Chapter Thirteen #3
“What do you think?” he asked Luca as he stepped out of his bedroom.
“I,” Luca said and then froze.
This gave Chris a moment to take Luca in.
He’d always loved the way Luca wore his suits, as if he were born to wander around in hand-tailored clothing, elegant and perfect.
He seldom bothered with ties, leaving his shirts unbuttoned at the collar.
Before this week, Chris had noticed how handsome Luca was but hadn’t thought much about why he cared.
Maybe he should have investigated how having a crush felt much earlier.
Now, looking at him, all Chris could think about was taking the suit off Luca piece by piece and biting every bit of skin he revealed.
He couldn’t believe Luca had let him touch him, let alone been so into it.
Luca was perfect. He was grumpy and snarky and hotter than the sun, and Chris wanted to make him come until he shook in Chris’s arms and then let Luca bully him into watching soccer.
“You look wonderful,” Luca said.
Oh. Right. Chris had asked for his opinion.
Hearing it made him blush. “Thank you. So do you. I mean, you always do, but gray’s a great color on you.”
The light shade of Luca’s suit brought out the richness of his skin tone. His crisp, white shirt contrasted the dark chest hair peeking out of the open top button, and he’d styled his hair to fall over his forehead in a great swooping wave.
Chris wanted him.
Having a word to put to the feeling was revelatory.
“So shall we go?”
“Oh. Right.” They had a hockey game to go to. Chris couldn’t spend all evening staring at Luca, no matter how much he wanted to.
When they got out of the car in the Cyberian arena garage, they found Kayleigh’s team lying in wait, taking pictures of the players as they arrived in their suits.
She wolf-whistled when she saw them. “Looking good, boys!”
Chris draped his arm over Luca’s shoulder and pulled him close for the photo. Kayleigh would get her roommate content, but it wouldn’t be straight.
He wasn’t straight.
Finally, gloriously, the unease Chris felt every time someone mentioned his straightness vanished.
He’d known something felt wrong about it, but he hadn’t been able to articulate it.
What would he have said? Sorry, I know I’ve only ever been with women, but I don’t think I’m straight because I suck at it?
No one wanted a man who appeared straight, for all intents and purposes, whining about being left out of the special club.
And Chris had always been too scared of being taken for an idiot—or worse, a bigot—to ever say anything.
Before today, no one had told him there were words for what he was.
A few people had made sure he knew he didn’t have to want sex and relationships the way other people did.
And he’d have to thank Phil and Michelle for getting him to the point of understanding that being different didn’t mean he’d done something wrong.
Without them, he might never have been ready to hear that somewhere in the maze of identity, there existed a word that actually described him.
Chris wasn’t 100 percent sure which word was the right one for him yet.
He had to finish reading all the pamphlets Mara had given him, but knowing it existed put a bounce in his step.
“You are in a good mood,” Luca observed as Kayleigh shot her photo. His lips were so close to Chris’s ear that Chris could feel the heat of his breath. He shivered.
“Looking forward to later,” Chris said. “I wanted to talk to you about…coaching.”
Luca tensed under his arm.
Was tensing up good? Did Luca want more?
Or was there a reason he hadn’t mentioned it in the last week?
Chris’s palms grew damp with sweat. He’d never felt this way about sex before.
He’d been anxious or full of dread, but never hopeful and excited and full of nerves all at once.
He pulled his arm away from Luca. What if Luca noticed him sweating and didn’t want to have sex again?
Did people walk around feeling this much all the time?
Chris remembered a guy in Juniors who had told him, in the safety of their shared hotel room, that he was crushing on three girls at once. How had he not exploded?
“Looking sharp, Breezy!” Phil came up behind them, propelling Luca and Chris from Kayleigh’s photo stand toward the locker rooms.
“I introduced him to my tailor,” Luca bragged.
The topic occupied him and Phil for most of the walk through the arena.
Phil shared Luca’s preference for classic, elegant suit design, though his definition of classic included plaid and elbow pads.
They still had plenty of ammunition to mock both Jax, who sported a baby-blue pinstripe number, and Dmitriyev, who wore a corduroy suit.
“Is fashion,” Dmitriyev said when he caught them at it, and then he went back to staring at the wall with his hands up and his eyeballs moving very, very fast.
Goalies.
As one, Phil and Luca snorted, and then Phil had to leave to do coaching things.
