Chapter 7
Theo Lindgren had spent his entire life building rules, because rules were how you survived being a thing other people needed.
Rules told you what you were for. He had said too much in the hotel, the shoulder, the singing, all of it, and had been building back around the breach ever since, mortaring it shut with silence and routine, so that by the time what was happening with Shane became undeniable, not once, not steam, but a pattern, a habit, a Tuesday and a Thursday and the long Sunday, Theo did what he did with everything that frightened him. He tried to write rules for it.
“We should have terms,” he said, the third night, both of them sweaty and wrecked across the disordered bed, the sheets a ruin neither had the will to fix.
Shane laughed, breathless. “Oh my god. You want to draft a new napkin.”
“I want to be clear. So nobody is hurt.” Theo stared at the ceiling. “We do not — talk about it. Outside this room. We are the same in the room, in the barn. Cold. Roommates. Enemies, if you like. And here we do this. And it does not mean—”
“Nothing. Yeah. We covered nothing.” Shane rolled onto his side, propped his head on his bad hand, winced, switched hands.
“Rule one: doesn’t leave the apartment. Rule two: doesn’t change the deal.
The deal’s still the deal. Mom, money, divorce.
This is just a perk. An amenity. The gym in the building we don’t use. ”
“An amenity,” Theo repeated, and a cold weight moved through him that he did not examine, because an amenity was a thing you provided, and Theo knew how to be a thing that got provided, the arrangement he’d run his whole life, and so he said, “yes. Good. An amenity,” and Shane, who was watching his face, frowned for a second as if he’d heard the word land wrong, and then let it go.
The rules lasted about as long as the napkin had.
* * *
The next road trip was a three-in-four through the eastern swing, and the rooming list said Lindgren / Novak, because of course it did, and this time there was no standoff in the doorway about the single king.
They just put their bags down. They didn’t build a pillow wall.
They’d stopped pretending somewhere around the second week of February, and the not-pretending was its own quiet vertigo, exposure with no gear underneath.
They won the first game, a tight one, and Theo had the kind of night that didn’t make a highlight: two blocks, a clean breakout pass that started the winning rush, eighteen minutes of just being a wall.
Shane had three assists and a goal and got the first star, and they came back to the hotel both still humming with it, the electricity of a road win, adrenaline with the whole night ahead and nowhere it had to go.
“You were good tonight,” Shane said, pulling his tie off, and then, because he could never leave well enough alone, “for a guy who never shoots.”
“I do not need to shoot. I have you to shoot. Nobody in the league divides labor more efficiently.” Theo was sitting on the edge of the bed easing his shoulder through its range, the careful nightly negotiation, and he wasn’t hiding it from Shane anymore.
Its own kind of nakedness. “You scored because I made the pass that made the pass. You will not see it on the sheet. It does not matter. I know what I did.”
“I know what you did too,” Shane said.
Theo looked up. Shane crossed the room and kissed him.
Not like the dive-bar nights, the hate-hot ones, the this means nothing ones.
There was no fight in it to convert. Just want, plain, chosen, two tired bodies that had won a hockey game ninety miles from anywhere choosing each other in a hotel room because they wanted to and not because they were too furious to do anything else.
“Careful of the—”
“I know,” Shane murmured against his jaw, already shifting his weight to the left, automatic, already shielding the bad shoulder, automatic, the same instinct he’d been running on the ice for weeks.
“I’ve got it. I always have it.” And he did.
Even here, even wrecked and wanting, Shane’s body had memorized how to protect the broken part of him, did it without being asked, did it on reflex, as if Theo’s shoulder had been filed somewhere in him under things that matter.
“You good?” Shane asked, mouth at his ear, hands already at the knot of Theo’s loosened tie, working it free. “Tell me you’re good. Three-in-four, you played eighteen minutes, if you’d rather just sleep I will heroically—”
“Shane.”
“Yeah?”
“I want this. Undress me.”
“Yeah,” Shane said, lower. “Yeah, okay. That I can do.”
He let himself be laid back on the hotel bed.
The room was hotel-quiet, the air handler ticking over, a television murmuring through the wall, and under it nothing, just three hours of game still draining out of their legs.
