When he gets home, ridiculously late at night, Natalie is at his and Adam’s place, waiting for him and he hugs her for about fifteen minutes without saying a word and she lets him, gently rubbing his back. Adam sneaks away, doesn’t stick around to chirp him and doesn’t say anything about it when they’re going to practice the next day.
Before practice, while they’re skating around, waiting for the rest of the guys, Andreas catches up with him, face red, and says, “You want to stick around after practice?”
“Yeah,” Elliot says.
Slowly, so slowly, he starts racking up points.
December begins with a hat trick on the road, and it’s like he can’t stop scoring after that. Their line is on fire, Adam and Magnus on his wing, giving him the most beautiful passes as early Christmas presents. Another hat trick three games later, and he’s now on a seven-game point streak and when he gets out on the ice, it’s like he’s flying. After the second hatty – this one at home, hats raining down onto the ice – the amount of messages he receives is completely insane.
Nothing from Blake, not that it matters, but a year ago he would have at least sent him one of those congratulations texts.
He sees Blake in late December, a few days before Christmas. The Ravens are playing against the Knights in Newark and it’s the first game of a back-to-back for the Knights, and of course they decide to put Blake in goal against the Ravens, because the Ravens are, objectively, doing a lot worse than the Grizzlies, who will be in town the next day. Despite Elliot’s point streak, the Ravens aren’t winning enough games. Elliot is one goal away from overtaking Morozov, even though he missed several games at the beginning of the season and Morozov hasn’t missed a single game.
The game against the Knights is dirty, but they always are, same with the Mariners. They’re too close, the fans riled up as much as the players. Less than five minutes in, Moby drops the gloves with the Knights’ Ian Hennings for something that happened in a previous game, but the fighting doesn’t stop there. Power plays and penalty kills are chasing each other and they go into the third tied at three.
Elliot scores on Blake halfway through the third and Blake looks fucking pissed, slams his stick against the goal and glares out at the ice, past Elliot, like he’s not even there.
The Knights tie the game again, not a minute later, no power play this time.
Things somehow get even uglier, one of Elliot’s teammates – he’s not even sure which one – takes Blake’s net off and trips Blake in the process. Blake seems to be okay, but someone touched the goalie, and when someone touches the goalie, any goalie, you can expect gloves to go flying. It’s Moby again, now exchanging blows with the Knights’ captain, the most terrifyingly large D-man in the Eastern Conference. Another Knight tries to jump in, Elliot tries to pulls him back, then someone tries to pull him back. Elliot shoves his elbow back blindly and is shoved back in return. Elliot turns around and finds that it was Blake.
“Fuck off,” Elliot shouts in his general direction, but Blake won’t and practically cross-checks him out of his crease.
Before Elliot can retaliate, he has two Knights on him, then Blake pulls one of them off of Elliot saying something that sounds like, “It’s okay, we’re all good, all good…”
Then one of the officials gets between them, but not before Johnny Brammer can lay one on Elliot.
The officials start dealing out penalties, minor and major alike, and the Knights end up on the power play. They convert within twelve seconds and the Ravens don’t manage to tie up the game again.
Elliot is on the ice when the final horn goes, Blake’s teammates taking off, surrounding Blake, about five of them trying to hug him at the same time and Blake hugs all of them thoroughly one by one. As Elliot gets off the ice, memories gnaw on him, memories of being in that line, Blake crushing him against his chest after games.
He doesn’t dwell on the thoughts of Blake, mostly because thinking of him also makes him think of last summer, of what Blake said, and just like that he’s done with his trip down memory lane.
Chapter Six
When Elliot gets selected for the All Star Game, he’s not sure if he deserves it.
Adam, when they drive home that day, lays it all out for him, all the stats that likely contributed to that decision, and Elliot knows the stats, knows he’s overtaken Morozov in scoring, knows he’s leading the team in points, but maybe Swanson would have been more deserving. Sure, his save percentage has suffered, but that’s just because the rest of the team was playing like shit in front of him for the first three months of the season.
They’ve recovered a little, keep slipping in and out of a wildcard spot, but Elliot shouldn’t even be thinking about making the playoffs right now, except he thinks about making the playoffs every single second of every single day.
He can tell that Natalie isn’t too happy with him constantly on edge, but when he apologizes she’ll always say something along the lines of it’s fine and she understands and she’ll support him, like he supported her when she had to finish a paper before Christmas and didn’t talk to him for three days straight. But there’s an edge to her voice when she says it, like it still bothers her and she won’t say it for some reason
