” Swoops apologized a lot. Mostly it was to other people on Kent’s behalf, but more and more often it was to Kent, too. Kent still wasn’t sure he ever quite understood what Swoops was apologizing for. (Then again, he didn’t have much experience on the receiving end of an apology.)
Kent picked at his cuticles, ruining his recent manicure, and didn’t talk until Swoops got off the bed.
“I never meant anything to him,” Kent said, surprising himself at how much venom was in his voice.
Swoops looked broken. “God, Parse.” His voice was hoarse. “Yes you did.”
Kent couldn’t think of anything to say, so he didn’t. He stared at his hands until Jeff wandered off to the bathroom, lingering for a suspiciously long time between opening the door and closing it, loitering in the doorway. Kent could feel his eyes on him.
“You okay?” he asked, finally.
“Yeah.” Kent replied. “Gimme a minute.”
Jeff finally closed the door. It was another minute until Kent heard the water start, the creak of ancient faucets kept in working order by harried managers under the pressure of even more harried customers. Kent heaved himself off the bed and was struck with a sudden dizzying light-headedness, bordering on nausea. He felt almost as if he were drunk, and thought back to the iconic Beyonce song, Drunk in Love. He supposed, in a way, he was.
He couldn’t help but stare at the closed door, a polished and spotless white, as if it would give him the answers to questions he didn’t know how to phrase.
Jeff had taken a shower after the game- they all did, weren’t fucking pigs- but Jeff could shower three times day, sometimes. Kent had given up on analyzing Jeff’s quirks- god knows he had enough of his own to worry about.
He sent up a silent prayer of thanks for Jeff, and the fact they always roomed together on roadies. He was the only one Kent could tolerate anymore. (He was the only one Kent would let himself be vulnerable around, now and ever. Since Zimms, anyway.)
He picked up the magazine and walked over the the desk, littered with empty water bottles and his powered-off phone. It looked like he was preparing to sit down and read, and maybe he would be, if the desk had a chair.
Besides, Kent wasn’t sure if he could bring himself to peel his eyes away from Jack’s on that cover image and actually see what he had to say.
It was ironic, in a way, that Jack had been the one to come out first. He’d always been a private person, especially in comparison to Kent. All clenched teeth and lurching away from accidental touches, always stiffening and making a quick departure of the room when a kiss threatened to become too heated in anything less than an apocalypse-bunker level of privacy.
Maybe Kent had just been reckless.
It made sense, though, too. Kent had his career with the Aces at stake, feelings he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) place developing for his best friend, and a mom and older sister he needed to be strong for.
Jack had supportive parents, a stable relationship with an out partner, and nothing left to possibly lose. (Kent has to bite down on the threat of that train of thought spiraling down, has to stop himself thinking about how freeing it would be to watch all his problems drip and swirl down the drain like Zimms did when he fucking caved-)
He bit his lip until it throbbed.
Kent ran his eyes over the cover of the magazine, taking in the body that was different from the one he someone still had to reconcile with in his mind.
Kent had loved Jack- while, he still loved Jack, the past tense only applied to the physical sense- in a different time. Jack hadn’t been the face of desirable men’s physique, all those years ago (though he was still the most beautiful thing that Kent had ever seen). The vestiges of puberty clinging to him in the baby fat around his face, and body not toned from professional athletic regimens. Kent had been the same in a different direction- shorter, back then, with Jack standing a couple heads taller. Kent’s body had been all angles, sharp planes and flat lines. Too skinny to carry all that weight on his own.
Maybe he still was, but he figured they were both stronger now.
Kent had read once that all the cells in your body were replaced every seven years. He hadn’t bothered to verify the source.
He put his hands to his ribs, now covered by a strapping of muscle that would have felt foreign to Jack’s hands, or his own at the age of seventeen. He inhaled so sharply it hurt. His skin burned with memory.
He knew, be it five, ten, or twenty years down the line, he would never have a cell that Jack hadn’t touched.
You can’t be in love if both people aren’t in love. It’s a state of being, that without the reciprocation just boils down to… He sighed. Being pathetic.
He dropped the magazine on the shitty Ikea desk. It landed with an anticlimactic smack as he looked out the window, subconsciously taking a step towards it, like it was pulling him.
He hated Boston. It reminded him of Rochester, and he’d never much cared for that either. Just on the wrong side of cold, with muddy black ice that he slipped on every time and frozen litter on the side of the road. Concrete slabs rose up like jaws from the earth. At least in Vegas shit lit up at night.
Kent pondered whether or not to step outside, but quickly abandoned the idea. The cold might make him feel something, but they were five floors up and it was nearly eleven. Besides, he’d need to let Jeff know where he went, which meant either turning his phone on and dealing with a barrage of well-meaning but entirely unhelpful consolation messages from his mother and friends, or scrounging up pen and paper to leave a note. He craved a smoke, though, and sought an option that wouldn’t leave the scent clinging to the sheets and the wallpaper.
The hotel room had no balcony. Normally, they would be put up in something nicer, but it was Boston, and it was expensive, not to mention that the damn balcony would be nearly useless for several months of the year.
He sighed, resigned himself to the confines of the four-walled suite, and opened the window instead. It creaked and halted, obviously a symptom of disuse. The prickly draft bit at his face.
He hated the ice and the losing.
Turning away from the window, he rummaged through his backpack, nodding to himself when his hand finally closed around the hidden pack of Marlboros.
He slipped a cigarette out of the pack before shoving it into his back pocket, holding it between his teeth while he grabbed a lighter from the bag.
He registered the sudden silence that was the lack of shower running, somewhat broken by the usual city noises from a few stories below.
He twirled the lighter around in his hands, perched on the window ledge, staring down into the darkness at a street he couldn’t see, barely visible by lamp-light.
The cigarette still hung unlit from his lips when the bathroom door creaked open a moment later. Kent had intended to light it, but then, he intended to do a lot of things. Sometimes the pressure was enough, the presence of a vice, the memory of a long-ago held bad habit.
He’d picked up a lot of vices, over the years, not nearly as many virtues. Kent could cut himself some slack, though- no hard drugs, despite- or maybe because of- heroin evolving into a huge problem in Kent’s hometown. No gambling problem despite- or maybe because of- living in Vegas. No hookers (he never had trouble picking up, anyway). No heavy drinking, though he’d gone through the phase. He was kind of a lightweight, when push came to shove.
He had never touched the pills or the bruise.
He had kept the sex (mostly casual), the fast cars and fancy clothes (it wasn’t like he didn’t have the money), and the cigarettes.
He lit it, not inhaling but nonetheless immediately calmed by the plume of smoke wafting out the window. He didn’t look up, but he could feel where Jeff was in the room. Maybe they were that in sync; maybe they were just that predictable. Jeff- out of the shower in a white towel slung around his waist and nothing else. Walk over to the table (in this hotel room, it was beside the flatscreen), pull his shirt on over his head and then shake his wet hair like a dog, then boxers, then gym shorts, then another run of the towel over still-damp hair before throwing it down on the table, floor, or bed like the heathen he was. (Kent couldn’t judge. He did the same.)
Maybe one day he would stop falling for his best friend. Maybe one day he could be a better person.
But you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.