You Could Make a Life

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  He sleeps in the next morning, Marlies camp not starting until all the Leafs rejects have been sent down, assembled. He wakes up with two messages from Marc, the first worried, the second furious. Only half of it's in English, but the French is predominantly comprised of cussing Dan out, so Dan understands it well enough.

  Marc mad at him is better than Marc mad for him, but only by a bit, so when Marc knocks, sharp, at the exact time Dan figures you'd arrive if you flew from training camp on the wings of righteous indignation, Dan lets him in and doesn't fight it when Marc shoves at him for a minute before he pulls Dan in.

  "Sorry," Dan mumbles into Marc's hair. He's not sure whether he's apologising for not telling him or for not being good enough to stick around, but either way he means it.

  "Stupid," Marc says. "I had to find out from Buchanan."

  "Sorry," Dan repeats, then lets Marc manhandle him onto the couch, where he sprawls over Dan and turns to one of the French TV channels to punish him. And of course then promptly falls asleep on Dan, but he's cleverly trapped Dan's arms enough that he can't grab the remote without waking Marc, and he looks too wrung out and exhausted for Dan to have the heart.

  Plausible deniability is pretty much out the window when Dan's parents come home while Marc's still using him as a pillow, and if he didn't know better, he'd think Marc planned that too. He's sort of a wretched little shit when he's mad. To be fair there isn't even a hint of surprise on their faces, so maybe it was only plausibly deniable in Dan's mind.

  Marc stays for dinner, and then goes upstairs to presumably pass out in Dan's bed while Dan's on dish duty. His dad waggles his eyebrows at him.

  "Never do that again," Dan begs. "Please."

  "I think it's sweet," his mom says. "He's a good boy."

  "Shows what you know," Dan says under his breath, and his mom flicks his ear before leaving the kitchen. When Dan's done, he follows Marc up, and Marc is, indeed, passed out on Dan's bed, still fully dressed and taking up the entire mattress. Dan nudges him awake, helps Marc out of his sweats, and shoves him to the far side of the bed, watches TV on his laptop with his headphones in and Marc clinging to him like a limpet. He sets his alarm for early, in case Marc forgot to, and wakes up long enough the next morning for Marc to kiss him goodbye with minty fresh breath (did he use Dan's toothbrush? He totally used Dan's toothbrush, didn't he), before going back to sleep the sleep of the not good enough.

  *

  It really isn't that bad. It's amazing Dan got to have his rookie season when he did, got a rookie season at all. If he'd been playing for a better team he would never have even peeked his head over the minors. The Leafs are a better team now than the one he was drafted by, not by a huge margin but enough that it doesn't make sense to keep Dan around. He can't have hard feelings about what's fundamentally a smart business decision.

  Marc doesn't see it that way, and Dan's tempted to regurgitate Marc's 'biased' speech from Dan's freak out post-Calder snub. Doesn't only because he likes that Marc's biased, but while Dan's freak out had been perfectly logical in the face of gross stupidity, Marc just doesn't like that the right choice wasn't the choice that kept his boyfriend close. Can Dan say boyfriend? They haven't exactly talked about it, but he thinks sex, sleepovers, and 'I love yous' probably qualify them for boyfriend status.

  It's not like Dan curls in a ball and gives up because he isn't NHL calibre. For one, that'd pretty much guarantee he never will be, and two, he's never been the best on his team, never been the fastest or the smartest. If not being good enough got in his way he'd have quit hockey at twelve years old when everyone was getting their growth spurts before him.

  So Dan grits his teeth and fucking deals. It could be worse. It could be infinitely worse. He could be on one of the many, many farm teams hundreds or thousands of kilometres from their NHL partner. He could be packing up and going down to the States for training camp, or across the damn country. He doesn't have to move, figure out accommodations, leave his parents, leave Marc. Hell, he knows half the Marlies from training camp and the times some of them were sent up for a stretch, so it's not even like he's the odd man out. It could be so much worse.

  But it really fucking sucks all the same.

  *

  One good thing about the Marlies is that Dan isn't fourth line material. He's looking at second, with potential of growth, and going up against guys as desperate to make it into the bosom of the NHL is the best thing he can get, the generous ice time he's going to carve out giving him experience that no amount of summer training would have been able to give him.