Chris missed him in the locker room. Sure, he’d only ever played one playlist, and Chris had gotten pretty sick of the songs on it by the middle of his second year.
But so far, taking turns hadn’t been better.
Nieminen got to pick the music today, and he always went for metal.
Some of it was epic stuff, with sweeping orchestral soundscapes and a person of indeterminate gender screaming over it in a language Chris couldn’t understand
Most of it made Chris wish his ears had lids, the way his eyes did.
He wouldn’t let the soundtrack deter him from his good mood though. Not today.
“All right everybody!” he called once the whole team was assembled in the room in various states of undress. “We may have had a few stinkers, but this is Chicago. The Firecrackers couldn’t buy a shot on goal last time if they were Jeff fucking Bezos. Let’s do this!”
Mooney clapped and whistled, and Jax got to his feet. He gave Chris a side hug.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “We’ll talk.”
Chris nodded. “On the roadie.”
With a last pat to Chris’s shoulder, Jax released him, turned to the locker room at large, and whooped to get everyone’s attention. “All right!” he called. “They might have one massive forward in Denisov, one great goalie in Petterson, and a so-so one in Henderson—”
Luca booed loudly.
“Number four!” Vanderbilt yelled from the inside of the compression shirt he was pulling on.
“But what have we got?” Jax roared.
Usually, they saved the roll call for the playoffs, but Chris appreciated doing it right now. Morale needed boosting, and no one boosted like Jax and him.
“We’ve got the Crow!” Chris shouted. The room clapped as one. “We’ve got Jax fuckin’ Grant. We’ve got Bilts. We’ve got Mooney. We’ve got Abrahamov. We’ve got Gustafsson.” With each name, the whole room clapped, and the energy pumped higher and higher over the growl of Nieminen’s angry folk metal.
“We’ve got Dmitriyev!” Chris dared look over to the other side of the locker room, where Howie sat in his new seat beside the goalie, buckling his chest protector. “We’ve got our secret weapon—Howie!” A few of the guys cheered while they clapped.
“Take Denny out!” Hayes yelled through cupped hands.
“We got someone who hates this shit so much he’s about to murder me with his eyes,” Chris yelled. “We got Luca!”
Laughter joined the clapping, and Chris called out the last couple guys, the bench warmers who rarely got double digits of ice time.
The room was pumped. Everyone was jiving. And then Tom got to his feet.
For a moment, anxiety filled Chris. What if Tom tried to address Halloween? It could either go wonderfully or terribly, and the game would sink or swim on it.
Instead, Tom said, “As usual, he forgot someone important. The heart and soul of this team. The one guy who gets us through every bad phase with a smile on his face. The one person we can all talk to. Who else have we got?”
As one, the guys chanted, “Breezy!”
Emotion caught Chris’s breath in his throat. “Guys.”
In the corner of his eye, he saw Howie scoff and roll his eyes.
He took a breath.
Howie would come around. They had plenty of time together; the season lasted until April at least. He couldn’t avoid Chris forever.
And today, they were going to win.
The home crowd greeted them with subdued applause, unsurprising after two losses.
But with Jax and Chris tossing out sticks and pucks to kids in the stands by the handful and Mooney and Tom showing off by racing up and down the ice and passing as they went, they got some atmosphere going.
Even Howie got in on it, practicing trick shots on Dmitriyev.
“They’re playing Henderson again,” Luca said in an undertone, squinting down the ice at the goalie on the other side, limbering up in his number one jersey.
“Why? We obliterated him last time.” Chris could barely see the decals on Henderson’s helmet, but he thought he could make out two sea otters. Those were kind of dope. Dmitriyev favored flames and skulls. Cool, but not very original, and not at all matching the Sea Lions’ aquatic theme.
Luca shrugged. “Maybe he wants to prove himself.” He grinned, all teeth.
Chris wanted those teeth on his skin.
The thought excited him as much as it scared him. The constant desire to touch Luca overwhelmed him, a want he now realized he had filled through more hugs and cuddles than was in any way normal for platonic roommates. But to him, the strangest feeling of all was wanting to be touched in return.
When he’d thought about sex before Luca, Chris had pictured himself in an active role, as the person who did things to someone else.
Now, he realized his assumptions about sex had been based on the belief that, as a straight guy, he ought to want sex in a particular way.
It shouldn’t be such a revelation; five different people had had to tell him he could want things however he wanted them and still be okay for the concept to sink in.