He kept catching himself about to direct it, lift here, this button first, the managing reflex, and each time he put the reflex down.
Did not issue the instruction. Lay with his hands open on the duvet and let Shane set the speed, which tonight, against all precedent, was slow.
He let Shane take his time, the loud man gone quiet and intent and then, inevitably, not quiet at all, narrating his progress button by button.
“I like this shirt on you. I like it better off you. You know what you look like after a win? You don’t, you have no idea, you walk through the room all stone-faced and the entire time I’m thinking about getting you out of the suit.
” The shirt came off Theo’s shoulders, eased down the left side, slow, no tug.
The belt. The suit pants. Shane’s mouth followed his own hands down, the sternum, the stomach, the cut of his hip, lower, until he was breathing against Theo’s cock where it strained against his boxers, and looked up the long pale length of him and said, “Tell me what you want. Out loud. You did it in the dive-bar days, you can do it sober and winning.”
“Your mouth,” Theo said. Then, because the night had stripped the careful out of him, the rest of it, blunt, accented, unhurried: “Suck me.”
Shane’s whole body answered that. “There he is,” he said, and dragged the boxers down and took Theo’s cock in his hand and then his mouth, slow and certain, no hurry in him at all, and Theo let his head go back against the hotel pillows and let it happen, let himself be the one taken apart for once with no fight underneath it to convert.
Shane knew him now, knew the slow deep pull that made Theo’s hands open and close against the duvet, knew when to take him to the back of his throat and stay, knew to pull off and lick and talk, because the talking was half of it, “you’re so hard, god, the calmest man in the league,” and Theo lay there and burned and did not file any of it.
That was the strange part: he was not filing it.
His whole life ran on intake, everything logged and sorted, pain in the pain column, want in the locked drawer, and tonight the system was simply open.
Shane’s mouth dragging up him slow, the wet heat of it, a palm resting on his sternum for no reason except to rest there, and none of it went anywhere.
It accumulated. Sensation with no ledger under it, and the loss of the system should have frightened him and did not, and his hand drifted into Shane’s hair, not gripping, not steering, just there, and he let the data pile up unsorted.
Shane was quieter than usual, too. The commentary still came, but at half volume, murmured against skin between long stretches where his mouth was too occupied to talk and didn’t mind.
“No rush,” Shane said, to Theo’s hip, almost to himself.
“We’ve got all night. Nobody’s mad at anybody.
I’m just glad.” Glad was not the word he’d been headed for, both of them heard that, and he went back down instead of correcting it, slower, the unsaid word staying in the room, the new thing neither of them would name.
“Up,” Theo said, when it got close, too close, too soon. “Come up here. I want your weight.”
“Bossy.” Shane came up grinning, wet-mouthed. “Where do you want me, exactly? Use your words, you’re so good at them tonight.”
“On me. All of you.”
Shane stripped his own clothes off, no performance in it, road-tired, unhurried, and stretched out along him skin to skin, and for a while that was all it was: the full press of another body after a three-in-four, the slow drag of a kiss with nowhere to be, Shane’s hand moving in long passes, good shoulder to hip and back, learning him at quarter speed.
Theo’s hands did their own slow work, the broad muscle of Shane’s back, the knots the season had left there, and Shane made a low sound and pressed down, both of them hard against each other and neither reaching for it yet, letting it build because tonight building was allowed. Was the point.
The shoulder ached, low and steady, and for once Theo didn’t pretend it didn’t, said it out loud, a little, good side, easy, and Shane adjusted without comment, without making it a thing, shifted his weight off it, settled his hips over Theo’s hips so their cocks slid together and they both hissed, and reached for the lotion on the nightstand, hotel-issue, and slicked his hand and worked them both together, his cock against Theo’s, his fist around the both of them, foreheads close, breath mixing, Theo’s good hand fisted in Shane’s hair and Shane’s free hand braced beside Theo’s head.
“Like that,” Theo said, low, the careful accent gone ragged, “yes, like that.”
“Yeah? Tighter? Tell me.”
“Tighter. Slower. Yes.”