Chapter 4 #3
Nate recited what had happened as succinctly and undramatically as possible.
Seeing the hottest guy in the world across the bar.
Ramsey approaching him. Them flirting. Ramsey making his desires clear.
Nate deciding he didn’t care—or that he could change his mind?
He still wasn’t clear on that, and he skipped over it.
The kiss. The sex in his place. The kitchen and its aftermath.
Then running into Ramsey at the Vault team party, and realizing that he was actually a hockey player, and a friend of Wes’.
“Wait a sec,” Deacon interrupted him again. “What did you say his name was again?”
“You’re going to fucking google him?”
“Well, yeah. You said he was the hottest guy you’d ever seen. I need to verify that this is actually factual and not just your dickmatized goggles on.”
Nate sighed. “Trust me, he’s that hot.”
“Not gonna believe you, not til I see him myself,” Deacon said.
“Fine. Ramsey Andresen.”
There was a second of quiet. Then, “Holy shit.”
It was hard not to say, I told you so, but Nate was thinking it.
“Okay, yeah. You’re right. Holy shit.”
“Good thing Grant isn’t listening in,” Nate teased.
“Are you kidding me? When he gets home from the office, I’m gonna show him. You said this guy’s a hockey player?”
“I know, right?”
“Shit,” Deacon said appreciatively. “And he was good in bed?”
Nate swallowed hard. He’d tried very hard not to think about Ramsey and a bed—or a couch or a dirty bathroom or any possibly conveniently horizontal or even vertical surface—but that was like asking water to not be wet.
“Yeah,” he said.
“No wonder you’re fucked up about him,” Deacon said.
“That doesn’t help,” Nate complained. “I don’t want him, but he won’t leave me alone.”
“Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?” Deacon chuckled under his breath. “How’s that working out for you?”
Fucking terrible, that was how it was working out for him.
“That’s what I thought,” Deacon said when Nate didn’t answer. Didn’t trust himself to answer.
“I know the team guys want us to get along. But every time I think about it—about playing nice—I . . .” Nate trailed off.
I think about playing way too nice. But it was obvious that Ramsey didn’t want that.
He’d been so charming, but also keeping Nate at a distance.
Like he didn’t want Nate to get any ideas.
Well, Nate wanted to stop getting ideas.
“You don’t like it. I’ve been there, trust me,” he said wryly.
And yeah, he probably had. Deacon’s final season had coincided with Nate’s rookie season—and also the season when Deacon and Grant had finally stopped circling each other and had gotten together for real.
“I’d ask you what you did to get over it, but we all know you never did.” Even thinking about that fact was entirely unhelpful.
Nate couldn’t say he was pining after Ramsey, but he was doing enough of something that the very presence of the guy, even around the periphery of his life, made him tense.
The Jordan situation wasn’t helping that either.
“No, I didn’t,” Deacon agreed. “Are you—”
“No. No. I’m not anything. I just . . .he’s just there, all the time. An irritant.”
“Sure,” Deacon said easily. But Nate wasn’t sure Deac actually agreed with him.
“Nothing I can do about it. Just try to avoid him, I guess.” Though he’d already been doing that.
Not that well, and if he wasn’t mistaken, he had a feeling the longer Ramsey spent hanging around Toronto, the more likely it was that he was going to end up getting a lecture from Aidan.
He could feel Aidan worrying about it, wanting to fold Ramsey into more of their team functions, making sure he didn’t feel alone or abandoned, even though he wasn’t playing.
Maybe Ramsey wasn’t on Aidan’s team, didn’t play Aidan’s sport, even, but none of that mattered. Aidan was the most aggressive team captain in the history of team captain-ing, plus he had all those big brother genes.
“You could try not avoiding him,” Deacon said, far too reasonably.
Nate laughed, but he wasn’t that amused. “Why would I do that?”
“Because fighting the inevitable is still fighting.” Deacon was still saying all this in this fucking calm ass tone, like what he was saying was not only sensible, it was valid.
“And then I stop fighting and what?”
Deacon hesitated.
