Home Ice Advantage (Penalty Box #3)

Chapter Eight

December

The thing about the end of November and into December, Ryan was finding, was that the team’s results had evened out from .500 to slightly below it. Despite any coaching work that he and Aronson and Petey and Heidi managed to drum into the youth, he still had an entire roster full of underperforming veterans, and he was starting to find that no matter what he did in the practices, they were still essentially the same players. There were a few, like Emil H?rm?l?, who had discovered new levels of backchecking that they’d never had before. But then there were others, like Jesse Keen, who simply could not seem to put together the lessons that Ryan was desperately trying to teach them.

Sometimes, when he watched Keen in the neutral zone making blind passes to no one, Ryan wanted to drop the determinedly positive face that he presented at practices and even on the bench, and scream. Unhinge his jaw and let loose with the full stable of curses in five languages that he’d picked up over the course of twenty years in the league.

“You’re gonna have to do something about him,” Aronson said, for the umpteenth time, as they sat in an all-hands coaching meeting going over tape. The game had been particularly egregious: a stupid penalty that Keen had taken had led to the game-winning goal against.

“He’ll sit the next game, but there’s not a whole lot more that I can do,” Ryan said. “I can bump him down the lineup, but then he’s just going to be someone else’s problem and our fourth line is going to get caved in even worse.”

“Waive Jesse Keen, waive Jesse Keen,” Petey sang, in the tune and rhythm of “Carol of the Bells.”

“While I do not agree with goyische holiday shit this early in December,” Aronson said, “Petey’s right. You have to make them face some consequences, Sully, or they don’t have any incentive to get better.”

What Ryan didn’t say, immediately, is that they were probably right. What he also didn’t say was that he wasn’t ready to give up on his coaching philosophy, which was still relatively new. He’d put a lot of thought and care into it. Waiving a veteran was a pretty harsh move. While Keen had a one-way contract and would make the same in the major or minor leagues, it was still a statement that wouldn’t go over well. For a man who hadn’t sniffed the minors in at least a decade, it would be a blow, and Ryan couldn’t tell how liked in the room Keen was, whether there would be ripple effects or not.

“He’ll sit for now,” he said, “and we’ll see if that lights a fire under his ass.”

“The man is wearing heatproof underwear,” Heidi muttered, and Petey laughed, but everyone fell silent and moved on to the next issue once Ryan shot them a look that said: we’re doing it.

The other thing about the end of November and December, Ryan was finding, was that road games were a great opportunity to experiment. Specifically, with fucking around with Aronson.

He was actually kind of shocked how easy it was, to follow Aronson back to his room after games; to drag Aronson back to Ryan’s room. He was shocked how easy it was to learn things he never thought he’d like but actually liked a lot . He was shocked that Aronson didn’t seem to mind if Ryan couldn’t stop talking or couldn’t stop laughing; he seemed to think it was funny. Which was something, even if he didn’t actually like it and just wasn’t saying anything.

He was shocked how easy it was to accept that maybe, his entire life, he just hadn’t realized that he was queer until Eric Aronson pushed him up against a whiteboard.

Ryan’s life had had weirder things happen, but that was probably up there.

The road trips and travel had been a good excuse not to go home for Thanksgiving. There weren’t games on the day of the holiday, but Ryan had begged off, saying he was tired and had preparation for the game the day after.

He had ignored the barrage of text messages from his brothers and from Dad, all of them talking shit about how he thought he was so important now that he was back in the major leagues again, and he wasn’t even playing , he was just coaching. Ryan read every single one of them—he never had read receipts on because he didn’t like to give anyone the satisfaction—and sighed. He was definitely going to have to go home for Christmas. And that wasn’t even counting his divorce hearing, right smack in the middle of the month.

Even phone calls with Murph had gotten awkward. Whenever Ryan started talking about the team, it all looped back to Aronson, and he could hear Murph starting to check out. As much as he tried not to, it happened anyway. It was like any small space left in his brain that wasn’t occupied with hockey had suddenly been filled with Aronson: the way he frowned and the way he smiled, the way his body felt under Ryan’s and inside of it, the way it was so easy to piss him off and get a reaction out of him.

Aronson, though: he had turned out to be exactly the kind of distraction Ryan hadn’t known he needed. Sure, he was still an obnoxious little shit in practice, especially now. They had a kind of competition going, who could shoulder-check who accidentally the most times without anyone noticing, and Ryan was winning. And then they were on a western road trip in the beginning of December—Los Angeles and San Jose and Vancouver—and it was even easier not to think about what was waiting for him later in the month.

They landed in Los Angeles, where they’d be staying for the game against the Blades and the Arsenal. The first night, the coaches—with the exception of Heidi, who didn’t always travel with the team because sometimes she was working with their minor league affiliate in Providence—went out to dinner. Ryan didn’t remember much of the conversation because all he could think about was Aronson, about what they could do after the check was cleared and they made it back to the hotel.

The thing was that Ryan had thought he knew about sex. He’d been having it for over thirty years at this point, but the thing was that he was learning he didn’t know much at all. The thing was that Aronson was constantly surprising him. It wasn’t just that he seemed to understand instinctively how to make Ryan do and say absolutely insane things, with his tongue and his hands and his dick. It wasn’t just that he seemed to be driven equally as insane by the things that Ryan did to him even when they were fumbling and awkward.

Somehow, it just worked.

“Do you ever think that you’ve... I don’t know. Kind of lost your mind or something?” Ryan asked. He was lying on his back where he’d collapsed after pulling out, still disgusting and sweaty and red-faced.

Aronson was sprawled on his stomach, eyes half-closed. Ryan took a second to admire the way he looked like that, the funny hockey proportions gone to seed—his broad shoulders and muscular ass and incongruously lanky body. Some hockey guys waxed; Aronson was hairy from his neck down to his ankles. His curls were dark with sweat and without his glasses, he looked younger, somehow, less intimidating.

“Pretty much every day,” Aronson mumbled. “Only explanation I can come up with for you, anyway.”

