18. Cameron

EIGHTEEN

CAMERON

Cameron floated home from All-Star break. All the times in his life where he thought about how being Zacky’s best friend was the best part of his life not only made so much sense now, but they also paled in comparison to being able to touch Zacky at any moment. To kiss him, full on the mouth, and feel the way it affected Zacky’s body.

Cameron was determined to go at Zacky’s pace because he knew Zacky was processing more feelings than Cameron was, but also because, while Cameron was fully on board with what they were doing, he also didn’t have any experience. When Zacky had sucked his dick, he’d done it perfectly. If what Zacky said about being from a different universe was true , it meant Zacky already knew Cameron’s body. And Cameron was behind. Inexperienced in a way no one in human history had ever been inexperienced.

The morning after their revelatory sex, they had rubbed off on each other and then rushed to pack up and leave. Traveling home took it out of Zacky, which was a good reminder to both of them that he was still healing.

The next morning, Cameron took Zacky to an appointment with his neurologist. Zacky held his hand the whole time, out in the open, as Cameron took notes on his phone while Zacky’s mom was on FaceTime on Zacky’s phone. It was complicated, but Camilla asked better questions than Cameron could have.

They got the news they were expecting. Zacky’s concussion was improving steadily, and he was cleared to get back out on the ice, even if he wasn’t cleared to play yet. Ostensibly, this was good news.

But it also came with the confirmation that the memories Zacky was “missing” were likely not coming back. That he should plan to move forward in his life with that gap. It wasn’t surprising, but it was an acknowledgement of an ending.

And it didn’t exactly put Zacky in the mood . They got Thai takeout that night and ate it while watching the All-Star Skills competition, which they had DVR’d. Cameron had to get on an airplane tomorrow for games in New York and New Jersey and leaving Zacky sounded excruciating. Even more so than usual. Physically, Zacky would be fine. He wasn’t worried about him drowning in the pool anymore, at least.

But now that he’d looked Zacky in his eyes and confessed his love, it seemed ridiculous for anyone to expect them to be apart for even a second.

“Once you get back on the ice, maybe they’ll let you travel with the team again,” Cameron said as they watched their captain win Fastest Skater. They’d already seen spoilers on Twitter, and Eddie didn’t take home the big prize, but it was nice to see him win the competition he was expected to crush.

“I’ve never been on a private jet,” Zacky said, stretching his feet out onto the coffee table, careful not to knock over their empty takeout boxes. Shimmying down allowed him to recline on Cameron’s chest. The past couple of months hadn’t exactly been the world’s best example of maintaining physical boundaries with another person, but now Zacky was treating Cameron’s body as an extension of his own, which even in a nonsexual context was amazing. Like the final little bricks of happiness clicking into place in their relationship to make it perfect. Complete.

“You love private jets, don’t worry. The food is incredible. We always sit next to each other.”

“Of course we do,” Zacky said, the easy agreement over how obsessed they were with each other feeling so fucking right .

God, Cameron loved being in love. It was fucking awesome.

Being in love sucked when you had to be across the country from the person you loved, but now Cameron had context for why he felt so strongly about Zacky. Why it was so difficult to be away from him. Because he had never thought about Zacky as being just his best friend.

The team flew into New York that morning and had practice at Madison Square Garden, a building that never failed to amaze Cameron. When they were in New York, the boys liked going out to see the city, hit up a few restaurants, do something fun. It wasn’t Vegas, but it also wasn’t Columbus, Ohio, or Winnipeg, Manitoba. There were things to do.

Cameron didn’t want to do any of it. He begged off and found himself at a bodega on the same block as their hotel. He bought a protein shake and a bottle of water so he could also feel good about his peanut butter M&M’s. And then out of the corner of his eye he saw…a tiny office supply section. He locked on the black-and-white composition notebook that reminded him of Zacky’s notebook of memories. And well, Cameron had three years of memories of the two of them that he was now the sole keeper of too, so he might as well try to keep them.

He picked up the notebook and a two-pack of blue clicky pens and brought his selections to the cashier, who bagged them up without question. Not like he was expecting to be asked what he’d be writing about in that notebook, but something about it made him nervous.

