Chapter 13
We won.
I think?
I was there. I was on the ice, I knew that much. My body did the things it knew how to do and the crowd did the Morr Roar and at some point the buzzer went. People were hitting me on the back and I was grinning and saying the right things and I have absolutely no memory of any of it in any detail.
I showered.
I know I showered because my hair was wet and I was in different clothes.
No matter what had happened during the game or after the game, I wasn’t thinking about any of it.
Because all I could think about was that sound.
Not the kiss, although the kiss with Cross was—that was its own category of information I was going to need significant time and possibly a longer couch to fully process.
But specifically that sound, the small sharp inhale when I'd gotten past Cross’s guard before he'd made the decision, before anything was decided, the one he hadn't chosen to make.
The most honest thing Cross had ever done in front of me.
His thumb against my jaw.
That's not what I see.
The wall coming back. His face before the wall came back.
You should go warm up.
Someone knocked on my door.
I didn’t move.
They knocked again.
I got up.
Cross was in the hallway.
Cross was in the hallway.
He still had his coat on, which meant he'd come straight here, no intermediate stops.
But the coat was unbuttoned, which was not how Cross wore a coat.
His tie was loosened. Not dramatically, just half an inch, the collar open one button, and on anyone else that would be nothing and on Cross it was the equivalent of showing up in pieces.
He looked like hell.
Not literally. He looked like Nathan Cross, which meant he looked unfairly good, but there was something around his eyes that hadn't been there this morning.
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
"You left," he said.
Not hello. Just that, breathy and immediate.
"I went home," I said.
"After the game." A muscle in his jaw. "You didn't—" He stopped. Something moved through his expression, brief and unguarded, and then the assembled look arrived—the professional posture pulling itself back into place like he'd caught himself leaning. "We need to talk about what happened."
"Okay," I said.
He glanced over his shoulders to the hallway outside my apartment. "Not out here."
I looked at him for a second. The loosened tie. The unbuttoned coat. The something behind his eyes that was doing its best to look like nothing.
"Okay," I said, and stepped back and let him in.
Cross walked into the middle of my living room and started talking.
He was saying something important. I could tell it was important by the quality of his voice. Professional boundary was a phrase I caught. Team context. His role, my role. I registered these the way you registered weather: present, noted, not fully processed.
He had very blue eyes.
I was thinking about that, too. About how blue they were in my apartment, in the low light of my living room with the lamp on. I had been cataloguing the different versions of Nathan Cross's eyes for months without meaning to and the apartment version was—
He said something about before it became something that affected—
He was still talking.
Something about the team. Something about what was best.
He had a small scar below his left ear that I'd never noticed before. Faint. Old. I wondered how he got it and then I wondered if I was allowed to ask that.
I was standing in my own space in bare feet with my hands in the pockets of my sweats, and Nathan Cross had driven here to tell me something important that I had almost entirely not heard because of his eyes and the scar below his left ear.
"You drove here," I finally said, interrupting him, probably.
Cross froze.
"You could've texted," I said. "You could've waited until tomorrow. Pulled me aside at the rink, kept it professional.” I didn't move yet. "Or, shit, you could have called, I guess. But you got in your car tonight and drove here."
He didn't say anything.
"Why'd you drive here, doc?"
The question sat in the room between us. Cross looked at me with that expression, and his jaw was set and his hands were still and he was doing everything exactly right except for the part where none of it was convincing either of us.
I moved.
Not fast. Not the way I'd moved in the corridor.
I crossed the distance slowly this time, giving him every foot of it to make a decision, and I watched his face and his face watched me back, and he didn't step back, didn't do anything except stand there while I closed the space between us until there was barely any left.
We were close enough that I had to angle my chin up slightly.
Cross was taller, but I was right there. I could feel the warmth of him and hear him breathe and see the way he was looking at me, which wasn't clinical at all.
"You should—" he started.
"Tell me to go to hell," I said. "Or don't."
I waited. He was definitely going to tell me to go to hell, right? Because the alternative was. . .
But then he said: "Fuck it."
His hand grabbed the front of my shirt, and he kissed me.