Maybe earlier in the year Ryan would have been upset by that, or even a little stung. But the more he took a pit stop to the end of the evening in Aronson’s bed, the more he was starting to realize that Aronson was more bark than bite. He reached out, experimentally, ran his hand down the length of Aronson’s back. Aronson didn’t pull away, just opened one eye and looked at Ryan a little warily, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing.

“I’m not gonna be able to go again,” he said.

“I can’t, either,” Ryan said, surprised. “I don’t know, I just—wanted to touch you.”

Aronson gave him another one of those looks, not quite suspicious, but definitely measuring. There was something going on behind his eyes that Ryan couldn’t decipher. His back felt tense under Ryan’s fingers, so he took them away. It felt like the weird kind of precipice moment where whatever was going on between them could nosedive very sharply south, depending on the way Aronson responded. Instead, he rolled over onto his back, looked up at Ryan with a wry smirk twisting the corner of his mouth up.

“You’re kind of a slut for any kind of physical affection, huh.”

“What?” Ryan demanded, stung, and kind of—embarrassed. He wasn’t sure what it was about this whole thing—whether it was having sex with another man, whether it was just Aronson—that always made him feel so off-balance, but sometimes, he felt like a teenager again, awkward and unsure.

“Like this,” Aronson said, sitting up. He ran his hands down Ryan’s sides, and Ryan shivered but didn’t pull away. He couldn’t pull away. Aronson’s hands made their way farther down, tracing his thighs, warm against Ryan’s skin. “See? You fucking love this.”

Ryan thought about retorting, It’s been a while since anyone actually enjoyed touching me , but that sounded even worse than whatever Aronson was probably thinking. So he just shut the fuck up and let Aronson touch him.

Aronson’s face had started out with that mocking little smirk, but the longer it went on, the more Ryan’s body swayed unconsciously into his hands, the more his expression changed. Ryan had lost track of the time; lost track of how long Aronson had been touching him. It didn’t matter. By the time Aronson’s fingers closed around his dick—hard, again, which seemed impossible—the noise Ryan made, an involuntary gasp, sounded completely unlike him.

“See?” Aronson said, again. “God, you...you really...” His voice didn’t sound mocking anymore, though. It was rough and ragged, and when Ryan finally opened his eyes again, Aronson was staring at him, like he could take Ryan apart just by looking.

“I thought you said you wouldn’t be able to go again,” Ryan managed, before Aronson’s mouth came down on his again, and then neither of them was talking at all anymore.

It was really like his body, which had had very limited, unexciting sex for the past five years or more, had suddenly developed a mind of its own. Like a tree withering away in a drought turning greedily into a rainstorm.

Against all of his own logical thoughts or desires, there he was, in Aronson’s room again after the games. And there Aronson was, letting him in, even while he was saying shit like, “This doesn’t change anything at work, this doesn’t change anything about the way I feel about you.”

“And what’s that?” Ryan asked, trapped between the wall and Aronson’s body, his legs hooked behind Aronson’s back. Since the first time they’d done this, it was like Aronson secretly enjoyed making the point that despite Ryan’s muscle and history and awards, Aronson could manhandle him easily. Not that Ryan was complaining.

“You annoy the shit out of me,” Aronson said, teeth digging into the dip of Ryan’s neck, right against the muscle. “You’re the most annoying, frustrating little—”

“Okay,” Ryan agreed, the hand he had fisted in Aronson’s hair yanking his head back up. That was going to leave a bruise tomorrow. “You’re also pretty fucking terrible,” he managed, although it came out a lot fonder than he’d intended it to sound. “You really have to—have to stop that, someone’s going to ask questions—”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Aronson asked, dumping him onto the fluffy hotel comforter, and Ryan had to admit that, secretly, he had a point.

The next day, the boys lost to the Blades, which wasn’t surprising: the Beacons were rebuilding, and the Blades were nearly done. Ryan was going to need to tell them to watch it around the net. There was a fine line between battling for the puck, and slashing at the goalie’s glove so hard that one of the Blades’ big forwards lost his mind about it and the Beacons earned costly fighting and instigator penalties.

Ryan just had to move on to the next one the same way he always did. This would be Anaheim, which should have been a gimme . There weren’t any sure things in this league, though: even the lowliest team in the standings could defeat a Cup champion, given the right bounces. There would be time to go over video with the team before the game, the specific small things they would need to tighten up, the things that Ryan had studied in Anaheim’s play that would be easy to exploit.

Meanwhile, by the time he got back to the hotel, he was exhausted, but too amped up to sleep. He could feel the anticipation shiver through him, knowing that Aronson was probably going to open the door if Ryan knocked.

Aronson did, one eyebrow raised. Even without his glasses to emphasize how high the eyebrow had gone, it was still a ridiculously sardonic expression. He was already stripped down to his boxers and undershirt, and Ryan, for some reason, couldn’t stop staring at the dark curls of hair visible over the neckline. It was especially difficult now that Ryan knew what it felt like, soft under his fingers.

“Can I help you, Sullivan?”

Even now, it felt ridiculous to say it out loud, but he was tired enough that he didn’t want to beat around the bush or play games. “Fuck me. I mean, you should, that is. Fuck me.”

Aronson looked at him for a long, silent moment, the corner of his mouth twitching like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to smile or frown. It was funny, how they’d gotten physical in a moment of anger, but once they’d actually started doing this regularly, it was like Aronson couldn’t keep up the pretense for real. He’d say one thing and his body would say something completely different. Ryan wasn’t sure what he actually felt about all of it, but at least Aronson wasn’t unwilling, anyway.

Aronson took a step back from the door and flourished an equally sarcastic gesture at the bed, and Ryan stepped over the threshold and into the room proper, chin lifted. Aronson wouldn’t embarrass him out of this.

“That an order?” Aronson asked.

“What do you think?” Ryan said, stripping off his shirt.

Aronson followed him into the room proper, shaking his head. “You’re ridiculous, you know that, right?”

