Chapter 2
PATRICK
"EVERYONE'S GONE. YOU played like garbage. Let me fix your mood."
That's Theo's argument, in its entirety, delivered with both palms flat on my chest, walking me backward down the equipment hallway like I'm a couch he's rearranging.
I open my mouth to point out that I didn't play like garbage, I played fine, my team gave up the game in front of me, but Theo’s already hooking the video room door open with his foot, shoving me inside.
I go. I could stop this with one hand. I never want to.
Eleven days. That's the whole lifespan of this thing. Eleven days of supply closets, hotel bathrooms, and one memorable incident behind the Zamboni, no labels, no plan, no fuss.
The room's dark except for one monitor, displaying a frame of my five-hole giving up the game.
"Turn that off."
"No." Theo boosts himself onto the desk edge. "I like it. It's romantic. Ambient losing."
"Theodore."
"Every time you look, you'll be motivated to impress m—"
I put my mouth on the spot under his jaw that turns him from a person who talks into a person who makes sounds.
"—mm. Unfair. Cheating. Do it again."
I do it again, recruiting my teeth this time, and feel the groan start in his throat before it makes it out of his mouth.
He grabs a fistful of my base layer and hauls me between his thighs, and then his tongue is in my mouth and his hips are already working, grinding the hard line of his cock against my hip, patience a foreign concept.
Eleven days and I already know this body better than my own crease. The bruise on his left hip from Tuesday, purple going yellow, that makes him hiss when I dig my thumb into it.
So I dig my thumb into it.
I get a hand under his shirt and shove it up. His stomach jumps against my palm, abs tight, skin damp, and when I drag my knuckles down the trail of hair below his navel, his whole body follows the motion like I've got him on a string.
I do have him on a string. That's the entire appeal.
By the time my hand slides into the front of his pants, he's fully hard, cock straining against his briefs, a wet patch already bleeding through the cotton. Eleven days, and this is still my favorite discovery in professional hockey: Theo Moreau, the fastest man on my team, leaks like a faucet the second he’s slowed down.
I palm him through the fabric. His head drops back and he swears in French, low and filthy and continuous, a rosary of profanity.
That starts around minute three of anything. It's become one of my favorite sounds.
I pull his briefs down just enough to get skin. His cock springs up against his stomach, flushed dark, wet at the tip. I wrap my fist around it dry and loose, barely a grip at all, just heat and the suggestion of friction, and stroke him once, root to head, taking my time.
Theo hates it. And when he doesn’t hate it, he loves it. "You're doing the thing," he pants.
I lower my mouth to his ear. "What thing."
"The slow thing. The I have all night and several theories thing."
"I do have several theories."
"Test them faster."
I don't. I drag my fist up him again, tighter now, twist my wrist over the crown, slick my thumb through the mess at his slit and spread it down his shaft in one long pull. His thighs shake, and his cock jumps in my hand, another bead of pre-cum welling up for me like applause.
There's no version of Theo Moreau this obedient anywhere else in the Universe, and I'm the only one who gets to benefit.
My own cock is a problem I'm ignoring, thick and insistent, dragging against the seam every time Theo's hips buck into me. Later. This part first.
I like this part.
I like it more than I've let him figure out: his cock hot and heavy in my fist, the sounds that get away from him. The exact moment his brain gives up on words and starts transmitting static.
That's when the light changes.
Not much. A shift in the door gap. A shadow where the hallway glow used to be.
I don't look up. Looking up is for forwards. I track.
Big. Very big, filling most of a doorframe. And even in the semi-darkness, there is exactly one head of hair intense enough you could navigate by.
Wall.
Standing in my doorway.
Watching me jerk off my teammate.
This is…definitely not ideal.
Stopping is an option. I could step in front of Theo, invent a stretching program in real time and feign ignorance.
The thought arrives and sits there for a few seconds.
Then, it evaporates, because here's what my body does with the information that both my career and my closet are most likely on the line right about now: it goes calm. Shootout calm, a glassy flat-line where the game slows down and I can see the whole ice.
And then it does something else, something with no business happening at all, as every point of contact gets louder. Theo's cock pulsing in my grip. The wet sounds my fist is making, obscene in the quiet. The heat crawling up the back of my neck.
The fact that I'm harder than I was thirty seconds ago.
If I stop now, Theo panics, loudly, in a building with concrete acoustics, and Wall walks away with a story that has a beginning, a middle, and me scrambling. If I don't stop, however, I keep the room, the pace, the ending, and I deal with Wall on my own schedule.
