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Locker cleanout day never comes with any form of joy. The room empties as the day goes on, lockers stand vacant, guys drift in and out. Interviews are given. Bags are packed. Words are said. Some are left unsaid.
Ryan’s done it three or four different ways. There’s a span of time available. Exit interview times are assigned. Some early and some late. He’s been the first and he’s been the last. He’s had all the emotions, seen the guys who sneak in and out, who avoid the emotional minefield of a summer of goodbyes and potential trades, he’s been the guy who meets the day with false hope, with a smile and a slap on the back and a promise of text messages and summer at the lake.
He’s spent time in 3 NHL locker rooms now. He’s been to the playoffs and been on the very last team in the league. He knows what it’s like to be the caboose.
His name isn’t the first on the exit interview list. But it isn’t the last either. He and Hallsy and Ebs’ times all fall close enough together that they all pile into Taylor’s truck and make the familiar drive to Rexall.
The car is quiet. Ryan isn’t stupid. He isn’t delusional. He knows how to google his own name, how to read his twitter mentions and he watches TSN with enough regularity to read the writing on the wall. And even if he couldn’t read it, he has an agent who makes a healthy amount of money to basically help him out on the off chance he somehow found himself at the end of a lock-out shortened season without any idea where he fell on the depth chart helpfully labelled “The Future of the Edmonton Oilers.”
He doesn't need any of those things.
The exit interview goes exactly the way the entire world knows it’s going to. Ryan was a healthy scratch enough times during the season to know how management feels about him. He didn’t play the last 2 games of the season and spent a better than average chunk of the last road trip of the season driving around Edmonton alone, saying a silent goodbye to the place that has seen some of the best and worst times of his life.
He doesn’t begrudge this organization for where it’s going, but he can’t help but begrudge it a little for throwing him off the back of the train.
* * *
On Friday night, after the Oil Kings have taken a 3-2 lead in their series Ryan hangs around until Rexall is empty but for a couple of Oil King equipment guys. He’s technically hurt, one camera phone picture and this moment will be front page news in a heartbeat. But he’s never been afraid of doing what his heart believes.
He laces up his skates in an empty locker room. There’s no voices tonight, no chirping, no laughter, nothing but the sound of laces through rivets and tied tightly. He takes the ice in his sacred Lululemon sweats and an Oilers hoodie, no pads, no helmet, just one final time over the boards and around this place he once believed he could forever call home.
At morning skate tomorrow the ice will start out marred by the crisscrossing patterns of his skate blades. The team will add their tracks until his are nothing more than the first cuts. Maybe the deepest, maybe not. But it feels somehow symbolic, he won't wear his skates on Rexall’s ice again with the Oiler crest across his chest.
He allows himself this one moment of solitary hurt. His skates slide across the ice so familiar he can tell with pinpoint accuracy where it gets soft at the end of periods, where the boards are stiff and where they have give. The ghosts of players who came before him all stretch across this ice and in the quiet of an arena that’s been filled with cheers and boos he draws a final deep breath.
He watches the game against Vancouver with a strange sense of detachment, already it feels like this is the past, a team he used to play for, former teammates, old friends, a line from the Goyte song that nobody likes except for the glockenspiel.
* * *
His exit interview doesn’t go off the rails. MacT and Ralph are straight shooters - he agrees with some of the things they say and disagrees with others. He was the biggest fish in the trade bait pond and all he really got was an extra month of reprieve. An exit from the team that thankfully won’t be documented in living color by Oil Change. But everyone in the room, everyone in the city, knows it’s over. After 3 years, and heart and soul and ankle injuries and surgery, he’s leaving this room for the last time as a player for the Edmonton Oilers.
His last interview with the Edmonton media on the other hand does go a little off the rails. He says some things that he doesn’t mean to say, some things his mom will shake her head at, some things he’s bound to get a lecture about, some things that his dad will say make him look like a spoiled brat and a shitty teammate and a bad friend.
None of that is wrong. But he hopes that 3 years of friendship and playing together will earn him the right to be a little emotionally raw after the day he’s had.
Hours later more lockers sit empty. He doesn’t look back at the hulking building behind the when they throw their equipment bags and sticks into the back of Taylor’s truck and head for home.
