![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlrockfandom: hrpf
pairing: 1343 (r63)
rating: m
wc: 11.4k
1) this is not a fic 2) don't read this 3) I WAS ENABLED. hypothetically this post is various snapshots of a longer thing that could conceivably be written and would be like a 100k slowburn character study with many complications and turns and difficult feelingz reflections but also that thing should not exist and will continue not existing. really i was just sick of having this document open when i hpave many other things to be doing with my life so like… Ok. thank you for your understanding 🥲 sometimes you're a girl and your captain is your captain but also not just your captain and it's complicated. also 4) don't read this
cw forpregnancy
It's like this.
After the buzzer beater that leaves her sprawled out on the ice with her stick broken over her knee, splintered ends clasped between her mitts as she rolls over and feels her lungs burn and heave; after a hastily-packed suitcase and express one-way booking for EWR and an early-morning, surcharged Uber, a breakfast of airport cold brew and a stale everything bagel and a packet of in-flight trail mix; after she sits down with Pat on the line and squares her shoulders and puts her name to ink and someone claps her on the back and the boys roll into her comments section with Congrats and Ewww; after Quinn texts her that he's proud of her and she fires back 👍, like an asshole, and then—later, when she feels less like she needs to get medically checked for arrhythmia—Thx❤️, she finds herself standing in the hallway of Jack's place, kicking at an obstructive pair of Air Max's while he dangles a new set of keys in front of her face.
They're a back-up, he explains. For if she ever forgets the code or the keypad stops working. Nico is there, too, because of course he is, though for once his presence barely registers. He grins at her when she sees him and tells her that he lives just a few floors up if she ever needs him, because of course he does, continues, But I'm sure Jack will have you covered. And, 'Grats again. It's great to have you.
Luke takes the keys. She feels the metal along the ridges of her palm and puts them inside her pocket.
"Pretty sick, right?" Jack asks when they make their way across the living room, peering over the endless stretch of glass and into the congested traffic circle that winds through downtown, suffocating their apartment building like a boa constrictor. The slow crawl of cars feels especially glacial from this distance.
"It's fine," she says, rolling her eyes. It was a change of pace from the suburban nothingness of Granger, obviously: its life-preceding quiet, the kind of college-town calmness that invited the activity they watched animate before them. No floor-to-ceiling skyrise windows to block out the obnoxious rev of motorcycles at 2AM or drunk frosh yelling back and forth at each other from across the street. It'd been a while, clearly. "I mean. It's different."
Jack scoffs like he doesn't believe her. "Whatever, man," he says, pushing weakly at her arm. A moment later he tries to throw himself onto her shoulders so he can tuck her into his side. Nico laughs next to him. "Don't go acting like you're too good for your contract, big boy."
"Fuck you, I'm not," Luke insists. She wrestles out of his hold and spins on her heel, surveying their surroundings. It's April and spring-warm and she's been in New Jersey for less than 24 hours, and she thinks that if she were to dig down deep enough she might still be able to feel the cardiovascular sting of last weekend's loss, that prorated, time-sunk window in which she'd let her flayed heart lay out on the ice.
But that was it, then. One door closed. Another tunnel unfurling in endless fashion before her, kaleidoscopic and surreal, colored with the promise of something more.
"Can't believe it's finally fuckin' happening, man," Jack says.
"I know," she agrees. Their eyes meet. "Shit."
"Shit."
"Shit," Nico chimes in, smiling broadly at them. "You guys need help with anything? Lunch?"
By the time Jack is done showing her around, getting her set up in her to-be room with the measly essentials she'd muscled over to the East Coast, Nico has leftovers he's scrounged from the fridge reheated and tabled. He reaches over to hand Luke a plate, and his fingers brush over hers for a moment that's long enough to notice but short enough that she'd be insane to think anything more of it.
It's not anything. She might remember it later, maybe. In the context of the whole day, Jack at their window and his kicks lying on the floor the way he always leaves them, total pylon hazard, TV on and Chel paused at the menu screen, the way their fridge seems to spit out chicken-and-rice leftovers at a legitimately regenerative rate.
But it's not anything. It's not even the beginning of anything.
Luke isn't here to save the team, obviously. Not this season, and especially not now, headed for the road and down in the series. She calls Quinn, a spasm of weakness. He tells her to at least keep her plus-minus up, if nothing else, and they sit in silence while he puts her on speaker and starts scrolling wordlessly through his Instagram feed. You call mom already? No—calling her next. Okay. Well, good luck. And see you there.
They don't talk about Vancouver. Palat pulls her aside after her first warm-up and says, kind and uncomplicated, "Just try to have fun with it, rookie."
Luke doesn't think she was hardwired that way, but she's left with little choice. The losses roll on. She nets time on the second PK unit, watches Nico try to corral the locker room after a third-period beating, feels her not-yet-rookie, not-quite-summer postseason fade away.
Plus-two.
That's nineteen.
Someone is putting another glass in her hand. Luke scowls. Moyler used to stand in the kitchen during house parties making mixed drinks with blatantly stupid names that always tasted foul and looked positively radioactive, and it's what she thinks of now when she sucks on her cocktail straw and feels sticky fizz hit the back of her teeth.
"We're going out tonight," Jack had said decisively, shrugging his jacket on in the mouth of their locker room door while her fist clung awkwardly to her first-goal puck from the photo they'd taken together for socials. "And we are getting you wasted."
Of course, several hours and a nervous flash of her cheap fake later, Jack has pulled a Jack on her: he'd taken one look at the throng of tightly-packed bodies and slipped into the dark of pulsing club heat. Even more tragically, it means that Luke is now stuck at the team booth fielding Dawson's probing inquiries into, "So how much do you pick up, man, really?"
The conversation began after the table collectively decided that there was definitely no way Simon had a girlfriend, not with a mug like that. Simon leaned back with a scoff and proclaimed in smug, stilted English to not needing one when he was categorically hot shit in Slovakia, or at least something to that effect. Nico raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"Oh please," Nate interrupts now. "I bet baby Hughesy's too focused on her game to get her dick wet."
"Dude."
"What?" His gap pokes through when he grins at them. "Never said I don't respect it."
Luke feels her face start to flame despite her best efforts. She takes another sip that goes down tasting less like gin and more like regret. The conversation had officially dragged on for too long, but she was neither drunk nor sober enough to be graceful about it, an impossible impasse, blatantly didn't trust her inhibitions to get her out of this one unscathed. God damn it.
"Do you fucking mind?" she interjects.
"Hey, we're only curious." He turns to Nico. "I mean, 's her rookie season. Go crazy, right?"
Nico stares him down coolly. "I'm not getting involved in this," he declares a moment later, through an air of faux-captainly conservatism. Luke, remembering all the locker rooms she'd tried to glue together with overcompensating bonding exercises and half-assed character lectures at off-ice get-togethers, can't help the snort that escapes her at his pacification attempt. Even if a more furtive part of her wishes she could wear his same nonchalance.
"I'm sure I do better than all of you, Jesus," she allows, stirring her straw to rattle the ice around. "Like, if we're talking roadkill faces…"
"Oh hoo," Nate whistles. He shrugs good-naturedly, then turns to gesture at Nico, "Eh, I do all right, but this guy over here's the real chick magnet. Sucks I was too busy slummin' it in the A to get in on that rookie-year action."
He sounds genuinely mournful about it. Luke thinks she might be starting to understand who Jack was getting unfettered access to coke from at eighteen. She expects Nico to shrug it off again, or maybe just laugh and own up to it, his apparent smashing success at getting girls to semi-reliably Snapchat him nudes or let him hit on the road or whatever—and, no matter how much she didn't care to think about it, it did make sense to her—but he only rolls his eyes and takes a pull of his drink.
Which, okay. Luke doesn't know why she follows the movement of his throat. Doesn't even realize she's doing it until his eyes cut to her. Against the dark scruff and olive-deep complexion of his face, she wonders whether she might be able to make out the faint pink impression of a blush, even in the low-fluorescent nightclub light. Or whether it was all just a particularly fucked-up brand of wishful thinking, this mental suggestibility she was now apparently privy to.
Luke thinks—she needs another drink.
"Hey. Lukey."
That's Nico, some time later, standing over her. He nudges at her arm with a steady hand.
"Huh?" she mumbles.
"Hey, I'm heading back now."
Luke can't hear shit. "You what?"
He pauses. When he repeats himself it's with a shout that fights against the noise of the club. "I said I'm heading back!" Perfectly punctuated. Continues, "Wanna split an Uber? With me?"
For whatever reason, the way his accent says Uber rings hilarious in her inebriated state. She sits up with a giggle and stretches her legs out, feeling the muscles protest. Then she remembers who she'd come with in the first place.
"What about Jack?"
"Yeah, sorry. Pretty sure he left with someone already."
"Right." Luke huffs. She doesn't know what time it is, but by the looks of it she thinks it's most likely too late to still be sticking around, all the family guys long since trickled out. "Yeah, sure. Okay."
It's raining on the ride back. Luke feels loose-limbed and on the verge of blurry, eyeing the rivulets that run down the cool frost of her window, the city lights blinking past her. Nico hums, faint. The sound mixes with one of the Top 40 hits playing from the radio, the intermittent dry rattle of the driver clearing his throat and his GPS low-volume signaling new turns at what feels like every fucking corner. Cities, man.
Apropos of nothing, Nico says: "Hey. You looked nice tonight."
Slowly, as if waking from something, Luke blinks.
"Oh. Um, thanks?" she manages, and thinks it slips out only vaguely doubtful. Luke knows what she looks like: her knotted floral top that sits cropped but was definitely meant to be regular-sized, categorically marketed with women under 5'8 in mind, the dark wash jeans that always seemed to hug awkwardly at her hips. She doesn't know if nice is the word she'd use to describe it.
Luke continues, "You, uh…" and her eyes hunt down the way Nico runs a hand along his hair, teasing the strands that had been flattened under a baseball cap for most of the evening, slicked-back and straightened-out. "You look. Fine."
"Okay," he laughs.
She's drunk, she justifies. Her face tingles. Then it's silence.
When they get back, they say goodbye as the elevator door opens onto her floor. Luke is still buzzing when she gets into bed, when she wakes up an unsatisfying number of hours later with a sore neck and a throbbing headache. She washes down some Advil with cold Gatorade, then raps insistently at Jack's door and barges in to realize that he isn't even home yet, and when she pulls out her phone to a message from Cap, Nico's smiling contact photo contiguous a simple Breakfast?, a Also gna hit the bike later. U in? 😄, Luke doesn't know which evolutionary instinct to blame for the way her teeth find themselves compelled to the unsuspecting flesh of her tongue.
Just that it hurts like hell. Fucking ow.
Luke is: in the midst of a post-game Ozark binge, unwrapping a fig bar she'd pawed out of the pantry, and two disruptive yawns away from getting into bed early when Nico rings at her doorbell. None of these details are particularly important to the story, but she remembers having been irritated at the interruption, walking across the length of her kitchen with one hand awkwardly holding her crumbling pastry bar as she went to check the peephole.
"Hi. Where's Jack?" Nico asks. He leans into their doorframe ever so slightly, beard neatly trimmed and Mets hat pulled down to his brows. Luke takes an aborted step back.
"Oh," she replies. She bites into her bar and looks around at their empty living room and then back at Nico, the answer already on her tongue. "Yeah, he's out."
Nico blinks. "He not bring you?"
The face she makes in response must be interesting, Luke thinks, because she's trying valiantly not to imagine the four-to-seven girls Jack Hughes manages to wheel simultaneously via artless Instagram DMs at any given moment, or the way she sometimes finds herself standing at the kitchen island like a trapped giraffe when she stumbles down to breakfast and sees evidence of his nightly exploits still lingering by their granite countertop, drinking their shitty coffee and nibbling her way through a stash of the sourdough bagels they buy from the shop down the street. "Not really that kind of out."
"Ah. Right," Nico says, with understanding, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smirk.
Luke elegantly stuffs the rest of her bar in her mouth. She pulls out a hand to swipe at the crumbs that gather at the corner of her lip, rubbing away until the skin runs smooth. Nico's eyes are fixed on her, and although he isn't small the way Jack is she thinks she kind of likes how he still instinctively tilts his neck up to meet her, just the subtlest touch. Hates herself, too, for even noticing.
"So," she tries.
She's wearing an out-of-season Christmas fleece and team-issued XL sweatpants that pool down to her heels. Fiddling with her empty wrapper, she asks, "Did you, like, need something?"
"No, I was just…"
Nico pauses. It feels like he's watching her with X-ray precision. Whatever explanation he starts sharing about Jack, about meaning to hang out, fades away slowly on his tongue. When he peers past her shoulder and toward the dimmed TV light, he tries—a fresh angle, a redirected shot: "You're alone?"
Something in the way he says it makes the hairs of her forearm stand on end.
"It's 9PM." She shrugs. "And I'm boring."
"That's not true," he refuses, earnest even as he snorts with it. Luke hates that. Or wants to. Or thinks that she wants to, if the distinction even matters.
Jesus.
"But," he continues, "if you aren't doing anything…"
First of all: Ozark was doing something. Luke obviously does not say this. Nico's fist clenches momentarily, unfurls, lets the tension fade away. "Did you wanna come up, maybe?"
Later, some part of Luke will wonder whether this had been the turning point. Or whether it had come before, or after, in the club or at her aunt's place upstate or inside Nico's new, big, beautiful apartment, within some indistinguishably dark crevice in her chest, the doctor's table, all the fucked-up places she let herself feel more than she'd ever known she could feel. Whether she'd already known, long ago, somehow or subconsciously, that their inevitability had embedded itself in the way she spoke and stood and acted around him, the way she hated looking but couldn't stand even more to look away, the indestructibility of her idea of him. She'd spent a long time, after all, especially at twenty, lying to herself.
