Chapter Text
THE SPECIAL SAUCE
How hockey’s most thrilling trio discovered magic together on their way to capturing the holy grail
by Caroline Stern, ESPN
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA – 1,270 combined goals. 1,643 assists. Five Hart Memorial trophies and four Stanley Cups over 19 years. The numbers alone paint a picture of one of the most productive and exciting lines the hockey world has ever seen. In sports, though, as in life, nothing truly great can last forever. All three members of the infamous Ley Line—left wing Richard Gansey, center Adam Parrish, and right wing Ronan Lynch—announced their simultaneous retirement at the end of the season, leaving the rest of us to wonder: where do we go from here?
Throughout the years, each has been described as a critical piece of their team’s overall chemistry: one day we might be talking about the heart (usually referring to Gansey), another day the brains (usually Parrish), yet another the fists (always, always Lynch). It’s difficult to imagine what the rollicking Richmond Ravens offense will look like next season in the absence of so many necessary body parts. But before we get to questions about next year, or the year after that, or the five years beyond that, it’s important to take some time to reflect on just how lucky we’ve been to watch this team play for two decades.
I sat down with Gansey, Parrish, and Lynch at the end of the regular season for an extensive, exclusive, no-holds-barred interview. They were uncharacteristically candid about a number of subjects, including the sport, the league, each other, and themselves. The agreement we reached was that this article would not be published until after the postseason was over, because they didn’t want anything to distract from their final playoff run.
A few weeks later, of course, they won the cup again. Just like magic.
Content warning: this interview contains the sort of adult language typical of professional hockey players.
ESPN: Your retirement isn’t exactly coming as a shock to anyone—time marches on, for all of us—but it’s unusual for such a high-profile group of players to call it quits at the same time. And your respective contracts didn’t line up that way on their own. How did you all decide that this was the year, and how did the Ravens front office take the news?
Ronan Lynch: Oh, they loved it. Couldn’t wait to be rid of me.
Richard Gansey: I wouldn’t say calling it quits, exactly. I’m sure you’re aware I’ve had some injury struggles over the years. With Parrish’s contract up, and with Lynch’s future with the team uncertain, it honestly just...felt like the right time for all of us. You always want to play for as long as you can, and I don’t want anyone to think that we’ve lost our competitive edge. And it is a sort of terrifying prospect to think about the end of everything. But, to be quite honest, I think this way is better for everyone, the Ravens included, especially with all the bright young talent waiting in the wings. I’d rather us end on a high note than suffer through the inevitable slide down into mediocrity, clinging onto nothing but nostalgia as our bodies continue to break down.
Lynch: That’s fucking bleak, man. This guy is always thinking about his own mortality. It’s depressing as shit.
Adam Parrish: Shut up, Lynch.
Lynch: Don’t pretend you didn’t say exactly the same thing to me the other day. Or is it time to break out Philosopher Parrish, now you’ve got a captive audience? Come on, give all your adoring fans out there a taste of your nihilist theories of existence.
Parrish: He’s unbearable, isn’t he? No wonder the team didn’t want to re-sign him.
Are you two going to snipe at each other for the entire interview?
Gansey: Try living in an apartment with them. Actually, no, don’t. I would not wish that on my worst enemy.
Parrish: Not even Whelk?
Gansey: ...okay, maybe Whelk.
Lynch: Now you’re punishing us. What did we ever do to deserve that?
I know you’ve spent a career dropping gloves against him, but that was just an on-ice rivalry, right? You don’t all actually dislike him.
Lynch: Says who? Barry, I ever see you at one of those stupid league events Gansey insists on dragging me to, it’s on sight, I don’t care what kind of fancy suit I’m wearing.
Alright, alright. I’d love to hear every single detail about all the players in the league you hate, but let’s start at the beginning. Gansey and Lynch, you began playing together all the way back in high school. When did you first realize that you complemented each other’s game so well?
Gansey, looking at Lynch: First shift?
Lynch: First shift.
-
Ronan Lynch met Richard Gansey at a lanky and graceless fourteen. At that age, everything seemed monumental, so Ronan didn’t even wonder at the force of his own feeling. He knew it immediately: this boy was going to change his life.
Two late-semester newcomers to Aglionby Academy, the prestigious preparatory school in Minnesota fondly known as the Hogwarts of Hockey, Gansey and Ronan were shoved together into the oldest, shittiest dorm room and left to fend for themselves among a locker room filled with rude and rowdy teenage boys who had already bonded without them during preseason. Ronan was taller than most of them already, with growing pains and paws too big for his body. Gansey was a legendary legacy, not only at Aglionby but throughout the entire hockey world. They shouldn’t have fit together, and yet by some miracle, they did.
Ronan knew nearly as soon as his skates touched the ice on that first day of practice. Gansey felt more natural on his left than Declan ever had, and they’d scored two goals apiece before the coach decided to swap the lines around to give the backup netminder a break.
The feelings were inevitable. Ask anyone to put themselves in Ronan’s place that winter and come out of it unscathed: impossible. Gansey was winsome and clever and had a one-timer from the circle that was, frankly, pornographic, and underneath it all he was...interesting. His tendancy toward insomnia rivaled Ronan’s own. He had a crushing anxiety about not living up to his father’s and grandfather’s legacies, and a reckless determination to do something even greater because of the guilt he felt that life had already handed him so much. Inexplicably, he was obsessed with medieval kings. He was the only guy on the team that willingly paid attention during class, even though his name had been marked down for the pros since he’d strapped on his first pair of skates. He looked at Ronan with bright eyes that made him ache to be someone else, someone better, someone worth this boy’s time.
