Chapter Thirty-One
FRIDAY
Elliot
The arena was vibrating with the sound of nineteen thousand fans hanging on the edge of their seats.
The clock ticked under forty seconds and Elliot’s lungs screamed as he tracked the play through a visor smeared with sweat and rink-smudge.
His defenseman picked up the puck behind their own net and fired a hard pass right onto Elliot’s stick as he crossed the center line.
It was a deadlocked third period. They were playing Denver, which was weird because Dustin wasn’t on the ice, and weirder because he was up in the box, watching. Elliot almost felt bad that he was about to undress Bennet’s team again while he had to sit there and do nothing about it.
Almost.
He crossed the hash marks into the scoring area as the opposing defense skated in to flatten him. He dodged and hit a high-speed toe-drag, pulling the puck back through his own skates, and in a fraction of a second, jammed on the brakes, dragged the puck to his backhand, and sent it into the net.
The red light flashed.
The goal horn detonated.
Up in the box, Diego was probably gleefully yelling into Dustin’s face that that was, “Filthy!” and asking him how he liked getting his ass whooped by Elliot Rodriguez again. Well, they had to get to know each other somehow.
The stadium erupted and nineteen thousand people screamed with either excitement or disbelief as Elliot was swallowed by a mob of jerseys – right in front of the plexiglass where Dustin stood watching. He wasn’t in the box. Elliot hadn’t realized he’d come down to the bench.
Later, he couldn’t remember what happened next.
He didn’t remember being hoisted into the air and carried around like a girl at her quinceanera – he saw it later on social media.
He didn’t remember skating off the ice. He just remembered Dustin, leaning with his arms folded at the gate at the edge of the rink, in his leather jacket with a VIP tag around his neck, smiling and holding up his hand for a high five.
Elliot clamped his hand in his glove. And for reasons he’d never be able to explain to himself later, pulled Dustin in and kissed him.
Dustin
The next three minutes were anarchy.
As Elliot’s mouth touched his, the noise in the stadium doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and then reached a fever pitch he hadn’t even heard during a Stanley Cup final.
The cameras and cell phone flashes went into a frenzy that might have given people seizures.
On the PA, the announcer was stammering the same sentence over and over and over again, and in the corner of his eye, Dustin could see him and Roddy on the jumbotron, thirty feet tall.
Roddy seemed to realize what he’d done, and tried to pull away.
Dustin grabbed the front of his jersey and didn’t let him.
It was the scariest moment of his life, and he held on like a man clinging to a life raft in a storm.
Scarier than watching Dad go down on his knees at practice that day.
Than his knee hitting the boards at twenty-three miles an hour and quite literally exploding – and knowing in that instant he was done.
He’d tried to deny it for months. Scarier than the specialist saying the words ‘physically dependent’ and Dustin realizing how close he’d come to losing his life.
Roddy’s hand came to the back of his head and held on tight as well, and Dustin wondered what terrifying moments from his life were replaying for him right now.
When they pulled apart, they stared at each other in disbelief, and even though Dustin knew the building was coming down around them, he couldn’t see anything but Roddy.
Then they were being dragged in opposite directions by PR and security people, and Elliot disappeared into the tunnel.
Someone was saying Dustin’s name and the words, “Come with me,” and he allowed himself to be escorted through a side door and into the service corridors.
By the time they got to the loading dock sixty seconds later, a tinted SUV was already waiting, and he was out of the building before the announcer had probably gotten his second sentence together.
Elliot
He was given five minutes to decompress, then whisked into a press event.
He spent twenty minutes answering zero questions about the game and about a thousand questions about Dustin, and then, gracias a Dios, the team’s PR woman wrapped it up and got him into the locker room, showered, and out of the building.
An hour after he’d kissed Dustin Bennet in front of nineteen thousand people and heard the world as he knew it end, he was standing outside Dustin’s hotel room with no memory of how he’d gotten there, smelling of shampoo, with his cell phone going off in his hand.
He hadn’t even had the presence of mind to turn it off.
He looked down and saw the latest was from Drew.
It was the only one, apart from his mother’s and Diego’s, that he opened.
brO!!!!! IS THIS PICTURE REAL???? OMG!!!! WTF!!!! I LOVE IT!!! I LOVE YOU!!! YOU GUYS ARE SO CUTE!!!! KINGS OF HOCKEY!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!! YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!
