From a plane window, a descent into Toronto was exactly what you expected from a cosmopolitan city. The GTA was vast, with the big city bleeding into smaller cities. Toronto was called Canada’s central hub for a reason. Nothing but cityscape and suburban homes as far as the eye could see in all directions. But a plane’s descent into Calgary? Not so much. After the captain announced an imminent arrival at the airport, the view out the window consisted of the round bales of hay on the farm fields and bedroom communities closer to the city’s boundaries. It was the Great Canadian Prairie.

Over a million people lived in Calgary. The city had expanded its boundaries quadruple times over. Ontario was the largest province in the country, but Alberta always felt bigger. Somehow it always seemed like there was more space, more room for growth. Toronto built upward. Calgary built outward.

But being in Calgary meant I was only halfway home.

It was the last day of June. Gavin and I had made the trip from Toronto right in time for our parents’ annual Canada Day barbeque, the next day. It was a lucky calendar year because Canada Day had fallen on a Friday, which meant that—unlike the last two years—there was a Canada Day long weekend. Parties would be allowed to reach legendary status.

I ducked into the first washroom I could find once I was off the jet bridge and into the airport. I told my brother I would meet him at the baggage carousel. A four hour flight across two time zones and a shift in climate to dry, prairie-mountain air was more than enough cause for me to check on my complexion. The fluorescent lighting made me look too washed out for an afternoon arrival, but it also helped me see the areas on my face that I would want to highlight. I quickly got out my favourite multiple stick and my cellphone, keeping in mind that if I got a new text, then I was probably keeping my ride waiting too long.

But the last text I’d received was the one I’d gotten just before I got on the plane back in the Eastern time zone: Can’t wait to reunite.

First, I used the multiple as a blush stick, smearing a bit on the tops of my cheekbones. With much lighter strokes I applied some to my t-zone and chin. I used my fingers to blend the pigment into my skin, giving me a bit of a dewy appearance. It was like getting freshened up, all packed into a compact makeup stick. Finally, I dabbed some onto my lips, just enough to enhance the colour but not enough to make a mess if I were to receive lip service.

Sliding doors welcomed me to the Arrivals terminal. Since Gavin and I had come on a domestic flight, and there was no customs to go through, the carousel with the baggage from our flight wasn’t in a restricted zone. I could see cars, taxis, and busses outside the entrance. I saw Gavin, arms crossed over his chest, two carousels away from me and began walking towards him.

In the hustle and bustle of a busy travel day, I didn’t see or hear the person who crept up behind me. I nearly yelped when large palms covered my face and a voice rang in my ear, “Guess who?”

I gave my heart a few beats to adjust after my fight-or-flight response had been elicited. No danger. That voice was familiar. “Hi Mitch.”

“Hey,” he hugged me. “It’s been so long.”

“It’s good to see you,” I smiled. “It has been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Not since September,” Mitch reminded me.

He was right. Summer was usually the only time I saw Mitch. I did see him after last summer, but it was still a long time ago—last autumn. I hadn’t seen him since his older brother moved to Toronto, into the same building as my brother and me.

“Speaking of September,” Mitch smiled, “I just got here a few days ago from Saskatoon. Our boy Luke seems to be doing pretty well for himself.”

There was no way I could forget the last time I saw Mitch. It was during his few days in Toronto that I met Luke. Mitch had been in the room when Luke proposed a game plan to me, to gain the attention of a guy I’d been crushing on since junior high. When the game was over, Luke and I had become such good friends that we didn’t just disappear from each other’s lives. I still saw him once in a while and we exchanged text messages regularly.

“I’m really happy for him,” I said honestly.

Luke and his ex-girlfriend managed to work out their issues, and she was his girlfriend again. I’d met her during one of her visits to Toronto. She was from his hometown, and a university student there, so they were used to long distance love. They were basically perfect for each other. She was such a sweet girl. When Luke and I told her about the game, she laughed forever and said that it sounded just like him: a perfect combination of loyalty and trouble.

Late into the hockey season, before Luke left town for the summer, he’d checked in with me to see how I was handling the fallout of the failed game. He’d also confessed to me that he was pretty sure the girl he was with was the one he wanted to marry. They were so lucky and he was so happy. I was happy for him.

