Chapter 6
Magnus
“Magnus...Ah!”
Alaric’s sweet voice pings from my phone, fueling me with such lust I feel the need to bite my fist. My hand pumps my cock hard and fast.
“Magnus, please. Can I come yet?” His voice is breathless, ruined.
These videos are from a few days ago but I can’t help but pull them out right before going to bed. We’re both being extra careful just in case our social media’s get hacked, but fuck, I wish I could see his face.
Everything else is almost enough, but I want to see his expression. His blushed neck. His carved abs. His thick dick. Its almost enough, except I want him under my hands, whimpering my name in person.
I come on my chest with a grunt, exiting out of Alaric’s porno.
He hasn’t messaged me since that night.
The city is a smear of sodium orange and cold glass outside my window, a living thing with a pulse that matches the throb in my temples.
I should sleep. I should shower. I should do anything except sit on the edge of my couch, half-empty bottle on the coffee table, phone in my hand like a detonator.
I keep seeing his name at the top of the screen—Alaric Hale—and underneath it the last line he sent:
Goodnight, Flint.
Goodnight and not goodbye. Not block. Not silence.
I clean myself up with a tissue before finishing off my drink.
I let the whiskey burn a highway down my throat.
It’s not enough to drown the buzz in my blood, but it blurs the edges.
Recently, I’m all edges: the blade of jealousy, the bright wire of want, the thin line between being clever and being reckless.
I scroll back through our messages like a thief admiring his haul.
I should be furious about Kyle. The image of Thorn’s hand on Alaric’s back—too casual, too familiar—keeps flickering behind my eyes. It spikes my pulse every time. It makes my jaw ache from clenching. It turns the whiskey inside me to kerosene. The jealousy is primitive, ugly, and honest.
But underneath it, something mean and satisfied purrs, because I read between his lines.
He went out for burgers and milkshakes and safe kisses, and the whole time he was answering me fast, letting me in, cracking the door, letting the draft of me into that careful little life of his.
Even when he told me to grow up, even when he typed goodnight, his thumb didn’t travel to the settings menu to pull the ripcord.
He didn’t block me. He let me follow his private account.
He let me see the dog, the skyline, the book at the café.
He let me stand in a room he didn’t want me in.
And if Thorn kissed him at the end of the night? If Thorn glowed with that dopey, pleased warmth that “safe” men wear when they think they’ve found a harbor? Good for Thorn.
Alaric came home and answered me. Bent for me.
I rub my thumb across the cracked corner of my screen.
It’s an old habit—calm the hands before the fight, smooth the knuckles after.
My reflection stares back at me in the black center of the display: eyes too bright, hair a mess, the faint shadow of a grin I can’t quite control.
I look like a man who needs to be talked down.
I open a new message and type: Where do you live?
I stare at it for five seconds, then hold down backspace until the bubble is empty.
Jesus. I can hear Phoenix’s voice already—Don’t start a war you can’t finish. The captain tone he uses when he’s trying to be my older brother and not my boss. It grates because he’s not wrong.
I type again: Text me your address. I backspace that too.
New draft: Dinner. Backspace. Coffee. Backspace. Come over.
I push the heel of my hand into my eye until starbursts open and close. The urge to call him is consuming. Pick up the phone, press the green button, let it ring until his clipped voice says Hello? and then take whatever comes: the fight, the silence, the breath that means he’s listening.
I could be out the door in ten minutes. I could find myself on a couch that smells like soap and book glue and dog hair, telling him things I’ve never said out loud.
I pour more whiskey instead. The glass knocks the table with a cheap chime; my hand isn’t as steady as I want it to be.
I hate drinking alone, not because I’m sentimental but because it removes friction, and friction is what keeps a man like me from sprinting into every bad idea like it’s the length of open ice in front of an empty net.
It’s almost funny. I’ve always thought of obsession as a thing that happens to other people—the soft-handed rich who never had to grit their teeth and push, addicts who wanted a reason to fall.
I’ve been addicted to this sport, to the way a new blade feels biting into clean ice, to the weight of a game on my shoulders, to the heat of a fight when the gloves come off and something honest breaks through the rules.