He got back to his hotel room and chugged his protein shake to get it over with, then ripped one of the pens out of the package and tossed it and the notebook onto the bed before crawling in himself.

Cameron looked at the time. Back home, he knew Zacky was getting a workout in at the practice rink with one of the trainers as he got closer to getting back on the ice. Cameron hoped it would happen when he was in Texas to see it, but regardless, he was so excited for Zacky to be making these big steps toward getting back on the same line with Cameron.

He sent off a quick text about missing him and then called his brother.

“Hey, kid.” His brother’s clear, confident voice was comforting. Cameron had grown up thinking his brother was the coolest person in the world, and he liked that the feeling hadn’t worn off completely yet.

“Hey, man.”

“You’re in New York, yeah?”

“I am. Two games, and then Jersey, and then home.”

“Welcome, briefly, to the Eastern time zone. What’s up?”

“Just wanted to say hi. Also maybe seek some advice. Are you busy?”

“I’m at work, but I can take a break. What’s up?”

“You remember what we talked about last time?”

“About Zacky?”

“Yeah.”

“About maybe having feelings for Zacky?”

“That’s the one.”

Chris chuckled as he tried to extract the exact topic of this phone call from Cameron. It was hard to say out loud. Even to his brother, who already knew what was up and would love Cameron pretty much no matter what.

“I kissed him,” he said, leaving out the rest of the events of that evening.

“Fuck yeah, you did,” Chris said appreciatively. “How’d it go over?”

“Good. Uh, really good.” He listened to his brother laugh at him.

“That makes sense. Even if you didn’t have some alternate-universe version of him that was already in love with you. Is that the scenario? I don’t know if I’m remembering correctly.”

“Yeah. That’s the scenario. And why I’m confused. Because I am…gone on him. But what if he likes me because he misses his husband and I look like him.”

“Well, if we’re accepting the reality of a multiverse, the man he married is you.”

If we’re accepting the reality of a multiverse. Yeah, there was a reason he’d told his brother the truth. He was a fucking nerd, and it was paying off for Cameron.

“What if he wakes up one day and feels like he’s cheating and won’t be with me anymore? What if he somehow ends up back in his universe?”

“Those are big questions. And I think the right approach in matters of the heart is to trust in love. There’s nothing you can do to control Zacky’s feelings other than treat him like gold. And since you have no idea how one particular Zacky would switch universes, all you can do is enjoy whatever time you have together, whether that’s weeks, or years, or the rest of your life.”

A solid perk of having a much older brother who was also a nerd was that occasionally he got sound being-in-love-in-the-multiverse advice.

“Do you think you and Thea are in love in every universe?”

“Not a single doubt,” he said. The smile in his voice came through, and Cameron could imagine the dopey look on his brother’s face because that was the way Cameron looked at Zacky. “You ready for your game tomorrow? I’ve been liking your line with Elliott and CJ.”

Chris played hockey when he was a kid, but at a normal level, not the elite competitive level Cameron had played in. Still, Chris was the only person outside of his coaches and teammates who saw his game for what it was, and was kind and genuine with his feedback. No unnecessary gassing up, but compliments that were based on what happened on the ice. Once, Cameron had a shitty game in Junior and his dad had let him hear about it on the way home—there were benefits and drawbacks of playing for your hometown OHL team. He got to live at home and not with a billet family, but the cost was in-person criticism. Chris, though, had given him a compliment, and Cameron had asked him why he was always nice after games. He said it wasn’t his job to give him critical feedback. That was his coach’s job. His job was to love and support Cameron.

Chris was a great example of someone who turned into a great human despite their upbringing. Cameron was hoping he was on Chris’s path and not his dad’s.

“Yeah, getting some chemistry with that line. But Zacky is getting back on the ice pretty soon, and hopefully he’ll be ready to play again.”

“Ice soulmates.”

Soulmates . Yeah. That sounded right. “Off-ice soulmates too.”

“Okay, goober, go meditate on your new love or something. I need to get back to work.”

