Chapter Nine #2
“Go nuts,” he told Charlie. “Seriously. I can afford it. Your clothes, your room— Make it whatever you want.”
Watching Charlie proceed with great caution made Phil add another data point to his collection of information about Ben and Charlie’s family: weird about money.
Even given the license for unlimited spending, Charlie went nowhere near as far as Phil would have at his age.
It reminded him of the way Ben only ever put store-brand foods on the grocery list and complained about unnecessary luxuries.
They came out of the Gap with a decent wardrobe all the same, closer to Charlie’s actual size.
Apparently, baggy jeans were in again though.
Charlie resisted further clothing stores. “It, um…” He pushed his hair out of his eyes. “It can make me kind of dysphoric. Clothes shopping.”
“Oh,” Phil said. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”
“No, no, this is good. This is…not that. But I don’t wanna push it.”
“Okay.” Phil hesitated and then decided he couldn’t do worse than Charlie’s family already had.
“Look, I don’t know anything about being trans.
Nothing. We got some emails from work for a charity program we’re doing, and I’ve been reading the websites they linked, but you’ve gotta tell me if I fuck up, okay? ”
“You’re doing good,” Charlie said.
“Still, tell me if I fuck up,” Phil insisted. “Now, I was thinking we could hit some furniture stores so you can set up your room how you want it. And, uh, if you want, we could go to a hairdresser? Even out that haircut you gave yourself? But only if you want?”
Charlie barreled into him and wrapped his arms around Phil’s middle.
“Can we stay with you forever?”
Forever. Phil let himself imagine not waiting for the time when Ben and Charlie would leave and his house would be empty.
The worry he hadn’t known he’d been carrying eased—worry about where the two of them would live and how Ben would cope with the added stress of raising a teenager alone when he already seemed so exhausted. Phil was right there, he could help—
Oh.
He hadn’t realized he’d gotten so invested, but the thought of Ben sticking around and making omelets and criticizing Phil about how he used his money made a knot in Phil’s shoulders unclench.
“You gotta take forever up with your uncle,” Phil said. “I’m fine with it.”
It wasn’t like being on the team plane or playing hockey, but it was a pretty good afternoon.
He left Charlie stringing up fairy lights in his room.
The bookshelf would have to wait until Ben returned to help them; after watching Ben’s progress fixing up the stairs, Phil knew better than to try using the drill himself.
But Charlie had posters to hang, school supplies to sort through, throw pillows and blankets to unpack.
It was the sort of thing Camille’s designer would have fainted at, everything mismatched and no one item costing more than a hundred dollars.
When they’d planned the house, the designer had asked carefully if she should be including a nursery in one of the spare rooms. They’d both turned her down flat.
Camille because she didn’t want kids, and Phil because he thought if they decided to have them after all, he’d want to set their rooms up himself.
Charlie was old enough that Phil couldn’t do it for him, but helping him choose and watching him make himself at home was close enough.
Phil headed for the home gym. Shopping had involved a lot of standing around, which made his knee achier than usual. Despite it being a rare PT-free day, he decided to go through a few exercises anyway. After an easy warmup on the spinning bike, he settled in the leg press.
Invariably, it made him think of Ben.
Phil pulled out his phone and reread the messages for the tenth or possibly five hundredth time.
Nice suit.
I’d like to take it off you.
He hadn’t responded, not because he didn’t want to but because he had no idea what to say. Since Ben had sent those texts, they’d talked in person about all manner of domestic arrangements pertaining to Charlie, but neither of them had mentioned what Ben wrote.
Phil could leave it at that. He could message Ben about his brunch with the guys, the progress he’d made getting Hayes reintegrated into the team.
Or let him know about Charlie’s successful haircut and new home furnishings.
Then Ben would be torn between gratefulness and being judgmental about money, and he could berate Phil about it before he got home, which meant that by then he might be over it.
But if Phil changed the subject, the door might close. Ben might never kiss him again as he had that night, and Phil might never get an answer to the questions burning under his skin.
What would you do with me then?
He sent the message before he could question himself and returned to his workout.
