Chapter 3
The hockey didn't suck.
The hockey was everything he'd dreamed of: the sheer giddiness of being out on the ice, the strange, comforting thrill of knowing he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Only he barely played hockey and had to deal with all the bullshit anyway.
In the end, it was his big sister Bridget who saved him, so he owed her, probably.
She still lived in the city back then so when their playoff run ended she took Simon out in the Harbor and got him plastered, which got him talking, and by the time he was winding down she had his face in her hands and looked very, very seriously into his eyes and told him hockey couldn't be his life.
There's so much more
, she'd said, with the earnestness of the very intoxicated.
Look around you.
Look at all this, look at everything that exists in this big beautiful city—
Then she'd started crying, because she was drunk and because she loved Bellwood and probably because she'd once told him it saved her life, when she was young and newly out and their small town had felt like it was burying her alive, and Simon cried a little too because his sister was crying and because his dreams had turned out to be, like, a chocolate Easter bunny that wasn't just hollow but was also filled with spiders or something, whatever, he was drunk.
But he'd woken up the next morning on her couch, with a cat on his head and a wastebasket next to him on the floor, and known she was right and hockey wasn't enough.
That if he wanted to make it through this, he needed more.
So he'd found more.
The guys on his team were mostly dicks, so he went to board game nights at the comic store close to his apartment and made new friends.
The team's idea of fun was going drinking and picking up women, which had never quite been Simon's scene, so he bought a mountain bike and joined a club.
A year passed, and another, and one day he realized he was pretty happy, actually, in Bellwood, bench or not.
Then, on the luckiest day of his life, he broke his collarbone.
The doctor who fixed him had dark hair and dark eyes and a deadpan sense of humor and strong opinions on the Star Realms sequel trilogy, and Simon was so gone for her he forgot his own name.
After that, Bellwood was perfect.
"To a bar?" Zoe said, like she'd never heard the words before.
"It's a type of drinking establishment," Simon said.
"Where, if you're old enough, a person will serve you—"
that wasn't the question, asshole," she said, laughing.
Simon grinned at the locker room wall.
A couple other wives and girlfriends are gonna be there.
Sounds pretty chill," he said.
"And Pat, like, specifically asked if you were coming and you don't want to disappoint him, right?"
"Ferris!" shouted the man in question, from clear across the locker room.
"Tell your woman she has to come!"
Your woman
?" said Zoe.
"She's gonna make you answer for that," he told Pat.
"Good!" he said.
"I'll buy her a drink to make up for it."
"He says he'll—"
"I heard him," Zoe said, and Simon could hear her smile.
"They heard him on the moon."
The man in question waved as he left, and Simon sat on the bench, lowering his voice.
"Last time I went out with them it was actually fun," he said, answering her unvoiced questions.
"The bar is pretty low-key.
We, like, played pool and went home by ten."
"Tell me more about your glamorous professional athlete lifestyle," Zoe said.
"You love it."
"As long as it's not weird that I'm there," Zoe said, because they were both remembering the time Zoe had come out with the team in Bellwood, because
, WAGS were welcome.
She'd been the only one there, it had been a whole fucking
scene
, and the next day he'd learned that the other WAGS had gone somewhere else without inviting Zoe, even though she'd been at the game with them.
It was the last time he'd bothered trying with most of the guys.
"Not weird," Simon said.
"Promise."
"Then I'm there," she said easily.
"Send me the address."
Three beers in, Simon had a big, crashing realization, the kind that felt like it was a meteor and he was an unfortunate tyrannosaurus.
Not that he was a T. Rex type.
Obviously, if he were a dinosaur he'd be an archaeopteryx, but they lived at the wrong time to get wiped out by a meteor, so.
This is good
, he realized.
He was hanging out with a group of hockey players, from his own actual team in his own actual city, and it was
He had hockey player friends, obviously; he hung out in groups of hockey players all the time, but they had always been—chosen, friends he'd made in places besides Bellwood's locker room.
And secretly, deep down, he'd assumed that all UHC teams were the same way once you were in them.
I like it here
, he thought, and turned that thought over a few times in his mind.
Flipped it around, held it up to the light like it was a stained glass window, checking for cracks.
He was alone in the booth for the moment—Drummond had gone to the bathroom, Kostya had gone to get another round but was busy flirting with a blonde at the bar, Patel was trying to teach one of the rookies how to play darts while Tanner tried to hustle him, Zoe was talking to Fontaine, who was nodding very seriously—and he stared at the TV above the bar, playing some hockey game, and he thought:
I can't believe I like it here
"The problem with Jack Slade is he's a spy, not an action hero," Drummond said from somewhere behind Simon before throwing himself into the booth opposite.
"All the cool shit he does is spy shit, not action shit."
Simon grinned, leaning back in the booth.
"That seems like semantic distinction at best," he pointed out.
"Isn't blowing up cars and shit action hero stuff?"
"But he does it in a spy kinda way," said Drummond.
"Like, with sneaky remotes and shit."
"An explosion is an explosion," Simon said.
"That's like, the pinnacle of action.
There's nothing more action-y than an explosion."
"But Jack Slade is all about the
low-key
explosion," Drummond went on, because he was apparently determined to die on this hill.
"He never, like, blows up the whole building.
He blows up one guy, in one car.
With a personal touch."
Beers thunked down, followed shortly by Kostya.
Simon grabbed one.
"Are you still arguing about Action Movie Mount Valor?" Kostya asked.
"I thought you were leaving with that girl," Drummond said, and Kostya shrugged.
"He thinks Jack Slade isn't an action guy because he's a spy so all his explosions are personal," Simon said.
"The fuck is a
personal explosion
?" Kostya asked, and then they were arguing again, and Pat came back, and Zoe sat next to Simon and he put an arm around her as she made some very salient points in favor of putting Dakota Flynn on Action Hero Mount Valor, and—it was good.
Scratch that.
Watching Zoe lay out a very well-reasoned, thorough, and swearing-filled argument in favor of Dakota Flynn while utterly destroying every point Drummond tried to make wasn't good, it was transcendent and also hot as fuck.
God, he missed her, even as he
was grinning so hard he thought his face might break.
"Was fun, yes?" Kostya asked as they headed out the back door and into the fucking freezing parking lot, the first snow of the season still around the edges.
"For sure," Simon said, breath frosting in front of his face.
"I know
had fun, Simmy, I was asking Zoe," Kostya said, grinning like the shithead he was.
Simmy
," Zoe snickered.
"Oh, fuck off," he teased, and she laughed.
"Yeah," she said.
"The team seems pretty cool."
"Better than Bellwood?"
"I mean," Zoe said, and glanced at Simon, because she had manners and circumspection and shit.
"You know.
Different."
"They know Bellwood sucked," Simon said.
"Sucks?
Present tense."
"Then oh, my God, so much better," Zoe said on a hard exhale.
"Those guys were just—a whole collection of mouth-breathing dickheaded assholes."
Kostya made a delighted noise, and Simon snorted.
"A collection?" he said, because that was a new one from her.
Zoe grinned.
"Sure," she said.
"You know, a variety of dickheaded assholes.
One in every flavor."
Mouth-breathing
dickheaded assholes," Kostya corrected.
Simon wasn't sure he'd ever seen him quite this excited.