Thrown Off the Ice

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  “So Liam’s moving in with me,” Mike says, when they’ve exhausted the topics of Tom and his girlfriend and their son, which takes awhile, because his mom’s completely besotted with her grandkid. Good thing too, because it looks like he’s the only one she’s getting. Mike’s sure as shit not providing her any, and Tom and Amber both seem content with Sam. Or, in the words of Tom, “I love him, but fuck if I’m having another. I’m going to be catching up on sleep for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s quite a step,” his mom says. She doesn’t sound particularly surprised. Mike’s trying not to take offense.

  “Well,” Mike says. “He would have been sticking around all the time anyway. Just seemed like the most efficient solution.”

  “Efficient,” she says.

  “Yeah,” Mike says.

  “Most people don’t ask someone to move in with them because it’s efficient,” his mom says.

  “I do,” Mike says.

  “Not because you want him to live with you or anything,” she says.

  “Well,” Mike says. “He’d be sticking around all the time anyway, so—”

  “So it’s efficient,” she says.

  “Exactly,” Mike says, and pretends he doesn’t hear her laughing at him.

  “I’m happy for you,” his mom says, and Mike asks about her gardening just to change the damn subject.

  Chapter 24

  Liam takes to the North Stars with unsurprising alacrity.

  The kid never had any trouble making friends on the Oilers, even when he spent half his time trotting at Mike’s heels, and from what Mike gathered, he was close to a few of the Red Wings, got along well enough with everyone else. Mike imagines anyone who didn’t immediately like the kid buckled to the sheer brute force of his personality, those oddly charming moments when he was actively trying to be annoying but landed on endearing instead. Everyone’s little brother, Jacobi said, and that was true enough, except, Mike supposes, in Mike’s case.

  Liam bounces his way through training camp, somehow still having enough energy at the end of the day to needle Mike. Training camp’s sure as shit one of the things Mike doesn’t miss about hockey, though you wouldn’t be able to tell, looking at Liam, how fucking draining it is. Mike sometimes wonders if he has emergency reserves of energy to keep himself bouncing along like the Energizer Bunny long after everyone else is on the verge of collapse.

  Liam makes the team, which isn’t much of a surprise. Makes the first line, which is more of one, because Mike’s pretty sure they signed him as a second-line center. But either that streak of genius in the playoffs hasn’t run itself out, or Liam’s finally reached his potential, because once the season starts, Mike can tell he deserves that spot, even from listening to the radio broadcasts. The North Stars aren’t the team the Red Wings were, a team almost guaranteed to make the postseason every year, but Liam might take them to that point, grit his teeth and do it single-handedly if he has to.

  He’s a force of nature. Mike knows that better than anyone.

  Liam likes it in St. Paul, which Mike guesses is good. He likes his team. He fits in well. He even gets a good winter coat after Mike pushes him enough times.

  Liam’s team is objectively ridiculous, caught up in a bunch of petty shit that sounds more like Juniors than anything, or maybe high school, though the two are often one and the same. There’s apparently a rookie with a crush on a vet — a vet only a year older than Liam, which is a crazy fucking thought — which Liam of course has to tell Mike everything about with clear relish.

  Fuck, Mike feels for Novak. If that rookie of his is anything like Liam was, he’s going to have a crisis on his hands sooner rather than later.

  More often than not, Liam’s coming home and telling him about all the ridiculous fucking drama that’s happening around him. He’s got such an inside track on it Mike’s wondering if he’s taken up spying. Probably not: he’d be caught in two seconds flat. Pestering information out of people though, Mike can absolutely see that.

  Mike can’t think of any team he played on ever approaching the drama that Liam gleefully tells him about, and Mike’s torn between thinking Liam’s exaggerating it, or that he’s a catalyst. Fuck knows life on the Oilers got a lot more dramatic for Mike when Liam strolled onto the roster.

  *

  It’s a mere four months into the season when Liam takes him aside, looking serious for once.