"Am I going to regret saying yes?" she asks.
Nico only says, diplomatic: "I think that's up to you. To decide. But I can make it worth your while."
Frankly, Luke doesn't really want to explain that the guys 6'2 female athletes get set up with in college generally range from plain annoying to borderline intense, verging on creepy. Back then she'd remembered thinking that if they were all going to be this unapologetically bad at sex, the least they could do was not be wrong about the Knicks or waste half an hour grilling her on the physiological benefits of going keto, as if she weren't already a professional athlete who met with three different types of sports nutritionists on a weekly basis. Of course, the guy who'd done that had been about 5'10 on a good day, had spent their date stroking her shoulder between reserved sips of mango White Claw like an absolute maniac, and she remembers the tattoo encircling the side of his neck and how it'd made her think that this was probably the experience Thom offered girls he hit up at the seniors' parties, the only bright spot of the entire interaction. The next day she'd forced Duker to buy her Chipotle—double rice and beans as always, fuck a carb cleanse—and conveniently forgotten to Venmo him back. Maybe she looked miserable enough that he let it go.
But that was Luke. In some shape or some sense. Now, a girl who barely knows herself sits next to a guy who knows he's hot shit and bites out, flushing:
"I have had sex before. I wasn't just trying to save face at the club, Jesus. Go the fuck to hell."
And the guy who knows he's hot shit goes: "Yeah, okay."
Says: "But, I mean. Like, on a scale of one to ten. How good?"
"Oh, don't you fucking—what would you rate yourself, huh? Think you'd come on top?"
Nico shrugs, grinning. "Just saying I've never gotten complaints before."
"Obviously no one is going to tell you if your dick game is weak." The absolute balls on this man, she thinks. He shuffles around on his bed, casually dropping an elbow and leaning his weight into it. The position makes the collar of his shirt slip down to reveal a mocking strip of skin, the flex of his shoulder muscle, lean but broad and built.
This is weird, she wants to say. Doesn't say. Killing a frustrated noise at the base of her throat, Is this not weird to you? Because it's fucking weird to me. It was incomprehensible, she thought, the way he turned away briefly and cast his eyes along the stretch of his bedroom, a brow lifted. Strange the way he said, voice rough and low and generous: "If you don't want to, you can just say that."
As if it were up to her. As if any of this were her choice.
Luke doesn't… she doesn't know.
She leans over and kisses him.
An interlude, tangentially:
Back in freshman year, Luke remembers KJ informing her that she didn't need to be wearing eyeshadow because it only deepened the purpled rings of her eyes, the Hughes-variety mark of exhaustion that made her appear panda-like. Or like a wet-looking dog, or—they were creative with the animal imagery. Kent also laughed when Matty called her a hairless cat and liked to razz Luke about her "astronomically negative amounts of sty," which, honestly. She didn't have time to be worrying about a back tuck, for fuck's sake, maybe Kent would net a few more one-Ts if she weren't constantly mouthing off at practice. And sure, Luke probably shouldn't have been listening to them in the first place, but even Kent in all her rampant assholery managed to pull some of the objectively hottest chicks Luke had ever seen, so Luke figures she probably knew what she was talking about.
Point being, Nico Hischier is so far out of her league he might as well be in another stratosphere. Luke has never not been the kind of flat that doesn't even register in locker rooms. Her nose too big for her face, or maybe everyone thought this of themselves, the universal incapability of looking yourself square without feeling an edge of discomfort at its uninterrupted perception, the fishbowl depreciation of your own image. The fact remained solely that nothing ever seemed to slot into place. Every morning her hair flew around widely in flagrant defiance of the laws of physics. She remembers overhearing two teammates in the USHL talking about her during a round of Smash or Pass once, punctuated with sharp disbelief: Hughesy? Nah, bro. Come on. A hand waving around, some laughter: I dunno, man. She's all fucking legs, right? I could paper bag it.
Her rookie year proved a strange, tumultuous time. Heaving simultaneously under blunt expectation and pointed doubt, limboing precariously not beneath rope but rather something like a serrated knife blade, the wicked edge of an ice skate. At the end of it, she thought: well, there are worse things in life than losing the Calder to Connor Bedard. And her last shot at Juniors gold, and a chance at being KJ's favorite U20—though, honestly, Luke figures if the way Kent used to drawl on and on about her Bantam days to an embarrassingly receptive OP were any indication, she hadn't exactly been missing out on much there—but who was counting, really.
There were worse things. The ankle sprain that took her out for a chunk of March. The bruised rib. Her game being her game being her game until it didn't even feel like it anymore, became something else altogether, foreign and ugly and beaten-down. Jaw biting down onto the word potential like it might finally one day break open for her, split from its gilded shell, its unknowable skin.
Now, Nico kisses Luke on his bed like she's twenty and still has time. There would be worse things down the line, but—this was not one of them, even if she didn't know it yet. He pushes her against the headboards and draws a thigh between her legs, hips bearing down heavy and conscious, fingers teasing gingerly at her tits. His mouth sucks at her tongue and chases the sighs that escape the tight line of her lips, pressure building deep inside and all around her, walking the line between rough and constant and something in the wrenching vicinity of sweet.
By the time Nico gets his fingers properly worked inside of her, her legs are shivering with the effort of staying collected. He drops back and looks at her bra hooked off and thrown to the side, the pink of her spit-slick mouth, parted dumbly. Says, considering: "You will tell me if my—what was it you said? Ah. My dick game is weak, yeah?"
Luke flips him off. "It's a three so far," she informs him, and gasps only a little bit when his fingers fuck back into her in retaliation. "Better put your back into it, Cap."
"You don't have to rate me while I'm doing it," he complains, as if he hadn't been the one to bring up the number system in the first place.
He doesn't say much else, which Luke kind of likes about him.
If pressed: eight point four. Always leave room for improvement.
Earlier, at the inception of it:
"So Jack can't know?"
"Well, obviously."
The thing was, it'd be devastating for a multitude of reasons. She didn't know how to explain it. How Jack had stopped being soft on her when she hit six feet, or once she started high school, the timelines forever unintelligible and interlinked. The way quarantining together had been a relief, of course, but at the end of the day Luke remembers the times when she'd felt caged and antsy, like she had no way of siphoning off the pent-up energy that swam to the top of her lungs and slowly flushed her nervous system like a saline drip. How Jack looked at her like he didn't know what to do with the fact that his sister was no longer stubbornly twelve and might have a life to her that wasn't just hockey, even if she still fully looked and acted it.
One of Nico's brows furrow contemplatively, both eyes blinking intermittently between the lull of conversation. He considers the tenseness in her shoulders. Luke wonders what leadership book he's digging for in his mind's index, whether one of his references has insights on how to deal with a girl so cocky she circles back to being afraid of herself.
"Okay," he says eventually. "If it's what you want."
She nods, with relief.
"It is," she promises.
Luke will remember this. Being twenty, and then twenty-one, thinking: this is nothing. Not knowing she could have it any other way, never letting the notion of personal openness lapse across her mind. This, and them, their configuration. Her with Nico, the occasional hook-up on her living room sectional or in the privacy of his bed, or once, ill-advised, in the backseat of his car, or another time, on the road, within the walls of the single room she was entitled to whenever the numbers shook out that way—they would always be a stopgap toward someone else. They had to be.
More than anything, though, this had been Nico meeting her in the middle. Luke doesn't understand that until later.
"I'm being patient, Luke. But you are not touching my dick with this shit playing."
"I don't even—" Luke huffs. Okay, fair. She rolls around his bed to slam the speaker off, biting back a retort about his Euro club trash. Even she can concede that Luke Bryan ballads don't make for the sexiest of environments. "Do you have any other requests, or can we get to it already?"
"Don't be mean," Nico chastises, tightening a hand at her waist to pull her in. The motion jerks her back, sending her against his chest.
"Oh," she says, a little light.
He always mouths out the word like that, when she gets snippy—mean—with some amount of wonder. Smiling ambiguously. Luke doesn't know whether it's better or worse, that her moods so obviously amuse him.
"You like that?" he asks now. Wrapped around her back, leaning forward, teeth nipping at the shell of her ear. Then, more decisively, at her neck, the sensitive expanse of her throat, between the tender junction of bone and skin.
It's Jack's idea, ultimately. Though Luke is the one to tell him.
She says, "Dude, just be cool."
"I'm always cool. When am I not cool?"
"You… don't actually want me to answer that," she decides for him.
He pouts at her. "Ouch," he says, and it makes his face distort in a way that isn't even remotely cute.
Luke is standing in his kitchen, scraping at the dregs of her breakfast oatmeal while they solidify the plans. Jack had said, Hey, you think the rookies want in on a party?, in a tone that didn't even vaguely convey the quaint, rambunctious Weinberg-ness of their aunt's place, straddling the border to Connecticut, the last-minute family Hanukkah get-together she'd expressly invited them to at the tail-end of their three-day breather. It went: golfing, food, and pretending she wasn't going to freak out when Nico spoke to her aunt in the vicinity of two different Hughes siblings.
The main difference between Jack and Quinn, Luke realized a long time ago, is that Jack only knows how to push at something when it's been demanded of him. Late-period monster efforts, pedal-to-the-metal shifts. Hounding away at the puck until something finally bent, or snapped, or sunk its sagging weight into the net.
He couldn't understand this, though. More realistically, her. Luke both loved and hated this about him, the total absorption of his own character, because it only lengthened the leash of what she was doing behind his back. Enabling the head-first, mountainside stumble she'd let Nico pull her along. Or her to him, this embrace rooted in mutually-unconcerned destruction.
A few winters ago, around this time, Luke remembers sitting in one of her aunt's guest rooms with Quinn. They'd both been tipsy on nothing but hard seltzers and fancy champagne, shooting the shit, her first year in Ann Arbor. She'd then unceremoniously hiccuped and announced, "You know, people say you slept with Norris freshman year."
Like, a joke. But Quinn—restraint softened by drink, not that it could even really matter; Luke knew him well enough to disrobe any attempt at misdirection—jerked up as if electrocuted. His shock, in turn, shocked her. It mandated new alignments. A mental restructuring of the model she'd built in her head, of who her brothers were to her and to everyone around them, the abstractions they carried.
"Dude, what? Dude. Oh, gross."
He sighed and crumpled an empty can in his fist. "I mean. Define slept with."
"That's even worse!" They were both drunk and started laughing, inexplicably, the sound ripping out of Quinn like a broken seam. "I did not need to know that."
And then he said, hand to his mouth, quiet like he wore so well, "Don't tell Jack, okay?"
Abstractions.
Really, though. It isn't hard to hide something when no one else is looking.
How much is enough?
Her aunt is asking this now. Well, no. Before that, she says:
"Oh, Jack." Brightly, "I was just on the phone to Ellen about you." Luke stands next to him and Nico in the kitchen, where the charcuterie board is laid out, the three of them expertly weaving around the migration patterns of peckish cousins and their hordes of in-laws and plus-ones. "And how's the girlfriend doing?"
Jack's eye twitches. Nico's head whips up to look at her in a way that says, Oh, so it's this kind of family gathering?, and Luke stuffs a cracker into her mouth so she has something to stifle the smile with, valiantly ignoring the way it makes Nico grin.
Later, when prodded, Nico graciously says: "Ah, no. I don't have a girlfriend."
"Swear I keep telling him to settle down," Jack interrupts sweetly, blatantly lying. All Jack actually says is shit like, You got a new girl yet? and So fucking jealous of you, man, wish I wasn't cuffed right now.
Her aunt tuts. "For crying out loud. It's just hockey, hockey, hockey with all of you, isn't it? You know," she nudges at Luke, stood off-guard, who stumbles at the unexpected force of it. "Ellen didn't start having these three until late, either. Her thirties."
She says it like a death sentence. Luke briefly wonders whether this is one of the things Nico has some randomly progressive European opinion about, or whether it's all the same over in Switzerland. "But you do want kids, don't you?" she continues.
"Uh." For once, so unlike his usual self, Nico actually looks out of his depth.
"If I find the right person, then…" he trails off. Luke studiously avoids his eyes until he manages to shake himself out, slotting his usual smile back on. "Of course, kids are great."
"Oh, they're just the best, aren't they?" She coos, clearly charmed by him. Nico has successfully pacified her edge, softened the bite in her inquisition. When she turns to Luke it's only with a lamenting sigh, worry so plaintive it reads tender in its fragile care.
Luke's mom had taught them a lot of things. Like how to skate, of course—she was a Weinberg-Hughes product to the bone, nothing less and nothing more—but also the right way to wash formal wear and load the dishes, recipes for basic vegetable dishes that she and Jack consistently resisted proper instruction of, in thanks largely to their documented incompetence around the kitchen. Luke still threw in her clothes all at once and got food delivered more than she objectively should, managed to chip glassware in the dishwasher on a near-impossible bimonthly basis, but it was the thought that counted.
Their mom had never wanted them feckless or complacent. Luke remembers that. Now, and later, once fate has turned in on her, a hand to her stomach, her aunt's words flashing by.
"I wish Luke here could find a nice man, too," she says. She rests a manicured hand on her forearm, not baleful but not exactly forgiving, either. "Sometimes I just wonder, you know. I mean, how much is enough? Maybe I don't understand all this stuff."
What would it take—to call it a day. The million dollar question. What would it take. To run in clockwise fashion for once, to stop winding herself so tightly it threatened total detonation, dropped her down to the flash point?
The worst-kept Hughes family secret, her and Quinn's abstractions aside, remained: Jack was their only hope. At the real life, a namesake who would make their parents proud. The difference in the confidence he wore was that it actually wasn't worn at all, had never been put-on, grew right along the grooves of his skin. His expectations went unspoken.
