Chapter Eight #3
Was Kilian still at the club? Did he know he’d been traded yet? Or was he on the dance floor, loose and relaxed from alcohol and the orgasm he’d had thinking about Damir?
Damir called him.
“Oh my God!” Kilian shouted down the line. “I did the thing in the bathroom; let me dance in peace!”
He sounded drunk.
He sounded happy.
Noise bled through the phone speakers, a thumping beat and the hum of dozens, maybe hundreds, of other guys talking and laughing and kissing.
“You need to sober up,” Damir said.
“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
Damir rolled his eyes. “I’m serious, Kilian. They traded you to fucking Chicago. Your GM or your coach or some other grown adult is about to get in touch. Do you want to be drunk off your ass in a gay club when they do?”
Silence.
The sound of a scuffle, voices muffled. Kilian’s voice, distant, came as if he had the phone pulled away from his ear. “No, Liam, I gotta take this.”
Who was Liam? Was Kilian dancing with him?
Or worse, dating him? No, wait. It wouldn’t be bad if Kilian was dating him.
Kilian could date whoever he wanted. But then he shouldn’t send Damir voice messages of himself getting off in the bathroom.
And he would have to dump the guy anyway because he’d gotten traded to Chicago, and—
Damir was getting ahead of himself.
The distant clang of a door closing drew his attention back to his phone.
Then, small and quiet, “They traded me?”
Damir swallowed heavily. “I’m sorry. I just found out. You and two draft picks for Henderson.”
There was a little whoosh, as if Kilian had sucked in a breath. “We need a tendy. I guess it’s my fault Dmitriyev’s broken.”
“It’s not—”
“Thanks for warning me, Damir. Guess I’ll drink some water before the grown-ups start calling.”
The line went dead. Shit.
Damir scrubbed a hand over his face and took a deep breath.
He went back inside.
Rocky and his CrossFit girl had moved on to comparing palm sizes.
In a few minutes, he might manage to hold her hand.
Damir had faith he could seal the deal. Lissy and the D-corps were a lost cause, jumping around completely out of synch with the music.
Judging by the manic light in Lissy’s eyes, they had stopped off in the bathroom at some point for a new kind of stimulant. Petterson continued to film them.
“Don’t put that online,” Damir warned him as he passed by.
“You ruin all my fun,” Petterson complained, but he put his phone away.
That left Ketchup and the rookies. When Damir joined them in their booth, Ketchup’s eyes were fully glazed over.
“…and Geo says it’s fine to concentrate on solving the puzzles, but I think you’ve really gotta get all the collectibles, you know,” Ketchup was saying. One of the rookies had passed out; the other’s eyes kept fluttering open and then closed again.
“Come on,” Damir said. “Let’s get you all to the hotel.”
“Boo,” Ketchup told him. “Fun-ruiner. You ruiner of, of…”
“Fun, yes, you said. It’s past rookie bedtime.” Damir hoisted Matheson, the closer rookie, up and out of the booth. His eyes blinked open in surprise.
“Wassat?”
“We’re getting you back to the hotel,” Damir told him. “Come on.”
“Oh. Sweet. Fulls! Hey, Fulls, c’mon.”
Fulls groaned.
Damir sighed and passed Matheson off to Ketchup, who had managed to get out of his seat. They wobbled unsteadily but stayed vaguely upright.
Damir grabbed Fulls by the arm and wrapped it around his shoulder before settling his own arm around the younger man’s waist and levering him out of the booth.
“Okay, time to go,” Damir told the three of them. Ketchup, who, unlike the rookies, was capable of understanding words in a sequence, pouted.
“Oh noooo,” he said loudly, not remembering he had already voiced his complaints a minute ago. “The fun police is here! Denny’s the fun police, bro.” He elbowed Matheson until he agreed.
Damir hated alcohol.
Three feet from the door, Fulls’s eyes fluttered open. His face went from ruddy red to waxy pale and then decidedly green. “’M gonna barf,” he managed to say before doing exactly that all over the floor, his own shoes, and Damir’s pants.
Fantastic.
Damir passed him off to Matheson and Ketchup, who at least understood the severity of the situation now. He gave the irate bouncer two hundred and twenty dollars in cash, which was all he had on him, and promised to get everyone home.
Fulls threw up twice more on the seven-minute walk to the hotel. The last time, Matheson went peaky around the edges watching him do it. Damir guessed he would be joining the fun, if not tonight, then tomorrow morning.
It took the better part of twenty minutes to get them both into their hotel room, cleaned up, and in bed. Damir set the wastebasket between the two twin beds and forced each of them to drink a bottle of water before placing two more on the nightstands.
“I’m right down the hall in room 207,” he told them both. “Come get me if you need anything.”
All he got in answer was a snore from Fulls.
He held their door for a long time in the hall, listening to make sure they were both still breathing and not choking on their own vomit. “Maybe I should stay here tonight.”
“Worrywart,” Ketchup said fondly. He at least had sobered up on the walk. “They’ll be all right. We’ve all been there; it’s a rookie rite of passage.”
Damir had never been there, and he never wanted to be. His expression must have given him away because Ketchup shook his head in mock consternation. “I forgot how holier-than-thou you are. Look, be glad they’re only wasted. They could have been doing nose candy with the captain.”
“You do, sometimes,” Damir pointed out.
Ketchup shrugged. “I’m old enough to know what I can take.”
Damir eyed him. Though Ketchup and Matheson had the same birth year, they ended up in different drafts thanks to the cut-off date. “And how’d you learn, hm?”
A sliver of a grin slid across Ketchup’s face. “Made some mistakes as a rookie.”
That was what Damir had been afraid of.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
Damir shrugged.
“Why did you become an athlete? You don’t enjoy any of the perks. You do your own cooking, you keep your own house, you don’t drink, you don’t do drugs, you don’t even talk to the puck bunnies.”
“You spent your adolescence on shitty bus trips and freezing ice rinks on the off-chance you’d be inundated with drugs, sex, and alcohol if you made it to the NHL?”
Ketchup sighed like a teakettle on a stove just starting to go cold. “It was a motivating factor, at least at the start. What are you here for?”
“To play hockey.”
Laughing, Ketchup clapped him on the shoulder. “I guess there’s that too.” He peeled off toward his own room on the opposite end of the corridor.
“Ketchup?” Damir called after him. “Do you mind if we get a third roommate?”
“You’re not going to take in a rookie to save him from the drugs and alcohol, are you?”
“No. We’ve got a new guy on the roster, and he’ll need a place to stay.” The second guest room wasn’t as big as Ketchup’s, but Damir aired it out regularly, and the sheets were clean.
“Dope. Fine by me.”
Damir nodded sharply and went to his own room.
If he wanted to take Kilian in to save him from the drugs and alcohol, well, Ketchup didn’t have to know.