  Training camp for the Marlies is shorter, and easier now that Dan isn't killing himself to make a team he's teetering on the edge of. He's still trying, he wouldn't be him if he wasn't still trying, but for once he doesn't have to fight to keep something he barely has.

  The thing is, Dan likes the Marlies. He likes Coach Samson. He likes the guys on the roster. The majority of them are young and laid back, understanding when Dan just wants to head home and crash after camp, and the nights out consist more of a couple of beers in Toronto West than a clubbing experience in the heart of downtown.

  He still has Marc. Marc who managed to wrangle a key out of Dan's mom and simply appeared, grinning, on his couch one day and then pretty much every day after, but Dan knows that's going to change with the Leafs season starting in a few days, the Marlies season only a week after that. Looked to see where their schedules matched up and where they didn't, and stopped doing it after he realised that both teams playing home games at the same time was bad business, of course it was, so it doesn't happen much at all. Stopped looking when all he felt was sick.

  *

  The first game of the Leafs' season prompts the first real boys' night out for the Marlies, who are off to a bar to watch it en masse, and the first time that Dan's bowing out is met with anything but a shrug. He wants to go, he does, but he still doesn't know how he feels about any of this, and he doesn't really want to be in public while he figures it out.

  Instead he heads home, picking up Thai on the way, and his mom and dad and Sarah are all home by six, even though it's almost mid-terms and Sarah spends every second she's not eating either complaining that she doesn't have time to do this or sticking her nose back in a psychology textbook, as if she didn't come on her own volition. But the second the puck drop her textbook's forgotten and she's leaning on Dan's legs and glaring his nervously bouncing knee into submission, so Dan lets out a breath and just watches.

  It's hard, watching from anywhere but the bench, but he already had to do that when he was knocked from the roster in the playoffs and that was infinitely worse. Dan didn't watch any of the exhibition games, just listened to Marc's testimony on them, and so it almost feels like an exhibition game now, Habs and Leafs, old-school and easy.

  Or easy until Desmartins checks Marc into the boards from behind, and Dan's hands clench and his breath goes short. It's probably better that he's here and not on the bench, where he'd burn with anger and adrenaline and maybe take a stupid penalty the next time he's on the ice, but he feels completely impotent, watching, Marc not a few strides away but all the way downtown, so if something happened, Dan wouldn't be there. Marc gets up after three seconds — Dan counts them — but the 'what if' leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

  His mom laughs when she sees the look on his face, and he turns to glare at her, feeling betrayed. "Now you know how we feel," she says, simply, and Dan has no idea how they kept letting him play if watching him felt like this.

  *

  Marc texts him after the game, a loss in overtime, asks Dan to come over, and his entire family laughs at him while he scrambles to get a hoodie and his shoes on, only laughing harder when he gives them all the finger.

  Dan gets there before Marc does, lets himself in with a key Marc gave him before they were even anything, heats up the leftover Thai just in time for Marc to get home and make a pleased face at him before digging in.

  "Good game," Dan says
, once Marc's stopped stuffing himself like a savage.

  Marc scowls. "We lost."

  "You got a point out of it," Dan argues. "And you played well."

  "We still lost," Marc says, and Dan just shrugs. He knows he'd be feeling the same if he played, he does still, a little, but there's a disconnect now. It's his team that lost in OT, but he wasn't sitting on the bench, stick clenched in his hand, while it happened. Wasn't on the ice, helplessly watching the puck sail into the back of the net. It was a good game, a good start, and he had just enough distance to see it for what it was.

  After his dinner Marc makes him watch some ploddingly slow Czech movie, and Dan lets him because when Marc gets to be pretentious he forgets to sulk, and hell, Dan was watching these films before he was even getting sex out of the deal, there's no way he's going to stop now. Dan dozes while Marc watches, waking when Marc shifts to close his laptop.

  "You would think you had played hockey tonight," Marc snarks, then immediately looks guilty about it.

  "Nah, just watching you guys put me to sleep," Dan says, and drags Marc to bed.

