Today, he’s wearing a Canucks hat and Blue Jackets jersey. He starts the video talking about the latest draft rankings, how he agrees with just about everything except the order of the top three.
“I know I’m gonna get plenty of hate for this,” he says. “But people are not paying enough attention to Alex Nakamoto. The guy had 161 points in sixty-eight games last season and is on track to beat that this season. In fact, he’s on track to overtake the OHL single season point record Doug Gilmour’s held since 1983. He’s got Jaysen Caulfield’s size and Mickey James’s hands, and the only reason he’s number three is because everyone is so obsessed with this rivalry they’ve got going on over at Hartland University.”
I lean back on my pillows and prop my laptop up on my knees. This is gonna be a good one.
“This is the NHL we’re talking about here,” Rhys reminds his viewers. “It’s not some reality TV show. There’s no such thing as family legacies in hockey. A guy doesn’t get to come into the league on his daddy’s coattails.” He holds his hands up and bows his head slightly like he’s already trying to calm the comment section. “I understand James is a good player. But he’s not top-pick material. His size might not have been too much of a problem in lower-level hockey, but no one’s coming into the Show at five foot five and making a lasting impact. Hockey is too physical. It’s one of the most brutal sports on the planet. There are times when someone’s coming up on James and I have to look away ’cause I’m afraid I’m about to witness a fatal injury, I’m just saying. I know it’s beyond his control, but still.”
Okay, so this was supposed to be a video about Alex Nakamoto and it’s become yet another roast session. He spends four whole minutes trash-talking me before finally getting to the point. “Nakamoto should be a contender for top pick, but I’d be okay with him taking second as long as it was to Caulfield and not James. He’s getting the shaft because people want some kind of fairy-tale story.”
I scroll down to the comments while he keeps talking. The first one says did a short guy steal your girl or? Another says you probably got a shrine to mickey james in your closet bro. you talk about him enough.
There’s hundreds of comments, some of them like that, some of them agreeing with Rhys. There’s a whole essay predicting how Nakamoto’s gonna sneak up on us while Cauler and I are too busy insulting each other on Twitter and a full-on thesis about how overrated I am.
I’ve gotten better about not letting things like this get to me as the season’s progressed, so I’m only mildly annoyed when the video ends. I scroll up to give it my usual petty thumbs-down and am faced with the most personally disrespectful picture of Cauler I have ever seen in my life.
The thumbnail for one of the recommended videos is a candid shot of Cauler. He’s got on his glasses and a forward-facing hat and one of those hoodies with the weird, slouchy-looking collars. His head is tilted to the side, showing off the curve of his neck, and his smile is bright and crooked and sexy as all hell. I can still feel that lip ring against my teeth, the way that smile felt pressed against my throat.
Oh god.
I click on the video, a roundup of the hottest young guys in hockey. I’m the first one up, which is technically the bottom of the list, sure, but also more than a little surprising. The narrator sounds like a college girl, talking about how I was both blessed by my Italian mother for my looks and cursed by her for my size and that if I were just six inches taller, I’d be drop-dead. Whatever. I skip ahead to Cauler.
He’s number one. Of course he’s number one. Beat out a bunch of NHL rookies and guys who’ve already been drafted.
And I had sex with him. Once, but still.
My face gets hotter with every picture that comes up while the girl talks. Cauler on ice in his Gamblers gear. Cauler in his black street clothes. Cauler with intensity in his eyes, burning through the cage of his Royals helmet. Cauler sweating at the gym. Cauler, for some unknown, completely unnecessary reason, shirtless.
Okay, yep, that’s too much. I get up and lock the door for the next five minutes.
I have to go to the bathroom after and splash water on my face to cool down. How am I supposed to look Cauler in the eye now? Having sex with someone is one thing; this is something else entirely.
I take out my phone to catch up on Nova’s snaps, watching a video of her ranting about an asshole in line in front of her at a coffee shop with a filter squishing her face as I get back to my room.
It’s not empty the way I left it. Cauler’s standing in the middle of my room. He turns his head in the middle of a smile, thumbs hooked in the straps of his backpack, and for a second he is an exact replica of the photo that just ruined me.
His smile changes when he sees me, like he’s not sure what to do with his face. Or like he can tell. My face gets hot. Again. Because I lost my ability to conceal my feelings somewhere back in mid-October.
“Okay, so,” Dorian says from over by his bed where I can’t see from the doorway. Cauler turns back to him, and I hurry to close the door and get back to my laptop. Thank god I didn’t leave anything incriminating up on the screen. “I’m kinda leaning toward the institutionalization of death, but then there’s the whole denial of bereavement in late-stage capitalism that’s pretty interesting, too.”
“You sure you don’t want to research the logistics of launching corpses into orbit to save space on Earth?” Barbie deadpans. He’s lying flat on his back on Dorian’s bed with his phone held right above his face with this giddy smile. I send a quick snap of him to Nova with the caption wonder who he’s texting.
“Ugh, god, could you imagine?” Dorian grimaces. “We’d be like Saturn but with a ring of dead people.”
“Metal as fuck,” Cauler says. “I’ll be the first to go.”
“And now you have your paper topic,” Barbie says. Judging by the sly selfie Nova sends back, they’re definitely flirting at this very moment. “You’re welcome.”
“We are not doing our final project on corpse rings,” Dorian says definitively, settling onto the floor and opening up a textbook. I pretend not to notice when Cauler glances back at me before sitting on the floor by my bed.
“What is happening?” I finally ask. Coming back from an existential bathroom crisis into a conversation about death and space corpses. Not how I expected my Thursday night to go.
“Cauler and I are doing our Death and Dying project together,” Dorian says. “Barbie’s here ’cause he’s obsessed with me and I can’t get rid of him.”
Barbie’s too busy smiling at his phone to retaliate. He’s so happy it makes my chest ache. Knowing it’s Nova on the other end of it is enough to make me wanna cry. If just one good, lasting thing comes from me being at Hartland, I hope it’s them.
I grab the tangled mess of my headphones from next to my pillow and work on fixing them. “Why do it here?”
Dorian arranges his laptop, textbook, papers, and notebooks around him on the floor in the most precise chaos I’ve ever seen. His notes are clean and organized and detailed and exactly what I’d expect from an astronomy major who was sitting at a 4.0 at the midterm of his first semester of college.
“Seniors are thesis-ing in the players’ lounge, and the library is fuckin’ lit tonight for some reason,” he says.
“Why?” Cauler asks. He tilts his head to the side, stretching the line of his shoulder and neck long and inviting. “You not want us here?”
His hair is starting to grow out on top. He’s got a dark freckle behind his right ear. The plugs he has in today are black roses, a birthday gift he got from Zero. He smells like fresh laundry.
“It’s Dorian’s room, too,” I say. Cauler chuckles and we are so obvious, how have we not been straight-up called out yet?
I get the cords untangled and slip the buds into my ears, plugging them into my laptop. I have an Italian assignment due tomorrow. Something simple that’ll take ten minutes and then I won’t have to worry about it in the morning. But I can’t focus with Cauler literally leaning against my bed when I can’t even touch him.