“So, speaking of September,” I copied Mitch’s segue, “where’s Kris?”

Mitch replied, “He dropped me off at the entrance and went to park the car. He’ll be here soon.”

Yup. Kris was my ride back to Lethbridge. Three hours in the car with my brother’s best friend, the crush that I’d never gotten over.

“Why would he park?” I wondered. “By the time he circled round a few times, we could’ve just been standing out in front already.”

“He’s a show-off, Kaylie. He probably wants to make some grand entrance,” Mitch rolled his eyes and shrugged. “You know how your boyfriend is.”

Oh yeah. There was that. Kris was my boyfriend. My boyfriend. Seven months later and sometimes I still felt giddy when I reminded myself.

It didn’t take long for us to get together after the night that he kissed me and that I kissed him. We only had to go on two dates before he asked me to be his girlfriend for real. Over the years, we’d spent so much time wanting to be together and there was no reason to put it off any longer.

He didn’t disappoint. Time passed quickly once I was in a relationship with Kris. We were good for each other and we adored each other. Before we became a couple we were both uncomfortable being around each other, because we could only think about how obvious it was that we liked each other, but that quickly dissolved into a non-issue. I’d practically moved into his place, made even more convenient by the fact that I lived across the hall. Every night he was home we’d fallen asleep wrapped around each other in his bed.

“There he is,” I told Mitch when the man of the hour walked through one of the entrances.

Kris was walking in a straight path but it wasn’t toward Mitch and me. Not that I was surprised. He and Gavin had been soul mates long before he and I got together. Anyway, between my brother and me, Gavin was the first one that he saw, so Kris made a beeline toward him. They half-hugged briefly and moved right into a conversation.

Mitch and I began walking toward the carousel that our brothers were posted at and I spoke again. “Thank you for not saying anything…about my crush on him…by the way.”

“I told you I could keep a secret,” Mitch said, matter-of-factly. “Besides, I knew everything would work out for you two eventually if you just let it take its course.”

I wish Kris and I would have known that. It would have given us more time together. The game that both of us bought into and played was a colossal waste of time. Once Kris became my boyfriend, our time together in Toronto was almost perfect. If we could have just been honest from the very beginning, we could have had two more months.

As good as Kris’ life off the ice had gone in Toronto, it was on the ice that was a problem. He was a skilled winger. In Chicago, he’d flourished on a checking line that turned defense into offense, and had scored more than twenty goals in consecutive seasons. But that was the problem, he was a complimentary piece on a team that went all the way to the Stanley Cup Final and won. It was clear very early on into the season that the Maple Leafs were nowhere near close to being that kind of team. Kris’ skill and scoring abilities were in vain on a team that was mediocre at best.

Leafs General Manager Brian Burke was a no-bullshit kind of man. As soon as the NHL All-Star Game break was over, he let Kris know that his name was first in the hat as a trade option. Burke had his own ideas and opinions about the trade deadline, which meant that if Kris was getting traded, it would be before the last week of February. I was devastated when Kris told me. We’d waited so long to get together. It was finally the right time and right place for us. We were steady. All of a sudden he had to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

I’d never been in a long distance relationship before. Kris had never been in a relationship that lasted more than six months before. The test of how steady we were hit us at three months. We weren’t going to break up just because he had to leave, but that didn’t mean we were adequately prepared for it either. We knew he was to be traded but we didn’t know when and where to. It wasn’t like I got to spend every last minute with him either. The NHL schedule was unforgiving to personal lives.

We got the news in a whirlwind. The Leafs’ weekend game during the second week of February was on the road in Montréal. They were back in Toronto by the middle of the night for two days off before another divisional road trip to Boston and Buffalo that next Tuesday.

The morning before, Monday, he’d gone to morning practice and I went to rehearsal as usual. It was Valentine’s Day but we didn’t get to spend it together. He left our building with a suit in a garment bag and a carry-on bag. The team was set to leave for Boston a few hours after practice. The worst thing that could ever happen to a player, other than getting injured, was to get called off the ice in the middle of practice. It meant that they were either getting sent down to the minors or shipped out of town. When it happened to Kris that morning, he knew right away.