He was about halfway through the routine the trainers had worked up with him when Charlie appeared at the doorway. He wore a cozy maroon sweatshirt they’d just bought and smiled big enough that he looked like a real teenager and not a tiny adult.
“Hey,” Phil said.
“Hi. I, um, wanted to say thank you again for today. It was really good.”
“I’m glad. And I would say anytime, but I think Ben might murder me in my sleep.”
“Huh?”
Phil laughed awkwardly, trying and failing not to think about his phone. “He’s weird about me paying for stuff.”
“Oh.” Charlie shrugged, his shoulders sharp points under the thick fabric of the sweatshirt. “Well, he’s been on his own for a long time.”
Interesting. Phil had gleaned that Ben and Charlie didn’t have a prior relationship.
Based on how they’d acted and a few choice words they’d exchanged, Phil got the impression Ben had been shunned by his family for being gay, except for when they needed him to do colossal favors like taking in another black sheep with no warning.
He knew they were Mormons or, in Ben and Charlie’s case, ex-Mormons.
But he didn’t know how long it had been since Ben had left.
His CV had him coaching in Utah as recently as last year, but apparently that didn’t mean he’d still been close with his family.
If he really had lost his whole community years ago, maybe it explained why he wouldn’t open up about what was happening with the team.
“Guess we’ll have to convince him,” Phil said. He continued to work with the resistance band, lying on his back and stretching it out wide with his feet.
Hesitantly, Charlie crept into the room and sat at the very edge of the mat.
“What’s up?” Phil grunted between reps.
“Um.” Charlie toyed with the sleeves of his sweatshirt. “I was…so, you’re, like, an athlete, right?”
Phil bit back a self-deprecating comment about how he wasn’t exactly out on the ice right now and nodded.
“Could you show me some stuff?”
Tensing his abs, Phil rolled to a sitting position. “What do you want to learn?”
Charlie bit his lip. “I don’t know—that’s why I’m asking.”
“Oh, no, I mean what’s your goal for exercising? Do you want to have more endurance; do you want to get strong; do you want speed? Are you more of a runner or a boxer or a swimmer? You do different things depending on what you want out of it.”
“Huh. You’d think they’d cover that in PE classes.”
Phil blinked. “True.” PE had been an easy A for him in high school, and his hockey coach had covered the more intricate stuff.
At the time, Phil hadn’t yet grasped that to some people, exercise wasn’t a daily necessity, or that not everyone had a hockey coach to work up a personalized training plan with them. “So what is it you’re after?”
Charlie looked over at him and then away, red suffusing his cheeks. “I want to be bigger.”
Clothes shopping had made him feel dysphoric, Phil remembered. “You know some guys stay slender even if they work out, right?”
“Yeah, I know. I just wanna be strong, I guess.”
“We can definitely do that.”
He walked Charlie through a basic workout routine: ten minutes on the treadmill, followed by the rowing machine, the leg press, and a sequence of free-weight exercises for his arms and shoulders.
“When those exercises start feeling easy, we can see about adding weight and using the bench press,” Phil told him. “If you keep at it, it should be pretty soon.”
Charlie, now sweating with the sleeves of his sweatshirt rolled up, asked, “How often do you do this?”
“I’m in the NHL,” Phil told him. “I do this every day.”
Charlie eyed him. “Seriously?”
“Try starting with three times a week,” Phil suggested. “Figure out what you like. You might hate doing weights. The important thing about exercise is finding something that works for you and that you enjoy doing.”
“Do you listen to this music every time?”
“Hey. Don’t knock the classics.” Phil knew at least a dozen hockey players who would protest calling Dr. Dre a classic, since the word “classic” could only be followed by “rock” in their world.
But if it made Charlie think he was uncool, too, maybe Phil should spend some time listening to newer music.
He’d have plenty of time if he had to retire.
“Okay. Whatever.” Charlie sprawled onto the mat. “I’m just going to die here; don’t mind me.”
Kids these days. Phil finished up his workout and stretched before getting to his feet and grabbing his crutches.
“You too dead for dinner?”
Charlie opened an eye. “What are we having?”
“Well, since you’re interested in getting fit, I was thinking we’d do a high-protein salad.”
With a groan, Charlie dropped his head back onto the mat.