  “You cool with me telling the guys I have a boyfriend?” Liam asks, and then before Mike can say anything, “I live with you, telling me I’m not your boyfriend is actively deluded at this point, Michael.”

  Mike gives him the finger, but he really has no rebuttal there. Mike’s sure as shit not going to be calling anyone his boyfriend — it sounds like a word you should toss after high school — lover makes him want to gag, and partner puts a formal spin on things that makes him uncomfortable, so he’s got nothing. He’d prefer to go without labels entirely, but it’s not like Liam’s wrong.

  “Not comfortable with your team knowing about me,” Mike says. He knows some of the older guys, never played with any, but played against them. Hell, that last fight, the one that finally knocked his head permanently askew, that was against one of the North Stars, though he hasn’t mentioned it to Liam, hopes Liam never realizes if he hasn’t already. Novak’s one of the guys Liam gravitated to the quickest — apparently he likes the enforcers even when he isn’t trying to fuck ‘em — and Mike doesn't want to spoil that. Not Novak’s fault that was the final straw, but Mike doubts Liam would see it that way.

  “I wouldn’t tell them about you, exactly,” Liam says. “Like, is it cool if I just…let them know I have a boyfriend? Not that it’s the infamous Mike Brouwer?”

  Time for the fucking finger again.

  “S’your prerogative,” Mike says, though he doesn’t like it. Doesn’t matter if he likes it or not, though, because he doesn’t have the right to tell Liam to keep his life quiet unless it’s the parts of his life that directly include Mike. And it technically does, but if he’s not attaching Mike’s name to his that gets into grayer area, and Mike refuses to be the kind of controlling shithead that dictates what Liam is or isn’t allowed to do like he’s got any valid claim on him. He saw enough of that growing up.

  “That mean yes?” Liam asks, and Mike knows, he fucking knows Liam understood him the first time.

  “That’s a yes,” Mike says anyway, since Liam seems intent on making Mike say it outright. “But if it backfires on you, don’t come crying to me.”

  “It won’t,” Liam says confidently. Mike wonders what that’s like, trusting everyone around you to accept you exactly as you are. Nice, he bets, right up until it isn’t true.

  Liam’s determined at breakfast the next morning, because once he’s decided on something, of course he’s got to do it right away. Mike guesses it’s better that Liam’s doing it at home so he can escape at the end of the day if it all goes to shit, but, honestly, he wishes he wasn’t doing it at all. Not his business, though. Well, sort of his business. Not his choice.

  Mike’s restless all day. Anxious, maybe, though the word doesn’t quite fit. The world isn’t all rosy like Liam acts like it is, and Mike wishes the kid would realize that, but at the same time, he doesn’t. At the same time, he wants to hurt anyone who’d undermine Liam’s effortless faith in things working out, even when that person is him. Especially when that person is him.

  He tries to listen to the radio coverage of Liam’s game, but it’s hard not to get distracted from it, wondering if Liam’s told them yet — probably, in fact, almost definitely, because after the game’s no time to do it, what with reporters hanging around and everyone heading off at different times. They win — Liam goes pointless, but he had two points last game, so no one’s going to say shit, probably, but maybe he couldn’t get on the board because he was distracted, or upset, or —

  Mike jumps up from the couch when he hears Liam’s key in the lock, wonders if him comi
ng straight home is a bad sign. The North Stars often go out after a win at home, and Liam joins them sometimes, sometimes doesn’t, so it’s not like it’s unusual for Liam to be home early, but —

  Mike sits back down, doesn’t want to look like he’s been actively waiting for him, because he wasn’t. Doesn’t want to look anxious, because he isn’t.

  Liam flips off the light in the hallway — Mike drilling energy conservation into his head has apparently started to show results — and comes into the living room, presumably to do the same.

  “You’re up,” Liam says, sounding surprised. It’s not that late, but Mike is admittedly usually in bed when Liam gets home, if not sleeping.

  “Anyone give you shit?” Mike asks.