In the end there isn’t much time, Taylor and Jordan are on a plane for the World Championships in the morning and Ryan’s on the late flight to Boston not long after. He’s distractingly anxious for what’s next, to get out of here and onto the next, while being equivalently melancholy. He’s had ample time to come to terms with leaving this team, with learning all over again how to be a member of a new team, a different team.
But it’s something else to leave these two clowns.
On Sunday night Taylor disappears for an hour and comes home with takeout and a case of beer. They sit on the couch for hours and watch completely mindless, un-hockey-related TV. They sit there until the chinese food is cold and congealed in the bottom of styrofoam boxes and empty beer bottles take up most of the landscape on the coffee table.
The three of them don’t talk a ton, it’s always been feast or famine as far as conversation is concerned in their household. Ebs and Whits are both as happy not to talk as they are to fill the silence with meaningless conversation and Taylor is just as likely to settle into a headspace where he’s consumed by the internet and his phone and whatever music is bopping in his headphones and forget completely that he has the ability to talk at all.
But other times they do fill the silence with chatter, chirps and mocking and laughter ring across the tiled floors of their townhouse as often as silence reigns.
“You shouldn’t leave town with a crappy interview with Edmonton Jack and a high five from Ralph and MacT,” Taylor’s voice has the low slur that means he’s riding the edge between drunk and relaxed. Jordan’s curled carelessly against his side on the couch nursing a beer.
“We’re too drunk to drive,” Ryan points out, “and besides, I burned more than a few bridges today.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to get some,” Taylor gestures grandly with his beer. “The good people of Edmonton deserve one more opportunity to suck your dick before you abandon us for the Red Sox.”
Jordan snorts at that and Taylor shoves at him.
“I’m serious dudes. This isn’t how the story ends. Whits doesn’t leave town with his tail between his legs. He leaves town pumping his fists because he rode this town hard.”
“I appreciate the sentiment,” Ryan grins, because fuck it all, he has good friends, a lot of money, three-quarters of a college education and can still use SAT vocab words after he’s consumed his fair share of 2 cases of beer. “But seriously dude, this is good enough, we don’t need DUI’s and reckless driving charges to add to the damage we’ve already done.”
Nothing that has come before explains how they end up in Taylor's bedroom, lit by the light from the bathroom, left on from god-knows-when and casting strange and oblong shadows across their faces.
They don’t really do this. Ryan mostly listens with a distracted ear to the low moans from the bedroom down the hall and ignores the fact that all of Jordan’s clothes are in Taylor’s closet and the bed in the third bedroom has gone untouched since they moved in.
Twice he’s caught them with their literal pants down and he’s learned to be pretty vigilant about making noise when he comes into a room unexpectedly.
But somehow he finds himself here, hand shoved down his pants, well on his way to fully hard and tucked into the wrinkled sheets of Taylor’s king sized bed, watching while Hallsy and Ebs devour each other's mouths and attempt to make an Olympic sport out of getting into each other's pants.
Taylor bounces Jordan into bed too and grins wickedly when he moves to curl against Ryan’s side. It’s clear immediately that Ryan doesn’t know what to do with a boxer-clad Ebs pressed against him and the kilometers of smooth winter tan skin that comes along with him. Jordan solves this problem by nuzzling his cold nose against the line of Ryan’s neck until he gives in and turns to capture his mouth.
Ryan always forgets what it’s like to kiss another guy. He mostly sticks to girls during the season. There’s people around wherever they go in Edmonton and It’s easier to pick up and not worry about any discussions about his chosen gender. But there’s something about kissing another guy that he always forgets how much he likes. The fight for dominance, not worrying about being gentle, the scratching rub of facial hair against facial hair.
The bed shifts as Taylor crawls up between Ryan’s legs. Ryan kicks his foot out a little as Taylor forces his hands out of his pants and mouths at Ryan’s fleece-covered dick. He’ll admit to being more than a little overwhelmed, but if there’s one thing Ryan’s good at, it’s adapting. He lets Taylor free his dick and slides his now empty hand up Jordan’s side to thumb at his nipples while Jordan slides his tongue across the roof of his mouth.
Taylor likes to tease. In the back corner of his mind Ryan feels like he shouldn’t be shocked by this, but at the same time he hasn’t exactly spent a lot of time considering exactly what Taylor’s bedroom tendencies might be. He alternates stucking Ryan deep into his mouth with running his tongue around the crown and sliding his lips down to press kisses against the base.
