12. Mason
TWELVE
Mason
“Can I ask you a question?”
I wasn’t sure I was capable of talking, let alone answering questions this early in the morning.
Not only had Xander just done one hell of a good job of topping, but he’d also made me wait until the point I was begging, and now wrung out we were flat on our backs on the bed staring up at the ceiling fan, fingers linked, and I for one was grinning like an idiot.
“Forty-two,” I murmured.
“Huh?” We turned our heads to face each other.
I loved how adorably confused he looked.
In fact, I loved everything about him from his smile to his eyes to his belly, and his pecs, and his ass, and his deliciously gorgeous cock.
Plus, his hockey playing skills and how sexy he looked on the ice was just one more facet to super-stud-Xan who clearly didn’t get the pop culture reference.
“Forty-two is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” I quoted from memory, which is kind of sad really when sometimes I’d forget which day it was yet could recall an obscure poster in one of my friend’s dorm rooms. I turned on my side to face him fully and lost myself in his incredible eyes.
“You don’t look a day over twenty-nine,” I whispered.
“Thank you, I think, but I still don’t get forty-two, is that a math equation or something?
” He frowned now, and I felt a tug of guilt.
As the annoying bratty kid brother, I’d always teased Eli, and by extension Xander, about his lack of college smarts but it was only in retaliation for them messing with me over being a book nerd.
I admired that Eli and Xander had an instinctive understanding of the sports world they inhabited that I didn’t have.
Hell, I’ve never met two more quick to calculate the path of a puck or understand the different ways that each one of a hundred skaters could come at them.
“It’s a quote from a book, sorry, you were going to ask a question?”
“But what is forty-two?”
I kissed the question away because he was all serious, and I wanted to pull him back to his subject, whatever it was. “What did you want to ask me.”
I slid a little closer and kissed the end of his nose before leaning back.
“Something you said about loving me forever.” He dipped his gaze shyly, and God, I wanted to gather him into my arms and never let him go.
“I wasn’t lying. It feels like forever to me.”
“You never said anything,” he said. “Not that you could have, or could know that I was… that I would… ”
I put him out of his misery. “You were like my big brother, only you were the one who didn’t noogie me at every opportunity or steal my scale model of the Millennium Falcon just to see if it could actually fly from the attic window.”
“Well, I might have mentioned that I wanted to see it fly,” Xander admitted and winced.
“Was it you who then took it up three flights of stairs to throw it off the roof?”
“Well, no, but—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if you did because of course I loved you. Adored you.”
“Yeah, but what about the day you thought you loved me? How did you know? I didn’t tell anyone I was into guys, so didn’t you feel sad?”
He was worried about me, and that was just another reason why I loved him.
“It started as hero worship, that was the start, but I can easily remember the day it became a proper love. You sure you want to hear this?”
“Did I do something impossibly sexy without realizing it?” He wiggled his eyebrows, and I shoved him.
“No. Well yes, you probably did, but I was newly out, and I had the hots for you big time. You and that guy from the ad for the cologne that… anyway, I digress. Hero worship turned to obsession the year of the Eric Staal birthday when you turned eighteen. Remember?”
Our two families, neighbors since before Eli and Xander had been born, made a big thing of birthdays, but this particular year had been special.
Turning a fancy old age like eighteen meant a backyard barbecue, deck hockey, and so many presents for the boy next door that I thought the table might break.
I’d saved money from a paper delivery route to buy him a hockey card.
It wasn’t the most expensive card. I couldn’t get him a rare Mario Lemieux trader or find a single mention of a Wayne Gretzky card anywhere in my measly twenty-three dollar budget, but I did manage to get him a special edition Eric Staal which I knew he was missing from his collection.
I wanted to give him something to remember me by. Something that proved I wasn’t the idiot kid my brother called me.
“Yeah, I remember.” He smiled softly then.
“You and Eli were leaving Minnesota and heading to the Rebels training camp and walking right out of my life, which sounds dramatic when I look back on it. After all, I would be going to see games with Mom and Dad, and you’d be coming home when you could, still, it was all wrong.
I just felt like my world was shifting, and at fourteen, knowing I was different, struggling with my feelings and my own life, I didn’t want things to change. ”
“It must have been hard to be left behind. I’m sorry,” Xander murmured.
“It was okay. I had friends at school. I still had Mom and Dad then, but you had hockey, and you and Eli had all the luck. Not only did you end up going to training camp at the same freaking NHL team, but Eli had some money to buy you a really cool gift.”
“The stick. I still have that you know, it’s battered and broken, but it’s at the back of my coat closet.”
“You were really happy about the stick, and all I had was a stupid little trading card, but even though it was tiny, you were just as excited to get that from me. You went and got your folder and made this huge fuss about finding the right sleeve to slip it into.”
“I loved that card. Eric was the only Staal missing from my collection. It was the perfect present.” He pressed kisses to my face and whispered against each eyelid that he loved me.
“If you keep doing that I won’t be able to finish my story.
” I pushed him away, just a little. “Anyway, you side hugged me, told me it was perfect, and said you’d miss me when you moved away for good, and that was the moment I fell in love.
I knew it wouldn’t come to anything because you know”—I waved at him—“being straight and all that. But any man I’ve ever been with had to measure up to you and the fantasies I had about what it would be like to be with you for real. ”
He growled low in his chest, rolled over on top of me, and pinned me to the bed.
“You’re mine now,” he said with a show of possession, grinning then kissing me all over.
He rocked against me until I was impossibly hard and needy then slid down my body to kiss my thighs, followed by my belly, and woke me up properly with the best blowjob of my life.
