Two for Boarding bonus story: Eric

Eric

“After another historic NHL season, the playoffs have now concluded on the 2024/2025 season, leaving the Florida Wildcats this year’s Cup winner! Better luck next year for runner-up Seattle and everyone else!”

Top comments:

seelionssaylions: GO SEA LIONS

clions2010: When our coaches aren’t actively conspiring against us we’ll be unstoppable

firecrackers_spark: or when you loophole the fuck out of LTIR and put Easton on the ice in time for playoffs. Cheaters.

(From: Post by the official NHL account on X.com, shared by the Sea Lions official account on 06/17/2025)

With his head still throbbing, Phil threw the rental car into park and hopped out. Take that, Mom. Guys who had been “crippled by professional athletics” couldn’t hop. He ignored the uneasy feel of the ligaments in his knee as he pulled a cart out and made for the store.

Maybe playing the whole playoffs, even in reduced capacity, had been too much. But he’d made the choice to retire after the end of the season, and that meant his time on ice had been limited to the team’s playoff run.

They’d made it to round three, but the exit stung.

He hadn’t quite finished moping when his yearly visit to his parents’ house came along and with it, the necessity of introducing his husband and son.

Phil had debated straight-up lying about how they had met. But Ben's articles were slated for release any day now, so there would be no point in pretending they hadn't started seeing each other when Ben was his coach. The alternative, to lessen the potential workplace harassment blow, was to admit that Ben had moved in to help him with his knee.

This in turn meant he had to reveal the full extent of his injury to his parents, and since they were both doctors, they’d been asking questions intermittently ever since.

“Can you rotate your lower leg, Phil? Just so I can see?” Phil muttered to himself. “How have you felt after impact sports? Fuck off.”

He stopped by the produce to grab some tomatoes and bell peppers, still fuming. What had they thought happened when he missed most of the season? Sure, the whole “previously straight son has gay wedding thing” took up more of their attention, but his knee should not be big news. They knew his injury history. This was why he hated visits home, they were so overinvested but only in the most annoying ways.

“Phil? Phil Easton?”

Phil whirled around and winced as his knee pulled.

The source of the question was a tall man, easily as tall as Phil himself, with straight, glossy black hair almost to his shoulders.

Phil squinted at him. “Eric?”

Eric slapped his shoulder. “Yeah! Wow! I didn’t think you’d recognize me. We only played together for, what, six months?”

Phil cleared his throat. “Yeah. Musta been, what, ‘02, ‘03?”

“‘02,” Eric corrected.

“Yeah, I guess you’d remember. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I wanted to apologize.”

Eric blinked. “What for?”

Phil pursed his lips and examined a bag of red onions. One of them was already soft. He picked up another. “I should have stuck up for you. When the other guys started teasing you about…well, you know.”

“Has that been eating at you all this time?”

Truthfully, Phil hadn’t thought of Eric much until this last year, but once he did the guilt reoccurred on a weekly basis. “We started working with this shelter for LGBTQIA+ youth this year,” he said, instead of admitting to a virtual stranger he’d also come out as bisexual and married a dude. “Put things in perspective.”

“Oh,” Eric said. “Well, no hard feelings. I’m sure you had a lot of your own stuff going on, God knows organized sports wasn’t a super inclusive place for anyone in the early oughts.”

Phil gave him a half-shrug. “Still. Wasn’t cool. You shouldn’t have been—we need to treat people better in the locker room, and—”

“Hey, Phil, you know I’m not actually gay, right?”

Phil blinked. “You aren’t?”

“Nah, I had really awful acne on my back as a teenager, it’s this genetic—never mind. Didn’t want the guys seeing it, I was so ashamed. It was stupid. But all’s well that ends well, when I quit hockey, I joined the mathletes at school instead and met Stacy! We're married now.”

“Oh,” Phil said weakly. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah! Now we're talking about it, though, we have a daughter, Zoe, and she is queer. Big fan of Jax Grant, on your team, and the shelter project he started. She’d kill me if I didn’t ask for an autograph.”

“No problem.”

“Awesome! Great running into you!”

“You, too.”

There was the usual kerfuffle of exchanging contact details, and then Eric headed off for the dry goods with a swing in his step. Good for him. Not about the back acne, but about the rest.

He went through the rest of the shopping trip on autopilot (oat milk for Ben, burgers for the grill, the good kind of chipotle mayo for all of them, lettuce, mustard, the usual fixings).

His phone pinged in the checkout line.

Ben: Your mom promises to stop asking about range of motion if you come home now.

Phil smiled. He'd gotten lucky to find a man who ran interference when Phil's parents got to be too much. Not only had Ben suggested a barbecue dinner, he’d volunteered Phil to go shopping to get him out of the house. Moreover, Phil's parents actually listened when he talked about hockey, largely due to the way he talked about it—like a scientist inspecting an insect.

On my way, Phil texted. He added a heart emoji, because he could.

After loading the groceries into the trunk, he opened a second text thread with a sigh. “Alright,” he muttered to himself, and then asked Jax Grant for an autograph.

He would never live this down.