It was all in caps and was followed by a wall of crowns and hearts and stars and faces with star eyes and cats with heart eyes and screaming faces and screaming cat faces and a single pineapple that Elliot figured was a typo.
He smiled and texted back, thanks bro. Then turned off the phone and knocked on the door.
The moment Dustin opened it was awkward. They stood with the threshold between them like high schoolers meeting for a first date. Dustin said, “Hi,” and Elliot said, “Hi,” and then Dustin grabbed Elliot by the front of the jacket and pulled him into the room.
Elliot’s hands were under his shirt before the door had closed behind them, and he frantically tugged at it as Dustin reached around him to push it shut. Dustin laughed and put his arms over his head as Elliot ripped it off.
“I was just trying to get you inside, I didn’t mean we had to do it immediately,” he said.
“No. Now. Right now,” said Elliot, and shed his jacket onto the floor behind him. Two days he’d been waiting, and two weeks before that, and now they’d kissed in front of nineteen thousand people and the adrenaline from beating Denver had already been roaring through him like an electrical fire.
“Are you hungry?” said Dustin.
“Yes, starving.” He stripped off his shirt and flung it aside and went for Dustin’s belt.
“I meant for food,” said Dustin, as Elliot went to his knees, pulling his jeans down with him.
“So did I. I don’t care. I’ll eat later.” He yanked down Dustin’s boxers – he wasn’t even hard yet, but Elliot took him in his mouth anyway and grabbed his ass with both hands.
“Fucking Christ,” croaked Dustin, and laughed roughly as his hand shot out to brace on the door. “Okay.”
He was hard in what felt like record time, and it was one of the hottest things Elliot had ever experienced.
The way it thickened and broadened in his mouth.
When it got to the point that Elliot recognized the feel of it, Dustin’s fingers tightened in his hair and it kept going.
It got harder than Elliot had ever felt before, and he flicked his eyes up as he pulled off, grinning.
“Wow, Viejo. A PR.”
Dustin grabbed him under the arm and hauled him to his feet.
He threw him at the bed, stumbling the rest of the way out of his jeans and boxers as he came after him.
Elliot fell on his back on the mattress, working his own button, but Dustin jumped on him, straddled him, shoved his hands out of the way, and did it himself.
He didn’t get the jeans all the way off – left them around Elliot’s knees as he held him down with a hand on his abs, wrapped his mouth around his cock and sucked him all the way down.
“Ay, fóquin bellaco,” Elliot moaned, trying to watch, but temporarily blind with relief. “You’re starving.”
Dustin worked him with both hands and his mouth, and Elliot was so pent up it was about four seconds before he was leaking like a faucet and everything was so wet he figured it wouldn’t make much difference if he jizzed a bathtub-sized amount or not.
To Dustin, it might. To the cleaning staff, it would not.
Dustin paused long enough to get his jeans the rest of the way off, and Elliot grabbed him as he flung them aside and pulled him right back down.
Dustin’s mouth crashed into his, wet and tasting of Elliot, his beard raw, his tongue savage as he sank both hands into Elliot’s hair to hold him still, punctuating rough kisses with words.
“You were” – “fucking” – “beautiful tonight.”
“Oh yeah?” Elliot lunged at his mouth between words, panting. “I thought you’d be mad that I whooped your little team again.”
“I am. Livid. What do you think is about to happen to you, punk?”
Elliot laughed and pushed him off and scrambled on top of him, but Dustin rolled him before he’d even gotten their mouths together, and then they were in a borderline violent wrestling match on the bed, taking each other down like they were trying to see who could pin the other guy and kiss him the longest.
Dustin won this game – not fair, he was bigger – and Elliot found himself facedown on the bed with Dustin’s tongue in his ass.
He moaned and thrust against the mattress, desperately trying to get free, because Dustin’s beard was so long it was all up inside him now, which was definitely going to make him come, and it had been less than five minutes at this point.
But Dustin was kneeling on his shoulders with his balls in Elliot’s hair, and his hands were holding him down as they spread him open, and Elliot was completely fucking trapped.
“Please, Viejo,” he gasped, “oh God, you gotta stop.”
“In a minute,” said Dustin. Elliot wondered if it was possible to detect via your asshole if someone was smirking. It definitely felt like he was.