What's the Use of Defense - Part 2
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Pairing: Sidney Crosby/Jonathan Toews
Rating: mature
Word Count: 8,120
AO3 here!
“It’s not serious, it was just one night.” Jonny knows it’s a lie as soon as he hears his own voice crack. Pat holds up one hand to stop him. “I will literally never be drunk enough to want to know about Crosby’s dick.”
Jonny huffs out a laugh, but his smile fades fast. “I left. I mean, I bolted, before he woke up.”
Jonny and Sid hook up at Sochi, and nothing is quite the same afterwards.
Jonny wakes up feeling like he’d spent last night licking asphalt. He chokes down some painkillers and jams on the first ball cap he finds, then calls Patrick with instructions to meet him at a diner in between them. He’s not suffering through this hangover alone.
By the time he gets there, Patrick’s already seated in a back booth with a spectacularly douchey pair of sunglasses on. Jonny can’t chirp him too much about how rough he looks, though, because Pat actually managed to change out of his clothes from last night and that’s more than Jonny’s got going for himself right now.
“So I’m freaking out,” he says as soon as their waitress walks away with their menus.
Pat groans. “It’s too early for me to suffer through more of your terrible rom com life.”
Jonny waves one hand dismissively. “You love rom coms and we both know that all those DVDs you have are actually your copies, not your sisters’. But no, I just. I gotta come out to the team, and probably PR.”
Patrick looks up at him, startled. “Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse? You haven’t even asked him on a date yet.”
Jonny shakes his head. “You know how Sidney is,” he says, wrapping his hands around the mug of shitty diner coffee. “He’s all or nothing. If he’s interested in… in anything else, he’s going to want to be all in. I can’t date someone seriously and not be able to bring them to team stuff.”
Pat hesitates. “Is it going to be worth it if you do all of that and then he says no? I mean, if you want to come out I’ll have your back, but…”
“Yeah, I know. I thought I could just stick to dating women and it would never be an issue, but…” Jonny sets the coffee back down without drinking any. “I just. I think this might be serious, if I let it be. The distance would be hard enough, I can’t try to do it if the team isn’t going to be supportive.”
“Okay, buddy.” Patrick awkwardly reaches across the table and pats Jonny’s hand. “Well, come out to the team then, I’ll come with you and punch anyone who’s a dick about it for you, alright? But maybe wait on PR until you’re actually bringing him around, that way you don’t have to stress so much.”
Jonny nods, relieved. “You think the team’s gonna be fine?”
“I mean,” Pat hedges, “I can’t promise anything about some of the newest rookies? Neither of us know them that well yet. The rest of the team’s gonna be cool though, you know everyone just wants you to be happy. I just can’t believe you told me before you told Sharpy.”
Jonny winces. “He’s going to tease me forever, isn’t he?”
“Maybe don’t open by telling him you hit it and then ran?”
Jonny opens his mouth, but then their waitress comes back with their plates and they both get distracted eating. They’re pushing the empty plates towards the center of the table by the time Jonny says, “Thanks. For not freaking out.”
“Yeah, duh.” Patrick cracks his knuckles. “Now let’s go tell the team.”
“Right now?”
“Pull it off like a bandaid, dude! Gotta go to practice hung over anyway, might as well make it entertaining.”
Jonny groans. “Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends.”
---
Coming out to the team turns out to be the most uneventful thing Jonny’s done all month.
He’s glad afterwards that Pat pushed him to get it over with - he would have stressed out otherwise and worked himself up for no reason. All of the guys he’s known for a while were supportive, even if some of them were clearly surprised or unsure of what to say. It’s a relief to have it over with.
Pat bumps shoulders with him in the locker room after, by which he means Pat bumps his shoulder into Jonny’s ribcage in ongoing denial of his height.
“So hey!” Pat chirps, douchebag sunglasses back in place, “Now all you gotta do is call your man and fix things.”
Jonny’s face falls.
“Don’t tell me you’re chickening out now.”
“I uh - no, I just realized I don’t have his number.”
Jonny can’t see Pat’s eyes behind the sunglasses, but he can feel when he’s being judged. Before he can protest, Patrick’s pulling out his phone. “Okay, so I’m gonna go bother someone on Twitter for it. Malkin probably has it, right?”
“Don’t do that publicly,” Jonny hisses.
“Duh, Jonny.”
Sharpy is leaning towards them, interested. “What do you want with Malkin?”
