Chapter Two #2
Easton took five minutes to answer the door, and when he did, he leaned heavily on one crutch.
His T-shirt had a stain of what could be either dried blood or barbecue sauce on the chest, and he hadn’t shaved.
It didn’t necessarily make him less attractive, but Ben didn’t like the look on him.
As a man who owned three suits that more or less fit and hated wearing ties, Ben’s style usually compared badly to Easton’s.
His walk-in looks were a little retro, plaid suits with checked shirts and elbow pads, but they looked good.
And he experimented with skinny ties and vests and all sorts of things Ben couldn’t be bothered with.
Right now, with Ben still dressed for work in a button-up and slacks, they would both be more comfortable if they traded outfits.
When he saw Ben, Easton groaned. “I told Tom I was fine.”
“And he didn’t believe you, rightly so.”
Easton’s mouth compressed to a thin line. “So you’re going to, what, babysit me?”
Ben scoffed. “You’re a grown man, Easton. It’s all right to need help sometimes.”
“Little odd to be getting it from my coach.”
Right. Just because Ben didn’t see himself as a real hockey coach didn’t mean other people knew he was faking it.
“You can look at it as a mutually beneficial situation,” Ben responded. “My apartment’s being renovated, and I need somewhere else to stay anyway.”
“Huh.” Easton looked him up and down. “Always figured you for the suburban house, two-door garage kinda guy. Space for the wife and kids, y’know.”
A hysterical laugh threatened to escape Ben’s throat. “Nope, not for me. Are you gonna let me in, Easton?”
“Phil.”
“Huh?”
“If you’re gonna be staying here, you should call me Phil.”
“Ben.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Ben glared at Phil. He would not be having any cutesy shit. Straight guy bro-flirting was not on the agenda. Not if Ben intended to win the battle of not staring at the view of his firm pecs swelling under his T-shirt.
Phil hobbled into the house, and Ben picked up his suitcases and followed.
Right away, he could see what Crowler had meant.
The air tasted stale, as if Phil hadn’t managed to open his windows in the last day or two.
A pile of plates rested on the coffee table, neatly stacked but still dirty.
The pillow and blanket thrown over the back of the couch sent a pang of sadness through Ben. He’d been there more than once himself.
“Thanks for this,” Phil said belatedly. “Last time I hurt my knee, my wife—ex-wife—was here. I forgot how much easier she made things.”
Ben hummed in something that could be heard as sympathy or curiosity, a skill he’d perfected over a hundred interviews, but Phil didn’t continue. Instead, he hobbled toward the left.
“So here’s the kitchen. It’s the only place I could get the architect to put a darn wall in downstairs.
I get a grocery delivery on Tuesdays. If you let me know what you need, I can add it to the list. Over there”—he gestured with the crutch he wasn’t leaning on—“is the living room, aka my den of sadness. There’s a home gym and a bathroom to the right, and the bedrooms are upstairs. ”
He glanced over at Ben, challenging, but Ben hadn’t gotten this far by being easily cowed, not even by hot hockey players.
“Come on, then.” Ben set down his suitcases and walked up to Phil. He gestured for Phil to sling an arm over his shoulders.
The height difference worked to their advantage.
Phil was tall enough to lean easily on Ben, and Ben was solid enough (some might say pudgy enough) to easily support some of Phil’s weight.
For all he’d shown up because Phil couldn’t manage by himself, it took them less than three minutes to get up the stairs, and neither of them had lost their breath doing it.
When he had to let go, Ben regretted the efficiency.
He didn’t want to stop touching. Phil was a long line of heat against his body.
He smelled of stale sweat and faintly of some sort of hair product, and Ben found himself inhaling deeply.
Ben forced himself to step aside. No objectifying the hockey players. Their jobs did that for him already, literally. He could name to the decimal point how many millions of dollars it was worth Pulvermacher to have Phil break his body for the team. Phil didn’t need it from him too.
“Thanks,” Phil said. “So, down the hall on the right are the guest rooms. The only one with sheets and stuff is the first room. It has a door to the en suite bathroom in the master right here. We’ll be sharing.”