“What do you mean?” Ryan demanded, kicking off his pants.

“Just...everything about you,” Aronson said, almost a little bemused, as he stepped into Ryan’s space and pushed him back toward the bed.

Ryan let him do it, fell back against the duvet without much of a protest, Aronson crouched over him. Ryan looked up at him, searching over his face: the dark brown eyes, the full mouth that could so easily turn Ryan into a quivering mess, the shadowed hint of a beard, the sharp jaw and stubborn chin. Aronson’s face was all angles, and Ryan had the irresistible urge to touch it. There was nothing to stop him, so he did, fingers brushing over Aronson’s stubbled jaw.

“I’m tired,” Ryan said. “Make it quick.”

Aronson made a noise that was somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “Jesus, you’re bossy tonight.”

“I’m tired ,” Ryan reminded him, “and I still have to go back to my own room after this, you know.”

Aronson’s mouth did that little twitchy motion again, like he wasn’t sure how annoyed he actually was. He didn’t say anything right away, just took Ryan’s dick in his hand, and said, “Well, you better get it up, then, old man.”

It was pretty embarrassing how fast Ryan’s body obliged, and he could feel the hot flush of excited shame in his cheeks and ears. Even when they were rushing through the preamble of sex, Ryan still marveled at how different it felt from the last few times he’d slept with Shannon. They had felt emotionless and distant. This was anything but. Every small touch of Aronson’s fingers on his skin, every grip of Aronson’s hands on his biceps or hip, felt new and revelatory. Every dig of Aronson’s teeth against his lower lip was something Ryan wanted to study and commit to memory.

Ryan urged him on, and Aronson obliged, hands rough on Ryan’s skin, fingers rough in Ryan’s body. It was different than it had been the first time, when Aronson had been so fucking determined to treat him nicely even though it was the opposite of what Ryan wanted. It was like now that Aronson knew Ryan could handle it, he was trying to test Ryan’s limits instead. To see when he’d say stop or if he’d tap out.

Well, the joke was on him, because Ryan fucking loved all of it.

“Come on,” Ryan managed, voice strained. It was really too fast, what they were doing, and it hurt, and Ryan didn’t care about that one fucking bit. “Fuck me.”

Aronson, somehow, managed to look skeptical. He was on his knees, crouched above Ryan’s body, two big fingers in Ryan’s ass. It felt incredible; it felt like too much. “Fuck you? You barely seem like you can handle this.”

“I want to see what it feels like,” Ryan said, fingers wrapped around Aronson’s free arm just in case he decided to pull away. “Before I’m really ready.”

“I’ve asked this before and I’ll ask this again: Sullivan, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing,” Ryan panted. “I’m just competitive. You know this.”

Aronson’s mouth twitched again but he didn’t answer, just leaned down to kiss Ryan again, twisting his fingers. For a long moment Ryan couldn’t speak at all, and when he did, it was half phrases and unfinished sentences, ragged and wanting: “Come on, come on, come on, do it, please—”

In the end Aronson had to compromise. It wasn’t as slow as he seemed to want but it also wasn’t as fast as Ryan wanted. They were trapped in a close, humid limbo, a tangle of limbs and lips and teeth. It still felt electric, and Ryan was sweating with the effort of taking it, trying to breathe through it, trying to relax. Aronson pushing inch by steady inch, filling him.

It was strange, how a month ago Ryan would never in his wildest imagination have guessed he’d be in this position. On his back, wrists pinned down to the pillow, stuck on the knife’s edge between pain and pleasure. Equally strange how much he just did not fucking care about anything except how good it was going to feel, once he could convince Aronson that he wasn’t made of glass.

“Insane,” Aronson mumbled into his mouth, “like you want a good grade in fucking. Where the hell did you come from?”

Ryan thought about telling him, from Southie, what did you think , but he was too busy shifting back against Aronson’s body, trying to force him to go deeper. Move faster. He thought that maybe Aronson was going to say something again, but they’d fallen into the rhythm of it now, and the only sound in the room was skin on skin and uneven breaths.

And then Aronson began moving, really moving, in earnest, and Ryan wasn’t thinking about much at all anymore.

Ryan was finding that regularly getting the conscious thought railed out of his head had an effect on his day-to-day. It was a lot easier to ignore texts from his father and brothers when he wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing after work. It was a lot easier to remain calm in practice when Aronson was being a dick when Ryan knew that afterward, he could just push Aronson’s head down and make him suck Ryan’s dick.

“What are you smiling about?” Aronson grumbled, back in Boston again, while they were waiting for the guys to finish one of the skating drills.

“Just thinking,” Ryan said cheerfully.

“About what .”

“Something to be said for the killing-them-with-kindness approach.”

Aronson shot him a suspicious look, and Ryan did his best to remain blank-faced.

Even with the distraction Aronson provided, the final divorce hearing still snuck up on him before he was ready. The whole process had been relatively painless, considering. His agent had found him a well-respected divorce lawyer; they’d had the conferences where they discussed what Ryan wanted out of the whole process—which was a fair division of assets and nothing more than that. He didn’t want to spend any time fighting with Shannon about it. And now he was driving back to New Hampshire so that the judge could finalize everything.

It would probably be the last time he’d see Shannon for quite a while after, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about the whole thing. She had seemed relieved to close the chapter of their lives together, and he had to admit he was also somewhat relieved to be done. But it still felt strange, to be heading in there in one of his game-day suits, his hair carefully combed, and his collar and tie arranged so that the hickey Aronson had left behind wouldn’t be visible in the courtroom.

The actual divorce hearing went by in a blur; if you had asked him to tell you any details, he would not have been able to recall a single one except for the way Shannon looked, sitting at the opposite table with her lawyer, elegant and composed. Her shoulders relaxed when the judge told them that he had reviewed their paperwork, the submissions of the attorneys, and would be issuing an order in accordance with the recommendations. Ryan’s ears rang, a little, an echo.

