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Kent’s been jittery besides him on the couch all night, but Jack doesn’t ask, because Kent won’t talk about it until he’s ready.
Unfortunately for Jack, Kent is suddenly ready just as the troops are landing in Normandy on D-Day, but he pauses the documentary anyway, because the way Kent’s voice wavers when he says, “So I was talking to Jess the other day,” means it’s big. Besides, Kent doesn’t like Jack’s documentaries—he will dutifully sit next to Jack while Jack watches them, even though he’s usually on his phone or watching hockey games muted on his laptop, but when Kent watches TV, it’s either badly scripted Hallmark movies or badly scripted reality TV.
“How is she?” Jack asks.
“Yeah, she’s good. She just said something weird.”
“Weirder than that time she asked if you had Connor McDavid’s number?”
“Yeah,” Kent says, wrinkling his nose, “but thanks for reminding me.”
He falls silent, and Jack puts a hand on his knee, anchoring.
“She said she’d help us have a baby someday, if we wanted,” Kent blurts all at once, and Jack tries not to tense. Baby is a very big word. “I mean,” Kent says, and now he’s rambling, talking too fast, “She said she’d be a surrogate, or donate an egg, or whatever. I don’t really know what it would be, you know, but she offered and I just thought, we’ve never even actually talked about that, having kids, I mean, and I didn’t know what to say because I didn’t know what you would say, but now you’re not saying anything, so…”
“I’m not upset,” Jack assures, because that’s what Kent always jumps to. Jack hates it, but he understands it. “I’m… thinking.”
“Okay, well, take your time,” Kent says, “Yeah, you do that. You think about it, and let me know.”
He kisses Jack on the cheek and wanders off to bed, and then Jack realizes he never asked what Kent was thinking.
…
They both have complicated relationships with fatherhood.
Jack’s never met Mr. Parson, and even Kent has never met him as an adult. To Jack’s knowledge, the last time they spoke was after Kent was drafted to the Q, and when Jack had asked what they talked about, Kent had thinned his lips and said, “He walked out of my life for almost fifteen years and then he wanted to be back in it once I’d succeeded at something. Fuck that. I don’t need him.”
Jack himself has had enough time and distance—and therapy—to realize that his actual father was never the issue, that it was his persona and Jack’s own insecurities and the way the rest of the world talked far more than it was ever Jack’s dad. His actual father is actually a pretty fucking great guy, who had said, after Jack woke up in a hospital bed, “Jack, I don’t care if you never play hockey again. I just want you healthy and happy. I’ll love you just as much either way.”
It was both one of the most terrifying things he could have said—never play hockey again?—and one of the best.
I’ll love you just as much.
…
Kent’s asleep by the time Jack comes to bed, brain still churning. He sleeps like the dead, doesn’t even stir when Jack strips off and climbs in beside him. Jack feels suddenly, achingly fond of him, and like he can see every one of their years together in his face—lying here sleeping is the Kent who had nodded at Jack in a locker room in Quebec, a Kent that had come to a college party, a Kent that had asked him nervously about having a family together.
A Kent twenty years from now, greyer at the temples and softer through the middle but still every bit Jack’s.
He strokes a thumb gently across the freckles under Kent’s eye, and curls around him to fall asleep.
…
“How many would you want?” Jack asks over coffee.
Kent’s eyebrows raise as if to say, we’re talking about this now?, but he only hums and says, “I never thought about it seriously, I guess. Maybe two, three? How about you?”
“Same,” Jack says, “If I were to have any, I think I’d want them to have a sibling.”
Jack tries to ignore the way Kent dims when he says if.
“Yeah, I don’t know what I would have done without Jess, some days,” Kent says casually, and rinses out his mug.
Jack had never had siblings and had never been social enough to make them on his hockey teams the way a lot of guys could. He remembers begging his mom for a little brother for Christmas—he’d gotten a puppy, instead.
It wasn’t until he went to Samwell that he thinks he truly understood what it was like to have brothers, and now he has almost more than he can count—Shitty, Ransom and Holster, Tater and the other Falconers.
But he would have liked that, growing up. It could have been good for him.
Kent and Jess are incredibly close, and almost as much as anything that Kent had said last night, Jack keeps coming back to how much Jess is willing to do for her brother.
For them.
Kent has been nominally part of Jack’s family since they were both sixteen—even when Kent and Jack weren’t speaking, his parents were in contact with Kent, would visit him and take him to dinner and even went to one of his Cup days. It used to upset Jack, make him almost jealous, but now it makes him fond in the sad sort of way he associates with knowing how long and how hard Kent has loved him for.
Jess, understandably, was much frostier towards Jack when they got back together, but Jack’s always wanted to be family to the Parsons like Kent is his family.