What would it take? A Norris she knows she'll never win, a Cup she might never hoist, a place for her name in the record books without an asterisk by its side, without first and best but only by modifier? She thinks about the millions in salary her brothers have already put in the bank. The guestrooms she doesn't need, their lake house in Michigan, Jack's beach rental out in Florida.
In between:
"I thought you guys broke up," she reminds Jack, baffled.
His laptop screen is turned away from her, but it's too late. He's gone and done it now. The two-million-dollar Zillow estimate he'd flashed her five minutes ago is permanently tattooed to her retinas.
"We were off for a bit," he dismisses. "Like, a while ago. But we're fine now."
"Yeah? And how'd that work out?"
"I fixed it," Jack insists, petulantly enough that it kind of sounds worse than it probably is.
"Oh, well. If you fixed it."
Jack must take offense to her sarcastic drawl because he starts sulking at her. Luke laughs and finally eases her teasing; she does like Jack's girl, really, the closest thing he's had to a committed relationship over these past two years, even with the ups and downs and the string of puck bunnies he'd brought back conspicuously to the apartment during a rough stretch at home the end of last season. Every time they met, Katie had been perfectly nice to her. She'd played lacrosse at Princeton and arguably had a better golf swing than Jack did, which—Luke thinks isn't a very high bar, actually, but was still more than she could say of herself, who as the tallest child had to instead perfect the art of one-on-one contact sports to gain any advantage over her brothers growing up.
Luke is almost twenty-three. Or will be this year, on the back-end of her ELC. The apartment has started to feel claustrophobic for a while now, thrown between the rock and hard places of Jack and Nico in her mind, their counterpositional endpoints, stretching out the hamstring of her judgment's patience. They were both growing up. Or had grown up a long time ago.
Either way, these things happened.
"It's cool," she says. "You better save me a room, though."
"Yeah, buddy. Six bedrooms," Jack reminds her, pointing at one of the scintillating images from the interior listing. It felt different from the lake house, somehow. Probably because she associated that with the guys and carefree summers and not Thanksgiving postcards or WAG jacket backdrops.
Luke shakes out her hand. "You think I should move one of the rookies in, then?"
He laughs. "I think you can afford your own place, Moose."
"Okay, sure, but. Who's going to let me kick their ass in COD every day?"
Which was just another way of saying: I'll miss you.
It was always going to be this way. The Montclair mansion off the side of its rural-suburban backroads and its fountain-centerpiece cobblestone driveway, the yawning forest property. The six bedrooms, purebred dogs you had to get on year-long breeder waitlists for and trips to Paris, a girlfriend sponsored by skincare brands and wine companies on Instagram. Jack likes kids. She knows this, because he's told her before, but also because of the way his face lights up when they volunteer at youth hockey programs, grin threatening to split his face when he crouches down to sign sticks or the backs of jerseys, as if he were hypnotically drawn to all life smaller and more fragile than his.
Things only get easier after Jack moves out. But—like a landslide kind of easy. Record-breaking swiftness of self-annihilating recalibration.
The fingers Nico runs along her hair are gentle now. Rhythmic, patterned motions teasing at the roots of her curls, lulling her into the fortified security of his embrace. She feels herself slip into that, its comfort, the weight of his idle arm as he slings it heavily over the soft of her middle.
"I could take you to Bern one day," Nico is saying. Voice syrupy and far-away, tinged with the nostalgic air of fantasy. "It's just… different. All of it."
Luke should really move. Somehow it feels like she's teetering on the edge of something, even though they're both firmly in the center of Nico's king bed, entangled together like they don't know where she begins and where he ends, every nerve ending in her body screaming at her to just give in.
But she should move. The night has long stretched past them. They have practice tomorrow morning, and if Nico shows up late at the rink again—with or without Luke by his side—the boys will probably start chirping him about reverting back to his rookie days, will ask him what had kept him up all night through low whistles and wolfish grins. Nico will probably laugh it off with practiced leniency, but Luke will stand there chewing at the side of her cheek until she feels the skin bleed, tongue shrugging dead cells away with a nervous sweep.
Instead:
"Yeah?" she mumbles, eyes already pulling closed. Nico is talking about mountains and blue lakes and ski trails. His favorite coffee shop, trips he's been on with his brother, how the light stumbles across the valley on summer mornings and the endless cobblestone of the city center. Luke—well. Luke is USA ride-or-die, to the bone and to the end. Doesn't really love anything more than the waterfront and sitting by the dock back at home and watching Jack bellyflop off his wakeboard while the guys from the program and the girls they'd invited over lean against the edge of the boat to laugh at him, but she thinks she feels it all the same.
Home, or. Its anchoring insistence. Belonging to something unequivocally, or to the idea of something, to love a thing so much you never lose the words for it. Or better, or worse, to love it so much no words encompass it.
Nico says, I think you'd love it there, the heat of his skin burning like a furnace against her. Its fireplace flame, dreamlike and hazy. A part of her is still wondering, even now, lying in his bed: after all this time, her?
She doesn't know if it's fear, then, the feeling that starts to punch in the cavern of her lung. Luke had never been the type of person who put thought into what her ideal date looked like, had always consummated pleasure through acts of somatic isolation, unseeing—or unfeeling—of any dependence beyond it. But Nico had fallen into her life. Or let her into his. Pulled her along and created structure of something she still couldn't quite get a read on, like it was a tough defensive play and she was about to commit to the wrong position.
Whatever it was, this couldn't be pokechecked away. Only exhumed. Luke swallows and swears she tastes smoke. She should move, but she's thinking of rain in Michigan, of Nico's family home in Bern, and the hand in her hair stills so he can press a kiss to the side of her cheek, and—
That's just not fair. It isn't.
Of course, they're late to practice. Shar nudges Nico over and says, Like old times, yeah?, while Nico huffs and swears it Legit happened, like, twice. Only Siegs notices them standing side-by-side, twists around to mumble something to Nico low enough that she can only recognize it for its vague incomprehensibility, the sloping syllables she presumes to be Swiss German. Nico's eyes find hers, and when he whispers back it's with a noncommittal shrug.
She turns away.
"I know you think everyone else is like, stupid. Or whatever. But we're not all like you."
Luke tells him to go die in a hole. Quinn pauses with a pensive breath.
"I mean. Sure, Jack and Z, and Brady…"
"Is this—are you just trying to call yourself smart?"
It was true, sure, but Quinn didn't actually need to say it. He was already annoying enough without matter-of-fact arrogance compounding the unbearable edge of his character.
"It's called being observant," he allows, shrugging. "I care about you, buddy. So just talk to me."
There was both too much and too little Luke could say. How she had run hot and cold throughout their entire playoff run, Nico chewing at his lip and taking it in stride, the losses she still never knew how to handle, not even now. The contract she still needed to sign before the summer faded, Quinn's impending UFA status. Each contextual undertone more murky than the last, too frostbitten and wintry for the balmy summer sun they now sat soaking by beach-side.
She opens with: "Jack has no idea."
Quinn nods. "Yes," he agrees, evident in itself. Of the three of them, he would always be the best at cutting to the chase. Then he leans in and delivers the dagger.
"You know, it's not—it's not like I've never met him."
Luke's eyes go wide. Involuntarily, she feels her blood curdling, tongue thick and choking, cold like sweat and fear.
"What are you talking about," she says, flat. No question to it.
Quinn's face pinches.
"Lukey…" he tries, trailing off.
Luke thinks about how easy it is to hide something when she tells herself it doesn't actually matter. Maybe Quinn understands that. Maybe it makes them the same.
Still, the line between pity and understanding could be so thin, like a straggling piece of filament. Even across national borders, a six-hour flight, three-thousand miles away, he knew too much. She couldn't hide from that.
Luke had spent a long time this way, in hiding. Never sure whether her confidence was real or constructed, or whether the quality of being constructed negated its actuality; how much of her hollowed focus came by instruction and how much of it was personally motivated, how any mathematical extraction of this self-referential equation proved impossible when she remembered that everything she'd ever done could only overlay the trodden path of her brothers' enduring accomplishments.
She remembers, when Nico first kissed her. How he'd pressed his hand between her thighs and rubbed her off in tight, insistent circles, bit at her neck with a kind of abandon that felt foreign to the way people usually spoke about her. No, or, not with a vaguely misappropriated appreciation for what her body might do, of what it could offer in spite of itself, in spite of her presentation, but instead with a desire straightforward enough it felt palpable. The way Nico always chased the shape of it, read between her lines and in their parallel space materialized equal parts sharp want and open-flame tenderness, so concentrated it made her motion-sick.
At one point in the second half of the season, Nico had considered moving out to a real house, even hit up Jack's realtor to talk market and visit a few neighborhoods out west. A few weeks later, though, he'd abruptly changed his mind, told her he was upgrading to a nicer apartment right around her block because he figured it would be more comfortable to put up any wayward rookies in JC if it came down to it, closer to the rink and the pulse of the city. As if the decision had been motivated purely by a locker-room kind of generosity and not—whatever.
"Bar scene in Essex not where it's at?" she'd teased.
"Maybe I like it here," Nico said. The levity in his voice felt weighed down with brick. She'd wanted to hear it, could admit that much to herself, but she also didn't know what to do when the words actually found material ground, soundwaves displacing the still air around them.
Once, after they fucked, she went into his bathroom and felt like she was seeing everything around her in sharp relief. The curly hair shampoo he'd bought her that she didn't even know how to use. That she still always reached for when she found herself at his place, the alarming frequency of it, its already half-empty weight. Hair ties in the drawer for whenever she grew it out, either by virtue of superstition or unbridled laziness, the dreaded second toothbrush in his cup, an ultimate declaration of moved-the-fuck-in. In his bedroom, the stupid leadership books he left strewn around that she sometimes leafed through, the bead bracelets he kept in the drawer of his nightstand. His endless collection of hats and the worn-out Mooseheads hoodie she'd once dug out of the closet and started wearing around in jest, the dizzying familiarity that came from slipping into it. He always left a basketball game playing on the TV in the background for her, or let her bully him into watching college football even when she could tell he didn't understand or even care to.
"There's this thing," she tells Quinn now. "It's been going on for a while. Um, over two years. But it's not serious."
She doesn't know, is the thing.
An itemized list of the places Luke has seen Nico lose his temper:
On the bench. During the dying moments of the third, when he'd shot at the gaping cage for what should've been a tying goal and struck iron instead, her teeth gnashing together as she watched the puck ricochet back out to center. In the locker room, every time they let themselves get outplayed, legs gassed and muscles weakened from lack of effort. Another time, carpooling together with Jack in Nico's car, when someone rear-ended them slowing down into a stop light, and it hadn't been funny in the moment but in hindsight also kind of had been, the way Nico had honked on instinct and yelled Fuck! This fucking asshole, what the fuck? and berated the guy for like ten minutes, and how when they finally dragged themselves into practice he immediately smoothed out the creases of his temper like he was pulling on another skin.
At her place. When he'd caught her screening snide DM requests from guys who called her the worst Hughes and a myriad of other names she couldn't repeat without meriting a gag order, who demanded she be taken out of the line-up for every diminutive mistake, tongues vicious with the lash of anonymity.
"Jeez. Tell me how you really feel," she'd drawled when he ripped her phone out with disproportionate insistence, setting it far out of reach.
Nico cared like a captain and a friend. It was apparent, because he also chastised Jack whenever her brother parroted back media appraisals as if they mattered to him, not that he realistically faced much of it to the degree she did anymore, the constant degradations of her worth and character and efforts. But.
Maybe that makes it worse, when he says it. That she can't feel any rage to him at all.
What Luke knows—or thinks she knows—is that when Nico first invited her up to his place, he hadn't been trying to make her his girl. There'd been some comfort in knowing this. Understanding that there would always be other Katies waiting, the fact that maybe her involvement in this song-and-dance made her easy, coiling herself around Nico, or, Hisch, Cap, the guy who laughed and shrugged when Jack asked if he'd been picking up lately and said, Hold up. Who's saying I have a girlfriend? with befuddled nonchalance piercing through locker room chatter, gossip like water off his back, but that it didn't matter because it was still symbiotic, mostly.
She doesn't even think brunettes exist in Switzerland.
The thing is that three years was both a long time and no time at all. A single entry-level contract. The length of this thing. A string of truncated postseasons, the 2OT Game 7 loss to the Canes, the summers they'd spent apart like cold-turkey reprieves from her body's compulsions.
How could she have known?
Summer of '26, she gets sick. But before that, a week until their exit interviews, Nico accosts her in the parking lot and says, "You know, you should come back with me."
"To your place?" She asks. Like a fucking idiot.
He says, "No, I mean. Back to Switzerland."
"I don't…" she stops. "Like, to Bern?" To your family?
"Yes," he confirms. Slowly, like he thinks she needs the patience. It's muggy out, clouds an indistinguishable mass of grey. Nico's eyes are dark and acerbic.
She doesn't understand. This was stupid. This was all so stupid. "Why?"
"Are you—Luke, come on." He makes to put his hand on her arm and then aborts the motion.
She tries again. "I just thought. I mean, like. You haven't told your family about me, right?"
"Would it be so bad if I did?"
"Well… no. But. I mean, we're like…"
"You haven't been seeing other people, right?" Nico asks suddenly.
"Seeing other people?" she repeats, dumbfounded. What was this, a romance novel? The worst part, she thinks, is how his tone wasn't even accusatory—probably because he had to already know, knew that of course Luke hadn't slept with anyone except Nico in… well. Since the start of it, obviously. He had to know. The sound of his inquiry mocked her. It had never been a question of her own commitment, had it?
Had it?
"Yes, seeing other people."
An astringent taste blooms on her tongue. "No, you're the only guy I've been sleeping with this whole time. Okay? Fuck. Congratulations."