“Playing matchmaker,” Pat tells him absentmindedly. Sharpy perks up almost immediately. “Didn’t know big burly Russians were your thing, Jonny boy!”
Jonny groans, but Sharpy just rolls his eyes at him. “What? I can be supportive! This is me being supportive! Even if you do have terrible taste. Is this, like, a bear culture thing? Because I think there’s clubs and stuff for that, if you’re into big and hairy.”
Jonny resolutely wills the ground to swallow him whole.
“It’s worse than that,” Pat tells him. “He’s into Crosby.” He says it the way one might say ‘puss-filled skin lesions’ or ‘an entire practice day of nothing but suicides.’
Sharpy grins. “You two can adopt a small army of kids and build your own NHL team. Hey, get me Crosby’s number too, I’ll-”
“No,” Jonny interrupts. “Absolutely don’t give him that number.”
“But-” Sharpy whines.
“No. Look, just - let me deal with this. I don’t want to make it a thing if it’s not going to be a thing.” Sharpy frowns, but bumps shoulders with Jonny before he heads back to the showers.
Malkin does give them Sid’s number, though not until he’s sent several messages with increasing numbers of question marks and Pat’s had to explain why he wants it. It’s soon followed by ‘Tell Toews I hurt if hurt Sid,’ which Pat passes along.
“I think I already have, though,” Jonny tells him.
“I guess Crosby didn’t tell him that? I don’t know if they hang out like we do.”
“We don’t actually hang out, you just show up and refuse to leave.”
Patrick kicks him in the shin. “You know you’d miss me if I didn’t, you fucker.”
Jonny really, really would.
---
The next step, of course, is to talk to Sid.
Malkin had reassured them both that Sidney had finally upgraded his phone to something that had texting, and Jonny taps out a couple messages but deletes them all. He’d rather talk in person, but they aren’t playing each other again for a month. Jonny figures the least he can do is to call instead. He checks the game and practice schedules on the NHL website to see if Sid’s likely to be around, then decides on a short message.
‘Hey, this is Jonathan Toews. I’d like to talk, is 7pm okay?’
It’s probably not nice to spring that phone call on Sid without any warning.
He gets a ‘Yes’ back almost immediately and then makes himself go jogging while he decides what he wants to say. He probably should find out if Sid remembers what happened in Sochi first, and if not he’ll have to find some way to ease into it. Opening with “I kind of want to touch your dick again and also date you” seems inadvisable.
It turns out that he shouldn’t have stressed himself out, though, because Sid just jumps right into it as soon as they’ve traded polite, stilted hellos.
“Is this you having a gay panic?”
Jonny splutters; apparently his extensive media training hasn’t prepared him for this.
“What? I - no, of course not!”
Sid sighs. “So what do you want, then?”
Jonny takes a moment to slouch further into the couch. Maybe he should have waited until they could do this in person. “I was going to ask you on a real date?” He hesitates, then adds, “Well, I was going to ask if you remembered what happened in Sochi first, because I wasn’t sure if you had forgotten or if we just weren’t talking about it. But I guess you do.”
The line goes silent for long enough that Jonny wonders if Sid has just hung up on him, and he’s about to take the phone away from his ear to check when Sid says, voice tight, “I wasn’t actually asleep.”
Jonny winces.
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
Jonny drags one hand over his face. “Uh, I might have panicked? Not over the gay thing, just over the part where I thought it was a one night stand and then I woke up and I wanted to see you again? I mean. See you off the ice.”
“The gay thing,” Sid repeats, sounding a bit judgmental.
“Look,” Jonny sighs, “I’ve known I like dudes for years. My family’s known I like dudes for years. Girls too, but you know. It’s not like I’m freaking out over that, it’s just - you’re you.”
“I’m not sure that freaking out over sleeping with me is any less offensive than freaking out over sleeping with a man,” Sid points out.
“I guess I deserved that.”
Jonny scoots over so he can lay down on his side, curling up on the couch so his face is pressed up against the back. It’s how he used to nap when he was recovering from his concussion, when he was so sick of being in his bed all day that he desperately needed to be anywhere else but couldn’t handle the light in his living room too well. It looks awkward since his legs hang off the end, but it’s comforting.
