Chapter Seventeen #4
Damir shook his head, a rueful smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “I should have been more careful with you. Later as well. And I’m sorry about tonight.”
“I promise I don’t want to do anything harder than, like, a weed gummy.” Kilian pecked him on the cheek. “And I’m not looking to get wasted at team functions. Been there, done that, regretted it for weeks.”
Damir still looked troubled. Kilian wrapped his arms tighter around Damir’s middle and made a questioning noise.
“I don’t want to make you miss out on anything,” Damir admitted. “You’re younger than me—”
“Six years. There’s hockey players married to women with twice the age difference.”
“Not a model I strive to emulate.”
“So don’t make me miss out,” Kilian suggested. “We live together and work together. You don’t have to go out clubbing with the team when you obviously hate it just to spend time with me.”
“I don’t hate it. I—”
“You feel responsible for everyone and spend all night making sure no one ends up in the tabloids or with alcohol poisoning.” Kilian traced his thumb along the base of Damir’s spine. “Maybe they deserve to fuck up enough to see the consequences.”
“And what do I do then, when you’re out having fun without me?” Damir’s words might sound as though the thought bothered him, but his tone had gone soft and teasing, and his body leaned into Kilian’s touch.
“I’m thinking spa trips,” Kilian said with a grin. “Sauna, a little mani-pedi if you’re into it, let someone pamper you for a change.”
He hadn’t noticed Damir was tense until his shoulders dropped a fraction. “Oh. That sounds…nice actually.”
“Mhm. If we’re doing the boyfriend thing, I’m gonna make it my condition.”
“The ‘boyfriend thing?’” Damir could not have sounded more scathing if he tried.
“Fine, adult relationship, whatever you wanna call it.”
“Your condition is mani-pedis.”
“No.” Kilian leaned in close and brushed a kiss across Damir’s lips.
“My condition is that I get to take care of you sometimes too. Let me keep driving you around so you don’t have to do it.
Let me fix your kitchen cabinets when they break.
Let me find relaxing stuff for you to do when I go out with the team so you don’t have to worry about us. ”
Damir cupped his hands around Kilian’s face and slid their mouths together, his lips already parted before they touched.
It was deep and wet and drugging. Kilian had no idea what taking cocaine felt like, but how could it be better than this?
How could it set his pulse racing and his heart thrumming and his veins fizzing with pure joy?
He didn’t know how long they stayed there, so close together their shadows melted into one, kissing furiously. It wasn’t until a long gust of warm air blew through the narrow alley between the club and the building beside it that they drew apart slowly.
“Warm wind in winter feels wrong.” Damir licked across his lips, leaving them shiny and dark in the dim light.
Kilian followed the motion with his eyes. “The Santa Anas are weird.”
“What?”
“Hm?”
“The Santa Anas?”
“Oh, it’s this wind pattern in southern California. I looked it up once after— You know what? It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?” Damir was smiling again. Kilian had no idea why people thought him grumpy or unfriendly. He smiled all the time.
“Nope.”
“What does matter?”
“Whether you’ll come back to the hotel with me.”
With a fluid motion, Damir pushed off the wall and toward the streetlight at the exit of the alleyway, pulling Kilian along behind him. Kilian laughed as he let himself be dragged away and into the balmy Los Angeles night.
The hotel wasn’t far away geographically, but LA traffic had no care for geography, not even at this time of night, so they were stuck in a cab for over twenty minutes.
The entire time, Damir kept his hands folded placidly in his own lap.
The driver didn’t know shit about hockey, but he instantly recognized Damir as a potential fellow Muslim based solely on his appearance.
Kilian could tell by the way he asked where Damir was from and proceeded to follow it up with a billion questions about how he ended up in Chicago.
The driver, a second-generation American with Pakistani roots, promised to watch their upcoming game against San Francisco.
The only way Kilian could tell Damir was less than patient about the whole ordeal was the way his knee bounced up and down throughout the whole ride. Kilian had to stuff his own hands under his thighs to keep himself from reaching out to steady him.
The cab driver bade them goodbye with, “Salaam alaikum.”
Damir returned the greeting and gave him a nod as he slid out of the back seat. Kilian opted for just the nod.
They had so much they needed to talk about.
Being boyfriends was great, awesome, amazing, but what about Damir’s religion?
All his reasons for not being out? Would they have to keep it a secret forever?
