Page 43 of Delay of Game

“Yeah, uh. It’s been good, though. You know?”

“Yeah,” Zach said, and patted his knee.

With the meal winding down, Nate was kind of drunk, very full, and warmly content. He grabbed the check before Zach could look at it when it was brought over. “No, man, I dragged you out, so I’m gonna cover it.”

Zach gave him one of those weird, searching looks again, but it smoothed out into a very Zach smile. “All right. Well, thanks, buddy. I...had a really nice time.”

“Sure,” Nate replied, feeling again like they might have been having separate conversations. “Me too.”

“You got dinner, so let me get the cab, all right?”

“All right,” Nate said, unable to suppress his yawn.

Zach patted his knee again, proprietary and affectionate. “Can’t keep you out too late, old man. You need your beauty sleep, I bet.”

“I’m notold, asshole.”

The companionable bickering continued as Nate slipped his card back into his wallet, and out onto the street. And if he went back to Zach’s hotel room after, that was just what they’d been doing recently.

Zach might have been an idiot, but also, his gamble had worked out better than he’d had any suspicion it would, so probably he was an idiot with occasional flashes of brilliance. Nate would have been furious to hear him say that, though, so he just thought it to himself, sometimes, when he had a spare minute. It wasn’t like he had many of those these days.

There was hockey, which as always consumed his life during the season, particularly once he had gotten the A.

And there was Nate.

They were winning consistently—ten in a row—and it wasn’t just because they were playing bad teams. There were a few gimmes sprinkled in there, but they were just playing really damn well. Since Bee had been added to their line in the middle of Zach’s first season, things had been magic, but even then, regression could hit at any time. Sometimes the scoring chances just didn’t finish. There’d been a long stretch of games in the beginning of the season when Bee particularly seemed snakebitten, shots flying wide or, even worse, hitting the posts.

But when it clicked, it clicked.

And the Nate thing was...going. Zach still had to resist the urge to grin like an idiot at nothing whenever he thought about it, because it was the first time in a really long time he’d been consistently messing around with someone he liked as much as he liked Nate.

Once they’d gotten over the initial awkwardness of the first couple of times—was this a mistake? was he gonna be weird about it in the morning?—it turned out that it was surprisingly easy to sleep with your best friend, particularly when you had a ready-made excuse. And it didn’t hurt that for someone who was relatively inexperienced when it came to sex stuff, Nate was pretty open to instruction.

He wasreallyopen to instruction. Zach had definitely lost track of what he was doing in practice, thinking about the way Nate’s eyes would narrow in concentration after asking,does this feel good?Of course he’d turn that stupidly intense focus he used on everything else toward sex too. It wasn’t asurprise. It was just a lot, sometimes.

Sometimes it felt like something Zach shouldn’t be able to see, or experience.

Something that had been given to him when he didn’t deserve it.

But Zach wasn’t even being weird about it, like, at all. He was completely chill and normal about the entire thing, totally cool as a cucumber, keeping things light and breezy, and no one on the team had noticed anything different because even before the season, he spent all of his time hanging out at Nate’s anyway. There were some occasional weird moments—like Nate taking him out to dinner that one time in Dallas, which had felt so much like a date but which wasn’t adate—where he didn’t know exactly how to categorize things. But because he was being super chill about it, he let them go.

Of course, he had to navigate how he was going to handle the whole thing when they inevitably lost a game, which they did shortly after he had that thought: the first game of a back-to-back, one in Philly and the second one in Minnesota. Those games were always the hardest anyway, because you had to play, deal with the frustration of losing, do media, shower, and then immediately get onto the plane for a three-hour flight. And you know you could sleep on the flight, but when you had to get up to get to the hotel after anyway, it wasn’t a good sleep.

Nate was always quiet and miserable after a loss, even if it was one that didn’t matter so much. The Western Conference was a shit show, and so even if they’d lost to a bad team, it wasn’t the end of the world. Zach usually tried to cheer him up, but today, he was also a little hesitant. He didn’t want to break the thing they had going, but the unspoken excuse was that it was to keep winning, and now that they weren’t winning, he didn’t know if Nate was going to be weird about it.

But he didn’t want tostop.

So he leaned sideways and whispered to Nate, “Come up to my room once you get settled?”

Nate blinked slowly at him. He was exhausted, dark circles under his eyes and the corners of his mouth turned down. He looked awful. He looked like Zach had felt after Montreal had traded him, but it didn’t make any sense because it wasonlyone game.

Nate glanced around the plane, but almost everyone else had already changed into sweats and were either sleeping or had headphones on in an attempt togoto sleep. He lowered his voice, and it was rough and scratchy. “Uh, we lost, though.”

“We weren’t gonna winforever. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t—you know. It’s been—working, mostly. Why mess with it?”

Nate was looking at him, that steady look that made Zach feel like squirming in his seat. “Uh...okay. If you’re sure.”

“Buddy. Dude. I’m sure.” Zach extended his fist, and Nate reluctantly did the handshake. “We’re not gonna slump again, I promise.”

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