Chapter 9
When Ramsey’s phone rang halfway through him scrambling himself some eggs, he glanced at the screen with a resigned sigh and tucked the phone between his ear and his bare shoulder.
“Took you long enough,” he told Brody.
“Eff you too.” Brody sounded exhausted, and Ramsey didn’t need to do the time zone math to know it was crazy early in California, where Brody lived with his boyfriend.
“Expected to hear from you at least half an hour ago,” Ramsey said.
“You don’t wanna know what I was doing half an hour ago,” Brody retorted, sounding marginally more awake now.
“Gross.” The dish back was automatic. Ramsey could hardly bitch at his best friend for his big, hot football-playing boyfriend when . . .well.
Not that Nate was his boyfriend. He wasn’t even his fake boyfriend. He was his . . .well, his . . .big, hot football-playing casual dating guy. Big, hot football-playing fake casual dating guy.
And that was a real mouthful that he wouldn’t have told Brody, even if he was telling him the whole truth.
“Got a lot of room to talk these days,” Brody said smugly.
“That didn’t take you very long.” Ramsey was resigned. He had given his best friend so much crap about Dean it was only fair that he had to take it back.
“Shoe’s on the other foot now, huh.” Brody paused. “You wanna hear the texts Wes sent me about it. Cause oh boy, there’s some good ones in there.”
“I imagine,” Ramsey said dryly. He flicked off the stove and grabbed his plate, loading it up. “Let’s get this over with, okay? I have a PT appointment this morning.”
Maybe it hadn’t been kosher to use his intricate knowledge of his best friend and his big science brain and his even bigger heart against him, but Ramsey wouldn’t be Ramsey if he didn’t try.
“How’s that going? I know you said the GyroStim was working—” He broke off abruptly. “Oh, you fucking asshole.”
“What?” Ramsey asked innocently.
He could practically hear Brody roll his eyes through the phone. “You know exactly what you did. Don’t fucking change the subject.”
“I didn’t—”
But Brody knew him way too well to believe it. Nobody else, except Wes, knew him better. “Bullshit,” Brody said, laughing under his breath. “You forget that you can’t run me like the way you run everyone else on the fucking planet.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna try,” Ramsey muttered.
He settled down at the island, setting the phone on the counter next to his plate of eggs and putting it on speaker.
“I’m just trying to figure out what your angle is in all this,” Brody said and Ramsey’s mental antenna pinged.
“What do you mean?” he asked carefully while trying not to sound careful.
“Oh come on, you don’t actually like this guy,” Brody said. “You don’t do that.”
Maybe Ramsey had taken Wes’ relatively easy belief in his and Nate’s charade for granted.
“And what, I can’t change?” Ramsey argued.
Brody hummed under his breath.
“Didn’t you change too, when you met Dean?”
“That’s not fair,” Brody complained.
“You told me so many times you didn’t want to get involved with anyone. You were perfectly happy being solo, and then you met Dean.”
“You mean, you shoved Dean into my lap.”
“Well, to be honest, I sort of think of you two as the other way around—”
Brody interrupted him with an outraged noise. “I really don’t want you thinking about it.”
“Come on, I’m not that cold-blooded.” He wasn’t going to tell Brody that he’d only thought about him and Dean objectively, wondering, like he always tended to do, how they might fit together. He’d bet that they’d be exactly what each other needed.
It was always satisfying to be proven right, but then there was being a little too right.
Not that he’d wanted Brody for himself—Brody was too sweet and naive, and a friend, and Ramsey never played around where he ate—but he’d never, ever expected what happened.
One of the few times he’d truly been taken by surprise.
“Still don’t like it,” Brody said. “But apparently you’ve got your own football player these days, so now you don’t have to fantasize about mine anymore.”
Ramsey spluttered.
“You didn’t tell me about him,” Brody continued, not sounding hurt, his tone still so casual, “and I can’t figure out if that means he doesn’t mean anything or that you were worried I was going to clock just how much he does mean to you.”
“Stick to what you’re good at, science boy,” Ramsey said, but he was suddenly a little worried.
“Psychology is a science, dumbass.”
“A soft science,” Ramsey retorted.
“Are you fucking joking right now? No, don’t answer that. I can see exactly how it is.” Brody paused and Ramsey’s fingers clutched, damp with sweat and sudden nerves, around his fork. “We don’t have to talk about it. So tell me about your physical therapy. How’s it going?”
“Symptom free for three weeks and counting. Feeling good. I feel like . . .” Ramsey wet his lips, not wanting to say it, even though he knew Brody wanted to hear it. But what if he jinxed it?
