the kind of guy who thinks he's smart; he's got to be the toughest guy that I've ever seen

[eggybread.livejournal.com]

title: Miracles in Hockey
involves: Tom Barrasso/Ron Francis
part: Brass Bonanza (III): it's a push-shove world but there's always a chance...
rated: NC-17
time: February-March, 1984
disclaimer: Written from inside my head; last I checked that and the "real world" where "actual facts" occur were two separate places. 
dedication: to nofaves , because she says this part's her favorite...merci.
prior to this: (I) (II)
feedback: yes please.  and 2012 and beyond is fine.
summary: post coitum omne animalium triste est: (after sex, all animals are sad).  dates on the calendar.

"Why?" he asked me.  Hours later.  It felt like hours later. 

"Why what?"

"Why'd you decide to do this?  Bring me here."

"I..." I said.  "I--"

"It's okay," he said, leaning over, kissing me and barely giving me his tongue, making it far better than 'okay'..."but you may want to think about the answer."

Really?  Why'd he come with me?  (And then, why'd he come with me?  Why are you in my bed?  Why'd you get naked and fuck me tonight, Ron Francis?  More questions, questions for him.)

"I..." tried again, unsuccessfully.  Bringing it up, the honesty, thinking about just how much I'd wanted (to do) him was arousing the hell out of me.  Again.  Knowing what the reality was like.

"...Did I satisfy your curiosity?"  His question was hot in my ear, dirty in my conscience.  I jerked my head around to capture him again, move my tongue in past his lips, grind my hips against his body. 

"Now that's an interesting question," I informed him, when I finally decided to return his mouth to its semi-rightful owner. "That you did, and more.  Am I satisfied?  No."  Definitely not.  "Hell no.  Not even remotely resembling anything close." I wrapped my arms around his neck, instead.

"...You know, insanity," he decided to let me know at the next conjunction of hands and mouths and bodies in motion against each other, "is doing the same thing again and expecting a different result."

"Guess there's nothing left to do tonight but go crazy on you." I grinned.  "I've been declared insane for about six months now.  I think I'm acclimatized."

 

=+=+=+=

 

We had a long, long kiss right before I took him back, and neither of us said anything for most of the way, until he spoke up.

 

"So I guess I'll see you Thursday."  

 

"...Thursday?"  It was 5 in the morning.  I could be taken by surprise.  Easily.

 

"You're playing us, remember?"  He smiled.  "Home-and-home."

Right.  Shit.  "We're going to Philly first."

 

"Are you going to start Thursday?"

 

"Uhhh...probably."  Since your team sucks. 

 

I thought we'd said our goodbyes before we left my place; he didn't touch me or move to touch me and I wondered if he was reliving that kiss ...or everything, in his head, when he stared at me for a long moment; that's what I was doing, staring back at him. 

 

"Bye, Tommy."  And he ducked out, and I watched him cross the street, and vanish behind the falling snow.

 

Suddenly it felt weirder without him. 

 

=+=+=+=

 

I got back, walked into my bedroom in the quiet, shadowy, early-morning light, and I looked at the floor, and my bed.  Where he and I had just done all that.  I ditched my pants and socks and climbed back in.  

 

I loved doing it in the dark, loved being able to do nothing but feel, loved how it made things seem that much more illicit, but I'd hit the lamp by my bed just briefly and I knew what he looked like... 

 

I wanted to remember before I forgot, so I brought Ronnie back, saw him naked again next to me: straight eyebrows and incredible ass... I felt his mouth, kissing me almost everywhere, getting his tongue involved and his voice: "Do you like that?  You do like that..." and the taste of his sweat and his curly hair in my fingers...

 

He kissed me in places I'd never even thought about; the backs of my thighs, my wrists, the undersides of my forearms, my nipples....

 

My cock had erected its own remembrance of him, and I pulled it out, shucked my t-shirt and underwear off, and thought about my nipples, and his mouth, and what was best: his tongue licking and teasing them, his lips sucking and kissing them, or his teeth biting down...

 

I thought about the heat and the hardness of his body.  Familiarity and difference.  I'd never thought about sucking a guy's chest, stimulating his nipples with my mouth while he masturbated me, the feel of his stiff bare prick in between my naked thighs.

 

He made me feel like I hadn't had sex before (and I hadn't, not like this...)

