SEVEN
ZACKY
Millsy stayed for two days. He slept in Cameron’s bed (Zacky tried not to be jealous of that), got part of the way through the jigsaw puzzle, and put together Legos with him. Zacky put the Jurassic Park T-Rex Breakout on Cameron’s dresser. They “watched” the Jackets games by having Millsy pull them up on his laptop and face it away from Zacky, so he could hear but not see. He made it through half of a coloring book watching two games that way. He was grateful Cameron didn’t score in either game because he would have made Millsy let him watch it.
Millsy left in the afternoon of the third day. Cameron would be home late that night, their flight leaving after the game in North Carolina. Zacky spent three seconds on his phone pulling up the radio broadcast of it and fell asleep in bed before the game was over.
He woke up to a warm hand on his shoulder.
“Zack, do you want to put your pajamas on and get under the covers?” Cameron asked, still in his game-day suit. Zacky’s lamp was on, and he was groggy. The spike of disappointment that came every time he woke up in this universe coursed through him. He felt better than the first morning after his injury but measurably stupider.
At least, that’s what he told himself as he grabbed Cameron’s sleeve and asked him to stay.
Cameron smiled at him. “Yeah, bud. I’m going to take my suit off. I’ll be back,” he whispered.
Zacky pulled his sweats and his t-shirt off, then slid under the covers in his boxers. He was used to sleeping naked with Cameron, but he would take anything.
Cameron came back shirtless in a pair of plaid flannel sleep pants and slid in next to Zacky.
“God, I’m so happy to be home,” Cameron said through a yawn. Zacky wasn’t sure exactly what time it was, but Cameron had originally estimated his arrival time to be after two a.m.
“Me too.”
Zacky had a vague worry that he would wake up trying to hump Cameron like a rabbit, but he managed to stay on his side of the bed. It was the one moment he thought he could be grateful for the pain he was in.
Instead, he woke up to the feeling of the bed shifting as Cameron got out of it. “Go back to sleep,” Cameron said, hand on his shoulder to soothe him back to sleep. Instead, Zacky got up, hit the bathroom, and hovered in the kitchen while Cameron made them eggs. The lump on his head was feeling better, but his brain was foggy, and he swayed on his feet more than once before Cameron made him go sit at the breakfast bar.
“Day off,” Cameron said, setting a plate with three eggs and two slices of toast in front of him. Cameron sat next to him with his own plate.
“What are you going to do?” He took a bite of his eggs. They were perfect—over easy, the hot sauce he liked on them. Toast thoroughly buttered. Cameron hadn’t even asked.
“I was thinking—if you’re up for it—we could hit the pool and hot tub?”
“Where?”
“Oh, yeah. Have you even left the apartment yet?”
“And gone where?” Zacky asked. He was still wearing sunglasses inside sometimes.“I’ve taken the elevator to the parking garage and back.”
“All right, all right. There’s a pool and a hot tub in the building. Figured a swim might help. It’s usually pretty dead during work hours on weekdays.”
“Okay,” Zacky said. That sounded nice. He’d grown up with a pool in his backyard. If he couldn’t be on frozen water, he wanted to be in pleasantly warm water. Cameron smiled, like he’d done something good.
They spent the rest of breakfast talking about the roadie, Cameron with his mouth full half the time. Zacky knew it bothered some people—Cameron’s mom prime among the numbers—but he loved it. Cameron was too excited about whatever he was talking about to wait to chew, and for whatever reason, Zacky found it charming.
Or maybe it had been a handful of days since he woke up in this weird parallel universe and he was desperately missing his husband. He was in too much pain to actually want to have sex, but now that he couldn’t , he wanted to. Zacky wanted to lie naked in Cameron’s arms and listen to him say sweet things while gently playing with his hair.He wanted to be in their bed, in their house.
They went to the pool right after breakfast to try for the calmest moment in the day. Zacky found his swim trunks, tossed a t-shirt on, and met Cameron at the front door.
“Where’d you get this?” Cameron said, his voice soft and fond. He pinched the shoulder of Zacky’s t-shirt, and when Zacky looked down, he realized why. He had a thirteen on the shoulder of his Jackets shirt.Cam’s number.
“It was in my drawer. Must have gotten mixed up in the laundry?”
Cameron was confused. Zacky let his eyes trace the exaggerated curve of Cameron’s left eyebrow. “We don’t do laundry together.”
Zacky shrugged. He didn’t know. “I just got here, dude.”
Cameron dropped it, and they headed downstairs. Zacky went through the guidelines for being in a pool or hot tub that his doctor gave him. Only supervised, and if the heat from the hot tub made his head hurt even a little worse, he had to get out.
Their building was cool—not extravagant, but nicer than the place he and Cameron lived in right after they got married. Half of one floor was the gym, the pool, and the hot tub. He and Cameron tossed their slides and t-shirts in a locker together, rinsed off, and headed to the pool.
It was deserted. The echoey space hit Zacky immediately with the smell of chlorine and the thick humidity of the warm air. The windows were giant but didn’t have that grand of a view. It made the space too bright. He squinted and ducked his head down, and then Cameron was in front of him, blocking most of the natural light.
