US Chapter 1
Wes
Vancouver is a beautiful city, but I can’t wait to leave it.
We’ve just finished the longest road trip on our schedule, and I cannot fucking wait to go home.
Standing in a fancy hotel room overlooking the waterfront, I shake the tissue paper out of a shirt I just bought at the boutique around the corner.
Since I’ve been living out of my suitcase for so long, I’m out of clean laundry.
But this is a great shirt, and it looked at me as I passed the storefront on my way back from signing autographs at a charity luncheon.
I unbutton it and slip it on. In the hotel mirror, I check the fit, and it looks fine. Great, even. The cotton is a fine weave, and there’s a lime-green checked pattern shot through the fabric. It’s very British, and the lively color reminds me that it won’t always be February.
Now that my dress code includes a suit and tie three or four times a week, I’ve had to pay more attention to my wardrobe. In college I wore a suit maybe three times a year. But it’s no hardship because I like clothes. And the hotel mirror says they like me, too.
I’m a sexy motherfucker. If only the one person I care about was here to appreciate it.
Last night we obliterated Vancouver, and it’s not bragging to say that I was the reason why.
Two goals and an assist—my best showing yet.
I’m having the kind of rookie season that makes headlines.
Though right this second I’d trade it all for a night in front of the TV with Jamie and a blowjob. I am beat. Whipped. Knackered.
Luckily, all that’s left of this trip is one more ride on the team’s jet.
I grab my phone off the desk and unlock it. With the selfie cam, I shoot a picture of my abs, the shirt parted to reveal my six-pack, my hand over my crotch. It took me a while to figure out that Jamie has a thing for my hands. I swear he likes them more than my dick.
I send the picture. No commentary needed.
The hotel room gets one last glance, but I’ve packed everything. I’ve learned in a hurry not to leave charging cords and toothbrushes behind. We’re on the road so often that packing has become my new skill.
My phone vibrates with a text. Grrrr. Just get home, would you? I don’t need any pics. My poor lonely dick is so hard.
That reminds me of old vaudeville jokes. So I reply, How hard is it?
Hard enough to pound nails into our bare walls, he replies. It’s true that we haven’t exactly decorated our apartment. We both work a lot and there’s been no time.
But, as always, sex is a greater priority than home decor. Show me, I beg. There’s a reason I keep my phone locked down. Jamie and I like to indulge in some private photography.
He doesn’t answer, though. Maybe he isn’t at home. It’s afternoon in Vancouver, which means it’s later in Toronto… Fuck. I’m sick of doing this math all the time. I just want to go home.
I grab my suitcase and head downstairs. A few of the guys are already waiting in the lobby, just as eager to get home as I am. I wander over to where they’re standing.
“Jesus,” Matt Eriksson says as I approach. “My wife better be home and naked when I get there. And the kids had better be asleep. With, like, fucking earplugs in their little ears.”
Eight days is a long time, I inwardly agree.
But I don’t say it out loud, because even though my teammates are great guys, I don’t engage in these discussions.
It’s not my style to lie and pretend there’s a girl at home waiting for me.
And I’m not ready to tell them who is. So I keep my own counsel.
Except Eriksson’s Nordic features have turned in my direction, and a goofy grin breaks out on his face. “Shit, my eyes! I think I’m blind.”
“Why?” I ask halfheartedly. Eriksson is always joking about something.
“That shirt! Jesus.”
“Seriously,” the veteran Will Forsberg says, laughing as he covers his eyes with one hand. “It’s so bright.”
“It’s so gay,” Eriksson corrects.
This comment doesn’t faze me in the least. “This shirt is Tom Ford, and it’s killer,” I mutter. “Bet you twenty bucks it shows up on the puck bunny blogs before the end of the week.”
“Attention whore,” Forsberg accuses. More than any of the other guys on the team, Forsberg eats up the media attention we get. When my mug started showing up on , he didn’t appreciate the competition.
Joke’s on him, though. He can keep the entire population of puck bunnies.
“Just sayin’,” Eriksson presses, “you could do well in the bars on Church Street in that shirt.”
“Yeah?” I ask. “You know from personal experience?”
That shuts him up. But Blake Riley is squinting at my chest now. He’s a big puppy dog of a guy with messy brown hair and no filter. “It’s, like, hypnotizing almost. It says, ‘Yowza. I fucking dare you to look away’.”