And then, there’s the other thing… Wall’s not leaving.
The door is his. The hallway is his. There’s a clean exit, and the man is standing perfectly still.
"Patrick—" Theo's voice frays. "Come on. Faster, you absolute—"
"No."
He makes a sound I’ll be replaying in my head later.
I tug his waistband down further, get his balls in my other hand, roll them slow, and watch his knees try to climb my hips. Then I get my fist around him properly, full grip, slick now, tight the whole way.
"Oh my God. Do that again or I will haunt you."
I do it again.
And maybe… Maybe I angle us, just slightly, so the doorway has a better view. Maybe I step back half a foot so nothing blocks the sightline to Theo, shirt rucked to his chest, pants around his thighs.
Maybe my voice sits a bit louder than Theo needs it.
And maybe I'm not proud of it, but I'm not not proud of it, either.
In my peripheral vision, the shape in the doorway hasn't moved. Or breathed, possibly. Eight years and I've never held his attention like this.
It shouldn't be doing anything for me.
My cock, full, aching, dragging against fabric every time Theo presses against me, has a different take on it all.
Theo's close. I’m not sure he knows it yet. His breathing breaks rhythm, his hips lose their manners entirely, fucking up into my fist in short, greedy snaps, his balls drawing up tight in my palm.
A sound starts climbing his throat, and I cover his mouth with my palm.
He moans into it, filthy and grateful, eyes screwed shut, hands scrabbling at the desk edge.
The vibration of it runs down my arm and straight to my cock, and I press my hand down harder.
His jaw works against it for a moment, and then he goes softer, more pliant, hips still moving but surrendered now, riding my grip instead of chasing it.
Theo Moreau, held still. Rare occurrence, really.
"Look at you," I say against his ear. Loud enough for the room. "So feisty in the hallway. Not so feisty now."
He gets out a muffled “I hate you” against my hand.
"Say it again."
What comes out isn't words. Theo goes rigid.
His cock swells in my grip, pulses twice, and he comes with a sound my palm barely holds, spurting hot cum over my, thighs shaking, while I milk him through every last wave, slow and thorough, until he's twitching and oversensitive and whining into my hand.
And now I lift my eyes to the doorway.
Wall is exactly where I tracked him, face wide open.
I’ve spent a long time learning this man. I know him more than I’d like to admit. Every tell he's ever leaked, I own it. I've built my own saves out of it. But I have never once seen his face do this. No mask. Nothing guarding the net at all.
I hold his stare for a moment. Then, Theo sags against me, boneless. I ease him off the desk edge, press my cheek against his curls, and glance back up to an empty doorway.
Theo comes back online thirty seconds later, boneless and smug against my chest, making a small sound like a satisfied radiator.
I don’t get to enjoy this for long though, my momentary peace shattered by something crashing in the hallway, the sound distant and metallic.
The unmistakable acoustic signature of a very large man meeting a laundry cart at speed.
But Theo doesn’t know that. He goes from liquid to vertical in half a second. Coaches would weep.
"What was that?"
I shrug, trying not to laugh. "A noise?"
"A footsteps noise!" Theo stage-whispers.
He's already fighting his pants up his thighs, hopping, one leg cooperating and the other staging a protest, and when his waistband snaps up over the mess drying on his stomach, he makes a sound of betrayal.
"Someone's out there. Why are you calm? Stop being calm, it’s annoying. "
I'm calm because I already know what's out there. What's out there is six foot seven of Chicago goaltender attempting a silent retreat through a hallway containing a stick rack, two equipment carts, and, judging by the second, more distant crash, at least one mop bucket.
He's clearing the zone. Good pace, too.
I find a towel on the AV cart and wipe my knuckles clean while Theo arms himself.
The weapon he selects is a dry-erase marker. He holds it like a knife. "Cover me."
"With what?"
"Your body! Your big— Whatever, shh. SHH."
I haven't even said anything.
Theo creeps to the door in a crouch that makes him zero percent smaller and one hundred percent more visible, and executes the horror-movie lean—body inside, head rotating out into the hallway at ninety degrees, marker raised.
God, I wish I were filming this.
He stands motionless for a beat. Then, he screams and hurls himself back into the room. "There's someone at the end of the hall!"
There is not someone at the end of the hall. There is a framed, wall-mounted Vipers team photo at the end of the hall, behind glass, in the dark. I know this because I've walked past my own reflection in it four hundred times.
