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English
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Published:
2017-11-17
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3,303
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1/1
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all i ever wanted (was the world)

Summary:

Kent doesn’t have the luxury of kindness.

...

(Kent craves being underestimated like it’s her drug of choice.)

Notes:

I'm struggling to tag this one because there's mentions of some things--sex, misogyny, toxic relationships and all the other fun things you might expect to go with women playing professional sports in men's leagues--but there's nothing too explicit. With that in mind, please don't hesitate to let me know if I should tag/warn better. This parallels the comic pretty closely (including OD, Kent/Jack, etc.) but if Kent was AAG. It is also, I realized after writing it, very much the spiritual counterpart to my RPF fic "roll like a rolling stone".

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

I’m better than you, Kent thinks, and Jack’s in the bathroom swallowing pills.

He comes out, shaking, eyes blue as sin.

“That’s enough, Jack,” Kent tells him.

He nods, stumbles, collapses onto the bed. Kent stares.

Tomorrow is the draft. She’s unequivocally better, but she’s going second, or third, or fourth.

Nobody wants to waste their first choice on a girl.

When she did the interviews, all the men in all their suits were visibly uncomfortable. They were all too afraid to ask her about being a girl and were all too afraid not to ask. Kent didn’t see another woman all day. 

Jack stirs next to Kent, turns his face towards her thigh. He likes to nuzzle when he’s like this, likes the feel of her under him. Sometimes he presses her into the bed until she can’t breathe, face in her neck or her cleavage. She never says a thing.

“Jack,” she says, and puts a hand in his hair.

He’s used to being babied. She worries about that. He went straight from his mother’s lap into Kent’s, and she won’t be there for him after tomorrow, not like he’s used to, not like he needs.

Not constantly.

…

Kent dreams about him sometimes still. In her dreams, she wakes and he’s in her arms, cradled there, and she kisses the back of his neck. She thinks about biting him there, where her white, straight teeth would sink in and leave a bruise the same blue-purple that always used to be under his eyes, and under hers, as well, back when she was keeping him constantly.

In her dreams, he rolls over and looks adoring and says her name in a soft, sweet voice. She makes him his coffee and she makes him his eggs and she smiles at him like she could do nothing better with her life than make him comfortable.

She wakes.

She detests herself.

…

[Instagram: Kent Parson

Red lips, black crop top, backwards cap. White Persian cat.

“kiss kiss, bang bang”]

…

When he overdoses, she’s in the next room, sleeping and covered in his come. He never bothers to wipe her off afterwards.

She does his laundry and she makes his sandwiches and his bed and she counts his pills out for him when his hands shake.

That’s why he has to sneak away, to take too many. She thought about locking them in the hotel safe before she went to bed. The code would have been her mother’s birthday, because Jack doesn’t know the date even though Kent celebrates it every year.

She should have locked up the fucking pills.

When she meets the Zimmermanns at the hospital, she’s in one of Jack’s shirts and that’s what the look on Alicia’s face says, too: you should have locked up the fucking pills.

Bob says not to blame herself. She and Alicia both know better.

Taking care of Jack has been her job for years, now.

…

Kent relishes doing the things that she’s not supposed to now that she has the money and the luxury of a good fucking PR person and the luxury of the chance to fuck around.

She buys an expensive car and she drives it too fast. She sucks off a stranger in a club bathroom because he nudged a finger beneath her skirt and panties on the dance floor and it made her want when she knows she should have pushed him away.

She sneaks out the window of her mother’s house in the summer and smokes on the back deck of the first boy she ever let break her heart, and she laughs and tells him, “I like the look of my lipstick on the butt of your cigarette,” and he stares and she laughs again because she knows she’s outgrown him and she likes to watch him know it, too. There’s a half-drunk bottle of whiskey—Canadian—in her hand. It’s stuck in her head now like words get sometimes when she’s like this, like a particularly irritating pop song, and so she says it again, consonants sharp, words spilling one at a time. “I like the look. Of my lipstick. On the butt… on the butt of your cigarette.” He says her name and she ignores him and goes back home, in through the front door because she’s twenty-three and her mother knows she’s out.

