You Could Make a Life

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  They get out of the cab, head up, but Dan's been pissed the whole way, and now he's changed his mind. They're talking about it. "Tonight was supposed to be Sarah's night," he says.

  Sarah clearly got a kick out of it, because she continues to be evil, but even if she hadn't, Dan can't imagine Marc would have acted much differently. "Maybe we could have done without the histrionics."

  "Big word," Marc says, that smile pulling at the corners of his mouth that means he's making fun of Dan.

  Dan knows it because it's something Sarah accused him of during his rookie year—he looked it up and then promptly denied it, because bullshit, but he could do without the mockery.

  "For someone who said I wasn't stupid when I didn't understand neopatism or whatever, you don't seem to believe that yourself," Dan snaps, and the smile drops.

  "Dan," he starts, and then, like he can't help himself, "Nepotism."

  "Wow, okay," Dan says. "I'm going to go sleep in your room."

  "I will sleep there," Marc says.

  "Fine," Dan says. He's not going to argue it—the mattress in the room they share is better, and it's not like Dan was the ass all night.

  "Dan," Marc says, before Dan reaches their room. "I know you are not stupid."

  "Congrats," Dan says, and shuts the door behind him.

  He's still pissed, and awake with it, wants another beer but knows that's probably a bad idea. His phone's flashing at him, and he has texts from Sarah, still laughing at him, and from Alex, a simple Sorry I was a dick tonight., which is more than Marc said.

  no worries Dan sends back. marc was 2. at least u didnt say i was stupid

  Yeah that was a dick move., Alex sends back. No freckles to be found either.

  Dan laughs. sry abt him tho, Dan sends.

  No worries., Alex shoots back at him, and now that Dan thinks about it, Alex is where he learned it. I like ya anyway.

  next time i wont bring marc, Dan sends, and gets a smiley in response.

  Marc's apologetic the next morning—the fact he's making breakfast is a pretty clear sign of that, because while he is without a doubt the better cook of the two of them, he's much more likely to get lazy and opt for something he can make in a minute.

  Dan's not really the type to hold onto his anger for the sake of holding onto it, and he's certainly not the type to turn down an apology omelette, so it's basically settled by the time they're finished breakfast. So long as Marc and Alex like, never ever meet again, for the sake of Dan's mental health, because there's basically nothing worse than watching two people you care about argue. Maybe it's like the opposite of Marc and Larsson—Marc and Alex are too alike to ever get along. He'll keep that theory to himself, though, because the last thing he needs is Marc reverting back to sullen.

  "You have terrible judgement, my friend," Larsson tells him, next practice, and Dan gives him the finger in return, but other than that, it's mostly forgotten, he thinks. He has his Marc and Sarah nights, now including more and more Larsson, where they go all film critic and Dan gets lost and makes the popcorn, and he has his Alex and Sarah nights, which tend to involve a couple drinks, some of Sarah and Alex's mutual friends, jokes about hockey at Dan's expense, and whatever tight pants hipster Sarah is dating currently. There was one guy who wore normal jeans and worked in civil service. Dan actually liked him. He didn't last long, unfortunately. At this point Dan thinks Sarah might be picking assholes on purpose.

  There's a comfortable rhythm to the season, a routine. Sarah nights, and Tremblay TV watching nights, and Pazuhniak club nights, and Buchanan family dinner nights, and Marc nights, of course, though every night ends up being one, sharing a room on the road and sharing a bed at home. But even when he's doing the exact same things he did last season or the season before, it's better, because they're winning. Him and Tremblay have run out of The Office and have moved on to 30 Rock, Dan has to take the subway to Buch's when he's invited for dinner, and Pazuhniak is now exclusively shopping brunettes in Dan's direction, like he thinks he had a breakthrough, but everything is the same, when it comes down to it, except that he comes home to Marc now. Also the winning thing. Dan likes that too.

  When the season's wrapping up, it's almost a surprise, because it feels so much shorter when he's not down, waiting to get the shoulder tap, when he's not pining, quietly going out to get fucked up in order to feel better. They make the playoffs by a huge margin, for once, second place in the East, first in their division.

