He’s a fucking idiot.
Chapter Three
Blake doesn’t get to play his first NHL game until the end of his second season with the franchise.
The season flew by, game after game, some of which he spent on the bench, some of which he missed because of a groin injury. When he was in net, he won more games than he lost, had a pretty nice streak going for a while, and then it’s April all of a sudden. Blake gets called up for the last game of the regular season because the Knights’ backup goalie is sick, and since the Knights have already clinched their playoff spot and can’t move up or down in the standings, they put Blake in goal.
He’s in goal. For his NHL team.
When they first called him up last season, he couldn’t wear his usual 31, because that one’s taken by the Knights’ backup, so Blake wears 33. He only thought of Elliot for a second when he made his choice and doesn’t think of him now that he’s pulling on the jersey, doesn’t think of Elliot wearing number three, or of Elliot kissing him before games, always three times, because three is the luckiest number. It’s not about Elliot, it’s about the numbers. He thought it might help if he felt like the universe was on his side.
They’re playing against the Minnesota Bears, who could definitely use two points, so Blake will be facing their regular roster. He’d lie if he said he wasn’t scared shitless, even though all that’s being asked of him is that he’ll do his very best. In the standings, nothing will happen if they lose and nothing will happen if they win.
Things aren’t looking so great when he gets scored on 35 seconds into the game.
Renwick skates over after and gives him a tap with his stick. It’s an apology, because the D sort of left him hanging there, and it’s an encouragement at the same time. They have over 59 minutes left on the clock, that’s plenty of time for the Knights to score. Blake does what he can, keeps the door shut for another ten minutes, then the Bears strike again on a breakaway.
Blake glances at the bench to see if Coach is going to pull him. Nope. It’s only two goals after all. He takes a deep breath and fiddles with his water bottle. The goals don’t matter. The saves matter. The game matters. He’s here right now, in his crease. All he has to do is make the next save.
That’s all there is.
The next save.
They make it to the first intermission without any more pucks getting past Blake.
Mattie shoots Blake a look across the locker room, nodding at Blake when he catches his eye. Tonight, this is Blake’s place. He belongs here, he belongs in that net. When he was a kid, everyone said he was too small and scrawny to be a goalie and then he somehow ended up being over six feet tall anyway. He grew out of spite.
Maybe he’ll win out of spite, too.
Three minutes into the second period, Paulie scores a goal and after that the rest of the guys seem to remember how to score, too. Three more Knights goals in the second, then the Bears get one back early in the third, but they never manage to tie the game. The Knights run away with the game, score one more, and then again into the empty net.
When the guys line up, patting his head and hugging him, Renwick drops a puck into his glove with a smirk, only to be practically pushed aside by Brammer, who hugs him like they just won a playoff series, bouncing up and down as he wraps his arms around Blake.
Back in the room, their equipment guy wraps some tape around his puck and writes 1st NHL WIN on it before he hands it back to Blake.
There’s hugs and pictures and interviews and even more hugs and Blake sends a picture of him and his puck to his grandma, who watched the game with her sister back home in Connecticut, hoping that she’ll figure out how to open it. He doesn’t have time to look at all the texts in his inbox, but he replies to his brother, who’s completely losing it, and he reads the text from Elliot – congrats on the win :)
It’s the first time he’s heard from him since they sent each other Merry Christmas texts over three months ago.
And that’s okay. It’s okay that they don’t talk, because it’s been months since they last actually spoke to each other and Blake is finally at a point where he’s across the river from Elliot and he doesn’t care.
He’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that he won’t have what he had with Elliot ever again. He doesn’t have much of a love life to speak of, and even that is a euphemism. His teammates try to set him up with girls often enough and Blake tries to be polite and has even gone out on a couple of dates with girls, so the guys would stop bugging him, but he never went out on a second date with any of them. There’s no point.
#
Blake flies to Los Angeles for the Draft.
His brother is projected to get drafted during the first round, so Blake first drives to Connecticut, spends a few days there, and then takes his grandma to LA with him.
There’s a good chance that Blake is even more nervous for this Draft than he was for his own two years ago. His palms are sweaty long before they even sit down at the venue and he can’t seem to stop jiggling his foot, until Evan puts his hand on Blake’s knee and says, uncharacteristically stern, “Stop, you’re making it worse.”
Evan is quieter than Blake has ever seen him, usually chewing his ear off with hockey stats and rambling about the Cardinals. Today he’s barely said a dozen words since they got up this morning.
“Do you think the Cardinals will draft Zach Goldman’s kid?” Blake asks, so he doesn’t have to sit here and wait for it to start.
Evan shrugs.
Their grandma reaches over Evan to pat Blake’s shoulder. She raised the both of them when their parents died, drove them to practices, bought their equipment, cheered them on at every game she could make it to. She still sends Blake a care package every few weeks and she probably does the same for Evan.
During the last couple of years they might have drifted apart, just a little, with them in different junior leagues, staying with different billet families, but it’s weird to think that they might end up playing against each other sometime during the next couple of years. Both of them in the NHL, both of them living their dreams.
When it’s about to start, Evan lets out a small breath.
