Chapter Sixteen #4
For such a large group, the logistics of setting up a game of truth or dare took a good chunk of the available flight time.
Eventually, Ketchup managed to input everyone’s nickname on a random generator.
He promptly dared Matheson to moon the plane, at which point Damir halted the proceedings to collect everyone’s phones besides Ketchup’s.
He stacked them up on the tray tables of the two seats he and Kilian occupied and hoped there’d be no turbulence causing them to topple.
The last thing the team needed was footage of this juvenile bonding getting shared with the wrong person.
Then Damir looked studiously away as Matheson showed everyone his bare ass.
Ah, the glory and prestige of professional sports.
Cerny drank a vile mix of tomato juice, red wine, and tequila; Lissy told everyone in great detail about how he’d met Céline when he had to see a podiatrist for his disgusting fungal foot infection after a hard playoff run, and she had miraculously not been repulsed enough to turn him down.
Perhaps because of the gratuitous tip he’d left.
“And now she sucks my toes all the time!” Lissy concluded, and Damir gagged a little bit.
“Denny!” Lissy called after activating the name generator app. “Truth or dare?”
Ugh. Damir had hoped interest in the game would die down before his name was called. He had no interest in getting out of his seat and making a fool of himself. With Lissy deciding his punishment, he also didn’t want to choose truth in case he’d be forced to discuss the helicopter again. “Dare.”
“Hmm,” Lissy said, drawing the sound out into the ridiculous. “I dare you…to go into your last Instagram message and send that person a picture of your abs.”
At least it wasn’t his dick. To be fair, Lissy probably knew Damir would have vetoed anything explicit.
Damir took his phone from the stack, pulled up his shirt, sucked in his stomach, and snapped a photo.
As he did it, he caught sight of Kilian in the window seat, stealthily removing his own phone from the pile.
Damir tabbed over to Instagram, hoping his most recent message wasn’t from a female fan.
When he saw the smiley face Kilian had texted him three seconds ago, he grinned. “Done.”
“Wait,” Lissy said. “Why are you smiling? You hate this kind of thing. Show me your phone.”
Damir showed him the sent picture, but when Lissy went for the phone, Damir snatched it out of his reach. He had no idea what messages might be most recent in his thread with Kilian, but he knew he didn’t want Lissy reading them.
The game went on. Damir pulled Rocky, and when he chose truth, Damir asked him how it had gone with CrossFit Girl from Carolina.
Rocky’s subsequent stammering through an admission of some heavy petting and a few racy FaceTime calls killed another five minutes of flight time.
Damir wondered how Rocky got through phone sex.
He could barely even say the word “sex.”
Fulls was then forced to burp the alphabet, after which Ketchup demonstrated his unfortunately famous cunnilingus technique, which, under the given circumstances, looked like a man wagging his tongue over thin air. And then Kilian chose truth.
“How was your first time?” Ketchup asked.
Damir tensed up. What a loaded question to ask a lone (as far as they knew) gay man who had been closeted for almost his entire life. He looked to Kilian for signs of discomfort.
But Kilian smiled, wide and real. “Perfect.”
“Bullshit!” Lissy called. “No one’s first time is perfect!”
“Mine was,” Kilian said staunchly.
“Liar.”
Ketchup made a dubious face and a weighing motion with his hands. “We need more deets to determine, man. Was it, um…who was it with?”
Kilian mimed zipping his lips.
“Wait, was it Jax Grant?” Matheson asked. “Were you guys having, like, gay orgies in the Sea Lions’ locker room?”
The expression Kilian made in response gave away the answer, but he responded anyway. “Gross! No! Ew! Jax and Tom were together for pretty much the entire time I knew them. And not in an open-relationship, inviting-the-rookie-to-threesomes way.”
“So who was it then?”
“I’m not gonna out him to you guys.”
Ketchup sighed, aggrieved. “Fine, be a good person. What made it so perfect then?”
“Fuck, everything,” Kilian said. “You know when it’s really good and your brain turns off so all that’s left is feeling?”
Silence greeted the question. Damir studied the back of the seat in front of him intensely.
Was Kilian actually describing subspace to a plane full of straight guys for whom toe-sucking represented the limits of kink?
Damir couldn’t believe Kilian had gone into it his very first time.
It did explain how brazen Kilian had been when he first propositioned Damir.
Damir hoped whoever he’d been with had been good to Kilian.
Although Kilian’s shoddy understanding of aftercare made him think that while the sex might have been good, whoever Kilian had been with was a dick.
“Okay,” Ketchup said dubiously. “So how’d you meet this guy?”
“Hockey.”
At the renewed explosion of questions, Kilian rolled his eyes. “How else would I have met someone? We play shit-squillion games per season, and this happened before I had a decent fake ID and knew where the good clubs were in San Francisco.”
What a pleasant reminder he was under the legal drinking age in the USA and had been a teenager only last year. Damir wished he’d known Kilian then, wished he’d felt for him the way he did now so he would have been able to take care of him.
Ketchup shook his head in disbelief. “So, what? You just went up to some guy on your team and said, ‘Hey, wanna fuck’?”
“He wasn’t on my team, but yeah, basically.”
Damir blinked.
“And he went for it?”
Kilian chuckled. “To be honest, he was kind of salty about it. You know I like to chirp guys on the ice, and he didn’t take it well. But him hating me made it hotter.”
A round of wolf whistles and hollers followed this pronunciation along with the unanimous decision that Kilian’s first time had actually been perfect. But Damir’s ears had stopped functioning, and he blanked out the entire rest of the game up until their landing at LAX.
Kilian’s first time hadn’t been with some random NHL-er who didn’t know shit about aftercare.
Kilian’s first time hadn’t been with someone who had good intentions but hadn’t known to be kind to him in the aftermath.
Kilian’s first time hadn’t been with someone who had treated him the way he deserved to be treated.
His first time had been with Damir, and Damir had fucked it up monumentally.
No wonder Kilian didn’t want to date him.