Chapter 5 #3
“Oh my God, you have no idea,” Ramsey confessed. “And honestly, it’s nice sometimes, but mostly like you say, it’s annoying as fuck. Especially when he doesn’t . . .when he has no idea what he’s talking about.”
Nate considered telling Ramsey that he’d told Aidan at least the bare facts of their first meeting, but he had a feeling Ramsey wouldn’t like that, and he also didn’t particularly want to bring up, into this surprisingly chill moment between them, the reminder that they’d had sex once.
“Right.”
“So we’ve got a few options,” Ramsey said.
“Options for what?”
Ramsey rolled his eyes, but his glance over at Nate was full of fond affection. Nate wanted to believe it was real, that he meant it, that it wasn’t just another act designed to placate Nate, to wrap him around Ramsey’s fingers so he could control him better.
“Come on, you don’t want to continue this way,” Ramsey said.
He didn’t, but he was also justifiably concerned about letting Ramsey make plans to shift the narrative.
“Of course not,” Nate said. He was tired of well-meaning teammates interfering. But what he was most tired of were his own fucking reactions.
Maybe Ramsey would suggest they come up with a way to avoid each other, and that would take care of the latter, too.
“We should just pretend that we’re friends now. I’ve been trying, but you keep pushing back,” Ramsey said, with a frank glance over at Nate. Like this was all his fault.
“I keep pushing back?” Nate retorted.
“See? That right there. All you had to do was say, sure, Ramsey, sounds good.”
“Maybe I’m not as good at faking it as you are,” Nate said. It was kind of shitty. Not as shitty as what he’d said about Ramsey to Dawson earlier, but then, he was working on a sliding scale right now.
But Ramsey didn’t even look slightly offended. He actually looked pleased instead. “Nathaniel, nobody is as good at faking it as I am.”
“I can’t believe you’re gonna brag about that like it’s something worthwhile.”
But Nate could. He could.
It was why Ramsey alternatively made him want to tear his own hair out and wrap his hands around his neck. Pull him in and . . .well.
“Don’t mistake the ability to see through some of my bullshit to mean you actually know me.” Ramsey said it in a faux-stern tone, but Nate had a feeling he’d actually pricked something deeper there. Ramsey wasn’t happy about what he’d said.
Guilt pulled at Nate, again, and he was so tired of it.
He didn’t apologize, but he did say, “Okay, so, you want to just, what . . . pretend we’re okay with each other. Pretend we’re friends?” There was a big problem with that one—well, more than one. Several, in fact.
Starting with the issue that he’d just told Aidan that he could never be friends with Ramsey.
Finishing with that Nate wasn’t entirely sure he could pull off a casual friends vibe. Not when it came to Ramsey.
“Eh,” Ramsey said, shrugging. “I’m not sure that’s gonna work. You’re never going to be able to not look at me like you don’t want to tear my clothes off.”
Nate squawked in outrage. “I don’t—I really—I don’t.”
But he probably did. He was thinking about it, anyway.
Embarrassing that it showed on his face. Embarrassing that Ramsey had recognized and then identified that look so easily.
“I was going to say, before you freaked out, that despite all my acting skills, I couldn’t pull that off either.”
Nate reared back. Not sure he’d actually fucking understood. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I said,” Ramsey said steadily, like he hadn’t just admitted to wanting to rip Nate’s clothes off, too. Again, actually.
“But—”
“Keep up,” Ramsey said impatiently. “Don’t play dumb football player with me. I’m predisposed to think that, but I’ve never been able to believe it with you.”
Now that was flattering. Maybe even more flattering than Ramsey wanting to get him naked.
“Okay, so you want to . . .” Nate swallowed hard.
This was a terrible fucking idea. Of all the insane plans that he’d imagined Ramsey might trot out, them sleeping together—even continuing to sleep with each other—was not even on the list. It was so far deep into crazy pants territory that Nate hadn’t even considered it.
“Pretend that we’re fucking? Yeah.”