The line is silent again, but at least Sid hasn’t hung up yet, so that’s something. “I’m sorry,” Jonny tells him, and presses his forehead against the couch and squeezes his eyes shut. “I shouldn’t have just left like that. I did maybe freak out. A bit. Just. It’s a little different knowing you’re into guys and actually confirming it than it being, you know, sort of this abstract thing. I always thought - I figured I’d only date girls until I was done with hockey, and then I’d come out when I retired so I could date both, so that by the time I met someone I was seriously interested in it wouldn’t be a big deal if they were a dude. But then you happened, so.”
Sid sighs. “If I’d known you didn’t usually - you were so forward in Sochi, I just assumed you picked up men discretely at home.”
Jonny laughs a little. “No, just you, I guess.”
“You should have said something during when we played you.” He hears a rustling sound, like Sid’s moving around to get more comfortable. “I thought it was a one time deal.”
“Yeah, I thought it was too.”
“Why, then?”
Jonny’s not sure if he’s asking why break your plan to wait until retirement, or why me, or even why do something like that in Russia while surrounded by so much media if you’re trying to be discrete, but he probably owes Sid answers to all of those anyway.
“Well, you were safe, for one?” Jonny frowns. “That sounds - I don’t mean I picked you because of that, I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t interested in you. But it was different than trying to pick someone up in Chicago and hoping they wouldn’t talk. I didn’t want to come out while I was playing because I didn’t want the media drama to hurt my game. I’ve always known I’d come out eventually, I just didn’t want to end up getting outed by someone in the middle of a cup run or anything like that. Even if you’d wanted to out me, you couldn’t have done it without outing yourself too, and then at least I wouldn’t be dealing with the media shitstorm on my own.”
Sid hmms. “You said didn’t?”
“Hm?”
“You said you didn’t want to come out, not that you don’t want to come out. Did something happen?” He sounds concerned, but more like he’s worried about Jonny than like he’s worried for himself.
“Oh,” Jonny grips the phone tighter, “I, um, I came out to the team this morning?”
There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other side of the line, but Sid isn’t interrupting him, so Jonny takes a breath and tries to explain it as best he can.
“I kind of, uh, people could tell I was really distracted since I got back from Russia, and I talked to a friend and decided it might just be for the best if the team knew so that I wasn’t so stressed out? I needed to know they’d have my back if I started dating a guy or if I got outed, I guess. I hadn’t even realized I was so worried about it until I told them.”
He’s not sure how Sidney’s going to feel about it. He’s glad he did and he’s not going to regret it even if nothing else happens with Sidney; it’s a relief he didn’t know before that he needed, just the knowledge that if he wants to bring a boyfriend to team events some day they’ll be welcomed there.
“The Penguins know I’m gay,” Sid says slowly. “I told Mario and he sat down with the staff with me and helped me tell them. I plan on staying here as long as they’ll have me, and I didn’t want to spend the whole time looking over my shoulder.”
“I haven’t told management yet, just the team. I don’t think - it’s not going to be a problem, just, one thing at a time.”
“Okay,” Sid says, and Jonny can’t really get a read on what he’s thinking without seeing his face, so he just waits. Finally, Sid sighs and asks, “So, a date?”
“Yeah, uh, I figured we could go golfing or something?”
“You want to go golfing with me.”
Jonny cringes. “I mean, we could have dinner instead? But I kind of figured we’d end up doing that anyway.”
Sid’s laughing at him, that awkward way he does where his whole body sort of spasms, and it’s a pretty good sign of how far gone Jonny is that he actually finds it endearing. “You’re even worse at this than I am, aren’t you,” Sid says, not even really asking so much as telling him. “Yeah, sure, we can go golfing. Loser buys dinner?”
“No,” Jonny draws out, fighting against the competitive urge to take him up on that bet, “I asked you out, I’ll buy dinner.”
Sid is still snickering at him. “Are you coming out here, or am I coming out there, then?”
Jonny shouldn’t actually be surprised that Sid’s willing to travel too, but he is, a little bit, just because he’d been thinking about the whole thing as all the work he’d have to do if he wanted to make this work instead of both of them putting in an effort together. It’s good though, knowing that Sidney’s willing to try too.
“Actually,” Sid says, and Jonny can hear the sound of typing, “I think it might be easier for me to come out there. I have three days in between games starting on the 12th.”
Jonny runs through their schedule in his head. “We’re playing in Colorado on the 12th, but we’ve got a red eye back if you want to get here on the 13th.”
“Yeah,” Sidney says, “I’ll text you my flight.”
