Chapter 11
REN
The road trip was a test that neither of us studied for.
Three games in five days: Tampa, Miami, Carolina.
The Reapers traveled by charter flight, which meant thirty hockey players, a coaching staff, medical team, and support personnel stuffed into an aircraft for two hours with the specific, concentrated energy of men who were about to compete and needed to manage the adrenaline.
I traveled with the team now. Video analysts were part of the road staff, which meant I had a seat on the plane and a room at the hotel and a credential that got me into the press box and a proximity to Jonah Park that was, under road trip conditions, approximately ten times more dangerous than our already dangerous domestic arrangement.
At home, we had walls. Separate rooms, even if the separation was becoming increasingly fictional.
Doors that closed. A kitchen counter to stand behind when someone dropped by unannounced.
On the road, we had hotel hallways and team buses and the constant, unavoidable surveillance of twenty-eight men who lived in each other's pockets for five days straight.
The hotel rooms were assigned by the travel coordinator.
Players roomed in pairs. Staff had singles.
I had a single on the fourteenth floor. Jonah's room was on the twelfth, shared with a rookie defenseman named Eriksson who went to bed at 9 PM and slept like the dead, which was a detail Jonah relayed to me via text with the specific, understated significance of a man providing tactical intelligence.
Tampa. First night. The team went out after the game, a win that put everyone in high spirits.
We gathered at a restaurant near the waterfront, long tables pushed together, the noise level escalating with every round.
I sat across from Jonah and three seats down, which was close enough to see him and far enough to maintain plausibility.
The problem with maintaining plausibility was that my face was a traitor.
Every time Jonah said something funny, which was constantly, I smiled.
Not the careful, measured smile of a colleague.
The specific, involuntary, face-altering smile of a person who was in love and whose facial muscles had not received the memo about discretion.
Luca, who was sitting next to Wes at the end of the table, caught my eye. His expression was knowing and warm and contained the particular Italian wisdom of a man who had personally navigated a secret locker room romance and recognized the symptoms.
He mouthed: Careful.
I adjusted my face. The adjustment lasted approximately forty-five seconds before Jonah made a joke about the waiter's pronunciation of "bruschetta" and my face betrayed me again.
After dinner, the team dispersed. Jonah and I walked to the elevator in a group of six, the proximity required by logistics and the distance required by secrecy creating a tension that I felt in every muscle.
His hand brushed mine in the elevator. The contact lasted a fraction of a second.
My entire nervous system registered it like a seismic event.
He got off on twelve. I got off on fourteen. The doors closed between us and the separation was physical and absurd and I went to my single room and sat on the single bed and texted him.
This is stupid.
His response: Which part?
The part where you're two floors away and I can't touch you.
Three dots. Then: Eriksson is asleep. Snoring. The man sounds like a diesel engine.
Is that an invitation?
A pause. Then: Room 1208. Don't get caught.
I got caught by no one. The hallway was empty. The elevator was empty. The twelfth floor was quiet with the particular post-midnight quiet of a hotel full of exhausted athletes. I knocked on 1208 with a single knuckle, the softest knock I had ever produced.
Jonah opened the door in a t-shirt and boxers and the sight of him, domestic and rumpled and close, produced a physiological response that was immediate and comprehensive.
"Eriksson?" I whispered.
"Dead to the world. Nuclear bomb wouldn't wake him."
I stepped inside. The room was dim. Eriksson was indeed unconscious, a mound of blankets producing a sustained, rhythmic snore that would have been annoying in any other context and was, in this context, the most beautiful sound in the world because it meant we were effectively alone.
Jonah pulled me into the bathroom. Closed the door.
Turned on the exhaust fan for noise cover.
The bathroom was small and bright and the fluorescent light was unflattering and none of this mattered because his mouth was on mine before the door fully closed and the kiss was hungry in a way that three hours of enforced distance had amplified beyond what either of us anticipated.
"We have to be quiet," he whispered against my mouth.
"I'm not the loud one."
"You are absolutely the loud one. Last Thursday you made a sound that I'm fairly certain the neighbors heard."
"That was involuntary."
"Then you'd better practice voluntary."
His hands were under my shirt. The touch was different in a hotel bathroom. More urgent. The scarcity of privacy created an intensity that our apartment, with its unlimited access, did not produce. We were stealing this. The stolen quality made it electric.
He lifted me onto the bathroom counter. The counter was cold against the backs of my thighs and his body between my legs was warm and the temperature differential was doing things to my sensory system that I had no interest in analyzing.
His mouth was on my neck and his hands were on my belt and the exhaust fan was humming and Eriksson was snoring and the whole thing was ridiculous and desperate and the most alive I had ever felt.