“Hey,” Jack says, snagging an arm around Kent’s waist as he tries to leave the kitchen. He thumbs the same freckles as he had last night, feels the same rush of emotion. “I love you,” he says earnestly, and watches the way Kent’s face softens.
“Yeah, Zimms,” Kent says, “I love you, too.”
…
Jack hates the way he can almost feel the days sliding away. They’re tucked away at his Montreal house—his summer home, as Kent obnoxiously calls it, even though Jack keeps telling him that his financial advisor had called it a good investment—but sooner rather than later, they’ll both have to fly back to start the season.
Jack loves being back in Quebec. It’s quiet, completely removed from the pressures of the season, and when Kent is here, it feels like home.
That probably means something, Jack knows, but some days he’s more willing to look that in the face than others.
Jack still runs a youth hockey camp in the summer, and Kent’s helped him with it for a few years now. It’ll start next week, and suddenly Jack can only think of the way that Kent always helps the kids up when they fall, the way he pretends to let them check him and how he lets them win against him, putting up just enough of a fight that they don’t think he’s cheating.
“Kenny,” Jack says, and falls into the deck chair where Kent is laying out, absorbed in whatever’s on his phone screen. It could be an email from his agent, or it could be a cat video. It’s hard to tell.
The chair is much too small for two fully grown hockey players, but they make it work. Kent drops his phone, but he’s wearing sunglasses, his face hard to read. Jack pulls them down gently until Kent’s squinting up at him, eyes adjusting to the bright afternoon.
“Do you want kids?” Jack asks him, although he probably already knows, just by the way Kent had asked him last night.
Still, the way Kent looks at him and says, “Yes,” without hesitation is important.
Jack leans in, nudges their foreheads together.
“Me too,” he says.
…
Jack’s desperate for him, wants nothing more than to work his way inside and fill him with half the emotion he can feel brimming over.
They still have sex, obviously—they’re both young, fit, attractive, and only see each other for a few months a year—but it’s not like it was when they were sixteen, or even when they first got back together. They’re not in their honeymoon phase anymore, and Jack truly doesn’t miss it that much. The sex was amazing when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, but the well-worn comfort of knowing exactly how much they mean to each other, exactly where to kiss and touch to make each other feel good, is so much better.
Kent laughs breathlessly, folded open beneath him, and says, “Jack, you know you can’t actually knock me up,” and Jack honestly doesn’t realize until that moment.
“Um,” he says, and stills.
Kent runs a hand through his hair, pulls just right, and rocks his hips up slowly. “I mean, if you want to try,” he says, and kisses him before he finishes the sentence.
…
Kent dries the tears off the cheek of a first grader who got tripped up doing a drill and fell over and Jack feels it like a check in overtime; blindsided.
He’s been in denial, maybe, or they both have, because now it’s so clear—Kent’s the one who stops to sign autographs for kids even when his publicist tells him he doesn’t have time, who gleefully holds any baby he can get his hands on, who coddles his teammates’ children like his own.
Kent practically raised his sister during the summers growing up; he has a cat he dotes on like a child; three of his teammates have asked him to be a godparent. He’s got an open door policy in Vegas and regularly feeds stray members of his team, has billeted more than one of the Aces’ most recent trade acquisitions.
Hell, he tried so hard to take care of Jack those last months that it was one of the biggest hurdles of their relationship, helping Kent believe that he wasn’t responsible.
He’s a nurturer and always has been, despite the face he sometimes puts on.
“He okay?” Jack asks, when Kent finally convinces the kid to start skating on his own again and skates back over to Jack. Jack tucks an arm around his shoulders—they can get away with more on the ice, when they’re wearing pads and gloves and look like nothing as much as any other hockey bros, and they can get away with more around kids, who are either less observant than their parents or just care less.
“Oh, yeah,” Kent says cheerfully, “But he made me promise to give him a piggy-back ride at the end of the day. Which means all the other kids are going to ask, too, but at least my trainer won’t be able to say I haven’t been keeping up with my weight training, right?”
Jack nudges him with his hip. “You’re a natural,” he says, and Kent grins at him.
…
Jack knows it’s not going to be easy, but then, he figures if they survived playing each other in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, they can probably survive anything.
He hadn’t been on the ice when it had happened, which may have been a blessing in disguise, because he probably would have given their relationship away in a heartbeat. Still, he’s never cared less about a hockey game than when Kent went down hard in the second period, though it was game six of a playoff series and the Falconers were down by one, just a period from losing all together.
He’d been forced to sit there, looking across the ice at the way his teammates were kneeling, at the way Tater was elbowing Aces aside to see Kent, protesting that they were friends, at the way the trainers had helped him gingerly to his feet.
