In Every Universe

26. Zacky

TWENTY-SIX

ZACKY

The thing about rejoining an NHL team after an injury was that it was hard to ramp up to it. You got thrown in and had to keep up. And Zacky was struggling to keep up. He played three games before being healthy scratched. Every second they weren’t actively at practice or a game, he wanted to be at the gym. At one point, his body had handled this level of play. He could get back to it. And dutifully, Cameron had been sweating in the gym right next to him.

Cameron wasn’t having it on their day off, though.

“It’s not a waste of a day, Zacky,” Cameron said as he drove them into a residential area of Dallas. Zacky had no idea where they were going, but most of Dallas was pretty new to him.

“I can’t believe you until I see the surprise.”

“It’s right up here.” Cameron parked his SUV behind a white Mercedes.

“Do you know who lives here?” Zacky asked, looking at the house they were in front of. It was a brick ranch with a nicely landscaped front yard and a fenced backyard. The two of them got out of their car at the same time as the woman in the Mercedes.

“You must be Cameron and Zachary,” a blonde woman in a sport coat said, holding her hand out to shake.

“That’s us. I’m Cameron, that’s Zacky.” Zacky held his hand out on autopilot, trying to piece together what was happening here.

“Angela. So, this first house is a two bedroom, one and a half bath, two-car garage. It’s not on the market yet, so I know this is the first house we’re seeing, but if it’s the one, we should move on it. The market is hot right now.”

She led them up the pathway to the front door and got the key out of the padlock.

“What are we doing?” Zacky whispered as he trailed Angela and Cameron into the house.

“This will be your first house, is that correct?” Angela asked as she led them through the living room and into the kitchen.

“Yes. We’re first-time home buyers,” Cameron confirmed, and Angela continued the tour, pointing out specs and features. They saw the bedrooms and the backyard, and if Cameron was going to spontaneously buy a house in Dallas, this one was cute.

Zacky would have liked it to be a bit more of a conversation, though.

“So that is the first one. We’re getting our bearings and finding out what you two like, so chitchat with each other on the way to the second house, and we can home in on the perfect spot for you.”

Cameron put the address of the second house into his GPS, and the two of them hopped back in Cameron’s car and pulled away from the curb after Angela.

“Are you house hunting? I thought we would look for a place in Toronto before we did anything permanent here.”

“Oh, we’re not going to buy a house.”

“So, what are we doing?”

“You said you wanted to do something that made you feel close to your Cameron.” Cameron’s hand found his thigh to give him a reassuring squeeze.

“Oh.” His Cameron, a realtor who never shut up about houses.

“We can dip at the next house if you want. We’re only seeing three.”

“No. I like this,” Zacky said, sliding his hand under the one Cameron had on his thigh and interlacing their fingers. “I wish I brought my notebook.”

“I brought it,” Cameron said. Zacky had to turn toward the window so Cameron didn’t see his tears. Zacky wasn’t hiding anything, though. Cameron pulled over for a moment to press a kiss to his cheek. Zacky wiped the moisture from his eyes, and Cameron pulled back into the sparse traffic.

The second house was an angular contemporary. The siding was hung at a forty-five-degree angle, and the entire thing was painted the same medium gray. Siding, trim, front door. It was weird, and Zacky knew realtor Cameron would have loved it.

“This one is a three bed, two and a half bath. The kitchen was recently remodeled, and it has a pool.”

Zacky’s eyebrows shot up. “Can we see the pool?”

“Cameron mentioned you’d be excited about the pool. Yeah, let’s check out the backyard,” Angela said, leading them out the sliding door in the kitchen onto a patio. The pool took up most of the small backyard, but what was a yard for if not a pool?

“Bigger than your folks’,” Cameron observed.

“Everything’s bigger in Texas, etc., etc.,” Zacky said as he walked around the rectangular perimeter of the pool. They were nearing the end of the regular season, and it was heating up in Texas. He loved the idea of having their own outdoor pool.

“Are you ready to see the interior?”

The inside of the house was spacious, with vaulted ceilings and an open loft on the second floor where they could have a second living room. It was a seventies home that needed some updating, but honestly, Zacky didn’t care too much about how modern his bathroom looked as long as everything worked.

They made it to the primary suite, and Zacky was already picturing their life together. The chance of the two of them playing on the same team for the rest of their careers was so slim it was laughable, but he had such a deep yearning to buy this house. It was perfect.

“Can we have a moment alone to talk some things over?” Zacky asked, and Angela excused herself and let them know she would be in the kitchen.

“You were making some pretty big heart eyes at that pool.”

“I want it. I want to buy it. Can we put in an offer?”

“We’re not pre-qualified. I didn’t know you liked it that much.”

“Cam, it’s perfect.”