Gansey knew almost as soon as Ronan knew. Not about the crush, which would have been mortifying enough to warrant a murder-suicide, probably. But he was perceptive, and he figured out pretty quickly that no one should expect to hear locker room tales of Ronan’s exploits with girls any time soon. He was so goddamned nice about it too, which made Ronan want to put his fist through a wall.
Ronan tattooed his knuckles into Joseph Kavinsky’s face instead, during shinny on the lake one winter afternoon and later again in the empty storeshed by the dock. They bit at each other viciously, tasting the blood and bruises they’d inflicted as they exchanged frantic, frost-bitten handjobs behind the shelf filled with wooden sticks from the 70s. It was Ronan’s first kiss. Not exactly the stuff of fairy tales, but then again, Gansey was the prince, not him.
Ronan did get over Gansey eventually. Maybe not completely; there probably wasn’t a person in on earth who could claim they didn’t have at least a little bit of a crush on Richard Gansey the Third. But he learned to stop torturing himself about it; having him as a best friend, a partner, a line-mate...it would have to be enough.
Kavinsky got kicked out of Aglionby before the year was out, and Ronan never heard from him again.
-
Gansey: Lynch and I were both newcomers that first year, maybe that was part of it. Everyone else already knew how to play with each other, and we had to find our own feet. Or, skates, I suppose.
Lynch: I think we clocked it immediately. You ever see that movie with the psychic people inside giant robots fighting alien dinosaurs?
...You mean Pacific Rim? You’re talking about drift compatibility?
Lynch: Right, that. It felt exactly like that. I wasn’t close to being the best passer on the team, but somehow I could always find Gansey’s stick. He made me better. He always has.
And then you ended up drafted by the same team. That’s unusual, too. Did you ever consider the possibility when you were at Aglionby? Was it just fate dealing you a lucky hand?
Gansey: Sure, w e used to talk about it. Dream about it, you know, the way kids always do. When we make it to the NHL, we’ll... we never really thought about how long the odds were, or how little control we had over our own futures. Obviously, we knew it wasn’t up to us where we’d end up, but it didn’t feel like that. No use thinking about it. In our minds, when we made it to the NHL, it was always going to be the two of us together.
Lynch, anything to add?
Lynch: Never had a doubt in my mind. I probably wouldn’t even be in the league without Gansey.
-
Improbably, impossibly, Richard Gansey and Ronan Lynch were drafted together. Not as a matched set, Sedin-like, but somehow they ended up on the same team anyways. Richmond really only had their eyes set on Gansey, of course; who wouldn’t want to build a dynasty around the third-generation Gansey? That he was a native Virginian only sweetened an already rosy narrative. They took him fourth overall, and then they’d snapped up Lynch for an afterthought in the third round. It was more than Lynch deserved, so the scouts said, but Gansey had always elevated Lynch’s game when they played together, first at Aglionby and then in the Q, so the Ravens GM must have decided to take a chance on a repeating pattern. He never revealed to the press whether he’d had a conversation with Gansey about it, but who knows what goes on during the combine interviews? When all the chips had fallen, Gansey ended up a Richmond Raven, and he got to keep his best friend and leading assist-partner with him.
Adam Parrish watched the draft on a borrowed laptop and a stolen internet connection. Once upon a time, he would have been eligible for the same draft. Once upon a time, he’d been healthy.
Too damn bad, the scouts said, but it’s a tough sport. Not every kid is lucky enough to make it. Adam Parrish could have made it, if only he’d kept his head up. If only he’d looked to his left in time. If only he hadn’t stepped right into the path of an oncoming slapshot.
He was never good enough to be talked about by the pundits, not like the prince of junior hockey Richard Campbell Gansey the Third. But he’d made it onto the scouting lists, and then the GM lists, and he probably would have been taken in the fourth round, maybe even the third if luck was on his side.
If only, if only.
A puck to the head was easier for everyone to understand. It wasn’t even that uncommon, although players usually worried more about losing an eye than an ear. Telling them all anything else would only have complicated the situation. The truth would have dashed his chances for good. Teams didn’t want broken kids. Teams wanted corn-fed hockey phenoms who grew up playing in the most competitive tournaments with top-of-the-line equipment, who, when they got injured—by playing hockey, not by getting in the way of their drunk father’s fists—recovered in a week with no fuss and ended up stronger than they’d been before.
Adam had spent his three months of recovery in a shitty attic studio apartment, then he’d rehabbed and retrained for a season at Boston College before Hartford picked him up, undrafted, like panning through the refuse for any scrap of garbage that might have some meager value. They found a use for him almost immediately by dealing him to the Ravens in exchange for a bruising fourth-liner and two late round draft picks. Richmond, in turn, shunted him down to the AHL.
Improbably, impossibly, both Ronan Lynch and Richard Gansey were there in Henrietta too. Gansey, once the rosy-cheeked great white hope of a struggling Ravens offense, had been plagued with hamstring injuries his entire rookie year, leaving him bouncing him back and forth on a tether between the two cities. Lynch hadn’t been called up at all.
-
Adam, let’s talk about your introduction. I know the first time you all shared ice together was in Henrietta, with the Generals. Was it difficult to find your footing with such an established duo? Was there ever a point when you guys thought, ‘this isn’t going to work’?
Parrish: It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, that’s for sure.
Gansey: There were some touch-and-go moments. Lynch is slow to warm up to people—
Lynch: Fuck you, I’m selective. That’s a good thing.
Gansey: —and Parrish is extremely stubborn—
Parrish: Oh, like you’re one to talk.
Gansey: —and although I am a dazzling ray of sunshine at every minute of every day, even I had a moment or two of doubt along the way.
Could you give an example?