  "I mean it," Dan says to Marc before their last game of the season. They're already in, and Ottawa's already out, so this is just a reputation game, and Dan can hear the Leafs crowd all the way in the dressing room, knows, from experience, that Leafs fans are taking up at least half of the Canadian Tire Centre. He did that trip as a kid—it's cheaper to buy the ticket and do the drive and get accommodations in Ottawa than it is to buy a ticket in Toronto, and you get the bonus of pissing off a lot of Ottawans.

  "Mean what?" Marc asks distractedly, watching Tremblay get into some sort of slap fight with Pazuhniak.

  "This is our year," Dan says, "we're getting it this year."

  Tremblay disentangles himself from Pazuhniak, coming over and smacking Dan upside the head.

  "Ow," Dan says mildly.

  "Don't jinx us before we even get started," Tremblay says, then, chasing an escaping Pazuhniak, "Pazuhniak, you're not off the hook!"

  "I don't believe in jinxes," Dan tells Marc.

  "No?" Marc asks. "But you believe in us."

  "Yeah," Dan says. "Just wait, Marc. We got this."

  Marc doesn't even correct him with 'have'. Dan takes that as agreement.

  viii. you are not alone in this

  When they're caught, Dan's a restricted free agent, Marc's in the middle of cementing a 64 million dollar deal, and they've just won the Stanley Cup.

  Dan isn't on the ice when they win it, not even on the bench, is on the sidelines in a suit and tie and walking cast, and he has to wait until they roll out the carpet before he can even join the team so he doesn't break his ankle in even more places slipping and sliding on the ice. He's hastily pulled his jersey on over his dress shirt, been handed a winners' cap, and Marc seemingly ignores whatever order they're supposed to be handing the Cup off in, because he when he gets it he skates right up to Dan, Stanley Cup outstretched, looking like he wants to kiss Dan right on the mouth, screaming arena worth of fans be damned.

  Dan takes it, regretful that he can't do the lap around the ice, cold metal in his palms, but then Larsson and Tremblay show up, grabbing him in a tight hold and taking off with him before he can protest, so that Dan's half laughing, half terrified his linemates are going to drop him on the ice as they skid around with him, that he'll break the rest of himself and the freaking Cup in the process, while the whole building echoes around him with cheers.

  He gives it to Tremblay once he's landed with both feet back on the carpet, and Marc skates right back up to him, so fast that Dan can barely catch him as he barrels face first into Dan's chest. It isn't anything everyone else isn't already doing, the whole team an orgy of hugs, their faces lighting up as their families hit the ice, so Dan just holds onto Marc until his mom shows up, and then lets her grab both of them, hauling them in.

  Dan loses track of who he's hugging, who he has in his arms, Marc's mom tugging him down so she can take his face in her hands, kissing him firmly on both cheeks, Marc's father patting him on the back, Marc's little brother giving him some kind of complicated bro handshake Dan thinks he messes up on his end. Sarah's latched on to Marc and won't let go, so that when he skates over to his dad she gets pulled along behind him in her sneakers like a kid being towed along in a sled, which is not going to halt the never-ending gossip about their torrid love affair. Dan's pretty sure she's crying, but she'd kill him if he mentioned it, so he pretends he doesn't see it. Besides, his own cheeks are wet. He doesn't remember crying, though he must have, but hell, half the people on the ice are crying, and there's no shame
in it.

  They win it at home, so when they leave the locker room, sticky with champagne and grinning so hard it hurts, they're greeted like heroes, a crush around them that isn't claustrophobic because it's so euphoric, Dan getting an arm around his mom, his sister, losing track of Marc in the crowd but unconcerned because they're all going to end up in the same place.

  That place is a bar down the block, first, and most of the parents peel off to leave them to getting drunk, though no one explains that to Dan's parents. Buchanan tipping a bottle of Veuve Cliquot into Dan's mom's mouth while Kelly and Dan's dad cheer her on is almost enough to wipe the grin off Dan's face, but not quite. When last call rolls around the staff looks genuinely sad to obey the law, and the remaining family and hangers-on head home while the team, along with assorted wives, girlfriends, and annoying big sisters (Dan's not naming names), head over to the owner's mansion, where the doors sit wide open, the lights are on in every room, and the kitchen is stocked with enough booze that it actually puts the bar to shame.