Cameron took both of Zacky’s hands and they stood in the middle of the primary suite, among a stranger’s furniture and belongings. The people who lived there loved landscapes, and there was a painting of the Grand Canyon above the bed. “Is it perfect, or does it just have a pool?”

“It feels good here. I can’t explain it.”

“Maybe you’re feeling your Cam here with us.” The suggestion was so gentle. Maybe that was what he was feeling. Maybe there was something soothing about surrounding himself with the thing his husband found to love after they couldn’t love hockey anymore.

There was always something that came after.

Zacky wiped away the tears that slipped down his cheeks suddenly.

“I’m sorry if this was a bad idea,” Cameron apologized, pressing a kiss to Zacky’s forehead.

“It was a good idea. Sometimes good things are sad.”

“Yeah, they are, babe.”

Cameron wrapped him up in a hug, and Zacky dried his tears on Cameron’s t-shirt. He took a shaky breath.

“When we go home for the summer, let’s buy a house.”

“Okay. Let’s do it.” Cameron’s smile was soft, like seeing Zacky’s happiness made him happy, too. Something in him was reflected back through Cameron. He had always thought of their relationship like that. Like they built off each other. Like they were more than the sum of their parts.

When they made it back downstairs, Cameron declined seeing the third house, letting Angela know that this process had been surprisingly emotional and he’d call her.

Then they stopped at a Whole Foods to pick up food for lunch, which they took to a park.

“We can find a better spot if this isn’t perfect,” Cameron said as they settled into a patch of lush green grass. He had a blanket in his car for emergencies of the Ontarian winter variety, and they used it as a picnic blanket. They had compostable clamshells of hot buffet food sitting off to the side, and Zacky was sitting crisscross-applesauce with his notebook in his hands.

“It’s hard to figure out a good place to say goodbye to someone who I didn’t know in Dallas. My Cam and I had barely ever been here. So, this is as good as anything.”

“Do you want to tell me more about him?”

“The thing that is ripping me apart is that the strong, perfect memories I woke up with dissolved. I can’t remember anything I didn’t write down. It feels like saying goodbye to a dream.”

Cameron took his hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles.

Zacky opened his notebook and flipped through it, wishing that he had more memories. That he’d written faster when he’d had the chance. But he didn’t know that things would start washing away.

“We went to Banff for our honeymoon.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“In the winter. It was so beautiful. We snowboarded and skated on the lake, and even though we had a backyard rink every winter when I was a kid, I had never experienced skating outside like that. It was like being on an entirely different planet.”

“That sounds amazing.”

“We should go. Not to reenact my honeymoon with someone else but because you really lost your shit about it. You’d love it. You have to see it.”

Someone else might have bristled at that suggestion, but not Cameron. The Cameron Zacky currently had was as sweet and kind and obsessed with him as he would expect any Cameron to be at this point in his life. Every Cameron loved every Zacky.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

“This…is weird. It feels like a funeral.”

“Do you want to leave?”

“No,” Zacky said, putting his notebook down and grabbing his lunch. He flipped the lid of the takeout container open to three kinds of pasta and a lot of cooked chicken breast. He stabbed a rigatoni and a piece of chicken and shoved them in his mouth. “I want to talk about our future.”

Cameron’s smile was the same soft, indulgent way he always looked at Zacky.

“Yeah, babe. We’re going to Banff. We’re going to find a house we love in Toronto. And then we’re going to figure out a way to keep playing hockey together forever.”

“That might be a bigger feat than waking up in a different parallel universe.”

“We’ll figure something out. We’ll get married.”

“You want to get married?”

“I want to be with you forever. I assume that means marriage, eventually. We could see if the NHL cares about that at all.”

“You’re out here assuming we’re getting married?” Zacky couldn’t stop smiling. He shoved more pasta in his face so he wasn’t giving everything away from the look on his face.

“Are you not about marriage in this timeline?”

“You’re kidding me. I would find you and marry you in every timeline.”

“Then there’s plenty of future together to talk about.”

“Yeah,” Zacky said. He put his pasta down and tugged Cameron closer by the arm, making him awkwardly scoot close enough for Zacky to kiss him. “You are such a good man, Cameron Vesper.”

“Only for you.”

“No. You’re good to everyone. But I get to benefit from it the most. And I am so fucking lucky for it.”

Yes, he got ripped away from the life he was living, but the life he woke up to wasn’t a bad hand to be dealt.

Zacky flipped the notebook open to a blank page and wrote the date at the top. Today Cameron took me house hunting in Dallas to help me mark the moment of realizing this universe is my forever now .

He wrote for ten minutes while Cameron ate his sandwich. Cameron kept sneaking little looks at him, and Zacky let him see his page and what he was writing about.

This notebook was the last thing he had preserving the Cameron he left behind. But the Cameron he was with now deserved to be written down and kept too.