He doesn't look particularly pleased, or even relieved, at her revelation.
"I'm being serious, Luke," he says now.
"Of course you are," she tells him helplessly. They were both serious people and always would be. Luke remembers Jack once calling Nico the best captain the Devils could ever ask for and wondering if what she felt churning in the pit of her stomach was jealousy. But this—something outside the realm of hockey, of captainly responsibility, was different. "I just don't—"
"If you don't want to," Nico interrupts. Pauses.
"I don't know what you want," he realizes. His face shutters when he steps back, the heel of his boot clanking against asphalt. "But if you figure that out, then. Can you. I don't know." A hand raises to readjust the brim of his cap. And that's when he says it. "Luke, I just need you to meet me halfway."
Then he turns away and walks back to his car. Her convictions make a lonely place, she thinks.
Luke hits the gym. She's still sick, so she throws up. Keeps throwing up. She looks at Nico's close friends story. She buys a business-class ticket home, back to Michigan. Opens her Health app, sees the faded red dot of her cycle tracker, the ugly sort of truth that not even bedrest or a BRAT diet or staying hydrated could fix.
Fuck.
When she goes back to Canton, Jack announces: "Guys, I think I'm gonna propose this summer."
Quinn makes a noise of recognition. Thanks to some comedic stroke of irony, Luke feels her malaise and plain-toast breakfast lurch back at her, barely has a moment to process before she's legging it from the family table to go hurl pathetically in the toilet bowl of their first-floor bathroom. She's still sitting with her knees drawn to her chest and hands reaching around the back of her neck when Quinn finds her, minutes later, considering her wordlessly.
"You good?" he finally asks.
"What does it fucking look like."
"Dude. This is like, the third time in the last 12 hours."
"Yeah," she says, miserable.
The thing with Luke is that when she fucks up, she fucks up big. This used to never really bother her—at least never on any actionable level—back when she was still young and didn't know better. Back when she could tell herself that there was more to play toward, that she still had another inch, a whole foot of developmental carpet left to unravel.
The problem was, though, that the gravitas of her volatility only sunk deeper as her path to the league narrowed. The roof converged and collapsed in on her, sharpening her awareness of it, knowing her makeshift tether increasingly shorter. No matter how many times she rehearsed an objectivity to her self-assessments, spoke through the media-conscious shape of a patient, paternally-trained tongue, the fact remained that she feared running out of time. Feared not improving, never becoming what and who she knew she could be at thirteen, the very notion she'd strung and molded the aching ribcage of her future around.
"Don't tell anyone, but…" Luke starts. And then the words immediately die in her throat.
Adapt or die. Quinn used to say this, when he was thirteen and undersized and still let their mom call him sensitive like it was an asset and not a stranglehold indictment of his character. Over and over again. Conform to all whims. If you can't—dig your grave out and lie in it.
Luke had always wanted to be better than Quinn, even if such motivation went largely unspoken. She'd been given tools to work with that he lacked by nature, a rarity considering her position, whatever ambiguous role she occupied by decree of girlhood within the game and this league. During her draft year, when her father—and Pat, and every adult around her entitled to half an opinion on playing professional hockey, a number she understood at seventeen to in fact encompass a sizable amount of people—walked her through the draft process as if one bad interview might be the catalyst for an apocalyptic reckoning, she used to lie in bed and speak these truths to herself like commandments. Well, obviously I can play all situations. I kill penalties. I'm great on the transition; strong at controlled O-zone entries, but I can also defend the rush, and—
Jesus wept. No one liked a liar, but there was a difference, however slight, between doubt and the absence of belief. She knew she could make them believe. Liking her game would never—could never be a problem.
The ones who liked her, they called her self-aware and mature. I'd like to see Owen Power skate the way I do, Luke never continued. She'd gone home after her last interview and turned on the computer to start yelling at people on Fortnite. The ones who didn't like her, they said she made boneheaded plays and was too opportunistic with the puck, was prone to overhandling at the blueline, that her skating wouldn't disguise her lack of defensive acumen at the top level. That some ceilings were simply that. Ceilings, untouched. Rooting her down with gravity.
She'd worked too hard. She keeps telling herself this.
"Hischier?" Quinn asks, an answer and a question at once.
"It's…" God fucking damn it. Some addled part of her brain thinks letting in a game-tying own-goal would be easier to swallow than this conversation, if only marginally. She presses the meat of her palm against her brow bone, where her skin is glossy with grease and the hairs lie rough and unplucked. They both already know. But that's not the point, not exactly.
"I mean. It's—just. Fuck."
"It's fine, Luker," Quinn tells her, even if it remotely isn't. She wishes she could believe him. Earnestly does. But the aftertaste of sick is still sour on her gums, and there's a fresh headache taking shape along the tender base of her skull, pounding at the apex of her spine to let it in.
More than anything, Luke is tired.
"Do you need me to go with you?"
"No," she barks out. Everything is making her sensitive right now. "Fuck. I've got it."
Nine months isn't three years, sure, but it's still a considerable chunk of time no matter how you slice it. A long time to stay helpless and changed, stuck in an interim state. The uncertainty frightens her.
"Miss Hughes?" asks the nurse reading off her file.
Luke nods, tight. The paper gown they've put her in crinkles. She imagines her mom, twenty-something years ago, those dreaded thirties, married and happy and phasing out of the Olympian spin cycle.
"Fantastic," she says with a hum. Luke does not feel fantastic. "And how are we doing today?"
"I'm okay," Luke mumbles. In reality, she feels like a child. The sentiment only intensifies when the nurse smiles at her, starts explaining the tests and the ultrasound they'll be running today, hands her a specimen cup to pee in; when the OB comes in and probes her about her medical history, patient and kind and rattling, asks, And was this pregnancy planned or unplanned? like Luke's world isn't being upended on itself.
"Everything looks great," they tell her. "You're eight and a half weeks along, so right now we're looking at a due date in early January."
Christ. January was a lifetime away, a whole chunk of a season that would be lost to her if she didn't get rid of this now, nipped it in the bud while she still could. Luke is supposed to be starting summer training soon. She imagines Nico, back in Switzerland, the workouts he always posts on Instagram during the off-season and the pick-up games from his local rink, the family she still hasn't met yet and probably never will, who only know her as a last name on the roster and a pixelated jersey snapping Nico the puck from the point, the red and black of her flinging him into the boards when they cellied.
Luke hates the word expecting. She thinks expectation is what kills you. That the opposite of adapting is just that, after all, to sit there in wait, lying down and taking it. A part of her wonders if that's what the heartless thing taking root below her gut is supposed to make her feel. Like giving up. Or, worse—actively binning it.
"Do you have any other questions?"
No, Luke wants to say. So she can sling her bag back on and jettison out the industrial-looking hospital door and all the way down to the relative safety of Quinn's beat-down Kia, with its mottled paint job that has been begging for a power-wash for months. So she can take grounding breaths from the leather of its sun-boiled driver's seat and lose all concept of thought to the crooning notes of her favorite country station, safe from the consequences of her own actions.
It's not like she's never thought about any of this before. Obviously. Her sprawling family network, the aunts and uncles who kept hounding Jack about when he and Katie planned on having kids, her mom's patient tone whenever she reminded Luke that she should always do what made her happy first. Luke takes her pills, if forgetfully, which she knows maybe defeats the purpose. But she's also never been particularly regular, either, had maybe assumed that it had to mean something, when she was perpetually late in the name of sustained athleticism and her floor-scraping BF%. Reconfiguring her body to inhabitable dimensions, or at the very least unknowable ones. She imagines it navigable in only dark and unfathomable ways, like a dry savanna, or a volcanic island, one of those extreme-survival Nat Geo documentary climates.
Luke's brain swims against dense fog. The decision feels beyond her, even if in reality it was completely within her rights and personal capabilities, something millions of people went through every year. Having a child is one thing, but making it, or even simply choosing not to… she doesn't think it needs to be this difficult.
Luke lingers, kicking her feet at the base of the examination table. Breathes in and feels her chest sputter.
"I was wondering," she says, swallowing. "About—the morning sickness."
"Yes. Of course," the doctor says with immediacy. Sympathetically, as if the two of them are sharing something. The truth of it, maybe. Or some pale imitation of it. This protracted effort and what any of it even meant for her body, for Luke to be entertaining its vulnerability, the folly of her own sickness. A moment later the doctor is turning aside to pull out another pamphlet, depositing it onto the clammy plane of Luke's out-stretched palm, the paper thin and glossy and cool.
Luke doesn't cry on her way out, but it's a close thing. Her eyes sting anyway, a phantom act of tears. Wiping at her waterline only makes the pain worse, but she rubs and rubs away until she reaches the handle of her car door. Blinks hard and stares ahead.
There are leaflets in her bag. A vague and incongruous action plan. A laundry list of termination options, first-trimester tips on which vitamins to take and how to ease the hurling and why she should stop drinking if she hasn't already. All the people she needs to tell. Her aunt would never approve if she ended it. Pat would mostly be kind about it if she didn't, only with his detached brand of even-keel professionalism; he'd make it clear that most of her year would be over, that she needed to take responsibility for the front office's scrutiny and sit through every endlessly probing team meeting, all in the name of a kid no one even knew she'd been in the realm of possibly conceiving.
Then there was Nico.
Just looking at your height and activity levels here, she'd been told, don't be concerned if you don't start showing until some time later. Every pregnancy looks different, of course. But just something to keep in mind.
It meant that it might not even be until training camp, or the preseason, a long stretch ahead. Still looking the way she always does. Hiding in plain sight, the way she's always done.
Luke digs a palm into the hard plane of her stomach, grinds flesh to sinew. Wonders, Are you even in there?
Something has to change. Or someone, irreversibly.
"You want to know what I think?"
Luke crunches down on her apple. "Not really," she says, even though she does. Because she's still Lukey. Still Quinn's baby sister, and they would always work this way.
"I think you've made a mess of things," Quinn proclaims. Fucking tell her something she doesn't know. "But… I don't think it needs to be. A mess, I mean. Like, none of it is incorrigible."
"Oh, big word."
Quinn ignores her. He does that a lot. "Are you going to tell him soon?"
He means Nico.
"Jack?" she asks.
"Bro. Come on."
"It's not… dude." Luke sighs. "I don't know." Quinn was right: she'd gone and fucked it all up. She couldn't explain it any better.
He continues, "Because to me, it's like, you made it sound like he didn't care, or like he wasn't serious about it, but… was that because you didn't want it to be? Or he didn't?"
Was it because she'd believed Nate when he laughed and said that Nico wasn't a relationship guy? Because she was Luke and no one had ever wanted anything more of her, so she'd thought—why would Nico be the first? Because Jack was supposed to be the one who brought in the grandkids, who already had the house and property to boot, because—?
"Just look at it, Quinn," she says, exasperated. It was all so obvious. Couldn't he see? "None of this is ever going to last."
"I don't think you actually believe that," he estimates.
"Well, it doesn't matter what I believe."
That would always be the bottomline, more or less. It didn't matter where she wanted to get drafted, or whether she wanted to win gold, or the Cup, whether she wanted the guys' respect or for the accolades to stop differentiating her or for the fans to not call for her head every time she messed a play up. Didn't matter how badly she wanted something, or thought about it. The way Nico held onto her as she swayed in his lap, said Steady, baby, with his hands clutching at her hips, how sometimes she thought she might just vaporize with how badly she wanted to sink into him. It was impossible.
"Sure, keep saying that if it makes you feel better," Quinn shrugs. Later she'll blame the brain fog and first-trimester hormones for this, but in the moment she feels too-young and unmoored, wants him to hug her more than anything else, the tiny fluttering thing called fear beating in her chest. "But it doesn't, right?"
She'd gone and fucked it all up. Or, Luke was all fucked up about it. Quinn, too, in his own ways. They had this in common.
"Maybe," she admits. She pulls him in. His arms go warm and easy around her, his face tucked into her neck.
Quinn says, D-man's honor, "Don't go making mistakes you don't have to make."
Luke knows Nico is already back in Switzerland because he'd posted it to his story. An off-center airplane shot of thick clouds and nauseating stretches of blue and a huge 🇨🇭 sticker taking up a third of the screen. It was beautiful in a way that didn't feel real.
Home, his caption read. A declaration, albeit punctuated, or a promise. Maybe even an invitation.
She picks up the phone.
-
you: this makes zero sense
me: (despairing) i'm aware
pairing: 1343 (r63)
rating: m
wc: 11.4k
1) this is not a fic 2) don't read this 3) I WAS ENABLED. hypothetically this post is various snapshots of a longer thing that could conceivably be written and would be like a 100k slowburn character study with many complications and turns and difficult feelingz reflections but also that thing should not exist and will continue not existing. really i was just sick of having this document open when i hpave many other things to be doing with my life so like… Ok. thank you for your understanding 🥲 sometimes you're a girl and your captain is your captain but also not just your captain and it's complicated. also 4) don't read this
cw for
It's like this.
After the buzzer beater that leaves her sprawled out on the ice with her stick broken over her knee, splintered ends clasped between her mitts as she rolls over and feels her lungs burn and heave; after a hastily-packed suitcase and express one-way booking for EWR and an early-morning, surcharged Uber, a breakfast of airport cold brew and a stale everything bagel and a packet of in-flight trail mix; after she sits down with Pat on the line and squares her shoulders and puts her name to ink and someone claps her on the back and the boys roll into her comments section with Congrats and Ewww; after Quinn texts her that he's proud of her and she fires back 👍, like an asshole, and then—later, when she feels less like she needs to get medically checked for arrhythmia—Thx❤️, she finds herself standing in the hallway of Jack's place, kicking at an obstructive pair of Air Max's while he dangles a new set of keys in front of her face.
