Chapter 3
Ash
“Fuck,” I grumbled, shifting on my bed uncomfortably again under Callie. I was just trying to get comfortable, but Callie was clearly mistaking it for me being into this, grinding down on me more and making my thigh fucking burn. “Stop,” I panted, haphazardly moving her off me and back onto my bed.
All I was trying to do was get a little action before I had to be back at the rink, but nooooo. I played better when I’d just gotten laid, but my groin had been killing me all day long–it was my fault for thinking my hot girlfriend could change that.
“Still hurts?” she asked, gently rubbing my hip.
“Yup,” I sighed, dropping my head back against her dorm room wall with a thud. “I’m sorry,” I offered, lazily turning my head to her.
Callie perked up, smiling that sweet smirk at me before resting a dainty hand on my chest with a slow kiss. “I could do things that don’t require me on top of you,” she teased, trailing kisses down my jaw.
As tempting as that sounded, fuck no.
I’d been dealing with this pain for long enough to know that playing through it was one thing, but fucking through it was another–it never ended well. I always ended up in more pain than when I started, even when it was just Callie using that pretty mouth God gave her.
Callie was just so pretty in general. She was short and sweet with blonde hair and green eyes–didn’t annoy me, so that was a plus. I’d had a girlfriend in high school, swore that her going to college in New York wouldn't change anything…and then dumped her two months into my freshman year.
I wasn’t really proud of that, and I didn’t dump her for another girl–contrary to what her snotty friends thought.
Honestly, I broke up with her because it was too much work.
I couldn't maintain a long-distance relationship with how demanding hockey was– I thought she understood that.
I thought she understood me enough to know that I was never the type of person to leave her for just a girl that happened to be closer, but clearly, I was wrong.
Callie and I didn’t start dating until my sophomore year, and she'd been…okay. I expected very little from her, so it helped. I didn’t expect her to get me and be my little cheerleader–I wasn’t expecting deep conversations with the girl who thought saucing a puck involved your choice of buffalo sauces.
She killed time and was very pretty to look at, so I was in. It wasn’t like she was any deeper invested than I was–I was just hot and on a sports team, so she had a reason to doll herself up in yellow and blue on a Friday night.
If I were honest, it was boring.
We were boring these days.
Part of that was my fault–I couldn't do crazy stuff or fuck her against the walls the way I could when we first started dating. It was a fifty-fifty shot if I'd even be able to get hard with how uncomfortable or in pain I was when I was just lying in bed with her.
Pain felt good when it was working towards a win, but in my bed?
Not so much.
“I’ll have to pass,” I mumbled, gently working her mouth off my neck with a sigh. “I need to get to the rink anyway.”
“Okay,” she hummed, kissing my cheek sweetly. “I’ll be there later. I’ll be the pretty blonde with the Kincaid jersey and 22 on my back.”
“Can’t wait.”
Boring.
Honestly, walking out of her dorm, I wasn’t even all that upset that we didn’t have sex. I was fucking bored–even when I wasn’t in pain, I was careful not to do something that could irritate it.
Sex was just boring right now, at least until this finally healed.
Still, the superstitious part of me was screaming in my head the whole way to the rink, pissed off that we were breaking routine. I had the same routine every gameday, so skipping the part where I got off may not have seemed crazy, but it was going to throw off everything in my head.
When I got to the rink, I could already feel it.
Something felt wrong when I did my usual three knocks on my locker door, echoing wrong for some reason. My mouth was dry, and it wasn’t even time for me to drink my whole bottle of water, but I skipped two more steps, just to quench the feeling.
And just to make matters worse, when I was already feeling so off, Coach Thayer showed up.
He walked right into the locker room, smiling his annoyingly perfect smile at some of the guys, but walked straight up to me.
Go-fucking-figure.
“Ash, can you come with me?” he asked quietly, nudging his head towards the training rooms.
“I’m getting changed, but then I can–”
“Before you get changed.” He motioned again until I followed him.
I felt so off-kilter–so disoriented. I hated when my routine got messed up, and though it wasn’t entirely Thayer’s fault, he definitely wasn’t helping.
My muscles got tense, and my jaw clenched, irritation boiling in my body at what was so important that he had to break my routine more. I could feel my skin heating up every step closer to the training rooms we got, fully overheated when he shut the door and turned to me, completely calm.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his face scrunched as he gestured at the bench for me to sit with him. “I just wanted to–”
“You’re breaking my routine,” I said coldly, taking a step back from him–too overheated to sit down calmly with him. “You should know better than anyone that routines are fucking sacred, and you're breaking mine–”
“I just want to help you, Ash,” he said calmly. He held out his hand carefully, like I was liable to bite it off. “In the future, you could say, Coach Thayer, I have a routine, and this would break it. Is it important, or can it wait?”
From anyone else, that would have been patronizing. That would have sent me on a blaze of fury through this place, but something about the way he said it was just…fine.
It was just a suggestion, so we could understand one another better.
My eye twitched anyway–I needed to be getting changed. I needed to get changed, and then I needed to start my playlist to keep time while I warmed up on the ice.
I wanted to calm down–I really did, but this wasn’t helping.
“Or you could just leave me the fuck alone,” I spat, turning to the door, only to find a large hand covering the crack, stopping me.
“Calm. Down,” Thayer said slowly–calmly–in my ear.
Thayer was already taller than me, but you'd have thought I was two feet tall in the moment. He had his hand pressed to the door, standing behind me–closer than most of my coaches dared to get when I’d lash out at them.