“I’m kidding. Wanna order pizza?”
Phil didn’t dare check his phone until later, after Charlie had gone to bed. When he did, he found Ben had texted twice, an hour apart.
There are so many things I want to do with you.
I want to lick your thighs.
The message sent a spiral of heat licking down into Phil’s belly. It was so personal. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever wanted to do something so strangely intimate and raw before.
Camille liked it when he sent her topless selfies from the road—the staged kind where he took the picture right after working out, so his abs stood out.
In person, she appreciated him cleaned, groomed, and media-ready.
Her appreciation didn’t intersect with their sex life.
She never tried to lick or touch his abs during sex, no matter how much she wanted to look at them.
She gave the kind of blow jobs that could have been shot on film and released on VHS in the 1990s, her full, made-up lips wrapped tight around his cock, looking up at him while she did it.
Phil had been into it, no question. But he’d always felt as though at some point on the way to the bedroom, things had become about him wanting her rather than the reverse.
There was plenty to want, and Phil had enjoyed every minute with her until he didn’t anymore. But his experience with her hadn’t prepared him for the possibility of what Ben put on offer with a few desperate kisses and horny text messages.
The difference between her methods of seduction—coy, teasing, implying more than saying what she wanted to do to him or have done to her—and Ben’s blunt desire was striking.
By which Phil meant he felt as if he’d been struck with a two-by-four.
Ben wanted to lick his thighs. Not his smooth, waxed, photoshoot-ready thighs. His sweaty, hairy, mid-workout thighs.
The thought made Phil’s head swim.
Enough so that he looked down at himself, two beers in, legs spread on the couch, and had a really stupid idea. He squirmed deeper into the cushions, let his shorts ruck up under him, and shot a photo.
Before he could second-guess himself, he sent it off.
He threw his phone face down into the couch and tried to ignore how his cock had begun to swell under the polyester.
After about three minutes of the ESPN retrospective on the Kansas City Harlequins, he couldn’t stand it anymore and had to check his messages.
Ben had sent a photo back.
Phil opened it with trepidation. He had no idea how he’d feel about receiving a dick pic. Would it make him harder, get him squirming on the couch? Or would it turn him off?
Phil had seen a lot of dicks in a lot of different states over the course of his life, having spent so much time in locker rooms. The Sea Lions’ room tended toward modesty as far as these things went, but communal showers were still communal showers.
Phil had also spent a lot of time thinking of men’s bodies in carefully neutral terms. Much like with the knee he’d known was threatening to give out, the words “not gay” had haunted the corners of his mind for years now.
People, Phil knew, didn’t generally define their sexualities by what they weren’t.
It had simply struck him as a problem for later.
Or, during his marriage to Camille, never.
Now, faced with a potential dick pic from a man he very much wanted to want, Phil found himself suddenly pulled in the opposite direction: What if he’d repressed so hard he’d forgotten how to want other men?
What if his teenage experimentation really had just been a phase? What if he disappointed Ben?
Better he found out now, when Ben couldn’t see him react. Phil took a deep breath and peeked at his phone screen.
It wasn’t a dick pic.
Relief and disappointment melded in the pit of confusion under Phil’s breastbone.
He inspected the picture more carefully.
The photo captured Ben’s face from the nose down to his chest, little enough for plausible deniability if anyone found it but enough to be recognizable to Phil.
Ben wore a suit. Of course he did. The team had flown to LA today, which meant being photographed getting on and off the plane.
But his tie was long gone, and the top buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned.
A flush rose up across his collarbones and to his cheeks, his mouth slightly open.
Desire raced through Phil and, hot on its heels, incredulity.
He’d never thought of himself as a particularly complex man when it came to what turned him on.
When Camille wore lingerie, it got him hot.
He enjoyed getting his dick sucked, maybe a little more than fucking someone because he got to be lazy about it.
He liked porn unless it involved the really outlandish shit like tentacles or rubber suits.
He was a simple guy and pretty easy to please.
But a collarbone? A picture of a flushed collarbone and an open mouth? That was enough to get him going?
He looked down at his erection.
Apparently.
Good to know he could still surprise himself.