Tater had helped Kent skate off the ice, one of Kent’s As on his other side, and after every player in the building, Ace or not, had tapped their stick to the ice for him, Tater had come back to the bench and shook his head just once, and Jack had thought, what would happen if I went with him?
He hadn’t. He’d finished the game, put the Falconers up two points to take the series to seven games, and then ducked the media for the first time in his career.
The atmosphere in the locker room had been relieved, but subdued—nobody likes to see a player hurt badly, but then, when it’s the Stanley Cup on the line, it’s hard to pity the opponent.
Jack had used his name for the first time to talk his way into Kent’s hospital room post-surgery—a broken clavicle, definitely out for the season—because Kent’s mother couldn’t fly in from New York until the next morning. Jack had been desperately grateful that they weren’t returning to Providence for Game Seven until the next night, that they were in the same city even if they had to be on different teams.
Kent had been thin and bruised, worn down from playoffs and fresh from surgery, and Jack had bowed his head and tried frantically not to think of how their positions had been reversed, so many years ago.
They’d agreed not to talk during this last series, both of them worried that their relationship would impact their playing, or worse, that hockey could come between their relationship. Still, he had hated the surprise written on Kent’s face when he had opened his eyes and seen Jack there.
“You came?” Kent asked, and Jack had taken his good hand, said, “Kenny, of course I came. I was worried sick.”
It’s not often that they have to deal with being rivals instead of boyfriends—they’re in different conferences and only play each other twice a year or occasionally on international ice, though in the last Olympics, the USA had been knocked out so early they barely saw each other there at all.
Jack hadn’t known what Kent had wanted him to be, then: Zimms, worried about his health and aching to provide him comfort, or Jack Zimmermann, Alternate Captain of the rival Stanley Cup Playoff team.
“Well,” Kent had said dully, “Congratulations on the Cup, I guess.”
If Jack were a betting man, he would have had to concede the point—Kent wasn’t the only elite player on the Aces by any means, but without their leading scorer, or even considering just the blow to morale that an injured captain would deal to a team, the Falconers had seemed almost assured to win game seven.
“Hey,” Jack had tried to soothe, but Kent had said, “I’ve already got three, I guess I can let you have this one.”
It hadn’t stung like it once might have—Kent was hurting, in pain both physically and emotionally, and they both knew that neither team would give in without a fight. Jack wondered whether it would be harder for Kent if his team won and he wasn’t there to lift the Cup, or if they lost and people never stopped saying it was because Kent was injured.
Jack had lain beside him, careful of the tubes and of Kent’s immobilized arm, and Kent had said, “I guess at least I have the summer to heal, right? Might not even miss next season.”
“Kenny,” Jack had said, tipping Kent’s head over from where he’d been resolutely staring at the opposite wall. “It’s okay to be upset, you know?” It hadn’t been a dirty hit, just a fluke accident, but then, it doesn’t really matter either way, when the end result is the same. “It’s okay to be hurt, or angry. If you want me to leave, I can go.”
“Don’t go,” Kent had said, clutching Jack’s shirt, and he’d cried raggedly into Jack’s shoulder, play-off beard rasping against his shirt, until the nurse came to kick Jack out.
He’d still come to Jack’s Cup Day, sling and all, because he’d known that Jack would want him there. Jack had tried very hard not to think of what it might have been like, if all the overly-interested reporters had written that he’d celebrated with his boyfriend, rather than his CHL teammate.
He had mostly succeeded.
…
They’ve never really talked about what they might do after hockey.
They get asked at least a few times a season what they would do if they didn’t play hockey, and Kent hates it more than most other questions; when Jack asks him why, he rolls his eyes and says, “Because everybody always gives second grade answers. You know: firefighter, astronaut, veterinarian. They’ve never had to think about doing real job. Nobody ever says construction worker or telemarketer or pencil pusher in an office five days a week.”
Jack usually says a history professor or a professional golfer. Kent says Keeper of the Cup so that he could still see it, even if he didn’t win it, because he knows how to play along for the cameras.
It’s true what Kent says—Jack can hardly think of what he might actually be doing if he’d never played hockey. He could have gone into hockey management just using his dad’s contacts; if he’d never worked a day in his life, he still could have lived off his inheritance.
Kent’s parents were blue collar in an economically depressed city—he was never going to college, might never have left the city without hockey. If nothing else, hockey brought them together, and so Jack will never be able to regret all the ways it also tries to tear them apart.
Jack could coach, maybe, when he retires. Not in the NHL; he’s weary of being in front of the cameras. Maybe somewhere without so much pressure—juniors, or women’s. He thinks he could consider college, when he remembers how good Samwell had been for him.
