Chapter Eleven

February

Murph's visit at the end of January had really fucked Ryan up, he realized later. It was funny: the divorce with Shannon hadn't affected him nearly so much. They hadn't spoken in the months since the final divorce hearing, and he barely even thought about her. He went a week without talking to Murph, and it felt like the world as he knew it had ended.

He wasn't his usual self at the numerous charity events the coaching staff had to attend, he wasn't charming the season-ticket holders in the same way. He wasn't as sharp on the bench, and he wasn't as intense in practices. Eric and Petey were able to cover for him, to a certain extent, but once February rolled around Ryan realized that he really had to get it the fuck together. He couldn't let his personal life affect his work life that way: if he did, he would never be able to do the job the way he needed to do it, especially because his father was lurking at the edges of the team, like a scavenger biting at his ankles and waiting to steal the scraps of garbage.

"Who are you texting?" Eric asked, his voice a sleepy mumble, as he rolled over and pressed his face against Ryan's ribs.

"My fucking dad. Guess who wants free tickets for him and Chelsea and my brothers?"

Eric's eyes opened fully, and he propped himself up on his elbow. His expression was measured, searching. Even without his glasses, he always had a kind of raven-like air when he looked at you that way, like some kind of big, overgrown bird with prey in its sights. "You know that Conroy will just give you the tickets if you ask for them."

"That's the thing. I don't want to ask him. My family is...you give an inch, they take a mile, and then some. If I give him the tickets he's just going to keep asking."

"So just say no, then."

Ryan didn't laugh, but the noise that escaped was a sort of pained chuckle that was close enough. "I am saying no. Mark Sullivan never accepts no as an answer. That was the first lesson he taught me as a boy."

Eric flopped back down in the bed and closed his eyes. Ryan fought the sudden and inexplicable urge to run his fingers through Eric's unruly hair, which had grown a little longer as the season went on. Eric said, "I'll tell him to fuck off for you. Gladly."

"Ha. Mental image is nice, but man, would that backfire. Then I'd never hear the end of it about someone else fighting my battles. No. Sorry to keep you awake. This is just something I need to handle on my own."

"It's fine, mon pitchounet." Eric's muffled voice drifted off, and he was asleep again.

Ryan looked at his phone again. Dad had said, It's the least you can do considering all of the shit I've done for you over the years. He sighed and rubbed his hand over his eyes. He really had to just put all of it into the background, concentrate solely on the team, which was in another losing skid. He locked his phone and lay back down in the bed, turned over on his side to look down at Eric. In his sleep, he did look younger, more peaceful, in a way that he never did on the ice. And he just let Ryan see him like that without even thinking about it anymore.

Ryan closed his eyes, although it took him a long time to sleep.

They lost on Valentine's Day, and even Ryan could tell that the season was really starting to wear on Williams. He might have been the team's number-one center, but he was still young, and going against top lines that had learned to game-plan for him every night for twenty minutes was starting to wear on him. It was the kind of night when everyone blew their defensive responsibilities, when they went down 3-0 in the first and Davey had to come in cold in the second to relieve the starter.

In the locker room after, Ryan made sure to go over to talk to Williams, let him know that it wasn't his fault. "We're expecting a lot out of you, Willy, and you've more than risen to the challenge. You know a night like this doesn't change that."

"I should be better," Williams said, raising one eyebrow. Like it was a challenge to pep-talk him into accepting this.

"We can all be better. We're going to work on it. But that's what it comes down to, in the end. You can only work on the things you can control. The roster is what it is, and you're a load-bearing beam, buddy. It's not fair to you, but that's what it is."

Williams exhaled. Around them, the rest of the team was still noisy and chaotic, stripping out of wet gear, checking to see who'd lost the most money on the board, chirping each other. Williams never participated in the worst of it. He wasn't that kind of a kid.

He looked back up at Ryan, his dark eyes shrewd. "They're going to blame me."

"The reporters?"

"Yeah."

"I won't let them. But even if they did, you know you can't let it get to you too much."

Williams nodded. "I'm working on it."

"Good kid," Ryan said, and squeezed his shoulder. "If you want to come to the office to review tape tomorrow before morning skate, we'll all be there. We can talk about that one goal against in the third."

"I'd like that, Coach," Williams said, and finally smiled.

Ryan watched him go and thought about the way he accepted the weight of the world onto his shoulders, the way Ryan had always done as a younger man. That was a leader: that was the kind of kid you wanted as the backbone of your team going years forward. He was lucky, to be coaching, and to have a few of them so early in his own career. The team was a good group, and Williams was the fulcrum.

The questions from the press started immediately after the game: "Are you disappointed in the team, Sully?"

He was frustrated. He couldn't lie; it killed him watching the team dig themselves into a hole with mistakes that he had tried so hard to drill out of them. But he never threw individual players under the bus and wasn't about to start now. "I'm disappointed in some of the lapses. But a young team, it's like potty-training toddlers, you know? They might piss on the carpet because they're having too much fun to remember to go, and it's up to the parent to teach them. It doesn't mean that you don't love him. You just have to work with him."