  It's three in the morning before Marc finds him again, while Dan is staring with vague horror over at Tremblay, who appears to be chatting up Sarah. "Come on," Marc says, wraps a hand in Dan's shirt, taking the beer out of his hand and then promptly finishing it himself, the brat.

  "What?" Dan asks, drunk and dazed, as Marc tugs at him. "No wait, I need to supervise this."

  Marc laughs at him and tugs harder, until Dan reluctantly follows, clomping behind him until Marc pulls him into a dim hallway, pushes him against the wall.

  "No fucking way," Dan warns, not drunk enough. Never going to be. It isn't as much of a secret as it was — Larsson keeps walking in on them, to his loud dismay, and Dan is almost positive Buchanan at least suspects, but it still isn't in a semi-public hallway open, Jesus, Marc.

  "We won the Stanley Cup," Marc says, and Dan doesn't know if that's an argument for it or just a deliriously happy statement of fact, but it's effective enough that he lets Marc tug him down for a kiss. He pulls back after a minute, and Marc lets him, just drops his forehead against Dan's shoulder, fists his hands in Dan's shirt, and holds on.

  They stay like that longer than they should, Dan's hand coming up to card through Marc's hair, tangled and sticky with the champagne that's coating everyone. "Want to go home?" Marc asks.

  "No," Dan argues, but Marc's already leading him by the wrist. "No, I have to go save Sarah."

  "Sarah does not want to be saved," Marc sing-songs, and pushes him into one of the town cars sitting outside, waiting to take them all home.

  They're too drunk to do anything coordinated when they get back to their apartment, Dan fumbling with the keys, then his belt, Marc's belt, everything much more complicated than he remembers it usually being. They get off fast, and Marc manages to bully him into the shower to wash the booze off before they hit the sheets.

  The next day Dan feels almost too hungover to live, but there's plenty more champagne at a team brunch, and hair of the dog is an effective cure.

  'Hair of the dog is an effective cure' becomes the team motto that week. Dan spends unspeakable amounts of time vomiting, wanting to curl up and die, and drunk off his face. There doesn't seem to be any other state of being except asleep, or passed out, more accurately. He's amazed no one falls off the bus during the parade, amazed that neither babies nor the Stanley Cup are dropped. He should be amazed that he is charmed when he wakes up alone one morning only to find Marc asleep on the bathroom floor, head resting on the toilet seat, but he's been gone on Marc since their rookie year, so he's resigned to it by now.

  By the end of the week they've pulled themselves together, more or less, everyone splitting up and heading home, though Marc sticks around the city, in and out of meetings with his agent, Toronto's management, trying to nail down a deal before the trading really opens up. Toronto's so desperate to keep Marc that Dan's pretty sure half the city would cry if he left, not to mention management.

  He updates Dan on it while poking dubiously at the dinner Dan's set out for him (Dan's trying to grow as a person, okay, he can manage to feed them both without ordering in), and they're looking at eight years, locked down until he's almost thirty. It's the niggly things that need to be set—Toronto wants ten years from him, wants to pay him seven million a year while Marc's agent is loudly demanding nine, to Marc's evident embarrassment, want to secure him in some spokesperson deals, the kind Marc avoids like the plague. The nuances of Marc's no-trade clause are still being hammered out, his agent pushing for a no-movement clause as well.

  "If I don't get re-signed, will you be my sugar daddy?" Dan asks, only half kidding, and Marc scowls at him, because yeah, that's been looming. Dan got called in to make a list of the six teams he wouldn't be willing to go to ('anywhere Marc isn't' is not an applicable option, unfortunately). Stanley Cup teams tend to purge, after, and Dan's cheap, is fine with taking less than he'd get somewhere else if he can stick around, has made that abundantly clear, but the management system is something that Dan has never understood and never will, so there's nothing close to a guarantee.

  "My agent would not let me put you in my contract," Marc says.

  "Marc, seriously?" Dan asks. Marc's agent is well aware of them, glares at Dan every time he sees him like he's a thorn in his side, and has a more than a contingency list for Marc in case of worst case scenarios — he has a binder. This is not going to further endear Dan to him.