Together he and Ebs form a deadly combination, somehow managing to be in sync enough that while Taylor’s licking long leisurely strokes up Ryan’s dick, Jordan’s sucking his tongue with the same single-minded determination that Ryan recognizes from complex skating footwork and laser sharp wrist shots.
When Taylor goes for broke sliding down as far as he can on Ryan’s dick while pairing it with just the right suction Ryan pulls back Jordan’s mouth for a minute to steal a look down at the blonde head bobbing between his legs and Taylor’s looking up at him through stupidly long eyelashes. Ryan presses his shoulders back against the bed and turns his head to pant against the navy flannel sheets that he’s pretty sure were his originally.
Jordan runs a hand through Taylor’s already messy hair and smiles when Taylor butts his head against the pressure of the hand twisted in his hair. He pulls back and Ryan almost loses it right there, the tip of his dick sitting like a present on the red and swollen lower lip that he suddenly finds himself thinking about sucking on.
Taylor grins like he knows exactly what he’s thinking and opens his mouth to drop back down on Ryan’s dick.
Jordan pulls a pillow from the head of the bed and tucks it under Ryan’s head before he rolls to the side and rests his own head against Ryan’s shoulder. Together they watch Taylor’s seriously sinful lips as they slide rhythmically up and down Ryan’s dick. Ryan’s not going to win any awards for stamina here, it’s been a shitty year hockey-wise and that’s translated pretty much to his entire life, including picking up. So the fact that he has someone else’s mouth on his dick right now is nothing short of a serious novelty. The fact that it’s Taylor, someone he knows, someone he hopes is going to fall far more squarely into the lifelong-friend category as opposed to the former-teammate category [to say nothing of the newly acquired, lifelong-friend-former-teammate-who-also-happens-to-have-sucked-my-dick category]
Ryan’s a considerate guy, so he slides a hand down to give Taylor’s hair a courtesey tug when he gets close and when he’s met not only with Taylor sliding down as far as he can go and but with Jordan grinding against his thigh in search of friction, and yea, Ryan’s pretty much done at that point. He arches his back up off the mattress and is rewarded with Taylor’s fingers branding his hips with what will be tomorrow’s bruises. He comes with his dick bumping the back of Taylor’s throat and Jordan mouthing distractedly at his collarbone while they both stare down at Taylor’s mussed hair and hard, leaking dick outlined in his own gray boxers.
Ryan succumbs to the haze of beer and take-out and orgasms and saying goodbye and passes out curled around one of the pillows. The last thing he sees before he closes his eyes is Taylor sliding his fingers deep into Jordan and laughing, low and familiar when he hits the spot that causes Jordan’s hips to arch off the bed and rips an involuntary groan from his throat.
There isn’t any time for awkwardness on Tuesday morning, the bathroom light is still on but they sleep through one alarm completely and end up running late for the airport and Ryan’s phone is ringing and he has about a million missed texts and Taylor’s packing a truly haphazard stack of clothes into a suitcase and Jordan’s phone charger is completely MIA and the controlled chaos of 3 people preparing to leave the country means everything is completely normal.
They don’t say goodbye, because they don’t do that, Ryan drives Jordan and Taylor to the airport and chirps them while they load all their crap onto a luggage cart and then, because Edmonton is the biggest little town on earth, Nuge pulls up to drop off Justin and they end up talking at the curb for 20 minutes about Cleveland and Nuge’s surgery and the movie that they watched with Gags the night before and before Ryan can really think about what’s happening they’re making their way through security and he’s waving to Nuge and climbing back in his truck alone and headed for home.
At home Ryan gives in to a nagging headache and sentiment and crawls back into Taylor’s almost still-warm bed and tries to feel some kind of peace, some kind of normalcy about his future. The house is quiet around him, the sound of rush hour traffic fading and he can almost imagine that it’s a normal morning, that Taylor and Jordan are just downstairs watching TV. He’ll get up and they’ll go to practice, eat, play COD, take a nap and head back to the rink. Another normal day. Except for the fact that Ryan woke up 2 hours ago naked on his back with an equivalently naked Jordan tucked against his side, arm slung low over his stomach and an also naked Taylor spooned behind Jordan.
That part isn’t normal at all.