When the guys line up, patting his head and hugging him, Renwick drops a puck into his glove with a smirk, only to be practically pushed aside by Brammer, who hugs him like they just won a playoff series, bouncing up and down as he wraps his arms around Blake.
Back in the room, their equipment guy wraps some tape around his puck and writes 1st NHL WIN on it before he hands it back to Blake.
There’s hugs and pictures and interviews and even more hugs and Blake sends a picture of him and his puck to his grandma, who watched the game with her sister back home in Connecticut, hoping that she’ll figure out how to open it. He doesn’t have time to look at all the texts in his inbox, but he replies to his brother, who’s completely losing it, and he reads the text from Elliot – congrats on the win :)
It’s the first time he’s heard from him since they sent each other Merry Christmas texts over three months ago.
And that’s okay. It’s okay that they don’t talk, because it’s been months since they last actually spoke to each other and Blake is finally at a point where he’s across the river from Elliot and he doesn’t care.
He’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that he won’t have what he had with Elliot ever again. He doesn’t have much of a love life to speak of, and even that is a euphemism. His teammates try to set him up with girls often enough and Blake tries to be polite and has even gone out on a couple of dates with girls, so the guys would stop bugging him, but he never went out on a second date with any of them. There’s no point.
#
Blake flies to Los Angeles for the Draft.
His brother is projected to get drafted during the first round, so Blake first drives to Connecticut, spends a few days there, and then takes his grandma to LA with him.
There’s a good chance that Blake is even more nervous for this Draft than he was for his own two years ago. His palms are sweaty long before they even sit down at the venue and he can’t seem to stop jiggling his foot, until Evan puts his hand on Blake’s knee and says, uncharacteristically stern, “Stop, you’re making it worse.”
Evan is quieter than Blake has ever seen him, usually chewing his ear off with hockey stats and rambling about the Cardinals. Today he’s barely said a dozen words since they got up this morning.
“Do you think the Cardinals will draft Zach Goldman’s kid?” Blake asks, so he doesn’t have to sit here and wait for it to start.
Evan shrugs.
Their grandma reaches over Evan to pat Blake’s shoulder. She raised the both of them when their parents died, drove them to practices, bought their equipment, cheered them on at every game she could make it to. She still sends Blake a care package every few weeks and she probably does the same for Evan.
During the last couple of years they might have drifted apart, just a little, with them in different junior leagues, staying with different billet families, but it’s weird to think that they might end up playing against each other sometime during the next couple of years. Both of them in the NHL, both of them living their dreams.
When it’s about to start, Evan lets out a small breath.
Phoenix pick first. Then Philadelphia. Then Ottawa.
The Knights don’t get to make their pick until much later – they made it through one round of playoffs before the season was over for them. The chances that they’ll pick Evan are comparatively slim, and anyway, Evan will likely get picked up before that.
Or that’s what Blake thinks until the Seattle Sailors are making the 27th pick and Evan is still sitting next to him.
Blake can tell that Evan is starting to get anxious, because he keeps picking at his fingernails and Blake is trying extremely hard to keep himself from jiggling his leg again, because that’d make it worse for Evan, but someone should have picked him by now. Blake knows his stats. Evan went to World Juniors, he was second in points on his junior team.
Once the Sailors have left the stage, the Grizzlies make their pick, and then they’re on to the Conference Finals losers. First the Seals, then the Ravens, not because they actually made it to the Conference Finals, but because they got the pick in a trade before the Draft.
“What if I don’t get picked at all?” Evan eventually whispers to him when the Seals pick… someone else.
“You’ll get picked.”
It happens only a few minutes later when the New York Ravens make their selection and their GM finally, finally, says, “Evan Samuels.”
Blake doesn’t hear anything else, is too busy hugging Evan to pay attention. Their grandma hugs him, too, and then they send him on his way to the stage, where he’s handed a jersey and a baseball cap and he’s beaming and Blake is so proud of him that he doesn’t even realize what else this means until his phone buzzes in his pocket.
It’s a text from Elliot – can I have Evan’s number?
That’s right. Because the Ravens are Elliot’s team.
Blake sends it to him, as requested. He doesn’t get a reply back and isn’t exactly surprised, but when they find Evan later, he beams at them and says, “Elliot called me!” He hugs Blake again. “Jacob Desjardins, too. And Mitch Swanson sent me a text!”
“Awesome,” Blake says.
“Wow, are you actually smiling? I think you were smiling earlier, too. What’s happening?”
“Shut up,” Blake says gruffly, but he