“That’s fine. Do you need help with showering?”
Phil remained silent for a suspiciously long time.
“Will you accept help with showering?” Ben amended.
“Ugh, fine, I guess.”
“All right, what can I do?”
Phil shouldered the bedroom door open. The air there was stale as well, so Ben propped open a window. The blankets were piled in a heap, but otherwise, the room appeared clean and neat. Phil sat down slowly on the corner of the bed, letting his leg rest, stretched out in front of him.
“I have a bench in the shower,” he said. “I can handle the actual showering part. It’s the crutches on the bathroom floor when it’s wet and getting dressed and undressed that’re difficult.”
“Okay, so I’ll help you with that.”
Phil looked him over slowly and then released a long breath. “All right. I guess it’s just like being in the locker room, eh?”
For the first time, Ben felt a flicker of honest sympathy.
No one enjoyed vulnerability, and the life Phil led didn’t invite it at all.
Accepting Ben in his house, in his space, performing very personal tasks, couldn’t be easy.
It was to Phil’s credit that he hadn’t protested or tried to establish physical distance.
“It’s not the same, no,” Ben said. “It’s okay to feel weird about it, but if it helps, I have seen a naked man before.”
When he laughed, the skin around Phil’s eyes and mouth creased up. It gave his face a happier, lived-in look, and Ben caught himself wanting to see it again and again. He hadn’t realized how serious the locker room tended to be, how seldom he’d seen Phil smile before now.
“All right, then.” Phil pulled off his shirt. “Let’s do this.”
Ben’s mouth went dry. You are forty-two years old. You’ve seen many attractive men undressed.
Phil got to his feet slowly, and Ben rushed over to help him.
“Okay,” Ben said, “so I’ll hold you up, and you just…”
Thankfully, he didn’t have to say it. Phil dealt with the drawstring on his sweatpants. They clung to the swell of his ass, and he had to push them off properly, which had the unfortunate side effect of drawing Ben’s eyes to that part of Phil’s anatomy.
Forty-two. Years of experience seeing naked men. Men who were objectively hotter than Phil, no matter how much Ben liked his smile and his ass and whatever he put in his hair.
“I need to sit to get at the brace,” Phil said.
Unfortunately, Ben only heard the words “get at the brace,” and his body acted on autopilot. He was on his knees with his hands on the brace before he could think twice. “You can, uh…” He cleared his throat. “You can hang on to my shoulders.”
He kept his motions as quick and clinical as he could, but he couldn’t avoid his fingers sliding over Phil’s thigh. The goosebumps they left in their wake must have been because of the cold.
Finally, the brace slid off, and Ben set it on the bed. He got to his feet again, ready for the torture to continue. Phil’s boxers went next. He leaned heavily on Ben as he stepped out of his clothes and made to bend over and grab them, but Ben stopped him with an arm across the chest.
“Where’s your laundry room?” Ben asked.
“Oh, it’s in the basement, but I’ll just dump that in the hamper. I have a laundry service. They’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”
Laundry service. Of course Phil had one of those, along with his grocery service and his housekeeping service. Well, if anything could stamp out Ben’s budding attraction, it would be the reminder they led very different lives.
“Right.” Ben gathered up the clothes and tossed them at the hamper Phil had indicated. “Let’s go.”
Heat from Phil’s bare skin bled through Ben’s dress shirt everywhere Phil brushed up against him as they made their way to the bathroom. Ben kept his eyes to the front; it seemed only polite, even when the weight of Phil’s body against his made him want to look and touch.
The bathroom, tiled entirely in marble, took up twice the size of any bathroom in any apartment Ben had inhabited in his entire life. The massive shower held an installed seat, broad enough for three people, made of the same material as the walls—the bench Phil had mentioned.
He got Phil settled on the bench. “Do you need anything for your hair?”
“Huh?”
Ben gestured to his head. “You know, like a cap or something.” He didn’t know much about Black hairstyles, but he remembered his college roommate had used a shower cap most days.