Afterward, Petey clapped him on the back. "All-time metaphor with that one, man," he said cheerfully. "Don't worry. We'll get out the training pants and get those defensemen using 'em this weekend."

"Thank you, Peter," Ryan said dryly.

"You ain't the only one with metaphors, Coach," Petey said, with all of the immense satisfaction that only he could manage.

It was late by the time they finished with the media availabilities and talking to the players who had been particularly disappointing and getting ready to head home. It wasn't even a question that he would head back to Eric's afterward, and it was late enough that Ryan risked just getting into Eric's car with him.

"Hey," Eric said, as he was circling his block looking for a spot, "I wanted to, uh...tell you something."

"What?"

"I'm going home to Montreal for the All-Star weekend. I do every year, but since we've been spending so much time together, I wanted to warn you. I know I probably waited too long to do it, I just—there was so much other shit going on."

It was weird, like a shadow of the way he'd felt when Murph had made his confession. Felt it like a physical blow, a hand pushing hard against his chest. "Oh. Yeah. That makes sense. Of course you don't get to see your mom very often, that really makes sense that you'd want to go home and visit her."

He wasn't sure why it felt so bad, but it was probably the prospect of the whole weekend alone. Ryan liked being around other people, even if his family was shitty; it was part of the reason he'd gotten into coaching. He was always around other people that way.

The way the All-Star breaks worked, the guys who would be playing went, and the rest of the team would be scattered, too. Williams had been picked by the league, and Cook had won the fan vote, so they would be gone. Some of the rest of the team would go to show support for their buddies. Some of them would go home, like Eric was planning to do, to visit their families. And some of them, like Laurent Martel, loudly proclaimed their intensions to do absolutely nothing except enjoy a quiet beer and play some video games. There weren't any practices and there weren't any team events.

He'd probably have to spend most of the weekend dodging his family.

Eric parallel parked his car at about 40 mph, something he did regularly and that always shocked Ryan when he did. When he turned off the ignition, he looked sideways at Ryan. His eyes were uncharacteristically nervous. "Unless."

"Unless what?"

"It's kind of last minute, I know. I've had my tickets booked since they announced the dates, but...if you wanted to come with me?"

Ryan stared at him. "Come with you? Like, to your mother's home?"

"You don't have to if you don't want to," Eric said. He wasn't looking Ryan in the eye anymore. "I know it's kind of a weird thing to ask."

It was risky, but Ryan's body was moving without his brain's input. He leaned across the center console and took Eric's chin in his hand. It was a quick kiss, a messy clash of mouth on mouth, and Eric made a surprised noise into it.

"Shit, of course I'll go," Ryan said.

Eric pulled away. The corner of his mouth tipped up in a smile, for once, no sarcasm hinted in it. "You'll like it, I promise. I have so many places to show you. You're going to love the food. My mother will—well. She'll like you."

"You told her about me?" Ryan asked, momentarily stunned.

"Not yet. I didn't want to do it unless I knew you wanted to do it, but I'm going to do it tonight. Okay?"

"Uh, sure, okay," Ryan said, still trying to process the conversation. "Eric...thank you?"

"Yeah, well. Let's see how the conversation goes first before you start thanking me," he muttered.

"Hey. With everything I've heard about your mom, I'm sure it'll be fine. Shit, I have to start packing."

Eric laughed and turned the car on again. "So maybe we should head back to your place instead?"

"Guess so," Ryan said, feeling the weight of that shitty weekend lifting already.

He hadn't really been expecting anything for Valentine's Day, but this meant more than any gift or card or dinner could have. Eric had given him something he couldn't have even imagined asking for. He exhaled, pressed his fingers against the cold glass of the window and, for a second, wondered at how quickly his life had changed in just a few months.

Eric still couldn't entirely believe that he had done it. Was doing it. His hand wasn't shaking when he called his mother, but it felt like it should be. Part of him still thought that maybe it might have been easier to just show up with Ryan, let her figure it out on her own. He knew she would have been fine, probably, but that wasn't fair to Ryan.

Ryan, who had become important enough to him that Eric was breaking years of his own personal rules for the first time. Ryan, who was currently in his bedroom, playing Soundgarden on his tinny phone speaker while he packed his weekend bag. Eric could hear him singing along, his shitty, enthusiastic voice carrying.

"éric!" she said when she picked up, delighted. "You missed your last call."

"I'm sorry, 'Man, I've been busy. And I'll see you very soon, you know."

"I do. I'm looking forward to it. It's been so long, tateleh."

"I was actually calling to talk to you about the visit."

You couldn't put one past Rosa Aronson: as soon as the words were out of his mouth, her tone sharpened audibly. She wasn't worried, necessarily, but she was focused in. "Is anything wrong? You don't need to cancel, do you?"

"No, no, nothing like that." He was shocked how calm his voice sounded. "I'm seeing someone—I have been for several months now—and I wanted to bring him home to meet you."

In the long pause that followed, Eric died several painful deaths.

Finally, she said, "My boy, you have been seeing someone for several months and you are only just now telling your mother about it ?"

