Fic: We Didn't
Title: We Didn't
Fandom: Hockey RPS // Chicago Blackhawks
Rating: UST
Pairing: Jonathan Toews/Patrick Kane
Words: 634
Notes: Written for the hockey kink meme prompt: Kane and Toews break-up or go through a rough patch in their relationship... This is not that fic. This is the one where they don't get together at all. The title, first line, and general structural ideas are stolen from Stuart Dybek's short story, "We Didn't" as an exercise in writing.
Summary: After the Cup, as told by Jonathan Toews.
We did it in front of the mirror
And in the light.
We did it in darkness,
In water, and in the high grass.
--Yehuda Amichai, We Did It
We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't quietly in your apartment during a thunderstorm or in the elevator, caught somewhere between floors 5 and 19. We didn't in front of the windows, Chicago laid out in lights before us and you on your back, laid out beneath my hands. We didn't in my car, in the parking lot, in Philadelphia, before driving to the game, tense and restless, with the score at 3-2. We didn't against the outside of a bar, drunk off our asses on too much beer, not enough sleep, and a dull ache that may have been the uselessness of want stretched thin after too many years of not doing what we were both thinking and not thinking about what we denied feeling. We didn't in Winnipeg, in my old room, careful of the bed creaky with age or fumbling, and we didn't after falling to the floor, the wood still warped from where water had leaked through the ceiling a few years back, adjusting to fit the curved spaces, shushed mumblings into each others' skin, with my momma downstairs making us pancakes.
At the dead end of a wrong-turn Buffalo street-railroad tracks crossed with a line of white siding houses-where you sheepishly tapped the GPS and chewed your lip, my fingers inches from your thigh; in front of a gas station twenty miles from your house at three in the morning, map folded carefully on the front seat, you coming back from 'just a bathroom break' with a cup of coffee, a protein shake, and a few candy bars tucked under your arms, hair rumpled, smiling through a stifled yawn, we didn't.
How oblivious you were, how telling every half-lidded glance and boundary-ignoring gesture, how maddeningly, dizzyingly close your skin.
Remember that night strangely unsettled by the coming summer, and the two of us, creeping up your porch steps with our duffle bags slung over our shoulders, the wind making the trees tremble in the quiet of the dark blue morning, and you whispering, "God, it's good to be home," in disbelieving awe. Even in the dim light, you radiated in the unexpectedly open, bright way you do sometimes, and before I could think to stop the movement, I pulled you towards me, mimicing the way our bodies naturally find the other after a goal.
The line of your back stiffened as our bags thumped heavily against our sides, and then, sliding, landed with a soft whump at our feet, you slumping to press your forehead into my shoulder, freshly cut curls grazing the slope of my neck. "Man, I still can’t believe it-we got the Cup, baby," you said emphatically, still on a high two weeks after the game, rocking on the balls of your feet. "Isn't anything we can't do."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," I breathed despite the realization that there were things that no, no, we couldn't, we didn't, we wouldn't do lying thick and heavy on my tongue.
Somewhere, a car alarm sounded and a street light sputtered out; the air was still and the tips of morning began to show over suburban Buffalo rooftops and I clung to you like a dying, desperate man to a plank of wood adrift in the ocean, praying that you wouldn't hear the sharp stutter of my heart against your chest or feel the fractional push of my hips into yours or recognize the hard clench of my fingers in the shirt bunched around your shoulders as more than a relieved, post-season, post-finals embrace between teammates, roommates, friends; and never this, whatever this could mean.
Fandom: Hockey RPS // Chicago Blackhawks
Rating: UST
Pairing: Jonathan Toews/Patrick Kane
Words: 634
Notes: Written for the hockey kink meme prompt: Kane and Toews break-up or go through a rough patch in their relationship... This is not that fic. This is the one where they don't get together at all. The title, first line, and general structural ideas are stolen from Stuart Dybek's short story, "We Didn't" as an exercise in writing.
Summary: After the Cup, as told by Jonathan Toews.
We did it in front of the mirror
And in the light.
We did it in darkness,
In water, and in the high grass.
--Yehuda Amichai, We Did It
We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't quietly in your apartment during a thunderstorm or in the elevator, caught somewhere between floors 5 and 19. We didn't in front of the windows, Chicago laid out in lights before us and you on your back, laid out beneath my hands. We didn't in my car, in the parking lot, in Philadelphia, before driving to the game, tense and restless, with the score at 3-2. We didn't against the outside of a bar, drunk off our asses on too much beer, not enough sleep, and a dull ache that may have been the uselessness of want stretched thin after too many years of not doing what we were both thinking and not thinking about what we denied feeling. We didn't in Winnipeg, in my old room, careful of the bed creaky with age or fumbling, and we didn't after falling to the floor, the wood still warped from where water had leaked through the ceiling a few years back, adjusting to fit the curved spaces, shushed mumblings into each others' skin, with my momma downstairs making us pancakes.
At the dead end of a wrong-turn Buffalo street-railroad tracks crossed with a line of white siding houses-where you sheepishly tapped the GPS and chewed your lip, my fingers inches from your thigh; in front of a gas station twenty miles from your house at three in the morning, map folded carefully on the front seat, you coming back from 'just a bathroom break' with a cup of coffee, a protein shake, and a few candy bars tucked under your arms, hair rumpled, smiling through a stifled yawn, we didn't.
How oblivious you were, how telling every half-lidded glance and boundary-ignoring gesture, how maddeningly, dizzyingly close your skin.
Remember that night strangely unsettled by the coming summer, and the two of us, creeping up your porch steps with our duffle bags slung over our shoulders, the wind making the trees tremble in the quiet of the dark blue morning, and you whispering, "God, it's good to be home," in disbelieving awe. Even in the dim light, you radiated in the unexpectedly open, bright way you do sometimes, and before I could think to stop the movement, I pulled you towards me, mimicing the way our bodies naturally find the other after a goal.
The line of your back stiffened as our bags thumped heavily against our sides, and then, sliding, landed with a soft whump at our feet, you slumping to press your forehead into my shoulder, freshly cut curls grazing the slope of my neck. "Man, I still can’t believe it-we got the Cup, baby," you said emphatically, still on a high two weeks after the game, rocking on the balls of your feet. "Isn't anything we can't do."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," I breathed despite the realization that there were things that no, no, we couldn't, we didn't, we wouldn't do lying thick and heavy on my tongue.
Somewhere, a car alarm sounded and a street light sputtered out; the air was still and the tips of morning began to show over suburban Buffalo rooftops and I clung to you like a dying, desperate man to a plank of wood adrift in the ocean, praying that you wouldn't hear the sharp stutter of my heart against your chest or feel the fractional push of my hips into yours or recognize the hard clench of my fingers in the shirt bunched around your shoulders as more than a relieved, post-season, post-finals embrace between teammates, roommates, friends; and never this, whatever this could mean.