Chapter 27
PATRICK
THE QUIET THAT fills my apartment in the middle of the night isn’t new.
What's new is, I can hear it.
For most of my life, some part of me has stayed on shift while the rest of me slept, planning, drafting answers to questions that hadn't been asked yet.
Tonight that part clocked out. There's nothing left for it to guard, and instead of resting, I keep mentally wandering back to the empty space to stare at where the worries used to live.
Theo sleeps like he was dropped from a height, one shin flung over mine.
On my other side, Wall barely appears to breathe.
Between them, with eyes wide open for hours, buzzing like a wire: me, a man who has slept through playoffs and injury scares, wide awake in the middle of a peace he has no training for.
At half past midnight I stop pretending and wake them, trying to convince myself that tomorrow’s a day off, so they won’t mind.
Wall's eyes open before my hand lands. Theo requires excavation, and aims one eye at me.
"Get dressed," I say.
"It's midnight," Wall points out, voice dripping with sleep I’ve just robbed him of.
"I know."
"He's finally lost it," Theo tells the ceiling, but he’s already rolling off the bed.
Wall asks no questions on the drive. Theo asks a constant stream of them—about everything except where we're going.
That warms me the whole way there.
***
MY KEYS, MY code, my building.
The arena at one in the morning belongs to nobody. One bank of lamps over fresh ice, the compressor humming under the stands, twenty thousand seats holding their breath in the dark.
I've had keys to this place for six years and I have never once brought anyone in. This is where I'm the thing on the wall posters. This is the one place on earth I have never not been in control.
"Skate it out," I tell them, which is what I told myself in the car, and it's even mostly true.
We raid the stall room for skates and sticks and lace up at my bench in street clothes, and then there's cold air moving over my face and a fresh sheet of ice under my blades, the three of us spread across it with one puck, passing for no reason, keeping no score.
Wall drifts to the far end and, without a word, backs himself into the visiting crease.
A hoodie, no pads, hands loose on a borrowed stick.
I send the puck down easy and he sends it back the same, and my chest makes a full production out of a routine pass—the whole war is suddenly out here with us, him in one paint and me in the other, and it isn't heavy anymore.
It's sweet. We built the thing without ever knowing what we were building.
Theo collects the puck, winds up through center ice, abandons the puck entirely, and "checks" Wall into the boards.
It's the gentlest check in the history of the sport.
It's also not a check at all—his fists are already in Wall's hoodie, Wall's hands leave the stick to catch him, and the boards give a soft boom that rolls all the way around the empty building.
By the time the sound comes home from the upper deck, they're kissing.
I stand in my crease and watch. The part of me that controls every second of everyone’s life stays off duty. The rest of me pushes off and glides down the ice for the plainest reason available: they're there, and I want to be too.
Theo hears my blades and turns, mouth wet, eyes bright. “Well, finally.”
We come off the ice tangled, laughing at the physics of us, a stick clattering onto the runner where it can lie until morning.
The bench is where it stops being playful.
Wall sits, pulls me down across his lap, and kisses me slow, my jaw held in one huge hand.
Theo fits himself behind me, mouth at the back of my neck, hands sliding under my jacket, and my shirt, spreading warmth across my stomach.
I'm hard before a single zipper is involved, aching, grinding back against Wall on instinct.
The sound I make into Wall's mouth returns off the walls a half-second late.
This arena gives every sound we make straight back to us, and the perfect volume.
Theo laughs against my neck, dark and thrilled. "Oh, we are going to have so much fun with the acoustics."
My jacket goes first, then my shirt, peeled up over my head so the cold gets a full pass at me.
Every place their hands land turns hot, and every place they leave goes cool, my skin building a map of the difference.
I strip Wall's hoodie off him and put my open mouth on his chest just to feel his breathing change.
Theo loses his own shirt in the time it takes me to think of it, then goes to work on my fly, pops the button, and rests two knuckles against my cock through my boxers, pressing lightly, holding there until my hips chase it.
I know what I want tonight.
I've known for a long time, if I’m being honest with myself, probably since Theo and I first started being a thing we didn’t have a name for.
And if Theo ever wanted it himself, I'd flip a coin right now and be perfectly happy with either outcome.
But Theo has informed us both, cheerfully, more than once, that his interests all run in the other direction, permanently.
