21. Brody
The door opens before I find the buzzer.
I had a speech, built it somewhere over the ocean. It was short and calm. All about the kid.
But then the door swings in, his scent rolls out of the hallway, and the speech is simply gone.
Orange peel. Dark honey. It’s been six months since I’ve had it anywhere but memory.
Memory has been selling me a knockoff the whole time. The real thing slides down my spine and grips me.
There’s something new in it, low and warm, wound through every part of him. I know exactly what it is.
It’s the baby, somehow both of us within him. It makes my knees want to buckle.
“Everett.”
There’s my speech.
He stands in the doorway with his chin up. His eyes are bright and fixed on me. My eyes drop to the middle of him before I can stop them.
“You found it,” he says.
“I found it.”
He steps back to let me in. “I’m afraid there’s no lift.”
The stairwell is narrow and it’s full of him. I carry the case so the wheels don’t wake the building, staying half a step behind him the whole way up. He climbs with one hand on the rail. I notice.
His apartment is one big room under old beams. It’s brick, tall windows, the river moving gray past the glass doors at the far end.
It’s warm and it’s quiet and there is not one thing in it that has anything to do with hockey.
No photos. No silver and green. I put my case down by the door.
I have no idea where I am staying tonight.
I haven’t booked a hotel. I didn’t even think that far ahead.
All I could think was that I needed to see him.
It’s London. There must be hotels everywhere. I’ll find somewhere.
Unless he offers to have me stay here.
He goes to the kitchen end and flips the switch on an electric kettle.
“Sit down,” he says. “You look dreadful.”
“Long flight.”
“There are hotels between here and Heathrow. You could have slept first.”
“No. I couldn’t.”
He makes coffee with his back to me, slides the mug across, and stays standing on the far side of the counter with his tea.
The counter stays between us. Understood.
“So,” he says. “I guess you want to talk about this.”
A laugh bursts out of me before I have the opportunity to hold it in. I just flew across continents, missing one of the most important games of the season, potentially letting the entire team down.
I guess I do.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Sorry, it’s been a long twenty-four hours.
Two days. Whatever.” I put the mug down, and the speech comes out easy.
“I’m in. You wrote that you don’t require anything from me.
Fine. Here’s what I require. I’m in. This is my kid too and I’m in.
I’m not being the kind of man my father was.
I want to be a real dad. I want to be in for the diapers.
Night feeds. School runs. I’m there. All of it. ”
He stirs his tea. He doesn’t look at me. “You play eighty games a year on another continent.”
“I’ll make it work. People do.”
“People with nine-to-fives do. You’re the captain of the Barons.
” His mouth goes flat on the word Barons.
“And you should hear the legal position before you promise anybody anything. This is where I live. British law doesn’t recognize prime matches.
There’s no Bureau here, no alpha priority, none of it. This child stays with me.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t just be agreeable.” Everett’s voice sharpens. “I grew up in your system, Callahan. I know precisely what an alpha with money and a famous face can take when the mood strikes him.”
“I’m not here to take anything off you.”
“You would say that.”
“Then I’ll put it in writing.” His eyes come up at that, and for a second he looks younger, and I want to reach across the counter so badly that I wrap my hand around the hot mug instead.
Don’t just be agreeable, he said.
Well, I’m going to be agreeable whether he likes it or not. Don’t just be agreeable.
But then his eyes narrow. He puts the mug down. “You can’t parent a child from across the ocean, Callahan. I know how it works. That’s what my dad said he’d do and he never turned up unless he wanted something. I’m not putting my kid through that.”
So apparently my role in this is being agreeable while his is being an asshole. Typical Everett Rourke, saying something like that when he’s the one trying to screw me over.
How is it that this one omega can make me so mad?
Suddenly, I don’t feel like being agreeable at all.
My big speech flies out the window. Instead what comes out of my mouth is six months of pure frustration.
“For fuck’s sake, Everett. I’m trying here.
I just got on a damned plane to come see you.
I’m the one who was willing to try and give the match a go.
I’m the one who said you could come stay with me.