"Maman, you heard me say he was a man, right?" With all of the fear that had built up about telling her, about wondering whether his mother's age and tradition would have led her to disown him, it was almost a comical situation that the thing she was most upset about was that he had someone in his life and hadn't told her. Of course it would be just his luck that his elderly mother had misheard him, now, when he'd finally gotten up the stones to tell her.

"Of course I heard that," she said impatiently, "my hearing aid is working just fine. But you have been seeing this man for months and you have not told me? When I have been worrying about you being alone for so long? My darling, did you really think I would..."

"I really didn't know, 'Man," Eric said. The shame felt thick in his mouth, cloying and dirty. Not of who he was, but that he hadn't trusted her to accept him. The heavy regret of wondering, now, whether his father would have been the same. "I didn't know what to think. I'm sorry."

There was another long pause. "No, tateleh. I'm sorry. We should talk about this when you come home, but first...of course you should absolutely bring your boyfriend. I want to know about him first. What is his name? Is he Jewish? Does he have children...?" The hope in her voice was almost painful.

He thought: boyfriend? His brain immediately skipped over the word. "Thank you, 'Man. He's not Jewish. He doesn't have kids. His name is Ryan."

"Ryan— éric , you didn't ."

He had to laugh. Once again, in everything, his mother wasn't worried about the fact that Ryan was a man, but that Ryan was his boss. She wasn't wrong. "You'll understand when you meet him, 'Man," he said, finally. "He's really...something."

"Yes," she said dryly, "considering the way you used to complain about him, he certainly must be. All right, éric. We'll talk about this when the two of you arrive. Do you have any dinners you'd like me to make?"

"‘Man, I don't want you making any dinners, I want you to rest. I'll take you out—"

"The usual, then," she cut him off. "I love you, tateleh. You know that, right?"

"Yes," Eric said, although for the first time in many years, he was able to say it without qualifications. He hung up and looked at the phone screen for a second. His head was spinning, but he felt like laughing, like running into the bedroom and picking Ryan up and twirling him around in a fucking circle. The knowledge that Ryan would probably let him do it and laugh about it. Things certainly had changed over the last few months. He was still trying to play catch-up with his own life.

In the bedroom, Ryan was zipping his bag. He looked up, smiled and asked, "How'd it go?"

"We're good," Eric said, because it was easier than trying to explain anything else. "You're going to have to help me bully her into going out to dinner instead of cooking, though."

"Eric Aronson, I am not bullying your elderly mother into anything —"

"Just wait," Eric said. It was strange; his mouth was smiling without his brain's conscious input. "You'll understand when you meet her."

"I'm looking forward to it," Ryan said.

Flying into YUL had been bittersweet over the years. It was such a familiar airport, one he'd spent so much time in. Sweet to see his parents; bitter to leave them. And then, after his father had died, a whole other layer of regret and the knowledge that time was slipping by faster than he could do anything about it. Walking through the arrivals hall with Ryan at his shoulder, talking a mile a minute about the time that the baggage claim at YUL had lost the entire Desperadoes' gear and Murph had threatened to go down there and sort it out himself, felt different than anything he'd been through here before.

"It's nothing special," Eric warned him, as they got into a taxi to head to his mother's house.

"Shut up. It's where you grew up; of course it's special."

The thing was that it wasn't a very impressive house. Eric had grown up solidly lower middle class, and the house reflected that. It was an older building, a long brick rectangle with a sloped roof on top, a skinny yard in front and a shallow yard in back. There were a few equally skinny, stubborn trees on that block, and he had spent many hours in the street shooting pucks and orange balls at the beaten-up net his parents had to replace too frequently. It had been a happy place for him, close enough to walk to the synagogue he attended with his parents, not too far from his billet when he had gone away to play in Boisbriand for juniors.

He knew he shouldn't have been nervous about Ryan meeting his mother, because Ryan always made a good impression on everyone. His mother was excited to meet him. There was no need to worry about it. But he was evidently doing a piss-poor enough job hiding it that Ryan looked over and said, "Hey, it's going to be fine, you know?"

"Logically, I know this," Eric said, exhaling.

"Okay, well, logically or not, it's going to be fine ," Ryan said, following Eric up the concrete path to the door.

When Eric's mother answered the door, she immediately threw her arms around him and held on tight. He hugged her back, trying not to think about how frail she felt these days when he remembered her from his youth as an imposing and solid physical presence. Her grip was just as tight as it had always been, though, and her eyes were just as bright when she looked up at him and said, "I'm glad you're here." She took a step back, her smile a little intimidating. "And you... I've heard a lot about you, Mr. Sullivan."

"Sully, please," he said, holding out his hand, "or Ryan. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Aronson."

Instead of taking his hand, she threw her arms around him in the same bear hug she'd subjected Eric to. "Then you'd better call me Rosa, Ryan."

Eric exhaled: he shouldn't have worried. It was clear that Ryan was going to be fine here. He knew his mother, the way she opened her home to his friends, the way she lived to feed guests and make them feel welcome. There had been nothing to worry about. And yet, seeing the physical evidence of it...for a second, he let himself stop thinking about it and just enjoy the novelty of watching Ryan Sullivan and his mother, chatting away like they had known each other for years.

