Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Rook
Varga reached one arm around me while he put his free hand flat on my chest. I held on.
He was quiet. It was the version of him that only I got to see. He pulled back an inch to look at me. “We’re still here.”
We ended up at the kitchen table. Varga held one of my hands on the surface, weaving his fingers together with mine.
“I should have told you,” I said. “I’m sorry, and I’m going to change and be better at this.”
That was all. I meant to say more, but I didn’t have more.
I watched him process it. His jaw moved once. He gripped my hand tighter. There was no okay or thank you. He waited.
“There’s a name,” I said. “I haven’t told you. In fact, I’ve never told anyone. I should have given it to you a long time ago because it’s part of every wall I’ve built around us.”
He didn’t move.
“Alan Easton,” I said.
I hadn’t said his name out loud since he left the team, back when I was a longshot kid from Maine who knew every morning he was one awful month from a bus to the minors.
“Who is he?” Varga asked.
“He was a veteran on my first NHL team, over a decade in, near retirement. I was a terrified rookie, Mikkelsen pumped up to eleven. One morning he told the room I deserved to be there.” I rubbed my thumb on the back of his hand.
“That one line meant so much. He kept me in the league. He didn’t have to say it, but he did. ”
“Okay,” Varga said.
“And then something got out about him. Someone said they’d seen him with a man.
I never heard the details. I’m not sure it was true.
” I kept my eyes on Varga’s face. “It went through the room in three days. By February, he was a healthy scratch. By the deadline he had been traded somewhere that traded him somewhere else. In less than two years, he was out of hockey. I never heard his name again.”
Varga leaned back slightly.
“I didn’t say a word against him,” I said.
“I said nothing for him either. Just stopped sitting in the stall next to his. He was the most decent man on the team, and the only thing I did about it was move three feet down the bench.” I kept my voice level while my heart pounded.
“And I decided that February that nobody was ever going to see the same thing in me. It worked. I got to stay. He didn’t. ”
The kitchen was silent. The refrigerator hummed.
“Five years ago,” I said, “you got hurt, and I started showing up. Soon, I had something I thought I needed to protect. I followed my instincts and bought this house for us, and I made our cleaner sign the NDA. Then I taught you to assume someone was watching.” I swallowed hard.
“Two nights ago you asked me what I was protecting you from, and I couldn’t answer because the answer was my first team—what a locker room could do to a man in three days—and I couldn’t dig down deep enough to show it to you. ”
Varga didn’t say anything for a long moment. We sat in silence. Then he pulled his hand back, got up, and walked around behind me. He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his lips to the top of my head.
“Okay,” he said into my hair. “There you are. I’ve been looking for the rest of you for five years, and I finally get to see all of you.”
He took my hand and led me up to our room.
He undressed me slowly, tugging on my shirt and pushing it up and over my head. He placed both hands flat on my chest, thumbs moving over the muscles. I reached for the hem of his shirt out of habit, and he caught my wrist.
“Not now. You hold still and let me.”
I stopped. Switching positions was never tough. Lying still and letting him run it all was.
He got the rest of my clothes off me and laid me back against the pillows. Then he stood at the side of the bed, stripping down and letting me watch.
The sight of him still did the same thing to me it did that first night. I was already hard.
He came down over me on his hands and knees, kissing my throat. Then he kissed that soft spot below my ear before working his way down from there.
“Ten days on the road,” he said against my collarbone, “and then a fight, and then this. This is my turn.”
His lips touched a bruise under my collarbone. He was gentle, and then pressed harder. I hissed. “Yes,” Varga said.
He kissed down the center of my stomach while he kept one hand on my chest. My muscles jumped.
“You’re shaking,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“It’s okay if you’re not fine right now. That’s the whole thing, Rook. I’ve been trying to say that since we met. You can lie here and let me see it all.”
He wrapped his lips around my cock. I reached for his hair to set the pace, and he stopped. “No,” he said. “I’ve got this.”
He grinned before taking me into his mouth again. I pressed my hand flat against the sheets. I had nothing to do but let it all happen. It wrecked me.
When he had me close, he pulled off and rested his cheek against my hip.
“You stopped,” I said while panting for breath.
“I’m not done.” He kissed the inside of my thigh.
“I want this to go on for a long time. We don’t have a curfew.
No one o’clock or thirty seconds in the hall after.
We’re home.” He looked up and licked my balls.
His eyes were steady on mine in the low light.
“I want to do this like men who get to keep each other.”
He reached across me to the nightstand for the bottle of lube and settled between my knees like he meant to stay there the rest of his life. The first finger went in slowly, and he watched my face the whole time.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Keep going.”
