Blake gets knocked over early in the second, loses a skate blade and has to get that fixed on the bench, but he’s still good to go after.
When he gets injured, Elliot isn’t out there.
Their third line is on the ice and they’re skating into the offensive zone and Crab gets tripped up by one of their own guys and he crashes right into Blake, who goes down with Crab. And Crab is quick to scramble off, but Blake is still down on the ice and the Knights are ready to kill Elliot’s entire team for touching Blake. Crab gets shoved out of the way by Brian Kelly. He bends down to talk to Blake, who seems to be saying something back.
Behind the net, there’s still some pushing and shoving, but the arena has gone quiet, all eyes on Blake.
“Is he okay?” Adam mutters. He sounds worried, even though Blake isn’t one of their own guys. No one ever wants to see anyone get seriously injured out there.
“I don’t know,” Elliot says, standing up to see better, but the Knights crowded around Blake are blocking the view.
Kelly eventually helps Blake up and gets him across the ice with Johnny Brammer, who’s saying something to Blake as they skate to the bench. Blake goes straight down the tunnel and doesn’t return.
Crab watches him go, face blotchy.
The Ravens win the game, but their celebration is subdued, and Crab in particular looks like he’s about to burst into tears, so Elliot pulls him aside before they get on the bus.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Elliot says. It really wasn’t. There’s nothing Crab could have done, unless he’d spontaneously learned how to fly. “He got up and he skated off the ice, which means it could be way worse,” Elliot goes on when Crab doesn’t say anything. What he’s telling Crab right now is what he’s been telling himself, too.
Blake made it off the ice on his own. That’s a good sign.
Elliot has been checking the Knights’ Twitter ever since the game ended, but all they posted was that Blake Samuels wouldn’t be returning to the game after getting injured in the second period. On the bus ride home, they put up another update, which is just that the Knights’ coach will be giving an update on Blake the next day after he’s been evaluated.
Crab is sitting next to Elliot on the bus, the guilt is eating him alive. Elliot doesn’t know what to tell him. That hockey is a sport where injuries happen? Crab knows that. It’s different when you’re the one who caused the injury, even though it was nothing but a freak accident.
“Let’s see what they say tomorrow,” Elliot says. Again, that one was also for himself. As much as he wants to call Blake right now, he probably wouldn’t even answer his phone and it’s not like… Well, they’ve been texting a lot since they hung out in January and they managed to grab a coffee a few weeks later, right before Elliot left for Sochi, so maybe they’re tentatively back to being friends, but it might be weird if Elliot called him today. Tomorrow is better.
Crab nods. “I hope he’s okay,” he whispers.
“I’ll give him a call tomorrow.”
“You know him?”
“We used to play together,” Elliot says.
Crab’s eyes go impossibly wide. “Can you tell him I’m really, really sorry?”
“I will,” Elliot says. “Promise.”
After that, Crab is little less upset. Elliot’s still vaguely nauseous, thinking about Blake going down.
He checks Twitter again.
Nothing.
#
“You still alive?”
“Stop,” Blake groans and picks up his TV remote to throw it at Noah, then quickly decides against it.
Noah’s fingers curl around his wrist, then the remote is removed from his hand. Blake’s on his couch and he’s pretty sure that there’s a cat on his feet, but he has his eyes closed so fuck knows.
He has a concussion because Keith Taylor decided to fucking come for his life yesterday, or at least that’s what it felt like when he barreled right into Blake. He hasn’t watched the replay because he’s not allowed to watch anything right now. Noah has watched the replay and has assured him that Taylor probably didn’t mean to plop his ass right on top of Blake’s head.
Blake is lucky, because he didn’t pass out on the ice, his symptoms aren’t severe, but he has a murderous headache and he just wants to lie here with his eyes closed and with Noah’s fingers curled around his wrist, thumb brushing slowly back and forth against his skin.
