Chapter 4
VASILY
Taylor had chosen a sports bar that he said was fairly quiet during the week and had some good microbrews on tap. Fine by me.
About ten minutes after our conversation in the parking lot, I walked into the place, and I had to pause to let my eyes adjust from the bright afternoon to the darkness inside. When I could see again, I found Taylor at a booth beneath a neon Coors sign.
“Hi,” I said as I slid onto the bench.
“Hi.” He folded his arms on the edge of the table and studied me. Awkward silence hung between us even after a waitress took our orders, then brought us each a beer. I wasn’t sure what to say. Maybe coming here had been a mistake; we should’ve just let it go after we’d talked outside the rink.
Taylor finally spoke, though. “Just, um… right off the bat? I’m sorry. I read the whole situation wrong.” Avoiding my gaze, he murmured, “I don’t know why I took it so damn personally.”
From the way he wouldn’t look at me as he said that, I suspected he knew exactly why he’d taken it personally. I was curious, but my gut said not to pry that out of him. Not yet, anyway. We’d only just eased some of the tension that had formed during practice.
“Honestly,” he went on, watching himself thumb the edge of the table, “it shouldn’t have been a big deal.
Dancing with me or kissing me didn’t mean you had to go any further, you know?
” He met my gaze. “Even if you didn’t have the shit with your ex, like…
if you weren’t into it, you weren’t into it, you know? ”
I swallowed, heat rushing into my cheeks, and now it was my turn to avoid looking at him. “To tell you the truth, I was into it.”
I may have been imagining it, but I thought I heard Taylor’s breath hitch.
After a moment, I made myself meet his gaze again, and I swallowed hard.
“I was. I didn’t just grab you at random to dance.
” Rolling my shoulders, I exhaled. “But then I started getting into my own head, and I had to bail. I thought I was ready, but…” I trailed off and made a frustrated gesture.
“Getting rejected—it sucks. I know it does. But it really wasn’t because of you.
It could have been you or any other man in that building, and it still would have played out the same. ”
Taylor chewed his lip and nodded, staring at the table between us.
“I still don’t even know why it fucked with me so much.
Going to places like that— everyone gets rejected, you know?
I don’t…” A thought seemed to pull his brows together, but whatever it was, he let it go and mumbled, “I was stupid.”
Yeah, there was more to this. Something that made a rejection—any rejection—hit harder than it should have. I had to wonder if, just as I wouldn’t have been able to follow through with any man in the building that night, Taylor would have been just as stung by a rejection from anyone else.
Well, aside from the part where no one else in that building had, in his mind, ignored him at training camp.
“Maybe it’s good we didn’t go further than dancing, then.”
He met my gaze. “How do you figure?”
I rolled a sip of beer around in my mouth, studying him as I weighed exactly how to say this. The fact that we were speaking in my second language didn’t help; I was fluent in English, but it would never be as effortless for me as Russian.
Finally, I said, “It’s been months, and we can both remember how fucked up we were that night. The next morning probably wouldn’t have been much better.”
Taylor straightened, eyes losing focus, and he whispered, “Oh. Shit.” He reached for his beer. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
Neither had I, but now that I was thinking about it—yeah, I was glad we hadn’t hooked up. It probably would’ve been hot as hell—just seeing Taylor naked would’ve been amazing—but the regret wouldn’t have been pleasant.
And there was the part where he’d only be the second man I ever slept with, and I had a pile of regrets about the first, so… yeah. Not hooking up was the best outcome, even if it made things a little awkward today.
“Can I…” Taylor hesitated. “Can I ask about what happened? With your ex?”
My stomach somersaulted, but I nodded. “You can ask.”
He chewed his lip, and silence held for a long moment. “Feel free to tell me if it’s none of my business, but…” He absently ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “Were things really as messy as people said they were?”
I winced, dropping my gaze into my own drink. “They were messier, to be honest.”
“Yeah?” Honest curiosity, though he wasn’t being pushy.
I was tempted to keep these cards against my vest. I hated talking about Drew and our shitshow of a breakup, and I hated that anyone knew about any of it at all. On the other hand, maybe Taylor would understand better why I walked away from him the night we met at the club.
