The Other Side of Her by Jessica McBrayer

The fans weren’t sure what to make of me. I was their Captain. I was single. I was Canadian. I had a new tattoo every couple of months. And my best friend, who played professional football, had just come out of the closet.

And now the world wondered if I was gay too.

I didn’t give a f***. Love was love and everyone had the right to love in the way they wanted, but I was getting some serious backlash. Most professional athletes supported gay rights and gay teammates, privately. Very few were brave enough to do it publicly. Especially in the world of professional hockey, where all the players were ‘tough guys’ and alpha males. Like a gay man couldn’t be those things too. F***, the world could be full of idiots.

The hate mail started as soon as Jaysun came out. Everyone wanted to know if I had been his lover, or if I was secretly gay but too afraid to come out. Didn’t matter how many pictures of me with women were floating around on the internet. It was common knowledge that Jaysun and I had been best friends since college. I told them that his being gay didn’t change a thing about our relationship and that he had my full support. And that was it. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to distract from Jaysun’s moment.

It did not go over well. Not with some of the media and not with some of the fans.

It got bad. Death threats started coming in and our team owner, Reese Stone, talked to me. He’d gone on record repeatedly to support Jaysun and told the world that the Cajuns stood with Jaysun and the Boston Beacons, Jaysun’s NFL team. The Beacons were a hundred percent supportive of Jaysun.
Reese worried about my safety. He wanted me to work with Cynthia Dorsan, the Cajun’s PR director, to help me work on the fans’ approval of me. Everyone just wanted the threats to stop. We all knew that total tolerance was not coming anytime soon.

Cynthia didn’t mingle with the players. As far as I knew, she didn’t mingle with anyone. She had a ten-foot-high security fence around her at all times and, from what I could see, very few people made it past her defenses. I called her the ice princess until one night I had seen her dance. It was an accident. The door had been left ajar. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She was mesmerizing.

From that moment on I called her Sin with an ‘S’ since the things I’d wanted to do with her would land me in the sin bin in a hot second. But my intentions were DOA when I tried to get past her professional persona. If it weren’t for the passion she danced with and the sleeve of ink that showed when I saw her taking off her suit jacket, I would never have believed that she wasn’t the ice princess she tried to fool the world into seeing.

Suddenly, taking Reese’s suggestion seemed like the best idea I’d had in a long time.