Gansey: Well...to begin, Lynch couldn’t stand the sight of Parrish. It was a real problem, actually.
-
Growing up, Ronan had a well-loved poster of Sergei Fedorov on his wall. He was mid-crossover, the easy movement apparent even in stasis, with a shock of sandy hair poking out from under his helmet and a crooked, smug little smile on his face. Ronan couldn’t even remember where the poster had come from; his parents had never been particularly big hockey fans beyond cheering on their sons at peewee games, and there wasn’t some uncle from Michigan or Moscow to pin it on.
Ronan thought about that poster the first time he saw Adam Parrish play hockey. It wasn’t a one-to-one comparison—there wasn’t the same flair, the filthy stick-handling, the drama that Fedorov’s bursts of speed brought to his game. Parrish’s play didn’t crave the spotlight in the same way. Still, there was something there: a dogged do-it-yourself determination, a fluidity of movement. An uncanny ability to know where his linemates were and to teleport the puck exactly where they needed it to be in the precise moment it needed to be there. The way that he managed to fade into the background was simply another one of his magic tricks. It was incredible to Ronan that no one else seemed to notice they were watching the best player on the ice.
Ronan hated him.
He hated Parrish’s icy politeness. He hated his wariness in the locker room, his uncanny silence in place of bawdy jokes. He hated the way his blue eyes narrowed in challenge when Ronan said something rude, like he was only biding his time before biting back. He hated his large, wiry hands, sure-gripped and methodical as he ritualistically taped his stick before games. Most of all, he hated the way that Gansey loved him so immediately.
-
Any particular reason for the dislike?
Gansey: You think Lynch needs a reason to dislike someone?
Lynch: Cut me some slack. Who wasn’t a little bit of an idiot at eighteen?
Gansey: He says that like he doesn’t still hold grudges today for things that happened on the ice fifteen years ago.
But you must have worked out the kinks pretty quickly. You won the Calder that year. You even have your own little sign language now. I’m sure you know that over the years, the cameras have picked up those strange little hand signals you all do during games. You probably also won’t be surprised to know there’s a thriving ecosystem of conspiracy theories on the internet about what those mean.
Lynch, laughing: I’ll bet there is.
Any chance you’ll enlighten us?
Gansey: That’s—well.
Gansey and Lynch look toward Parrish.
Parrish: That started out for my benefit. I don’t hear well on the ice—well, or anywhere, really. I have single-sided deafness. In my left ear.
You’re Deaf?
Parrish: Partially.
This is something you’ve dealt with your entire career, and never disclosed publicly until now?
Parrish: I mean, some people in the league know. Definitely some of the coaches and GMs, some teammates. It was an early decision not to discuss it publicly, though, to sort of...minimize the avenues of attack. Coaches never wanted other players on the ice to realize they could fuck, pardon me, screw up my game by making a lot of loud or interfering noise around me, and I have to say I agreed with that approach. It was hard enough orienting myself around the regular sounds of the rink and the stadium.
But they never did screw up your game. You’ve been one of the top centers in the NHL for two decades.
Lynch: All credit to me.
No credit to Gansey, points leader in twelve of those nineteen seasons, and recipient of a whopping 41% of Parrish’s career assists?
Lynch: Fuck your stats and fuck Gansey, no way. I’m the real moneymaker.
Gansey: Watch your language.
Lynch sends Gansey his own hand signal. Readers can probably guess what that one was. Parrish seems completely unbothered by this interaction.
So, Adam, do you speak ASL?
Parrish: I never learned. Maybe I’d like to someday; I’ll definitely have more free time now. The sh—stuff we do on the ice is more similar to pitching signs in baseball, or playcalling in basketball. Just a little visual shorthand.
Have you been Deaf since birth?
Parrish: No, it was a consequence of the head injury that kept me out of the draft that first year I was eligible.
So not only were you recovering from a serious injury that year, but you had to relearn how to play your game in a completely different sensory environment. And you still made it to the NHL. That’s an incredible comeback.
Lynch, smiling: Magician.
-
Adam had assumed a medical solution was out of the question. The urgent care gave him some pamphlets on the various options he could try, and he’d flipped through them mechanically. Surgery. Bone conduction. Osseointegrated steady-state. With each new word, all Adam could see were dollar signs. These treatments were so far out of his world of possibility that they might as well be on the moon. He threw the papers away and called the scout he’d talked to all those months ago, who put him in touch with BC’s athletic department.
The first time back on the ice was a disaster. Adam’s head felt unbalanced, too heavy on one side and light on the other. The familiar sounds of the rink flattened and jumbled, crashing crazily off the boards and tripping into his remaining ear in a tangled, cacophonous mess. The vast, white, stillness over his left shoulder was eerily wrong: he knew the space wasn’t empty, but he was suddenly blind to it. He couldn’t hear his center, so his passes became turnovers. He couldn’t hear defensemen skating up behind him, so he got hit. His right side screamed in protest as he was checked into the boards again and again.
“Parrish—” Coach started.
“I know,” he cut off. He didn’t want to hear it. They all saw how bad it was. He stumbled over himself, terrified they were about to cut him before he’d even begun. “It’s—it’s just an adjustment. I’ll work through it. I have to work through it.”
They didn’t cut him, and he did learn to manage, after a fashion. He got used to the flattened sound, but he couldn’t get comfortable with the silent void over his shoulder, the creeping feeling that monsters lurked just out of range. Eventually they tried him on the left wing, angling his blind side to the boards. It was better, miles better. The sound even opened up so he could tell where his teammates were. Shooting left from the left felt strange, and passing to the wrong side felt stranger, but he ducked his head and he worked through it, and slowly, too slowly, things started to fall into place.