I took a deep swallow of beer and pushed the glass aside. “Which story have you heard?”
Taylor shifted in his chair. “Um. I mean, the one that’s going around social media is that your ex couldn’t handle being in a secret relationship anymore, and when you guys got into a fight in the locker room, the team turned on both of you.
” He furrowed his brow. “That… doesn’t seem like the whole story. ”
“It’s a bullshit story,” I muttered. “Drew was the reason we kept it a secret. He insisted—Ugh. Well. It doesn’t matter now. He had a laundry list of reasons why he didn’t want to be out to anyone. Not even our teammates.”
Taylor’s eyebrows climbed. “Wait, so he wanted it to be a secret?”
I nodded, swallowing against the sudden bitterness in my mouth. “I’m the one who hated it. It was—the stress. The sneaking around. It… That’s no way to carry on a relationship. If we hadn’t been roommates—both on the road and at home—I think I would have ended it a long time ago.”
“Because you’d be stuck rooming with him?” Taylor asked. “Or because rooming together was a break from the secrecy?”
I had to think about that for a moment. Now that he mentioned it…
fuck. “Both, I guess? Being roommates made it easier to be together without anyone suspecting anything. But it also meant we couldn’t get away from each other.
Not easily.” I paused. “When things started getting shaky, I realized I was kind of trapped. Drew didn’t want anyone to know about us, but if I asked for a new roommate on road trips and I moved out of our shared place—people might ask questions. I didn’t know how to explain it.”
“Wow,” Taylor said. “So you couldn’t get out without outing yourselves.”
“Exactly. Any time we’d fight and I’d suggest some space, he’d remind me of that, and… ugh. It was exhausting.”
“How did it end up getting so public?”
Laughing bitterly, I turned my pint glass between my fingers.
“Because of the time Drew thought I was going to stay at the hotel bar longer than I did. He said he was tired and calling it a night while I was hanging out with our teammates.” I sighed and brought my beer up to my lips.
“I left a little while later and busted him balls-deep in—well, in a staff member who I won’t out. ”
Taylor almost choked. “Whoa. He cheated on you? With a staff member?”
“Mmhmm. Some of our teammates heard us fighting about it, and… Well, after that, everyone knew about us. And they heard us very loudly breaking up.”
“Shit,” Taylor breathed.
“Yeah. The next morning, Coach healthy-scratched us both because he knew we weren’t fit to be on the ice.
Drew tried to do damage control with the coaches, our teammates, his piece of ass, and me, in that order.
” I rolled my eyes. “I went straight to the GM and demanded a trade out of Vegas. He had to scramble a bit, because he already had a bunch of trades in the works leading up to the trade deadline, but he made it happen. Two days before the deadline, I was on my way to Seattle.”
Taylor whistled. “How has nothing come out about the staff member? Or your ex?”
“Our GM made us all sign mountains of NDAs. Not just the three of us, but the whole team and the staff. The staff member was quietly fired with a fat severance package as long as he keeps his mouth shut.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Taylor muttered. “Screwing a player has to be a breach of contract. They shouldn’t have needed to give him severance.”
“No, definitely not. But they really, really wanted to keep this thing quiet. I have no idea why—maybe they just didn’t want the bad press, or…
I don’t know. But they were way more concerned with keeping it quiet than anything else.
” I laughed bitterly. “I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason they didn’t give me shit about demanding to be traded out.
Just had me sign an NDA and got me the hell out of there.
Now the only one left is Drew, and he gets enough points every year that he’d have to rob a bank or murder someone to get released from his contract. ”
“Jesus Christ.”
I grunted in agreement. Then I sighed and met his gaze. “When I met you at the club, it had only been a few months since that all blew up. I just… I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.”
Taylor nodded solemnly. “Yeah. Yeah, I can understand that.” He sipped his beer. “How long were you and Drew together?”
“Four years,” I whispered.
“Wow.” He exhaled. “Well, you guys did a pretty good job of hiding it. A lot of the gossip from the NAPH team filtered down to us on the farm team, and I never heard a thing about you two.”