Phoenix pick first. Then Philadelphia. Then Ottawa.
The Knights don’t get to make their pick until much later – they made it through one round of playoffs before the season was over for them. The chances that they’ll pick Evan are comparatively slim, and anyway, Evan will likely get picked up before that.
Or that’s what Blake thinks until the Seattle Sailors are making the 27th pick and Evan is still sitting next to him.
Blake can tell that Evan is starting to get anxious, because he keeps picking at his fingernails and Blake is trying extremely hard to keep himself from jiggling his leg again, because that’d make it worse for Evan, but someone should have picked him by now. Blake knows his stats. Evan went to World Juniors, he was second in points on his junior team.
Once the Sailors have left the stage, the Grizzlies make their pick, and then they’re on to the Conference Finals losers. First the Seals, then the Ravens, not because they actually made it to the Conference Finals, but because they got the pick in a trade before the Draft.
“What if I don’t get picked at all?” Evan eventually whispers to him when the Seals pick… someone else.
“You’ll get picked.”
It happens only a few minutes later when the New York Ravens make their selection and their GM finally, finally, says, “Evan Samuels.”
Blake doesn’t hear anything else, is too busy hugging Evan to pay attention. Their grandma hugs him, too, and then they send him on his way to the stage, where he’s handed a jersey and a baseball cap and he’s beaming and Blake is so proud of him that he doesn’t even realize what else this means until his phone buzzes in his pocket.
It’s a text from Elliot – can I have Evan’s number?
That’s right. Because the Ravens are Elliot’s team.
Blake sends i
t to him, as requested. He doesn’t get a reply back and isn’t exactly surprised, but when they find Evan later, he beams at them and says, “Elliot called me!” He hugs Blake again. “Jacob Desjardins, too. And Mitch Swanson sent me a text!”
“Awesome,” Blake says.
“Wow, are you actually smiling? I think you were smiling earlier, too. What’s happening?”
“Shut up,” Blake says gruffly, but he doesn’t stop smiling.
#
Before the start of his third NHL season, Elliot sort of adopts three newcomers.
They don’t move in with him and Adam, but they follow him around like ducklings during training camp. It’s not that surprising that one of them is Evan Samuels, because he remembers Elliot from when he was visiting Blake a few summers ago. It’s weird at first, to have him around, this kid who looks so much like Blake but couldn’t be any more different if he tried. He talks more, smiles more, and is generally more inclined to share information than Blake has ever been. William Isaksson, their new Swedish kid, seems to start following Evan around, and then Andreas Wagner, their new German kid, joins the New Kid Club as well.
Elliot doesn’t even notice at first, he tries to help them out, finds them places to stay, calls the bank for Andreas, because he’s scared that his English isn’t good enough, helps William with his driver’s license, gives them pointers on how to navigate the city, which places to avoid, where to go for dinner. It’s all stuff that other people did for him when he first came to New York.
He literally went through all of that, minus the language barrier, so it makes sense that he passes on what he knows.
He sits with them during lunch, because he remembers being at a total loss, not knowing where to sit, who to talk to. He’ll leave the pranking and chirping to the other guys. He doesn’t really mind that those three are basically glued to him and look at him wide-eyed when he talks about last season’s playoffs.
They got closer to the Cup than the Ravens have been in the last seven years. They didn’t make it past the first round, but the media called it a miracle. Elliot would have rather called it hard fucking work.
Elliot likes the kids. Probably because he’s a kid, too, barely older than the three of them. Evan is the youngest, Andreas almost a year older than him, and William has already played a season with the Sailors’ farm team out West and got traded to New York during the summer. William talks about Blake MacDonald, the Sailors’ Hockey Jesus, all the time and every time Elliot hears his name he thinks about his Blake, except he’s not really his Blake, not anymore. Evan doesn’t usually mention his brother and Elliot can’t decide if he’s grateful or if it’s driving him nuts.
Evan mostly talks about other players he admires and William joins in, hearts in his eyes, and Elliot can see the beginning of a wonderful friendship there. Andreas often sits next to them and looks lost because William’s English is so good that he almost talks faster than Evan and uses words that Elliot doesn’t know the meaning of, but they usually slow down quickly when they notice that Andreas isn’t following.
Their captain finds Elliot before their first preseason game and gives him a pat on the back. “Good job with the kids, Moo,” Jacob says.
“I was just trying to help,” Elliot says.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying,” Jacob replies and hands him a jersey. “Good job with the kids.”
Elliot frowns down at the jersey, because he does have one hanging in his stall, except, when he looks at it, he notices that this one has an A on it. “I…”
“Chris, TJ and I talked about it and we talked to the coaching staff and we agreed that you deserve it,” Jacob says, so thankfully Elliot is saved from the embarrassment of being totally speechless. “So we’ll have three alternates and you guys are gonna rotate. Sound good?”
“Thank you,” Elliot says.
“Put it on, eh?”
Elliot nods and pulls it over his head and the rest of the evening is full of pats on the back and hugs and his three little ducklings are looking at him with stars in their eyes, congratulating him like he signed a 10-million-dollar contract and won the Cup at the same time. They win the game 6-1, and when Elliot falls into bed that night he still has a smile on his face.