He’s pathetically glad that Noah came over. He was going to come over anyway, because Noah has the day off, just came back from a West Coast roadie last night, and they were going to hang out, and maybe that’s what they’re doing, except they’re doing it quietly, because Blake isn’t a fan of loud noises right now.
“You want anything to eat?” Noah asks, voice low. There’s a good chance that he’s had one of these before and knows what he’s doing.
“I wanna take a nap,” Blake mumbles.
“Okay, I’ll…” Noah trails off, because something’s buzzing. “Your phone, Fish.”
“Who is it?”
“Uhhh… Elliot.”
Blake sighs. Of fucking course it’s Elliot. Blake can’t really not answer. “Can you pick up?” Blake doesn’t want to open his eyes right now and he also doesn’t want to move or even talk, but he’ll spare ten seconds to tell Elliot that he’s still kicking.
“Me?” Noah asks.
“Or hand me the phone, I don’t–”
“No, I got it,” Noah says. He shifts away. “This is Blake Samuels’s personal phone answerer, how can I help you?”
“Noah,” Blake grumbles.
“Shut up, Fish.” Noah gives his arm a squeeze. “Elliot asks if you have a minute.”
“Yeah, just…” Blake squints at him and regrets it, closes his eyes again and Noah pushes the phone into his hand.
He gets up and mumbles something about Blake’s fridge. There’s nothing in there and Noah will figure that out in a few seconds, too. He’ll probably order them takeout, not that Blake is actually hungry.
“Hey,” Blake says. “Are you calling with a formal apology from your out-of-control rookie?”
“Are you okay?” Elliot asks, ignoring him.
“Concussion.”
“Yeah, we saw as much, but… How bad is it?”
“Not so bad that I won’t be able to murder your entire team during the playoffs,” Blake says. “On my own.” He regrets that sentence. It was long. Doesn’t even know if it made sense. Took it out of him. He really wants to take that nap.
“So it’s not…”
“They’re hopeful that it won’t last too long, but it’s still a concussion, so…”
There a moment of silence and Blake isn’t sure if it’s awkward or not, but then Elliot says, “Crab wanted me to tell you that he’s really sorry and that he obviously didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Tell the kid that I’ll kick his ass,” Blake mumbles.
“I…”
“No, don’t tell him that.” Blake huffs. “I’ve never been in a fight, Elliot.”
Elliot laughs. Blake would be glad to hear it if it didn’t make his head hurt even more today. “I think you could take Crab.”
“Of course I could, he’s tiny. But still. Tell him I won’t kick his ass, how’s that?”
“He’ll be so happy to hear that.”
“I’m sure,” Blake says. Shit, he’s so tired. He rolls onto his side and it doesn’t hurt so much, but his head still hurts like it did before.
“I’ll let you rest, but… Blake?”
“Hm?”
“I’m glad that you’re… well, that you’re gonna be okay.”
“Mm, hopefully.”
“We’re in town for a couple of days, in case… I don’t know, if you need anything…”
“It’s okay, I have…”
“Your personal phone answerer?” Elliot asks.
“Yeah. That.”
Blake opens his eyes long enough to hang up his phone after Elliot h
as said goodbye, then he closes them again with a groan. A moment later the couch dips, and fingers gently brush his hair back.
“’m gonna nap,” Blake says.
“I’m gonna go out and buy some food,” Noah says, fingers lingering in his hair. “Can I borrow a key?”
“Mmm.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit.”
Noah gets up, footsteps barely audible, then something soft lands on Blake. Blanket maybe. He doesn’t need a blanket, but he doesn’t tell Noah that. He’s too tired to say anything.
He’s asleep before Noah’s even out the front door.
When he wakes up, Angus is on his feet and Squid is next to his head, staring at him like he’s about to eat him, which reminds him… He’s about to start sitting up when a hand on his arm stops him.
“Where are you going?”
Noah.
“Cats need food.”
“I can do that. I think.”
“Thank you.”
“Drink some water. You want food?”