“Feel like what?” Brody prompted. And maybe he’d let Ramsey go about Nate, but he wasn’t going to ever let him down easy when it came to his health.
“I feel like maybe it’s finally clearing. Maybe . . .”
Brody had been in California for the entirety of Ramsey’s injured reserve stint, but unsurprisingly, he’d been as involved as possible. He was the one who’d come to Ramsey and suggested the GyroStim that had saved Sidney Crosby’s career.
Even found the closest one to Buffalo, that just happened to be in a hospital in Toronto. “And,” Brody had said, “you’re already there most of the time, so it works out.”
At that point, he hadn’t told Brody that he’d been crashing in Wes’ guest room, not wanting to worry him, but then he shouldn’t have been surprised either that his two best friends had been talking about him behind his back.
“Maybe?” Brody prompted.
“You know what I’m saying.” Ramsey didn’t want to say it so bluntly.
“Yeah,” Brody said. He’d been a hockey player. He knew how superstition was baked into hockey DNA. “But God, that’s so great. I’m so happy for you.”
“Well, I’m not sure yet. But things are promising.”
“When are you getting back on the ice?” Brody asked.
“Not sure yet, but hopefully soon. Maybe in the next week or so? Balance is so much better,” Ramsey admitted. “But the Wolves want me to stay up here, and keep using the GyroStim, so they’ve been talking to the Leafs about letting me use their practice facility during off-hours.”
“And,” Brody added slyly, “I bet you’re wanting to stay up in Toronto anyway.”
“Brods,” Ramsey warned.
“You can’t tell me that’s not part of it.”
“I want to play hockey again.”
“Well, no shit, of course you do.”
“That’s all I’m saying,” Ramsey said.
“And all I’m saying is that you’re probably extra motivated.”
Ramsey sighed. “I thought you didn’t think I was legit interested in Nate.”
“Oh, is that his name?” Brody asked innocently. “Are you telling me about him now?”
“Dick,” Ramsey hissed.
But Brody just laughed. “How’d you meet him?”
For a split second, Ramsey wanted to tell Brody the whole truth.
He’d not even been tempted to tell Wes—probably because Wes was too close to the whole situation—but he felt a nearly impossibly huge yearning to be honest with someone about it.
Someone who’d understand. Who’d make all the right sympathetic noises and then kick his ass from here to Buffalo about it.
The only person who could do that would be Brody. But he knew Brody and Wes talked, specifically and mostly about him, which was a situation he was only tolerating, and if he told Brody, Wes would eventually find out and then kick ass in a way he didn’t need.
“At the bar,” Ramsey said vaguely. That was true.
“Wes said he didn’t like you on sight. That ever happened to you before?”
Ramsey laughed because what else was he supposed to do? He couldn’t say, actually, he liked me too much. But more than that, he saw right through me.
“Oh, sure,” Ramsey said lightly, though he wasn’t sure that had happened before.
“Bullshit,” Brody said. “You wrap everyone around your little spider fingers. It’s what you’re best at. Weaving the right web, at the right time, for the right person.”
Most of the time Ramsey was grateful for his skills, but when he contemplated how hard he’d worked to try to get Nate to ease up, he only felt a deep-seated frustration.
“Well, it didn’t work on him. Hasn’t worked on him,” Ramsey said.
The only thought that eased it was flashes of memory from last night. Nate smiling as he added too much sushi to the online order. Nate and him on the couch, holding hands. Nate teasing him, more gently than normal. Nate actually listening when Ramsey talked about hockey.
Ramsey would have said, unequivocably, before this that none of that would have particularly interested him. Maybe it would have even bored him.
But he hadn’t been bored at all.
“Seems like something must have. Wes told me you guys went on a date last night. You, a date. I can’t even imagine it.”
“You want me to tell you about it, so you can,” Ramsey guessed.
Brody laughed. “Well, yeah. No shit. This is big.”
Ramsey was tempted to say again, but you don’t believe it, but if he kept bringing it up, kept picking at that thread, Brody would eventually get even more suspicious than he already was.
He couldn’t figure out what to say. Was it big? It didn’t feel big, maybe because it wasn’t really real. But if it was real, it would be big, wouldn’t it? That Ramsey would be panicking. Terrified that someone who wasn’t Wes or Brody might see behind his carefully reinforced walls.
But before he could decide which angle to take, Brody continued. “I’m trying to figure out why you’re not freaking out more.”
“How do you even know if I am?”
“Fair. Except I don’t think I’ve ever really seen you freak out, before. Maybe a little, when I told you I was going to med school. But that was about you, not about someone else.”