 

I didn't care what I hadn't thought of -- I'd let him show me.

 

I fell asleep and I dreamed a bit, and it was Miracle at Lake Placid Day, and I was sledding just like I'd been four years ago.  

 

Hang on to whatever you were riding, fling yourself from the top of the hill, enjoy the exhilarating terror of flying through the air, know the likelihood of breaking your neck was basically reduced because of all the snow, and shoot for the finish.   

 

You ended up cold and bruised and sore, not hot and satiated.  (Wet and thoroughly exhausted, okay...)  Yet somehow, what I'd done with him was like sledding.  

 

(And if I went back and told fourteen year-old Tommy what I was doing for fun these days, I would have convinced my younger self that sanity was clearly not an integral part of my future...)  

 

On the one hand I was throwing my body into gravity and the open air and trying to get where I hadn't been; on the other hand, I just lay back, pushed off and slid, enjoying the ride and totally uncaring of where I'd eventually land.

 

Ronnie was at the bottom; I didn't know when he'd gotten there, but he threw a snowball in my face.  He waited until I made one, then started to run.  I launched it after him, he ducked... but fell, and went down in the snowbank.  I caught up to him, and he was flat on his back, staring at the sky.

 

I knelt down.  "...Are you a snow angel, then?"  

 

I put a gloved hand on his cheek.  "Are you cold?"  He only raised his eyebrows, so I sank towards him, stretched out next to him, began to kiss him... 

 

"You're mine," I said.  He nodded. 

 

Some extremely long and satisfactory minutes went by, and then...

 

"It's too cold to do anything out here, Tommy."

 

"Then let's get warmer."

 

=+=+=+=

 

February 23, 1984 (Buffalo at Hartford, Whalers win 3-2)

 

He came out of nowhere with his invitation in the Mall, post-morning skate.  As if I were dreaming awake, in daylight.

 

"Want to go for a walk?"

 

I suppose that after an encounter with him that felt more like something you write or imagine, not actually live, I was wondering what it would be like, seeing him again, but we were in some sort of deserted storage area when we stopped. 

 

Because I never thought about picturing it in Hartford, it's transpiring here.  Right?  

 

He just put his thumb and index finger out and used them under my chin to kiss me.  It was a few fleeting moments, and then I was instinctively yearning for more, a lot more than if it had been slow.

 

His eyes were kind, amused.  "I had a lovely time the other night, as my mum always told me to tell people." 

 

"So why didn't you just send me a thank-you note.  You have my address."  I was irritable. 

 

"Better things to do with twenty cents."  Still amused.  "And because I'm pretty sure there's the...  what's the name Act?  You still can't send obscene things through the mail." 

 

"I don't know; I think the procedure consists of writing "-FUCK-YOU-" and then you just take it to the Supreme Court."

 

"My birthday's in a week. You're being unsurprisingly....I don't know why I was wishing differently.  That you wouldn't."  I don't know why he sounded so disappointed; sooner or later I disappoint everyone. 

All of the time, if I include myself.

It was a fluke, last time.  A dream and a fluke.

 

"February 30th?" 

 

"Yes, February 30th.  Or as they call it in kindergarten, March 1st." 

 

"What, are you looking for a present?"  I am not a kindergartner.  They're incapable of sarcasm. 

 

"No.  I think I already got one."  He walked away.  "See you past the blue line, Tommy."

 

I closed my eyes. 

What the hell did I just do?  Why??

 

Then I realized if I didn't follow him, I'd be abandoned somewhere in the bowels of the Mall, and I had to move just to keep him in sight and trail behind him, not wanting to close the gap, not hoping to catch up.  

 

Then we lost the game. 

 

3 days later I returned home from Minnesota versus the North Stars, and found a note in the mail (postmarked, twenty cent stamp, return-addressed RMF from the Civic Center in Hartford), in pen on a blank piece of paper.

 

 

"I want you to let me see you again.

Not to put you in my debt.  Ron."

 

 

Christ, that did more obscene things to me than... I realized how just good his powers of recall were, as good as mine; he knew how I'd started this to begin with, and how he'd acquiesced, and everything that had ensued... this... felt like a violation and was such a dirty play it should have been illegal. 

 

And he put his address on the bottom.  ("Now you know where I live.") 

 

So I wrote back, figuring it would get there in time.  