"That's the team photo."
"It moved!"
"You moved."
Theo processes this, straightens up with all the dignity he has left, which rounds up to zero, and his shoulder catches the shelf by the door. Something drops, bounces once with a flat thock, and rolls a lazy arc across the floor before stopping against his foot.
A puck.
He picks it up. Turns it over. "Why is there a—" He looks at me. Whatever my face is doing, his slides from curious to lawyer in half a second. "Patrick. Whose puck is this?"
"Wallace's."
Silence.
"He must have left it behind," I add, evenly, because delaying the rest of this sentence isn't going to make it land softer, "when he walked in on us."
Theo does the five stages of grief in eleven seconds.
Denial. "No."
Anger, immediate and directed entirely at me. "No."
Bargaining. "Okay, but— Maybe he didn't see anything. Maybe he just, like, walked in, saw a coat rack, walked out—"
Depression, which for Theo looks exactly like sitting down hard on the desk he was just draped over. "Oh my god."
Finally, acceptance, which arrives as a full-body recoil and the loudest whisper-shout I've ever heard produced by a human: "Wallace? As in, Wall? The big red?"
"That's the one."
"Patrick." He's pacing now, puck in one hand, marker in the other, conducting his own panic.
"Do you understand what this means? The Wolves are close.
Criminally close. Bet every guy on that team is in four group chats minimum.
And— Oh my God, Becker has a podcast. A podcast, Patrick!
With listeners. You know what happens when something gets on a podcast?
It becomes a fact. Podcast facts have a half-life of forever. "
I should be the one pacing. The stakes are all mine. Theo’s out. Not headlines-out, but out enough not to care. Me? I’m out to my sister and one very discreet college ex.
But I’m not pacing. I'm standing very still, replaying two minutes of a very large man not leaving.
Theo notices. Under all the noise, he always notices.
"Why aren't you panicking?" He stops mid-lap and squints. "Patrick. Why are you making that face?"
"He didn't leave," I say.
Theo blinks. "What?"
I nod at the puck in his hand. "He just stood there. For two minutes. He had a clean exit the whole time."
I watch that land, the panic rerouting into something much, much worse. Theo's grin comes on slow. It’s the exact grin he wears three seconds before doing something that requires an apology.
"Patrick," he says with gravity, "your nemesis isn't scandalized. Your nemesis is thirsty."
I don't answer. Everything I've got is some version of I noticed, and I don't know what to do with it.
My phone buzzes somewhere deep in my pocket, breaking my train of thought.
I glance at the screen and whine.
Vipers PR, and it’s almost midnight. PR has no circadian rhythm. All caps, the way PR writes anything it finds exciting, the message reads:
BORDER BATTLE FOR PAWS — JOINT CHARITY CAMPAIGN W/ CHICAGO WOLVES. SEASON-LONG. CO-CHAIR ASSIGNMENT: YOU. FIRST STATUS MEETING: CHICAGO, FRIDAY.
I read it twice, then look at the ceiling. “Kurwa.”
"What?" Theo cranes his neck. "What is it? Is it the podcast already? I swear, if it’s the—"
I turn the screen around.
He reads it upside down anyway, out of habit. It takes him four full seconds. Then he makes a sound like a car alarm going off in a church.
Let me lay out what the league, in its infinite wisdom, has just handed me. A full season of charity events with the Chicago Wolves. The one and only organization in the world that employs the one and only human alive who has seen me with my hand down a man's pants.
Yeah, I think not.
I open a reply and start typing.
Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts—
I pause mid-word, because I can already picture the headline: VIPERS GOALIE SAYS NO TO SHELTER PUPPIES.
There's no surviving that. Nobody declines puppies. Puppies are a PR checkmate.
I delete the draft.
Beside me, Theo grins. "Friday, Patrick. You're going to his city. To do charity. With his team. While he knows." The grin again, wider. "This is the best thing that's ever happened to me."
I close my eyes and pinch the bridge on my nose. "It's not happening to you."
"I'm coming with."
My eyes snap open immediately. "You're not."
Theo already has his phone out. "I'm volunteering for the campaign."
"Theo."
"Too late. I love dogs now. Always have. Ask anyone. I'm their biggest—"
"Theodore."
He looks up at me over the screen, thumb hovering, grinning like this entire disaster is a gift he gets to unwrap.
I sigh.
I could stop this with one hand.
I don't want to.