Chapter 8
EIGHT
Griffin
The locker room echoed with the distant sound of running water from the showers.
Most of the team had already cleared out, eager to get to Friday night plans that didn’t involve sitting under fluorescent lights, picking tape off their shins.
I was taking my time, partly because my shoulder pads had gotten tangled in a way that required actual problem-solving skills, and partly because I wasn’t in any hurry to leave.
Andrei sat two spots down from me, methodically working through his post-practice routine.
Chest protector first, then shoulder pads, each piece of equipment handled and stored with careful attention.
I found myself watching the process more closely than I probably should have, noting the way his muscles shifted as he reached overhead to hang his jersey, the brief glimpse of his stomach when his undershirt rode up as he stretched.
There was something almost hypnotic about watching him undress, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.
Maybe it was the contrast between his careful movements and the casual chaos of most locker rooms, or maybe it was just that Andrei made everything look deliberate and purposeful, even something as mundane as changing clothes.
He pulled his shirt over his head in one fluid motion, and I caught sight of the long line of his torso, the definition in his shoulders and arms that came from years of training.
My throat went dry for no reason I could name, and I had to force myself to look away, focusing on my own gear with sudden intensity.
“Shaw, you planning to sleep in here?” Phoenix called from across the room, already dressed and ready to leave.
“Just taking my time,” I replied, fumbling with my skate laces. My fingers felt clumsy, uncoordinated in a way that made no sense.
Phoenix shook his head and headed for the door, calling back, “Don’t let Coach lock you in when he makes his rounds.”
The warning was unnecessary. Coach Neilsen had made his Friday evening circuit twenty minutes ago, but Phoenix’s departure left just the two of us and a couple of guys still in the showers.
The sudden quiet made me hyperaware of every sound: the soft thud of Andrei’s equipment hitting the bench, the whisper of fabric against skin, the steady rhythm of his breathing.
I glanced over again and immediately regretted it.
Andrei was down to his base layer now, the fitted undershirt that clung to his chest and showed the lean lines of his build.
He was digging through his bag for clean clothes, his movements efficient but somehow graceful, and I felt that weird tightness in my chest that had been happening more and more lately.
What the hell was wrong with me? I’d spent years in locker rooms, surrounded by half-naked teammates, and it had never been a thing.
But lately, watching Andrei get changed felt different, charged with something I couldn’t identify and didn’t particularly want to examine too closely. These things were best left alone.
I finally managed to get my gear sorted and pulled on my street clothes, grateful for something to do with my hands. Andrei was scrolling through his phone, his expression growing darker with each passing second.
“Everything okay?” I asked, shouldering my bag.
He looked up from his screen, and I could see genuine frustration in his pale eyes. “Have you checked your social media today?”
“Not really. Why?”
“You should.” His voice carried an edge I’d rarely heard from him, sharp enough to make me pay attention. “The new episodes are getting more attention than we probably want.”
I pulled out my phone and opened Instagram, immediately slammed with a wall of notifications.
My follower count had jumped another few thousand since this morning, and my mentions were flooded with clips and comments and reactions to whatever had aired this week.
We had stopped watching the episodes after the second one had aired.
“Looks like good news to me,” I said, scrolling through the responses. Most of them were positive, lots of fire emojis and compliments about my performance in practice footage. “People seem to like what they’re seeing.”
Andrei’s laugh was bitter. “Keep scrolling.”
I did, and gradually, the tone of the comments shifted.
There were still plenty of thirst trap responses and general appreciation for the team, but mixed in were other things.
Edits that focused specifically on Andrei and me, video compilations set to romantic songs, comments that used language I wasn’t expecting.
This had happened immediately after the first episode, too, but it had seemed tamer back then.
“Didn’t you see this shit?” Andrei asked, his voice rough with some emotion I couldn’t quite place. “Griffdrei isn’t just a bromance anymore.”
I looked up from my phone, confused by his tone. “What is it?”
He shot me a cold look that made my stomach drop. “Try and guess.”
The pieces clicked together in my head, and I felt my mouth curve into a grin despite Andrei’s obvious distress. “Oh. Fan fiction?”
The expression on his face could have frozen the shower water still running in the background. He shook his head dismissively. “It’s not funny, Griffin.”
“Come on,” I said, still grinning. “It’s kind of flattering, right? People like us enough to write stories about us.”
“Stories.” He said the word like it tasted bad. “Right.”
I was missing something important, I could tell, but I couldn’t figure out what.
Andrei was genuinely upset about fan attention that seemed harmless to me, even if it was a little weird.
So what if people wanted to speculate about our friendship?
It wasn’t like anyone was forcing us to read their theories.
“Look,” I said, trying to use the reasonable tone that usually worked when he got moody, “it’s just people having fun with what they see on-screen. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Andrei stared at me for a long moment, something unreadable flickering across his features. Then he grabbed his bag and headed for the door without another word.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
“Out,” he said without turning around. “Don’t wait up.”
The locker room felt cavernous after he left, too quiet except for the steady drip of a leaky faucet somewhere behind me.
I stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d said wrong, but came up empty.
Andrei had been in weird moods before, usually when the cameras got too invasive or when Coach pushed too hard in practice, but this felt different.
