Chapter 15 #2
“Yeah.” Bell held my gaze, his gaze assessing in a way that made me instantly nervous.
“Took him a long time to get there, you know? But I think he's finally realized he doesn’t have to hide who he is anymore. It’s like this huge weight has been lifted, and he’s not going to let anyone or anything hold him back from living the life he wants. Know what I mean?”
Bell continued watching me expectantly, and I couldn't help but think he wasn't talking about Ethan anymore. Or at least, not only about Ethan. And he knew that I knew exactly what he was implying without him having to spell it out.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know what you mean.”
He nodded once, like that was precisely the answer he’d been waiting for.
He clapped me on the shoulder. “You should come over for dinner tonight. Ethan got his hands on like half a lamb, and he’s been telling me I should invite some of the guys around.”
“Let me get this straight. Ethan—your Ethan—wants company?”
He laughed. “Well … I mean, not just anyone. But you’re cool.”
“High praise,” I said.
“The highest,” he agreed. “So you’ll come?”
“I’d love to, but umm …” My hand came up to scratch at my jaw, a nervous tell I'd never been able to shake. “My best friend from college is in town visiting. Would it be okay if I brought him along?”
Given the tone of our conversation, maybe I was imagining things, but I swore I saw Bell's gaze sharpen for an instant before settling into something more neutral. “Don’t think I’ve heard you mention any friends before.
I always assumed you were a loner like Ethan before he met me.
Maybe that’s why he's comfortable around you.”
My pulse kicked up at the comparison, but I forced myself not to show it.
“Yeah, well. Sebastian and I lost touch for a while, but we ran into each other when I was in Vegas for that tequila thing. It was … uh … like no time at all had passed. He’s doing some work out here, so …
” I realized I was babbling and cut myself off.
“Cool,” Bell said easily, thankfully ignoring my stammering. “What kind of work?”
“Political consulting. Campaign strategy, that kind of thing.”
His eyebrows rose. “No shit? Ethan’s gonna love that. Fair warning, though—once he gets going on politics, it’s hard to shut him up.”
“Somehow, I seriously doubt that.” Some of the tension I'd been holding seeped from my shoulders. It'd be easier to keep up our ruse if the conversation stayed focused on Sebastian's job and not our past. “But I’ll make sure to warn Sebastian anyway.”
“So that’s a yes? You’ll come?”
“I mean, I haven’t asked him yet. But I don’t see why not.”
Even as I said it, I could come up with at least three different reasons why Sebastian would balk at the invite, but I was trying not to let myself go there.
Bell was my teammate and my friend, and Sebastian was my …
well, whatever he was. Friend, yes. But so much more, too, and there was no reason why I couldn’t introduce my friends. “If you’re sure it’s okay.”
“More than okay.” He climbed off his bike and grabbed his towel, wiping the sweat from his face and neck. “Come by around six?”
“Sure.”
“And I can’t wait to meet your … friend.”
I watched him go, my heart pounding harder than our easy workout warranted. After that parting comment, the way he'd stressed the word "friend," there was no way Bell didn’t suspect there was more to it than that.
And the weird thing was, I wasn’t scared. I was mostly just relieved.
Sebastian was exactly where I’d left him at the kitchen island, his laptop open, his coffee mug replaced with a glass of water. He glanced up when I walked in, his face lighting up in a way that still made my breath catch.
“How was practice?” he asked, closing his computer.
“Only a workout, but good.” I dropped my gym bag by the door and crossed to the fridge, pulling out a bottle of water. “Watched some rookies puke. One of ‘em even cried. You know, the usual for this time of year.”
“How riveting.”
“It was.” I took a long drink, then leaned back against the counter, working up my nerve to tell him about dinner.
On the drive home, I’d practiced a few different ways to bring it up, but in hindsight, they all felt forced. It was probably best to just come right out and say it.
“So, uh. Bell—my captain—invited us to dinner tonight.”
Sebastian’s expression shuttered, turning instantly wary. “Us?”
“Well, he invited me. Then I mentioned that my college roommate was in town, and he said to bring you along.” I kept my tone casual.
Like this was no big deal. Like he didn't need to freak out. “His husband got his hands on some lamb he’s dying to grill and wants to share it with us. Should be good.”
“That’s nice of him,” Sebastian replied slowly. “But I don’t know if that’s a good—“
“It'll just be Bell and Ethan,” I blurted in a panic. “No one else. Super low-key.”
“Taylor,” he chided, his jaw ticking.
“Don't 'Taylor' me.” Like a petulant fucking teenager, I lifted my chin, practically pouting.
He pushed off the stool, moving around the island to stand across from me. “We talked about being careful. This is the opposite of that.”
Heat flared in my chest—not quite anger, but close enough. “How is taking my college roommate to eat food at a private residence with people I know and trust not being careful?”
“You’re asking me to sit across from your captain and his husband—two men who are openly living the life I can’t have—and pretend I’m just your buddy passing through town,” he explained, his voice laced with frustration. “That puts me in a very awkward position.”
“You want to talk about awkward positions?” I shot back, the words firing out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“You’ll grind on Wyatt in the middle of a fucking club, but dinner with one of the only friends I have is a no-go?
What kind of position do you think that puts me in? How do you think that makes me feel?”
Sebastian’s hand, which had been tracing idle patterns on the granite, stopped mid-motion. Even his breathing seemed to pause. “That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Do I?” I slammed my bottle down onto the countertop, sending a geyser of water shooting up. “You’ll risk everything for that asshole, but nothing for me.”
“That's different, and you know it.”