They're a back-up, he explains. For if she ever forgets the code or the keypad stops working. Nico is there, too, because of course he is, though for once his presence barely registers. He grins at her when she sees him and tells her that he lives just a few floors up if she ever needs him, because of course he does, continues, But I'm sure Jack will have you covered. And, 'Grats again. It's great to have you.
Luke takes the keys. She feels the metal along the ridges of her palm and puts them inside her pocket.
"Pretty sick, right?" Jack asks when they make their way across the living room, peering over the endless stretch of glass and into the congested traffic circle that winds through downtown, suffocating their apartment building like a boa constrictor. The slow crawl of cars feels especially glacial from this distance.
"It's fine," she says, rolling her eyes. It was a change of pace from the suburban nothingness of Granger, obviously: its life-preceding quiet, the kind of college-town calmness that invited the activity they watched animate before them. No floor-to-ceiling skyrise windows to block out the obnoxious rev of motorcycles at 2AM or drunk frosh yelling back and forth at each other from across the street. It'd been a while, clearly. "I mean. It's different."
Jack scoffs like he doesn't believe her. "Whatever, man," he says, pushing weakly at her arm. A moment later he tries to throw himself onto her shoulders so he can tuck her into his side. Nico laughs next to him. "Don't go acting like you're too good for your contract, big boy."
"Fuck you, I'm not," Luke insists. She wrestles out of his hold and spins on her heel, surveying their surroundings. It's April and spring-warm and she's been in New Jersey for less than 24 hours, and she thinks that if she were to dig down deep enough she might still be able to feel the cardiovascular sting of last weekend's loss, that prorated, time-sunk window in which she'd let her flayed heart lay out on the ice.
But that was it, then. One door closed. Another tunnel unfurling in endless fashion before her, kaleidoscopic and surreal, colored with the promise of something more.
"Can't believe it's finally fuckin' happening, man," Jack says.
"I know," she agrees. Their eyes meet. "Shit."
"Shit."
"Shit," Nico chimes in, smiling broadly at them. "You guys need help with anything? Lunch?"
By the time Jack is done showing her around, getting her set up in her to-be room with the measly essentials she'd muscled over to the East Coast, Nico has leftovers he's scrounged from the fridge reheated and tabled. He reaches over to hand Luke a plate, and his fingers brush over hers for a moment that's long enough to notice but short enough that she'd be insane to think anything more of it.
It's not anything. She might remember it later, maybe. In the context of the whole day, Jack at their window and his kicks lying on the floor the way he always leaves them, total pylon hazard, TV on and Chel paused at the menu screen, the way their fridge seems to spit out chicken-and-rice leftovers at a legitimately regenerative rate.
But it's not anything. It's not even the beginning of anything.
Luke isn't here to save the team, obviously. Not this season, and especially not now, headed for the road and down in the series. She calls Quinn, a spasm of weakness. He tells her to at least keep her plus-minus up, if nothing else, and they sit in silence while he puts her on speaker and starts scrolling wordlessly through his Instagram feed. You call mom already? No—calling her next. Okay. Well, good luck. And see you there.
They don't talk about Vancouver. Palat pulls her aside after her first warm-up and says, kind and uncomplicated, "Just try to have fun with it, rookie."
Luke doesn't think she was hardwired that way, but she's left with little choice. The losses roll on. She nets time on the second PK unit, watches Nico try to corral the locker room after a third-period beating, feels her not-yet-rookie, not-quite-summer postseason fade away.
Plus-two.
That's nineteen.
Someone is putting another glass in her hand. Luke scowls. Moyler used to stand in the kitchen during house parties making mixed drinks with blatantly stupid names that always tasted foul and looked positively radioactive, and it's what she thinks of now when she sucks on her cocktail straw and feels sticky fizz hit the back of her teeth.
"We're going out tonight," Jack had said decisively, shrugging his jacket on in the mouth of their locker room door while her fist clung awkwardly to her first-goal puck from the photo they'd taken together for socials. "And we are getting you wasted."
Of course, several hours and a nervous flash of her cheap fake later, Jack has pulled a Jack on her: he'd taken one look at the throng of tightly-packed bodies and slipped into the dark of pulsing club heat. Even more tragically, it means that Luke is now stuck at the team booth fielding Dawson's probing inquiries into, "So how much do you pick up, man, really?"
The conversation began after the table collectively decided that there was definitely no way Simon had a girlfriend, not with a mug like that. Simon leaned back with a scoff and proclaimed in smug, stilted English to not needing one when he was categorically hot shit in Slovakia, or at least something to that effect. Nico raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
"Oh please," Nate interrupts now. "I bet baby Hughesy's too focused on her game to get her dick wet."
"Dude."
"What?" His gap pokes through when he grins at them. "Never said I don't respect it."
Luke feels her face start to flame despite her best efforts. She takes another sip that goes down tasting less like gin and more like regret. The conversation had officially dragged on for too long, but she was neither drunk nor sober enough to be graceful about it, an impossible impasse, blatantly didn't trust her inhibitions to get her out of this one unscathed. God damn it.
"Do you fucking mind?" she interjects.
"Hey, we're only curious." He turns to Nico. "I mean, 's her rookie season. Go crazy, right?"
Nico stares him down coolly. "I'm not getting involved in this," he declares a moment later, through an air of faux-captainly conservatism. Luke, remembering all the locker rooms she'd tried to glue together with overcompensating bonding exercises and half-assed character lectures at off-ice get-togethers, can't help the snort that escapes her at his pacification attempt. Even if a more furtive part of her wishes she could wear his same nonchalance.
"I'm sure I do better than all of you, Jesus," she allows, stirring her straw to rattle the ice around. "Like, if we're talking roadkill faces…"
"Oh hoo," Nate whistles. He shrugs good-naturedly, then turns to gesture at Nico, "Eh, I do all right, but this guy over here's the real chick magnet. Sucks I was too busy slummin' it in the A to get in on that rookie-year action."
He sounds genuinely mournful about it. Luke thinks she might be starting to understand who Jack was getting unfettered access to coke from at eighteen. She expects Nico to shrug it off again, or maybe just laugh and own up to it, his apparent smashing success at getting girls to semi-reliably Snapchat him nudes or let him hit on the road or whatever—and, no matter how much she didn't care to think about it, it did make sense to her—but he only rolls his eyes and takes a pull of his drink.
Which, okay. Luke doesn't know why she follows the movement of his throat. Doesn't even realize she's doing it until his eyes cut to her. Against the dark scruff and olive-deep complexion of his face, she wonders whether she might be able to make out the faint pink impression of a blush, even in the low-fluorescent nightclub light. Or whether it was all just a particularly fucked-up brand of wishful thinking, this mental suggestibility she was now apparently privy to.
Luke thinks—she needs another drink.
"Hey. Lukey."
That's Nico, some time later, standing over her. He nudges at her arm with a steady hand.
"Huh?" she mumbles.
"Hey, I'm heading back now."
Luke can't hear shit. "You what?"
He pauses. When he repeats himself it's with a shout that fights against the noise of the club. "I said I'm heading back!" Perfectly punctuated. Continues, "Wanna split an Uber? With me?"
For whatever reason, the way his accent says Uber rings hilarious in her inebriated state. She sits up with a giggle and stretches her legs out, feeling the muscles protest. Then she remembers who she'd come with in the first place.
"What about Jack?"
"Yeah, sorry. Pretty sure he left with someone already."
"Right." Luke huffs. She doesn't know what time it is, but by the looks of it she thinks it's most likely too late to still be sticking around, all the family guys long since trickled out. "Yeah, sure. Okay."
It's raining on the ride back. Luke feels loose-limbed and on the verge of blurry, eyeing the rivulets that run down the cool frost of her window, the city lights blinking past her. Nico hums, faint. The sound mixes with one of the Top 40 hits playing from the radio, the intermittent dry rattle of the driver clearing his throat and his GPS low-volume signaling new turns at what feels like every fucking corner. Cities, man.
Apropos of nothing, Nico says: "Hey. You looked nice tonight."
Slowly, as if waking from something, Luke blinks.
"Oh. Um, thanks?" she manages, and thinks it slips out only vaguely doubtful. Luke knows what she looks like: her knotted floral top that sits cropped but was definitely meant to be regular-sized, categorically marketed with women under 5'8 in mind, the dark wash jeans that always seemed to hug awkwardly at her hips. She doesn't know if nice is the word she'd use to describe it.
Luke continues, "You, uh…" and her eyes hunt down the way Nico runs a hand along his hair, teasing the strands that had been flattened under a baseball cap for most of the evening, slicked-back and straightened-out. "You look. Fine."
"Okay," he laughs.
She's drunk, she justifies. Her face tingles. Then it's silence.
When they get back, they say goodbye as the elevator door opens onto her floor. Luke is still buzzing when she gets into bed, when she wakes up an unsatisfying number of hours later with a sore neck and a throbbing headache. She washes down some Advil with cold Gatorade, then raps insistently at Jack's door and barges in to realize that he isn't even home yet, and when she pulls out her phone to a message from Cap, Nico's smiling contact photo contiguous a simple Breakfast?, a Also gna hit the bike later. U in? 😄, Luke doesn't know which evolutionary instinct to blame for the way her teeth find themselves compelled to the unsuspecting flesh of her tongue.
Just that it hurts like hell. Fucking ow.
Q: You're the first female rookie defenseman to hit 40 points in NHL history. What does that mean to you?
A: Obviously it's a huge accomplishment.
A: I mean… I don't want to pretend that the results don't matter. So, yeah. A huge accomplishment.
A: But I also know the numbers aren't everything in the end. And, y'know, I'm just trying to work on my game day-by-day. Whether it means my shot, or my skating, or…
A: At the end of the day, I think it's just about not getting too caught up with these things. I just want to continue getting better for next season, and do what I can to help the team out.
A: Obviously it's a huge accomplishment.
A: I mean… I don't want to pretend that the results don't matter. So, yeah. A huge accomplishment.
A: But I also know the numbers aren't everything in the end. And, y'know, I'm just trying to work on my game day-by-day. Whether it means my shot, or my skating, or…
A: At the end of the day, I think it's just about not getting too caught up with these things. I just want to continue getting better for next season, and do what I can to help the team out.
Luke is: in the midst of a post-game Ozark binge, unwrapping a fig bar she'd pawed out of the pantry, and two disruptive yawns away from getting into bed early when Nico rings at her doorbell. None of these details are particularly important to the story, but she remembers having been irritated at the interruption, walking across the length of her kitchen with one hand awkwardly holding her crumbling pastry bar as she went to check the peephole.
"Hi. Where's Jack?" Nico asks. He leans into their doorframe ever so slightly, beard neatly trimmed and Mets hat pulled down to his brows. Luke takes an aborted step back.
"Oh," she replies. She bites into her bar and looks around at their empty living room and then back at Nico, the answer already on her tongue. "Yeah, he's out."
Nico blinks. "He not bring you?"
The face she makes in response must be interesting, Luke thinks, because she's trying valiantly not to imagine the four-to-seven girls Jack Hughes manages to wheel simultaneously via artless Instagram DMs at any given moment, or the way she sometimes finds herself standing at the kitchen island like a trapped giraffe when she stumbles down to breakfast and sees evidence of his nightly exploits still lingering by their granite countertop, drinking their shitty coffee and nibbling her way through a stash of the sourdough bagels they buy from the shop down the street. "Not really that kind of out."
"Ah. Right," Nico says, with understanding, the corner of his mouth lifting into a smirk.
Luke elegantly stuffs the rest of her bar in her mouth. She pulls out a hand to swipe at the crumbs that gather at the corner of her lip, rubbing away until the skin runs smooth. Nico's eyes are fixed on her, and although he isn't small the way Jack is she thinks she kind of likes how he still instinctively tilts his neck up to meet her, just the subtlest touch. Hates herself, too, for even noticing.
"So," she tries.
She's wearing an out-of-season Christmas fleece and team-issued XL sweatpants that pool down to her heels. Fiddling with her empty wrapper, she asks, "Did you, like, need something?"
"No, I was just…"
Nico pauses. It feels like he's watching her with X-ray precision. Whatever explanation he starts sharing about Jack, about meaning to hang out, fades away slowly on his tongue. When he peers past her shoulder and toward the dimmed TV light, he tries—a fresh angle, a redirected shot: "You're alone?"
Something in the way he says it makes the hairs of her forearm stand on end.
"It's 9PM." She shrugs. "And I'm boring."
"That's not true," he refuses, earnest even as he snorts with it. Luke hates that. Or wants to. Or thinks that she wants to, if the distinction even matters.
Jesus.
"But," he continues, "if you aren't doing anything…"
First of all: Ozark was doing something. Luke obviously does not say this. Nico's fist clenches momentarily, unfurls, lets the tension fade away. "Did you wanna come up, maybe?"
Later, some part of Luke will wonder whether this had been the turning point. Or whether it had come before, or after, in the club or at her aunt's place upstate or inside Nico's new, big, beautiful apartment, within some indistinguishably dark crevice in her chest, the doctor's table, all the fucked-up places she let herself feel more than she'd ever known she could feel. Whether she'd already known, long ago, somehow or subconsciously, that their inevitability had embedded itself in the way she spoke and stood and acted around him, the way she hated looking but couldn't stand even more to look away, the indestructibility of her idea of him. She'd spent a long time, after all, especially at twenty, lying to herself.
"Am I going to regret saying yes?" she asks.
Nico only says, diplomatic: "I think that's up to you. To decide. But I can make it worth your while."