Ryan hadn't known what to expect when he'd agreed to come home to Montreal with Eric. He hadn't known what to expect from Eric's mother, beyond the fact that Eric had said he'd told her who Ryan was to him and that it had gone much better than he'd expected. He'd been to Montreal before over the years—had actually had his bachelor party there, been dragged through the strip clubs on St. Catherine by his older brothers and gotten incredibly, painfully sick in an alleyway after. He'd been there for games, which had always been a little more intense than usual for him: even though he played in Dallas, he'd grown up a Beacons fan, and he'd still nursed that little rivalry deep in his heart.

This was completely different. This wasn't even coming to Montreal as a tourist. This was...well, it was important that he made a good impression. This was meeting the mother of someone who had, in a fairly short time, become pretty important to him.

Whenever Ryan stopped to think about everything that had happened to him over the last year or so, he almost felt like his head was spinning, dizzy and off-balance. It wasn't bad , it was just objectively somewhat insane.

Ryan hadn't known at all what to expect from Rosa Aronson, but he could see the ways she was both like and completely unlike her son. She was much smaller than Eric, but still taller than Ryan, and however frail she was, she had the air of someone who would only be stopped by force. Her thick-framed glasses mirrored Eric's, and her snow-white hair was a hint of what might be in his future, once the salt overtook the pepper.

Where Eric had been grumpy and closed-off and combative, she was immediately warm and welcoming, throwing her arms around Ryan in a tight hug. But he could see she had the same sharp sense of humor, the same mean little glimmer in her eye that promised a cut to the quick if you weren't on your toes.

Eric's childhood home was so different from Ryan's. It wasn't as big, but it felt warmer, cluttered with books and papers and full of family photographs. Ryan surreptitiously snuck glances at the pictures of Eric and his parents from his childhood: they had had him later in life, and Eric's father was the spitting image of Eric to the point that it was a little eerie, like looking at the same face from years in the past.

"You look so much like your dad," Ryan said to Eric, while Rosa was puttering around in the kitchen, getting their lunch ready. Eric had tried to argue with her that he would do it and she had both shut him down firmly, and banished both of them to the living room so they wouldn't get in her way.

"Everyone always says that," Eric said, looking down at the same photograph Ryan had picked up. In it, Eric was about thirteen years old, and he and his parents were at the beach. He had been tall even then, gangly and awkward. "I don't see it."

"Really?"

"Maybe I don't want to see it," he admitted. "My dad was special, you know? There was only one of him. It doesn't seem right that people tell me that."

"I dunno, Eric," Ryan said, looking down at the picture again. "You're also pretty special."

"Shut up," Eric muttered, clearly embarrassed, and Ryan relented. "Anyway, now you know what I meant about Maman being stubborn as fuck."

"Again..." Ryan said, trying to hide his smile and definitely failing, "I wonder who else in this room has that particular quality."

"That goes for both of us, you know. Not just me."

"Probably," Ryan said, and slipped his arm around Eric's waist. "It's just nice, though. Seeing where you came from. Seeing parts of them in your face."

"Who knew you were such a romantic?" Eric drawled, but Ryan could tell from the little crinkle at the edge of his eye that he was smiling.

"Boys!" Rosa called from the kitchen. "Lunch is ready."

It turned out that lunch was Montreal-style bagels with cream cheese, lox, and all of the fixings, which included everything from thick slices of red onion and tomato and cucumber to dill that Rosa had hand-shredded, and capers. She had bought a few other things from the deli: whitefish and fruit salad and little chocolate pastries called rugelach.

"So you see," Rosa said severely to Eric, in her heavily accented English for Ryan's benefit, "I wasn't actually cooking , I was assembling . And now we have time for you to tell me about yourself, Ryan."

Ryan told her while they each assembled their bagels, although it was a bit of a sanitized version. He told her about growing up in Boston with older brothers who were all taller than him and a father who liked to play them all off against each other, about how he was the only one who had actually made it in the major leagues. He told her about marrying too soon and divorcing too late, about accepting the head coach's job on a hope and a prayer and not having expected anything that came after.

Rosa was a good listener. She asked questions occasionally but didn't push, and she kept her warm, dark brown eyes, filmed a little with cataracts, focused on his face the whole time. It was a disconcertingly direct stare, the same one Eric had, Ryan thought, a little hysterically. But it wasn't uncomfortable, being the focus of her attention. He could tell that she was interested in him .

"Do I get the embarrassing stories about Eric, or do I have to wait a few days for those?" Ryan asked. He was at the point in a meal where he was full but still had some food on his plate: he pushed around a bit of whitefish salad with his knife.

"Maybe you'll be surprised to hear this, but Eric was a very good boy," Rosa said, and laughed. "He loved his books when he was growing up, and he was a real bookworm until he got seriously into hockey. The worst thing he ever did was fighting, and usually he had some sort of a reason for it, and I couldn't be too angry."

"You were a bad influence," Eric said, looking down with a smile.

"Well, if a boy throws a penny at you, he deserves to get a punch in the nose."