“Just the hot tub, maybe?” Cameron asked, gesturing toward the hot tub that was tucked away from the windows. Zacky nodded. “No jets?”
Jets would be loud in a room where they’d echo a bunch. That would be a nope. Zacky declined. He stepped into the water after Cameron and let his body slowly adjust to feeling like he was an ingredient in a soup.
The tub was a perfect circle, which made it easy for both of them to sit across from each other and stretch their feet out in front of them to the far bench. Zacky’s body would prefer the jets to be on, but it was still nice to sit in hot water like this.
“Had to make sure this place had a pool before I signed the lease,” Cameron said.
“Why?”
“You, pool boy,” Cameron said, like it was obvious. Zacky grew up with a pool and loved nothing more than being in the water. He had no idea how he escaped swim team. “You said you’d live anywhere, but why take any chances?”
“You found it?”
“Yeah. You kept saying you’d help, but I knew you didn’t want to.”That was true. Zacky thought apartment searching was worse than the dentist.
“You found our house, too. In my world. My Cameron.”
“Zacky Porters need to be taken care of,” Cameron said. At this point, Zacky knew Cameron took that seriously. Zacky couldn’t deny it. “What’s our house like?”
“It’s a Cape Cod.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”Zacky was growing fonder and fonder of the little peek of missing tooth that came along with Cameron’s dimpled smile now.
“It’s cute. It has dormers and looks super wholesome. We could film a sitcom there. My mom is obsessed with it.”
“In Newmarket?”
“’Sauga.”
“Oh. Really?” Cameron sounded like he knew of course they’d settle down in Newmarket, on Zacky’s turf. Like even this Cameron was used to deferring to Zacky’s needs.
“We searched both places. Found our favorite house not too far from your folks.”
“We live by Cindy and Greg? We picked that over living by your folks?” Cameron’s young adulthood was marked by his strained relationship with his controlling parents.
“It’s better now, with them. They’re…softer than they were when we were kids.”
“Wish they had softened in this universe too. What do we do?”
“I’m student teaching elementary gym. Working on my education degree. It’s pretty awesome. You’ve been doing real estate. You’re getting good at it. Fell in love with houses when we were looking for ours. You have a knack, and people fucking love you.”
“I’m lovable,” Cameron said, and Zacky raised an eyebrow at him like yeah, dude, I know. I married you . “So, we quit.”
“Hockey? Yeah. We quit.”
“Both of us?”
“Both of us,” Zacky confirmed. It had been a big deal when it happened.Cameron had been so angry with him.
“What happened?”
“It’s so weird that you don’t know. It changed our whole lives, and you don’t know.”
“Parallel universe, buddy,” Cameron said. Cameron was never pedantic with him. Never condescending. Never and is the parallel universe in the room with us now? He believed Zacky. Whether or not he believed this was what was really happening, he believed it was Zacky’s reality. It was more than Zacky would have hoped for if he could have predicted this.
“You got injured. It was a knee-on-knee. Then you slid into the boards. It was…the most pain I’ve ever seen you in.”
“And I was too fucked to keep playing?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. Can I walk now?”
“Yeah. You’re fine. You’ll never run a marathon. Still a few things to be careful about when we fuck, but you’re fine.”
Cameron laughed. He didn’t seem uncomfortable with the idea of them having sex. Or at least Zacky having sex with a different version of him.
“So, what happened with you? Also an injury?”
“Oh. No. I just…I couldn’t do it without you. I couldn’t keep playing hockey games while you were living with your parents and doing PT and being in the shittiest mood I’ve ever seen you in. I couldn’t be in Texas while you were in Ontario.”
“Zack,” Cameron said, like he was going to give him a lecture on why he shouldn’t have quit. “You gave up everything for me.”
“No. I only gave up hockey.”
Cameron looked at him so intensely, like he couldn’t imagine someone doing that for him. Even in this weird universe, Zacky would still do anything for this Cameron.
“You were so pissed at me, oh my god,” Zacky said, remembering back to the worst few months of their lives, until Cameron started healing and accepted that Zacky would give up anything for him. “We lived in your parents’ house for a while, because I think they understood I couldn’t keep driving an hour each way to see you every day.”
“Fuck, every day?”
“When I didn’t stay over. At the beginning, your parents were protective of you, even around me. It took a while for them to realize I cared about you as much as they did. They’re not perfect now, but they’re better than they were when we were teens.”
“Jeez. Thanks, Zack.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
Zacky was struggling to get comfortable leaning back against the wall of the hot tub. It didn’t have the molded seats like the one his folks had. Cameron watched him squirm for five seconds before he got out, grabbed his own towel, and folded it into a pillow that he carefully tucked under Zacky’s head before stepping back into the hot tub, settling next to Zacky.
“I’m sorry you’re not home,” Cameron said, his voice low enough that it didn’t echo through the tiled walls of the pool area. Without thinking, Zacky leaned into Cameron, resting his head on Cameron’s shoulder.
“Me too. But if I have to be anywhere else, this isn’t bad.”