Prompt #7 with PLD?
ah PLD, the man i can never let go of. this prompt might be a little cliche but do you know why cliches become cliches? because they work!
Love doesn't have to be something that we hide behind the scenes.
“I think we should tell them.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” you sigh, your voice quiet but assured. “To be honest, I’m kind of surprised we managed to keep it a secret for this long.”
“Well, to be fair, we didn’t really plan for this to happen.”
“I know, Luc. I was there when it started,” you tease and your heart trills at the sound of Pierre’s laughter coming from the adjoining bathroom of the hotel suite you found yourself in.
How did you get here? Well, it was a long story.
How you came to be staying in the same hotel as the Winnipeg Jets was an easy answer. Right before the season started, you got a job as a part of the Jets the athletic training staff and soon, you found yourself as part of the travelling team, an honor that you hadn’t expected to receive in your first year. So, technically speaking, you were supposed to be in this hotel with the rest of the players and staff. However, your assigned room was actually a floor below.
That lead to the story how you came to find yourself nestled in the bed sheets behind the hotel room belonging to one Pierre-Luc Dubois.
As previously mentioned, you didn’t plan on this happening. At first, Pierre was just another co-worker. An insanely attractive co-worker who maybe sometimes flirted with you in the hallways to be sure but that was all. You certainly weren’t expecting him to become something more than that, a brief infatuation that you would get over eventually and things would return to business as usual. The rational part of your brain also told you that it was impossible for you and him to become something more. You’ll be the first to admit that you had only skimmed the employee code of conduct but you were pretty sure there was a section that said no fraternizing with the players.
And you never planned to.
Not until one night in Tampa when Victor Hedman laid a particularly messy hit on Pierre, a hit that caused his legs to tangle underneath him and had him ushered off the ice to the training room where he sat as you checked to see what the damage was. And when you and Rob confirmed that it was serious enough for Pierre to not return to the game, you stayed with him in the recovery room, icing and taping his knee to make him feel as best he could.
You could confidently say those 30 minutes or so of you and him just sitting together talking was the turning point in your relationship. And shortly after, you found yourself falling into an easy romance that you now couldn’t imagine your life without.
The two of you knew that being together wasn’t the smartest plan, that it could easily cost you your job. But you managed to keep it under wraps for almost four months and no one was the wiser.
However, you knew you had to come clean at some point. And that’s what lead to this conversation in a hotel room.
Pierre emerges from the bathroom, his pullover and sweatpants covering his frame as he walks back over to you still in bed.
“Are you sure you want to?”
“I wouldn’t say I want to. I like what we have right now, I like being in this nice little bubble of just you and me. But I think it would just make things easier, less complicated.”
“I could kiss you in hallways instead of having to wait until we were alone,” Pierre adds and you laugh at his light teasing.
“If I keep my job,” you say, trying to keep your voice light but having to voice the harsh possibility.
“Oh, right,” Luc sighs, his eyes ducking down. You reach out for his hand, taking in his palm in yours as you intertwine your fingers.
“Hey, that’s the worst-case possibility,” you rationalize, trying to dissuade your fears as much as his own. “I could also stay in my current position, or I can’t travel with you guys, or I get fired at the end of the season instead of immediately so we’d still get about another month of this. We really know until we reveal… this.”
Luc chuckles at your stuttered sentences, his hand tightening around yours.
“If it does go badly, which I hope it won’t considering the fact that this has been going on for months and I’d like to think I’ve remained professional, I’ll just be like a normal hockey partner. Like everyone else,” you laugh and Pierre smiles at you.
“You could never be like everyone else,” Pierre says with a soft smile and you can’t stop the heat from flooding your cheeks. “But I think you’re right. I think it’s time we tell everyone.”
“Maybe not everyone,” you laugh. “Maybe, let’s start with my boss. I can talk to Rob on the plane today and we’ll go from there.”
“So, I still can’t tell the boys?”
“Not yet. Depending on what Rob and the rest of my bosses say slash decide, we can talk about telling the boys.”
“That works for me,” Pierre accepts, lifting himself up off the mattress and using the hand clasped in yours to pull you up from the sheets. You can’t help the giggle that falls from your lips and you and Luc fall back into the easy intimacy that had defined your relationship. The two of you finish getting dressed, Pierre’s bag packed and the two of you are causally talking as you step out of the hotel room, so caught up in the conversation that you don’t notice Mark Scheifele stepping out of his own hotel room directly across the hall at the same time.
You notice Mark first, your words pausing and eyes widening as you watch him take the scene before him; you and Pierre stepping out of the room, one of Luc’s shirts falling from your shoulders.
“Oh my god,” he says and the pleading look that you plaster onto your face is a millisecond too slow because before you knew it, Mark’s voice was carrying down the hallway, followed shortly by the sound of other doors being opened and more hoots and hollers joining in the noise.
“This is who you’ve been seeing, Luc?”
“Yo, Lowry you owe me 20 bucks.”
“I knew it the whole time. You two weren’t being subtle at all.”
These sentences and more surrounded you as you felt the entire teams’ eyes on the two of you, the heat that you felt in your cheeks earlier now multiplied by a hundred. But soon the embarrassment turned into contentment as the boys came up to you, hugging you and you felt like you were being welcomed to the team once again. And somehow, having the boys know before anyone else made you feel better about the prospect of telling your bosses. Because now you had an entire team backing you; a family that you would now always be a part of regardless of what happened.
Eventually, you feel Pierre’s hands on your waist, pulling your attention from the few bodies still lingering in the hallway to him. And when you connect your eyes to his, you see a matching smile stretched across his face.
“Well, that didn’t go as planned.”
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