Phil’s hair looked nice, shaved on the sides and curling tightly on the top.
It would be a shame for anything to happen to it.
“Oh, uh, no, it’s a wash day.”
“Right.”
“But thanks.”
“Sure. I’ll just…” Ben sat on the toilet lid with his back awkwardly turned.
Behind him, the shower turned on. The room steamed up fast, and Ben tried and failed to let some of the tension steep from his shoulders.
He hadn’t been lying when he’d said this was different from the locker room.
They were all alone in Phil’s big house, and the nature of Phil’s injury meant constant physical contact.
They barely knew each other, and Phil thought of Ben as his coach, a guy who had a lot of power over his professional future.
If Phil had known that Ben wasn’t a hockey coach and also as gay as a field of old, grumpy daisies, he probably wouldn’t have been too thrilled about being naked in the same room. Hockey guys were not known for being cool about that kind of thing.
Under the circumstances, Ben’s level of tension fit the situation perfectly.
Phil kept the shower short. When he shut off the water, the room smelled of sandalwood and oranges.
Ben inhaled deeply and got to his feet to grab the towel off the rack.
He turned, and oh, there was Phil, naked and dripping wet.
Ben eyed a particularly saucy drop of water as it made its way down Phil’s chest barely to the right of his nipple.
Before he could follow the droplet’s track further, Ben thrust the towel at Phil.
“Thanks. Um, could you…” Phil didn’t finish the question, but Ben could guess.
He stepped up and let Phil put his arm over Ben’s shoulders. He supported Phil over to the dresser and held him up as he pulled out boxers. After depositing Phil back on the bed, Ben turned away so Phil could get dressed in peace.
“Hey, um…”
“Hm?” Ben turned around and regretted it instantly. Phil had the towel draped over his lap, preserving his modesty, but the effect made him look like a Greek statue, firm and chiseled and utterly gorgeous.
“In the bathroom,” Phil continued, “there’s a bottle of hair oil and some lotion. Could you…”
“Oh, sure.”
The bathroom counters shone in the soft lighting, the polished marble surfaces left disturbingly empty.
Ben did find toothpaste, an electric toothbrush hooked up to the charging station, and two expensive-looking glass bottles.
One bore the label “hair oil” in a fancy, curving script.
The label on the other one was entirely in French, but since he didn’t see any other likely suspects, Ben grabbed both and returned to the bedroom.
Phil had put on his underwear and knee brace, but it wasn’t an improvement. Now, nothing but a pair of tight black boxer briefs preserved his modesty. It only made him more attractive.
This impression was not helped by him rubbing lotion over every available inch of his bare skin—so many inches.
Ben swallowed drily, his throat clicking.
Should he offer to help with the lotion?
Would he sound like a helpful coach-slash-roommate or would he segue immediately into Silence of the Lambs territory?
Better not to find out. Ben forced himself to sit on the chair opposite the bed, hands under his thighs to stop any wayward impulses.
“Thanks for your help.” Phil smiled over at him, which did not help Ben find him any less attractive. “It’s a shame my shoulders are fine or I could get you to do this for me too.”
Watching him rub the oil over both hands and then run them through his hair accompanied by those words made Ben get lost in a brief dream of having Phil’s back to his chest as he massaged oil into Phil’s scalp.
He needed a cold shower.
“Real shame” was all Ben could manage.
Phil wiped his hands off on the towel, balled it up, and threw it into the hamper with impressive accuracy. “Thanks. I feel like a real person again.”
“Sure. Um. Good night, then?”
“Oh, fuck, I’m a terrible host. Towels are under the sink, your bed’s made up, and if there’s anything you need, I can’t help at all.”
He looked so honestly ashamed Ben had to laugh. “I’ll be fine. I did surprise you here.”
“Yeah well, occasionally, I know what’s good for me. I know you work with him and all, but your buddy, Trout, has a lot to answer for,” Phil said as he scooted up toward the headboard.
A lump rose in Ben’s throat. Trout had more to answer for than Phil even knew. If Ben wasn’t careful, he’d end up with a similar ledger.