In Every Universe

19. Zacky

NINETEEN

ZACKY

Zacky would have to lose all of his memories to forget how to put hockey equipment on. He’d never done it in an NHL practice facility, though.

His stall was right by Cameron’s, and the sounds of regular practice echoed through the building as Zacky suited up. He was working one-on-one with Noel Suzuki, the trainer he’d been working with closely, and the two of them started off-ice that morning.

“You’re ready,” Suzuki told him as he laced up his own skates. The coaches and trainers all had matching windbreaker jackets and pants that Zacky always thought looked silly, but it would be sillier if Suzuki put on full hockey pads to skate around with Zacky.

“I hope this isn’t something I forgot.”

“Well, if you did, I just taught my three-year-old to skate, so I can teach you, too,” he joked.

Zacky was less nervous about forgetting how to skate than he was about suddenly being in the same room with the whole team.

As practice ended, the boys filed off the ice and into the locker room. Zacky knew them all from studying the roster, but he’d only had direct contact with a small group of them. He was expecting it to be awkward.

What he wasn’t expecting was fanfare.

“Back in it!” Elliott yelled, taking one of Zacky’s hands and holding it above his head in triumph.

Zacky blushed.

“You’ll be back out there with us in no time, kid,” Eddie told him, his smile warm. He’d come to check in on Zacky a couple times, and Zacky knew Cameron thought highly of their captain, so it wasn’t hard for Zacky to feel the same.

Beside him, Cameron collapsed into his stall and sagged against him. From the yelling out on the ice he’d been overhearing, it sounded like a tough practice.

“You ready to get back out there?” Cameron asked, pulling himself back up on his skates and holding a hand out for Zacky.

“If there ever was a time, it’s now.”

Cameron pulled Zacky to his feet and walked out to the ice with him, Suzuki behind the two of them. Zacky assumed Cameron was being nice and dropping him off, but Cameron hopped out on the ice and waited for Zacky to buckle the chin strap on his helmet and take his own cautious step out.

The ice had been eaten up a bit by practice, but Zacky’s skates had no problem, his body moving naturally over the ice. It was as intuitive as walking.

“Yeah, baby,” Cameron shouted, holding his stick over his head like he’d scored a game winner. The term of endearment wouldn’t have flagged as irregular in any hockey situation.

Zacky followed him, the ice feeling as normal under his skates as grass felt under his feet. He could use some conditioning, but it was good to stretch his legs.

Suzuki tossed some pucks on the ice, and Cameron sent softball passes Zacky could have caught in his sleep. Suzuki took him through some basic skating drills, some of which Cameron did alongside him to keep him company. The trainer watched the two of them with an understanding that Cameron wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone knew the two of them well enough to know that.

They ended with some passing drills, and this was what Zacky missed. The on-ice connection he had with Cameron. The way their skates synced up no matter where the two of them were on the ice. How they could anticipate each other, even down to the fuckups. In his own universe, Zacky hadn’t regretted retiring for a second if it meant getting to stay with Cameron. But now Cameron was here, playing hockey. Zacky had thought being back in skates would be more difficult, emotionally, than this.

Instead, he felt freer than he had in a long time.

After a decent number of good days in a row, Zacky should have known better than to get too cocky. He was back on the ice a few times a week. He had the world’s most beautiful man tending to his every need, and his head hurt significantly less.

However, the better his head felt, the more he felt like a different person. Like the fog that kept him in the memories of his old life was clearing. His husband and the kids he saw every day at school, his coworkers, and the neighbors who lived next to them and always snowblowed their sidewalk because they knew about Cameron’s bad knee and Zacky’s busy schedule—all of that was starting to slip out of easy reach, like a dream in the moments after you wake up.

Cameron was at morning skate. They had a game that night, and Zacky was finally feeling good enough to be in a loud environment post-concussion and would sit in the press box with the other injured guys. He was nervous. He knew at some point the broadcast would pan over to him, eating a fucking bag of popcorn or some shit, and talk about his concussion progress.

Eventually, people would know about his memory. They would know the story of his cut-and-dry amnesia, and the more he thought about it, the more that seemed like the reality he was headed to.

And it freaked him the fuck out.

He took a breath. His worst nightmare, past never seeing his husband again, was forgetting about him . So, he wouldn’t. But when he thought about Cameron now, his brain supplied the buzzed hair and hockey body he’d been sleeping next to for weeks, not the man who, when Zacky last saw him, had a scratch on his nose from the neighbor’s new kitten and a farmer’s tan that still hadn’t faded from the summer when he got obsessed with making their yard beautiful. He was getting a softness in his stomach that was making Zacky positively feral for him.

But those thoughts were memories that he’d written down and read over and over. Like the memories of childhood that are stories someone else told you from before you could remember.

All he needed to do was grab his notebook. He’d jog his memory a bit and pull out something new. Something he hadn’t written down before. He would prove to himself that it wasn’t slipping away.