“You’re insane.”
Ramsey shrugged. “You want them to leave us alone. You can’t pull off being casual friendly. This is the easiest solution.”
Nate’s jaw dropped. “To pretend to be fucking?”
He’d been right before. Talking about sex with Ramsey was horrible. Catastrophically stupid, really. To say the word fucking made him think of all the things he’d shoved down hard into the box. Even if the lid had always refused to stay closed, at least they’d been contained.
They weren’t contained now. Him saying it, them talking about it, had incinerated the box and now they were all floating around his head.
Too many memories. Too many fantasies.
“Yep,” Ramsey said, like this was nothing. Like it was a perfectly logical solution to their problem.
“I . . .that’s honestly the worst plan I’ve ever heard. Nobody is going to believe it.”
“And what, they’re going to believe that we’re suddenly friends, all bloodless and desireless?” Ramsey snapped back.
He’d been keeping a tight leash on himself, Nate realized.
Then he realized, too, that maybe this was getting to Ramsey the same way it was getting to Nate. That made the whole idea even worse, and it had been fucking cataclysmic to begin with.
Nate forced himself to take one deep breath and then another. “They’re not going to believe it, because they’re not going to believe that I’d be okay just casually fucking you.”
“If I wasn’t the king of problem solving, we might actually have an issue.
” Ramsey had tightened his leash again, and now he just sounded pleasant, like they were discussing the weather outside.
“Also, positively, we’re not back in Portland or in Buffalo, where the easiest solution might be too difficult to prove particularly convincing. But we’re not, so . . .there it is.”
“There what is?” Nate was afraid to ask. The more casual and easygoing Ramsey seemed to get about this, the more totally insane his ideas became.
“We don’t pretend we’re just fucking. We’re . . .I don’t know, what’s the step between just fucking and like, soulmate-boyfriend shit, like Aidan and Levi?”
Nate’s jaw dropped even further. “You want to pretend to be dating now?”
“Okay, so casual dating, yeah,” Ramsey said, nodding to himself like Nate had not said anything at all. Like this was all plausible, and not absolutely batshit insane. “That makes sense. I can see that. I’ve not done any of it so I wasn’t sure, but that was probably what I would have suggested.”
“Wait, you’ve never?”
Ramsey shot him a look. “This should not surprise you.”
It really shouldn’t. Ramsey had told him everything he needed to know back in June.
But then, it was hard to conceive that that Ramsey—the one who didn’t exchange phone numbers or do second nights or get involved romantically at all—was willing to fake date him.
Not only was willing, but had been the one to suggest it.
“Maybe I’m still surprised from everything else,” Nate said.
Ramsey laughed. Not the fake, I’m charming everyone in my aural vicinity kind of laugh, but a real laugh. Nate was cursed, and blessed, to be able to tell the difference.
“That’s me,” Ramsey said wryly. “Full of surprises.”
But Nate wouldn’t have said that, at least not before tonight. In fact, other than the startling reveal that Ramsey was a pro hockey player, nothing he’d done had ever brought even mild astonishment. He’d been exactly the overly-charismatic-and-knew-it guy that Nate had imagined him to be.
It hadn’t been even remotely shocking that he’d wiggled into Nate’s social circle, without seeming to break a sweat. If Ramsey wanted something, he got it. And always, it felt like there was an ulterior motive with him.
Of course that made Nate wonder what Ramsey’s ulterior motive was with this whole fake dating thing. Sure, getting Nate’s teammates and Wes off their backs was appealing, but this was a lot to do just to make that happen.
“Why are you even suggesting this?” Nate asked bluntly.
The corner of Ramsey’s mouth quirked up. Nate wished the memory of kissing it was hazier, but it was crystal clear still.
“You worried about me?” Ramsey asked.
“Maybe I’m worried about me.”
Nate was aware Ramsey had deliberately not answered the question, but he’d be stupid to assume he could make Ramsey, of all people, tell him something he didn’t want to.