“How?" I asked hotly. “Explain it to me like I’m five.”
Instead of answering, he blew out a breath and said, “The more people who know about us, the bigger the risk is someone will slip up.”
I could have pressed him on the deflection—probably should have—but the point of this conversation wasn’t to bring up all the ways I was jealous of Wyatt Hastings.
So I followed his lead, saying, “No one’s going to slip up.”
He exhaled slowly, giving me a look that was equal parts exasperated and affectionate—the kind of look that said he couldn’t believe I was this fucking oblivious, but he found me adorable anyway.
“I’ll slip up,” he said softly. “You really think I can sit there and not …” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Every time I look at you, I give myself away. And you’re just as bad,” he continued. “You look at me like—“ He stopped himself with a shake of his head. “They’ll know, Taylor.”
He wasn’t wrong. I knew he wasn’t wrong. Every time Sebastian walked into a room, my whole body reoriented toward him like a compass finding north.
And yet ...
“Bell would never out me—or you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I fucking do.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “He’s married to his former teammate—a gay man who was in the closet his whole damn life. They had a secret relationship for like a whole season before Ethan retired.”
Surprise flashed over Sebastian’s face before morphing into recognition. “Wait. I think I’ve heard of them. Is Ethan the guy who wrote that book after he came out a few years ago?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Oh, shit.” The sharpness left his face all at once. “I saw an interview with him once. It was … hard to watch. And uh …” He scratched at his eyebrow. “Wyatt was kind of obsessed with the guy.”
Everyone in hockey knew Ethan’s story—or at least the broad strokes of it: the assault by his teammates when he was a teenager, the years of hiding afterward, and the way he’d fought like hell to keep his sexuality a secret until he met someone worth coming out for—but it surprised me to know that someone like Wyatt Hastings had followed it too.
Then again, it was probably safe to assume that a man who’d carried on a years-long affair with another man would be interested in learning about a public figure who wasn’t as straight as he’d always pretended to be.
But Wyatt’s interest wasn’t the point. The point was that people knew Ethan had survived his past. That he’d come out the other side of it with a life he loved. A man he loved.
The point was that neither he nor Bell would ever break our trust.
“He’s happy now. He and Bell both are.”
Bell’s story wasn’t mine to tell, though it wasn’t hard to find if you looked hard enough. It wasn’t as harrowing as Ethan’s, but it was still pretty tragic. Thank god they’d found each other.
“They get it, Sebastian. They understand what this is like.”
He was silent for a long moment, his eyes flicking over my face and his shoulders losing some of their tension. “You really want to go to this dinner?” he asked, his voice low.
“Yeah. I do. Bell’s my friend, and those are in short supply for me. Also, I—”
I pressed my lips together. There was no good way to say what came next.
“You what, Taylor?” he pushed, his hands gripping the edge of the counter behind him.
Shit.
This conversation had already gone off the rails. How would Sebastian react to finding out that Bell already suspected there was more to our relationship than meets the eye? More than Sebastian intended for anyone to ever know?
Fuck it.
“I think Bell knows about me—or at least suspects.” I held my breath, waiting for him to react.
He nodded once, quietly absorbing this information, and when he spoke, it wasn't the reaction I expected. “I’m keeping you from being your authentic self, aren't I?
“No.” I closed the space between us, reaching for his hand.
His thumb moved back and forth across my knuckles. "It feels like I am." He dropped his eyes to where our hands were joined.
“Sebastian.” I waited until he glanced back up at me.
“I knew what I was signing up for when I invited you here.” I squeezed his fingers.
“But you're right. I need to say the words out loud to someone. I need to not—” I broke off, trying to find the right words to express the riot of thoughts running through my head.
“Not what?” he asked softly when I didn’t immediately continue.
“I’m tired of acting like half of who I am doesn’t exist. Just once, I’d like to look a person I respect and admire in the eye and say, ‘Hi, I’m Taylor, and this is the real me.’”
Sebastian’s face crumpled, and he pulled me into his arms, one of his hands coming up to cup the back of my head. “You should be able to do that,” he said quietly.
I buried my face in his neck and just breathed him in as he held me.
“Okay,” Sebastian said after a while, pulling back to meet my eyes.
“Okay?”
“Okay, we’ll go to dinner.” He brushed his thumb along my jaw. “And if you want to tell Bell, then you should do it. I support you.”
My chest felt tight again, but in an entirely different way from before. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said, but there was clear worry in his eyes even as he nodded. “Besides, after knowing what your friends went through, I feel like an asshole for making this about me.”
“You’re not an asshole.”
“I’m a little bit of an asshole.” He tipped his face forward and kissed me softly. “But I’m working on it.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me for giving you permission to do something you should have been able to do all along.” He stepped back, firming his shoulders. “What time is dinner?”
“Six o'clock.” I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock now, and Bell’s house was about forty-five minutes away from mine.
“I might be an asshole, but I have excellent manners. We need to bring something. Do they drink?”
A lot of hockey players didn’t, especially not heading into the season, but Bell didn’t subscribe to the idea of denying yourself something you enjoyed, and that man loved a good bottle of red wine. “Wine for Bell; beer for Ethan.”
As I followed Sebastian to my car, I tried to ignore the nervous flutter in my gut—hope, maybe, or possibly terror.
Likely both.
Tonight, I'd sit across from Bell and Ethan with Sebastian at my side, and try to pretend we were simply old friends while my captain watched every interaction with those sharp, assessing eyes that made him so lethal on the ice.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was either going to be the start of something really good for me or it was going to blow up spectacularly in my face.
I just hoped like hell I knew what I was doing.