  Liam shrugs. “Nope,” he says. “I mean, except about the fact that I wouldn’t tell them anything about my boyfriend other than that I had one. Apparently I was being ‘suspiciously secretive’.”

  What is it with hockey players and treating privacy like a foreign fucking concept, Mike wants to know.

  “Wait, are you still up because you were worried about me?” Liam asks.

  “Going to bed,” Mike says.

  “That’s so sweet,” Liam says, following him up the stairs like an annoyingly gleeful shadow. “You’re so sweet.”

  “You want to sleep in the bed too, you might want to stop there,” Mike says.

  “You are probably the only person alive who would make someone sleep on the couch for calling them sweet,” Liam says.

  Mike shrugs a shoulder. Could be, but if Liam keeps it up he’s going to have to deal with the couch murdering his back all night. Well, they have a guest room, so no, but the threat’s there.

  “I don’t know why you were worried,” Liam says, after they’ve undressed and gotten into bed.

  Mike would deny he was worried at all — worried isn’t the word, even, maybe just tense. Except the fact that Liam can’t even imagine something like that backfiring, imagine that anyone could have an issue with him being gay in the hyper-masculine environment of hockey, that’s absolutely incomprehensible to Mike.

  “It’s 2023, Mike,” Liam says, when he says as much. “Players have been out for over ten years now, and that’s just to the public. I was thirteen freaking years old when Riley and Lapointe came out.”

  And Mike was twenty-five, the same age as Liam is now. Christ, if Liam wanted to make Mike feel old, it worked.

  “What’s the point you’re trying to make here?” Mike asks.

  “People are over this,” Liam says, all big eyed and earnest, like he truly believes that.

  “They’re really not,” Mike says.

  “No one gave me shit,” Liam says. “Not even a little bit.”

  “Good,” Mike says. Or he’d have to — well, be furious about it. Not much else he could do.

  “So you don’t have to go knocking any heads together, okay?” Liam says.

  Mike could do that too, he supposes.

  No one saying anything to Liam’s face doesn’t really mean much, Mike knows. Doesn’t mean they aren’t saying shit behind his back, doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking shit, doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t going to flinch away from a hug or feel self-conscious in the locker room when they strip to their skivvies. Doesn’t mean, contrary to Liam’s belief, that they don’t care.

  Still, Mike guesses it’s something. And Liam’s happy right now, happy enough that it’s obvious that despite the blase way he approached it, he was worried it wouldn’t work out, that someone would say shit, make it a thing. And maybe they will, maybe that’s coming, but right now, Mike doesn’t see the harm in letting Liam be happy for a night.

  *

  It’s an objectively stupid moment that Mike realizes he’s going to be stuck with Liam for the rest of his life.

  They’re doing the crossword, Liam reading out the questions and carefully filling the small boxes in pencil when Mike gives him an answer. Liam’s feet are tucked under Mike’s thighs, because they get cold easily, and he’s wearing an old button up of Mike’s that doesn’t fit Mike anymore — Mike is firmly ignoring his expanding girth, because it’s fucking depressing — but sure as shit doesn’t fit Liam, who’s drowning in it. Still, he looks good, the way he always does in Mike’s clothes. The pencil’s scored up by imprints of his teeth, since he keeps sticking it in his mouth when both of them get stumped, no matter how many times Mike tells him to quit it.

  Mike looks over at him, so pleased he knew the answer to the capital of Idaho without even asking Mike, and he doesn’t look anything like that kid that stubborned his way into Mike’s bed. Or he does: still has those big blues Mike’s always been helpless in the face of, still practically vibrates with contained energy, still smaller than just about everyone in the league. Still has the best ass Mike’s ever seen.

  But he’s built like a cannonball now, which is fitting, considering that’s the way he lives, smashing through every obstacle in his path. He’s finally capable of growing facial hair without looking like he just rubbed some dirt on his face, and he's predictably negligent about shaving it, so Mike ends up with stubble burn in the weirdest places. He’s got the start of lines around his eyes, which isn’t surprising considering how much he fucking smiles.