But a person? No. Humans disappoint. Bodies fail. People leave.
Except now there’s a line of text on my screen that says Goodnight, Flint, and I can’t stop scrolling up to read it again, like if I do it enough times it will become something more.
Stay. Come over. Mine.
I can’t tell if the lie is that I’ve never been like this before, or the lie is that I’m telling myself I can control it.
I stand, pace to the window. My building sits high enough that I can see the river, dark as a vein, bent like a sleeping animal in the city’s ribs.
It’s beautiful and cold and indifferent—like him.
I press my forehead to the glass and let it leech some heat.
Ask him out. The thought arrives not as a suggestion but as a dare.
Not come over, not send more, not remember what I did to you, but something normal.
Something human. Dinner. Tuesday. Seven.
I can write it. I can send it. I can pretend that underneath the bite and the taunts and the blood in the water, I am a man who asks and waits and doesn’t flinch.
What happens if he says yes?
I snort softly. We sit in a restaurant under lighting that flatters him, and he pretends he doesn’t notice the way people look at us.
The server asks if we’re celebrating anything special and I say no, just hungry and he kicks me under the table for being an ass.
We talk about books—his café photo wasn’t a prop—and I tell him the truth: I don’t read as much as I should, and what I read I read like I skate, fast and looking for breaks in the line.
He talks about his sister. I ask about the dog.
He softens when he says Butter again. I watch it happen and file away the knowledge like a map of weak points and hidden doors.
What happens if he says no?
That answer I know. I go back to ice-level war.
I skate inside his stride, I steal pucks, I whisper worse things in better moments until his body confesses what his mouth denies.
Rivalry sharpens everything into sugar glass.
You can cut yourself on it and not notice you’re bleeding until the third period.
The phone buzzes. I flinch like I’ve been tapped with a cattle prod.
It’s not him. It’s a group chat. Leander sending a cursed meme about Phoenix’s protein shakes.
The kid’s relentless. I flick a smile back, send some skull emojis, and drop the phone onto the cushion like it burned me.
The apartment falls quiet again, and my mind goes back to where it’s been circling all night.
Kyle. I respect him. I hate him for making me say it, but I do.
He plays honest defense, quiet stick, smart angles.
He likes Alaric in the way safe men show affection: patient, open-handed, no claws.
I try to imagine becoming the kind of person who can tolerate that kind of love, receive it even.
The image skews. I see myself scratching at the door, leaving marks in the paint.
Nice isn’t an answer, I’d sent him earlier, and he’d volleyed back with You jealous? The question was a knife turned sideways, slid between ribs without malice. He wanted to see if I’d bleed. I did. I’m still bleeding.
I pick up the phone again and open our thread.
I type: Dinner. No cameras. No noise. Just us.
I don’t hit send. The bubble sits there, soft blue, like a small animal waiting to see if it can cross the road before the truck comes. My thumb hovers. My heart does something I hate: it changes tempo, goes fragile.
I add: I’ll behave. I delete it. The promise feels like a lie even before it exists.
I add instead: You pick the place.
I stare at the three lines for a long time.
They look like a counterfeit version of me—a polite man wearing a suit he stole.
But there’s strategy here too. Let him control the setting and he might stop bracing for the worst. Give him something to decide and I’ll learn how he decides.
If he chooses a low-light place with velvet booths, he’s looking to disappear.
If he chooses a loud bar near the rink, he’s testing how much noise we can take before we fracture.
If he says coffee, he wants daylight and an escape route.
If he says no, then I know which weapon to bring to the next game.
I lock the phone without sending. My reflection stares back from the black glass again, and I try to recognize the man looking at me.
The league calls me reckless like it’s a brand.
The Wolves marketing team prints it on shirts and we all pretend it’s a joke.
I’ve always thought of my recklessness as a controlled burn—hot enough to keep the enemy away, tidy enough not to burn the house down.
This doesn’t feel tidy. This is a field fire that jumps the road and runs into the trees.
I pace to the kitchen and wash the glass I’m not really using, spin it under the tap until the water runs cold enough to cool my wrists.