She does cocaine once—and once more after that, and after that—off Swoop’s glass coffee table with a dirty American hundred dollar bill, and her whole head is sparkling and she’s so in love with the world and it feels like maybe she doesn’t want to cry, just this once.

Rudy’s girl is tall and tanned and perfect looking, and she dances with Kent when they go out, grinding into her until she pulls back and says, “I want to kiss you.” Her name is Clara, and she’s so, so drunk and Kent’s not interested in fucking up her team and so she tells her to ask Rudy first, and Rudy says yes and so Kent shrugs and kisses her there in front of God and the Las Vegas Aces. The guys all whoop and laugh and it’s a joke to them and nothing short of jerk-off fodder and Kent knows it too, deeply and intimately, but it’s not a fucking joke to her. She likes it. Clara pulls back and laughs and likes it too, and until Rudy puts a ring on her finger she finds Kent at parties sometimes and pulls her into her lap and holds her there and kisses her until they can’t breathe, and then when Rudy proposes it stops and they don’t talk about it again.

Kent wears eyeliner on the ice because she likes the way it looks around her eyes and the way it smudges when she sweats.

She lets her hair curl.

…

She doesn’t go back to sleep when she leaves the hospital. It’s 3 a.m. She goes back to the hotel and straightens her hair the way Jack always liked it, carefully working the cowlicks out. She puts on her makeup the way Alicia showed her once.

It’s good makeup. The foundation cost her forty dollars that she doesn’t have yet, but it was Jack’s money, anyway.

It was Jack’s money that bought the dress she’s going to wear, and Jack’s money that paid for the alterations on it to make it fit her hockey figure, and Jack’s money that paid for the shoes and the silver necklace with the little skate charm. It’s a figure skate, because they didn’t sell a hockey charm for a pretty, delicate girl’s necklace. Kent would rather go without than have the charm wrong, but it was a Christmas gift from Jack, so she wears it anyway.

Not like he’s going to see it.

Then she sits on the edge of the bathtub and cries her makeup off, and then she stands up and washes her face and puts it all back on again.

…

Swoops stays at her house one night, on the couch, which she only finds out when she walks out of her room the next morning and he’s sprawled there, snoring. When she went to bed, there had been three guys still up playing video games. They use her house to crash at, because she’s the only one who remembers to buy toilet paper and the only one who ever has clean mugs.

Well. Some of the married guys do, too, but that’s because they have wives.

“Why did you sleep on the couch,” Kent asks flatly when Swoops stumbles into the kitchen. He looks at her for a long time. He’s waiting for her to make him his coffee.

“Because it was late and I didn’t want to drive home.”

Kent starts the coffee. “I didn’t ask you why you stayed at my house. You can stay when you want, I don’t care. I asked you why you slept on the couch instead of one on of the three guest beds I have. You know where I keep the sheets.”

Swoops shrugs to hide his flush.

She stares. “You don’t know how to make a bed.” It’s not a question, and so he doesn’t answer. “You don’t know how to make a bed,” she repeats. She’s having a fucking aneurism.

She takes a long time to drink her coffee, and she doesn’t pour him a mug. He acts affronted when he has to round the counter to get his own, even though it’s her house and her coffee and her mug.

She wants to go put sheets on the fucking bed, just to get it over with, but she promised herself a long time ago not to mother these fucking boys again. These little fucking boys, old enough to drink and make millions of dollars and old enough to find fucking wives to do their housework for them.

“Come on,” she says, and rinses her mug and puts it in the dishwasher. “You’re learning how to make a motherfucking bed, Swoops, I swear to God.”

He leaves his mug on the counter.

…

The first season Kent spends in the Q, she walks in on Jack kissing another boy. It shocks her so badly that she goes home and runs a bath and times how long she can hold her breath before her instincts kick in and she inhales. The last time, she goes too long and comes up sputtering and coughing and dripping and her lungs burn worse even than they do when coach bags skates them.