“It says, ‘Three hundred dollars, please’,” I correct. “It’s expensive to look this good.”
Blake snorts, and Forsberg says I should ask for my money back. Then the topic moves on to another brand of smack talk and speculation that the bus won’t ever show up and that we’ll all die of blue balls in Vancouver.
Eventually we board, though. I take a seat alone.
We’re halfway to the airport when my phone buzzes with a text.
I have it set so that none of my texts (especially the photos) show up on the screen unless I’m logged in.
It’s a pretty crucial precaution, and the text Jamie has just sent me proves why.
When I authenticate my thumbprint, the screen fills with a picture that is not safe for work.
It’s both dirty and hysterical all at once.
Jamie’s very hard dick fills the shot. Only it’s angled toward the wall where the full, pink head leans against a flat nail that it’s presumably pounding.
And Jamie has used some app to draw a happy face on his cockhead.
The effect is startlingly transformative.
His dick looks like…an expressive, alien creature performing some minor home repair.
I give a snort of laughter. And here they thought my shirt was gay. I’ll show you gay…
“Wesley?”
Blake rises from the seat behind me to say something, and I press down on the menu button of my phone so hard that my knuckle cracks.
“Yeah?” I wonder what he saw.
“Remember how I asked you whether you liked living at 2200 Lake Shore?”
“Sure?”
“My stuff got moved there yesterday. I’m your new neighbor on the fifteenth floor.”
Seriously?
“That’s great, man,” I lie. When he’d asked me if I liked the place, I should have told him all the drawbacks.
It’s too far from the subway. The cold wind off the waterfront is a bitch.
Nothing against Blake, but I don’t need any of the neighbors to know me.
I work pretty hard to fly under the radar.
“Yeah, the view is killer, right? I’ve only seen it during the day, but the lights at night are probably spectacular.”
“They are,” I admit. As if I care. The view of my boyfriend’s face is the only one I want right now. And we still have a four-hour flight until I get home to him.
“You can help me find all the best bars in the ’hood,” Blake suggests. “I’ll buy the first round.”
“Awesome,” I say.
Fuck, I’m thinking.
It takes eighteen years to get back to Toronto.
By the time we’ve landed and gotten our luggage back, it’s seven o’clock. I’m really looking forward to spending some time with Jamie, but there’s a deadline. He has to leave at six o’clock tomorrow morning for an away game in Quebec with his major juniors team.
We have eleven hours, and I’m still not there yet.
Every red light on the way home makes me seethe.
But finally I’m pulling into the parking garage (a feature of the building that I’d boasted about to Blake, damn it).
I wheel my giant duffel into the elevator and luckily the car climbs toward our tenth-floor apartment without any stops.
I fish my keys out so they’re ready in my hand.
At long last, I’m twenty paces away, then ten. Then I’m opening our door. “Hey babe!” I call out like I always do. “I made it.” I drag my duffel over the threshold, then toss my suit coat on top, abandoning these things beside the door, because all I need now is a kiss.
Only then do I notice that our apartment smells amazing. Jamie has cooked dinner for me. Again. He is the perfect man, I swear to God.
“Hey!” he calls, emerging from the hallway leading to our bedroom. He’s wearing jeans and nothing else except—and this is unusual—a beard. “Do I know you?” He gives me a sexy smile.
“I was going to ask the same thing.” I’m staring at the sandy-blond beard. Jamie has always been clean-shaven. I mean—we’ve known each other since before facial hair. He looks different. Older, maybe.
And hot as blazes. Seriously, I can’t wait to feel that beard against my face, and maybe my balls… Jesus. The blood is already rushing south, and I’ve been home fifteen seconds.
And yet I’m just stuck there in the middle of the room for a moment, because even though it’s been eight months since Jamie and I started up together, I’m still a little stunned at my own good fortune. “Hi,” I say again, stupidly.
He walks forward, his easy gait so familiar that my heart breaks a little bit. He puts his hands on my traps and squeezes the muscle there. “Don’t go away for so long. If you do that again, I’m going to have to sneak into your hotel room on the road.”
“Promise?” I ask, and it comes out like gravel. He’s close enough now that I can smell the ocean scent of his shampoo and the beer he drank while he waited for me.
