Chapter 8 #2
This was Jax’s moment. This was when he would intervene with a timely quip or a perfect takedown. This was what he had been preparing for his entire professional career.
No words came to mind.
Beside him, Tom got to his feet.
“Enough.”
At some point in the last month and half, since joining the team and learning first to challenge Tom and then to support him, Jax had forgotten how imposing he could be. At full height, with his eyes glinting, steely and determined, he made Jax’s breath catch in his throat.
“I will not have that kind of language on my team or in my locker room. If you’re going to speak about your teammates like that, you can do it from the bench.”
Then, he turned his back on the team and stalked out onto the ice.
Jax followed. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
The third period was an unmitigated disaster.
For the Montreal Wyverne, anyway. The Crow took to the ice, and he was not fucking around.
He scored his first goal three minutes in off a pass from Jax.
Jax hadn’t even been going for the assist. He’d thought they’d have to deke it back and forth a few more times, but Tom saw some imaginary lane right between two opposing D-men, and a second later, the goal light went on.
One goal away from equalizing, they doubled down.
Morris sent the first line out for longer, searching for chances, and Luca got them.
With the puck on the wrong side of the ice, the Wyverne’s first-line winger racing on a breakaway, Luca sped up to cut him off at every turn and stripped away the puck in a neat little game of keep-away.
He spun around and shot it over to Vanderbilt, the puck control breathtaking. The next minute, Vanderbilt had passed to Tom, who had hauled ass toward the blue line as soon as he’d seen Luca’s play, and then the puck hit the back of the net.
The team barely paused to celebrate drawing even, not least because Vanderbilt had the assist, but he was clearly too much of a homophobe to get near Luca and too much of a coward to get near Tom.
Jax hugged them both as hard as he could.
“All right, boys,” Morris said when they made it to the bench, blissfully unaware that the first line couldn’t make eye contact. “We’ve got about seven minutes to wrap this thing up. I don’t wanna go into overtime, you hear me?”
He wasn’t great at reading the room, which made Jax wonder more than ever how he’d gotten the coaching gig, but he was absolutely correct. No one wanted to be here longer than necessary.
“Gotta get Cap the hatty,” Breezy added, a much better motivation for Jax.
Jax did his level best, sending the puck Tom’s way every time he had it on his stick.
Tom, fucking on fire, tore across the ice at full speed.
Jax remained firm in his belief of the unsexiness of hockey gear, but Tom made it work.
He pulled his helmet off between shifts and pushed his sweaty hair out of his eyes, and Jax actually started chubbing up a little in his cup.
This was a disaster.
He had a lifetime track record of not making it weird with his teammates, a shining beacon with which to prove all the idiots wrong who said stuff like “I don’t mind gay dudes, but I don’t want them in the locker room, y’know?
” And yet, he found himself here, at twenty-five, getting all boned up over his captain.
It didn’t matter that Tom was gay or that he was out there performing the sexiest feats Jax had ever seen on ice. It was the principle of the thing.
In the end, Jax didn’t get him the hatty.
He ended up with all of one assist on the board for the night, but he couldn’t be mad about how it happened.
Montreal got chippy as the clock ran down, equally unwilling as the Sea Lions to go to overtime.
It made them sloppy. One of their forwards got called for slashing, and on the ensuing power play, all of Jax and Tom’s strategizing paid off.
Jax won the face-off. He took the puck forward, deked around a defenseman, and then doubled back, shooting to Luca.
Luca picked up the pace, using his quick feet, right up the left side of the ice, and shot the puck neatly onto Tom’s tape.
Luca’s aim had been so perfect Tom barely needed to tip it in, but it counted as his third goal of the night.
With only two minutes left to go, the hats rained down on the ice for Tom.
A little smirk played around Tom’s mouth when they hit the bench, only a tiny upward quirk of his lips revealing he knew exactly how good he was.
God, Jax wanted to suck his dick.
Right there on the bench, just shoulder his way between those thighs, pull down his layers of sweat-soaked, disgusting gear and swallow him straight down his throat.
He bet Tom would stink of exertion and wet hockey gear, repulsive at best but also familiar and comforting.
