Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Creed
Then . . .
“How are you?” Hal suddenly asks.
“Fine.”
“Lafontaine.”
“What?”
“That was a fast answer.”
“I’m well-trained.”
His thumb moves once against my chest.
“Try again,” he says.
I look at him.
The room is too bright for this. My body hurts in layers. Shoulder. Hip. Ribs. Thigh. Places I remember getting hit. Places I don’t. Places Halston touched afterward with a focus that made me feel more seen than the cameras did last night.
Halston has, in almost two years, taught me that when he asks, “how are you,” he is asking the actual question. The social answer, with him, is a small disrespect.
So I take a breath.
“I’m tired in a way I don’t know how to describe. I’m happy in a way that scares me. I miss Livia, and I’m in your bed in Chelsea, and my body hurts everywhere.”
His face changes.
Most people would miss it. With Halston, a whole confession can live in a blink. His hand glides up over my collarbone, along the side of my neck, to the back of my jaw. His thumb traces along my cheekbone once, and I close my eyes before I can stop myself.
That’s the danger with him.
He doesn’t pry me open. He finds the place I already cracked and puts his hand there like he has a right.
“Look at me,” he says.
I do.
His hair is a disaster. His mouth is still a little swollen.
There’s a mark low on his neck from me, a bruise I left there because sometime after three in the morning, I stopped pretending I had any class.
He looks tired too, but awake in the way he gets when something matters and he refuses to look away first.
“You won the Cup,” he says again.
“You said.”
“I want to do something for you.”
“You did several things for me last night.”
“I want to do something else for you.”
Something in me shifts, slow and quiet.
With Halston, I am never entirely sure what he is offering until he offers it.
He opens doors half an inch at a time. He lets me decide whether to walk in.
Some doors I’ve walked through. Some I’ve left for him.
Some Liv has walked through first and held open from the other side, muttering about emotional inefficiency and poor communication practices, while being braver than both of us.
I say, “What?”
Very quietly, he says, “Let me have you today.”
I know what he means.
My body knows before my head finishes catching up.
We have done this before. He has had me.
I have had him. We have learned the architecture of each other’s bodies over a year and a half, in the patient way two men who love each other learn anything that matters—by paying attention, asking, listening, and asking again.
There are nights when one of us tops, nights when the other does, and nights when it changes because one look across a room makes every plan irrelevant.
“Today,” I say.
“Today.”
“What’s today?”
His gaze drops to my mouth, then returns back to my eyes.
“You won the Cup. You haven’t put your body down in eight weeks.
You haven’t been allowed to live inside it without someone measuring, taping, icing, scanning, or hitting it.
I want you to put it down.” His voice drops.
. “I want to do the work for both of us. I want you to take what I have.”
I look at him.
There are things I should say. Are you sure? What about you? Is this because I won?
None of them make it out.
“Yes,” I say.
His breath leaves him.
Just once.
Then he kisses me.
Slowly.
Not like last night, when we came through the door half drunk on champagne and noise and relief, when he shoved me against the wall and I laughed into his mouth because I had the Cup in my apartment for twelve minutes and still wanted him more.
This kiss is different.
This is Halston taking inventory with his mouth. My lower lip. The corner of my jaw. The cut on the inside of my cheek from the second period. He kisses me like he’s checking for damage and making a promise to every part of me he finds.
I try to take over.
Of course I do.
My hand comes up to his neck, my thumb under his jaw, and I push into the kiss with enough heat to turn it into something I understand. Want. Friction. A way to make my body louder than my feelings.
Halston pulls back an inch.
“Creed.”
I freeze.
His eyes hold mine.
“You’re going to lie here.”
The command should irritate me.
Instead, it goes through me low and hot.
“Okay.”
“And let me.”
“Okay.”
His mouth returns to mine, softer this time. Cruel in its patience. He kisses me until my fingers loosen on his neck. Until my shoulders sink into the mattress. Until I stop trying to prove I can still control the pace.
Only then does he move down.
Halston kisses the bruise above my sternum with a care that almost hurts more than pressure would.
The bruise is yellowing at the edges, greenish where the blood is fading, but the center is still purple from last week’s hit.
The same one they replayed on the jumbotron while I pretended I didn’t need a second to breathe.
