Like You’ve Nothing Left to Prove (Breakaway #2)

by E.L. Massey

everyone in the living room has abandoned their various pursuits and is now watching raptly as if Eli’s ridiculous boyfriend being ridiculous is some sort of spectator sport.

“You deserve good things. To be treated like—like you’re the best thing. Because you are. And I know I’m going to fuck things up. I’ve never been in a relationship before, and I’m, you know, human. But this is something I can do right. Do better.”

Eli is in love with a fuckboy. It’s less distressing than it probably should be.

So he gets just tipsy enough that everything goes warm and bright, and he can dance without being embarrassed that his boyfriend is a sexy, beautiful dancer, while Alex is, by contrast, a flailing potato.

“I won’t apologize for coming out or for, uh”—and after everything that’s happened, the word still sticks in his throat—”being gay. I’m not sorry. But I do apologize for how this will affect you. It shouldn’t. But it will. And I know that.”

“There are kids all over the world right now who are going to watch how this whole thing plays out and use it as a determining factor in their own lives—whether they’ll keep playing hockey or quit. Whether they’ll come out or stay in the closet. We can’t control how other organizations react, but we can make damn sure they see a united, supportive team behind Alex. Okay?”

He doesn’t seem to care about the Schrödinger’s Pants situation.

And the refs certainly aren’t helping as it seems they’ve been rendered temporarily deaf and blind.

He should probably talk to his therapist about it, except he’s already back to seeing her every week again, sometimes more, and they usually spend all their time dealing with hockey stuff. Because the hockey stuff is… Bad. Not his team. Not the Hell Hounds. Even the call-ups are mostly behaving themselves. And honestly other teams, as a whole, are too. But there’s usually a handful of guys every game they play who, even if they aren’t being directly malicious, are using the gay thing to try to get penalties. Then there are the occasional ones who are malicious—who spit venom and make illegal hits and leave him bruised like he’s in the playoffs. Dealing with that every other night is exhausting. Dealing with refs who ignore it all is exhausting. Dealing with media who desperately want to break his Jessica-approved demeanor to talk about the language or the hits or the refs is exhausting. Trying to encourage his team through it—because he’s the captain and they didn’t sign up for any of this shit anyway—that’s exhausting too. So Alex is dealing with shitty players and shitty refs and shitty media, and then having to put on a good face for his team, and he comes home so, so, tired, and then he has to worry that his boyfriend is slowly killing himself. It’s not good.

Regardless of social media and shitty people and refs who make bad calls—We should replace all the refs with dogs, Rushy says, smooshing the sides of Hawk’s face. You would have called goaltender interference, wouldn’t you? Yes, you would—regardless of everything else, the Hell Hounds, Alex’s team, their loyalty and defense, is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.

“You’ve been very quiet up until this point,” Washington Post guy says. “Is there a reason you’ve joined your teammates and coach at the table? Is there anything you’d like to say?” “Oh, me?” Martel throws his thumb, cavalier, toward Okezie. “I’m just here as moral support for my boyfriend.”

“So every time you succeed at something, you feel good because success is supposed to feel good. But you also feel like you’re digging your own grave as, inevitably, that success will be used against you at some point in the future.” “Yeah,” Alex agrees. “And as an adult, your self-worth is all tied up in your accomplishments. So even when you’re successful, you don’t feel as if you’re good enough. The minute you’ve achieved something, the achievement gets added to the list of things that make any failures even more noteworthy. And when you do fail at something, it feels like the end of the world. Since you’re certain you should have, and could have, succeeded, even if you don’t know how.”

“you’re really only confident when you’re doing something you’re exceptionally good at. But even then, you live in constant fear of somehow losing your ability. Not necessarily because you love the thing, but because you’ve separated the very concept of joy from an activity and attached it instead to your…perceived success at the activity.”

knows it’s stupid, but if Eli were to die today, he thinks he would die tomorrow. Because Eli is…Eli. Because there is only one of him.

I like your shoelaces.