Honestly, when he pictures it, he’s back coaching his peewee team; more honestly, he would find whatever team was in whatever city Kent decides to settle in and coach there, even if he hasn’t quite vocalized that yet.
Kent could do anything in hockey that he wanted to, and that’s not just the part of Jack that loves Kent speaking. He’s personable enough and knowledgeable enough to be a sportscaster; he could certainly coach; he’s got enough hockey intelligence to work in a front office, somewhere.
If he wants to be a stay-at-home dad, that’s fine with Jack—if Kent wanted to be a gardener or a house-husband or to stand on his head for a living, Jack wouldn’t care.
But he doesn’t ask, because he thinks it might be one of the few areas in which he’s better adjusted than Kent. He’s had a few years’ worth of experience without NHL hockey, but Kent has been playing non-stop since he could lace up skates.
Hockey Gods willing, they both have at least another decade in the league, anyway, so it’s not much use worrying about yet.
Although, they both have at least another decade in the league, which also makes considering a family at the moment an exercise in futility.
Jack knows that a lot of NHL players—most of the guys on his team, even—have families, but those same guys mostly also have incredibly understanding wives who serve as quasi-single parents for a good portion of the year. Jack and Kent have the same demanding schedule, which Jack rarely resents, except to consider that he might be forty before he gets to have a child.
Jack is moody about it until Kent asks him; when he tells Kent the truth about what he’s been thinking, Kent just says, “You’re worth waiting for,” and Jack hates that he knows that.
But then, if anybody was ever going to understand the sacrifices Jack makes for his career and the rationale behind how he can give so much up for a game, it would be Kent Parson.
…
It’s probably not healthy, all things considered, to start thinking about what it might take to have a child at this stage in their relationship, especially considering just how much that would be.
They’re not even out, to anybody besides their own families and a few of Kent’s closest teammates. They live across the country from each other and only get to spend summers and a few very carefully scheduled breaks with each other.
None of this stops him from thinking in the grocery store, Would they keep us on the same team, if they knew we were together? What if we were married? Would they trade me to Las Vegas, if I told my agent the truth? What if I did tell them, and they didn’t care? He drives himself crazy until Kent tells him to stop agonizing over three of the same kinds of chicken breasts and just pick one already.
And then he sees a blond toddler in the shopping cart down the aisle and thinks, is that what Kent’s baby would look like?
The baby smiles at them when they pass, and Jack reaches down to take Kent’s hand, just for a moment.
…
The last full day they have together before Kent flies back to Vegas—a few days before Jack leaves so that he has time to shut up the house—Jack doesn’t let him put clothes on. He knows it won’t work, that he can’t actually stop the hours from passing and keep Kent here forever, but it’s nice to pretend for a little while.
Kent finally dozes off early in the morning, tucked under the covers in Jack’s big bed, and if Jack doesn’t sleep at all then at least he’ll know every line and freckle and nuance of Kent’s beautiful face by the time he has to put Kent on a plane.
He images a bassinet in the corner, the way Kent might talk sleepily to a baby when it mewled in the night, the way he’d smile when Jack spoke French because they’d both want their children to grow up bilingual. They’d have more than one, and he imagines breakfast time with two kids, or three—the way pancakes might burn in the pan and milk might spill but none of them would care, much.
Now, he just has the sound of Kent’s breath in a quiet room, and it’s enough. Kent’s enough—if they never had anything more than this, Jack could be happy.
But if Kent wins the cup next season and Jack is the first person to reach Kent on the ice, he wants to kiss him—he wants the headlines to read Aces’ Kent Parson celebrates fourth Stanley Cup with partner Jack Zimmermann. He wants to be able to stroke the freckles on Kent’s cheek at dinner just as easily as he can here in their bed.
He thinks that someday, their son might climb between them in bed and say that he had a nightmare, and Jack wants to tuck him up safe between Kent’s warm chest and his own and tell the truth when he says that he’ll never let anything hurt them. He wants to teach his daughter to ride a bike and say her letters and he wants to see the wonder on her face when Kent takes her skating for the first time.
But for now, Kent fits perfectly in his arms, just himself, and Jack pulls him too close and hugs him too tight and when Kent murmurs against his neck and settles back into sleep, Jack buries his nose in Kent’s hair and breathes.
It used to scare Jack, that he might never love anyone more than Kent. Now it scares him that he could, but then, that’s the thing about parenthood: he might love their kid more, but Kent would want him to.
Or maybe it’s not quantifiable, really. He wouldn’t know, because he’s not a parent, yet. He’ll love them the same, but maybe not in the same way. He could live with that.
He can wait to find out, he thinks. If it’s for Kent—with Kent—he could wait.