He bet Tom had a fantastic cock. Jax would make it so good for him, too, really pull out all the stops and make him moan.
Make him beg. Tom was wound so tight, Jax bet anything he’d beg so prettily.
The game ended.
On the way to the locker room, Jax held his breath until his erection subsided.
Mostly. Adrenaline erections happened all the time after close games and common courtesy was to pretend at selective blindness, but it seemed disrespectful to enter a team space while sporting a full chub because Tom fucking Crowler had been so hot decimating the opposition.
The locker room after the game was awful.
On the one hand, they had won, which meant Breezy put on East’s “winning” playlist (a lot of Nelly, some Jay-Z, some nineties rap, which, unfortunately, sounded very stupid to Jax’s uncultured ears.
He was used to much less upbeat hip-hop, a sign of the times he lived in).
On the other hand, no one talked except Abrahamov and Dmitriyev, speaking in quiet Russian in the corner.
Jax didn’t want to know what they were saying.
He doubted they felt differently than Hayes and Vanderbilt.
Jax escaped to a cold shower as quickly as he could. On his way out, he carefully didn’t look too closely at Tom, stripped down to his base layers and talking to the media.
This was fine. Jax could deal with this.
He’d go out tonight. It had been ages; he hadn’t had sex since Edmonton, six weeks ago.
No wonder he’d gotten pent up enough to fantasize about oral while at work.
That was probably all this was, misplaced libido.
He took a few deep, grounding breaths and washed his hair.
If he went out tonight, he wanted to look good.
He returned to the locker room to hear Breezy loudly asking, “Hey, Ziti. You wanna come for dinner with my folks? They’d be so psyched to meet a real Italian.”
Luca, in the middle of tying his silver tie over an elegant dark blue suit, leveled Breezy with the most long-suffering expression known to man. “That is not my hockey nickname.”
“Sure, it is! Mazetti, ziti, you’re Italian.
It’s perfect!” Breezy threw an arm around Luca’s shoulders.
He wore a serviceable tan suit off the rack, given how it strained across his shoulders and thighs but wrinkled over his stomach, and one of the ties they sold in the merch store.
The contrast could not have been more obvious if he’d tried.
Breezy steered Luca out of the locker room still discussing the merits of baked ziti. Apparently, there were many.
In their wake, Hayes stared after the two of them, dumbfounded. “He’s, uh. Italian?”
“Yup.” Jax popped the p as obnoxiously as he could.
“What about the other thing?”
Mooney snorted derisively. “Ziti’s wheeled a girl in every city this road trip. Howie’s jealous; he could never.”
Howie looked up, made a face as if he wanted to be insulted, but then seemed to decide it might not be worth drawing more attention to himself. Rightly so. If Jax were in charge, Howie’d be doing nothing but bag skates and bench warming for the next three years.
“By the way,” Mooney added, throwing his bag over his shoulder with enough force to smack Hayes in the side. “I am Mexican.”
Hayes watched him leave. “Well fuck,” he muttered.
Jax debated getting into it with him, telling him all the ways he’d been out of line. He debated walking up to Howie and asking him what the hell he’d been thinking. He took a deep breath and did precisely none of it.
He was too angry, too emotional, and weirdly, still a little horny.
If he tried for confrontation now, he’d break things beyond repair.
Better to try in the morning, when he could remember nineteen-year-old rookies like Howie spent their entire lives surrounded by bullshit and probably didn’t know better.
Hayes, though, was old enough to know better. Jax might need two or three nights to stomach talking to him again.
The bus ride to the hotel remained quiet.
If Breezy had been there, he might have livened things up, forced some sort of connection back into the team.
But his family lived in Montreal, and he used his curfew exemption to stay with them (after dinner out with Luca, it seemed).
Jax spent the time researching queer-friendly clubs on his phone.
Normally, he’d have waited till they got there, and no one else could see his phone screen.
Normally, he wouldn’t have dared trying to hook up in Canada.
These were not normal times. Jax clung to sanity by a thread, and when it snapped, he’d either scream his sexuality in Hayes’s face or kiss Tom on the mouth. Neither of which constituted a safe or sane option.