“Exactly,” Nate said. “He’s not magically going to want me.
He’s just going to keep hanging around, being tempting and infuriating.
” Nate could imagine it. Nate woke up from nightmares in cold sweats, thinking about how shitty it would be if he gave in to his feelings and Ramsey only kept taunting him.
Not wanting him the way Nate could want him, if he let himself.
“Okay then. Keep fighting the good fight then?”
Nate snorted. “Yeah. Okay.”
“And don’t be a stranger.”
“It was good you dropped by the suite tonight,” Wes said.
Ramsey looked up from his spot, where he was reclining on his guest room bed. Well, it was basically Ramsey’s bed now, he’d spent so much time here.
“Yeah,” Ramsey said. It had been weird, the Wolves coming to town, but he’d known it was coming, too, and that he wasn’t really any closer to getting on the ice than he’d been before.
With enough time, he could mentally prepare for anything, could build his walls high enough, smooth enough, impenetrable enough, that nothing could ever really touch him.
Wes kept a closer eye on the Wolves schedule than he did these days—though Ramsey had most definitely known that this game was coming up—and there was no way it was a coincidence that Wes had made sure the Thunder contingent came to the arena for this particular game.
“Did it help at all, or did you want to just lick your wounds in peace?” Wes asked. He pushed off the doorframe and came into the room, settling down on the corner of the bed.
It had been obvious before that Wes had wanted them here for Ramsey, even if they weren’t Ramsey’s team—and it was even more obvious now. It was a kind gesture, even if Ramsey wasn’t entirely sure it meant anything, in the end.
He was still up in the suite, not down on the ice.
His team was still playing without him.
“It was good.” Nothing would’ve really helped, but just having Wes so transparently give a shit about his emotional state helped.
“Don’t lie to me,” Wes said. “I saw you talking to Nate.”
Wes did not know any of that story yet, though it was clear enough something else had happened, even to Wes, and Ramsey kept expecting to be asked about it.
But Wes kept pretending.
Hard to say if that was better or worse.
“Yeah, well, maybe I haven’t given up on getting on that guy’s good side,” Ramsey said. Not a lie. Not exactly. If he did somehow end up on Nate’s good side, he wasn’t sure he’d survive it.
“Maybe you should,” Wes said, sighing. “I was surprised he came.”
Wes was not subtle. He should have just admitted, out loud, that he would’ve strongly suggested that Nate not show up to the game with the other guys.
“I’m not,” Ramsey said. He could always feel Nate’s eyes on him. He felt a lot of guys’ eyes on him, but they weren’t ever like Nate’s. It was obvious Nate didn’t want to be looking. That he’d rather be looking anywhere else.
But he still looked anyway and then resented Ramsey the whole time for the fact he couldn’t help himself.
Wes shot him a transparently concerned look. “He’s a good guy. I don’t know why he hated you basically on sight.”
Ramsey sighed. He knew he should tell Wes the truth, but at this point if he did it, Wes would know why he waited so long.
And after that exception piled on yet another exception, so many exceptions he’d made for Nate, that he kept making for Nate, Wes might finally figure out why he drove Ramsey crazy.
Having to see him, his presence a forcible reminder of how it had felt that one night, and then put that aside every time, was not easy. Compounding the problem was that it had always been easy before.
“Are you ever gonna tell me why?” Wes pressed.
Ramsey hesitated.
“There’s nothing,” Ramsey said. Hating himself.
Hating lying to Wes. The further into this that they got, the more he knew he should have told him the truth in June.
Sorry, bud, I accidentally picked your teammate up and it was really good.
Until I realized who he was, I thought there was a chance he might be the exception to a lot of my rules.
Wes sighed. “I know there’s something. You’re gonna tell me someday.”
“Yeah,” Ramsey agreed, despite not knowing if that was true, especially not with how things were going.
Wes stood, shooting Ramsey a wry look. “Don’t spend too much time on screens tonight, okay?”
Ramsey had nearly reached his screen time limit for the day looking over the books for the bar this afternoon, so he just nodded.