 

"Ronnie, 

I was a dick.  Happy 21.  I'll have to see how much you've grown. 

-Tom the Rookie"

 

=+=+=+=

 

"Did you have some objection to what happened last time?"  

March 11, 1984 (Hartford at Buffalo, Sabres win 4-3 OT)

A clandestine rendezvous in a foreign country.  To face the hard questions.

 

I hadn't played tonight, so virtually all I had to think about was him, and nowhere to expend the stress.  "No."  I drank some of my coffee. 

 

"Do you have some objection to me?"

 

"No.  God, no."  

 

"I liked being with you, Tommy."

 

"Well... I did too."  Once again, he was reducing my vocabulary to single-syllable words. "I really did."  There.  Two syllables.  So why didn't you act more like you did, Barrasso?  "I think...I think you just caught me off guard.  Like the juxtaposition of seeing you at work and in your building and all I'm thinking about happened four nights ago."  There wasn't any reason for me not to like seeing him again.  But I still felt weird.  Even now.

 

"You never got an answer for what I asked you about, did you?"

 

"I...no."  Is 'I wanted to take you and see if something almost exactly like what would happen did happen?' still too vague?  "Why'd you say 'yes' to anything?"

 

"I... just a feeling.  I thought we might work well together." 

Why did it feel like he might as well have said "I've got what you want and you've got what I want"...?

 

This discussion was getting too embarrassing to have or hold in public, even across international borders in a barely inhabited room.  "You want to take this and go?"  I gestured at our coffee, and the rest of the donuts. 

 

"Well, we probably need the evidence for the guy at the border, or they'll never believe we just went across to get Tim Hortons."

 

"Well, it was your idea."  (It must exist as a welcome post for homesick Canadians; it was right there in Fort Erie.)  "Your coach probably wouldn't be too happy if you called to bail you out."

 

"And Bowman would?"

 

"Scotty?  Scotty'd probably leave me there."  For some reason the whole scenario made me want to crack up.  "You know, depending on how well I'd been playing.  Use it as motivation for Sauve.  Give him a chance to bring Cloutier up from Rochester."  Now he was starting to laugh.  "...And then when he did bail me out, I'd be dying to get back on the ice again, so that's three goalie-raising performances for the price of one staying in jail.  Probably enough reason for him. Just let the border patrol keep me in custody."

 

They let us back across.  If we were going to be incarcerated it would have to be on the American side.

 

"Should I take you back?"

 

"I don't mind hanging around.  If I turn into a pumpkin, guess I'll notice."

 

"Well it's either your place or mine."

 

He just took a long sip of his coffee.  

 

I think we both knew where we were going.

 

"It's fine," he said.

 

 

We got inside and I headed for the kitchen to dump the stuff on the counter, without turning any lights on.  Back where I'd left him he was still in the half-light with his coat and shoes off.

 

I could still see him.  Eye to eye, even in the dimness, as I walked right up to him. 

 

"Do you want me to kiss you?" he asked.  Low, like we were still having a private conversation despite being all alone.  I nodded.

 

His thumb traced the side of my face.  He cocked his head to the side, studied me for a moment.

 

"Do you want me to kiss you now?"

 

"Yes."

 

And his mouth touched mine, presence and pressure, and I could feel the tension and nervous energy leaving my body, getting replaced by something warm and tranquil, and beneath that the blaze that was being sparked, kindling meeting the flame. 

 

"You want me to do that again?"  He was still holding my face in his hands.

 

"I do, Ronnie."  He was starting to make my head spin; maybe he was just depriving me of oxygen.  We were on the couch, when we separated enough to talk again. 

 

"Want me to keep doing it?"

 

"Want you..." I breathed, echoed.  "Oh, yeah.  I want you."

 

"So you want me to keep doing this?"

 

"Do I get to contribute at all?"  I was on top of him at this point, looking down at him all stretched out under me.

 

"If you...really want to."

 

Time stretched and coalesced for a bit and movement simply became arousal, me biting his neck or his hands rubbing my thighs.

 

I sat up and pulled off my shirt but before I let him up to do the same, a thought occurred to me.

 

"Do you,"  I panted, "do you want to...?"  (Go lie down naked on my bed and get each other off again?)  I just inclined my head in the general direction. 