Frankly, Luke doesn't really want to explain that the guys 6'2 female athletes get set up with in college generally range from plain annoying to borderline intense, verging on creepy. Back then she'd remembered thinking that if they were all going to be this unapologetically bad at sex, the least they could do was not be wrong about the Knicks or waste half an hour grilling her on the physiological benefits of going keto, as if she weren't already a professional athlete who met with three different types of sports nutritionists on a weekly basis. Of course, the guy who'd done that had been about 5'10 on a good day, had spent their date stroking her shoulder between reserved sips of mango White Claw like an absolute maniac, and she remembers the tattoo encircling the side of his neck and how it'd made her think that this was probably the experience Thom offered girls he hit up at the seniors' parties, the only bright spot of the entire interaction. The next day she'd forced Duker to buy her Chipotle—double rice and beans as always, fuck a carb cleanse—and conveniently forgotten to Venmo him back. Maybe she looked miserable enough that he let it go.
But that was Luke. In some shape or some sense. Now, a girl who barely knows herself sits next to a guy who knows he's hot shit and bites out, flushing:
"I have had sex before. I wasn't just trying to save face at the club, Jesus. Go the fuck to hell."
And the guy who knows he's hot shit goes: "Yeah, okay."
Says: "But, I mean. Like, on a scale of one to ten. How good?"
"Oh, don't you fucking—what would you rate yourself, huh? Think you'd come on top?"
Nico shrugs, grinning. "Just saying I've never gotten complaints before."
"Obviously no one is going to tell you if your dick game is weak." The absolute balls on this man, she thinks. He shuffles around on his bed, casually dropping an elbow and leaning his weight into it. The position makes the collar of his shirt slip down to reveal a mocking strip of skin, the flex of his shoulder muscle, lean but broad and built.
This is weird, she wants to say. Doesn't say. Killing a frustrated noise at the base of her throat, Is this not weird to you? Because it's fucking weird to me. It was incomprehensible, she thought, the way he turned away briefly and cast his eyes along the stretch of his bedroom, a brow lifted. Strange the way he said, voice rough and low and generous: "If you don't want to, you can just say that."
As if it were up to her. As if any of this were her choice.
Luke doesn't… she doesn't know.
She leans over and kisses him.
An interlude, tangentially:
Back in freshman year, Luke remembers KJ informing her that she didn't need to be wearing eyeshadow because it only deepened the purpled rings of her eyes, the Hughes-variety mark of exhaustion that made her appear panda-like. Or like a wet-looking dog, or—they were creative with the animal imagery. Kent also laughed when Matty called her a hairless cat and liked to razz Luke about her "astronomically negative amounts of sty," which, honestly. She didn't have time to be worrying about a back tuck, for fuck's sake, maybe Kent would net a few more one-Ts if she weren't constantly mouthing off at practice. And sure, Luke probably shouldn't have been listening to them in the first place, but even Kent in all her rampant assholery managed to pull some of the objectively hottest chicks Luke had ever seen, so Luke figures she probably knew what she was talking about.
Point being, Nico Hischier is so far out of her league he might as well be in another stratosphere. Luke has never not been the kind of flat that doesn't even register in locker rooms. Her nose too big for her face, or maybe everyone thought this of themselves, the universal incapability of looking yourself square without feeling an edge of discomfort at its uninterrupted perception, the fishbowl depreciation of your own image. The fact remained solely that nothing ever seemed to slot into place. Every morning her hair flew around widely in flagrant defiance of the laws of physics. She remembers overhearing two teammates in the USHL talking about her during a round of Smash or Pass once, punctuated with sharp disbelief: Hughesy? Nah, bro. Come on. A hand waving around, some laughter: I dunno, man. She's all fucking legs, right? I could paper bag it.
Her rookie year proved a strange, tumultuous time. Heaving simultaneously under blunt expectation and pointed doubt, limboing precariously not beneath rope but rather something like a serrated knife blade, the wicked edge of an ice skate. At the end of it, she thought: well, there are worse things in life than losing the Calder to Connor Bedard. And her last shot at Juniors gold, and a chance at being KJ's favorite U20—though, honestly, Luke figures if the way Kent used to drawl on and on about her Bantam days to an embarrassingly receptive OP were any indication, she hadn't exactly been missing out on much there—but who was counting, really.
There were worse things. The ankle sprain that took her out for a chunk of March. The bruised rib. Her game being her game being her game until it didn't even feel like it anymore, became something else altogether, foreign and ugly and beaten-down. Jaw biting down onto the word potential like it might finally one day break open for her, split from its gilded shell, its unknowable skin.
Now, Nico kisses Luke on his bed like she's twenty and still has time. There would be worse things down the line, but—this was not one of them, even if she didn't know it yet. He pushes her against the headboards and draws a thigh between her legs, hips bearing down heavy and conscious, fingers teasing gingerly at her tits. His mouth sucks at her tongue and chases the sighs that escape the tight line of her lips, pressure building deep inside and all around her, walking the line between rough and constant and something in the wrenching vicinity of sweet.
By the time Nico gets his fingers properly worked inside of her, her legs are shivering with the effort of staying collected. He drops back and looks at her bra hooked off and thrown to the side, the pink of her spit-slick mouth, parted dumbly. Says, considering: "You will tell me if my—what was it you said? Ah. My dick game is weak, yeah?"
Luke flips him off. "It's a three so far," she informs him, and gasps only a little bit when his fingers fuck back into her in retaliation. "Better put your back into it, Cap."
"You don't have to rate me while I'm doing it," he complains, as if he hadn't been the one to bring up the number system in the first place.
He doesn't say much else, which Luke kind of likes about him.
If pressed: eight point four. Always leave room for improvement.
Q: What would you say it means to have this young leadership core here, with your brother and Nico? Or, I guess, how have they been helping you along the process?
A: Um, yeah. It's special, of course.
A: Nico's just… a great guy. We're lucky to have a captain like him. And obviously, my brother, we don't actually talk that much, you know, one-on-one about the game and stuff, because we get enough of that with the team. But he's always been there for me. Sometimes I still can't believe we get to play together.
A: And, uh… I mean, Nico and Jack have made this team theirs. The moment you walk into the locker room, you can feel it. So, it's…
A: Yeah.
A: It's special, definitely.
A: Um, yeah. It's special, of course.
A: Nico's just… a great guy. We're lucky to have a captain like him. And obviously, my brother, we don't actually talk that much, you know, one-on-one about the game and stuff, because we get enough of that with the team. But he's always been there for me. Sometimes I still can't believe we get to play together.
A: And, uh… I mean, Nico and Jack have made this team theirs. The moment you walk into the locker room, you can feel it. So, it's…
A: Yeah.
A: It's special, definitely.
Earlier, at the inception of it:
"So Jack can't know?"
"Well, obviously."
The thing was, it'd be devastating for a multitude of reasons. She didn't know how to explain it. How Jack had stopped being soft on her when she hit six feet, or once she started high school, the timelines forever unintelligible and interlinked. The way quarantining together had been a relief, of course, but at the end of the day Luke remembers the times when she'd felt caged and antsy, like she had no way of siphoning off the pent-up energy that swam to the top of her lungs and slowly flushed her nervous system like a saline drip. How Jack looked at her like he didn't know what to do with the fact that his sister was no longer stubbornly twelve and might have a life to her that wasn't just hockey, even if she still fully looked and acted it.
One of Nico's brows furrow contemplatively, both eyes blinking intermittently between the lull of conversation. He considers the tenseness in her shoulders. Luke wonders what leadership book he's digging for in his mind's index, whether one of his references has insights on how to deal with a girl so cocky she circles back to being afraid of herself.
"Okay," he says eventually. "If it's what you want."
She nods, with relief.
"It is," she promises.
Luke will remember this. Being twenty, and then twenty-one, thinking: this is nothing. Not knowing she could have it any other way, never letting the notion of personal openness lapse across her mind. This, and them, their configuration. Her with Nico, the occasional hook-up on her living room sectional or in the privacy of his bed, or once, ill-advised, in the backseat of his car, or another time, on the road, within the walls of the single room she was entitled to whenever the numbers shook out that way—they would always be a stopgap toward someone else. They had to be.
More than anything, though, this had been Nico meeting her in the middle. Luke doesn't understand that until later.
/r/devils
Question from a Canucks fan who doesn't really follow the Devils: how's Luke Hughes looking so far?
Question from a Canucks fan who doesn't really follow the Devils: how's Luke Hughes looking so far?
Ignore some of these comments… take it from a long-time fan, I'd say she's doing pretty well. Obviously great offensive metrics with flashes of huge talent. Her weaknesses do show a lot with the turnovers but she's young and has time to develop defensively. A little bit sheltered at the moment but I'd expect that to change as her game grows. I also think it's hard to compare her to her brother (if that's why you're asking) because they play very differently, but Devils future is bright with the kids we have on the blueline :)
"I'm being patient, Luke. But you are not touching my dick with this shit playing."
"I don't even—" Luke huffs. Okay, fair. She rolls around his bed to slam the speaker off, biting back a retort about his Euro club trash. Even she can concede that Luke Bryan ballads don't make for the sexiest of environments. "Do you have any other requests, or can we get to it already?"
"Don't be mean," Nico chastises, tightening a hand at her waist to pull her in. The motion jerks her back, sending her against his chest.
"Oh," she says, a little light.
He always mouths out the word like that, when she gets snippy—mean—with some amount of wonder. Smiling ambiguously. Luke doesn't know whether it's better or worse, that her moods so obviously amuse him.
"You like that?" he asks now. Wrapped around her back, leaning forward, teeth nipping at the shell of her ear. Then, more decisively, at her neck, the sensitive expanse of her throat, between the tender junction of bone and skin.
It's Jack's idea, ultimately. Though Luke is the one to tell him.
She says, "Dude, just be cool."
"I'm always cool. When am I not cool?"
"You… don't actually want me to answer that," she decides for him.
He pouts at her. "Ouch," he says, and it makes his face distort in a way that isn't even remotely cute.
Luke is standing in his kitchen, scraping at the dregs of her breakfast oatmeal while they solidify the plans. Jack had said, Hey, you think the rookies want in on a party?, in a tone that didn't even vaguely convey the quaint, rambunctious Weinberg-ness of their aunt's place, straddling the border to Connecticut, the last-minute family Hanukkah get-together she'd expressly invited them to at the tail-end of their three-day breather. It went: golfing, food, and pretending she wasn't going to freak out when Nico spoke to her aunt in the vicinity of two different Hughes siblings.
The main difference between Jack and Quinn, Luke realized a long time ago, is that Jack only knows how to push at something when it's been demanded of him. Late-period monster efforts, pedal-to-the-metal shifts. Hounding away at the puck until something finally bent, or snapped, or sunk its sagging weight into the net.
He couldn't understand this, though. More realistically, her. Luke both loved and hated this about him, the total absorption of his own character, because it only lengthened the leash of what she was doing behind his back. Enabling the head-first, mountainside stumble she'd let Nico pull her along. Or her to him, this embrace rooted in mutually-unconcerned destruction.
A few winters ago, around this time, Luke remembers sitting in one of her aunt's guest rooms with Quinn. They'd both been tipsy on nothing but hard seltzers and fancy champagne, shooting the shit, her first year in Ann Arbor. She'd then unceremoniously hiccuped and announced, "You know, people say you slept with Norris freshman year."
Like, a joke. But Quinn—restraint softened by drink, not that it could even really matter; Luke knew him well enough to disrobe any attempt at misdirection—jerked up as if electrocuted. His shock, in turn, shocked her. It mandated new alignments. A mental restructuring of the model she'd built in her head, of who her brothers were to her and to everyone around them, the abstractions they carried.
"Dude, what? Dude. Oh, gross."
He sighed and crumpled an empty can in his fist. "I mean. Define slept with."
"That's even worse!" They were both drunk and started laughing, inexplicably, the sound ripping out of Quinn like a broken seam. "I did not need to know that."
And then he said, hand to his mouth, quiet like he wore so well, "Don't tell Jack, okay?"
Abstractions.
Really, though. It isn't hard to hide something when no one else is looking.
HISCHIER: Of course, Luke's been great. She's a really special player. I think there are a lot of expectations, you know, but if anyone can keep proving people wrong… it's her.
How much is enough?
Her aunt is asking this now. Well, no. Before that, she says:
"Oh, Jack." Brightly, "I was just on the phone to Ellen about you." Luke stands next to him and Nico in the kitchen, where the charcuterie board is laid out, the three of them expertly weaving around the migration patterns of peckish cousins and their hordes of in-laws and plus-ones. "And how's the girlfriend doing?"
Jack's eye twitches. Nico's head whips up to look at her in a way that says, Oh, so it's this kind of family gathering?, and Luke stuffs a cracker into her mouth so she has something to stifle the smile with, valiantly ignoring the way it makes Nico grin.
Later, when prodded, Nico graciously says: "Ah, no. I don't have a girlfriend."
"Swear I keep telling him to settle down," Jack interrupts sweetly, blatantly lying. All Jack actually says is shit like, You got a new girl yet? and So fucking jealous of you, man, wish I wasn't cuffed right now.
Her aunt tuts. "For crying out loud. It's just hockey, hockey, hockey with all of you, isn't it? You know," she nudges at Luke, stood off-guard, who stumbles at the unexpected force of it. "Ellen didn't start having these three until late, either. Her thirties."
She says it like a death sentence. Luke briefly wonders whether this is one of the things Nico has some randomly progressive European opinion about, or whether it's all the same over in Switzerland. "But you do want kids, don't you?" she continues.
"Uh." For once, so unlike his usual self, Nico actually looks out of his depth.
"If I find the right person, then…" he trails off. Luke studiously avoids his eyes until he manages to shake himself out, slotting his usual smile back on. "Of course, kids are great."
"Oh, they're just the best, aren't they?" She coos, clearly charmed by him. Nico has successfully pacified her edge, softened the bite in her inquisition. When she turns to Luke it's only with a lamenting sigh, worry so plaintive it reads tender in its fragile care.