He showed up at St. Lawrence Hall right on time for lunch after company class. He’d brought me a dinky heart-shaped balloon wrapped around the wrist of a teddy bear but I could tell by the expression on his face that he hadn’t shown up to surprise me for the Hallmark holiday. He’d been traded to the Philadelphia Flyers. We didn’t have time to discuss it because he had very little time to pack some extra clothes and essentials before he had to be at the airport. Instead of going to Boston on the Leafs charter, he had a flight to Tampa to meet his new Flyers teammates on the road.

It was the worst Valentine’s Day ever. We didn’t even have time to sneak into a utility closet to get our hands on each other. After ten minutes of kissing and hugging, I didn’t see him again until March, when the Flyers made a trip to Toronto. Everything was fast: the dinner, the sex, and the time we got to spend together. As soon as he’d come, he was gone again.

I didn’t blame any of the WAGs who basically gave up their lives to be a part of and support their significant others’ lives. Talking to Kris on the phone and getting to see him during video chats wasn’t the same as being with him. Long distance was tough. More than ever I understood why Kris had put off the possibility of an ‘us’ until he was ready. He would have broken my heart if we’d gotten together earlier and he couldn’t handle it. Instead, I was smitten. Absence really did make the heart grow fonder. And yeah, we were in love.

The Canadian National Ballet went on a two-week cross-country performance tour to begin the spring dance season at the end of March. At the end of it, I had a week off before the final block of rehearsal weeks for our last ballet program of the year, Jewels. I hightailed to Philadelphia to get even a weekend with my boyfriend. If he’d stayed with the Leafs, the NHL season would have been over for Kris by mid-April. But the Flyers were considered a contender, especially with secondary scoring from guys like Kris, and their team made it to the second round of the playoffs, only to be swept in four games by the Bruins.

That was when we got to be together again. Kris finished out the month of May, including his birthday, with me in Toronto. But his offseason training program was in Calgary and he’d set it up to begin in the first week of June. That marked nearly a month between the present and the last time I’d seen him. The final curtain call on the ballet season was just a few days before Canada Day. Finally—finally—we had an extended period of time to be with each other. I had all of July off, and half of August. Usually I just went back to Toronto after the holiday. The alternative, Lethbridge, didn’t have enough going on for me to do my own offseason activities. But because Kris was in Calgary, I could stay with him. Calgary was a big enough city for a dancer to summer in.

Kris and Gavin didn’t even look up until Mitch and I reached them. How they ever even survived hockey season, without seeing each other for long periods of time, I would never know. I knew that I wanted Mitch and Gavin to take over driving duties back to our hometown so I could sit in the back with Kris, hold hands, and giggle over stupid shit. He and Gavin probably wanted to roleplay all the way there.

He was making googly eyes at me once I was in front of him. I grimaced at him and spoke, “What are you wearing?”

“Here I was, excited to see you—counting down the minutes—and that’s the first thing you have to say to me?” Kris scoffed.

“You look like you’re from Lethbridge,” I retorted, “and not in a good way.”

He smiled proudly and raised his hands in the air. “MHSOC, baby!”

I rolled my eyes. True to the ‘crew’ name, Kris was wearing a sleeveless shirt and a mesh hat. Nothing about it was cool. The green shirt was baggy and the armholes went down so far that I could see the outline of his ribcage through his pale, Alberta boy skin. The brim of his hat was flattened, like a trucker, but put on backwards, tucking away the blond locks that he was growing out. Combined with cargo shorts and boat shoes, his look was not sexy. More like shipwrecked.

“You know you’re a millionaire, right?” I asked. “You can afford to be casual without looking like a redneck trying to be a bro?”

“Oh, shut up,” he wrinkled his nose at me and reached out, “get over here already.”

His arms went around my waist and then I was pressed up against his chest, up against his stupid shirt. He smelled really good though, like aftershave and fabric softener. Kris smiled, just a little bit, and I giggled. He leaned in and kissed me softly, just once.

I confessed, “I missed you.”

“I missed you, baby,” he whispered back.

That was us in a nutshell. Everything I’d liked about Kris was everything we were. We took our relationship seriously, and, maybe ironically, the key to it being successful was not taking ourselves or each other too seriously all of the time. That lightness that I’d admired about him, we had it. We were sweet and flirty. But we also didn’t hesitate to be who we really were: sarcastic and coy.