I’m the one who is willing to try and find a way to make this work.
All you do is act like I’m about to do everything I can to fuck up your life. ”
He startles. In everything we have been through, I’ve not given him shit like this. Well, he can take it.
“And it’s not me who’s been fucking with you,” I continue.
“I know what you said to the league about me. Trying to get me off the ice. What the fuck was that? Despite all that shit, I am still here. I am still trying to meet you halfway and find a way to make it work for our child. And what are you doing? Behaving like you’re some wounded party. What the fuck did I ever do to you?”
I’m an idiot. What the hell am I even doing here? I’m going home. I’m not putting up with this guy. He might smell like heaven on earth, but that’s not enough. It’s just not. I’m done.
I turn my back on him, stalk over to the door to my suitcase when one thought stops me in my tracks.
What I am doing here is trying to be a good dad. That has to be enough.
I turn back, taking a deep breath.
He’s gone very still. He’s staring at me.
“Look, I get it,” I say. “Whatever your reasons were for trying to get me out of the team, I don’t care.” I do care but I’m not going to admit it. “But that’s my kid too. You need to meet me halfway here. You have to. Please.”
He’s still staring. His eyebrows furrow. “Why do you think I was trying to get you out?”
“The morning after the heat broke,” I say, “I went out for your latte. Dorn was in the line behind me. He told me you’d told them to make an example of me.”
There’s a long silence, then he says, “You believed Cade Dorn.”
“Everett—”
“Oh my god. That’s what happened.”
“It’s true though.”
“No, it isn’t.” He doesn’t shout it. That’s somehow worse.
“I’ll tell you what is true. You came back from that coffee run and locked yourself in the basement — that night, I called Priya.
The next morning she called the league office.
The club’s public position didn’t move, because I was not going to stand in front of cameras and bless what you did.
But I told them their best player sitting in the stands helped nobody, and I asked them to keep it as short as they could defend.
They were talking about eight, Callahan.
You got four. Maybe my call mattered, maybe it didn’t, but I sure as hell didn’t try to screw you over. ”
I can’t say anything. He isn’t finished.
“And Dorn. My lawyers have been on the league about Dorn since the week of the hit. Formal complaint, liability, the lot. It’s still crawling through their legal department and it costs me an obscene amount per letter. Priya can forward you the entire file.”
Oh crap. Is that true? It might be. It has to be. He’s not going to lie about something so easily checked. Surely, he wouldn’t?
That means that I came back to him just post-heat and turned cold for no good reason.
I am a complete dickhead. And I told everyone he did it. The whole room thinks that Everett Rourke tried to fuck me over because I told them he did.
I’m the one who screwed up. No wonder he just left. No wonder he doesn’t want me as a father to his child.
The fury dies inside me in an instant and all that is left is shame.
He’s still looking at me, his face flushed and angry.
I only have one option left. “Fuck, Everett. I’m sorry. I am really sorry. I was wrong. I apologize.”
Surprise crosses his face like it’s the last thing he expected me to say.
I let out a sigh and shake my head. “I can’t believe I’ve screwed this up so badly. Look, I’m still in about the baby. I have to be. I want to be a good father. I’ll move over here if I have to. Give up the Barons. And I don’t expect anything from you but the opportunity to be that good father.”
He’s still staring at me like I’ve grown a second head.
But now that everything is coming out, I can’t seem to stop. Not with that insane honey orange scent driving me mad. Not with those bright eyes looking at me.
I have no filter left. It has completely disintegrated. “But if you want more, I still want to try. You are the most beautiful maddening thing I have ever met and despite everything I still want you.”
The room goes quiet. All the anger has burned off.
What’s left is the two of us and six months of wanting with nowhere to hide.
His scent has been climbing this whole time — the orange gone rich, that new warmth underneath — and mine must be answering, because his nostrils flare and his knuckles are white on the counter’s edge.
“You should sleep,” he says. He doesn’t move. “You look half dead.”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
“No,” he says. “Neither do I.”
He comes around the counter. It’s the first time since the doorway that there’s been nothing between us, and neither of us pretends we don’t know what the last step is. He takes a fistful of my shirt, tips his face up, furious about every part of it, and kisses me.