Which leaves the man currently holding my jaw like something breakable.
It also leaves me having to ask.
"Wallace."
His eyes come up. I open my mouth and nothing follows. Theo's hands go still against my stomach, and heat crawls up my neck.
I’ve never been good at asking people for anything. I can only ask for small things, things they can refuse, no hard feelings involved.
This? This is the opposite.
This one has to go out with no armor on it.
When I finally get myself to say it, I say it with my eyes closed. Somehow that seems safer. "I want…” I swallow around the words that are real, but not easy. “I want you inside me." Only then do I get the courage to open them again.
Even the compressor seems to pause.
Wall searches my face, and there’s the flare in his eyes. "Are you sure?"
"I don't say things I'm not sure about."
"I thought… When's the last time you—"
"Years. Before either of you." My throat works around the rest. "I don't hand this over. I never want to. Now I want to."
Behind me, Theo makes a sound that starts as a whimper and somehow lands as speech. "Ohhh. Welcome to the dark side, the lighting's better—"
"Theo…"
"I'm helping!” he says it with pure delight. “I'm going to help so much."
Wall holds my eyes a moment longer. Then he stands me up by the hips and goes.
He crosses to the equipment corner, and comes back dragging the trainers' big blue stretching mats, one under each arm. I watch, motionless, as he carries them out the gate, and lays them flat, edge to edge, squared to the paint of my crease.
My net.
The patch of ice I've defended my whole adult life, and he's building a bed in it.
Something in my chest comes loose. I let it go.
Theo waggles his brows. "This is why we keep him."
Wall straightens, takes a small zippered pouch from his jacket, and sets it on the mat. Lube. A condom. I look at it, then at him. "You brought that to a midnight skate?" I ask, even though he didn’t know where he was going.
"I plan," he answers anyway, shameless.
The laugh that pulls out of me turns into wanting before it finishes being a laugh.
"Skates off," Wall says. "Carpet for prep. Then the crease."
Theo’s next breath comes out shaky. "I'm going to pass out."
My fingers fumble the laces. Around me, Theo and Wall are doing no better, and there's a full minute of swearing, and hopping, and one near-miss between a blade and Theo's jeans before all six skates stand in a drunken row under the bench.
Then, my jeans are gone, and the runner is rough under my knees, and Theo's mouth is on me.
He starts at the base of my spine and takes the long way down, left to right, and back again, hands spreading me open, breath arriving first so I feel exactly where his tongue will land before it does.
The first slow lick over my hole empties my head completely. The sound I make is obscene, and the arena hands it back to me from the cheap seats.
"There he is," Theo says against my skin, reverent and filthy at once. "The man behind the man."
He goes back to work, his tongue circling, pressing, opening me slowly, with a patience he spends on nothing else in his life. I grip the bench pad. Somewhere ahead of me, wood creaks—Wall, sitting down on the bench.
To watch.
He doesn't touch me. Forearms on his knees, he sits where I can see him if I lift my head, gaze moving between my face and what Theo's mouth is doing to me.
I've experienced this exact level of attention before, but it was different. Because every other time, I had the luxury of hiding behind doing. But there’s nothing to hide behind anymore, and from this side of things, undone myself, loud, held open, it's very nearly too much.
"Look at me," Wall says, quiet.
I look at him. Theo's tongue pushes into me. I keep looking, and let my face show him all of it.
"Good," Wall says.
The word goes through me like current.
Theo's fingers replace his mouth, slick and careful, and he narrates the whole operation—how I sound, and what exactly he plans to think about now every time he watches me stand in this building in full gear. It should be ridiculous, but it’s dismantling me instead.
Then his fingers crook, find my prostate with ease that folds my arms out from under me, and what leaves my mouth stops resembling words.
"More of that," Theo says, awed.
"Come and get it," I manage into the bench pad, and he laughs.
Wall stands. "He's ready."
"Oh, he was ready ten minutes ago. I know his sounds by heart."
From down on my back, my net is something new entirely.
Red steel overhead, work light catching the crossbar, the upper bowl climbing away into dark, cold rising off the ice on either side of the mats.
My whole career has happened on one side of this paint.
Lying naked in the middle of it with both of them kneeling over me, it stops being a place I defend. It's just where they have me.