 

He looked up at me, one of his not-quite smiles on his face (and eventually, I'd learn he could work the expression like no one else could).  He ran his hand slowly down my side.  "...I was waiting for you to ask me."

 

I didn't let go of his hand this time; I pulled him down the hall with me even though it was a short trip.  When we got to my room, that same hand pushed me down on my back on the bed.  The guy it belonged to leaned over me, kissed me long and deeply to keep me in my place.  I felt him fumble with my belt.  Seemed he wanted to disrobe me himself.  

 

I let him.

 

I got to watch him strip.  Not as though he made a big production of it, but the more of him I could see, the less my brain cared about anything else.

 

Almost like a weird form of relaxation. 

 

It felt good being naked together, it felt good last time and it felt good now.  He took my cock in his hand and rubbed his against it, rubbed us together stiff and hot while we were kissing until we were both sticky and wet and satisfied -- for the moment.

 

"It's just sex," he whispered to me later.  "Like you said, no debts.  You're not incurring anything."

 

("Wrath of God?") went through my mind briefly, but I kept my mouth shut.

 

"Tommy, we could never do this again.  Don't overthink it."

 

"But, Ronnie...I like you."  I realized I had my answer to his question when he'd wanted me to overthink.  I really, really, crazy liked him like I didn't even remotely like most people, and it was easier not to think about it, and wanted...more.  Still.

 

"Do you?"  He kissed me.  "I think I like you, too."  

Comments

[lite-bright.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I was so psyched to see that you'd updated this!

This is really enjoyable; I like the way the narrative follows a couple of different threads, like it's almost slipping through time. It's a nice counterpoint to the hockey history links, as they so firmly anchor the events to something, well, real :) Plus, it's *hot,* despite being pretty subtle.

The conversation is so perfect and you really have a way with that. It just works so well, woven right in:
"You never got an answer for what I asked you about, did you?"

"I...no." Is 'I wanted to take you and see if something almost exactly like what would happen did happen?' still too vague? "Why'd you say 'yes' to anything?"

Yessss, I am sort of stupid about them, and really like that section.

[eggybread.livejournal.com]

Well, if you're the only one to leave feedback, then technically you're the only one that exists, so. ^^;

"You never got an answer for what I asked you about, did you?"
.....
"Why'd you say 'yes' to anything?"

Wow, again you pick one of the more recent additions to fave. Guess I don't have to worry about adding stuff. :)

Glad you liked this part.

Are there really different threads? I just thought it was All T.P. Barrasso and His Oversized Ego Cranial Capacity, All The Time...

[lite-bright.livejournal.com]

Well, I know that you'll put up with my comments now so that helps.

Yes, please keep adding things! Those lines sort of explain that totally crazy thing I said about interweaving different threads: over time, and with new attention. Of course, the narrative is still carried by whatever's in Barrasso's head, and that's plenty enjoyable! There are moments where something slightly different seems to sneak in there, though, like in the letters, and where I started to get a sense of their relationship.

Okay, I just had to re-read this, and oh my, so good. How do you do this :)

also, oh man, in the last couple of days, the Canes have been all about how awesome Barrasso is; we do appreciate him!

[eggybread.livejournal.com]

also, oh man, in the last couple of days, the Canes have been all about how awesome Barrasso is; we do appreciate him!

*gasp* you mean The Dark Lord Barrasso has managed to make NHL 'tenders not only out of his protégé Cam Ward, but even of people like Justin Peters and (lol) Manny ("Headcase") Legace? (did I miss anyone? ;) Or was he being fêted for something else?
Believe me, I'm sure the appreciation's mutual...

How do you do this :)
Go through life frequently coping like Tommy Barrasso, then become aware of that, then become aware that there's even further formal classification for that... ;) (It's called the Enneagram. He's a Four, I'm a Four, Ronnie's a Two... The writing? Not really sure! :D But I'm glad I can.

[lite-bright.livejournal.com]

did I miss anyone? ;)

As of the deadline? Justin Pogge, who seems to have been acquired as something of a...project, to see how good Barrasso can be. No, really, that's the rationale. (Well, that and having a goaltender who's healthy enough to play in the AHL. But that's less funny.)

Haha, I knew there was a secret! That's pretty delightful, too. Or, um, actually thinking about it, not so much *delightful* as it is tough, but at least it's channeled into something productive? I meant the writing, which is actually delightful, and I'm sure of that. :)