Afterward, Shannon crossed the aisle. Behind them, their lawyers had their heads together, talking over some point about the split of assets. Shannon ignored them, came up to hug him. It wasn’t as hard or bone-crushing a hug as the one she’d given him in Newfields, but when she pulled away, she still looked a bit sad. “This is it, huh?”

“This is it,” Ryan said. “You’re officially a free woman.”

“About that...” Shannon looked down at her shoes, twisting one of the many rings she always wore. “I just wanted to be honest with you. Since we’ve been handling all of this so—well. I’m seeing someone. I have been for a few months now.”

“What?” Ryan said, surprised. He’d half considered the possibility before, but never seriously. He wondered if the news would have come as a blow, if life hadn’t fallen into place the way it had.

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, it truly wasn’t personal, it just sort of happened. He’s an artist and a sculptor, and we met at a pottery class he was running, and he’s very kind and—”

“Shannon, you don’t have to feel bad about that. It’s fine. I’m just really happy you’re happy, you know? You deserve that.”

She stopped short, surprised. “Well, that’s—that’s very mature, Ryan.”

“I, uh, met someone, too.”

Shannon’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

“It’s pretty new, so.”

“Well, that’s great,” Shannon said, slowly, like she was still trying to process it. She didn’t sound upset, at least. “What’s she like?”

Ryan took a deep breath. The judge had gone back into the robing room behind the bench; the attorneys were still talking about whatever it was attorneys talked about when they didn’t want to gut opposing counsel with a fountain pen, when they weren’t exactly friends but knew each other well anyway.

It was probably a stupid idea to say anything, but he’d never liked hiding things from Shannon, and she had been up-front with him. He didn’t want to think about how it would feel if she reacted badly, so instead he said, all in a rush, “He’s kind of an asshole, sometimes, but it works for me. I guess.”

Shannon stared at him again. “That’s—that’s great, Ryan. Is this—is he someone I’ll be able to meet at some point?”

Ryan shifted, a little uncomfortable. “I don’t know if it’s really like that, right now. I don’t know if you and I are really like that right now. Or ever. But if we’re being honest, I wanted to be honest.” He didn’t know if it would ever really be like that. If he wanted it to be like that. He also didn’t know how to explain it to her. Whether there was even a label he could use. He said in a rush, realizing how it must have sounded, “I’m not—it’s not like I never loved you, like I was never attracted to you. This thing with him—it sort of just happened. I’m learning a lot of things about myself, you know? It’s been pretty weird.”

“I—I can imagine,” Shannon said. She was still looking at him like she’d never seen him before. “You know. This explains a lot of shit about Murph.”

“Murph?” Ryan said, blinking. “This has nothing to do with Murph. What are you talking about? Murph and Tara have been married for years, the same way we were.”

“Oh, Ryan ... I think, maybe, you still have a little learning to do.” Ryan stared at her, but she didn’t explain any further. “Okay, well, I’m meeting Jackson for lunch, so I should probably start packing things up here.”

“All right, Shannon.”

Shannon reached out and touched his cheek. “Ryan, I’m just sorry this all didn’t work out. You’re a good man. I hope this—whatever you’re figuring out is making you happy, too.”

And just like that, his marriage was over.

The news as Eric was getting his morning coffee ready seemed more and more dire these days. The lawsuit against the Railers for their role in covering up the assault on an anonymous player had been proceeding through the courts. Eric wasn’t familiar with the way the American court system worked, really, but the team had hired an independent investigator to look into allegations that the front office and even the coaching staff had been aware of what happened. The report was going to come out any day now, or at least, had been about to come out any day now for the last few months. Privately, Eric wondered whether they’d ever release their findings. It seemed like the kind of thing the team would do its best to squash.

Today, the other dire thing was that he was getting his coffee ready in Ryan Sullivan’s apartment, and it turned out that Sully did not have any proper coffee-making equipment at all. He had a $20 Mr. Coffee and a single-serving Keurig machine both taking up space on his counter, and it looked like he’d never used the Mr. Coffee in his entire time staying here.

“You know this shit is terrible for the environment, right?” Eric called, fiddling with the flippy top of the Keurig.

“I never use it,” Sully mumbled, still burrowed deeply in the covers where Eric had left him. The apartment was small enough that Eric could hear him, even muffled by the blankets, even in the kitchen. “I just go to Dunkin’.”

“Of course you do,” Eric said, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“What’s wrong with Dunkin’?”

“If you wanna drink vaguely coffee-flavored water that’s mostly cream and sugar, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“Jesus, I didn’t know I was fucking a coffee snob.”

“It’s not being snobby, it’s called having one taste bud, Sully.”

“Fuck off, it’s too early for this.”

It was, of course, a little early. And they had been up late last night. Late enough that when they were finished, Sully had rolled over and wrapped his arms around Eric’s body, closed his eyes and muttered into Eric’s chest hair, “Come on, it’s ass o’clock, you can stay over for once , it’s not gonna fucking kill you.”

Eric had felt his heart beating too loudly in his own ears, knocking against his ribs. It was probably loud enough that Sully could have heard it, too. This felt like something he shouldn’t have been doing, but the bed was warm, and he was so fucking relaxed and loose and comfortable, that he’d said, “Fine, fine .”

He’d woken up in the morning to the light streaming through Sully’s blind-less window and Sully’s arm slung over his waist still and his phone buzzing on the floor next to Sully’s bed and thought: fuck .

By the time he’d spoken to his mom and jury-rigged passable coffee in the percolator, Sully had stumbled into the kitchen, wearing only his boxers. He yawned hugely, stretching one arm a little, like it was aching, and he wanted to test it. Eric tried not to stare at him when he did it, at the way his stomach and shoulder muscles shifted, the way the boxers rode up his thighs. It was just his fucking luck that he had developed some kind of temporary derangement about Ryan Sullivan, where every stupid thing he did made Eric want to shove him against a wall.

“Do you do that every morning?” Sully asked.

“What?”

“Talk to your mom?”