[ Part 3]
Pairing: Sidney Crosby/Jonathan Toews
Rating: mature
Word Count: 8,120
AO3 here!
“It’s not serious, it was just one night.” Jonny knows it’s a lie as soon as he hears his own voice crack. Pat holds up one hand to stop him. “I will literally never be drunk enough to want to know about Crosby’s dick.”
Jonny huffs out a laugh, but his smile fades fast. “I left. I mean, I bolted, before he woke up.”
Jonny and Sid hook up at Sochi, and nothing is quite the same afterwards.
Jonny wakes up feeling like he’d spent last night licking asphalt. He chokes down some painkillers and jams on the first ball cap he finds, then calls Patrick with instructions to meet him at a diner in between them. He’s not suffering through this hangover alone.
By the time he gets there, Patrick’s already seated in a back booth with a spectacularly douchey pair of sunglasses on. Jonny can’t chirp him too much about how rough he looks, though, because Pat actually managed to change out of his clothes from last night and that’s more than Jonny’s got going for himself right now.
“So I’m freaking out,” he says as soon as their waitress walks away with their menus.
Pat groans. “It’s too early for me to suffer through more of your terrible rom com life.”
Jonny waves one hand dismissively. “You love rom coms and we both know that all those DVDs you have are actually your copies, not your sisters’. But no, I just. I gotta come out to the team, and probably PR.”
Patrick looks up at him, startled. “Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse? You haven’t even asked him on a date yet.”
Jonny shakes his head. “You know how Sidney is,” he says, wrapping his hands around the mug of shitty diner coffee. “He’s all or nothing. If he’s interested in… in anything else, he’s going to want to be all in. I can’t date someone seriously and not be able to bring them to team stuff.”
Pat hesitates. “Is it going to be worth it if you do all of that and then he says no? I mean, if you want to come out I’ll have your back, but…”
“Yeah, I know. I thought I could just stick to dating women and it would never be an issue, but…” Jonny sets the coffee back down without drinking any. “I just. I think this might be serious, if I let it be. The distance would be hard enough, I can’t try to do it if the team isn’t going to be supportive.”
“Okay, buddy.” Patrick awkwardly reaches across the table and pats Jonny’s hand. “Well, come out to the team then, I’ll come with you and punch anyone who’s a dick about it for you, alright? But maybe wait on PR until you’re actually bringing him around, that way you don’t have to stress so much.”
Jonny nods, relieved. “You think the team’s gonna be fine?”
“I mean,” Pat hedges, “I can’t promise anything about some of the newest rookies? Neither of us know them that well yet. The rest of the team’s gonna be cool though, you know everyone just wants you to be happy. I just can’t believe you told me before you told Sharpy.”
Jonny winces. “He’s going to tease me forever, isn’t he?”
“Maybe don’t open by telling him you hit it and then ran?”
Jonny opens his mouth, but then their waitress comes back with their plates and they both get distracted eating. They’re pushing the empty plates towards the center of the table by the time Jonny says, “Thanks. For not freaking out.”
“Yeah, duh.” Patrick cracks his knuckles. “Now let’s go tell the team.”
“Right now?”
“Pull it off like a bandaid, dude! Gotta go to practice hung over anyway, might as well make it entertaining.”
Jonny groans. “Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends.”
---
Coming out to the team turns out to be the most uneventful thing Jonny’s done all month.
He’s glad afterwards that Pat pushed him to get it over with - he would have stressed out otherwise and worked himself up for no reason. All of the guys he’s known for a while were supportive, even if some of them were clearly surprised or unsure of what to say. It’s a relief to have it over with.
Pat bumps shoulders with him in the locker room after, by which he means Pat bumps his shoulder into Jonny’s ribcage in ongoing denial of his height.
“So hey!” Pat chirps, douchebag sunglasses back in place, “Now all you gotta do is call your man and fix things.”
Jonny’s face falls.
“Don’t tell me you’re chickening out now.”
“I uh - no, I just realized I don’t have his number.”
Jonny can’t see Pat’s eyes behind the sunglasses, but he can feel when he’s being judged. Before he can protest, Patrick’s pulling out his phone. “Okay, so I’m gonna go bother someone on Twitter for it. Malkin probably has it, right?”
“Don’t do that publicly,” Jonny hisses.
“Duh, Jonny.”
Sharpy is leaning towards them, interested. “What do you want with Malkin?”
