Chapter 2 #3
He glanced over his shoulder, and then walked back to the last room, keeping an eye on the pile of boxes.
And sure enough, a moment later, right before they got behind the corner of the prior room, a barrel of a laser gun emerged between two of the boxes.
“Shit,” Ethan whisper-yelled as someone aimed and fired, barely missing him.
Hank pulled him right back against him, behind the corner.
“That worked better than I expected,” Hank said, also pushing away a flare of embarrassment at how breathless he sounded.
Only because this whole thing was exciting. The laser tag. Not Ethan. Not at all.
“Shit, man, who do you think that is? Charlie?”
Hank huffed out a laugh. “I was too busy running to figure out who it was,” he admitted. “Why does it matter?”
“I just wanna get a really good hit on him. At least one.” Ethan looked over at him. His eyes were sparkling, bright and happy, and Hank’s insides clenched, inconveniently.
“Let’s try not to get killed first,” Hank suggested.
“What do we do now?” Ethan asked.
Hank had no idea. But the positive was that whoever had been hiding behind the obstruction hadn’t followed them. Which meant that they were either alone or in a much smaller group and didn’t feel like they could risk coming after Hank and Ethan.
“We can’t go back in there,” Hank said slowly. They’d have no way to get to whoever it was, not without being totally exposed. Maybe they’d only get one of them, but they’d get one of them.
“There’s no way around that room.”
He was right; there was only forward.
“We’re gonna have to risk it,” Hank finally said. “Or go back with Max.”
“No way,” Ethan scoffed. “You can cover me, pepper the room with some fire. Maybe that’ll give me a chance to go get Charlie.”
“We don’t know that it’s Charlie,” Hank reminded him.
“Oh, whoever’s back there is hiding, scared. That’s totally Charlie.”
“Ouch,” Hank said, chuckling. “I guess we can try that. You sure you don’t want me to go first?”
He didn’t say that it was a much riskier choice to go first, especially with Hank’s subpar shooting skills.
“Nah,” Ethan said. “I got it.”
If Hank thought that Ethan would hesitate or go in scared—apparently like Charlie, though Hank had spent enough time around the guy, though obviously not as much as Ethan had, to know he didn’t play scared—he was wrong.
Ethan straightened and only a few seconds after he declared that he was good with the plan, he was charging ahead, right into the room, barely giving Hank the time to get into position.
He sprayed to the left of the room with his laser fire, hoping to draw whoever’s attention away from Ethan as he crept around the room’s perimeter and, at the worst, make them hesitate to uncover themselves long enough to shoot Ethan.
Once or twice, Hank thought he saw the barrel of the laser gun pop out, but it never shot, not until Ethan nearly finished edging towards the pile of boxes.
Hank had felt safe enough to come a little farther into the room, shooting as he went, taking care to avoid any shots that would come too close to Ethan. So he was actually in a decent position when the figure behind the boxes straightened up unexpectedly, taking aim right at Ethan.
“Eth!” Hank yelled and took aim himself.
Ethan ducked just as Hank shot right at the guy, his chest plate blinking red, indicating that he’d been hit.
“Shit,” Ethan exclaimed and then repeated himself as the guy pushed his goggles back, and of course, it wasn’t even Charlie. It was Danny, and he was making a hilarious, sulky face.
“Shit’s right,” he said. “This is what happens when you volunteer to be the advance scout.”
“Should’ve gotten a kick-ass partner like me,” Ethan said, lifting his hand, and Hank fist-bumped him.
“Should’ve,” Danny agreed.
Ethan turned to Hank with a grin. “That was cute, how worried you sounded.”
“You weren’t paying attention,” Hank grumbled, even though Ethan had been.
“Paying enough attention,” Ethan argued, but his dimple was still showing and Hank needed to look anywhere but at it. “Come on, let’s go kill Charlie.”
Danny laughed. “Want your bro, huh?”
Ethan’s face morphed from amused to serious in a second. “Can’t let his ego get any bigger.”
Hank did not say that Charlie’s last two back-to-back one-hundred-point seasons kind of justified any ego he wanted to have. He had a feeling Ethan wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
He didn’t have an older brother—or two older brothers and an older half sister, like Ethan—but he did have an older sister, Annie, who’d played hockey in college. So while Hank couldn’t entirely understand, he had some idea of what drove Ethan.
“We got this,” Hank said to Ethan and supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised when Ethan slung an arm around his waist, giving him a brief squeeze.
“Yeah, we do,” Ethan said, nodding. “Fucking dream team here.”