Luke's mom had taught them a lot of things. Like how to skate, of course—she was a Weinberg-Hughes product to the bone, nothing less and nothing more—but also the right way to wash formal wear and load the dishes, recipes for basic vegetable dishes that she and Jack consistently resisted proper instruction of, in thanks largely to their documented incompetence around the kitchen. Luke still threw in her clothes all at once and got food delivered more than she objectively should, managed to chip glassware in the dishwasher on a near-impossible bimonthly basis, but it was the thought that counted.
Their mom had never wanted them feckless or complacent. Luke remembers that. Now, and later, once fate has turned in on her, a hand to her stomach, her aunt's words flashing by.
"I wish Luke here could find a nice man, too," she says. She rests a manicured hand on her forearm, not baleful but not exactly forgiving, either. "Sometimes I just wonder, you know. I mean, how much is enough? Maybe I don't understand all this stuff."
What would it take—to call it a day. The million dollar question. What would it take. To run in clockwise fashion for once, to stop winding herself so tightly it threatened total detonation, dropped her down to the flash point?
The worst-kept Hughes family secret, her and Quinn's abstractions aside, remained: Jack was their only hope. At the real life, a namesake who would make their parents proud. The difference in the confidence he wore was that it actually wasn't worn at all, had never been put-on, grew right along the grooves of his skin. His expectations went unspoken.
What would it take? A Norris she knows she'll never win, a Cup she might never hoist, a place for her name in the record books without an asterisk by its side, without first and best but only by modifier? She thinks about the millions in salary her brothers have already put in the bank. The guestrooms she doesn't need, their lake house in Michigan, Jack's beach rental out in Florida.
In between:
"I thought you guys broke up," she reminds Jack, baffled.
His laptop screen is turned away from her, but it's too late. He's gone and done it now. The two-million-dollar Zillow estimate he'd flashed her five minutes ago is permanently tattooed to her retinas.
"We were off for a bit," he dismisses. "Like, a while ago. But we're fine now."
"Yeah? And how'd that work out?"
"I fixed it," Jack insists, petulantly enough that it kind of sounds worse than it probably is.
"Oh, well. If you fixed it."
Jack must take offense to her sarcastic drawl because he starts sulking at her. Luke laughs and finally eases her teasing; she does like Jack's girl, really, the closest thing he's had to a committed relationship over these past two years, even with the ups and downs and the string of puck bunnies he'd brought back conspicuously to the apartment during a rough stretch at home the end of last season. Every time they met, Katie had been perfectly nice to her. She'd played lacrosse at Princeton and arguably had a better golf swing than Jack did, which—Luke thinks isn't a very high bar, actually, but was still more than she could say of herself, who as the tallest child had to instead perfect the art of one-on-one contact sports to gain any advantage over her brothers growing up.
Luke is almost twenty-three. Or will be this year, on the back-end of her ELC. The apartment has started to feel claustrophobic for a while now, thrown between the rock and hard places of Jack and Nico in her mind, their counterpositional endpoints, stretching out the hamstring of her judgment's patience. They were both growing up. Or had grown up a long time ago.
Either way, these things happened.
"It's cool," she says. "You better save me a room, though."
"Yeah, buddy. Six bedrooms," Jack reminds her, pointing at one of the scintillating images from the interior listing. It felt different from the lake house, somehow. Probably because she associated that with the guys and carefree summers and not Thanksgiving postcards or WAG jacket backdrops.
Luke shakes out her hand. "You think I should move one of the rookies in, then?"
He laughs. "I think you can afford your own place, Moose."
"Okay, sure, but. Who's going to let me kick their ass in COD every day?"
Which was just another way of saying: I'll miss you.
It was always going to be this way. The Montclair mansion off the side of its rural-suburban backroads and its fountain-centerpiece cobblestone driveway, the yawning forest property. The six bedrooms, purebred dogs you had to get on year-long breeder waitlists for and trips to Paris, a girlfriend sponsored by skincare brands and wine companies on Instagram. Jack likes kids. She knows this, because he's told her before, but also because of the way his face lights up when they volunteer at youth hockey programs, grin threatening to split his face when he crouches down to sign sticks or the backs of jerseys, as if he were hypnotically drawn to all life smaller and more fragile than his.
Things only get easier after Jack moves out. But—like a landslide kind of easy. Record-breaking swiftness of self-annihilating recalibration.
The fingers Nico runs along her hair are gentle now. Rhythmic, patterned motions teasing at the roots of her curls, lulling her into the fortified security of his embrace. She feels herself slip into that, its comfort, the weight of his idle arm as he slings it heavily over the soft of her middle.
"I could take you to Bern one day," Nico is saying. Voice syrupy and far-away, tinged with the nostalgic air of fantasy. "It's just… different. All of it."
Luke should really move. Somehow it feels like she's teetering on the edge of something, even though they're both firmly in the center of Nico's king bed, entangled together like they don't know where she begins and where he ends, every nerve ending in her body screaming at her to just give in.
But she should move. The night has long stretched past them. They have practice tomorrow morning, and if Nico shows up late at the rink again—with or without Luke by his side—the boys will probably start chirping him about reverting back to his rookie days, will ask him what had kept him up all night through low whistles and wolfish grins. Nico will probably laugh it off with practiced leniency, but Luke will stand there chewing at the side of her cheek until she feels the skin bleed, tongue shrugging dead cells away with a nervous sweep.
Instead:
"Yeah?" she mumbles, eyes already pulling closed. Nico is talking about mountains and blue lakes and ski trails. His favorite coffee shop, trips he's been on with his brother, how the light stumbles across the valley on summer mornings and the endless cobblestone of the city center. Luke—well. Luke is USA ride-or-die, to the bone and to the end. Doesn't really love anything more than the waterfront and sitting by the dock back at home and watching Jack bellyflop off his wakeboard while the guys from the program and the girls they'd invited over lean against the edge of the boat to laugh at him, but she thinks she feels it all the same.
Home, or. Its anchoring insistence. Belonging to something unequivocally, or to the idea of something, to love a thing so much you never lose the words for it. Or better, or worse, to love it so much no words encompass it.
Nico says, I think you'd love it there, the heat of his skin burning like a furnace against her. Its fireplace flame, dreamlike and hazy. A part of her is still wondering, even now, lying in his bed: after all this time, her?
She doesn't know if it's fear, then, the feeling that starts to punch in the cavern of her lung. Luke had never been the type of person who put thought into what her ideal date looked like, had always consummated pleasure through acts of somatic isolation, unseeing—or unfeeling—of any dependence beyond it. But Nico had fallen into her life. Or let her into his. Pulled her along and created structure of something she still couldn't quite get a read on, like it was a tough defensive play and she was about to commit to the wrong position.
Whatever it was, this couldn't be pokechecked away. Only exhumed. Luke swallows and swears she tastes smoke. She should move, but she's thinking of rain in Michigan, of Nico's family home in Bern, and the hand in her hair stills so he can press a kiss to the side of her cheek, and—
That's just not fair. It isn't.
Of course, they're late to practice. Shar nudges Nico over and says, Like old times, yeah?, while Nico huffs and swears it Legit happened, like, twice. Only Siegs notices them standing side-by-side, twists around to mumble something to Nico low enough that she can only recognize it for its vague incomprehensibility, the sloping syllables she presumes to be Swiss German. Nico's eyes find hers, and when he whispers back it's with a noncommittal shrug.
She turns away.
"I know you think everyone else is like, stupid. Or whatever. But we're not all like you."
Luke tells him to go die in a hole. Quinn pauses with a pensive breath.
"I mean. Sure, Jack and Z, and Brady…"
"Is this—are you just trying to call yourself smart?"
It was true, sure, but Quinn didn't actually need to say it. He was already annoying enough without matter-of-fact arrogance compounding the unbearable edge of his character.
"It's called being observant," he allows, shrugging. "I care about you, buddy. So just talk to me."
There was both too much and too little Luke could say. How she had run hot and cold throughout their entire playoff run, Nico chewing at his lip and taking it in stride, the losses she still never knew how to handle, not even now. The contract she still needed to sign before the summer faded, Quinn's impending UFA status. Each contextual undertone more murky than the last, too frostbitten and wintry for the balmy summer sun they now sat soaking by beach-side.
She opens with: "Jack has no idea."
Quinn nods. "Yes," he agrees, evident in itself. Of the three of them, he would always be the best at cutting to the chase. Then he leans in and delivers the dagger.
"You know, it's not—it's not like I've never met him."
Luke's eyes go wide. Involuntarily, she feels her blood curdling, tongue thick and choking, cold like sweat and fear.
"What are you talking about," she says, flat. No question to it.
Quinn's face pinches.
"Lukey…" he tries, trailing off.
Luke thinks about how easy it is to hide something when she tells herself it doesn't actually matter. Maybe Quinn understands that. Maybe it makes them the same.
Still, the line between pity and understanding could be so thin, like a straggling piece of filament. Even across national borders, a six-hour flight, three-thousand miles away, he knew too much. She couldn't hide from that.
Luke had spent a long time this way, in hiding. Never sure whether her confidence was real or constructed, or whether the quality of being constructed negated its actuality; how much of her hollowed focus came by instruction and how much of it was personally motivated, how any mathematical extraction of this self-referential equation proved impossible when she remembered that everything she'd ever done could only overlay the trodden path of her brothers' enduring accomplishments.
She remembers, when Nico first kissed her. How he'd pressed his hand between her thighs and rubbed her off in tight, insistent circles, bit at her neck with a kind of abandon that felt foreign to the way people usually spoke about her. No, or, not with a vaguely misappropriated appreciation for what her body might do, of what it could offer in spite of itself, in spite of her presentation, but instead with a desire straightforward enough it felt palpable. The way Nico always chased the shape of it, read between her lines and in their parallel space materialized equal parts sharp want and open-flame tenderness, so concentrated it made her motion-sick.
At one point in the second half of the season, Nico had considered moving out to a real house, even hit up Jack's realtor to talk market and visit a few neighborhoods out west. A few weeks later, though, he'd abruptly changed his mind, told her he was upgrading to a nicer apartment right around her block because he figured it would be more comfortable to put up any wayward rookies in JC if it came down to it, closer to the rink and the pulse of the city. As if the decision had been motivated purely by a locker-room kind of generosity and not—whatever.
"Bar scene in Essex not where it's at?" she'd teased.
"Maybe I like it here," Nico said. The levity in his voice felt weighed down with brick. She'd wanted to hear it, could admit that much to herself, but she also didn't know what to do when the words actually found material ground, soundwaves displacing the still air around them.
Once, after they fucked, she went into his bathroom and felt like she was seeing everything around her in sharp relief. The curly hair shampoo he'd bought her that she didn't even know how to use. That she still always reached for when she found herself at his place, the alarming frequency of it, its already half-empty weight. Hair ties in the drawer for whenever she grew it out, either by virtue of superstition or unbridled laziness, the dreaded second toothbrush in his cup, an ultimate declaration of moved-the-fuck-in. In his bedroom, the stupid leadership books he left strewn around that she sometimes leafed through, the bead bracelets he kept in the drawer of his nightstand. His endless collection of hats and the worn-out Mooseheads hoodie she'd once dug out of the closet and started wearing around in jest, the dizzying familiarity that came from slipping into it. He always left a basketball game playing on the TV in the background for her, or let her bully him into watching college football even when she could tell he didn't understand or even care to.
"There's this thing," she tells Quinn now. "It's been going on for a while. Um, over two years. But it's not serious."
She doesn't know, is the thing.
An itemized list of the places Luke has seen Nico lose his temper:
On the bench. During the dying moments of the third, when he'd shot at the gaping cage for what should've been a tying goal and struck iron instead, her teeth gnashing together as she watched the puck ricochet back out to center. In the locker room, every time they let themselves get outplayed, legs gassed and muscles weakened from lack of effort. Another time, carpooling together with Jack in Nico's car, when someone rear-ended them slowing down into a stop light, and it hadn't been funny in the moment but in hindsight also kind of had been, the way Nico had honked on instinct and yelled Fuck! This fucking asshole, what the fuck? and berated the guy for like ten minutes, and how when they finally dragged themselves into practice he immediately smoothed out the creases of his temper like he was pulling on another skin.
At her place. When he'd caught her screening snide DM requests from guys who called her the worst Hughes and a myriad of other names she couldn't repeat without meriting a gag order, who demanded she be taken out of the line-up for every diminutive mistake, tongues vicious with the lash of anonymity.
"Jeez. Tell me how you really feel," she'd drawled when he ripped her phone out with disproportionate insistence, setting it far out of reach.
Nico cared like a captain and a friend. It was apparent, because he also chastised Jack whenever her brother parroted back media appraisals as if they mattered to him, not that he realistically faced much of it to the degree she did anymore, the constant degradations of her worth and character and efforts. But.
Maybe that makes it worse, when he says it. That she can't feel any rage to him at all.
What Luke knows—or thinks she knows—is that when Nico first invited her up to his place, he hadn't been trying to make her his girl. There'd been some comfort in knowing this. Understanding that there would always be other Katies waiting, the fact that maybe her involvement in this song-and-dance made her easy, coiling herself around Nico, or, Hisch, Cap, the guy who laughed and shrugged when Jack asked if he'd been picking up lately and said, Hold up. Who's saying I have a girlfriend? with befuddled nonchalance piercing through locker room chatter, gossip like water off his back, but that it didn't matter because it was still symbiotic, mostly.
She doesn't even think brunettes exist in Switzerland.
The thing is that three years was both a long time and no time at all. A single entry-level contract. The length of this thing. A string of truncated postseasons, the 2OT Game 7 loss to the Canes, the summers they'd spent apart like cold-turkey reprieves from her body's compulsions.