“Playing matchmaker,” Pat tells him absentmindedly. Sharpy perks up almost immediately. “Didn’t know big burly Russians were your thing, Jonny boy!”
Jonny groans, but Sharpy just rolls his eyes at him. “What? I can be supportive! This is me being supportive! Even if you do have terrible taste. Is this, like, a bear culture thing? Because I think there’s clubs and stuff for that, if you’re into big and hairy.”
Jonny resolutely wills the ground to swallow him whole.
“It’s worse than that,” Pat tells him. “He’s into Crosby.” He says it the way one might say ‘puss-filled skin lesions’ or ‘an entire practice day of nothing but suicides.’
Sharpy grins. “You two can adopt a small army of kids and build your own NHL team. Hey, get me Crosby’s number too, I’ll-”
“No,” Jonny interrupts. “Absolutely don’t give him that number.”
“But-” Sharpy whines.
“No. Look, just - let me deal with this. I don’t want to make it a thing if it’s not going to be a thing.” Sharpy frowns, but bumps shoulders with Jonny before he heads back to the showers.
Malkin does give them Sid’s number, though not until he’s sent several messages with increasing numbers of question marks and Pat’s had to explain why he wants it. It’s soon followed by ‘Tell Toews I hurt if hurt Sid,’ which Pat passes along.
“I think I already have, though,” Jonny tells him.
“I guess Crosby didn’t tell him that? I don’t know if they hang out like we do.”
“We don’t actually hang out, you just show up and refuse to leave.”
Patrick kicks him in the shin. “You know you’d miss me if I didn’t, you fucker.”
Jonny really, really would.
---
The next step, of course, is to talk to Sid.
Malkin had reassured them both that Sidney had finally upgraded his phone to something that had texting, and Jonny taps out a couple messages but deletes them all. He’d rather talk in person, but they aren’t playing each other again for a month. Jonny figures the least he can do is to call instead. He checks the game and practice schedules on the NHL website to see if Sid’s likely to be around, then decides on a short message.
‘Hey, this is Jonathan Toews. I’d like to talk, is 7pm okay?’
It’s probably not nice to spring that phone call on Sid without any warning.
He gets a ‘Yes’ back almost immediately and then makes himself go jogging while he decides what he wants to say. He probably should find out if Sid remembers what happened in Sochi first, and if not he’ll have to find some way to ease into it. Opening with “I kind of want to touch your dick again and also date you” seems inadvisable.
It turns out that he shouldn’t have stressed himself out, though, because Sid just jumps right into it as soon as they’ve traded polite, stilted hellos.
“Is this you having a gay panic?”
Jonny splutters; apparently his extensive media training hasn’t prepared him for this.
“What? I - no, of course not!”
Sid sighs. “So what do you want, then?”
Jonny takes a moment to slouch further into the couch. Maybe he should have waited until they could do this in person. “I was going to ask you on a real date?” He hesitates, then adds, “Well, I was going to ask if you remembered what happened in Sochi first, because I wasn’t sure if you had forgotten or if we just weren’t talking about it. But I guess you do.”
The line goes silent for long enough that Jonny wonders if Sid has just hung up on him, and he’s about to take the phone away from his ear to check when Sid says, voice tight, “I wasn’t actually asleep.”
Jonny winces.
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh.”
Jonny drags one hand over his face. “Uh, I might have panicked? Not over the gay thing, just over the part where I thought it was a one night stand and then I woke up and I wanted to see you again? I mean. See you off the ice.”
“The gay thing,” Sid repeats, sounding a bit judgmental.
“Look,” Jonny sighs, “I’ve known I like dudes for years. My family’s known I like dudes for years. Girls too, but you know. It’s not like I’m freaking out over that, it’s just - you’re you.”
“I’m not sure that freaking out over sleeping with me is any less offensive than freaking out over sleeping with a man,” Sid points out.
“I guess I deserved that.”
Jonny scoots over so he can lay down on his side, curling up on the couch so his face is pressed up against the back. It’s how he used to nap when he was recovering from his concussion, when he was so sick of being in his bed all day that he desperately needed to be anywhere else but couldn’t handle the light in his living room too well. It looks awkward since his legs hang off the end, but it’s comforting.