“Most mornings,” Eric said, warily prepared to get defensive about it.

“That’s really sweet,” Sully said, and smiled at him, still sleepy-eyed, hair messy.

“You tell anyone about that, I’ll fucking kill you.” To cover his discomfort, he turned away, so he could pour them both cups of coffee.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Sully said, and Eric heard him opening some cabinets, and the fridge. “It is sweet, though. Does she still live in Canada?”

“The only way she’s leaving Montreal is in a coffin,” Eric muttered. “Born and raised there. Loves it. I offered to move her out close to me, since she’s kind of frail these days, and she refused— what are you doing to that coffee?”

“Making it drinkable,” Sully said, as he dumped heaping teaspoons full of sugar into the cup, followed by long glugs of hazelnut-flavored creamer.

“Oh my god. Jesus, Sully, you do this every morning ?”

“I go to Dunkin’ every morning, usually. But someone insisted on making coffee here.”

Eric reached out and gripped his shoulders, and said, “Ryan Sullivan, I’m going to fix you. Somehow. I’m going to teach you how to be better.”

Instead of answering or trying to twist out of his grip, Sully went up on his tiptoes and kissed Eric on the mouth. It was disgusting. He tasted like morning breath and artificial hazelnut and sugar, and somehow, Eric was still kissing him back anyway, his hands slipping down to grip Sully by the biceps.

“Oh,” Sully said, with a little sigh as he pulled away, “you want breakfast? We have time. I have eggs.”

“You really missed your calling as a lawyer. Very convincing argument, right there.”

Sully shoved him hard into the cabinets, a little painful when his spine and ass hit the knobs, and said, “Do you want something to eat or not?”

“Fine,” Eric said, “feed me.”

He tried not to stare, but it was kind of a treat watching Sully cook in his boxers, the shift of muscle, the way his head bent low in concentration. Eric sat on the kitchen table, his legs swinging, arms crossed over his chest, and waited. “You missed practice yesterday,” he said, after a long pause, broken only by the sound of butter sizzling in the pan, the clank of a fork against ceramic, the faint hiss when Sully poured the eggs in.

“Yeah, uh, I was in New Hampshire for a court hearing,” Sully said. He didn’t turn to look at Eric, and his shoulders sagged a little.

“A court hearing?”

Another one of those shrugs that rolled across Sully’s entire body. “My divorce was finalized. It was a pretty easy divorce as far as those things go, but since we had the assets to divide up and we’d been married for so long, so we still had to...”

“Oh,” Eric said, not entirely sure what you said when a guy you’d been sleeping with for a month told you that his divorce had just been finalized. Eric had known, vaguely, that Sully had been married at some point, but he’d never worn a ring since he’d been coaching. He’d also remembered, vaguely, that Sully had mentioned to Petey that his wife had kicked him out of the house. And Eric just...hadn’t thought about it after that. “Are you...okay?”

Sully looked over his shoulder at Eric, and his eyes were dancing with the kind of mirth that seemed out of place for such a heavy topic. “Am I okay with my marriage to the girl I met at eighteen and married at twenty and spent most of my adult life with ending? Actually, yeah? She seems a lot happier already and that’s...mostly what I wanted for her. I loved—love?—her, you know? It really wasn’t her fault that she hated hockey so much, and I...”

Eric looked around the kitchen and living area of Sully’s relatively compact apartment, which was piled high with hockey equipment, hockey memorabilia, hockey books and various papers from work, which were all about hockey. “You are basically hockey in hobbit form.”

“Yeah,” Sully said, and shrugged. “It was about as amicable a divorce as I think I could’ve hoped for. She kept the house I hated. She’s seeing some sculptor from her pottery classes already.”

“Good for her,” Eric said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Sully said. The whole time they’d been talking, he’d been constantly stirring the eggs, pulling the pan on and off the heat. “I told her I—well, that I was seeing a man.”

“You what ?”

“I didn’t tell her about you . Don’t worry. But I told her I was, uh, figuring some things out about myself, you know.”

“That’s...bold.”

“I never could lie to her. And it’s not anything I’m ashamed of. It just is. You want toast?”

Eric stared at him. He had spent so many years hiding shit from his parents, afraid that they’d think less of him, afraid of disappointing them, afraid their religious practice wouldn’t end up being compatible with who he was as a person. He’d never even gotten a chance to come out to his dad before he’d passed. And here was Sully, just some middle-aged townie from Boston, who’d figured out he was queer for approximately two fucking weeks, and he was already coming out to his ex-wife like it was no big deal.

“Sometimes you, uh, really surprise me.”

“Sometimes?” Sully said, sliding a plate of eggs and toast across the table at him. “Shit, I gotta start working harder.”

They ate in silence, and Eric kept looking sideways at him. The thing was that Sully wasn’t classically handsome. As a younger guy, he’d been almost cute , with his stubborn chin and big brown eyes. He’d managed to edge his way toward distinction with the silver hair and the hint of a beard that he never fully grew in, but he was just magnetic. The draw was his charm, the stupid earnestness bleeding in every sentence, the way his eyes on you felt like everything else in the room faded out.

It was like that even here, eating eggs in his shitty apartment kitchen.

Sully was saying something, and Eric said, “What?”

“I said, we have some pretty intense ground to cover in practice today. I already texted Petey about some of the defense drills, but for the power play, I really need you to get the drills moving at as high a speed as you can get them going.”

“You got it, boss,” Eric said, and saluted him with a piece of toast.

They left for practice separately, because it would have looked pretty suspicious if they hadn’t, and Eric tried to get his head on straight. Things were shifting in ways that he didn’t fully understand, ways that felt like tiny pebbles underfoot that could rapidly become a cliff collapse if he didn’t watch his step. Except there was no clear path before him and no easy guidance as to where to walk.

At the practice facility, Petey was already on the ice, doing slow figure eights and blaring some kind of prog rock band Eric didn’t recognize on his tinny phone speakers. He felt a little guilty, briefly, that he hadn’t been there as early to tease Petey about his shitty taste in music the way he usually would have.

