to High Park with Dakota and hold his hand. Or give him a kiss while waiting in line to buy movie tickets. Or feed him a bite off my plate at a restaurant. All things coupled men and women do. I wanted that for myself.” He wedges his shoulder against Dakota’s and brings Dakota’s hand up to kiss his knuckles. “I wanted that for us. It’s impossible for me to hide how I feel about him, and I don’t want to try.”
So impossible that I can see it right in front of me. Dakota positively melts at Tay’s words, slinging an arm around Tay’s shoulders and whispering something in his ear that I don’t catch. If I were a lip reader, I’d say it looked like “I love you.” Dakota might not talk much during our interview but his facial expressions and body language say a lot.
“Why now, though?” I ask. “Why not back when you were first thinking about it?”
“I started seriously thinking about it last fall, but then my Gran . . . well, there was a bit of a family emergency and I didn’t think of it again until the new year. And then I met this guy and then it was the playoffs. It’s been a busy few months. Coming out in the off-season made more sense strategically anyway.”
Speaking of the playoffs, Tay laughs self-deprecatingly when I ask him about game seven of the first round. “Oof,” he says with a quiet laugh, rubbing his jaw. “We lost that pretty epically, didn’t we?”
Popular consensus is that their backup goalie, Dahlberg, choked when it counted. Tay is quick to set the record straight. “It’s called a hockey team for a reason. We’re all at fault. We fought hard but we weren’t cohesive. We didn’t come together in that last game the way we usually do.” He shrugs with a smile that I remember seeing on the most competitive players on my team. The one that says, “Look out. I’m coming for you.”
“We’ll be back next season,” he says. “Just wait.”
“Can we expect to see Dakota in your comp seats?”
Tay and Dakota share a loaded glance I can’t read.
“Not all of them,” Dakota says, speaking up for the first time. “I’ve got a four-year-old son, and I can’t leave him with a sitter for every game. Tay knows that. Besides, he donates a lot of his comp tickets to the Foundation.”
The Foundation is the charitable arm of Toronto’s NHL organization.
“You’ve got a son?” I jump on this because, for reasons I can’t fathom, I can’t picture twenty-three-year-old Tay as a father figure. “Do he and Tay get along?”
Dakota grunts. “Like peas in a freaking pod.”
This makes Tay laugh, and he falls onto his boyfriend. A murmured conversation ensues between them that I can’t make out but that has Dakota throwing his head back in laughter. Tay grins at him like he can’t believe how lucky he is.
Since Dakota’s now talking, I try to redirect the interview to find out a little bit more about him, but my “What do you do, Dakota?” has Tay jumping in. Now he’s using hand gestures as he sits on the edge of the couch.
“He works for the Foundation,” Tay says. “As a fundraiser. In fact, I’m helping them out with a direct mail appeal that’s dropping in early September.”
Dropping, he tells me, is a new word he’s recently learned. In the fundraising world, it’s the day a fundraising letter gets dropped off at the post office for mailing.
“And,” he continues, sitting so close to the edge I’m sure he’s about to fall off the couch. “He’s the co-owner of Once Upon a Time Cakes. Dakota’s a cake decorator and his cousin’s the baker. They’re opening a store in The Junction in September. They’re remodeling it now.” His proud-meter is at about a thousand on a scale of one to ten.
I ask, “How do you put in a full day at the Foundation and then work on your store?”
“My cousin and I work on the store evenings and weekends right now,” Dakota says, placing a hand absentmindedly on Tay’s thigh. “I bring my son and give him odd jobs to do. He loves it. The store itself didn’t need that much work, but we’re still taking our time with it. Once it opens, I’ll be cutting my days down at the Foundation to three a week. If the bakery takes off then . . .” He shrugs. “We’ll see.”
We spend the next twenty minutes looking at pictures on Tay’s phone of cakes and cookies and cupcakes that Dakota has decorated since he launched his business with his cousin as high school kids in Halifax. Tay’s proud-meter shoots up to five thousand. Dakota smiles at him indulgently, letting him have the spotlight.
Finally, our hour comes to a close, and I ask the question I’d ask of any athlete who’s just come out. “Do you have any advice for LGBTQ kids out there who want to play sports?”
Tay thinks about that one for a minute, running a hand through his hair. “I guess I would say that . . .” He pauses, thinking it through some more. “Playing sports comes with all sorts of expectations. From your teammates, your coaches, your family, the fans. You’re gonna have expectations coming out of your ass, and you’re going to try to meet them all to keep everyone happy. You can’t. It’s impossible. Just make sure that you’re meeting your own. Have enough self-respect to know that it’s okay to say no. As long as you’re meeting your own expectations—or are working toward that—you can’t lose. Don’t let anybody make you feel like you’re not good enough.
“Because you already are.”
Lacroix attends Dakota’s birthday dinner! Read the bonus scene by signing up for my newsletter. Already signed up? Get the bonus scene by filling in this form.
Did you enjoy Risking the Shot? Check out the rest of the Stick Side series:
Get Mitch Greyson and Alex Dean’s story in On the Ice (Stick Side #1).
Get Ashton Yager and Dan Greyson’s story in The Nature of the Game (Stick Side #2).
And get Shots on Goal (Stick Side #3), featuring Mitch’s best friend, Cody.
Author’s Note II
My research into paramedicine took me in several different directions, but the one conclusion I came to was that no two college or university programs are the same—even within the same province. For those of you wondering, Tay’s program of study is based off an actual program offered by the University of Toronto in conjunction with Centennial College, and his coursework follows U of T’s program requirements as closely as I could make it. Any errors or inconsistencies are entirely my own.
A huge thank you to my dad, and my brother-in-law, for always being willing to answer my hockey-related questions!
Huge thank you also to Happy Joy, a paramedic with years of experience who helped answer my paramedicine-related questions so that I could get Tay’s course material right.
As always, to my beta readers, Jill and Jules; my editor, Brenda Chin; my copyeditor, Posy; and my proofreader, Kiki—this book would not be what it is without your support and feedback. Special thank you to Jill for the readthrough of my very crappy first few draft chapters! Natasha, thank you for bringing Tay to life with this cover, and Stacey, thank you for making the interior shine.
Amy’s lived with her head in the clouds since she first picked up a book as a child, and being fluent in two languages means she’s read a lot of books! She first picked up a pen on a rainy day in fourth grade when her class had to stay inside for recess. Tales of treasure hunts with her classmates eventually morphed into love stories between men, and she’s been writing ever since. She writes evenings and weekends—or whenever she isn’t at her full-time day job saving the planet at Canada’s largest environmental non-profit.
An unapologetic introvert, Amy reads too much and socializes too little, with no regrets. She loves connecting with readers. Join her Facebook Group, Amy Aislin’s Readers, to stay up-to-date on upcoming releases and for access to early teasers, find her on Instagram and Twitter, or sign up for her infrequent newsletter.
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STICK SIDE SERIES
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Other books:
Elias
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As Big as the Sky
The Play of His Life