He went to grab his notebook from his side table where he kept it, next to the bed that he didn’t sleep in. It was safe there. It would have been weird to have the memories of his husband watching him sleep next to someone else.

But when he opened the drawer, the notebook, which was usually right on top, was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t small. It didn’t blend in. And it. Was. Not. There.

Okay. Everything would be fine. Where else would he have put it?

He pulled out the drawers in his bathroom, like the notebook would be hiding under floss picks and unused toothbrushes. Under the sink yielded cleaning products he needed to remember to use. The closet in his bedroom was the same. He’d crammed moving boxes into the back of his closet, and of course he had no idea what was in them. He hadn’t packed them. Other Zacky had.

He upturned them onto his floor. When would he have shoved his notebook—a notebook he had been protecting with his life—into an old moving box? He didn’t know. Maybe in his sleep? Weirder things had happened recently.

Breathing was getting difficult. There wasn’t enough air in the room. The window in his bedroom had a weird latch he’d never had to open before, and he couldn’t figure it out and?—

“Hey, what’s going on?” Cameron asked, standing in the threshold of Zacky’s bedroom in the casual clothes he’d worn to skate. He was backlit by the hallway light, and in that moment, Zacky thought he looked like an angel.

“I can’t find my notebook,” he said, hoping Cameron understood it as the emergency it was. “It’s not in my side table.”

“The black-and-white one?”

“Yeah,” Zacky said. He pulled the collar of his t-shirt up to wipe at his eyes.

Cameron pulled him to his feet and into a hug, and Zacky was able to get some air into his lungs.

“I know where it is,” he said.

“You do?”

“I unpacked our suitcases after break. I didn’t know it had a special spot. I’m sorry,” Cameron said, smoothing a hand down Zacky’s back. He shivered as Cameron scratched back up his spine, and Zacky burrowed his face into Cameron’s neck. Just being in Cameron’s arms was soothing.

Cameron held Zacky’s hand as he led him to the other bedroom. It wasn’t just Cameron’s room anymore. He had a short bookcase that Zacky never looked at that mostly had old DVDs on it, but there was his notebook, resting on top of it.

And…another notebook?

Zacky picked them both up. He recognized his as the slightly more beat-up one. He held the other up to Cameron. “What’s this?”

“I’m taking your lead. We have three years of memories that don’t overlap, so when you said you were trying to document that time, I figured I would too. I know yours is for you. But I also thought…mine could be for you, too. I know you might not think of the three years of this timeline you’re missing as yours, but I want to make sure you have them, anyway. Our memories. Together.”

Together. Together in every universe.

“I love you,” Zacky said, the weight of that feeling in each word. He loved Cameron. This Cameron.

“I love you, baby.”

“I love you, and I’m afraid I’m forgetting my husband, and you make me feel, god, like, high when I’m around you. I know this is fucking weird for you, and you’ve never made me feel weird about it. And I also feel like I’m losing the person I promised my soul to, and I…”

Cameron pulled Zacky in close again, rocking the two of them from side to side in the softest slow dance, as Zacky reached for words that didn’t come. Cameron pressed a kiss to his temple. He didn’t talk over Zacky or try to talk him out of his feelings. He just waited for more of them to come.

“I feel like I’m stuck in a spiral. Getting back on the ice has made me so happy. You make me so happy. And then I nosedive into guilt. I still miss him. And then that makes me feel like what’s happening isn’t fair to you.”

“You didn’t choose what’s happening. You didn’t abandon your husband to run away with me. We ended up together. And finding happiness in a weird, painful situation isn’t something you should feel guilty about.”

Zacky knew from the first moment he saw Cameron that they were destined for something together. He had no idea they would end up here, but knowing now how unimaginably gigantic his love for Cameron was would not have surprised his sixteen-year-old self, who took only weeks to become irrevocably and mutually obsessed with Cameron.

“What memories did you write down?”

“I’ve barely started. I bought the notebook in New York. But I started out with the Cup.”

“If you can’t remember winning the Stanley Cup, did you even do it?” Zacky truly didn’t believe his name should be on it.

“You or someone who is you won it, so yeah, you did. And I wrote about last summer, and how much fun we had knowing that in the fall we would be going back to an NHL team and wouldn’t have to fight so hard to get sent up like we did last season. And a charity Ping-Pong tournament that you won. One of my childhood friends got married and you came as my plus-one.”

“I was your wedding date?”

“You even slow danced with me.”

“And you’re sure we weren’t together before I hit my head?”

“Seems ludicrous looking back, admittedly. The fact that you are the only person I ever want to spend my time with was a clue that I didn’t notice.”

Zacky laughed. “In my world, nothing and everything changed when we started dating. We spent our time the same, we talked and laughed about the same stuff. But we were also having awkward teenage sex. It breaks my heart that you didn’t get that too.”

“Maybe it wasn’t the right time for me. Maybe now is the right time.”