I laughed halfheartedly. “I guess we did a good job, then. Right up until we didn’t.”
“I was already here by then.”
“Word still got around, though,” I grumbled.
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “That really sucks.”
“It does.” I traced my thumb through some condensation on my glass. “And Drew is the only boyfriend I’ve ever had, so… it’s hard to think about doing anything with anyone because it might end up public like that again.”
“Ooh, shit.” Then Taylor cocked his head. “Wait, he really was your first boyfriend? You weren’t out until… I guess your mid-twenties?”
“I was out. My family has known since I was a teenager.” I waved a hand. “It was never an issue with them. But I didn’t date. Didn’t hook up. Nothing.” I swallowed. “Drew was my first. First… everything.”
“Really?” His eyes lost focus, and I could almost hear him doing the math.
“There was a lot of pressure to play hockey when I was a teenager,” I explained.
“My parents emigrated to Canada when I was twelve, and they spent a lot of money they didn’t have to keep me on the ice.
Whenever I wasn’t playing, I was either doing schoolwork or helping with my parents’ restaurant.
” I half-shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot of time to notice boys.
Or do anything about it when I did notice. ”
“Oh. Yeah. I, uh… I played with a lot of guys who were so laser-focused on hockey, they didn’t do anything else. Including date.” He laughed softly. “I think hockey forces a lot of us to be late bloomers.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Does that include you?”
“Uh…” The blush on his cheeks should not have been that attractive.
Neither should the way he dropped his gaze and bit his lip.
Or the nervous little smile as he said, “I, uh… In major juniors, my billet family had a son who was my age and very, very bisexual. That was, you could say, a very educational year.”
I chuckled. “You were lucky.”
“I was. And he was a good guy, too. We’re still friends to this day, so—really lucky. But I totally get why some guys in this sport don’t have much experience early on.”
I relaxed a little at that. I’d been embarrassed of my inexperience for a long time, even after I’d put it behind me, so I appreciated the reassurance.
Maybe I’d just spent too much time with a man who liked to remind me that he knew better because “listen, Vasily, I’m not the one who was a virgin until I was twenty-five. ”
“So,” Taylor said, “you moved to Canada when you were twelve?”
I nodded, admittedly grateful we were moving away from my lack of experience with men.
He watched me curiously. “You still have a pretty strong accent.”
“We lived in a community with a lot of Russian immigrants. I played hockey with Canadians, but I went to a school with mostly Russian children. My neighborhood, our church, the people who came to my parents’ restaurant—Russian.”
“That explains it.”
“What about you?” I raised an eyebrow. “Where are you from?”
“Michigan. Super exciting, I know.”
I laughed. “And here we are, both surrounded by Canadians.”
That made him laugh, which made my pulse surge.
Fucking hell, he really was pretty, especially now that he’d relaxed.
His eyes dancing the neon light, and his bright smile—how had I overlooked him at training camp all those years?
Of course, Drew had never tolerated me looking at other men, even straight men who I was talking with about hockey, so I wouldn’t have let my gaze linger on Taylor.
What a missed opportunity.
I could look at him now, though, and as our conversation wound into more comfortable territory—our hometowns, our youth teams, some past and present teammates we both knew—I indulged thoroughly.
I drank in those quirky smiles and sly grins.
I watched the way his long fingers traced the logo on his beer glass or a crack in the table.
I watched those lips and remembered his kiss, wondering what it would have felt like if things had played out differently last summer.
It was only a fantasy, though. Nothing could happen between us, and nothing would.
I could look, but I wouldn’t touch. We were teammates for the next couple of weeks.
After that, judging by how well he’d played in practice today, I suspected it was only a matter of time before he was called up to the Rainiers.
Probably for the long run. Which meant we would be teammates again until one of us was traded, signed elsewhere as a free agent, or I retired.
As hot as Taylor was, and as much as I liked him now that we’d had a chance to talk, I had to leave well enough alone.
I was absolutely not putting myself in a position to get burned by another teammate.