His lips press there.
My stomach locks.
He lays his tongue against the bone, warm and slow, and I almost laugh because he is being so fucking serious about a bruise.
If I do laugh, he’ll ask me to explain the joke, and then I’ll have to explain that everything hurts and everything is hilarious and last night I held the Cup over my head while wanting to crawl into his lap and cry.
So I don’t laugh.
I let him.
His mouth moves lower, to the spread of my ribs, first the right, then the left, then the spot on my side he once said reminded him of those brown-sugar caramel bars people buy at airports.
I called him a walking air-travel catalog.
He told me that was not a recognized cause of action.
Liv told us both we were banned from flirting in legal-adjacent insults until she’d had coffee.
Now his thumb finds that same place like it belongs to him.
Maybe it does.
He nips the flesh between his teeth, almost shy with it, and the tenderness gets under my skin.
Halston is more confident with the law than with softness.
More fluent in risk than in asking for what he wants.
Yet here he is, mouth on my body, taking his time like I’m not a man who got paid to get hit for a living.
Like I’m allowed to be something breakable in his hands.
He speaks against my skin, voice muffled. “You know, if you quit hockey tomorrow, you could model for medical diagrams. The muscular system, probably.”
I stare at the ceiling. “That might be the least romantic compliment I’ve ever received.”
“It was accurate.”
“You always know how to make a man feel objectified and clinically assessed.”
His hands pause at my ribs, then slide up, thumbs brushing the seams of my pecs.
He studies me with that forensic focus that used to unsettle me.
Now it makes my dick twitch, because there is nothing cold about the way he looks.
He catalogs every bruise, sweat bead, and breath like evidence in a case he refuses to lose.
I could ask him what he’s thinking.
I don’t.
I know.
He is wondering if I’ll let him stay here. Not in the bed. In the moment. If I let him care for me without turning it into a joke or a competition or sex so fast it outruns the ache.
For now, he gives me action instead of theory.
He kisses down my stomach. His tongue draws a line that makes my abs jump. His hair falls forward, grazing my skin, and I thread my fingers into it because I want to feel him react. He glances up at me, one eyebrow raised.
“Problem?”
“No.”
“Then stop supervising.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re tugging my hair like you have notes.”
“I might.”
“You won the Cup. You don’t get to be in charge today.”
He strips my underwear off last, dragging the fabric over my cock with intentional friction. I hiss, hips lifting before I can stop them. He looks up, pleased in that restrained way of his, like satisfaction has to pass through security before reaching his face.
“Sensitive,” he says.
“Fuck off.”
It’s just noise.
He knows it. I know it. My body knows it worst of all because I want him so badly I could come from his attention alone.
He lowers his mouth.
The first touch of his tongue to the head of my cock punches the air out of me.
He keeps his eyes locked on mine, waiting for the flinch.
I don’t give him one. Instead, I arch into him, and he rewards me by taking me in inch by inch, slow enough to make me feel every second.
Halston isn’t showing off. He never does.
He’s a tactician. A problem solver. A man who finds the exact point where control becomes surrender and presses there until I forget which side I’m on.
His tongue works under the head. His hand wraps around the base and squeezes. His mouth is hot, perfect, focused.
I make a sound.
I have heard that sound from myself before in this bed with this man, and I still don’t know what to do with it. It’s too open. Too needy. Too honest for a man who spent last night smiling for cameras with blood in his mouth and champagne on his jersey.
Halston likes it.
I know because he hums around me.
I jerk.
“Fuck, Hal.”
His fingers dig into my thigh, holding me down without turning it into a fight. The heat gets worse. Better. Both. My hand tightens in his hair, and he takes me deeper, not rushing, not showing off, not trying to prove anything. Just giving me enough to make the polished part of me go quiet.
His other hand moves lower.
I lose my breath.
He touches me like he knows every place I pretend not to need.
Like he has been keeping a private record of what breaks my focus, what makes my hips jerk, what turns me from a man who can take a hit in front of twenty thousand people into this—spread out in his bed, aching, exposed, trying not to beg.
His fingers roll over me, slow and filthy, then one slick touch drags lower, teasing where I’m already open for him. His pinky presses there, barely enough to count, and my whole body shudders.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
He hums around me.