Chapter 14
JAKE
So. I had a boyfriend now.
Not that I hadn’t had a boyfriend before in Ethan, but it felt more…
real now. Which was weird of me, I knew that, simply equating physical intimacy to relationship status.
Plenty of people were in happy relationships without the physical stuff entering into it, but the physical act was one of the main ways I got things.
I had a hard time learning from videos or books, or even in seminars if I couldn’t work out the moves on the mat myself.
It took consistent repetition, playing around with things, and strategizing ways to work it into my game that made a technique stick for me.
And Ethan and I were doing a lot of repetition and playing around these days.
The week after the smoker was one of the best I’d ever had.
He came over to my place in the evenings more often than not even if we hadn’t worked together, and…
well, let’s just say he gave me plenty to work on.
All the other fun stuff aside, I liked being on the bottom more than I’d thought I would.
We’d only tried it the other way once, and we’d ended up with him in my lap because there was something about looming over Ethan that I couldn’t really get into.
Fuck. I probably needed to talk to my therapist about that.
Then Ethan and Marek left for four days’ worth of away games, which left me with a lot of Carson on my hands. And when I said a lot, I meant—
“You have to help me make sure it doesn’t suck, all right?” he demanded from “his” side of my couch for the sixth time in two days. “It can’t suck. It’s got to be the best proposal possible.”
“You’ve already guaranteed it’s not going to suck by not going onto the ice yourself,” I pointed out, and got a pillow to the face in retribution.
“I’m being serious here!”
“So am I!” Carson was a great athlete and good at so many things, but balancing on skates wasn’t one of them. He didn’t know if his skating would have been bad before the concussion, but it was absolutely shit now. Marek had to hold onto both his hands to get him around the rink upright.
I felt awful about the whole situation since I was responsible for said concussion, but Carson waved every apology off like the friend he was.
He preferred us being able to joke about it, so I tried to follow his lead.
“Look, even without you going out on the ice for this, you’re still combining Marek’s favorite things—you, and hockey,” I said.
“You got the team to promise to help, right?”
“Right,” he said, staring off into space as he wound his hands around my nanna’s afghan so tightly I could hear the fibers stretch. “They’re going to let me use their lockers to hang the banner on.”
“And one of the trainers is going to set up the confetti cannons, yeah?”
“Jimmy, yeah. He’s great.” Carson’s smile appeared for a second. “He works at his parents’ party store in the off season. He got me a great discount on the cannons.”
That was the only reason someone should ever consider a confetti cannon, as far as I was concerned, but this wasn’t my proposal.
If Carson thought Marek would like it, then he would.
“And Ethan’s made sure that one of the coaches will let us in the locker room right before the end of the game,” I continued, running down my mental schedule of events.
“Yes.”
“And I’ll film so you can have footage to send to Marek’s brother, and you’ve already ordered enough celebratory cupcakes that everyone on the team can have two, and you’ve got the ring—”
“Oh shit!” He looked at me frantically. “What about the chain?” Marek couldn’t wear his ring on his finger during games, but a lot of the married players strung them onto chains to wear around their necks.
“You bought it at the same time as the ring,” I reminded him. It was white gold with thick links and probably cost Carson as much as the ring had, but it would suit Marek nicely.
“Right… and the silicone ring?” It was black, stretchy, and another option if Marek wanted one.
“It came in the mail yesterday, remember?”
Carson leaned his head onto his hand and grimaced. “I don’t, actually. Not specifically. I’ve just got a feeling that something didn’t get taken care of. It’s probably this, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong, and I can’t afford for anything to go wrong with this. I can’t.”
My chest constricted sharply. I scooted a little closer to Carson and nudged his knee with mine. “You realize that you could propose to Marek at a McDonalds drive-thru and he’d say yes, right? He’s crazy about you.”
Carson sighed. “I know, but he deserves better than that. He’s no contact with his parents now, and Jan is great but when it’s not summer break they can’t see each other very often because of their schedules, and phone calls just aren’t the same.
He gets along well with his team, of course, but he doesn’t have a lot of people outside of that, and he should.