Ryan frowned. He thought, briefly, of all of the stupid shit his brothers had thought was so hilarious as kids, the shit he knew they did even at practice, to their own teammates. The shit his father had even encouraged. It wasn't a stretch to think that those kinds of things would have happened to Eric, even outside of Boston. "I'm sorry. I never had to deal with anything like that growing up, I—can't really imagine."

Eric shrugged. "It was a fact of life. They stopped doing it once they realized that even if I lost the fight, they weren't getting out of it unscathed."

"So you came by the reputation honestly, even before hockey?" Ryan asked, shaking his head, to Rosa's laughter.

"Sorry," Eric muttered, after lunch, as they were washing up the dishes and Rosa was putting some of the leftovers into the fridge, "she's been like this with everyone I've ever brought home. Grills them like crazy."

"I don't mind. It's nice that she's interested. And brought home?"

"Well, you know. I dated women too, for a long time, almost exclusively...but it's also been a long time since anyone's met Maman."

"Oh," Ryan said, because he didn't entirely trust himself to say anything else.

They spent another hour or so hanging out in the living room with Rosa, who had made coffee and insisted on bringing it out in what she called "the nice mugs," which were a set of vintage-y-looking white coffee cups printed with gold butterflies and flowers.

"You're really getting the star treatment, you know," Eric whispered out of the corner of his mouth to Ryan when Rosa went back into the kitchen for more rugelach. "She doesn't bring those out for just anyone. Guess you have to make the Hockey Hall of Fame first."

"Stop," Ryan demanded, embarrassed. "You didn't tell her all of that too, did you?"

"She looked it up herself when you first got the job. She knows how to get on the internet and everything."

"Jesus," Ryan said, hiding his face in his hand.

"Don't worry," Eric said, "she was probably just looking up your advanced stats. Nothing embarrassing."

After lunch was over, Eric took Ryan on a walking tour of the old neighborhood. It was pretty much what it had looked like on the drive in: pleasant and residential, with an abundance of trees and bushes. They walked past the synagogue where he'd grown up attending, with its beautifully landscaped grounds and its various memorial plaques and statues. They mostly walked in silence; Ryan enjoyed looking around and taking it all in. It was easy to imagine Eric as a child sitting on those steps, his nose buried in a book, his glasses slipping down his nose, or Eric being bar mitzvah'd, which he had explained was like being accepted as an adult in the community and had involved leading an entire service by himself.

When Eric wasn't looking, Ryan slipped a pebble from the synagogue grounds into his pocket. He could feel it there, smooth and round, pressing against his thigh.

"Like I said," Eric said, as they were walking home, "it's nothing special, but I had a happy childhood here."

"Stop being so self-deprecating. Like seriously, Eric, I grew up in Boston."

Eric laughed. "I made myself forget." He mock-shuddered, looking disgusted. "Boston. "

Later that evening, Rosa brought out dinner, to Eric's protests and Rosa's insistence that all she'd had to do was cut some vegetables. She had made a roasted chicken and some vegetable side dishes: roasted asparagus and something that involved potatoes and carrots, heavy on the ginger, cumin, and cinnamon.

It was nice to have a home-cooked meal and eat dinner in a household where there wasn't tension overwhelming everything at the dinner table; Ryan could relax and listen to Eric and Rosa teasing each other or Eric catching her up on the way the season had been going or Eric smiling at her or Eric throwing him under the bus with a sly remark that would immediately prompt a question from Rosa when he hadn't been paying attention.

After they'd done Rosa's dishes, again, Eric kissed Rosa on the forehead and said something in French to her that Ryan didn't understand but was apparently the indication that they were finished with dinner and going to take Ryan's bags up to Eric's room.

He hadn't been sure what to expect there, either. His own bedroom at his parents' house had long been converted into Chelsea's craft room. There was still a twin bed shoved in the corner, but it was buried under rolls of patterned fabric, and the vast majority of the rest of the space was devoted to scrapbooking and yarn and other supplies. He felt like that was probably one extreme, and the other was the typical hockey bedroom that hadn't been touched since the guy went away to juniors, and the only thing that had ever changed was accumulating more and more hockey memorabilia.

It turned out that Eric's room was neither of those things. It was clear that he came home often enough to actually care about the way that it was updated, and even though it was small and only had the space for a double bed, it wasn't cluttered with childhood artifacts or his parents' discarded items that hadn't fit anywhere else. It had the same Spartan style that his apartment had, with a lot of gray and navy blue, and as always, books piled up everywhere. Ryan immediately gravitated toward a stack of them, a little jump in his stomach when he saw the overlap: they both had copies of The Art of War , Marcus Aurelius, and Henry V , alongside the more obviously work-oriented tomes.

"You have good taste in books," Ryan said, thumbing through the well-worn and hand-annotated copy of The Art of War .

"I'm glad you approve," Eric said, dryly.

"So I'm allowed to sleep in here?"

"Ryan, I'm forty-two years old. Yes, you're allowed to sleep in the room with me."

"Pretty sure it wouldn't be the same at my dad's," Ryan said, and set the book back down on the stack.

"Well, luckily, you're not in Boston anymore, Dorothy."

"Ouch, that was terrible."

"What are you going to do about it?"