“No, I don’t know, maybe,” Blake mumbles and sits up enough that he can drink the water Noah just handed him.
“I bought soup, because I don’t know how to make soup,” Noah says.
“I don’t have the flu.”
Noah gives him a look that shuts him up quickly and then wanders off to feed the cats, who both dart away as soon as they hear the sound of food hitting their bowls in the kitchen.
Blake needs to buy Noah a present and write him a thank you note because he doesn’t mind spending his day off doing essentially nothing at Blake’s place, feeding his cats and buying him food, even though that definitely isn’t part of their deal. He returns to Blake, sits down with some space still between them, smiling down at Blake.
“He sounded really worried,” Noah remarks.
“What?”
“Elliot,” Noah says. “He sounded worried.”
“I think his rookie was scared that he killed me and that I’d come back to haunt him or something.”
Noah hums. “Poor kid. When I was still in Bridgeport, I clipped a guy’s neck with my skate and it wasn’t, like, deep or anything, but knowing that if it had been in a different spot or if it had been just a little deeper, he could have…”
“Yeah,” Blake says. He doesn’t blame the kid. Two seasons ago, he tripped up a guy with his stick, it was Remi Flaubert from the Seals, and he went into the boards head-first and he walked out of that game with a concussion, too. Blake apologized, and Flaubert turned out to be fine, is still playing.
They play hockey, they get injured.
Noah’s fingers are back in his hair and Blake can’t decide if it makes his headache better or worse.
Eventually, because he doesn’t know how to bring himself to ask Noah to hold his hand again, he plucks Noah’s fingers out of his hair and holds them and falls asleep, Noah’s hand still in his.
#
Elliot tells Crab that Blake won’t come for him the next time they see each other. All Elliot gets in response is nervous laughter, a frown and a, “He’ll be okay, though?” And Elliot tells him that Blake will be fine, because that’s what it looks like right now.
He won’t lie, he’s still worried about him, because concussions are brain injuries and even if the symptoms go away, the long-term effects can be… Elliot won’t even think about that. Blake will be okay.
Elliot goes home and his apartment is quiet – Natalie’s still out – and he curls up on the couch, because it’s high time for a nap, except his eyes keep fluttering open. Elliot is not someone who has trouble sleeping. Ever. Maybe when he has a cold. But for him it’s usually a lie down, close eyes, fall asleep kind of affair.
He thinks about the game last night.
Thinks about Blake.
About the way he sounded on the phone, exhausted, but mostly all right. And he has someone there with him, the guy who answered the phone. Whoever that might have been. Probably one of his teammates, except the Knights likely had practice this morning, just like the Ravens, so it must have been someone else.
Elliot almost wants to reach for his phone to look up the Knights’ practice schedule.
Which is ridiculous.
Maybe Blake has a boyfriend. Doesn’t have to be another player. It could be some guy. Some guy Blake met somewhere far away from the rink. Maybe at the movies, Blake always liked going to movies. Or maybe when he was playing golf. Does Blake even like golf? He likes baseball. Or at least he used to. Maybe he met a guy at that Chinese restaurant that he was telling Elliot about.
“We’ll go sometime, but not on a game day. It’s too close to the arena,” he said to Elliot when they met up in January. Elliot, in return, told him that he’d take him to a place that as the best dumplings in the world.
He squints at his phone. He’s been lying on the couch for twenty minutes and he still isn’t asleep.
Elliot groans, rolls over, and presses his face into a pillow.
It shouldn’t matter to him whether or not Blake is seeing someone, but it seems weird that Blake never mentioned it. They’ve been talking constantly for the past two months and it should have come up in a conversation. If it was serious. Maybe it’s not serious. Elliot has mentioned Natalie plenty of times and Blake said he’d love to meet her, which seemed strange to Elliot, although he didn’t say so. Blake can meet Natalie if he wants to.
His nap is shorter than usual that afternoon.
