Chapter 24
ROWAN
When Rowan set foot in Vic’s house for the first time, he knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he wouldn’t be continuing his housing search.
Not only because it was a pain in the ass, but also because as “resilient” as people have called Rowan in the past, he truly hated change and wanted to minimize it as much as possible his first year on the team. Also, he just kind of loved this house.
“I don’t know if I ever thanked you sufficiently enough for letting me stay here,” he told Vic, as they sat together on the back patio around the fire table as the sun set.
Julia was over, which was a little unusual.
Rowan assumed she didn’t like the boy-house vibe, which was understandable.
Theo was on a beer run. They weren’t going to drink too much—they hadn’t won anything yet, as they were reminded about fifty times that morning—but they still wanted to mark the occasion.
They had come home from Seattle earlier that day, and it hit Rowan that it really felt like home to him.
He didn’t want to live anywhere else. He knew it was Vic’s house, but it was the house Theo had nursed him back to health after being sick in.
It was the house that he had made Theo the worst meal of his life when the stakes felt so high.
He had enough on his mind that he couldn’t spare a thought to worry yet, but he got the vibe already that he would need to find a new place to live before next season.
“You made this house a home, blah blah,” Vic said. His body relaxed against the back of the patio couch he was sitting on, Julia tucked under his arm.
“Someone had to,” Julia said. There was disdain in her voice, and Rowan really hoped it wasn’t directed at him, but he couldn’t tell.
“Jules hates this place.”
“I do not.”
“You do. You’re just too nice to say anything.”
“It just has a certain…”
“It is not your vibe,” Vic laughed. “You should see her place, man. Lots of color, still classy.”
“Not an Ikea showroom,” she added.
“Barely any of my furniture is from Ikea.”
“It just feels stale,” she settled on.
“I guess I have shitty taste, but I love it here.” Rowan said. He was fine with having shitty taste. The way things looked to him mattered way less than the way things felt.
“I’m sure it’s nice that Laney isn’t giving you a daily death glare too, huh? I gotta admit, whatever you and T are doing now, that’s how I thought it would be from the beginning, when I invited you to stay.”
“Whatever we’re doing?” Rowan asked. He and Theo weren’t officially doing anything. Did Vic know something? Had he heard something? Had Theo said something?
“You just look like those adorable photos from your juniors team they showed on every broadcast after you signed here. Where you have googly eyes for each other and shit. Interviews where you can’t shut up about each other. It’s kind of sweet.”
“Wish someone would look at me that way,” Julia joked, setting her empty White Claw down on the patio table and cracking open the backup.
“Baby, no one can ever have what Foley and Laney have. That’s true romance right there.
” Rowan knew Vic was kidding. Hockey was full of shit that looked and sounded gay but was astonishingly heterosexual.
At least half his relationship with Felix had been a lot of touching and pet names that, unfortunately for Rowan at the time, were very platonic.
“High school sweeties,” Julia added. Rowan didn’t know Julia well, but whenever they had passing conversations, she knew what was going on with hockey, whether she had really boned up when she and Vic had started boning down, or she was a fan to begin with.
Plus, Rowan knew that if someone had a passing knowledge of hockey, they probably knew who he was.
Rowan was using his entire willpower trying not to blush.
“There’s your lover,” Vic said, as Theo came out the back sliding door with a twelve-pack of Corona in his hand. It wasn’t Rowan’s favorite, but it was Vic’s, and he was the captain and the homeowner.
“Huh?” Theo asked, taking a seat next to Rowan and cracking open the box of beer.
“Nothing,” Rowan muttered.
“Just reliving your love story with your man here,” Vic said.
“With this baby boy?” Theo said, easily melting into the joke and not turning into a scared bunny like Rowan had. He handed out fresh beers, and when he settled into his seat, he wrapped an arm around Rowan’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to his temple.
“Hockey stories rarely end happy,” Vic said. “It’s a lot of saying goodbye, and not a lot of reunion.”
“Don’t I know it,” Theo said. He’d kept his arm around Rowan’s shoulders, and Rowan didn’t know what to do with himself. He didn’t know how to convey the homoerotic, just-bros thing without being…well, not just bros.
“Why do we do this to ourselves?” Vic asked.
He’d had a league-famous bromance not too long ago himself, before his best friend was traded to Toronto.