When Eric pushed out onto the ice, Petey gave him a lazy wave. “Hello, stranger. Ain’t often seen you around these parts.”

Eric felt a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the fact that he was at ice level. “What do you mean?”

Petey smiled his inscrutable smile, and said, “Glad you and the boss are getting along. Things were getting a little uncomfortable before you worked your shit out.”

“We didn’t work anything out,” Eric insisted, lamely, lying through his teeth.

Petey didn’t answer, and Eric didn’t have a chance to argue with that serene smile, as the team and Sully both started to come down the tunnel toward the ice. The power play practice might have been a success, but the vague sense of unease was still present. The sense that something dangerous was about to happen. He just didn’t have any fucking clue what that was.

“Really, do you want me to get you a step stool?” Aronson asked Ryan, midgame.

Ryan, perched on top of the bench so he could get a better view of exactly how badly the Beacons were getting crushed by the Toronto Justice, sighed. It was one of those games where no matter what adjustments he tried to make on the fly, nothing was really working. He had probably been shown on the broadcast at least once hiding his face in his hand when a bad defensive-zone giveaway had immediately ended up in the back of Davey’s net.

“I can see fine from up here,” he said. “Not like there’s much to see.”

Aronson surveyed the ice: it was the last few minutes of the second period, and they were down three goals. It wasn’t impossible to mount a comeback, but it wasn’t likely, especially because all four lines had been struggling with successful zone entries. Or zone exits. In all three zones.

Ryan felt like he was vibrating out of his skin. He hated losing so fucking much, even when he wasn’t the one on the ice anymore. He had known going into it that the Beacons were rebuilding, that the team was not good on paper and in practice might have been worse with regressions and underperformances.

Knowing and experiencing it were two different things, especially because he had to keep it cool and keep his philosophy firmly in practice. He was focusing on the positive, encouraging, helping the players grow. He was not ripping them apart or tearing them down.

But Ryan hated losing.

And watching Laurent Martel take a stupid penalty right at the end of the period, which meant they would be starting the third on the kill again? Ryan thought that maybe the top of his head was just going to explode.

Mercifully, the horn sounded to end the period, and the players filed back toward the locker room to rest, refuel and, depending on their preferences, have their gear changed or dried. The coaches followed after.

Aronson said, “Is this it? The game that’s going to break the illustrious Ryan Sullivan?”

“We still have a whole damn period to play,” Ryan said to him. “We can come back and win it.”

Aronson pushed his glasses up his nose and gave Ryan one of those looks, sardonic and judging, that used to piss him off but now mostly made him squirm a little uncomfortably, knowing what that usually preceded. “You don’t really believe that.”

“No, but I’m sure as hell going to try to convince them of it,” Ryan said, and pushed the doors to the locker room open.

It was only during the worst games that the coach went immediately into the locker room between periods. The team would know, immediately, that they’d fucked up.

Whenever he gave speeches like this Ryan could never remember what he said afterward. It was like he entered into some sort of a fugue state, passionately expounding on the fact that they needed to play smart and stay out of the box, that they needed to anticipate the play better and think about where they were positioning themselves off the puck. Things just came out of his mouth without his brain’s conscious input.

All he could see were the faces of the players immediately in front of him. Williams’s serious determination. Cook’s smile. Martel’s scowl.

At the end of it, he exhaled and said, “It’s a rebuilding year. But I know you hate losing as much as I do, and I’ve seen you play with more effort than we’ve been putting in tonight. Let’s go out for the third and keep it tight and give them hell. All right. Thanks, boys.”

“I can always bag skate them,” Aronson said, as they and Petey left the players to finish changing.

“Not very chill of you, Roney,” Petey said.

Ryan shook his head. “Absolutely not. We’ll switch up the practices, keep them moving, but it has to stay fun and it has to stay motivating.”

“Optimism is a disease,” Aronson said, shaking his head. But on the bench, it was different.

Ryan wasn’t sure exactly when things had shifted, but he wasn’t complaining. Somehow, in between the hotel rooms and apartments and the rest of it, working with Aronson on the bench had gotten—easier.

They still had their tactical disagreements, especially about the power play, but since the first night against Colorado, when Aronson had directly contradicted his requests, things had settled. Ryan had to admit that, maybe, he was also more open to listening...but there was only so much they could do with the roster. If he split up Cook and Williams, then instead of one line that could score, he had zero lines that could score. And there weren’t many other options for shuffling the lines around.

The Beacons mounted a spirited comeback in the third, mostly on Williams’s back. He seemed determined to single-handedly win it, from the thread-needle passes to set Cook up for one-timers to his own drive to the net to shovel in a rebound. Ultimately, it wasn’t enough.

Ryan pulled Davey with three minutes to go to try to get them the extra goal and maybe push it to overtime, but the empty netter sealed their fate instead. Losing 4-2 wasn’t as bad as getting shut out 3-0, technically, but it felt the same.

Ryan had to face the media after every game, and he always tried to keep it the same tone: even, never too high, never too low. He didn’t call out individual players. But there were always pointed questions he couldn’t entirely talk his way out of.

“Sully, what do you think about the fact that there just isn’t any secondary scoring on this team?” someone asked from the scrum.

Ryan couldn’t lie and say that they were playing the right way 5v5, because the numbers were quite clear that they weren’t, whether you were looking at publicly available stats or the Beacons’ own internal numbers. But he tried not to throw anyone under the bus as his usual philosophy.

Instead, he exhaled, and said, “We just have to get back to playing the right way, keeping track of the little things, taking care of the team. It’s easy to get complacent across the season, and I know that the next game, after these practices, we’re gonna clean this shit—sorry, excuse my language—up.”

Whether anyone bought it—media or players—was anyone’s best guess.

Later that night, Ryan found himself on his knees at the side of Aronson’s bed, Aronson’s legs bracketing him in, one of Aronson’s hands in his hair. He was gasping; he still wasn’t so great at controlling his breathing, but he was always determined to go for it 100%.