What Ryan did about it was cross the room to take Eric's shirt in his fists and pull him closer so that he could tug him down into a kiss. Eric's mouth opened easily under his, hot and giving, and Eric's hands grabbed Ryan's ass to pull him closer against the long line of his body.

"That's a good start," Eric said, a little breathless, "but really, I know you're capable of a lot more than that."

"It's just—I don't know, it's kind of weird in here," Ryan said, laughing a little nervously. "It's your childhood bedroom. Your mom's downstairs."

"Considering you started this," Eric said, his hand worming its way under Ryan's shirt, "I think maybe you're kind of into that."

"Into what? Sneaking around in your parents' house?" Ryan asked, teasing at first, then sucking in his breath sharply when Eric tweaked his nipple. "Not in the least. I'm not—"

"Not what?"

"Not into the exhibitionism—"

"Hmm, the guy who blew me in his office with the door unlocked, not into the exhibitionism?"

Ryan looked up at Eric, how fucking delighted he always was to needle him into discomfort, the way Ryan liked it. Well, two could play at that game, couldn't they? He lowered his gaze, pulling out of Eric's hold, and said, "Are you sure it's okay to do this? Your parents aren't going to come home in the middle of things, are they?"

Eric's hands on his biceps flexed, squeezing tighter for a moment. "Ryan fucking Sullivan."

"What?" Ryan asked, innocent as anything. "I have to be careful; my parents would kill me if they knew I was here."

"How do you keep talking me into this shit?" Eric grumbled, but he didn't sound terribly annoyed about it.

"Because you only have so many opportunities to make out with me," Ryan said, refusing to break character, "and you said your parents wouldn't be back until late, so this is the perfect time to sneak me into your bedroom."

Eric looked at him over the frame of his glasses, and there was a second where Ryan wasn't sure whether he was actually going to go for it or not. And then his face shifted, and he was smiling, just a little mean. He moved forward and his hands on Ryan's hips were warm; Ryan could almost feel the heat of them through his clothes. "I think that was just because someone was pretty eager to get sneaked into my bedroom and fucked up—" Eric walked him back toward the bed. "Or fucked?"

Ryan's calves hit the edge of the bed, and he let Eric push him down onto it. It wasn't a hard push, but Ryan also wasn't fighting with it. He shifted backward so that Eric could move forward, between his legs. "But I've never done anything like this before," he said, looking up again.

Eric's eyes were laughing, but the curl of his mouth was a little mocking. "Oh really? That blowjob at school says otherwise. You like to pretend you're so innocent, such a good, well-behaved boy, but you're...anything except that, huh?"

"You make me do stupid things," Ryan said, voice lowered to a throaty whisper, "against my better judgment. Like being here—" Eric was close enough to touch, so Ryan took advantage of the proximity, pulling him forward by the belt and leaning up into the kiss.

"You're fucking ridiculous, you know that?" Eric mumbled into it.

"You're enjoying it," Ryan retorted, and got the answer he was looking for when he started to unbuckle Eric's belt and try to get his hand down his pants.

"You know, for someone who claims he's never done this before, you're awfully—awfully sure about—"

"I'm a fast learner. You know that."

"Yeah, you're a fucking teacher's pet, is what you are—"

Ryan ran his hand slowly up Eric's dick, very satisfied with the drawn-out noise of protest it got him when he stopped moving. "Well. You should tell me what you like. So I can learn."

"We have to be quiet, though, just in case my parents come home early."

"I can be quiet," Ryan insisted.

"You were pretty loud last time," Eric said, smirking, and Ryan could feel the tips of his ears turning a bit red, thinking about a completely imaginary encounter, about how it might've been if they had been doing this as teenagers, awkward and fumbling and eager.

"Tell me what you like," he insisted.

"Spit in your hand when you jerk me off," Eric said, his voice a little rough, "and once you do that, you can—a little harder. Faster."

Ryan did what he was told and the groan that he ripped out of Eric's throat when he shoved his hand back down his pants was worth all of it. Eric's body bracketed him in on the bed, close enough that he could lunge up to kiss him, although it knocked them both off-balance, landed them sprawled in the bed with Eric on top of him. From there it was messy and awkward and stupid, Ryan unwilling to stop touching him but trying to get his pants off at the same time, Eric trying to help but preoccupied with fucking Ryan's mouth with his tongue, and Ryan yelped again when Eric stopped kissing him, only to nip at his earlobe.

"Shh," Eric said, pressing his hand over Ryan's mouth. "We have to be quiet, remember?"

Ryan thought about digging his teeth into Eric's palm, or licking him, but it was weirdly exciting to have Eric's hand there, pressing down. In the end he settled for shifting the angle of his hand, being able to watch Eric's eyes close when he did it.

By the time Eric had managed to kick off his pants and get Ryan's off too, they were both hard and straining, and Ryan could hear his own ragged breath panting into Eric's mouth. "Come on," he said, the laughter bubbling up in his throat, still marveling that something that was basically a mutual hand job could feel like this, "come on, Aronson, make me come, come on —"

Eric's breathless amusement was audible when he said, "Not doing a very convincing job of playing a good boy, Sully. Always thought once I got you in bed you'd be like this—"

"Shh," Ryan demanded. "We have to be quiet in case your parents come home, remember ?"

