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Home / LGBTQ+ / Pucking Around with Fate / Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

117 Chapters

That Wide

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThe locker room had reorganized itself around the incident with the practiced efficiency of a group of people who had witnessed enough of these encounters to know that the best response was to pretend nothing had happened and increase the ambient noise level slightly to cover the residual tension.Khyle stood in his corner and breathed.His collar was still warm where Gunner's knuckles had been. He pressed his own palm against the skin automatically, the way you pressed at a bruise to confirm it was there, and found that it was warmer than it should have been and that his heart was doing something it had no professional justification for doing. He catalogued both of these facts, added them to the pile, and turned his back to the room.He was pulling his shirt over his head, one arm free, the other still tangled in the sleeve, when Sam materialized at his elbow with the quiet, sideways approach of someone trying not to startle a cornered animal."Khyle." Sam

Hangnail

POV: KhyleTwo of his teammates tipped their heads forward and ground their helmets together.Khyle watched it happen from three seats down the bench and felt something catch in his chest that had no business being there. That specific sound, the dense plastic knock of two helmets meeting, was one of the most ordinary sounds in hockey. He'd heard it ten thousand times. It meant nothing more than good luck and I've got you and we're in this together, the wordless vocabulary of men who expressed care through impact because that was the language the game had given them.He'd received that same gesture. He knew he had. He was part of this team in every way that counted, and most of the men around him had made that clear in their own ways over the past several weeks. Logan with his noise and his chaos. Shane with his relentless, suffocating loyalty. Kensei with the quiet authority of someone who had decided Khyle was worth investing in and was not going to announce it but was not going to

Marbles

POV: GunnerThe charging call was garbage and everyone in the building knew it.Gunner had hit the guy clean. Feet on the ice, weight forward, the hit landing at contact rather than leading with a jump, which was the definition of a legal check and had been the definition of a legal check since before Gunner was old enough to understand what a legal check was. He'd been making this exact hit, with these exact mechanics, for four years in the NHL and however many years before that in every level of hockey beneath it, and not once had it been called charging, because it was not charging.Kevin Ash, number seventeen for the Ravens, had decided otherwise.He'd gone to the officials with the specific energy of a man who understood that drawing penalties was a skill and had been practicing it, pointing at Gunner with the righteous conviction of someone who had been genuinely wronged and not at all with the calculated performance of someone who was managing a situation. Gunner watched him do

Jersey

POV: GunnerHe came off the ice first.Not because he was supposed to, not because the intermission protocol called for the enforcer to lead the team back to the locker room, but because he needed to be moving in a direction that was away from the ice and away from the bench and away from the specific accumulation of the last forty minutes before something gave way that he couldn't put back together in the remaining fifteen minutes of the game.He shoved Santos out of the way to do it. Not hard. Just enough to make the point that the point was being made.The locker room received him the way it always did when he arrived in this particular state, which was to say it absorbed the impact without complaint and offered him the structural courtesy of four walls and a ceiling and nobody in it yet to make demands on what remained of his composure.His gloves went first. One hit the far wall and dropped. The other made it further. His helmet followed, bouncing once off the wooden bench with a

Dead Weight

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerHe didn't wait to reach the other side of the room."Why the fuck am I even out there wasting my time on a piece of shit player like you?"The words hit the space between them and Khyle turned around with the controlled speed of a man who had been waiting for this and had already made decisions about how it was going to go. He brought one arm out sideways and stilled Shane before Shane could insert himself, because this was not Shane's problem and Khyle was done having other people absorb his fights for him."Oh, go suck eggs, Jäger," he said.His head was splitting. It had been splitting since the second period, a specific pounding that had set up residence behind his left eye and that he had been managing through the focused application of ignoring it. It had a name. He was not going to say the name out loud because the name was already in the room and hearing it twice would make everything worse.Gunner took it as an invitation.Of course he did.Khyle's

Keep It Together

POV: GunnerThe door closed.He stood in the middle of the locker room with the hands of three teammates still on his arms and shoulders and felt the specific quality of a room that had just had something removed from it. Not emptied. Just changed. The way a room changed after a storm passed through, everything rearranged slightly, the air carrying the charge of what had just happened.He pulled back.Not violently. He just withdrew from the hands that were holding him with the deliberate control of a man signaling that the immediate danger had passed and physical containment was no longer the primary concern. They read it correctly. The grips loosened, released, and the players who'd been part of the human barrier began dispersing with the focused efficiency of men who had somewhere else to be and were grateful for the excuse.Gunner stood where they left him and breathed.His brain was doing something he didn't have language for. Running multiple tracks simultaneously, the way it di

Fresh Ice

POV: AtmosphericOutside Sokyoku Hill Arena, nestled in the heart of Seattle, on a crisp dark Saturday night in December, the world was doing what it always did while the game was happening inside.Row after row of vehicles sat in frozen silence in the parking lot, their windows accumulating a fine layer of frost at the edges. A few dedicated smokers huddled near the entrance doors, red cigarette tips flaring and fading in the dark as they moved with the practiced efficiency of people managing their habit against the cold. Security guards made their slow loops of the lot with heavy flashlights cutting pale paths through the darkness. A stray piece of garbage moved across the pavement in the lazy hands of the night wind, the only thing in the exterior landscape that seemed to be in any hurry.Inside was a different country entirely.The ice had been shaved, scraped, washed, and returned to its pre-game condition by two Zambonis working in parallel during the intermission, and it gleame

Drop Em

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThe breakaway happened the way the best and worst moments in hockey always happened, fast and without warning and with complete disregard for everything that had been building around it.Gunner had won the puck off a Ravens player he'd pinned along the boards, spinning out of the contact with the puck on his stick and the open ice ahead of him, and Khyle had been there, paralleling him in the neutral zone before either of them had consciously decided this was the play they were running. The crowd noise lifted as the fans registered what was developing.Khyle cut in front of a Ravens forward moving to intercept, put his shoulder into him hard enough to redirect his momentum, and cleared the lane. Two seconds. That was what he'd bought them, two seconds of open ice with a single defender pulled wide and the goalie backing into his crease and calculating the angles.He could feel Gunner at his left without looking. The specific weight of his presence, the soun

Rusty Propeller

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThree security guards filled the space between them.It was a reasonable allocation of resources given the circumstances. Gunner stood at his end of the locker room and Khyle stood at his, and the geography was not accidental. They had arrived at opposite walls by unspoken mutual agreement, the same instinct that kept volatile compounds in separate containers, and they stayed there while the practical work of removing equipment proceeded in the specific silence of two people who understood that sound was a risk right now.It was faster than usual. They had each assisted the other in removing a significant portion of their equipment during the preceding twenty minutes, so the remaining layers went quickly. By the time the process was complete, both men had left the ice shirtless, which the crowd had apparently appreciated based on the particular register of the noise that had followed them off, and which neither of them had the current bandwidth to process.

Best of Friends

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerHe came in like weather.The door didn't slam because he didn't slam it. He didn't need to. The quality of his arrival filled the room without requiring any additional punctuation, and the players who had been in the general vicinity of the door dispersed to either side with the practiced efficiency of people who had worked with this man long enough to have calibrated their reflexes to his various states and understood that this particular state required significant clearance.His face was the color of something that needed medical attention."Santos! Jäger! Get your goddamn asses on this bench!"Khyle got there without scurrying. He was very deliberate about not scurrying. He sat. Gunner arrived a half second later with the sauntering pace of a man making a point about his own timeline, which was either brave or deeply unwise given current atmospheric conditions, and dropped himself heavily onto the bench beside Khyle with his forearms on his thighs and hi

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