  Marc sleeps like the dead beside him, and Dan presses his fingers lightly against a new bruise he's just noticed now, along Marc's left shoulder where the stick had made contact on that bullshit play. Dan grits his teeth and fights the urge to go after Desmartins, wants to be called up just so he can. And for other reasons, obviously, but in this exact moment, it's mostly that.

  *

  Dan's first game of the season is a week later, a Saturday matinee on Marc's day off, so he has his own little pep squad in the platinum seats, his parents and Marc and Sarah and the new boyfriend she brings along. He gets more than twice as much ice time as he did on the Leafs, an assist on a goal so pretty he wants to cry, a goal of his own that's ugly but does its job. He makes sure to check someone especially hard in front of where the gang is, because there's no point in being a hockey player if he can't scare his big sister's dates. It isn't Leafs hockey, but it's still hockey, and he's beaming after a 5-3 win, lets his dad reach up and ruffle his wet hair, Sarah give him a hug while her boyfriend hangs back tentatively (mission accomplished), and Marc give him something that doesn't quite fall under bro hug but is acceptable enough for a public place.

  They go out for dinner after, then his parents head home while the rest of them go out for drinks, just a couple because Marc's got a matinee game of his own Sunday afternoon. They get recognised and photographed, which startles Marc but not Dan, because he's well aware of how much stock Leafs fans are putting in Marc, how excited they are to have him. It shows up on blogs the next day, a shot taken while Sarah had said something into Marc's ear that made him flush red, something he absolutely refused to repeat to Dan, and it looks intimate enough that there's speculation about Marc and the 'mystery girl', which Dan laughs about for approximately two years.

  They were both lucky enough to have home games to open the season, but three days later Marc's packing up for a week-long road trip and Dan's packing himself a backpack for a grand trip to Hamilton, a whole hour away. For a freaking day trip.

  This was the part he'd been dreading. Luckily, Marc's sharing a room with one of the calmer guys, so no one will strangle him when he talks too much, but Marc's still made himself an outsider on his own team. He'll have no one's ear to talk off, notwithstanding the fact that both Dan and Marc's mom are a skype call away. No one to hand him glasses when he inevitably loses his again, though Dan sneaks two pairs in with Marc's underwear while Marc's in the bathroom. Dan is definitely mature and together enough not to act like a war bride when Marc goes, but that might just be because he drives Marc to the airport and desperate kissing isn't really allowed to happen in public, though they do make out in Dan's backseat for ten minutes, because tinted windows are a godsend. Dan leaves Marc dazed looking, well-kissed and with glasses reinforcements for when they're inevitably needed, and he thinks he can handle this shit.

  *

  Dan can't handle this shit. After four days and two games he's already getting that itchy feeling under his skin. First it made him want to fuck, then it made him want to run, but he doesn't know what he wants to do now, just has to deal with it, knowing that Marc got two goals in Pittsburgh, getting Marc's beaming face on skype and congratulating him through that, if not in person.

  Tells Marc where he hid the glasses when Marc sends him a sad text about losing a pair already, and gets another beaming face, this time a quick snap on his phone with a pair of the aforementioned glasses on his face, sends so many texts back and forth that he ends up calling the phone company to upgrade his plan to unlimited texting.

  It should be fine. They dealt with longer periods apart and less contact during the summer, but the summer had a deadline, and then they both just assumed—well, Marc did and Dan hoped—that it'd be back to inseparability once the season began. But this time there's no end date, no instant solution, and so it settles beneath Dan's skin and stays there.

  After yet another Saturday matinee game in which they eke out a narrow win over Rochester, Sarah drags him out to a house party she claims is celebrating his win, but Dan can pretty much guarantee she, Dan, and that suddenly ever present boyfriend are the only ones who even know there was a game to be won. The boyfriend's name is Sean but Dan refuses to remember the name of anyone who could be gone any second, wears his pants tighter than Marc does, and unlike Marc doesn't actually have the ass to hold them up. Dan prefers to have him remain nameless.