He’s almost asleep when his phone buzzes on his nightstand. It’s been buzzing all evening with people congratulating him on that A on his jersey – apparently the news spread quickly. He didn’t even have a chance to tell his parents, they somehow already knew, must have read it on Twitter or maybe his mom was googling his name again. Elliot’s mom follows hockey news like it’s world politics and her life depends on it.
Elliot isn’t sure why he decides to open his eyes and reach out to grab his phone instead of going to sleep and answering that text tomorrow.
When he sees who it’s from his heart betrays him before his brain even has a chance to catch up, fluttering in his chest, ruining the most excellent day he’s been having. It’s a text from Blake – saw you were wearing the A tonight, congrats!
Elliot thanks him and the next time his phone buzzes he doesn’t pick it up again.
#
Blake’s third year in the NHL begins with a blur of a preseason.
He ends up on the same ice as Elliot during the second game, tries not let it throw him off and wins them the game with only one goal sneaking past him. Elliot seems to be distraught because he didn’t get to score on him and Blake almost expects a text after the game, and is only a little disappointed when he doesn’t get one.
They don’t talk during warmups. They don’t talk during the game, not that there’s a lot of time for more than a quick hello. Blake considers going to the visitors’ locker room, but then realizes that he doesn’t have more than a hello in him anyway.
He gets sent back to the AHL together with Dennis and they settle back into their apartment quickly with tons of beer and pizza. Dennis literally won’t shut up about how he can buy beer for them now and maybe drinks one too many and then falls asleep on the couch while Blake finishes the Indiana Jones movie they were watching.
It’s easy to fall back into the routine he’s known for the past two seasons and nothing too remarkable happens for a few weeks. His grandma comes by to visit and Dennis is devastated when she leaves, because she was cooking all their food. Blake doesn’t mind cooking if it’s nothing too fancy, but Dennis has managed to burn a variety of things, including pasta and milk, so Blake won’t hold it against him if he stays out of the kitchen.
Elliot scores his second career hat trick and Blake sends him a text to congratulate him.
Blake goes on a 6-game win streak and Elliot sends him a text to congratulate him.
Elliot gets invited to the All Star Game and Blake sends him a text to congratulate him.
Other than that, they don’t really hear from each other, not until both the Knights’ goalies get injured, one after the other, and suddenly Blake’s in Manhattan, on NHL ice, with his NHL team hurling pucks at him, and no one other than Elliot Cowell and his NHL team on the other side of the center line.
Blake has never played a regular season game that wasn’t on home ice. Hell, Blake has never played a regular season game that mattered as much as this one. Not with the Knights. He goes through his warmup routine and tries to settle down. Because this is just a game like any other. And he’ll do what he can. And it doesn’t matter at all who’s coming at him on the ice, doesn’t matter if it’s Elliot. All Blake has to do is make saves.
And he does, for a while. He keeps the door shut until the second period, at the end of which they’re tied at one. Could be worse.
He tunes out the crowd as best as he can during the third, tries not to listen to what they’re chanting at him and his teammates, but things start to get chippy on the ice soon, guys pushing and shoving each other, trying to draw penalties and the whistle goes and goes.
Elliot comes for him on a breakaway late in the third, and shit, he’s so fast, there’s no way for anyone
to catch up, no matter how hard they try, and somehow, through some sort of miracle, Blake gets his stick on it and it deflects up into the netting. The others catch up when the whistle has already gone and there’s some more pushing and shoving and yelling behind Blake’s net.
Blake doesn’t want to get too involved, but Elliot is at the sidelines, holding on to one of Blake’s teammates, and Blake can’t help himself, he has to poke Elliot in the back of the neck with his stick. Very gently. Just a little tickle. Elliot spins around, eyes narrowed, ready to pounce, but only until he realizes that Blake is the culprit. Blake gets a masterful eye-roll in return.
Elliot is distracted soon enough, giving the refs an earful when they start escorting guys from both teams to the penalty boxes, because the Ravens have apparently never done anything wrong in their lives. They end up playing 4-on-4, but the clock runs down with the game still tied.
The Knights lose it in OT, but Blake is still sent off the ice with his teammates patting his back.
The Ravens give him third star of the game for his 37 saves.
When he’s asked why he was bugging Elliot, Blake says, “I was saying hello to an old friend. We used to play together.”
saying hello my ass, Elliot texts him a few hours later.
Blake doesn’t reply, only smiles about it and pulls the sheets up to his chin and goes to sleep.
He’s staying at Mattie’s house, so he knows when Mattie is ready to come back. Blake is happy for him when it turns out to be a quick recovery, loses another game and then wins two with the team in the meantime, then he gets pulled aside after practice one day.
“Blake,” Coach says and he’s making a face that Blake has never seen before, which probably means it’s not a good one.
“You’re sending me down?” Blake guesses. He doesn’t get it. Koivu had to have surgery and is on IR, so even with Mattie back in the lineup, they’re going to need a backup. He was playing well.
“You’ve been great for us,” Coach says, “but we need you to play more games, and you’re not going to play those here with Mattie back in the lineup.”
Three Is The Luckiest Number Page 3