The rest of the regular season passes in the blink of an eye, like it always does in the end. They don’t end up facing each other in the first round, with the Knights staying in the second seed and the Ravens slipping into a wildcard spot.
The Ravens exit the playoffs after seven hard-fought games. The Knights play thirteen before they lose in the second round. Blake was back on the ice for the Knights, looking rock solid, but good goaltending isn’t everything. There’s so much that plays into a playoff success, circumstances beyond anyone’s control. Injuries. Luck.
Blake takes him to that Chinese restaurant after the playoffs are over for them. Elliot is still in town, because Natalie’s here. They’re going to her parents’ beach house for two weeks in the summer, but for now they’re in the city and Elliot has been trawling through children’s hospitals, handing out Ravens gear, because he needs to do something with the time he has on his hands. Other than going to the gym with Adam. He does a few things that Ravens PR asks him to do, a few signings, a few appearances at events for charities the Ravens support and Elliot is happy to do it, but he’s glad to have a few off days in between, too.
Getting food with Blake turns into a sightseeing tour, because Blake tells him that he’s never gone to Manhattan to look at… pretty much anything. So Elliot takes him to the top of the Empire State Building and they stand next to each other and look out at the city, neither of them saying a word as the sun sets in the distance.
Elliot has been up here with his parents and they loved it. Maybe that’s why his eyes keep darting over to Blake, trying to figure out if he likes it or if he’s torturing him with tourist crap. He paid for Blake’s ticket, in case he ended up hating it. The expression on Blake’s face is, as usual, a mystery, but at least it’s not the murder eyes, so Elliot will consider it a success.
Elliot loves coming up here. It reminds him just how small he is, just how many people are out there, and how lucky he is that he ended up here, of all places.
“What do you think?” Elliot whispers.
“I think…” Blake is still staring out at the city. He doesn’t finish the sentence.
Maybe Blake feels small, too.
“You wanna go?” Elliot asks, just in case.
Blake shakes his head. “Not yet.”
“Okay,” Elliot says, and watches the smallest of smiles work its way onto Blake’s face.
Once they’re back in the street, they wander to Penn Station, which is where Blake will catch a train back to Newark, but they walk slowly, neither of th
em in a rush, the night air pleasant.
It’s then that Elliot can’t keep his traitorous brain from saying, “Are you seeing anyone?”
“Uh…”
“It’s just… when I called–”
“Yeah,” Blake says. “That was… yeah.”
“Oh. Good for you,” Elliot says and doesn’t pause to examine whether or not he actually means that. He might not like himself very much if he let himself reach the end of that train of thought.
“It’s not… a relationship or anything,” Blake mumbles. “Not like… I don’t know.”
“But you have someone.”
“I guess. He’s…” Blake snorts. “Yeah.”
“You wanna tell me about him?”
Blake’s face quickly returns to the default, his smile gone. “I can’t. He’s… I can’t, really.”
Fellow player, then.
Elliot nods, because he gets it. He shouldn’t have asked in the first place.
#
Blake’s summer begins the way it’s begun for the past couple of years, with a playoff loss.
He sticks around for a while, because he doesn’t have anywhere to go back to, other than the house in Norwalk that’s technically Evan’s now. He meets Elliot in the city a few times, but it doesn’t quite chase away the emptiness in the pit of his stomach.
It’s about to get worse, because the day after the Mariners have cleaned out their lockers after a third round loss, Noah calls him and asks him if they can talk. Blake says yes, offers to come over, but Noah insists that, no, he’ll come to Blake’s. Probably so Blake won’t have to drive home after Noah breaks things off with him.
Because that’s definitely where this is headed. No one asks to talk to you in person for any other reason.
Blake’s suspicion is pretty much confirmed when Noah shows up with a bag from Blake’s favorite bakery.
“Noah,” Blake says when Noah gives him a hug before he shuffles into Blake’s apartment.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to pretend that I don’t already know what this is about.”
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