Whenever Cameron pictured Chris working, he had an expensive mechanical pencil behind his ear and giant blueprints in front of him. Apparently, that wasn’t how architecture worked anymore. He was probably clicking around on a computer.

Cameron would never be an architect, but he did like houses. He’d need a job after he retired from hockey, whenever that would be, and being a realtor like the Cameron in Zacky’s universe sounded pretty cool.

The composition notebook was blank inside when he opened it. Crisp blue and red lines on stark white paper. He didn’t know where to start. If he’d read Zacky’s memories, he could match the vibe. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to remember their three years together between Cameron’s knee injury and Zacky’s head injury because Cameron no longer had someone to rely on to help remember. When he thought of the past three years, sure his teammates and his parents might remember some things, but he wanted to have a record of the CameronandZacky moments that were just theirs.

He started right at the top, the highest of importance, and the thing that absolutely gutted him every time he remembered that Zacky didn’t share these memories with him. Winning the Stanley Cup. Cameron wasn’t dumb enough to assume that his and Zacky’s presence on the ice was why they won, but hockey was a team sport more than any other, and Cameron’s memories of the day they won the Cup were saturated with Zacky.

When picturing Zacky in his head, he usually came up with a version of Zacky in casual shorts and a t-shirt, a general medium-good mood at all times. But hockey memories all had the stratified joy or sorrow of their wins and losses. On the day they won the Stanley Cup, Zacky had the world’s biggest smile on his face, his missing lower tooth on display from smiling so big.

Cameron catalogued the smile, wishing he was good enough at drawing to illustrate it. At least there were a thousand photos. He could tape in some of the photos he printed off before Zacky was clear to look at screens.

The aftermath of their win was a blur of his teammates, the chaos on the ice as they brought out the Cup, the matching hats they all pulled over their sweaty hair, the group photo they took. And then the parade of his teammates taking their laps around the ice with the Cup.

There was no scripted order to who got the Cup when, but Elliott handed the Cup off to Zacky, and Cameron knew that it was coming for him next. And as much as he loved the feeling of winning the Cup in general, the thing he was the most excited about was winning the Cup together. As teenagers, they had dreamed of hitting that goal as a pair, knowing it was highly unlikely that they would end up on the same team ever again.

Cameron was already crying when Zacky handed the Cup off to him, and the photo of the moment they held it together was on the wall in the living room. Anyone who had seen that photo wouldn’t be surprised to know that the two men in it were in love.

He didn’t remember his own lap he skated. But he remembered handing off the Cup to Shane and finding Zacky again.

He remembered how even after winning the Stanley Cup, his dad couldn’t muster any more than a stiff “congratulations, son” on the ice after. His mom had the decency to cry, at least.

That memory didn’t make the notebook, though.

What made the notebook was the week they lost from their nonstop celebration, and the summer they decided to spend mostly together, despite the drive between them. Zacky ended up staying at the apartment Cameron got as soon as he started making a decent hockey salary so he didn’t have to spend summers at his parents’ place. And how after only one night of sleeping on Cameron’s couch, they had both decided it was dumb not to share Cameron’s king bed.

He didn’t hook up with a single person that summer because having sex with a rando was a much worse outcome than hanging out with his best friend, playing video games, going rollerblading, and finding someone’s boat to waste days at a time on.

Winning the Stanley Cup probably deserved more than three pages of Cameron’s terrible handwriting, but he came to the end of the memory quickly. As he read it over, he was embarrassed by how obvious his obsession with Zacky always had been. But that was the point of this. This wasn’t for public consumption. It was for Zacky, and it was for Cameron, and he could be as cringe as he wanted to within these pages.

When they had won the Cup, Cameron assumed that would be the most cherished memory they would create together. But now it was something that Zacky felt fully separate from. Cameron knew that what was happening was harder on Zacky than it was on Cameron. But even though Cameron was putting on a positive face and supporting Zacky in whatever he needed, having your best friend suddenly lose three years of memories wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Every day was a challenge. But as much as it ached to know that the moments they shared aren’t inside of Zacky anymore, they were still in Cameron, and there was good on the horizon.

And he would choose the last night they spent together in Punta Cana over winning the Cup any day.