Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
breakaway beat
ROOK
Game day hit different when everything was on the line.
The arena was already buzzing by the time I walked in for morning skate, that particular electric hum that only happened during playoffs when every shift mattered and every mistake could end your season.
Game Two of the best-of-three against the Alberta Raiders.
Win and we were through to the semifinals.
Lose and we were going to a do-or-die Game Three.
I'd been awake since five, running plays in my head, visualizing every possible scenario. This was what I lived for—the pressure, the stakes, the way playoff hockey stripped everything down to pure will and execution.
The pre-game routine was the same as always.
Tape job, stretching, mental prep. Coach gathered us for a brief meeting where he went over the game plan, emphasizing our forecheck and reminding us that the Raiders would come out desperate.
We'd embarrassed them 4-0 in Game One, and desperate teams were dangerous teams.
“One more thing,” Coach said as we were about to head out. “We've got some pre-game entertainment today. Local band doing a quick set before puck drop. Supposed to be good for energy or whatever the marketing department is calling it.”
I barely registered the words. My brain was already on the ice, running through line matchups and power play setups. A band was just background noise.
That lasted right up until I walked out toward the bench an hour before game time and saw the stage set up at center ice.
Neon Veins.
Soren's band.
What the actual fuck.
I stopped walking so abruptly that Jace nearly ran into me from behind.
“You good, Cap?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I kept moving, but my brain was spinning.
Soren hadn't mentioned this. Hadn't said a single fucking word about his band playing at the game. Which meant this was intentional. A surprise designed specifically to wreck me right before I needed to be at my sharpest.
The lights went down and the crowd noise shifted, anticipation building. Then the opening chords hit and the stage lights came up, and there he was.
Soren was behind the drum kit, wearing a flannel tank top that showed off every goddamn tattoo on his arms and shoulders.
His hair was messy in that deliberate way that made him look like he'd just rolled out of bed, and the leather pants he had on were so tight I could see every line of his legs from fifty feet away.
He caught my eye across the arena and fucking winked.
I was going to kill him. Or fuck him. Possibly both.
The band launched into their set and Soren was absolutely in his element, sticks moving fast and sure, his whole body engaged in the rhythm.
I watched him hit the cymbals with enough force to make the sound ring through the entire building, watched the way his muscles shifted under his skin, watched him grin at the crowd like he owned them all.
This was wildly unfair. I had a playoff game to play in less than an hour and my boyfriend was up there looking like every filthy fantasy I'd ever had, performing in front of fifteen thousand people and making it look easy.
The set lasted twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of me standing near the bench trying to look professional while internally combusting. When the final song ended and the crowd erupted, Soren stood and took a bow with the rest of the band, and then they were clearing the stage and heading backstage.
I didn't even think about it. Just moved.
“Where you going?” Dmitri called after me.
“Bathroom,” I lied, and kept walking.
I caught up with Soren in the hallway near the loading area, and the second he saw me his face split into that troublemaker grin that meant he knew exactly what he'd done and had been waiting to see how long it would take me to come find him.
“Hey, Cap,” he said. “Enjoy the show?”
I grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the nearest empty room, a storage closet that smelled like cleaning supplies and stale air, and locked the door behind us.
One bare bulb overhead. Shelves of product on three walls.
Maybe eight feet of floor space and I was already crowding him back against the shelving.
“You didn't tell me you were playing today,” I said.
“Wanted to surprise you.” His hands came up to my chest, fingers spreading over my game-day suit, and the heat of his palms came through the fabric in a way that was doing absolutely nothing for my composure. “Did it work?”
“You're wearing leather pants at my playoff game.”
“I know.”
“You winked at me in front of the entire arena.”
“I did.” Still grinning, the bastard, hazel eyes bright and completely unrepentant. “You gonna do anything about it?”
I kissed him hard enough to bruise, one hand fisting in his hair and the other gripping his hip.
He opened for me immediately, tongue sliding against mine, and the sound he made went straight through my chest and lower.