  This is the shit no one tells you about when they talk domesticity: Liam mispronouncing a former NFLer’s name and bitching about the American bias to the crossword, like it’s not a fucking American newspaper they’re reading, scratching out each question with a cheerful and determined flick of his wrist when they get the answer.

  They don’t tell you that somehow your idiot housemate will break the dishwasher not once but twice in the first six months he’s living with you, that the rookies on his team will make a game of trying to figure out who he’s dating, because he won’t tell them; it’s probably the only thing he won’t, chronic oversharer that he is. That you’ll make gallons of potato salad for a team potluck, because no one deserves to experience Liam’s cooking.

  They don’t tell you that when you let a ridiculous teenager with more balls than sense into your bed, you aren’t getting him to leave. If Mike knew that, he never would have done anything with Liam, wouldn’t have considered it for even a second.

  It would have been a mistake.

  “What?” Liam asks, looking up from the crossword like he can feel Mike’s eyes on him.

  “Nothing,” Mike says, leaning over to press a kiss to Liam’s temple, and tries and fails to bite back a smile when Liam visibly preens at the attention.

  Chapter 25

  It’s Mike’s own goddamn fault, and he knows it.

  It’s been a few months since the docs upgraded their diagnosis of the occasional, and then less than occasional, hand tremors from ‘side effects of the meds, effect of the concussions, honestly who the fuck knows, we sure as hell don’t’, to Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s falls under the whole ‘shit, sorry your head’s fucking broken, have some more shit to deal with on top of everything else’ umbrella, but they know something about it at least, more than the rest of the shit he deals with.

  It’s obviously not particularly good news, so Mike’s resolutely ignoring the long term effects and focusing on the day to day part of it for now, the day to day part of it being the damn tremors he’s been dealing with for years, but more of them, and worse, and here to stay.

  All that to say Mike knew his hands weren’t reliable anymore, he knew the slightest tremor could get a lot bigger if he tried to do anything that required precise hand-eye coordination, but the ones he was dealing with seemed small enough to ignore, small enough that he could compensate for them if he was careful.

  The problem with cooking isn’t so much the required precision — Mike knows better than to do anything where steady hands are absolutely necessary for the recipe to turn out right — but that just about anything that isn’t some simple ass recipe calls for prep that involves knife skills. And Mike has them. Had, he’s sure as shit not
going to say, because when his hands aren’t shaking, he’s still got the precision. Problem is they’ve been shaking more and more, and sometimes he doesn’t know when they’re going to start.

  Today they start trembling hard in the middle of him chopping veg. As timing goes, it really couldn’t be fucking worse, and the knife slips right into his thumb instead of the cucumber. Mike keeps his knives sharp, and he doesn’t even feel it at first. The blood’s tracked down his hand and reached his wrist before it starts to sting, and by then there’s enough blood that he knows it’s deep.

  “Fuck,” Mike hisses, snatching the nearest dish towel and wrapping his thumb.

  “Liam?” Mike calls. The towel’s already more red than white, and his thumb’s throbbing hard with his heartbeat. He’s almost certain he needs stitches, and he probably can’t drive with the way he’s bleeding.

  “One sec,” Liam calls back.

  “Now,” Mike yells.

  “I was actually in the middle of—” Liam says as he comes into the kitchen, then goes very quiet.

  “Can you drive me to the hospital?” Mike asks. Fucking shame it’s too late to head to any walk-in clinics: they’re going to be stuck waiting hours for a couple of damn stitches.

  “What happened?” Liam asks.

  “Cut my thumb,” Mike says.

  “How?” Liam asks.

  “With a knife,” Mike says.

  “No shit,” Liam says, “I meant — I’ll get the car started.”

  Liam’s almost completely silent during the drive to the hospital — a short one, thankfully, because Mike made sure of that when he bought his place. His face is pale even under the passing streetlights, a dim orange glow to him.