When she reaches in between her legs, her fingers come away bloody and for a moment she thinks of how Jack was on top of her last night, the way he rutted until he came and how sore she was right after, before she brought herself off with her hand and his sleepy gaze on her. Then she blinks and thinks, oh, and sighs, and reaches for a tampon.

Then she thinks of him kissing that boy. He’d said her name last night. He’d left teeth marks on her left breast. He hadn’t seemed to hate it.

She breathes in. She can take his pills and his fucking dirty socks and the way he yells, sometimes. She can take this, too.

“Okay,” she says out loud.

…

[Instagram: Kent Parson

Backwards cap, pink bubblegum-bubble, saucy wink.

“I’m gonna be your bubblegum bitch”

…

The first time she goes to Samwell, she does herself up the way she knows Jack likes best. She looks like Alicia when she’s done. It’s not lost on her, but she doesn’t dwell.

He yells. First, he strokes his fingers through her newly straight hair when he lets her suck his cock and he even makes a token effort to bring her off, too. It doesn’t work, and she doesn’t tell him.

Then he yells. He uses words that she knows he knows because they’re both hockey players. He uses words she’s heard him use before, but never directed at her.

One of his boys comes in the living room, looking more than a little alarmed. “Bro,” he says. She wonders, semi-idly, if this one has sucked Jack’s cock, too.

Jack swears, in French, but she knows French and she knows him.

She laughs, because she knows he’ll fucking hate it.

He hates it. She laughs again.

“Jack,” she says. She tries to sound desensitized, and she is, when it’s some random dude on Twitter or across the faceoff dot. She’s not now, because it’s Jack, but she pretends. Her media smile is shiny and well worn. “You think this is shocking? You think I’m not used to this? This isn’t even the first time I’ve been called a cunt this week, and it’s Tuesday.”

“Bro,” the dude says again.

“Leave, Parse,” Jack says, tired.

Kent smiles at the bro. “It was nice to meet you!” she says. She’s sunshine in a bottle. She’s a Stanley fucking Cup champion. She’s better than needing her ex.

Halfway back to Boston, she parks her car on the side of the road to be sick. Her hair is starting to curl at the temples.

…

The summer after their first year in the Q, Kent starts dating a local boy who used to play hockey, and who doesn’t anymore, and who, as it turns out much later, resents her for it.

The summer after their first year in the Q, Alicia teaches her to cover a bruise with makeup—green base, careful application. Soft hands.

In between, Kent keeps letting Jack crawl into her bed and get himself off on or in or near her. Once, he goes down on her, and makes a face afterwards, and the next day Kent makes herself an appointment at a waxing parlor. It doesn’t end up mattering, because Jack doesn’t do it again.

…

Kent craves being underestimated like it’s her drug of fucking choice.

She wasn’t supposed to go first. She wasn’t supposed to be captain, or to have a gold medal or a Calder or a Stanley Cup.

Every victory is somehow still shocking to the people who are supposed to know about this kind of thing.

She relishes the surprise, nurses the vindication. She smiles like butter wouldn’t melt.

“I’m just going to play my game,” she says, sweet and charming. Honey catches more flies, and they’re swarming her. “That’s all I’m focused on, really. Just doing my thing, not worrying about anybody else.”

They should worry about me, she doesn’t add.

…

There’s a trainer, in the Q. When Kent rides the bike, he walks around and around her and looks and looks and looks.

Her ponytail is curling with sweat and her thighs are burning and she’s thinking, okay, I pretty actively want to die and he reaches over and ramps up her resistance until she has to stand and pedal and he stands behind her and looks and she thinks on top of that, enjoy the show, then.

He always stays just this side of business-like. Just enough.

She mentions it to Jack, once. “He’s a trainer,” Jack says, “that’s his job.”

When Jack’s on the bike, the trainer stands to the side and looks at his watch and says afterwards, “good ride,  Zimmermann.” Then he pats Kent low on the back.

Kent quite honestly doesn’t have the energy to explain.

…

Kent buys a house with a bathroom that Alicia Zimmermann would die for. It’s not why she buys the house.

At least, it’s not the only reason.

She locks the door to it when the guys come over. They can use her mediocre guest and leave the seat up and nobody will care.