When he got sent to Henrietta, Adam figured it would be more of the same. They stuck him on the second line; Gansey was down again, and there was no way anyone would pick Adam Parrish over RGIII for the top spot. His center was a lumbering bruiser, a wagon type that Adam would have put on the fourth line if he’d been coaching, and his right wing had speed but not much control. Still, Adam made it work. He had to; there was no other choice.
Only three days of practice passed before Sargent called Adam and Gansey into her office. Adam didn’t know what he could have done wrong already. He sat, staring at the battered corner of the old wooden desk, unable to meet Gansey’s eye.
“Parrish, I want to try you at top line center,” Sargent said without preamble.
Adam looked up in surprise.
“You know that I—” he stopped, his hand flashing up in an aborted movement toward his ear. He glanced toward Gansey and back to her.
“I know,” Sargent said brusquely. “If it doesn’t work, we won’t do it. But I think we should try it. You’re speedy, but there’s speedier. And you’re a good shot, but honestly, Gansey’s better. What you’ve got are the eyes. You’ve got the head, and it’s been, frankly, criminally underused up until now.”
Gansey was looking between them with an air of polite puzzlement, although Adam had noticed his shoulders straighten slightly at Sargent’s casual praise.
Adam sighed. He might as well know; they were all going to find out sooner or later. “What Coach isn’t saying is that I’m deaf on my left side. It’s why I moved to left wing: easier to hear what’s going on with my bad side to the boards.”
“I think it’ll work,” Sargent said, still using that matter-of-fact tone. “I think you’re going to be worth it. The thing is, this only works if you trust your line completely.” She turned to Gansey. “He needs to know exactly where you are at all times, when he’s not looking at you and he can’t guarantee that he’ll hear you calling for the puck. Not only that, but he needs to know where you’re going to be. You need to be utterly and completely predictable; not to the other team, but to Parrish.” She straightened the pile of papers on her desk with a final-sounding snap. “You and Lynch have that freaky sixth sense, so you’re already good at this kind of thing. I’m going to start centering you two with Parrish. Skate together, drill together, show him some of those old dumbass trick plays you guys pulled at Aglionby, even. Talk to each other. See how it goes.”
She stood up and left the room, and that was apparently that.
Adam looked over toward Gansey, feeling suddenly awkward now that they were alone .
“Uh,” he said, “Do you wanna break it to Lynch or should I?”
Gansey gave him a smile that looked too much like a grimace for Adam’s comfort. “I’ll take care of it. His bark is worse than his bite, don’t worry.”
Adam wasn’t worried. Ronan Lynch didn’t scare him, neither his bark nor his bite.
-
How did you first end up on a line together?
Gansey: Oh, that was all Coach Sargent’s idea.
Pretty genius move.
Gansey: She’s an incredible tactician. We’d never have gotten to the place we’re at now without her influence.
You think she’ll get the NHL nod someday?
Gansey: I hope so. Although I don’t know if she’d want it. This league is, pardon my language, a shit show when it comes to new ideas. Not that women playing or coaching hockey should be considered novel, by any stretch, but...you know what the scrutiny would be like. She’d be brilliant. We all know it, and I’d back her a hundred percent if she got the opportunity and decided to take it. But there’s a lot of baggage there, you know?
I’m aware of the baggage around women in sports, yes. And with hindsight, I don’t think even the misogynists out there can argue that it was a bad move. The three of you led the Generals to a Calder cup win that year. How did that first taste of victory prepare you for the beast that is the NHL playoffs?
Gansey: Oh, that was a wonderful time. Henrietta is—pardon me for getting sappy, but it still feels like home, even though we were only there for a short while. It’s a lovely town, but more than that, it’s where we learned to be men. You know, first taste of adulthood, with real responsibilities...Lynch and I had done the boarding school thing, and billeted with families in the Q, but in Henrietta, there was no one making the decisions or looking out for us but ourselves. Parrish was always more independent; he took to it like a duck to water. He had to, like, teach us how to do laundry and when to take our cars in for tune-ups and stuff like that.
Lynch: We also played a little bit of hockey, Gansey, if you remember.
Parrish: The thing about the Calder...you know, most people assume it’s like training wheels. And Gansey’s right, we were young. But it doesn’t feel like that when you’re in it, you know? The AHL isn’t the same as juniors, or college hockey. You’re sharing ice with veterans who have been in the league for years. You’re playing hockey professionally for sold-out stadiums. They’re smaller stadiums, sure, and the games aren’t often on TV, but the fans are just as dedicated. So yeah, it was a real rush. And it was real pressure. You never know how you’re going to react until you’re in it. So in that way, it was really important to get that experience before getting to the NHL. It taught me—taught us all, really—that we could thrive under pressure. It taught us how to be winners.
Lynch: And it taught us how to win fun. It was a real trip, when we started to play so well together, when Gansey started racking up the goals—remember your first hatty?—and even Parrish and I got in on the action. I’ll never forget the first time I heard the crowd chanting my name.
A nd you proved to the Ravens front office that the three of you belonged there.
Gansey: And that we belonged there together, that was critical. I had a leg up with the name, there’s no shying away from that, but I can’t do what I do on the ice without them. I’m just fortunate that the team recognized it too.
So you’d found your rhythm on the ice, and Lynch and Parrish warmed up to each other enough that the three of you got a place together when you moved to Richmond. That must have been a fun few years. Was it the typical young professional athlete experience, you know, spending all your nights going out to bars, getting sloppy, picking up girls, that sort of thing?
Parrish: Oh yeah, for sure. Lynch in particular was a real ladykiller there for a while.