Something of the fizzy burble of happiness and excitement in Kilian faded at the thought.
He’d only stopped keeping things secret a few days ago.
Although he never wanted it to happen the way it did, he felt so much better now that everything was out in the open.
Being with Damir, committing to Damir, meant committing to more secrecy.
It meant a threat to Damir’s career and public image should they get caught.
But more than that, it meant actual physical danger to his life and well-being.
To his family’s lives and well-beings. He’d gotten death threats for being Muslim.
Kilian wasn’t na?ve enough to think he wouldn’t get more of the same for being queer.
In the elevator up to their floor, he had to break the silence. “Damir—”
Damir placed a finger on his lips. “Not now,” he said.
“But—”
“Shh. Can we…can we enjoy tonight before we have to talk about the rest?”
Kilian softened. No way was he strong enough to turn down the offer, not when he knew Damir felt the same way for him. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, we can do that.”
“Good. Because I was thinking…well…”
“You were thinking?” Kilian echoed eagerly, wanting to know everything Damir was thinking at all times, especially about sex.
Was it time for whatever checklist of kinky shit Damir wanted to go through with him?
The concept sounded too clinical for Kilian’s taste, but the thought of Damir reading aloud a bunch of depraved things he wanted to do to Kilian did appeal.
The elevator doors slid open, and Damir fell silent.
Someday, Kilian would probably get tired of the way all hotels looked the same past the lobby—carpet-lined corridors and endless doors and ice machines whirring away in the stuffy silence.
When he played for San Francisco, he enjoyed getting away from his shitty apartment.
Living with Damir, who cooked and cleaned and loved his home, Kilian could already tell the sterility of hotel rooms and the repetitive taste of hotel food would get to him sooner rather than later.
Damir led them to his room. Inside, his suitcase lay open on the floor, clothing thrown around inside it as though he’d been rooting for the right thing to wear.
It was so unlike Damir it made Kilian smile.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just thought you’d be one of those guys who puts all their clothes in the closet in every hotel stay, you know?”
Damir kicked the suitcase aside slightly, clearing more floor space. “I’m not very fastidious on the road,” he admitted.
“Makes sense you’d need a break sometimes.”
“Yes.”
Drawing to a halt beside the bed, Damir turned to look at Kilian. His nervous energy had returned, the same restlessness that had caused his knee to bounce in the cab.
“Do you not want—”
“I want you to fuck me.”
Kilian’s brain blanked. Full blue screen of death, no thoughts, head empty, nothing.
Damir’s eyes remained firmly fixed on the wall beside Kilian’s head as he continued. “You’ve given me a lot of firsts, you said, and I didn’t know to appreciate it at the time. But I can give you one of mine.”
Kilian hadn’t finished processing the notion of Damir spread out on the bed…underneath him? Bent over for him? It seemed incongruous, but in a hot way—the same way Kilian thought it was hot to wear lace panties. Not something he expected to see, but when he did…
Then Damir’s words snagged in his mind, and he frowned. “Wait, no. You don’t owe me anything, Damir. I liked all of our…everything. I’m not going to do something you don’t want so you can atone for it or some shit.”
“I’m saying it all wrong.” Damir ran a hand through his hair, forcing it into disarray.
He had such thick, dark hair. Kilian wanted to sit on the couch with Damir’s head in his lap and stroke it over and over while they watched the stupid darts championship.
“You said…you said sometimes you want to take care of me too—”
“Yes.” The word fell out of Kilian’s lips so fast he interrupted the end of Damir’s sentence.
Finally, Damir met his gaze head-on. “So, tonight can be the first ‘sometimes.’”
Kilian released a long breath. “Okay.”
With a plan agreed on, Kilian found he didn’t know how to progress to action. He remained still, staring at Damir for a long moment.
“Would you come here?”
“Right.” Kilian shuffled closer until he was within Damir’s grasp, and then Damir pulled him in by the lapels and kissed him again, messy and nervous and exactly as though it was their first time.
Damir broke away to ask, “You had been kissed before I—before we—you had, right?”
“Will it make you feel better if I say yes?” Kilian asked.
Damir closed his eyes and thunked their foreheads together. “Kilian.”
“I had!” Kilian rushed to defend himself. “But only with a girl, once, at a party in eleventh grade.”
“What am I going to do with you?”
Their lips were close enough together that when he spoke, Kilian’s brushed against Damir’s. “Whatever you want.”