I pulled back long enough to look at him, the flush across his cheekbones, the mouth I'd just wrecked, the flannel tank that showed off every tattoo on his arms and shoulders and left absolutely nothing to the imagination about what was underneath.
“You look so fucking good up there,” I said against his mouth. “Playing for all those people. Being brilliant.”
“Yeah?” His hands were already moving to my belt. “You like watching me perform?”
“I like watching you do anything. But especially when you're showing off for fifteen thousand people and making it look like breathing.” I bit his lower lip and felt him shudder against me. “Get on your knees.”
He dropped without hesitation, looking up at me with those hazel eyes gone dark, and his hands finished opening my pants and pulled my cock out and the cool air of the closet lasted about half a second before his mouth was on me.
The heat of it went through my skull immediately.
Wet and tight and his tongue pressing up from below on the first stroke, and I let my head fall back against the door and bit down hard on my fist to keep from making a sound that the entire loading corridor would hear.
He worked me over with focused and deliberate attention, no teasing, no working up to it, just his mouth taking me in deeper with each stroke until his lips were at the base and his throat was opening around the head.
“Fuck,” I breathed, the word barely clearing my teeth. “Just like that.”
He pulled off long enough to look up at me with wet lips and an expression of pure satisfaction. “I know.”
Then he went back down and took me all the way in one motion and I felt the back of his throat and my hand in his hair tightened involuntarily and he made a low muffled sound that vibrated through everything.
The control was going fast. My hand fisted harder in his hair and his eyes came up to mine and he held my gaze and swallowed around the head and I almost bit through my own knuckle.
“You planned this,” I said.
He pulled off with a wet sound. “Obviously.”
“You brought lube?”
The grin that crossed his face was so deeply satisfied that it should have been illegal in at least three provinces. He reached into the back pocket of the leather pants and produced a small bottle and held it up between two fingers like evidence in his own defense.
“I'm a prepared person,” he said.
I hauled him to his feet and spun him to face the shelving and pressed my chest against his back, my mouth at the side of his throat.
The leather pants were so tight it took both of us working at them to get them down to his thighs, and the picture of him like that, bent forward with his hands braced against the metal shelving and the leather pooled at mid-thigh and his bare skin exposed in the single overhead light, was something I was going to be carrying around for a long time.
He passed the lube back over his shoulder without being asked.
I slicked my fingers and pressed the first one in and he pushed back against my hand immediately, a low rough exhale dropping out of him.
“Yes,” he said into his forearm. “Finally.”
I worked him open with two fingers, then three, watching the way his knuckles went white on the shelf edge and the way his hips kept rolling back to take more, and his voice had gone continuous and low and entirely genuine in the way it only got when he'd stopped paying attention to what he was producing.
“You have any idea what I've been dealing with?” I pressed my mouth to the back of his neck, three fingers buried in him while he pushed back. “Standing there watching you play, looking like that, knowing everyone in that building was watching you and you were doing it for me.”
“Yeah,” he managed. “That was the idea.”
I pulled my fingers free and slicked myself and lined up and he went still, braced and waiting, and I pushed in hard and fast in one stroke that bottomed out completely and drove him forward into the shelving with a clatter that I chose not to care about.
The sound he made was not quiet and his hand shot out to grip the shelf edge and his head dropped forward and he said something into his forearm that wasn't a word.
I gave him four seconds. The tight heat of him around me was doing things to my ability to count.
Then I moved.
The pace I set was brutal and neither of us wanted it any other way, one hand gripping his hip hard enough that I'd be able to read my own fingerprints there tomorrow, the other planted flat against the shelving beside his head for leverage.
The closet smelled like industrial cleaner and sweat and the sound of my hips driving against the backs of his thighs in the small enclosed space was obscenely loud and I did not care.
He made a wrecked sound that pressed against the shelving and echoed back.
“Touch me,” he said. “Please. Rook.”
“Ask me right,” I said against his ear, and kept the pace going, deep and hard and unrelenting.