Lynch, glaring: Parrish thinks he’s a comedian. On the other hand, I remember seeing some literal notches on his bedpost—
Gansey: Listen. We had our share of youthful fun, but that’s all it was. Nothing untoward or disrespectful.
Lynch: That’s not what you said after the whole Helen thing.
Helen thing? Want to explain that?
Lynch, whispering: Parrish hooked up with Gansey’s sist—
Gansey: No, we don’t. Let’s move on.
-
Adam didn’t intend to sleep with Helen Gansey. If someone had asked him outright, he might have been able to remember that Gansey had a sister, but he’d never expected to run into her at an NHL Awards afterparty.
He was alone, Gansey and Ronan having fucked off somewhere with Stevie Y, and he was a little worse for the bartender’s generous hand with the whiskey. Bright lights, a stiff collar, a fuzzy head, blindsided when a pair of sleek ankles in four-inch heels crossed his field of vision.
It didn’t feel like being hit on, not in any traditional sense. It felt like Adam had been selected. She had canvassed the room, discarded all others, and chosen Adam for her prize. So what if it was only for this one evening, or maybe the night if he was very lucky? He’d take what enjoyment he could from whatever she chose to give him. There was probably something psychological there, in how he’d never been drafted, how his parents had never wanted him. But that was something to unpack in twenty years with a dedicated therapist, probably, not to wonder vaguely about after downing four manhattans to calm his nerves during the awards presentations.
“Who are you here with?” he remembered asking, because it was obvious to him that she must be some other player’s girlfriend. Probably a model, or maybe some indie Canadian actress. Her straight nose and the shiny chestnut of her hair looked a little familiar, but he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen her before.
“Didn’t realize I needed a keeper. Do I have to be here with anyone?”
“Well,” he hedged, “I reckon you wouldn’t be talking to me like this if you worked for the league. They probably have rules about that. Fraternizing, or whatever.”
“And how am I talking to you?” She was different from the girls who usually approached him at bars, either eager and grasping or star-struck and stumbling. She was utterly cool.
“So, you know. Informally.”
“And you think I’d be talking to you like this if I were here with someone else?”
He grinned. “Talking to me like what?”
“So...informally.” Her lips curled around the word suggestively. He took that as his cue to not give a shit who she was, or who she might be leaving behind.
Adam wasn’t wasted, but he’d had enough to drink, and the curl of her hair looked so glossy and soft, that he didn’t notice when she gave the Lyft driver his own address without even asking. And in his room, when she stripped his shirt off and pushed his head down between her legs, he wondered whether he’d ever care to notice anything else again.
Gansey’s eyes widened in something close to horror as Helen followed Adam out of his room the next morning. She was wearing last night’s dress and she looked just as incredible in the morning light as she had in the glittering ballroom, and suddenly, Adam couldn't stop noticing every single similarity between his left wing and his hookup.
He should have seen it before, really. The entire Gansey family was beautiful. But Gansey was handsome in a boyish, conventional sort of way that led scores of teen girls to press homemade color-block posters to the glass during warm-ups. Helen’s beauty was more severe and more than a little uncomfortable. Last night, she’d cut through the celebrity crowd like a blade, unimpressed with it all in a way that left Adam reeling. Of course she was a Gansey. Of course she hadn’t been phased by the famous faces; she’d grown up in rooms like that. Adam was probably more starstruck than she was, and he’d been up for the Selke. He didn’t win, of course, but he’d considered the night a success anyways. What a fool he was.
Ronan, in the kitchen next to the bacon pan, let out a great shout of laughter as he looked between Adam and Helen. Gansey’s mouth opened, then shut again. He finally said, pointing at Adam, “You and I are having a conversation later.”
“Give it a rest, Dick,” Helen said, crossing over to the island to grab a piece off the mountain of fried bacon cooling on a paper towel. “I’m older than you; don’t play the protective asshole. I’ll give you a wedgie.”
She walked back over to Adam, completely unbothered, to kiss him goodbye. He kissed her back, shell-shocked, overly aware of too many eyes on them but not knowing how else to act. She shoved the rest of her bacon in his mouth and said, “See you later.”
Ronan didn’t stop laughing for a week.
-
Adam, anything to say in your defense? You know, you’re the last one I would have expected out of the three of you.
Parrish: Um. No comment? Except to say that no, there were no literal notches on my bedpost. That bed was just old and kind of scratched up. Lynch is being an asshole, as usual.
Lynch: Yeah, well. It was excessive, is all I’m saying.
-
The first time Adam brought a girl home to their shared apartment in Richmond, Ronan was surprised by the strength of his own disgust. He watched stonily as Parrish and this lipsticked, dark-haired beauty fell through the door giggling before stumbling up short, obviously not expecting to see him sitting there alone on the couch. Ronan looked over the girl’s short skirt and her long lashes and her hand swallowed up in Parrish’s. She was just the sort of girl that every other guy in the locker room slobbered over, but somehow he’d expected Parrish to have a bit more imagination. It wasn’t a surprise that she’d chosen him as her prey for the night, though. Parrish wasn’t anywhere near ugly, but even if he had been, he was a professional athlete with a shiny new million dollar bank account. Tale as old as time. Ronan didn’t know why it should bother him so much now.
Parrish, after a second’s hesitation, introduced her as Natalie. She smiled shyly, a little red around the ears, and gave him a self-conscious wave. Ronan said nothing, rudely relishing in her awkwardness and Parrish’s increasingly narrow-eyed irritation. Finally, he pulled her by that laughably tiny hand down the hallway and closed his bedroom door.