“Taking care of the team,” Aronson said. He had that particular tone of voice he had sometimes when Ryan had really gotten to him, taut and kind of trembly, like he didn’t want Ryan to know how much it had affected him. “You’re always fucking saying that.”

“It’s important,” Ryan managed, after pulling off. His own voice was throaty, rough. Aronson hadn’t been easy on him. “The little things. Watching out for the guys. It’s always been important; I’ve always said that.”

“You have. And you’re right. It’s important. It’s just...” Aronson said, that little sly smirk twitching the corner of his mouth up. “I bet you liked taking care of the team. Eh?”

Ryan blinked, shifted his weight so he wasn’t leaning forward. He wouldn’t be able to do this much longer; his knees were already screaming. “Wait, are you trying to dirty talk me about my fucking media availability ?”

“I’m not trying, bud.”

“This is insane,” Ryan said, his hands gripping Aronson’s thighs.

“Taking care of the team...one player at a time,” Aronson said, his voice a mocking singsong.

“Oh my god—”

If it was anyone else, Ryan probably would have felt—embarrassed, or humiliated. But Aronson was so clearly enjoying this, his dark brown eyes dancing, like it was a joke he was letting Ryan in on, that Ryan just leaned down and bit him on the thigh instead, teeth digging in. Aronson hissed but didn’t pull away, put his hand in Ryan’s hair and pushed him back down.

“I’m here. I’m here right now. Take care of me.”

Ryan, his mouth otherwise occupied, couldn’t answer. Not with words.

After they were finished, Ryan pressed his fingers against the deep red mark he’d left on Aronson’s thigh. “The media availabilities really get you going, seriously?”

“The things that come out of your mouth,” Aronson said with a satisfied sigh, “and the things that go into your mouth. Just a talent, you know.”

By the time the holiday break rolled around, Ryan had been so busy and distracted with practices and games and travel and having what seemed to him like a ridiculous amount of sex that he almost forgot he had agreed to go home to his parents’ for Christmas. The text from Chelsea, reminding him, felt like falling through the sheet ice on a pond in the winter.

The Sullivans were nominally Catholic, in that the family had emigrated from Ireland generations ago and belonged to the same South Boston parish since. They had all been raised with a vague sense of constant guilt, a lot of noisy family events, and set foot in church approximately twice a year. Ryan, once he moved out for college, stopped going at all, eager to shed as much of that baggage as he could.

Dad, on the other hand, had gotten more religious as the years had dragged on, but in a way that meant that he didn’t have to attend church any more than he normally did. The lectures had increased, and the strict adherence to family rituals around the big holidays like Christmas and Easter, but that was about the extent of it.

Ryan had always hated Christmas, even when Shannon was there to soften some of the worst of it. This would be the first year he would have to go alone, without his mother or his wife. Briefly, he imagined what it would have been like to drag Aronson along. The mental image of his father and Aronson having to have a conversation was almost worth the fact that it would likely end with someone bleeding. Aronson wasn’t the kind of person to put up with anyone’s bullshit, and Dad—well, Dad had a lot of bullshit to offer.

Petey had gone home to his family in Vancouver; Heidi and her wife, Melissa, and their adorable baby were having a quiet holiday at home. And Ryan had to just get the fuck over it and suffer through.

By the time he got there, everyone was already present. The thin driveway along the side of the house was already packed, the Sullivan Eric yelped in shock when Sully got his icy hands under Eric’s shirt.

“You little shit !”

“Warm them up,” Sully mumbled into his neck. His hands stroked Eric’s sides, and Eric shuddered. “Warm me up.”

“I don’t really have a choice about this, do I?” Eric demanded, squirming as he tried to get away. Behind them, the TV started playing again and Eric shifted again, realizing he’d sat on the remote.

Distracted, Sully’s head whipped around. “What the hell are you watching ?”

“Uh...it’s Inherit the Wind .”

“You mean the one about the Scopes monkey trial?”

“Yeah, you know it?”

“That’s an interesting choice of holiday viewing.”

“It was my dad. He always liked old movies, and this was one of his favorites. He’s been gone for a little while now, but I like to keep the tradition going.” Sully’s hands were slowly warming up against Eric’s skin, but he shivered anyway. “I really hate movies. But I have a lot of...a lot of good memories of them, with him.”

Sully had pulled back a little. He looked down at Eric with an inscrutable expression. “You really love your parents, huh.”

“They’re good people,” Eric said, embarrassed.

Sully had pulled his hand out from beneath Eric’s shirt. Instead, his fingers traced down the line of Eric’s wrist, over his sweater. “I left home as early as I could to get away from that. And then my mother died when I was away at college. And my dad, well. I don’t have a lot of fond memories of him. So it’s just nice that you love them so much. It’s not what you’d think about you at all. At least not when first meeting you.”

“What would you think about me?” Eric said. He had meant it to come out sarcastic, but his voice was weirdly quiet instead. How fucking weird was it that he actually cared what Sully thought about him?

“You’re kind of an asshole at first, but you’re also kind of a big softy, aren’t you? You really do care.”

“Oh, spare me,” Eric said, with an exaggerated groan, and then he had to immediately lift his hand up to swat Sully’s attempt at pinching his nose away. “All right, that’s it, I’m cross-checking you into the boards the next time we’re on the ice.”

Sully shifted around in Eric’s lap, and Eric bit back a small groan. Sully was grinning, the kind of shark-toothed smile that he had during drills, sometimes, when he knew that he was really wearing the team out. “That’s exactly what I mean. You don’t want anyone to know what you’re really like. But now I know.”

“You wouldn’t—”

“No,” Sully said, and leaned down to kiss him. His skin had warmed to the temperature of Eric’s apartment, finally, and his kiss was eager and hungry. Eric didn’t want to think too long about the fact that Sully had wanted to be anywhere except his family’s house, and that the first place he had thought to go was Eric’s. “Hey. You’ve got a perfectly good movie and a perfectly good tradition going, huh?”