Maybe Ramsey refused to admit it, even to himself.
“Don’t try to convince me you’re an asshole, Nathaniel. I won’t believe you.”
“Even though I’ve been a dick to you a bunch of times?” Nate asked archly.
But Ramsey just shrugged. “Maybe I deserved it. Some of it, anyway.”
That wasn’t right either, though. Ramsey had told him the score before Nate had ever kissed him.
And when he’d done it, he’d embraced Ramsey with eyes wide open.
He’d hoped something else would happen, sure, and he’d begun to believe that maybe it might, before they’d walked into the kitchen together.
But who was to say that hadn’t been Nate’s wishful thinking overflowing?
“You told me the truth that night.”
Ramsey gazed at him. Nate was mesmerized, in spite of himself. In spite of definitely knowing better. But then, that was the whole idea now, wasn’t it? He was supposed to be mesmerized. Admittedly, not when they were alone, necessarily, but they’d need to practice, right, in order to pull this off?
“Yeah,” Ramsey admitted.
“And I laughed at you.”
“I especially liked the bit where you called me Willy Nylander’s dog walker.”
He couldn’t mean that. “You don’t mean that.”
“Hey, maybe you aren’t aware, but I know how much Willy spoils those dogs.”
It was still humiliating, when Nate thought about it. “You just let me go on and on, digging myself into a deeper hole.”
Between one blink and the next, Ramsey was suddenly in his space, hands up on his shoulders, gazing up in Nate’s eyes.
His own glinted with amusement. Before, Nate would’ve shucked him off in a hot second, because they weren’t doing this any longer, but now he guessed .
. .well, they were practicing right? That had to be what Ramsey was doing, because he didn’t do anything without a purpose.
“Hey, listen, if I was actually offended, I wouldn’t have suggested we hook up that night,” Ramsey said.
He was tall, but Nate was taller, and Nate couldn’t help the perverse enjoyment of seeing Ramsey gaze up at him like this.
He was beautiful, especially like this. But it was funny, because his beauty, while an undeniable, constant, insistent reminder, wasn’t what kept Nate fascinated by him.
It was all those tall, slippery, impossible to climb, impossible to demolish walls, and how every once in awhile they’d shift just enough for Nate to get a glimpse of what might be behind them.
“What, you have a kink for people who laugh at you?”
Ramsey’s pink tongue flicked out, wetting the bottom of his even pinker lip. Ten out of ten times, Nate was sure that was one of the most effective tools in his not-inconsiderable arsenal. And yeah it worked on Nate too, even as he fought against succumbing to the weaponized gesture.
“You think you were laughing at me, Nathaniel?”
“Well, yeah. What do you think I was doing?”
“Come on. We were laughing together.” Ramsey shot him a look like he couldn’t believe he had to explain this.
“You really believe that.”
“You thought you were so funny and clever, and you were. You just weren’t playing with all the information.”
Nate shouldn’t resent that reminder. He hadn’t been. Ramsey had made damn sure of that.
But like Ramsey knew he was edging towards annoying Nate, he pulled back, just enough. “But,” he continued, “now you are. It’s me and you, on the same side, now.”
Nate knew he should tell Ramsey to forget the whole insane idea.
It didn’t even make that much sense. But the idea of being on the same side as Ramsey, of finally being in on the joke with him, was so appealing it was hard to imagine him deciding he didn’t want to.
Because he wanted to, desperately. And then there was the extra temptation of getting Ramsey where he wanted him.
Right in his space. Closer than anyone else had ever had him before.
“You’re crazy,” Nate muttered, which was emphatically not we can’t do this or we shouldn’t do this or this is a huge mistake.
And Ramsey knew it, because he grinned, wild and free for a split second and Nate’s heart hiccupped.
“Yeah, okay. But you’re down, though?”
It was a huge mistake, clearly, if his internal organs were to be believed, but that wasn’t what he was saying out loud.
“Sure,” Nate said.