Danny raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
Hank tried to battle back the flush that wanted to rise in his cheeks, but that was like asking the sky not to be blue. He had reddish-leaning hair and pale skin. The flush was a fact of life, no matter how much he hated that it gave everything away.
Ethan tapped him gently on the ribs. “Right?” he asked again.
“Yeah, yeah, teamwork makes the dream work.”
Danny chuckled under his breath. “Adorable,” he said.
Hank wanted to argue, but what was he going to say? He couldn’t say anything without probably hurting Ethan’s feelings—and it wasn’t like anything Ethan had said was wrong, even.
“Come on,” Hank said. “Let’s go find Danny’s teammates and your brother. Kick their asses.”
“I wanna know if anyone actually thought that plan was going to work,” Max said, a couple of hours later, gathered around a big table at a local bar, sharing fries and beers, as they celebrated the blue team’s defeat of the orange team.
The orange team was there, too, and they weren’t exactly drowning their sorrows, but Hank had seen Charlie and Danny share more than one commiserating glance.
“I totally thought it was going to work,” Ethan retorted hotly.
“Of course you did,” Hank said, nudging him with an elbow.
He didn’t know when it had begun to feel right and normal to be touching Ethan like this.
Hockey players were a touchy-feely breed, generally, and Ethan, also the youngest kid in a big family, was clearly okay with it, but Hank had never been that guy.
He’d always kept his distance. All the guys he’d played with in juniors, in Erie, and in the AHL, in Syracuse, and even on the Bandits, seemed to get that.
But either Ethan didn’t care, or he didn’t want any space, because he kept sliding right up to Hank, taking the seat next to him like they were already best friends.
Like he didn’t want there to be any room between them whatsoever.
That was strange enough, but it was even stranger that Hank kept letting him.
That he found himself meeting Ethan halfway there, even.
“I can’t believe you went out of your way to come after me specifically,” Charlie complained to Ethan. Glanced over at Max. “And that you let him.”
“I’m not gonna control him,” Max said, blushing a little.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Hank pointed out.
After they’d “killed” Danny, they’d systematically tracked down where Charlie was holed up with Brock and Willy, and by the time they’d taken them out, the game was over, because the remainder of Max’s team had taken out Pavel and Sasha, already.
“Sure did, ’cause we’re fucking brilliant,” Ethan said, smiling up at him, still as delighted as he’d been over an hour ago, when the lights had all flashed, signaling the end of the game. “Teamwork makes the dream work, right?”
Even though this was all temporary—Ethan was going back to Portland U, and while Hank was probably headed to Syracuse at the end of the preseason, hopefully he’d be back here sooner rather than later—Hank found himself unexpectedly enjoying the way Ethan leaned in.
But still, there’d be no reason to be close, soon.
This was just fleeting. A few days of insanity.
And it felt a little insane. He’d known the guy for a day. Maybe it was good that he’d get some distance soon. Clear his fucking head.
“And here I thought that splitting up Barney and Baby Barney was going to mean we lost,” Dom said dryly.
“Don’t ever call me that again,” Ethan said, but he was smiling.
“Baby bro it is,” Dom retorted fondly.
“Ugh,” Ethan complained.
“What do your guys at Portland call you?” Max asked.
Ethan raised an eyebrow, met Hank’s eyes for a second, a mischievous look in his eyes and then turned to the rest of the table. “What do my teammates call me? Scorer of goals? Future Selke winner? Or, sometimes, when I’m really fucking slaying, The GOAT.”
Charlie groaned loudly. “You’re such a fucker.”
But everyone else was laughing. Even Hank.
Even if it hadn’t even been all that funny.
It was more than the bad joke that Max had inadvertently teed up.
It was the way Ethan’s whole face had lit up before he’d done it.
The twinkle in his eyes. The way he’d met Hank’s eyes right before he did it, like he was in on the joke.
“Honestly,” Max retorted fondly.
“Eth, I guess, or Ethan.” Ethan shot a pointed glance over at Charlie. “This one’s always been Barney. I wouldn’t take that from him.”
“Like you could,” Charlie said.
“I’m taller than you now,” Ethan said and the whole table froze. Everyone here knew that one of Charlie’s tender spots was his height. On the official roster, he was listed as six feet, but it was honestly more like 5’11”. Maybe even 5’10”.
But Ethan? Oh, he was definitely six feet.
“Oh, you’re such a little shit,” Charlie said after a single beat, his face making a half grimace, half smile. Like even he couldn’t be mad about that, not really.
And Hank was beginning to see that was a little bit of Ethan’s magic. He was magnetic. Charming, in an easy way that made you want to join the joke.