He slipped a second finger inside and kissed the head of my cock. “I’ve got you. I’m taking my time.”
He crooked his fingers, missed, hummed as if that was interesting information, adjusted, and got it on the second pass. My spine arched off the bed. “There,” he said, pleased with himself.
He slid his fingers forward and back, and I rocked down onto his hand. When I moaned, he pulled his fingers out, slicked himself up, and pushed in, one long thrust.
I gripped his hips. “Harder.”
He gave it to me with real weight behind it, and the headboard knocked against the wall. He jammed his forearm under my shoulders to hold me where he wanted me. I dug my heels into the backs of his thighs to pull him in deeper.
Varga had a fistful of my hair with his mouth at my ear, swearing low. I took all of it and asked for more.
I swallowed the sound, releasing only low, soft moans.
“No,” he said. “Let me hear it. We’re home. Let me hear you.”
I let him hear me, something between a grunt and a howl. I came with my eyes open, gasping for breath.
He collapsed flat onto his back and pulled my head onto his chest. Then he reached for the lamp and turned it off.
“I’m tired, Luki.”
His fingers stopped combing through my hair.
“Not tonight tired,” I said. “The long kind. I’ve been so tired, and I kept thinking I could carry on until retirement, but tonight—I don’t think I can.”
He was very quiet. His heart beating was all I heard.
“The wall didn’t just hide us,” I said. “It hid me. I’ve been behind it so long that the only person who ever saw the whole man was you, and I turned even that into something we only did at night with the door locked. That has to end. I want what you want. Not for you. With you.”
He didn’t say anything. He turned his head and pressed his mouth to my hair and held it there while he breathed out, long and unsteady, and his arm wrapped tight around me.
“Then we don’t carry it until retirement,” he said. “We stop now.”
“We get ahead of it?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I exhaled. “We do it ourselves. Our words, our timing.” He nodded against me.
“On our terms,” he said.
For a while, neither of us said anything. Then it started—the shift in Varga. He took a deep breath.
“Cross won’t even blink,” he said. “You know that, right? He’ll do the thing—the nod.
It would be like we’d just told him the bus was leaving at nine.
” Varga did the nod against my shoulder so I could feel it.
“Pratt already knows. Don’t argue with me; he knows, and he’s known all five years.
Goalies see everything from back there. He’ll say one word in the hallway, and it’ll wreck you. ”
He wasn’t wrong.
“Rafe’s gonna be a disaster,” he said, softer.
“Good disaster. Kid’s been watching Heath and Kieran all season like he’s taking notes for a test.” He went quiet for a second.
“Heath,” he said finally. “Heath’s gonna lose it.
Three years he’s been sitting over there not saying anything, and the day we say it out loud in the room he’s gonna grin so hard he won’t be able to talk.
” His voice dropped lower. “I’ve wanted to be his friend for three years, Rook.
Now I can. I couldn’t because of the cover. ”
“Because of the cover,” I said.
“Yeah. I’m not mad. I’m just saying I get him now.”
He was quiet long enough that I thought he’d stopped.
“You want to know the dumb one?”
“Tell me the dumb one.”
“I’ve thought about scoring,” he said. “Home game. Late. I wouldn’t go to the bench after. I’d go to you.” He held his breath against me, like he’d said too much. “We’d kiss at center ice in front of everybody. That’s the dumb one. You can laugh.”
I didn’t laugh. I lay there in the dark with his entire vision in my mind.
“Not dumb,” I said.
He breathed out.
I reached up and found his jaw in the dark, ran my thumb along it once, and felt him relax against me.
“Now we sleep,” I said.
The thought of coming out should have closed my throat. The entire world would know about us—the team, the league, and my parents. I lay there waiting for panic to rise, and it didn’t. What came up instead was that I wanted it to be morning. I wanted the hours to pass so that we could start.
I stayed awake beside Varga. A little after three, I was still up.
I slid out from under his hand finger by finger, and he muttered something, reaching for the warm spot where I’d been. I tucked the duvet against his side and descended the stairs in the dark.
I went to the office. I turned on the lamp and opened my laptop.
Easton had been out of the game for over a decade, but it was hard to hide in the digital world.
I found out that he was in British Columbia.
He ran a community rink in a small town.
They had learn-to-skate lessons on Saturday mornings and a beer league at night.
The man who told the room I belonged had spent fifteen years on the outside, but he was still part of hockey.
I opened a blank message. I sat there with the rink in British Columbia open behind it, and I typed the first words I’d said to Alan Easton since I was twenty-one years old.