It wasn’t exactly a revolving door, as it turned out; Ronan had been exposed to too many hockey players for too many years to be scandalized at anyone’s numbers, and Parrish wasn’t nearly as disgusting as some he’d seen. Still, he was young and new to fame and had an apparently healthy libido, and evidence was mounting by the day that Adam Parrish had a thing for pretty, feisty girls with dark dramatic eyelashes who barely reached his chin even in stilettos.
Ronan, on the other hand, had a thing for Adam Parrish.
It was just a stupid crush. He’d had others, even in other locker rooms, and he hadn’t ever let it fuck with his game or the team chemistry. If he’d gotten over Gansey in high school, getting over Parrish now would be a cinch. It was just galling to have his nose repeatedly rubbed in the fact that though Parrish was so disastrously his type, Parrish’s type was as far from him as it was possible to be. He’d never even stood a chance.
-
Parrish: Lynch and I still live together, actually.
Like a pair of rookies.
Parrish: A lot less of the going out drinking and bringing girls home these days, though. I’m not twenty anymore.
You’ve never wanted your own space?
Lynch: Eh. Habit, at this point. He makes better food.
Parrish: That’s a lie. I’m a terrible cook. You know, it’s funny, Lynch makes such a goddamn fuss about being so truthful and never lying about anything, then he throws out whoppers and gets so offended when you call him on his bullshit.
So if it’s not the food, what is it?
Parrish and Lynch look at each other. Some wordless conversation happens: Parrish raises his eyebrows. Lynch shrugs.
Lynch: We’re in big gay love.
...Is that meant to be a joke?
Gansey, sighing: Ronan Lynch, I thought we’d decided you were going to take this seriously.
Lynch: This interview? I never agreed to that.
Gansey: This part of the interview. The coming out part.
Lynch: I am serious. I’m in big gay love with Parrish. Have been for fucking years, I don’t know how else to say it.
You’re serious? You two are together? Like, romantically?
Parrish: Getting married this summer. The Cup’s invited.
Gansey and Lynch, together: Parrish!
Lynch: Don’t fucking jinx it, dipshit.
Gansey: I can’t believe you’d even put that out into the universe.
Wow. This is huge. Congratulations.
Parrish: On the engagement or the preemptive fourth Cup win?
Lynch throws a pen at his head.
Parrish, continuing: They’re both superstitious idiots. I think you, as a rational person, would agree that the things I say during this interview have absolutely no bearing on how well we’ll do in the playoffs.
Sorry, I hate to break it to you, but I do have a lucky shirt that’s never been washed. And I can only drink beer brewed in Richmond when the Ravens are playing.
Parrish: Jesus.
Gansey: A woman after my own heart. You’re a real one.
Thank you for trusting me with this, guys. Can I ask for details? How did it begin?
Parrish, Lynch, together: Uhhh…
Parrish: Let’s just call it the magic of the postseason. Emotions can get...pretty intense.
-
The Ravens squeaked into a wild card spot by the skin of their missing teeth, but it was obvious to everybody that they weren’t supposed to be there. It was a convoluted and bizarre set of events; they’d needed to beat the Sockeye in regulation and the Whalers needed to lose to the Minutemen, and on the final night of the season, the dominoes fell, tick-tick-tick, and suddenly there they were in the show.
And the thing was, the playoffs made everyone insane, pundits and players and fans alike. They tore at composures, twisted at guts and shredded at nerves and turned normal, rational, thinking people into morons convinced that gods not only existed but cared deeply about what order you put your socks on in the locker room before a game. Adam hated it. He had no problem with routine. But when routine became ritual, and ritual became dogma, he started to get annoyed.
Gansey was the worst offender. The seeds had sprouted back in Henrietta during the Calder run, but probably they’d been planted even earlier. Adam thought that, like so many other things, he’d discover a partner in Ronan on this. That he could glance sideways at Lynch’s locker to find him already smirking back, the two of them united in exasperation.
Lynch, as it turned out, was almost as bad as Gansey.
They took game one away in Atlanta, and then lost game two in a brutal, crunching battle that left everyone battered. The post-game locker room mood was dismal, but Adam knew the loss wasn’t because they’d failed to perform some complicated set of actions stacked on top of each other in a particular order. Adam’s poor play was his own responsibility. Gansey’s injury was Barrington Whelk’s.
Gansey and Ronan were still squirreled away with the medical team when the rest of them boarded the bus back to the hotel. It was near midnight, and the anger and uselessness boiled under Adam’s skin like a pressure cooker as he waited alone in his hotel room. Finally, he heard the sound of the hotel keycard and looked up as Ronan slipped into the room.
The shiner was brilliant. Four neat, symmetrical stitches adorned the right corner of Lynch’s brow, and a deep purple-black bruise climbed over his cheek toward the bridge of his nose. The sight of it made Adam hot. He was always, always lecturing Lynch not get into stupid fights, and look, here was the natural consequence written all over his body: that magazine-advertisement face all bruised and bloodied up.
Of course, it hadn’t been just another stupid fight. Adam was just as angry about the boarding, a deliberate attempt by Atlanta’s goon to injure Gansey badly enough to knock him out of the series. He’d never have the same type of outlet for his anger that Ronan had, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it just as sharply.
That night, in a hotel room far away from home in a muggy, sweat-soaked city that hated them, Adam had nowhere to put his rage. Ronan sat on the end of his bed and fiddled with the string that controlled the blinds, and Adam found himself hating his itchy restlessness. The hotel a/c whirred as loud as a construction site, and Adam hated that too. Ronan always took the bed nearest the window on roadies, and he always turned the air up as high as it could go, because he slept better in arctic temperatures. The sound battered at Adam’s single working ear, but as long as he pressed it into the pillow to sleep, it wasn’t so bad.