“You really want to watch Spencer Tracy cross-examine an old fundamentalist?” Eric said doubtfully, finger brushing the line that demarcated Sully’s hair and his neck. “We could just fuck.”

“We can do that later. I want to see the movie.”

And like many things that Sully did, Eric found himself giving in. Sully shifted off his lap and wormed his way under Eric’s arm, and surprisingly enough, it wasn’t actually all that bad to just sit like that. Now that the shaking had subsided and he was fully acclimated to a room with heating, holding Sully was like having a miniature furnace tucked against his body.

There wasn’t much left in the movie, just the final climactic scenes. The guilty verdict, Cates’s allocution, the sentence of $100, Jennings’s collapse. Sully watched anyway. Eric realized he’d had a hand tangled in Sully’s hair and moved it away. By the time Spencer Tracy had started ripping into Gene Kelly’s cynicism, it felt much later than it was.

Nobody to mourn you, no one to give a damn. We are all alone.

“Jesus,” Sully mumbled into Eric’s side, as Gene Kelly asked who else would defend his right to be lonely, “some cheerful holiday viewing.”

“Mm,” Eric agreed. It hit him, right then, that he specifically wasn’t alone, for the first holiday in quite some time. The realization was a little shocking. “Hey,” he said, shifted so he could tip Sully’s chin up with two fingers. “Do you want to come to bed?”

Sully smiled, slow and sleepy. “Thought you’d never ask.”

Somehow, the sex was different this time, too, just as slow and sleepy as Sully’s smile. Eric could barely get his clothes off because Sully wouldn’t stop kissing him, wouldn’t stop touching him. For all of the desperation in his voice when he’d first shown up on Eric’s doorstep, that seemed to have faded away, replaced with the sort of confidence and surety that Eric recognized from his playing days.

Eric let him do it, let him take his time exploring what their bodies could do together. The force of that admiration, the intense study that Sully had about everything in his life turned just on him. It was a lot. But instead of being overwhelming, it was just good .

For once, Eric didn’t feel the need to tease him or push him. He didn’t have to do that. That wasn’t what this was about, as weird as that seemed. It had been a damn long time since he’d had sex like this, and part of him didn’t even know how to react.

“Can I—” Sully asked, eventually.

“Can you what?”

“Fuck you? I really want to.”

Eric exhaled. They’d switched it up often enough already. He genuinely didn’t have strong preferences about positions; he enjoyed Sully pretty much any way that they did it. It felt different tonight, though, and he didn’t know why. It felt bigger to say “yes,” and it felt almost vulnerable to let Sully do this now. But Sully had shown up on Eric’s doorstep and Sully had trusted Eric with his family and Sully was slowly opening Eric up like a goddamn textbook.

Sully, kneeling over him, said, “You good?”

“Get it over with,” Eric said, pulling him back down into a kiss.

“Wow,” Sully mumbled around his tongue and his teeth, “not a very enthusiastic endorsement, huh—”

“Fuck me, you gigantic baby. Do you want me to tell you how good at it you are?” Sully’s ears went a bit pink, and Eric laughed. “Shit, you do?”

The thing was. Once they actually started, once they got into the rhythm of it. Eric was having a hard time stringing together his thoughts, coming up with anything to say except “Fuck, Sully, like that, like that, like that—” and having a hard time doing anything except grabbing onto any part of Sully that he could reach.

Inside of him Sully felt overwhelming, thick and almost uncomfortably full, but so fucking good. Above him, Sully’s serious face, pained and twisted like he was trying so hard to hold himself back, sweat beading his forehead, in and out of focus whenever he managed to coordinate himself to smash a sloppy kiss against Eric’s mouth. Eric reached up again and touched his cheek.

“What—what?” Sully managed.

“You’re very good at fucking me,” Eric said, and Sully came with a stupid little groan.

His whole body seized up, collapsed on top of Eric, and he gasped, “Oh my god, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Eric said, wincing a little as Sully pulled out. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, even though his whole body was still trembling on the edge. “You can make it up to me.”

Sully didn’t answer, just looked up at him with a question in his eyes. He went down easily enough when Eric pushed a hand at his chest, then flinched when Eric shifted and straddled his thighs. “What are you—”

“Jerking off on you, obviously.”

Sully’s eyes, still a bit post-sex sleepy, opened wide with surprise, but he didn’t pull away. He licked his lips, watched while Eric took himself in hand. Even though he was spent, his gaze was still so fucking hungry that Eric knew he wasn’t going to be able to last long.

He didn’t. He forced his eyes open when he came; watched his come striping Sully’s broad chest. Sully’s little exhale when he did it was irresistible and before Eric could spend too much time thinking about it, he had leaned forward and they were kissing again, the kind of slow, devouring kiss that annihilated all thought from his head, even the exhaustion from the late night and getting thoroughly fucked.

Eventually, Sully pulled away and said, “That was pretty hot, but, uh, it’s getting kind of disgusting now—let me up.”

Instead of answering, Eric smeared his hand through the mess on Sully’s chest, ignoring his yelp of dismay and disgust, the sudden shift of his muscle as he tried to use a wrestling throw to toss Eric right off of the bed. The element of surprise worked in his favor.

Eric, in a heap on the floor, said, “I deserved that.”

Sully’s face, peering over the edge of the bed. “Never a dull moment with you, huh?”

By the time they had cleaned up and gotten back in bed, Sully was smiling, his eyes closed. “Thank you. For all of this. It’s probably the best Christmas I’ve had in a while.”

To cover his discomfort, Eric said, “Well, you’re welcome to come over and fuck me anytime.”

“I’ll keep that offer in mind, Eric,” Sully mumbled, and then he was asleep.

Eric lay in bed, staring at the ceiling for a long time after that. Something had changed and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. Didn’t even know if he knew how to describe it. Didn’t know if he even wanted to. Eventually, he fell asleep like that, listening to Sully shifting around in the bed, closer and closer to Eric’s body.