That was a relatively tame lash I let out, but Thayer didn’t buckle for even a second. I wasn’t suddenly calmed, or anything, but something in his tone made me freeze in place, hand on the doorknob, not moving.
“I’m sorry I broke your routine, but I was trying to help,” he said calmly, unmoving from behind me. “Can I please help you, Ash?”
“Help how?” I asked, clenching my jaw as I let go of the doorknob and turned around.
Thayer was closer than I thought he was–our chests were only a few inches apart when I turned around.
I felt his body heat more, but in a strange turn of events, it didn't irritate my overheated skin.
I still felt irritated and unsettled, but his proximity and company were not making it any worse, which was shocking.
Normally, anyone in my space when I was upset made it worse, even Callie.
“Lay down,” he sighed, dropping his hand from the door and gesturing at the mat on the floor. “On your back–”
“Why?”
“Just do it, Ash,” he said sternly, sure. I let out a quick breath, making a big show of kneeling and lying back on the open floor. “Your groin is bothering you, yes?”
In more ways than one today, but yes.
“No,” I lied. “It's fine–are we done?”
“Ash,” he said softly, kneeling on my right side anyway.
“I want to make a deal with you. I know you’re lying, and I know it's because you don’t want to say it hurts and then have me pull you–I know that.
So, let’s make a deal. Moving forward, no matter what it is, as long as you’re honest with me, I’ll listen to you. ”
“You’ll listen to me?” I asked, scrunching my face up at him from the ground.
“It’ll be your call,” he said, nodding once. “If you think you’re good to stay, then I won't pull you.”
“I want to help you, Ash–I do. I trust that you know your own limits, but I can help with things–things you have no idea can even be helped. Let me help you, and I promise, I’ll listen.”
Yeah, he wasn't the first coach to promise that.
He wasn’t the first coach to come in here and spout nonsense about how he trusted his players to blah blah blah. It was the oldest coach trick in the book…
It just didn’t really feel like a trick right now.
I couldn’t explain it, but something in Thayer’s face just screamed at me. He really wanted this, or was at least convincing himself that he did, so as irritated as I was, I wanted to believe him.
Maybe we could start with a trial run.
“It’s bothering me a little bit today,” I said quietly, almost drowning in the silence of the empty training room.
“Will you let me help you with it?” he asked calmly, a smile growing on his face when I nodded hesitantly. “Okay, just breathe. No matter what, just keep breathing steady.”
Thayer showed me his hands, almost proving they were just his hands and not a weapon, before moving them to my right knee. I nodded at him, closing my eyes like it would make this embarrassing amount of submission feel any better.
Slowly, Thayer started massaging my knee, working his way up my leg.
I knew in that moment the dude was a quack because my pain had nothing to do with my leg, but I still let him go.
I kept breathing as he asked, but it started to get a little hard to keep it steady when he reached the top of my thigh.
My thigh got tense on reflex, aching a little at the strain it was putting on me.
“Relax, Ash,” Thayer said quietly, massaging the same spot on my thigh until I forced the muscle to relax.
“Oh,” I almost moaned out, dipping my head back at just how…good his hands felt.
It had been a while since anything felt even close to good around there, so even if it was both embarrassing and uncomfortable, I was going to bask in the relief of not feeling so much pain right there.
Thayer kept working higher, paying no mind to how my breathing was now just full-on moaning like we were fucking in here.
His hands reached the junction between my leg and groin–the area I’d been cursing for months now–and continued his handywork there.
And that?
That was better than any sex I'd ever had–holy fuck.
The relief of long-term pain finally subsiding was unfucking matched. I’d tried massages like this on myself, but it never felt half as good as this one felt–by the time Thayer was done and releasing my leg, I was half hard from the relief alone.
I was half hard…from a guy touching me.
Suddenly very uncomfortable, I sat up quickly and scrambled some distance between us on the floor.
It was nice to move so quickly and awkwardly with very little pain involved, but I was more focused on squeezing my eyes shut and willing away what was clearly just a normal response to anyone touching me in that area.
It was totally normal–I'd been in so much pain, and he took it away–that was it. It was a relief boner, not a sexual thing–I wasn’t into guys, and definitely not Coach Thayer.
Thayer didn’t seem any more comfortable than I did, hands flat on his legs and blinking quickly. I’d clearly made him uncomfortable with my reaction to all that, which didn’t make me feel any better as I scrambled to my feet.
“T-thank you,” I fumbled out nervously, flattening out my shirt anxiously. “It feels better, thank you. I’m gonna go get changed now–”
“Good," he said after a beat, his voice steady. “That tells me the muscle finally released, but that’s not a permanent fix–we’ll have to do that again regularly for a few weeks, but it will fix it for you, Ash.”
“Sounds good.”
No, actually, that sounded fucking horrible.
The last thing I wanted was that man's hands anywhere near or around my dick again–no way. The moaning was one thing, but there was no way he didn’t spot the boner in my very thin gym shorts–his fucking hand was almost touching it.
This was Callie’s fault!
I was into everything we were doing, but it got cut short because of the pain–I was just in that mood, clearly. I was obviously just thinking about Callie, and it had nothing to do with Thayer.
Without another word, I slipped out through the door and back into the locker room, eager to get changed and back on track.
And I was doing everything I could not to think about how, whatever that feeling was he just gave me, it seemed to settle the nerves in me about breaking my routine.
Like it put me back on track.