That night, it was bad. Adam stalked over to the unit and turned the dial furiously. The sudden silence was just as deafening.
“What did they say?” he asked finally, when it didn’t seem like Ronan was going to volunteer any information.
Ronan shrugged.
“That’s not an answer.”
“They didn’t give me an answer. They wouldn’t fucking tell me. I don’t know. He was awake and talking, I heard him from the next room, but they wouldn’t let me see him.”
He looked up at Adam, his emotion raw and abrupt.
“I keep thinking about what could have happened if Whelk had hit him a little lower. If his head had gone into the boards, if his neck...”
Ronan trailed off. At once, Adam’s itch for a fight drained away, leaving his body exhausted. It was Whelk he wanted to hit; he was only jealous that Ronan had actually gotten to. Adam hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind either, the sick smack Gansey’s visor had made as it made contact with the glass. Gansey hadn’t been knocked out cold, he hadn’t gotten in the way of a skate blade, his neck hadn’t broken on impact. Yes, it could have been so much worse.
“It didn’t, though.” Adam stepped closer.
“Just lucky,” Ronan argued, but it was a little feeble. Probably he was all fought out, too. “I mean, what happens if I’m not there next time? What happens when I’m the only one of us without traumatic brain injury?”
It was a ridiculous kind of logic, the assumption that Ronan’s fists could do anything to prevent them from getting hurt. He was simply a reaction, the violent consequence to a violent inciting event. Sometimes Adam wondered if it made a lick of difference at all.
“Keep brawling like that, tough guy, and you’ll get there too.”
Ronan chuckled, then winced as his smile pulled at the stitches.
“Let me see.” Adam grabbed Ronan’s chin and tilted it up and to the left, toward the light. His thumb gently brushed against the bruise. Ronan swallowed, his eyes trained on the wall.
“Does it hurt?”
Ronan’s head shook minutely.
“Are you lying to me?”
Ronan shook his head again, and then nodded a little. “I’ve been worse, though.”
His eyes flicked toward Adam. Adam considered him for a second before dropping his hand from Ronan’s flushed skin.
Adam knew, sort of. He’d noticed how Ronan never brought girls home after nights out. He’d noticed how Ronan looked at him a little too long sometimes, when he didn’t think anyone else was watching.
He didn’t think Ronan knew that when he looked at Adam like that, Adam felt it like a fingernail down his spine. He didn’t think Ronan knew that he sometimes woke, sweat-soaked, from dreams where he was shoved into the boards by a heavy, muscled body, the breath knocked out of him in a way that had nothing to do with a check. No, Ronan Lynch didn’t have a monopoly on wanting.
It was also absolutely the worst possible time to start throwing stray wrenches into their carefully balanced partnership. But with Ronan looking at him like that, the dim light spilling in from the bathroom turning his bruised cheek hollow and darkening his lowered lashes, Adam wasn’t sure he could help himself. He was fragile and defiant and short-sighted and stupidly, painfully brave, and Adam badly wanted to lean down and kiss him.
And so he did.
It wasn’t a mistake, but it was clearly a shock. Ronan gasped into his mouth, a needy, desperate little sound that went straight to Adam’s groin, before pulling away with furrowed brows.
“What the fuck,” he said.
His mouth was as soft as it looked, tempting in a way that was altogether unfair, and Adam leaned in again, already aching for more. “What, you don’t want to?”
Of course Ronan wanted to. He met Adam’s kiss that time, and it lasted longer, his hands coming up to cup Adam’s chin as he opened his mouth into it. He stood up from the bed, dragging Adam with him, and backed them up into the wall. And then he pulled away again. His eyes searched Adam’s face for something.
“You’re serious,” he said. Adam could hear the question behind it, the disbelief papered over painful hope. His thumb found Adam’s mouth and he swiped at the lower lip gently, like his hands had to make sure his lips weren’t lying to him.
“Come on, Lynch,” Adam said. His voice shook a little. “Losing your nerve?”
That time it was Ronan who closed the distance between them.
“Have you ever done this?” Ronan asked, a little later.
Adam looked at him in disbelief.
“I meant—with a guy.”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s been while, though.”
“Me too,” Ronan said.
“And you don’t…” Adam trailed off. “With women, I mean, right? I’ve never seen you—” Ronan shook his head, and Adam nearly laughed at the look on his face. Instead, he asked, “How long?”
“A while.”
“Juniors?” When Ronan didn’t answer, he asked, “High school? Jesus, Lynch. What do you do?”
“I punch a lot of people.” He said, quieter, “I think about you.”
Adam knew that, or at least he’d wondered, but hearing Ronan say it out loud, so sweetly bare, sent another bolt of desire through him. He sank to his knees.
“You think about me like this? You should have said something earlier.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking God,” Ronan said, to Adam’s great satisfaction.
The regret set in not long after. Not at what they’d done; Adam was as far from regretful for that as it was possible to be. It had been—well. Maybe not even hyperbole to say life-changing. And despite his fears, they played together better than ever. They won game three handily, even though Whelk had done his job well and Gansey was declared unfit to play.
It was Ronan’s goddamned superstition that was the problem. Adam had sucked his dick, and Ronan had scored a goal on the way to winning the game. Ergo...
“I’m not doing this before every game,” Adam warned, though his hands already reaching for Ronan’s waistband were serving to undercut his argument a little bit. Truth be told, he was nearly as eager as Ronan was. It wasn’t like hooking up with the hottest guy he’d ever seen was exactly a hardship.
Ronan’s grin was unholy. Adam almost laughed at the absurdity of it, how a single night could feed his ego that quickly. “Aw, but you’re so good at it. And you want to do your part for the team, don’t you? We’ve got a series on the line. Get to it.”