The walk back to the team house gave me time to think, but I still couldn’t make sense of his reaction. By the time I reached our room, I’d decided the best approach was to give him space and let whatever was bothering him blow over on its own.
Our room felt strange without him in it. Too quiet, too empty, missing the subtle presence that had become such a constant part of my daily routine. I tossed my bag in the corner and flopped onto my bed, pulling up my phone to kill time until he got back from wherever he’d gone to sulk.
The notifications were still pouring in, a steady stream of comments and tags and shares that showed no signs of slowing down. I started scrolling through them more systematically this time, trying to see whatever had set Andrei off so badly.
Most of the content was pretty standard fan stuff.
Appreciation posts about the team, screenshot compilations of funny moments from the episodes, and speculation about upcoming storylines.
But as I dug deeper, following hashtags and checking out accounts that had tagged me repeatedly, the content got more intense.
There were video edits that focused specifically on Andrei and me, cutting together moments from different episodes to create narratives that the original footage hadn’t necessarily supported.
Lingering looks, casual touches, conversations edited to seem more intimate than they’d felt in real life.
The editing was sophisticated, professional-level work that transformed our friendship into something that looked almost… romantic.
One video in particular caught my attention, a compilation of moments where Andrei was looking at me during interviews or practice footage, sudden zooms bringing his wandering gaze into focus.
The editor had slowed down the clips and added atmospheric music that made every glance seem loaded with meaning.
Watching it, I could see why people might read more into our dynamic than simple friendship.
The way Andrei looked at me in those moments was intense, focused, and almost tender.
Had he always looked at me that way? I tried to remember being on the receiving end of those glances, but they seemed like normal Andrei behavior to me.
He was intense about everything, paid close attention to whatever had his focus.
Of course he looked at me like that during conversations; we were talking to each other.
But the comments on the video suggested other people saw something different.
“The way he LOOKS at him, I’m crying.”
“Griffin is so oblivious it hurts.”
“When will someone look at me the way Andrei looks at Griffin?”
Oblivious to what? I clicked through to the user’s profile and found dozens of similar videos, all focused on moments between Andrei and me, all edited this way.
That’s when I stumbled into the fan fiction.
It started innocently enough, clicking on a link someone had plugged into their bio and promoted through one of the videos.
The story was hosted on some platform I’d never heard of, tagged with our names and a bunch of other terms that meant nothing to me.
I expected something silly, maybe dialogue about hockey or exaggerated versions of our personalities.
What I found instead made my breath catch in my throat.
The story opened with a scene that was clearly meant to be us, thinly disguised with different names but recognizable in every detail. The text was charged with tension, even if the dialogue was sort of authentic. That was, more or less, how we spoke to each other.
I kept reading, telling myself it was just curiosity, that I wanted to understand what had upset Andrei. The story was well-written, I had to admit, drawing me in despite the weirdness of seeing fictional versions of ourselves in situations we’d never been in.
But as it progressed, as the fictional versions of us moved from friendship to something way more intimate, I felt heat creeping up my neck.
The author wrote with an attention to detail that was almost clinical, describing the slide of skin against skin and the “careful mapping of familiar bodies discovering new purposes.”
“He’d imagined this moment so many times that the reality felt like muscle memory, like his hands already knew the landscape of Griffin’s shoulders and the sensitive spot just below his ear that made him gasp.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry.
The writing was explicit and growing more so with every sentence, romantic in a way that made my chest tight with something that was starting to feel familiar.
But more than that, it felt real in a way that made me uncomfortable.
Like the author had seen something in us that I’d missed completely.
I clicked to another story, then another, each one exploring different scenarios but all built on the same foundation: the idea that there was something between Andrei and me beyond friendship, something deeper and more complicated than what played out on camera.
One story focused on the tension of hiding feelings while living in such close quarters:
“Sharing a room with Griffin was a special kind of torture, all casual intimacy and unconscious trust that made Andrei’s carefully constructed boundaries feel paper-thin.”
My pulse was racing now, my skin flushed, but it had nothing to do with the temperature in our room.
I tried to tell myself it was just the weirdness of seeing intimate fiction written about real people, about us, but that wasn’t quite true.
There was something else happening, something in the way my body was responding to the detailed descriptions of desire and discovery.
I tried to tell myself that it was just sexy. Sexy words, nothing else. The fact that it made me hard had to do with me being the subject of someone’s imagination, not that it was “Andrei” narrating the tale.
Heat pooled low in my stomach, and I was uncomfortably aware of my breathing, of the way my clothes felt against suddenly sensitive skin, of the way my dick was hard and trapped inside boxer briefs that were way too tight.
I locked my phone immediately and tossed it aside like it had burned me. This was not happening. I was not getting aroused reading fan fiction about myself and my best friend. That was insane, impossible, completely outside the realm of normal human behavior.
But my body didn’t seem to care about what was normal or impossible. Standing up only made me more acutely aware of my cock, the tight feeling of my jeans against the part of my body that suddenly felt hypersensitive to every touch.
Somewhere out there, people were writing stories about Andrei and me discovering feelings we’d never acknowledged, crossing boundaries we’d never considered. And somewhere in this quiet room, I was lying awake, wondering if the fiction was closer to truth than I’d ever realized.