The line is silent again, but at least Sid hasn’t hung up yet, so that’s something. “I’m sorry,” Jonny tells him, and presses his forehead against the couch and squeezes his eyes shut. “I shouldn’t have just left like that. I did maybe freak out. A bit. Just. It’s a little different knowing you’re into guys and actually confirming it than it being, you know, sort of this abstract thing. I always thought - I figured I’d only date girls until I was done with hockey, and then I’d come out when I retired so I could date both, so that by the time I met someone I was seriously interested in it wouldn’t be a big deal if they were a dude. But then you happened, so.”
Sid sighs. “If I’d known you didn’t usually - you were so forward in Sochi, I just assumed you picked up men discretely at home.”
Jonny laughs a little. “No, just you, I guess.”
“You should have said something during when we played you.” He hears a rustling sound, like Sid’s moving around to get more comfortable. “I thought it was a one time deal.”
“Yeah, I thought it was too.”
“Why, then?”
Jonny’s not sure if he’s asking why break your plan to wait until retirement, or why me, or even why do something like that in Russia while surrounded by so much media if you’re trying to be discrete, but he probably owes Sid answers to all of those anyway.
“Well, you were safe, for one?” Jonny frowns. “That sounds - I don’t mean I picked you because of that, I wouldn’t have if I wasn’t interested in you. But it was different than trying to pick someone up in Chicago and hoping they wouldn’t talk. I didn’t want to come out while I was playing because I didn’t want the media drama to hurt my game. I’ve always known I’d come out eventually, I just didn’t want to end up getting outed by someone in the middle of a cup run or anything like that. Even if you’d wanted to out me, you couldn’t have done it without outing yourself too, and then at least I wouldn’t be dealing with the media shitstorm on my own.”
Sid hmms. “You said didn’t?”
“Hm?”
“You said you didn’t want to come out, not that you don’t want to come out. Did something happen?” He sounds concerned, but more like he’s worried about Jonny than like he’s worried for himself.
“Oh,” Jonny grips the phone tighter, “I, um, I came out to the team this morning?”
There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other side of the line, but Sid isn’t interrupting him, so Jonny takes a breath and tries to explain it as best he can.
“I kind of, uh, people could tell I was really distracted since I got back from Russia, and I talked to a friend and decided it might just be for the best if the team knew so that I wasn’t so stressed out? I needed to know they’d have my back if I started dating a guy or if I got outed, I guess. I hadn’t even realized I was so worried about it until I told them.”
He’s not sure how Sidney’s going to feel about it. He’s glad he did and he’s not going to regret it even if nothing else happens with Sidney; it’s a relief he didn’t know before that he needed, just the knowledge that if he wants to bring a boyfriend to team events some day they’ll be welcomed there.
“The Penguins know I’m gay,” Sid says slowly. “I told Mario and he sat down with the staff with me and helped me tell them. I plan on staying here as long as they’ll have me, and I didn’t want to spend the whole time looking over my shoulder.”
“I haven’t told management yet, just the team. I don’t think - it’s not going to be a problem, just, one thing at a time.”
“Okay,” Sid says, and Jonny can’t really get a read on what he’s thinking without seeing his face, so he just waits. Finally, Sid sighs and asks, “So, a date?”
“Yeah, uh, I figured we could go golfing or something?”
“You want to go golfing with me.”
Jonny cringes. “I mean, we could have dinner instead? But I kind of figured we’d end up doing that anyway.”
Sid’s laughing at him, that awkward way he does where his whole body sort of spasms, and it’s a pretty good sign of how far gone Jonny is that he actually finds it endearing. “You’re even worse at this than I am, aren’t you,” Sid says, not even really asking so much as telling him. “Yeah, sure, we can go golfing. Loser buys dinner?”
“No,” Jonny draws out, fighting against the competitive urge to take him up on that bet, “I asked you out, I’ll buy dinner.”
Sid is still snickering at him. “Are you coming out here, or am I coming out there, then?”
Jonny shouldn’t actually be surprised that Sid’s willing to travel too, but he is, a little bit, just because he’d been thinking about the whole thing as all the work he’d have to do if he wanted to make this work instead of both of them putting in an effort together. It’s good though, knowing that Sidney’s willing to try too.
“Actually,” Sid says, and Jonny can hear the sound of typing, “I think it might be easier for me to come out there. I have three days in between games starting on the 12th.”
Jonny runs through their schedule in his head. “We’re playing in Colorado on the 12th, but we’ve got a red eye back if you want to get here on the 13th.”
“Yeah,” Sidney says, “I’ll text you my flight.”
[ Part 3]