I groan into his mouth. My hands find him — waist, back, the firm new curve of him pressed between us — and both our scents go up at once, orange and woodsmoke twisting together into the thing that belongs to nobody else on earth.
Six months. I could live a hundred years and not be made to forget what he tastes like.
“Bed’s behind you,” he says against my mouth. “You can sleep after.”
I pick him up. He makes the same noise of protest he made the last time I did it, with the same total lack of force, and wraps his legs around me anyway.
I set him down on the edge of the bed and go to my knees on the floor between his.
He drags my shirt over my head. I start on his buttons and make myself go slowly, one at a time, because he refuses to let me tear anything.
He’s changed. Fuller through the middle, softer at the hips, a curve where he was flat, and my hand goes over it without asking me first. We both go still.
“Later,” he says, low. “You can be soppy about it later. Right now I need—”
I put my mouth on his throat and end the sentence for him. The gland there is swollen, hot under my tongue, and when I drag my teeth across it — not biting, never that, not without being asked — the sound he makes goes through me like the crowd after a goal.
“Off.” His hands at my waistband. Same order as the first time, same voice. I have never obeyed anything faster.
There’s slick down the inside of his thighs already, and the scent of it fills the room, sweeter than I remember. When I get two fingers into him he drops back on his elbows, swears at me in that accent, and orders me to stop being careful.
“You’re pregnant.”
“Yeah pregnant, not made of glass. Move.”
I keep being careful anyway, right up until I’m inside him.
Then there’s no careful left in either of us.
He hooks a leg over my hip and pulls me the rest of the way in himself, and we both stop breathing for a second, exactly like the first time — except nobody’s in heat now, nobody has an excuse, and neither of us says a word about that.
It’s fast and loud and six months overdue.
He gives orders. I follow the ones I feel like following and get sworn at for the rest. His nails put lines down my back that I’ll be keeping away from the locker room for a week, and when he comes he says my name — Brody, not Callahan — and that finishes me, buried deep, his teeth clamped in the meat of my shoulder where the old mark used to sit.
After, he lies sprawled across my chest with his ear over my heart, and I run my hand up and down his spine and feel him breathe.
“This changes some things,” he says, eventually.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know.”
The second time is slow, and it’s his choice.
He puts me on my back and takes me astride, my hands exactly where he sets them, and he takes me apart with all the patience the first round skipped.
I relearn him inch by inch — what’s the same, what’s new, what makes him lose the thread of his own orders halfway through giving them.
He finishes with his head thrown back and my name in his mouth, and I follow him over, and by the end of it the whole flat smells of the pair of us.
We eat toast at midnight, standing up at the counter, because toast is the only thing in the kitchen that doesn’t need cooking and neither of us is willing to get dressed enough for a restaurant.
At half past midnight he walks to the sofa and turns the TV on, and he doesn’t explain and I don’t ask.
There’s an American sports package on it, the expensive kind they sell to homesick expats, under a profile named Guest. He puts on the Barons–Marauders game.
It’s already the first intermission over there.
“You’ve been watching,” I say.
“Every game.” He settles into my side with the blanket over both of us. “Don’t make it into anything.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
First shift of the second period, Ozzy catches up to Dorn behind the play and asks him the question with his gloves already coming off.
Dorn has to answer — the whole barn is on its feet demanding it — and Ozzy feeds him three short ones and takes him down, and even through the TV I can hear what our crowd thinks of that.
Matching fives. Worth every second. Early in the third, Linus walks their defenseman and roofs one, and the camera finds his grin through the glass, and Everett’s hand tightens on my ribs. I have the sense not to say so.
My phone lights up between periods. JP, from the room:
ozzy says you’re welcome. tell london hi.
Everett falls asleep on me somewhere in the third, mid-sentence, in the middle of telling me he isn’t tired. The Barons are up two. Dorn hasn’t taken a shift since the fight. I mute the TV, stay exactly where I am so I don’t wake him, and text JP one-handed.
found him.