Ryan couldn't remember the last time he'd ever had sex like this. When he was actually a teenager, sneaking girls into his parents' home, they had never been anyone he'd been seriously interested in. When he and Shannon had gotten together, they'd both been young as hell and had never tried anything particularly wild—that had only come later, when they'd been trying to save their failing marriage. It was something else altogether to fall into bed with Eric, a grown man who might have been discovering what he liked, but felt sure as hell about it, and comfortable enough to mess around, comfortable enough to laugh about it.

He looked up at Eric, the glasses slipping down, smudged from Ryan's nose bumping against the lenses, and felt his chest constrict with the force of his fondness, with everything that had happened to him over the last six months. If he stopped to look at it too long, it was overwhelming. So instead, he concentrated on the way Eric's hands and mouth made him feel and lost himself in the kiss.

Afterward, when they'd both come and before they'd managed to get out of bed to clean up, Eric propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at Ryan with a disbelieving expression. He'd lost his glasses halfway through and his lower lip was still a little red where Ryan had worried it. His chest was still sticky-looking where Ryan had come all over it.

"I really don't know how you talk me into this shit."

"No?" Ryan asked, still panting a little. "Because from where I'm sitting, you didn't require a whole lot of talking."

"Easy as hell for you, I guess," Eric said, then groaned as he hauled himself to his feet. "I let you talk me into this even though we have to go out into the hall to get to the bathroom."

"Better move fast," Ryan said, unable to stop the stupid smile from tipping the corner of his mouth up. "Don't want your mom to see."

Instead of answering, Eric leaned forward and kissed him. It was a different kiss than the ones they'd shared just a few moments ago, fond and almost sweet, over before it began. "Watch it," he said, as he pulled away. "I'm not getting dragged into this again."

"Mm," Ryan agreed, and lay back down. He wasn't going to think about it. There wasn't any reason to.

Eric hadn't been sure what to expect when he'd invited Ryan to come home with him, but it was going better than he'd ever expected.

Ryan and his mother had hit it off immediately, which didn't surprise him. Ryan was charming, and the kind of blinding, intense earnestness that had made Eric hate him in the beginning translated to most people falling in love with him a little bit, in some form or another. His mother wasn't immune to Ryan's charm either, especially when he insisted on helping with the dishes and asked her interested questions about her late husband and her childhood growing up in C?te Saint-Luc. It was a huge relief, really. Eric had hoped that Rosa would like Ryan as much as he did, and it was a weight off of his shoulders that she seemed to.

Rosa hadn't minded that Ryan was sleeping in Eric's room, and she greeted them every morning with coffee and a bone-cracking hug for each of them. Eric knew that she was thinking about how he would be gone soon; he tried not to think of it, either. It was a strange little reprieve, like a pocket universe, at his mother's house with Ryan.

They'd spent their time in Montreal pretty busy. It was strange, walking around with Ryan; he was clearly recognized more often than not, but probably due to the Boston connection, only a few people approached him. No one asked what they were doing there together; no one looked at them askance, although both of them were very conscious of how and where they touched.

Eric had taken Ryan to some of the museums and a few of his favorite restaurants, in Mile End and Rosemont and Little Italy. They had the poutine at Ma Poule Mouillée before Eric dragged him up to the summit of Mont-Royal, to look down over the city and the sparkling lights of the buildings and streets. It was really a beautiful city; Eric thought maybe one of the most beautiful cities in the world. He took a picture of the skyline. He didn't post often on his Instagram, but it was a nice place to catalog moments that he didn't want to forget. And Ryan wasn't in the shot, so none of his old friends would ask any uncomfortable questions before he was ready.

"It's a nice view, isn't it?" he asked, when he was done.

"I won't argue with that," Ryan said, pulling his coat a little closer around himself.

"You're cold—we can head down, if you want."

"It's okay." Ryan smiled when he looked up. "It's been nice, up here with you. Seeing the city the way you see it. It really is beautiful."

And Eric, overwhelmed again with all of the stupid things that he could have said, looked back out over the city and thought about what he would have to do on his last day. Instead, he checked his phone and whistled. "Hey, did you see? Our boys Cook and Williams are tearing it up at the All-Star game. Cook's got a hat trick. And guess who assisted on each one?"

"I'm glad the boys are having fun," Ryan said, and laughed. "I remember the first time I went it was a good time, and then after that, it was just...kind of a drag. I didn't get to have the same vacation everyone else did."

"You just have to rub in your multi-All-Star status every chance you get," Eric said, rolling his eyes, although he was finding that he didn't have the same kind of bitterness about it anymore. Maybe it was because now he knew Ryan, knew that he wasn't arrogant about it. Or maybe it was knowing that despite all of the hardware, Ryan still crawled into Eric's bed every night, got eagerly down on his knees for him.

On their last day in Montreal, they were in the bathroom. It was a small bathroom, and they had to step around each other to brush their teeth and shower in any kind of reasonable space. Eric spat some toothpaste into the sink and said, "Hey, if you want to hang out with my mom alone, or explore the city for a bit this morning, you're welcome to do whatever you want."