  Marc shrugs sullenly, manages one bite of Dan's slaved over meal before he nudges his food around his plate like that'll convince Dan he's actually eating it. Dan has to admit, it's not the most appealing thing he's ever looked at. Or smelled. He's sort of reluctant to taste it.

  "I'll order Korean," Dan says, giving in, scooping up their plates and leaning down to press a kiss to Marc's temple for at least taking a bite of it, which was more than Dan was willing to do.

  *

  The next day Marc's in a closed door meeting with his agent, the GM, a few lawyers, determined to hammer out the sticking points, send back an amended contract that makes everyone happy. Their phones are all on silent, if not off, and that's the only positive when the news blows up.

  The sad thing is it isn't paparazzi, or someone who snuck a peek. It's just some poor friend or girlfriend of one of their teammates who uploaded all the pictures she took the night of the Cup to a photo sharing site without looking closely enough at their contents. Or the contents of one in particular, a smiling group of girls, and then in the background, half out of focus, Marc pressing Dan into the wall, that momentary lapse where Dan gave in and kissed him. Someone with sharp eyes had noticed, then it'd been picked up by social media, and by the end of the hour the photo had been deleted from her account, but has been plastered everywhere in the meantime.

  It's pretty indisputably Dan. It's him that's facing the camera, for one, and the cast makes a convincing argument for anyone in doubt. But it could be almost any guy kissing him. Marc's hair is more brown than blond in the dim-lit hallway, height common, face hidden. He'd shucked his sodden dress shirt somewhere between the bar and the mansion, and was down to a white t-shirt and black dress pants, so even clothes won't nail him. This is important, because this is what his agent lays out for him, calling when it's still more of a tremor than a quake, when Dan's obliviously looking up recipes promised to be foolproof.

  She lays it out quickly, maybe lacking a binder of contingency plans, but not unable to think them up as she goes. Denial's pointless with that many pictures of him taken that night, the same clothes, the stupid fucking cast. It's too late to manage the flow of information. Any other year, he could leave it without comment and hope he was low-profile enough for it to die down, but this is a Cup year, and no one on the roster is low-profile, even if they broke their ankle in the third series. There are two options — he and Marc could come out, hope for the best, or.

  "Or?" Dan asks, heart in his throat.

  "Or you could release a statement, confirm it's you, but say
it's no one special. A casual relationship, maybe, or a hook-up. Leave Marc out of it," his agent says.

  Dan thinks about Marc, polishing up that eight year contract, poised to become the face of the franchise, the spokesperson. Marc at the top of his career, about as high-profile as they come. Thinks about the fact Dan was allowed to make a list of six places he wouldn't go, instead of twenty-nine. "How long will it take you to make the statement?" he asks, finally.

  "Are you sure about this?" his agent asks, suddenly not matter-of-fact, almost gentle. "You don't want to talk to Marc first?"

  "No," Dan says, feeling numb. "I want you to release a statement."

  *

  He stays on the phone with her as she drafts it, makes corrections where they're needed, only hangs up when she's assured him she's already sent it out to the media. It's barely been two hours since the picture was posted.

  His phone had buzzed with call-waiting the entire time he listened to her, and now he stares down at seventeen missed calls, too many texts. Two of those calls are from Marc's agent, three are from Marc, so he guesses it had been too much to hope that they hadn't heard yet.

  His mom calls while he's still staring blankly down at his phone, and he picks up by reflex, puts it to his ear, can't even manage hello.

  "Oh sweetheart," she says, and then just sits quietly on the other end with him for a minute when he can't find anything to say.

  "Marc loves you," she says finally. "And right now he can do no wrong. It's the best time for this to come out."

  Dan scrubs his hand over his face, rough, explains the game plan falteringly.

  This time the silence feels ominous instead of sympathetic. "Have you talked to Marc about this?" she asks.

  "He was in a meeting," Dan says. It's a feeble excuse.

  "Daniel," she says.

  "It's too late anyway, and it's not his fucking choice, is it?" Dan snaps, then, immediately guilty, "Sorry."

  "Talk to Marc," she says, clipped, and then softer, "I love you."