Chapter 5 #2
He’d known about Evan’s standing inventory nights since early in the season.
Finn paid attention to everything that had Evan’s name attached to it: his schedule, his routes through the facility, the times his office light was on versus off, the nights he stayed late enough that the parking lot was empty when he finally left.
Finn stayed late after practice. Hayes caught him at the locker room entrance.
“Film review?” Hayes read him with the accuracy of someone who’d been playing alongside Finn for four years and had stopped buying his excuses around year two.
“Something like that.”
Hayes studied him for a beat, his expression shifting from curious to knowing in a way that suggested he had questions he wasn’t going to ask.
“Don’t stay too late, Cap.” He headed out, his stick over his shoulder, and Finn watched him go and felt a brief, stupid pang of gratitude for a guy who knew when not to push.
The athletic complex was empty by the time the last fluorescents clicked off in the main corridor.
The hallways smelled like industrial cleaner and the faint ghost of rubber, the back corridors dim in the after-hours setting.
Finn walked through the familiar space with his fists in his hoodie pocket, his pulse in his throat, too fast for a man who was supposedly just walking down a hallway.
The equipment room was propped open with a rubber wedge. Light spilled out into the corridor.
Finn stopped in the frame.
Evan was at the far end of the room, his spine to the entrance, clipboard in hand, working through a row of hanging jerseys.
His sleeves were rolled up and his collar loose, how he looked when he’d been at it a while and had stopped performing for anyone.
The room was dense with the smell of hockey gear, rubber and old sweat and the industrial odor of the cleaner they used on the pads, and underneath all of it, cedar. Faint but there.
Evan turned and saw him.
One half-second where Evan’s hand stalled mid-air over the next jersey, his lips parting around nothing. Then the clipboard came to his chest, squared like a shield.
“Holloway.”
“I know about the inventory nights. I’ve known for a while.”
Evan’s knuckles whitened at the top edge of the clipboard. “You should leave.”
Finn stepped inside and let the entrance swing shut behind him. He reached past Evan and turned the lock, then lifted the clipboard out of Evan’s grip and set it on the nearest shelf.
Evan watched him do it. His chest rose and fell in the measured rhythm Finn had learned to read as effort, the kind of breathing that looked calm from the outside and cost everything to maintain.
“I’m not going to keep doing this.”
“Which part?”
“Any of it.” Evan gestured between them. “This. Whatever this is.”
“Okay.” Finn stepped in close. “Tell me to leave.”
Evan’s lips pressed into a line.
“Tell me you don’t want me here, and I’ll go. I’ll walk out, and we’ll go back to the hallway nod, and you can pretend you don’t watch me during practice.”
“Finn—”
“Tell me.”
Evan’s hand came up. Not fast, not reflexive. Evan lifted his hand with his eyes open and the fluorescents on and watched his own palm land on Finn’s jaw. His thumb brushed the corner of Finn’s lips.
Finn held absolutely motionless. Barely breathing. If he reached for Evan now, Evan would have an excuse. He could tell himself he’d been pulled, caught, overwhelmed. Finn wasn’t going to give him that.
Evan’s fingers curled around the nape of Finn’s neck, gentle but certain, nothing tentative in it, nothing that suggested anyone had pulled him anywhere.
His other hand came up to Finn’s shoulder, and Finn could feel the intention in it: Evan closing the distance because he wanted to, not because he’d been cornered.
Then Evan kissed him.
It started soft, a question Evan was asking himself as much as Finn.
His lips were warm, and there was a slowness in it that hadn’t been there in the film room or at the apartment, a deliberateness that said I am choosing this with my eyes open.
Evan’s thumb traced along Finn’s cheekbone, and Finn kept his fists at his sides.
Didn’t reach for him, didn’t pull him closer, didn’t do anything that would let Evan pretend this was someone else’s decision. This had to be Evan’s. All of it.
The kiss deepened. Evan’s grip tightened at the nape of Finn’s neck, fingers threading into his hair, and his lips parted on a long exhale through his nose, his shoulders dropping, the rigid line of his spine giving way an inch at a time.
It shifted into something hungrier, but chosen.
Evan kissed him like he knew exactly what he was doing and had decided to do it anyway.
When Evan pulled away, they were both breathing wrong.
“I can’t keep doing this.” Not a protest. A fact he was laying down and looking at.
“But you’re here.”
Evan’s thumb pressed once to Finn’s cheekbone. Then his hand dropped.
Evan didn’t answer. But he didn’t step away.
Finn sank to his knees.
Finn got Evan’s belt open and his slacks down and looked up once, getting what he needed: Evan’s breath snagging, Evan’s grip going white-knuckled on the shelf behind him. Then Finn took him into his throat.
The noise Evan made was low and involuntary, his hips jerking forward before he caught himself.
A hand found Finn’s hair and gripped, not directing, just holding.
Finn took his time. This wasn’t the film room, frantic and stolen and interrupted.
Finn had the whole inventory night, and he intended to use it.
He learned things. Evan’s breathing hitching when Finn flattened his tongue on the upstroke.
His thigh locking when Finn took him deeper.
His hand in Finn’s hair tightening and releasing in a rhythm that matched his breathing, like even here, even with Finn on his knees, some part of Evan was trying to keep count.
Finn listened to the sounds Evan tried to suppress: bitten-off half-breaths, a groan that died before it formed, the swallow he couldn’t quite manage when Finn hollowed his cheeks and took him to the base.
Finn’s own cock was aching behind his zipper. He palmed himself through his jeans without thinking about it, just pressure, just enough to stay sane, and Evan looked down and saw it and his whole frame stuttered.
“Show me.” Evan’s voice was wrecked, barely there. “Let me see.”
Finn pulled himself out and stroked, his fist tight around himself, his lips stretching around Evan’s cock, and the dual sensation was almost too much.
Evan above him making sounds he’d never make in the hallway, and Finn on his knees with his own hand on himself, and the equipment room smelled like rubber and cedar and the sharp musk of both of them, and this was the pattern.
This was what Evan said couldn’t be a pattern, and here they both were.
Evan’s grip tightened past holding and became something else.
His hips thrust forward, once, and the noise he made was raw and wrecked, the furthest thing from the hallway voice Finn had ever heard from him.
Finn took it, relaxed his jaw, and Evan came down his throat with a sound that cracked in the middle, his whole frame shuddering, his hand fisted in Finn’s hair hard enough that Finn felt it in his scalp for hours afterward.
Finn pulled off, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and came into his own fist two strokes later, forehead pressed to Evan’s hip, breathing hard.
Afterward, Evan straightened his clothes with hands that weren’t quite steady. He retrieved the clipboard from the shelf, reaching for it the way another man might reach for a cigarette: the first thing his grip wanted after the rest of him had let go.
Evan was at the entrance when he paused. Hand on the frame. Not looking back.
“You played well today.” His voice had reassembled itself, but not all the way, a half-tone lower, rougher at the edges. “The zone entries in the second period. You’re reading the defense better than anyone I’ve seen in this program.”
“This can’t happen again,” Finn said to Evan’s spine.
“No. It can’t.”
“Same time next week?”
Evan didn’t say no. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there with his hand on the frame, his clipboard held to his chest, and the silence between them filling up with all the things he wouldn’t let himself say out loud.
Then Evan walked out, and the corridor swallowed the sound of his footsteps, and Finn sat on the floor with his spine to the wall and his pulse hammering and the taste of Evan on his tongue and the ache in his chest that had been building since sophomore year, finally getting somewhere.
Finn counted that as a win.