Marek is the best person I know, he deserves so much love and support, and I want to make sure he knows he has it. ”
Well, shit. “We’ll make it perfect,” I promised him. “Let’s talk it through again.”
The team’s first day back in Vegas was capped off with a game in the evening. It had been a hard time on the road, losing three out of four games, and even Ethan had been glum when he called me about it the night before.
“We lost two guys to injuries in the second game,” he said. “And one of them was Keps, so that meant our best enforcer was out. Marek did what he could, and Ceders is no joke either, but it’s not the same.”
Oof. It was always rough losing a teammate to injury. “Are they going to be okay?”
“Trainers say yeah, but they need a break, so we won’t have them in the game tomorrow either.”
“But you’ll be playing at home,” I said, trying to be encouraging. “That counts for something, right?”
“It’ll be good to be home,” Ethan allowed. “Mostly so I can see you again. And so we can get this proposal done so Carson stops texting me every hour. Man, I love him, but he’s losing his mind about this.”
I sighed. “I’ll try to get him to back off.”
“Eh, don’t bother. Soon he’ll be happily engaged, and we’ll be in bed. Maybe with cupcakes.”
I laughed. “I don’t think we should eat in bed.”
“What about just the frosting?”
“Mm, I’ve got to pass on that, sorry.”
Ethan was quiet for a moment. “Do you think I could get my hands on one of those confetti cannons?”
Oh my God. “Probably, but I’m officially vetoing bringing that into bed right now.”
“But it could be fun!”
“No.”
“God, you’re so mean. No cupcakes, no confetti cannons… how am I going to woo you properly?”
“You’ll look at me and say, ‘I missed you, take me home’ and I’ll fall all over myself to do just that,” I said.
“That… shouldn’t be as sexy as you make it sound.”
“Anything is sexy when you compare it to a confetti cannon.”
“I’m just saying, it’s got possibilities!”
Needless to say, I was going to check Ethan over thoroughly before letting him into the apartment. Possibly with my tongue. But first things first—Vegas had a game to win, and Carson had a proposal to pull off.
I still didn’t know as much about hockey as I probably should, considering the number of professional players I knew.
I might have teased Carson about having two left feet on the ice, but I was just as bad.
I needed to figure things out on a kinesthetic level to really get them, and on top of that I found hockey hard to follow.
The puck was so small! It moved so fucking fast! How did they even see it half the time?
Carson wasn’t much better, but his enthusiasm was catching.
It helped that Marek was having a great game.
The crowd was amped up, happy to have their team home again, and Marek scored not once but twice in the first period.
Carson got so excited the second time around that he knocked his box of popcorn onto the guy in front of him as he stood up to shout.
Luckily, the man only brushed the kernels off and said, “Favorite player, I take it?”
“I’m gonna marry him,” Carson said, completely earnest.
The guy laughed and raised his beer in a mock toast. “I’ll drink to that.”
The second period was a harder fight, but Vegas was up for it.
They scored two more goals to their opponent’s one, and one of them was put away by Ethan.
After he accepted so much pounding on the back from his teammates I was surprised he didn’t fall over, he looked up to the stands where we usually sat.
I could tell the second he saw me—he beamed and waved, and I waved back.
“Puppy love,” Carson crooned. “So sweet.”
I scoffed. “If anyone’s the puppy around here, it’s you.”
“I don’t deny that,” he said, eyes darting away as the puck dropped, “but I—oh, fuck that guy!” Carson shot to his feet, dislodging his mostly empty container of popcorn as he started to shout.
“What?” I hadn’t seen the play. “What was it?”
“Boarding,” the guy in front of us said to me. “Number forty-two’s going to the box for that shit, but—hey, fight!”
There was, indeed, a fight on the ice right now. It was between Forty-Two, a burly player on the other team who’d apparently done Marek wrong, and—
Oh. That was Ethan.
“Nice start by Bernier,” our neighbor said as we watched Ethan get in one good punch before Forty-Two got hold of his jersey and pulled him into a headlock. Shit, we hadn’t done any work on getting out of headlocks, but maybe he’d pull it off anyway.