Wes flipped off the overhead light on the way out, just the dim lamp on the table next to the bed on.
Once, a few weeks ago, after a few drinks, Levi had insisted on air-dropping him the contact info of basically everyone on the team. “Just in case you need someone,” he said, “and Wes isn’t around.”
It was slightly ridiculous because Wes was always around, like an overeager and overprotective puppy, but it had also netted him the phone number he thought he’d never get. The phone number he’d told himself he’d never want.
Now Nate sat in his contacts, taunting him with his unused existence. The messages between them empty except for the different drafts he kept typing out and deleting.
It was so stupid. He should just delete the contact, and with it, the temptation to say something to Nate that he shouldn’t.
He typed out one of his many drafts. Hope you got the advice you needed.
Then Ramsey deleted it a letter at a time, forcibly, pads of his fingers pressing into the screen like he could erase it from his mind.
It was the kind of painfully obvious text he’d have told everyone he knew not to send, ten out of ten times.
A flimsy excuse to make contact.
If you have something to say, just say it, the old Ramsey would’ve said.
Well, if he was taking that advice . . .
The next draft read: I can’t stop thinking about that night in June. I don’t think you can either.
That text he erased with a regretful melancholy, fingers lingering instead over each word.
He’d ask why he was like this, but he already knew. The therapist his billet mom had insisted he see, when he’d played in juniors, when she’d discovered that despite his foster kid status, he’d never been, had told him that he had a lifetime of reinforced walls that nobody could hope to get around.
At the time, he’d thought, yes, and good.
Now, at twenty-five, that thought didn’t fill him with reassurance any longer.
He just felt alone. Even with Wes down the hall and Brody in his phone, all his secrets—even secrets from his best friends—threatened to bury him.
What he should really do was leave. Go back to Buffalo. If he did, he wouldn’t keep running into the guy. Would be able to get some much needed perspective.
Back in June, he never thought he’d be hanging around Toronto in October. He’d assumed, maybe naively, maybe with an overdeveloped sense of shit works out for me that he’d be back in Buffalo, back with the team.
Even if he wasn’t able to have contact or practice with the team, there was nothing stopping him from going back.
Back to his empty apartment. The empty life he’d built for himself pre-concussion that had seemed, at least on the surface, like what he’d always wanted. It had only taken a month on injured reserve to realize it was all meaningless bullshit.
If he was lonely now, even with Wes pulling his overprotective routine, Buffalo would be worse. Buffalo wasn’t a solution. Normally, he’d face that problem with a clear-eyed pragmatism that every adult he’d ever met had admired.
He typed out another text he wasn’t ever going to send.
Shit sucks.
That wasn’t a very Ramsey-like text. Hardly designed to make Nate actually want him.
He deleted it again and tossed his phone next to him on the bed, feeling the beginnings of a headache that might’ve had its origins in his fucked up brain, or his fucked up heart—it could be one or it could be both. Probably was both.
He stood up and walked down the hall.
Wes was lying in bed. “Hey,” he said, “everything okay?”
Ramsey ducked his head. “Do you mind—”
He didn’t have to say anything more. Wes just scooted over and patted the covers. “Of course,” he said, before Ramsey could figure out how to choke out the question.
Ramsey slid in next to him, settling down on the other pillow.
They did this sometimes—had done it more frequently when Ramsey had first come to Toronto—but it had always been totally platonic.
It would never be anything else, Ramsey knew that now, one hundred percent for sure.
He’d been ninety-nine-percent sure when he’d come to Toronto, because Wes was still painfully in love with Marcus, but after his night with Nate, he’d known.
It would never be like that with him and Wes, but there was still love between them. Two people who, if they weren’t together, would be alone and knew it.
“You okay?” Wes asked, rolling over, grayish-green eyes full of concern.
With anyone else, Ramsey would smile and nod. He’d practically made a fucking career out of being okay. But that was the beauty of Wes. He was allowed to shake his head instead. Allowed to say, “No. But I will be.”
And Wes was allowed to reach over and squeeze his arm and say back, “Yeah, you will.”