It was a couple years before Rowan got there, but he knew that Theo was sleeping in Jesper’s old bedroom now.
Vic loved having a full house even when he was still married.
“No choice,” Theo said. “Hockey’s in our blood. Hockey makes up who we are. The good and the bad.”
“The good and the bad,” Rowan agreed.
“This is the good though, boys. Don’t forget how this feels. Top seed. We didn’t win the President’s Trophy, but that’s a curse, anyway. That’s not the one we’re after.”
Vic couldn’t even call it by name. Like invoking its name would make it less likely for them to win it. Any wrong move in the Stanley Cup playoffs could easily mean elimination.
And if Rowan was going down, he would go down swinging.
* * *
Vic and Julia stayed long enough to have another drink, but Julia was a person who liked to be in her own space—and apparently she had a cat she needed to tend to. It left Rowan and Theo alone together in this house for the first time since whatever had been building between them had boiled over.
They heard Vic’s garage door close and his car slip out of the driveway, and the moment the coast was clear, Theo reeled him in at the waist for a kiss.
In a hotel, it had felt surreal. Like at any moment one of them could say, “lol jk, wasn’t that funny,” and they would go back to, well, not normal. They would go back to awkward. At home together, though, it felt undeniable.
They stood in the kitchen where they had brought their empties in to line up next to the sink and kissed, letting a slow hunger build between them. Gently, Theo pressed him up against the counter, and Rowan squeaked.
“Bad?”
“Uh,” Rowan said, guiding one of Theo’s hands to feel the bulge forming in his pants.
“Oh,” Theo said with a playful quirk of his eyebrow. He dipped to press a line of kisses to Rowan’s neck, so he was right next to his ear when he asked, “You wanna do something about that?”
“Yeah.” Rowan’s voice was just a breath. Kissing while standing up was a reminder of how much bigger Theo was now, and it was overwhelming. The abstract idea of a bigger guy was hot, but the reality of it made Rowan’s entire body feel lit ablaze.
Theo picked him up under his butt and deposited him on the counter behind them, then got to work pulling his shirt off.
He shivered when he was bare chested, the air-conditioning making his nipples pebble.
He got one hungry look from Theo before Theo had closed his lips around one of them, using his fingers to tease the other.
“We are in the middle of the house,” Rowan said, feeling exposed and anxious. He knew Vic and Julia weren’t there and weren’t coming back, but it wasn’t an impossibility, and he wouldn’t be able to think about anything other than getting walked in on unless they had a door closed behind them.
Theo pulled back and leaned in close enough to nudge his nose against Rowan’s. “Is public sex out of the question, too?”
Rowan blanched, and Theo’s hands came up to cradle his face. “I’m sorry, that was mean. I’m not trying to kill your boner here.”
“The idea of being walked in on would probably make me too anxious to come, if you wanted me to last longer than last time,” Rowan said, and Theo’s worried expression relaxed.
“Do you want to go to my room or yours?”
“Yours has the bigger bed.” He hadn’t spent much time in Theo’s room, since it was out of the way of the rest of the house, and Rowan normally had little reason to go up there. He wanted a better look.
“Alright, then, we’re heading up.”
Rowan took the stairs two at a time, and when Theo closed—and locked—the door behind him, he felt something inside of himself unknot.
He had lived so much of his life under a microscope that it had made him fiercely protective of the more personal parts of himself. Not always in the healthiest ways.
Theo’s bedroom was a little plain and a little messy.
He had the wonky snake jar he had painted on their not-date on his dresser next to what looked like the result of emptying his pockets before bed every night.
Crumpled receipts, change, a tube of ChapStick.
The painting over his headboard was bland and impersonal, a walking bridge over a creek. Rowan knew Theo hadn’t picked that out.
“Feel better?” Theo asked, pulling Rowan in for a hug and letting Rowan relax into it. He thought Theo would throw him on the bed immediately, but he was letting Rowan take the time to acclimate back into the horny mindset of just a few minutes ago.
“Do you want to fuck me?” Rowan’s question was muffled by Theo’s shoulder, but Theo heard it perfectly clear.
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I want to fuck you. I’ve wanted to fuck you for ten fucking years. Are you kidding?”
“Now?”
Theo kissed his forehead, which did not feel like an “I am about to fuck you” move to Rowan. “Well, based on yesterday, what just happened in the kitchen, and the fact that you’re a virgin—”