Adam paused with Ronan’s athletic shorts around his ankles. “You know, you make a really compelling point.” He looked up at Ronan, and then stood up, leaving the shorts where they lay. “I’m going to go practice passes with Cheng.”
“Parrish, what the fuck!”
Served him right.
The decisions about Gansey’s fitness trickled in one game at a time, cloaked in secrecy as is the custom during playoffs. He was scratched the morning of game four, and privately, Gansey told them the medical team said it would be at least a week, and more likely two, before he’d be ready to go again. Ronan stomped around the practice facility in a frustrated rage, black eye looking worse than ever, as Adam tried to corral him to sit down and talk strategy with Cheng, their top-line stand-in. Gansey couldn’t even be there for that, because the doctors had forbidden him to read or write—white-board privileges denied—or watch tape in the video room. It was an ominous sign. No one was saying the c-word out loud, but Adam knew what those instructions meant. He remembered his own dizzy nausea, and the way his legs couldn’t find their way to supporting his weight after the blow to his temple. The hearing loss had blown everything else out of the water, but the concussion symptoms were no joke, either, and he knew all too well how they lingered.
They lost the game. After, Ronan teetered between rage and vicious vindication—it was all Adam’s fault for fucking up his brand new routine, of course—and Adam didn’t want to be around either version of him. He slammed the door in Ronan’s face with a snarled, “Go fuck yourself,” and then lay in the dark, frustrated angry and and achingly hard. He slept badly, and woke early when he heard stirring on the other side of the wall.
He knocked on Ronan’s door.
Ronan’s “Hey,” was wary as opened it to look at Adam.
Adam pushed him inside wordlessly and shut the door with his foot as he roughly kissed him. They fucked for the first time that morning—Ronan’s first time ever—and were nearly late to board the plane back down to Atlanta for their sins.
That night, Ronan crashed the net to score a dirty, chippy, game-winning goal in enemy territory, and back on home ice for game six, Adam snuck a fuck-you wraparound between the pole and the netminder’s trailing pad ten minutes into overtime, netting them the series.
Ronan never got over his superstition, and in the end, Adam found he didn’t mind much at all.
-
Did you ever consider going public earlier in your careers?
Parrish: Same answer as earlier. I really wasn’t interested in giving anyone else more ammo against me.
Lynch: I didn’t give a shit. Frankly, I would have been over the fucking moon for the chance to beat up on homophobic dickwads out on the ice. Seriously, anyone has a problem with this, please, for the love of Mary, come see me in person about it. But in the end, it was a joint decision. You never know what’s gonna happen in this league. If either one of us had been traded—I dunno. I didn’t feel good about the prospect of hanging him out to dry on his own.
Parrish: My hero.
Lynch sends another inappropriate hand gesture in his direction.
And Gansey. You’re the captain, and close friends with both of them. You’ve clearly known about this a while. Were you ever worried that a relationship among teammates was a bad idea?
Gansey, laughing: Every goddamn day.
Both Parrish and Lynch send inappropriate hand gestures toward Gansey.
Gansey: To be honest...yes. I did worry, especially early on. I worry about everything that might impact the team. But by the time I learned about it, they’d already been dating a little while, and it certainly hadn’t made either of them play any worse. That was the year we won our first cup. If you remember, I’d gotten that injury, and they stepped up and carried us through the two rounds I was forced to sit out. So, yeah, I’d say it was a stressful time for everyone, but none of the stress was because my two best friends had started to fall in love with each other.
Lynch: Is that what we’re calling it?
Gansey: Don’t be crass. Nobody wants to hear your prurience.
Lynch: Says you. Any young players out there want a little free advice, something that does wonders for your playoff prowess is getting your di—
Parrish: Stop talking, for the love of God.
I have to assume some other players know too, right?
Parrish: Sure, some.
Ever any trouble?
Parrish: There have been some comments, yeah.
Now’s your time to name names.
Parrish: I’m not going to do that.
Lynch?
Parrish: Lynch isn’t going to do that, either.
Okay. On a completely unrelated note, want to go back to listing people in the league you hate?
Lynch: Oh, hell yeah. Ramsey, Andreiskov, Carruthers, Prokopenko, Greenmantle, both Allen brothers, Cheng—
Gansey: Whoa, whoa. Lynch is kidding. Henry Cheng is a close friend and a good guy. And very supportive of the two of them, as they well know.
Lynch: Don’t ruin my fun.
Gansey: Don’t ruin Cheng’s reputation in the press for shits and giggles.
So, what’s next for you all? Gansey?
Gansey: I’m going to spend some time back in Henrietta, actually.
Coaching?
Gansey: Maybe. We’ll see. There are some people I’d like to catch up with before making any decisions.
Ronan?
Lynch: After getting married, you mean? Shit, what else do you want from us? Honeymoon, I guess.
Any coaching in your future?
Parrish starts to laugh hysterically.
Lynch: Fuck you very much, I’d be a great coach. Nah, I dunno, I’ll probably just follow this one around a while.
And Adam?
Parrish: I’m thinking about going back to school. I didn’t even get a full year in at BC. I’d like to study...oh, I don’t know. Something completely unrelated to sports. Engineering. Pottery. Physics.
Philosophy?
Parrish: Ha. No.
Final question before I let you go. What’s the secret to success?
Parrish: Hard work.
Gansey: Teamwork.
Lynch: Spite.
Spite?
Lynch: Best motivator there is. If you aren’t living life versus someone, what’s the point?
I think we’ll leave it there. Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and an even bigger joy to watch you play over the years. Congratulations on all your success.