Not like the corridor. The corridor had been slow and deliberate and thorough, Cross making a decision and executing it. This was something else, this was what lived underneath the decisions, and it hit me like a physical fact.
His mouth and his hands and his body walking me backward until my shoulders found the wall and then staying there. I made a noise into his mouth that I was not going to analyze and kissed him back with everything I had.
My hands went to his lapels first, then his shirt underneath, then his waist, learning the shape of him through fabric, and he kissed me like he'd been keeping this somewhere for a very long time and the somewhere had run out of room.
I slid my hands under the hem of his shirt and found skin and he inhaled sharply.
It was that sound again, the unguarded one, and I swallowed it and wanted more of it, wanted to spend a significant amount of time finding out every version of it.
"Cross—" I pulled back enough to breathe.
His forehead dropped to mine. Both of us breathing. His hands were at my sides, thumbs against my ribs, and I could feel his pulse.
"Nathan," he said.
“If we're—" I stopped speaking as his thumb moved against my ribs. "Nathan."
That landed somewhere I wasn't prepared for.
I'd been calling him Cross for months, in my head and out loud, Cross the wall, Cross the problem, the Ice Doc, all of it, and he was standing in my apartment with his forehead against mine telling me his name like it was something he was handing over, and I didn't have a system for that either.
"Nathan," I said again.
His eyes closed briefly. Opened.
I kissed him again, slower this time, and walked us farther into the apartment until he was the one against the wall properly, and that was—that was something, Cross against my wall in my chaos, precise and controlled and completely undone, and I was the one doing the undoing, and I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted to hear that sound again.
I touched him, and he groaned.
Low and involuntary, the same quality as the inhale in the corridor but longer, deeper, and I hadn't known.
I genuinely hadn't known I could like a sound that much, hadn't known it could go straight through me like that, hadn't known that undoing Nathan Cross would feel like this particular flavor of yes.
I made a mental note to do it again. Immediately and as often as possible.
My hands found his belt.
He looked down at my hands and then up at my face, and whatever he found there made something shift in his expression. He said nothing, just watched me, and that was its own answer and I took it.
I dropped to my knees right there in the middle of my living room, the carpet rough under my shins, and looked up at him.
Nathan.
The name still felt new in my mouth, like something I’d stolen and wasn’t ready to give back. He was braced against the wall, chest rising fast, that icy composure already cracking wide open. His hands flexed at his sides like he didn’t know whether to stop me or drag me closer.
I didn’t give him time to decide.
My fingers worked his belt open, the metal clink loud in the quiet apartment, then the button of his slacks, the zipper. I tugged everything down just enough—boxers too—until his cock sprang free, already hard and flushed dark at the tip.
Thick.
Jesus.
“Wesley,” he said, voice low and rough, like the word had been scraped out of him.
I grinned up at him, slow and filthy, because I couldn’t help it. “Yeah. I’ve got you.”
Then I leaned in and took him into my mouth.
The first slide of my lips over the head made his hips jerk.
I sucked gently, tongue swirling around the tip, tasting salt and skin and something that was just him.
His hand came down to my hair—not pushing, just gripping, fingers threading through the blond strands like he needed an anchor.
I took him deeper, hollowing my cheeks, and that low groan tore out of him again, longer this time, raw.
“Fuck,” he breathed, and the curse hit me like a slapshot to the chest.
Nathan Cross—the Ice Doc himself—cursing because of my mouth.
I’d only ever seen him cool, clipped, professional. Hearing that gravelly “fuck” spill out of him made my own dick throb hard against my zipper. I wanted to bottle the sound, play it on repeat, memorize every broken edge of it.
I pulled back just enough to lick a wet stripe up the underside, tracing the vein there, then sucked him down again, faster this time.
My head bobbed, lips stretched tight around him, spit already slicking the way.
I relaxed my throat and took him as deep as I could, nose brushing the dark hair at his base, and held there for a second, swallowing around him.
“Shit—Wesley—” His voice cracked. The hand in my hair tightened, not quite pulling, but close. His other hand slapped flat against the wall like he was trying to keep himself upright. “That’s—fuck, that’s good.”