We teased each other and one-upped each other, and then we would make out. Kris made fun of the way my feet naturally pointed out, due to muscle memory, even if I was just standing still. But he certainly wasn’t making fun of my hip rotation that gave me great turnout when we were having sex, especially once he realized how intense it was with a dancer. I complained about his nerdy singing and rapping, and requested that he remove it from his repertoire because he just looked like a fool, but at the end of the day I was happy that he was my nerdy fool. And sometimes he called me ‘baby’.

Like I said, we were good for each other. We evened each other out.

“How are you feeling?” I wondered.

He wasn’t sick or under the weather, but he was feeling down. Over the last few days, I’d heard about it on the phone.

When he returned to Toronto to spend May with me, we’d both needed the comfort that the other could give. If I was going to get promoted to second soloist, it would have happened after the national tour, when contracts were renewed. I’d danced solo roles in a few more of the company’s productions, but I didn’t get a promotion. I got another contract, to stay in the corps de ballet, and a promise of “we’ll see” once the next spring rolled around. I should have been okay with it. The real problem would be if I wasn’t offered another contract, like a couple of my corps friends, but I was still bummed. Of course I thought that I’d worked hard enough and that I deserved it.

For Kris, he’d had an okay hockey season. But it was only okay. He’d gotten his usual 20 goals but he wasn’t the impact player the Flyers wanted him to be. The Flyers weren’t sold on him by the time their playoff run ended. He liked the city and his teammates, but something was off, and he knew he didn’t fit in with that club. In confidence, he’d told me that there were team problems off the ice: they were a room divided and everyone was forced into taking a side. Given the way they bowed out of the playoffs, and the rising tension, Kris was sure that at least one person from the core group was going to get shipped out. So-called spare parts that hadn’t dazzled were subject to get shipped out as well.

Kris was pretty sure he was that kind of spare part, just a rental. Back in May he was pretty sure that his time with the Flyers was over. With the trade freeze ending and free agency opening concurrently on Canada Day, it was what he’d been thinking about in the last few days. He was torn—he didn’t want to be a player who was traded three times in one calendar year, but he also wanted to be on a team where he was seen with value. Just like he’d grown up enough to handle being in a serious relationship, he’d also grown as a hockey player, ready to take on more pressure and responsibility. He wanted to be a core guy.

He stroked the back of my hand with his thumb and answered my question, “I’m better now that you’re here.”

What a cheeseball. He’d made good to me what he said on that night in November: he made me feel special. No one was as close to him, physically and emotionally, as I was. I kissed him again, but not so innocently. I let go of his hand and put both of my palms on his shoulders as I closed my eyes and kissed him with fervor. Kris held me in place, supporting me by the small of my back with one hand and cupping my face with the other as we were attached at the mouth.

“I think that’s enough,” my brother’s voice cut in after a few seconds. “Please stop making out with my little sister.”

Kris and I broke apart grinning and I buried my face into his chest. Mitch chuckled but Gavin glowered at us. He’d been supportive and on board with the relationship between his sister and his best friend, but that didn’t mean he wanted to watch our affection in public.

As Gavin and Mitch started towards the exit, waiting for us with the baggage in tow, I pressed my lips to Kris’ quickly, stealing one more kiss. He took my hand, squeezed it and intertwined our fingers, as we walked out of the airport. Since he had parked, he led the way.

It didn’t matter if he ended up back in Philadelphia or went somewhere else. Long distance was tough. We were tougher. Both of us had played a game and failed miserably. All props went to Luke. No one else could have pulled off what he did. He masterminded everything and played us both. That didn’t matter though, and anyway, he’d done right by us. Because reeling in our losses, Kris and I, we got each other.

Exactly what we wanted.

Fin.

Notes

That's all, folks! Game over, story over. I think everyone is where they're supposed to be.

Extended Chapter Notes

The link to the summary page of my next story is right here: Call It Off. If Kris is already someone that's not really written about for a hockey story, well, I've absolutely gone off the deep end with the next one. Thank you in advance if you choose to subscribe. The first chapter is coming soon.

I'm so grateful to everyone that rated, commented, and read the story. :) Your support is much appreciated. Truly, everyone, thank you.