  Dan sticks to his sister like a burr until she starts getting a little too cuddly with what's-his-face, and then he flees to find a beer, because even though the thought of his sister actually with anyone ever makes him want to hit the hard alcohol, he is a responsible young man. He's sorting through a mess of obscure micro-brews, trying to find a label he actually recognizes, when he notices Alex. And why shouldn't he be there? Even though Sarah hasn't been talking much about him lately Dan should have figured she was still friends with him, she just wasn't rubbing it in his face like she did when she was still mad at Dan for breaking up with him. Now she's Team Marc all the way, calls him the little brother she never had, because she's awful, but of course her and Alex are still friends.

  Dan hasn't seen him since that morning after, and he was too wrapped up in self-pity at the time to feel too guilty, but he does now, so he redoubles his efforts to find a beer he can feel safe drinking, finally gives in and grabs Guinness even though he hates it, because at least he knows it's actually beer. Dan plays oblivious for awhile, and assumes Alex does too, because it's a freaking house party, it's not actually that big a space, but after awhile Alex comes to stand beside him and they both lean against the wall in the living room, not looking at each other. Finally Alex says, "Okay, this is weird, but Sarah's glaring at us, so. Friends?"

  Dan looks over to see his mouth quirk, follows Alex's gaze to where Sarah is indeed eyeballing them, and laughs.

  "Yeah," he says.

  The party's kind of a wash, so Alex and him catch up on classes and 'career', and other things they mutually don't understand about one another. Dan doesn't mention Marc because Dan doesn't know how to mention Marc, and Alex doesn't ask about him, and around when they've run out of things to talk about Sarah's coming over, Tight-Pants in tow, and suggesting they get out of there.

  They hit up a bar around campus, cheap drinks and cheap food and light low enough that you can barely see whoever you're about to stumble home with. Dan looks around, sees enough bros that it makes him a little nervous, and tugs his baseball hat further down.

  "You big baby," Sarah says, "don't make me take that hat away."

  "What's going on?" Oblivious Boy Toy asks, and Sarah snorts.

  "He's afraid of paparazzi," she says. "Or frat boys. Whichever."

  "Well, I mean, you're an also-ran, they can't care that much, can they?" Alex asks.

  Dan has no idea what that means, but he's pretty sure it was mean, judging from the innocent look on Alex's face and t
he way Sarah smacks his arm, looking half disapproving and half like she wishes she'd thought of it.

  Dan splits a pitcher of beer he actually recognizes with Sarah, while God Who Did Your Hair Like That gets a gin and tonic because of course he does, and Alex gets some fancy Belgian beer because he's Alex. After a couple drinks he finally lets Sarah steal his Raptors hat, dropping it on her own head, and after their second pitcher when Apparently Has To Work Tomorrow heads out, he lets Sarah tuck herself onto his side of the booth with him and Alex, leaning on him.

  "Better?" Sarah asks, and Dan doesn't bother asking what she means, because he finally feels loose enough that he can breathe.

  "Better," he confirms.

  *

  The next morning (or wait, afternoon), he wakes up to a low-grade headache and a text from Marc. Forgotten me already? Mark sends, with a link to a Leafs blog that Dan clicks with some trepidation, as he's well aware it focuses on who they're supposedly fucking and just about nothing else. Stevens was a godsend for that blog. They must be missing him if they're blogging about Dan. "Riley After Lapointe's Girl?" it asks, mentions how he's been attached at the hip to her, and Dan furrows his brow, because the only girl he was cuddling up to last night was —

  "Agh!" Dan says when he scrolls down to the picture, only managing not to throw his phone due to sheer strength of will, and two hours later Sarah calls him crying, she's laughing so hard.

  *

  Their schedules intersect for a whole day, a day where Dan's miraculously free while Marc plays a home game. Marc wrangles Dan a seat for the game from management, platinum section, probably by flashing his baby blues, so Dan gets the uncomfortable in-between, breathing in the smell of ice, the smell that's pure arena, listening to the skate blades and the slap of stick against puck, and still not being close enough, not nearly close enough.

  He waits in the tunnel after the game, a crummy 4-1 loss against Vancouver, and gets some shoulder slaps and bro hugs when the boys come out. Marc's one of the last out, stuck explaining that mess of a game to the media, and he looks worn out but he lights up when he sees Dan waiting for him.