Page 43 of Home Ice Advantage

Sully shoved him hard into the cabinets, a little painful when his spine and ass hit the knobs, and said, “Do you want something to eat or not?”

“Fine,” Eric said, “feed me.”

He tried not to stare, but it was kind of a treat watching Sully cook in his boxers, the shift of muscle, the way his head bent low in concentration. Eric sat on the kitchen table, his legs swinging, arms crossed over his chest, and waited. “You missed practice yesterday,” he said, after a long pause, broken only by the sound of butter sizzling in the pan, the clank of a fork against ceramic, the faint hiss when Sully poured the eggs in.

“Yeah, uh, I was in New Hampshire for a court hearing,” Sully said. He didn’t turn to look at Eric, and his shoulders sagged a little.

“A court hearing?”

Another one of those shrugs that rolled across Sully’s entire body. “My divorce was finalized. It was a pretty easy divorce as far as those things go, but since we had the assets to divide up and we’d been married for so long, so we still had to...”

“Oh,” Eric said, not entirely sure what you said when a guy you’d been sleeping with for a month told you that his divorce had just been finalized. Eric had known, vaguely, that Sully had been married at some point, but he’d never worn a ring since he’d been coaching. He’d also remembered, vaguely, that Sully had mentioned to Petey that his wife had kicked him out of the house. And Eric just...hadn’t thought about it after that. “Are you...okay?”

Sully looked over his shoulder at Eric, and his eyes were dancing with the kind of mirth that seemed out of place for such a heavy topic. “Am I okay with my marriage to the girl I met at eighteen and married at twenty and spent most of my adult life with ending? Actually, yeah? She seems a lot happier already and that’s...mostly what I wanted for her. I loved—love?—her, you know? It really wasn’t her fault that she hated hockey so much, and I...”

Eric looked around the kitchen and living area of Sully’s relatively compact apartment, which was piled high with hockey equipment, hockey memorabilia, hockey books and various papers from work, which were all about hockey. “You are basically hockey in hobbit form.”

“Yeah,” Sully said, and shrugged. “It was about as amicable a divorce as I think I could’ve hoped for. She kept the house I hated. She’s seeing some sculptor from her pottery classes already.”

“Good for her,” Eric said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Sully said. The whole time they’d been talking, he’d been constantly stirring the eggs, pulling the pan on and off the heat. “I told her I—well, that I was seeing a man.”

“Youwhat?”

“I didn’t tell her aboutyou. Don’t worry. But I told her I was, uh, figuring some things out about myself, you know.”

“That’s...bold.”

“I never could lie to her. And it’s not anything I’m ashamed of. It just is. You want toast?”

Eric stared at him. He had spent so many years hiding shit from his parents, afraid that they’d think less of him, afraid of disappointing them, afraid their religious practice wouldn’t end up being compatible with who he was as a person. He’d never even gotten a chance to come out to his dad before he’d passed. And here was Sully, just some middle-aged townie from Boston, who’d figured out he was queer for approximately two fucking weeks, and he was already coming out to his ex-wife like it was no big deal.

“Sometimes you, uh, really surprise me.”

“Sometimes?” Sully said, sliding a plate of eggs and toast across the table at him. “Shit, I gotta start working harder.”

They ate in silence, and Eric kept looking sideways at him. The thing was that Sully wasn’t classically handsome. As a younger guy, he’d been almostcute, with his stubborn chin and big brown eyes. He’d managed to edge his way toward distinction with the silver hair and the hint of a beard that he never fully grew in, but he was just magnetic. The draw was his charm, the stupid earnestness bleeding in every sentence, the way his eyes on you felt like everything else in the room faded out.

It was like that even here, eating eggs in his shitty apartment kitchen.

Sully was saying something, and Eric said, “What?”

“I said, we have some pretty intense ground to cover in practice today. I already texted Petey about some of the defense drills, but for the power play, I really need you to get the drills moving at as high a speed as you can get them going.”

“You got it, boss,” Eric said, and saluted him with a piece of toast.

They left for practice separately, because it would have looked pretty suspicious if they hadn’t, and Eric tried to get his head on straight. Things were shifting in ways that he didn’t fully understand, ways that felt like tiny pebbles underfoot that could rapidly become a cliff collapse if he didn’t watch his step. Except there was no clear path before him and no easy guidance as to where to walk.

At the practice facility, Petey was already on the ice, doing slow figure eights and blaring some kind of prog rock band Eric didn’t recognize on his tinny phone speakers. He felt a little guilty, briefly, that he hadn’t been there as early to tease Petey about his shitty taste in music the way he usually would have.

When Eric pushed out onto the ice, Petey gave him a lazy wave. “Hello, stranger. Ain’t often seen you around these parts.”

Eric felt a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the fact that he was at ice level. “What do you mean?”

Petey smiled his inscrutable smile, and said, “Glad you and the boss are getting along. Things were getting a little uncomfortable before you worked your shit out.”

“We didn’t work anything out,” Eric insisted, lamely, lying through his teeth.

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