"Tell me what you want," he said. His voice was barely audible. A breath shaped into words.
"You. Quiet. Fast."
"I can do two of those three."
"Which two?"
"You'll find out."
His hand slid into my jeans and wrapped around me and the sound I made was not quiet, which answered the question about which two.
He covered my mouth with his other hand and the sensation of being silenced while being touched, the dual submission of sound and body, was so intensely erotic that my hips bucked against him involuntarily.
He worked me with the focused efficiency of a man who had learned my responses over the past week and was applying the data under pressure.
Tournament conditions. No practice reps.
Just execution. His grip, his rhythm, the specific twist at the top of each stroke that he had discovered made me lose the ability to form sentences.
All of it deployed in a hotel bathroom at 12:47 AM with a sleeping rookie twenty feet away.
I came hard. Into his hand. Biting down on his fingers to muffle the sound, which was a detail I had not planned and which produced an expression on his face that was so raw with want that I immediately dropped to my knees.
The bathroom floor was cold. I didn't care.
I pulled his boxers down and took him in my mouth and his hand went to the counter edge and gripped it and the sound he made was, credit where due, considerably quieter than mine, though the restraint cost him visibly.
His jaw was clenched and his throat was taut and the tendons in his neck stood out like cables and the sight of Jonah Park exercising superhuman vocal control while I took him apart was the most powerful I had ever felt.
He came with a shudder and a bitten-off version of my name that was more consonant than vowel and I swallowed because the logistics of the situation did not permit alternatives and because I wanted to and the wanting was its own revelation.
Afterward. On the bathroom floor. His back against the tub, my head on his thigh. The exhaust fan humming. Eriksson snoring through the wall.
"We are going to get caught," he said.
"We are not going to get caught. Eriksson sleeps like a man in a coma."
"Not by Eriksson. By someone. This is not sustainable. Sneaking through hotel hallways at midnight. Hooking up in bathrooms."
"It's a little sustainable."
"Ren."
"I know." I lifted my head from his thigh and looked at him. The fluorescent light was doing him no favors and he was still the most beautiful thing in the room. "We tell Cole after the road trip."
"After the road trip."
"I promise."
"Okay."
I kissed him. He kissed me back. The bathroom was small and bright and smelled like hotel soap and the specific, private scent of what we had just done, and the combination should have been unromantic but was instead the most intimate space I had ever occupied because the intimacy was not about the setting. It was about the man.
I snuck back to my room at 1:15 AM. The hallway was empty.
The elevator was empty. The fourteenth floor was silent.
I let myself into my single room and lay on my single bed and pressed my hand against my own mouth where his hand had been and felt the ghost pressure of his palm silencing me and the ghost pressure was enough to make my heart rate spike all over again.
The road trip continued. Miami. Carolina. Two more games, two more hotel nights, two more exercises in the specific, excruciating discipline of pretending the person you love is just a colleague.
We won all three games. Jonah played beautifully. I watched from the press box and took notes and the notes were professional and the feelings behind the notes were anything but.
On the flight home, Jonah sat four rows ahead of me. He did not turn around. He did not text. He was a professional in a professional setting and the professionalism was appropriate and I respected it and also I wanted to climb over four rows of seats and sit in his lap.
When we landed, we shared a ride home from the airport. In his truck. The radio on low. The familiar drive from Hartsfield to Midtown.
"We made it," he said.
"We made it."
"Nobody noticed?"
"Luca noticed."
"Luca notices oxygen molecules. He doesn't count."
"He mouthed 'careful' at me during dinner."
"Of course he did."
We pulled into the apartment parking lot. He turned off the engine. The truck was dark. The city hummed around us.
"I don't want to sneak through hotel hallways anymore," I said. "I don't want to be quiet in bathrooms. I want to be loud in our apartment and eat breakfast at our table and hold your hand when we walk to the car."
"Then we tell Cole. This week."
"This week."
He leaned across the console and kissed me. The kiss was slow and domestic and contained nothing of the urgency of the hotel bathroom. It was the kiss of a man coming home, and the home was not the apartment behind us. The home was the person in the passenger seat.
"Let's go inside," he said.
"Let's go inside."
We went inside. We did not go to separate rooms. We went to his room, which was our room, and we fell into bed together with the grateful, boneless relief of two people who had spent five days performing separation and were done. Absolutely, irrevocably done.
The telling was coming. The reckoning was close. But tonight, in the dark, in the bed that was ours, with no walls between us and no walls needed, the future was something to walk toward rather than something to fear.
We'd walk toward it together. Starting this week.
-e