If they came into her master bath, they’d see the lipstick on the mirror. She scrawled it there, drunk, in Louboutin red. It cost her ninety dollars and she’s never worn it on her lips, but she’s got money to burn, now. She’s never wiped it away, because she likes the way it looks, bloody and reckless and with hearts over the ‘i’s.

Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.

…

The second time she goes to Samwell, she goes prepared. She’s wearing her eyeliner and Swoops’ shirt and Louboutin red lipstick for the first time in her life. She’s expecting to draw blood.

She did a line in the front seat before she came in to the party. Her hair is tousled under Rudy’s backwards cap, and she knows what she looks like.

“Didja miss me?” she says, and she drawls it like a nightmare.

Jack takes her upstairs, so fucking predictable. He asks her about the cologne on her shirt before he asks her anything else, possessive with no right, and it’s her teammate’s and she doesn’t tell him that.

He says no, like she knew he would. He acts disappointed she would even ask, and then he kisses her on the lips, and if that’s her victory, than she’ll fucking take it.  

He’s gotten better, at kissing. Not by much.

“Zimms,” she says, and pushes him away. He’s startled. She’s never done that before, and she watches him realize it.

She’s won two Stanley Cups. This feels as sweet.

She’s high and she’s reckless and she’s here to prove that she’s just as fucking mean as he can be. Don’t come to play my game and expect to fucking win, she thinks, and she wears it on her face.

There’s a kid hiding outside Jack’s door. If she had to check the boxes, she could. Blond? Check. Small? Check. Closeted? Check and fucking mate.

She steps over the boy in her sky-high heels. They’re loud on the floor, purposefully so. She wears them to establish dominance.

She throws Jack a glance to tell him that she knows about this boy, and to tell him that she knows that he knows that she knows.

The slamming of his door rings in her ears like a motherfucking goal horn.

…

[Instagram: Kent Parson

All black, red lip, shadowed face.

“Make me your villain. Black always was my color.”]

…

Once, Swoops is drunk on her couch and Kent is drunk on her couch and he puts his hand on her thigh.

And she thinks about it.

She thinks about the way his playoff beard would feel between her thighs after they win another Cup. She thinks about the way he stays in her guest room and doesn’t look in the locker room and she thinks about his big hands in her hair and on her hips and in her mouth.

And she thinks about making him coffee in the morning and she thinks about the way he comes to her when he’s crushed and expects her to fix it and she thinks about the time she asked him to housesit and four of her plants died and she thinks about taking care of another fucking child for the rest of her life.

“Don’t,” she says softly, and he takes his hand away and he looks at his lap.

“Okay,” he says.

…

Being a woman is the worst part of her work life, and it’s the worst part of her home life, and it’s the reason that she gets knocked to her knees on the ice and the reason that sometimes her Twitter DMs are nothing but vicious threats and the reason that sometimes she looks in the mirror and wants to peel her own skin off.

After she sees Jack, she drives back to Boston with the windows down in December and she watches her breath frost just to know that she’s alive and she struts in after curfew and lies in a bed that hundreds of other people have fucked on and she thinks about whether she’s sorry.

When Jack woke up, Kent had already gone first, and he’d wanted her to apologize for it, and she had. She’d cried and she’d said she was sorry and he called her selfish and controlling and he told her to leave him alone.

And she did.

She left him alone and she proved she was better and she promised herself that she would never again apologize for something that she wasn’t really sorry for.

In all these years, it may be the only promise that she’s ever kept.

And she’s not sorry.

Kent rolls over and she closes her eyes and she sleeps like a baby. In the morning, she puts on her eyeliner and she laces up her skates and she has a four point game, and the little figure skate charm on the necklace she’s never taken off burns and burns and burns.

Kent doesn’t have the luxury of kindness.  

…

[Instagram: Kent Parson

Stanley Cup, hockey jersey, thigh-high heeled boots. Wild hair. A smile.

“I’m a free bitch, baby!”]

 

Notes:

Title from "Primadonna" by Marina and the Diamonds. If you don't already know why, I cannot recommend that song/album highly enough.

Comments, as always, are love!