Of course it was only polite to return the favor, and we giggled when I nearly fell off the bed, laughed when the shower wouldn’t warm up, sighed when we kissed under the water, and then finally we were dressed and leaving the privacy of the room.
We had breakfast to ourselves, no sign of any of the other Rebels, but I didn’t imagine they would surface for the rest of the day.
There was a reason I’d thought I’d be spending a day of chilling after the birthday, imagining it would be just me who was left standing.
Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Xander to be sitting here with me.
I thought he’d be just as dead to the world as Eli and had planned my own day of museum visits and walking.
We’d chosen a table with a view of the ocean and ate bowls of fresh fruit, toast with jelly, and drank a ton of coffee.
We didn’t talk much at first, exchanging soft secretive smiles and utterly happy to be in each other’s company.
“What’s on our agenda today?” Xander sat back in his chair, patting his belly and tipping his face to the sun, and I stared. I could never in a million lifetimes get tired of looking at Xander.
“Actually, I didn’t have anything planned because I thought you and Eli would be hungover, and the rest of the guys weren’t even meant to be here.”
He sent me a confused glance. “Huh?”
“It was supposed to be Eli and me surprising you, not the other guys as well, that was Eli’s last minute idea, and why I’ve had to rearrange a load of things to add them on.”
“Typical Eli. Gotta love that guy.”
I tipped my head to the sun as well, and we sat back in our chairs hand in hand with our eyes closed.
I could stay right here forever. Back home there were legalities to work through on the new partnership with Becca, our offices to fit out, and advertising budgets, and loans, and the fear of starting my life all over again.
Never mind what kind of relationship Xander and I could have in public.
It’s one thing announcing you’re bi, but it’s something else when you have a real life partner.
Would the press leave him alone? Would there be more slurs every time the Rebels lost?
Would he actually get to be captain? Was that a step too far for any high-level team?
As far as I was aware, no team captain had come out, and they already carried the burden of expectation without adding drama from the fans, management, and the press.
My mood dipped. I couldn’t imagine a life where I couldn’t hold Xan’s hands, or be in love with him the way I wanted, but I’d work around anything as long as he didn’t tell me to go.
“That was a big sigh,” he murmured.
“I sighed?”
“As if you carried the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
I’d been the one pushing Xander, but the closer we got to going home the more the worry of what might happen poked at me.
“It won’t be easy back home, what with everything. I mean, my new partnership with Becca and setting up the company, and the Boston fans and management, and what they’ll make of you dating Eli’s little brother.”
“I can see the banners now, keep it in the family, or some shit,” Xander laughed.
“I want you to be safe. So, we need to think about it—”
“Shhh,” he interrupted my weird but insistent spiral and tightened his grip on my hand for a moment.
“I can’t speak for the Rebels fans, management, or team, or even for your new company, but for us, it’s going to be easy.
” He sat up in his chair and tugged me closer.
“We’ll find our way through whatever life throws at us, together, because I love you. ”
“I love you too.” The words were beautiful, and a feeling of pure happiness filled my heart until I thought it would burst.
We grabbed water bottles before heading down to the ocean to walk off the big breakfast, following the shoreline with the wash of the waves cool on our feet and our fingers tightly laced.
I had so many important questions I wanted to ask Xander, all those things I thought about in the best of my fantasies where we were together, but everything felt so delicate right now, and it hadn’t been tested in the court of real life.
Stop catastrophizing, stay in the moment.
He stopped walking and pulled out his cell phone, releasing my hand and taking photos, all of which seemed to include me in one way or another, and then we took a ton of selfies with my phone as well.
“Just to remember the perfect first day of being together,” he said when he pocketed his phone, and I jumped him for that, kissing him as he caught me and held me steady.
We couldn’t do anything but kiss because this was somewhere anyone could walk by, but he was right.
Everything was perfect. Our love was new, and today was the very first day of the rest of our lives.
There was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t last.
We came to a rocky outcrop and climbed to the top, awkward and difficult in bare feet, but when we got halfway up, we found a place to sit. In the shade of a palm tree, with a cooling stream that ran down the rocks to the sea, I’d have been happy to stay here all day.
“We should hit some museums later,” Xander said and relaxed back against the rocks.
“Are you sure? We don’t have to.”
“I like history.”
“You do?” How did I not know this?
“Hockey history at least.” He chuckled. “But I need my horizons broadened and who better to show me.”
History was so in my wheelhouse. “Did you know that when Aruba was claimed by the Spanish it was a center for smuggling and piracy? Can you imagine calling this island your home to bury all your treasure?”
“That’s the kind of history I like. We should probably buy a spade and try digging some holes, find the treasure, and then never leave the island.”
“I think the team might miss you.”
“Yeah, but if we hid here, they’d soon forget me.”
“The mystery of the missing hockey player,” I mused.
“The mystery of the missing hockey player and his sexy boyfriend,” he corrected, and I felt a thrill run through me at the word boyfriend. It sounded possessive and hot and utterly perfect. I could be the very best boyfriend for him, and we’d be together forever.
“They’d make documentaries about you and show blurry photos of you in your pirate hat.”
“And you’d be right beside me and believe me I’d make that hat look good.
” He flexed his arm, and I was getting hard just at the teasing tone in his voice and the fact he looked like a freaking sun god lying next to me.
He trailed his free hand over my arm, and I don’t know when he’d moved to face me, but there he was, a few inches from me, looking just about as beautiful as he ever did.
I kissed him then, and his lips tasted of the ocean and sunshine and all the good things in life.
Now, this was the moment I could stay in forever.