“If I ever get a winning lottery ticket and a day off, I’ll do it,” he says. “Hotel sex after a game? Sounds hot.”
Now I’m measuring the distance to our sofa and counting the layers of clothes I’ll need to remove in the next ninety seconds.
But Jamie takes his hands off my shoulders. “I ate already, but your plate is in the oven. I just put it in there a few minutes ago. Chicken enchiladas. They should take fifteen minutes to warm up.”
“Thanks.” My stomach grumbles and he grins. I guess I’m hungry for more than one thing.
“Want a beer?”
Do I ever. “I’ll get ’em. Sit down. Cue up the next episode. We can watch it while we wait.” I sound overly polite to my own ears, but coming home after a road trip usually feels a little weird. There’s this brief but awkward re-entry that I hadn’t known to expect.
I have little use for the domestic chatter my married teammates share.
But if I were the sharing kind, it would be tempting to ask—will it always be this way?
Do the guys who’ve been coupled up for ten years feel it, too?
Or is it the newness of our relationship that makes things a little odd for an hour or two whenever I come home?
Wish I knew.
My first stop is our open-plan kitchen for two beers, which I open and then deposit on our coffee table.
We’ve lived here almost six months, and still there isn’t much furniture.
We’ve both been too busy to really furnish the place.
But we have the real necessities: a giant leather sofa, a kickass coffee table, a rug and a big TV.
Oh—and there’s a wobbly armchair that I rescued off the curb and kept over Jamie’s objections. He calls it the death chair. Jamie gives it wide berth, insisting that it has bad karma.
You can take the boy out of California, but you can’t take the California out of the boy.
I need to change, so I take a step toward our bedroom. But then I stop to ask him a question. “Hey, what do think of this shirt? I picked it up today, because I ran out of clean stuff.”
Jamie points the remote at the TV. “It’s very green,” he says without turning to look.
“I like it.”
“Me too, then.” He turns and the beard catches me off-guard again. But his smile sends me jogging toward our bedroom.
The bed is made up perfectly, so I toss my trousers, my very green shirt and my tie on the comforter, in a hurry to get back to Jamie.
I throw on a pair of sweats and make it back to the living room to find Jamie propped into the corner of the couch on his side, his legs stretched out across the cushions.
I don’t bother pretending to play it cool.
I lay down right in front of him, my head against his shoulder, my back to his front.
“Shit,” I complain when I realize my error. “I left the beers out of reach.”
He clamps a hand over my abs. “Go,” he says.
I stretch with both hands for our bottles and he prevents me from falling on the floor. While the table is positioned perfectly for our feet when we’re sitting up, this little maneuver is for beer emergencies while we’re cuddling. They happen sometimes.
I pass his bottle over my head and hear him take a swig. The opening credits for Banshee—our current show—are rolling. “You didn’t cheat on me while I was gone, did you?” I ask.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. The last episode wasn’t a cliffhanger, though. So you could say I haven’t really been tested.”
I snort into my beer and lean back into the solid warmth of his chest. Usually I’m really invested in this show, with its freaky plot and crazy fight scenes.
But tonight it’s just an excuse to be skin to skin on the couch with my man while my dinner reheats.
His beard tickles my ear, and that’s unexpected.
I tilt my head back so his beard brushes my face, too.
I can’t see the TV at all, and I just don’t care.
He dips his chin and rubs the beard against my cheek, then brushes his lips across my neck, leaving shivers in his wake. “What do you think?” he asks quietly.
I turn toward him carefully so as not to spill my beer. “You look fucktastic. Like J-Tim after he left NSYNC and got hot. But I want to feel it on my balls before I weigh in.”
He tips his head back and laughs suddenly, and that’s when the road-trip ice dam breaks. It’s just us again and his easy laugh and the comfort I feel when he’s around.
Yesss... I drop my head and lick his throat right below the border of the beard.
Then I suck on his skin gently. Jamie stops laughing and relaxes his body against mine.
We’re skin to skin from the waist up, and the feel of his heartbeat against mine makes me want to weep with gratitude.
I nuzzle my nose through his fledgling beard, taking a circuitous route toward his mouth. The hair is softer than I expected.
“Fuck. Kiss me already,” he whispers…