How could she have known?
Summer of '26, she gets sick. But before that, a week until their exit interviews, Nico accosts her in the parking lot and says, "You know, you should come back with me."
"To your place?" She asks. Like a fucking idiot.
He says, "No, I mean. Back to Switzerland."
"I don't…" she stops. "Like, to Bern?" To your family?
"Yes," he confirms. Slowly, like he thinks she needs the patience. It's muggy out, clouds an indistinguishable mass of grey. Nico's eyes are dark and acerbic.
She doesn't understand. This was stupid. This was all so stupid. "Why?"
"Are you—Luke, come on." He makes to put his hand on her arm and then aborts the motion.
She tries again. "I just thought. I mean, like. You haven't told your family about me, right?"
"Would it be so bad if I did?"
"Well… no. But. I mean, we're like…"
"You haven't been seeing other people, right?" Nico asks suddenly.
"Seeing other people?" she repeats, dumbfounded. What was this, a romance novel? The worst part, she thinks, is how his tone wasn't even accusatory—probably because he had to already know, knew that of course Luke hadn't slept with anyone except Nico in… well. Since the start of it, obviously. He had to know. The sound of his inquiry mocked her. It had never been a question of her own commitment, had it?
Had it?
"Yes, seeing other people."
An astringent taste blooms on her tongue. "No, you're the only guy I've been sleeping with this whole time. Okay? Fuck. Congratulations."
He doesn't look particularly pleased, or even relieved, at her revelation.
"I'm being serious, Luke," he says now.
"Of course you are," she tells him helplessly. They were both serious people and always would be. Luke remembers Jack once calling Nico the best captain the Devils could ever ask for and wondering if what she felt churning in the pit of her stomach was jealousy. But this—something outside the realm of hockey, of captainly responsibility, was different. "I just don't—"
"If you don't want to," Nico interrupts. Pauses.
"I don't know what you want," he realizes. His face shutters when he steps back, the heel of his boot clanking against asphalt. "But if you figure that out, then. Can you. I don't know." A hand raises to readjust the brim of his cap. And that's when he says it. "Luke, I just need you to meet me halfway."
Then he turns away and walks back to his car. Her convictions make a lonely place, she thinks.
Luke hits the gym. She's still sick, so she throws up. Keeps throwing up. She looks at Nico's close friends story. She buys a business-class ticket home, back to Michigan. Opens her Health app, sees the faded red dot of her cycle tracker, the ugly sort of truth that not even bedrest or a BRAT diet or staying hydrated could fix.
Fuck.
When she goes back to Canton, Jack announces: "Guys, I think I'm gonna propose this summer."
Quinn makes a noise of recognition. Thanks to some comedic stroke of irony, Luke feels her malaise and plain-toast breakfast lurch back at her, barely has a moment to process before she's legging it from the family table to go hurl pathetically in the toilet bowl of their first-floor bathroom. She's still sitting with her knees drawn to her chest and hands reaching around the back of her neck when Quinn finds her, minutes later, considering her wordlessly.
"You good?" he finally asks.
"What does it fucking look like."
"Dude. This is like, the third time in the last 12 hours."
"Yeah," she says, miserable.
The thing with Luke is that when she fucks up, she fucks up big. This used to never really bother her—at least never on any actionable level—back when she was still young and didn't know better. Back when she could tell herself that there was more to play toward, that she still had another inch, a whole foot of developmental carpet left to unravel.
The problem was, though, that the gravitas of her volatility only sunk deeper as her path to the league narrowed. The roof converged and collapsed in on her, sharpening her awareness of it, knowing her makeshift tether increasingly shorter. No matter how many times she rehearsed an objectivity to her self-assessments, spoke through the media-conscious shape of a patient, paternally-trained tongue, the fact remained that she feared running out of time. Feared not improving, never becoming what and who she knew she could be at thirteen, the very notion she'd strung and molded the aching ribcage of her future around.
"Don't tell anyone, but…" Luke starts. And then the words immediately die in her throat.
Adapt or die. Quinn used to say this, when he was thirteen and undersized and still let their mom call him sensitive like it was an asset and not a stranglehold indictment of his character. Over and over again. Conform to all whims. If you can't—dig your grave out and lie in it.
Luke had always wanted to be better than Quinn, even if such motivation went largely unspoken. She'd been given tools to work with that he lacked by nature, a rarity considering her position, whatever ambiguous role she occupied by decree of girlhood within the game and this league. During her draft year, when her father—and Pat, and every adult around her entitled to half an opinion on playing professional hockey, a number she understood at seventeen to in fact encompass a sizable amount of people—walked her through the draft process as if one bad interview might be the catalyst for an apocalyptic reckoning, she used to lie in bed and speak these truths to herself like commandments. Well, obviously I can play all situations. I kill penalties. I'm great on the transition; strong at controlled O-zone entries, but I can also defend the rush, and—
Jesus wept. No one liked a liar, but there was a difference, however slight, between doubt and the absence of belief. She knew she could make them believe. Liking her game would never—could never be a problem.
The ones who liked her, they called her self-aware and mature. I'd like to see Owen Power skate the way I do, Luke never continued. She'd gone home after her last interview and turned on the computer to start yelling at people on Fortnite. The ones who didn't like her, they said she made boneheaded plays and was too opportunistic with the puck, was prone to overhandling at the blueline, that her skating wouldn't disguise her lack of defensive acumen at the top level. That some ceilings were simply that. Ceilings, untouched. Rooting her down with gravity.
She'd worked too hard. She keeps telling herself this.
"Hischier?" Quinn asks, an answer and a question at once.
"It's…" God fucking damn it. Some addled part of her brain thinks letting in a game-tying own-goal would be easier to swallow than this conversation, if only marginally. She presses the meat of her palm against her brow bone, where her skin is glossy with grease and the hairs lie rough and unplucked. They both already know. But that's not the point, not exactly.
"I mean. It's—just. Fuck."
"It's fine, Luker," Quinn tells her, even if it remotely isn't. She wishes she could believe him. Earnestly does. But the aftertaste of sick is still sour on her gums, and there's a fresh headache taking shape along the tender base of her skull, pounding at the apex of her spine to let it in.
More than anything, Luke is tired.
"Do you need me to go with you?"
"No," she barks out. Everything is making her sensitive right now. "Fuck. I've got it."
Nine months isn't three years, sure, but it's still a considerable chunk of time no matter how you slice it. A long time to stay helpless and changed, stuck in an interim state. The uncertainty frightens her.
"Miss Hughes?" asks the nurse reading off her file.
Luke nods, tight. The paper gown they've put her in crinkles. She imagines her mom, twenty-something years ago, those dreaded thirties, married and happy and phasing out of the Olympian spin cycle.
"Fantastic," she says with a hum. Luke does not feel fantastic. "And how are we doing today?"
"I'm okay," Luke mumbles. In reality, she feels like a child. The sentiment only intensifies when the nurse smiles at her, starts explaining the tests and the ultrasound they'll be running today, hands her a specimen cup to pee in; when the OB comes in and probes her about her medical history, patient and kind and rattling, asks, And was this pregnancy planned or unplanned? like Luke's world isn't being upended on itself.
"Everything looks great," they tell her. "You're eight and a half weeks along, so right now we're looking at a due date in early January."
Christ. January was a lifetime away, a whole chunk of a season that would be lost to her if she didn't get rid of this now, nipped it in the bud while she still could. Luke is supposed to be starting summer training soon. She imagines Nico, back in Switzerland, the workouts he always posts on Instagram during the off-season and the pick-up games from his local rink, the family she still hasn't met yet and probably never will, who only know her as a last name on the roster and a pixelated jersey snapping Nico the puck from the point, the red and black of her flinging him into the boards when they cellied.
Luke hates the word expecting. She thinks expectation is what kills you. That the opposite of adapting is just that, after all, to sit there in wait, lying down and taking it. A part of her wonders if that's what the heartless thing taking root below her gut is supposed to make her feel. Like giving up. Or, worse—actively binning it.
"Do you have any other questions?"
No, Luke wants to say. So she can sling her bag back on and jettison out the industrial-looking hospital door and all the way down to the relative safety of Quinn's beat-down Kia, with its mottled paint job that has been begging for a power-wash for months. So she can take grounding breaths from the leather of its sun-boiled driver's seat and lose all concept of thought to the crooning notes of her favorite country station, safe from the consequences of her own actions.
It's not like she's never thought about any of this before. Obviously. Her sprawling family network, the aunts and uncles who kept hounding Jack about when he and Katie planned on having kids, her mom's patient tone whenever she reminded Luke that she should always do what made her happy first. Luke takes her pills, if forgetfully, which she knows maybe defeats the purpose. But she's also never been particularly regular, either, had maybe assumed that it had to mean something, when she was perpetually late in the name of sustained athleticism and her floor-scraping BF%. Reconfiguring her body to inhabitable dimensions, or at the very least unknowable ones. She imagines it navigable in only dark and unfathomable ways, like a dry savanna, or a volcanic island, one of those extreme-survival Nat Geo documentary climates.
Luke's brain swims against dense fog. The decision feels beyond her, even if in reality it was completely within her rights and personal capabilities, something millions of people went through every year. Having a child is one thing, but making it, or even simply choosing not to… she doesn't think it needs to be this difficult.
Luke lingers, kicking her feet at the base of the examination table. Breathes in and feels her chest sputter.
"I was wondering," she says, swallowing. "About—the morning sickness."
"Yes. Of course," the doctor says with immediacy. Sympathetically, as if the two of them are sharing something. The truth of it, maybe. Or some pale imitation of it. This protracted effort and what any of it even meant for her body, for Luke to be entertaining its vulnerability, the folly of her own sickness. A moment later the doctor is turning aside to pull out another pamphlet, depositing it onto the clammy plane of Luke's out-stretched palm, the paper thin and glossy and cool.
Luke doesn't cry on her way out, but it's a close thing. Her eyes sting anyway, a phantom act of tears. Wiping at her waterline only makes the pain worse, but she rubs and rubs away until she reaches the handle of her car door. Blinks hard and stares ahead.
There are leaflets in her bag. A vague and incongruous action plan. A laundry list of termination options, first-trimester tips on which vitamins to take and how to ease the hurling and why she should stop drinking if she hasn't already. All the people she needs to tell. Her aunt would never approve if she ended it. Pat would mostly be kind about it if she didn't, only with his detached brand of even-keel professionalism; he'd make it clear that most of her year would be over, that she needed to take responsibility for the front office's scrutiny and sit through every endlessly probing team meeting, all in the name of a kid no one even knew she'd been in the realm of possibly conceiving.
Then there was Nico.
Just looking at your height and activity levels here, she'd been told, don't be concerned if you don't start showing until some time later. Every pregnancy looks different, of course. But just something to keep in mind.
It meant that it might not even be until training camp, or the preseason, a long stretch ahead. Still looking the way she always does. Hiding in plain sight, the way she's always done.
Luke digs a palm into the hard plane of her stomach, grinds flesh to sinew. Wonders, Are you even in there?
Something has to change. Or someone, irreversibly.
"You want to know what I think?"
Luke crunches down on her apple. "Not really," she says, even though she does. Because she's still Lukey. Still Quinn's baby sister, and they would always work this way.
"I think you've made a mess of things," Quinn proclaims. Fucking tell her something she doesn't know. "But… I don't think it needs to be. A mess, I mean. Like, none of it is incorrigible."
"Oh, big word."
Quinn ignores her. He does that a lot. "Are you going to tell him soon?"
He means Nico.
"Jack?" she asks.
"Bro. Come on."
"It's not… dude." Luke sighs. "I don't know." Quinn was right: she'd gone and fucked it all up. She couldn't explain it any better.
He continues, "Because to me, it's like, you made it sound like he didn't care, or like he wasn't serious about it, but… was that because you didn't want it to be? Or he didn't?"
Was it because she'd believed Nate when he laughed and said that Nico wasn't a relationship guy? Because she was Luke and no one had ever wanted anything more of her, so she'd thought—why would Nico be the first? Because Jack was supposed to be the one who brought in the grandkids, who already had the house and property to boot, because—?
"Just look at it, Quinn," she says, exasperated. It was all so obvious. Couldn't he see? "None of this is ever going to last."
"I don't think you actually believe that," he estimates.
"Well, it doesn't matter what I believe."
That would always be the bottomline, more or less. It didn't matter where she wanted to get drafted, or whether she wanted to win gold, or the Cup, whether she wanted the guys' respect or for the accolades to stop differentiating her or for the fans to not call for her head every time she messed a play up. Didn't matter how badly she wanted something, or thought about it. The way Nico held onto her as she swayed in his lap, said Steady, baby, with his hands clutching at her hips, how sometimes she thought she might just vaporize with how badly she wanted to sink into him. It was impossible.
"Sure, keep saying that if it makes you feel better," Quinn shrugs. Later she'll blame the brain fog and first-trimester hormones for this, but in the moment she feels too-young and unmoored, wants him to hug her more than anything else, the tiny fluttering thing called fear beating in her chest. "But it doesn't, right?"
She'd gone and fucked it all up. Or, Luke was all fucked up about it. Quinn, too, in his own ways. They had this in common.
"Maybe," she admits. She pulls him in. His arms go warm and easy around her, his face tucked into her neck.
Quinn says, D-man's honor, "Don't go making mistakes you don't have to make."
Luke knows Nico is already back in Switzerland because he'd posted it to his story. An off-center airplane shot of thick clouds and nauseating stretches of blue and a huge 🇨🇭 sticker taking up a third of the screen. It was beautiful in a way that didn't feel real.
Home, his caption read. A declaration, albeit punctuated, or a promise. Maybe even an invitation.
She picks up the phone.
-
you: this makes zero sense
me: (despairing) i'm aware