Ryan's gray head, wet from the shower, immediately popped around the side of the curtain. "Why? What are you doing?"

"Well, I, ah, have to go to the cemetery to visit my dad. It's not a particularly fun trip. So I understand if you'd rather do something else."

"Are you kidding? Of course I want to be there for you. Unless...you don't want me there?"

Eric sighed. "It's not that I don't want you there. Not at all. I just didn't want you to feel at all obligated."

"Well, trust me, you fucking idiot, I want to be there."

"All right," Eric said. He felt, unaccountably, relieved.

Joseph Aronson was buried at Baron de Hirsch, which was a reasonably annoying bus ride away from his parents' house. The stones felt heavy in his coat pockets as they sat, Ryan's thigh pressed against his in the seat next to him. Eric watched the familiar streets rolling by and it felt different, knowing he wasn't going to be alone there this time. Rosa didn't make the trip often herself anymore, but Ryan was undeniably there, a warm, solid presence.

The cemetery itself was nondescript, bordered by a low stone wall and sandwiched in between the residential neighborhood of ugly condo buildings that had sprung up around it. It was crowded, with rows and rows of utilitarian headstones stretching out to fill the entirety of the land. Some of the graves had beds of red and white flowers planted on them; some were just grass. All of them were stacked neatly head to toe. No sense in wasting space, when there wasn't much of it.

Eric knew immediately where to walk to find his father's marker. Ryan trailed along after him, like he didn't want to get too close and make Eric uncomfortable. On instinct, Eric reached out and took his hand, briefly, even though it was risky. "It means a lot that you're here, so don't feel, I don't know. Weird. Okay?"

"Got it," Ryan said, and smiled, a little uncertain.

When they got to the gravesite, Eric took a few minutes to clear away some leaves and branches that had blown up against the stone that the cemetery workers hadn't gotten to yet. He brushed his hand over the top of it, although there wasn't any dirt to be found there. It had been over thirty days since he'd been to the cemetery, so he went through the blessing you said when you were coming home again. He finished, murmuring, "Baruch et adonai m'chayeh hemetim."

And then there wasn't anything for it but to begin, the way he always started, in French, "Hello, Papa... I've really missed you."

As he placed the stones on the grave, he went through each of the cities they'd visited, told Papa a little bit about the games. He talked about how the team had been struggling but they'd figured out the power play, a little bit; he talked about how proud he was of the boys for pushing through it even when the games were tough; he talked about how Ryan had come to visit, too. He couldn't bring himself to look behind him to see what Ryan's face was doing, so he kept his eyes firmly forward instead. The stones formed a little row on top of the grave, and when that filled up, Eric crouched down on the cold ground, laid them at the bottom as well.

He knew Ryan was listening and he knew Ryan could probably only understand about a third of what he was saying. That was probably for the best, because Eric had started telling his dad about Ryan, too.

"I wasn't really sure what to expect, 'Pa, but it's been really good for me. I don't even really know how to describe what it all means. It's been a lonely few years, wondering whether I'd ever be able to bring someone home to meet Maman, and now here we are, and he's meeting you, too, in a way. I wish I'd been honest with you before the end. I should have trusted you, and I will always regret that I didn't. So this is the best I can do now. He is...well, he's funny and smart and kind even when I don't fucking deserve it. He's good with the boys. He's patient with the worst of them. Maman likes him; he was so kind to her. He's been an open book with me since the beginning, and things are—they're just really good. In a way I never thought I'd be able to have. And he wanted to come here with me to see you, and it means so much to me that he understands what it means, and I think maybe—"

Eric caught himself. Ryan was standing off to the side, so that he wasn't intruding on Eric's private moment, but close enough that he could still hear. Eric knew that he didn't speak French fluently, but that didn't mean he hadn't picked up a few more words than Eric had suspected. And besides, je l'aime wasn't difficult to translate.

Because that was the tricky thing. It had crept up on him, quietly and gradually. But it was true. Eric did love him, and it was probably the stupidest thing he could've done. Ryan was his boss; Ryan hadn't signed an extension yet, despite being in constant conversation with Joe Conroy about the state of the team and what they could expect for next year; Ryan was newly divorced and had known he was queer for all of fifteen minutes while Eric had been struggling with what that meant for him as a professional hockey player for almost his entire adult life.

There were so many reasons why it was stupid, and why it wouldn't work out, and why he was better off either saying nothing, or ending things right now.

But he also didn't want to lose whatever they had, as undefined as it was. He hadn't wanted that before he'd realized he was in love with Ryan Sullivan, and it was even harder to think of it after.

"Hey, Eric?" Ryan asked, and Eric realized he'd been silent, staring at his father's grave, for probably too long. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, uh. My knees can't really handle this anymore."

Ryan held out his hand and Eric looked up at him and his handsome, open face, and realized, once again, what a fool he'd been not to realize before this. He took Ryan's hand, let himself be pulled to his feet.

"Goodbye for now, Papa. I won't be so long next time," Eric said, his hand on the cold stone.

And together, they left for home.