Page 57 of Home Ice Advantage

Eric was still watching him.

“Take one of your little pictures, it’ll last longer.”

Eric just looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, “it just tastes like coffee to me.”

“Try some more,” Eric said, crowding forward so that he trapped Ryan against the counter, without much space to escape unless he scooted sideways.

“Oh, is this a threat now?”

“Yes,” Eric said, his arms bracketing Ryan in.

Careful not to spill the mug of coffee between them, Ryan went up on the tips of his toes to press his mouth against Eric’s, morning coffee breath and all. For a second Eric resisted, like he was going to keep arguing, but then his body relaxed into the kiss and his hand came up to take the mug away from Ryan and set it on the counter behind them. That was all the cue Ryan needed to grab the sides of Eric’s face with his hands, half an attempt at distracting him from making Ryan drink the rest of the coffee, half just eager, as always, to touch him.

“I thought you said you were going for a run,” Eric mumbled into Ryan’s mouth.

“I am. You just have to let go of me.”

“Hmm,” Eric said. He didn’t let go.

Ryan’s back dug uncomfortably against the edge of the kitchen counter, but somehow, his inclination wasn’t to try to push free. It was nice, being in the kitchen in the morning together, even with the shitty coffee a constant threat behind him. It was nice, to have Eric’s hands teasing him and Eric’s breath hot against the shell of his ear.

It was—nice.

“I can cut it a little short,” Ryan said breathlessly, and Eric laughed and replied, “You’re always a little short.”

“I’m going to kick your fucking ass at practice, you know that, right?”

“Can’t wait,” Eric said, and then Ryan wasn’t thinking about the coffee or the practice anymore.

Eric was the kind of guy who didn’t trust it when all of the parts of his life seemed to be going well. He wasn’t the kind of person whose life worked out like that, not without more strife and struggle. His mom was in good health as far as he could tell. The team was still in its holding pattern of playing a decent game offset by a real fucking stinker, which was frustrating, but was about as good as he could expect given the quality of the roster. And things with Ryan had been—

The thing was that Eric didn’t even know how to describe the situation with Ryan. They hadn’t ever really talked about what they were doing and Eric, to his immense confusion, couldn’t bring himself to ask. Forty-two years of bluntly saying whatever the hell he wanted to whoever the hell he wanted to say it to hadn’t prepared him for the experience of waking up in the morning next to a short-as-fuck hockey savant from Boston and wanting nothing more than to tease a stupid smile out of him.

Every morning when he talked to his mother and she tried and failed to set him up with various women in her huge extended circle of acquaintances, he thought about telling her that he was seeing someone. That he was seeing a man, specifically. That he was seeing a divorced goy without children. And then, of course, the words froze on his tongue. He couldn’t tell his mother about Ryan any more than he could ask Ryan to define what the hell they were doing.

It was fine. It was all fine. Everything was working, everything was running smoothly, he just couldn’t actually put definitions or limits or labels on anything. And that was fine, too, because for the first time in a very long time, he was able to actually enjoy something sort of like a relationship.

He was able to enjoy shit like looking at Ryan’s body for days following the role-playing incident and seeing the physical marks that he’d left behind. The signs that Ryan was his, even if he wasn’t able to actually say it.

The kind of marks that had caused some raised eyebrows in the locker room before and after practice, but no one had been willing to say shit to Ryan about them. Eric had just looked at them instead, willing himself not to get hard thinking about it, knowing he could go back to his apartment and press them later, make Ryan squirm and sigh and demand whatever he wanted out of Eric instead.

The kind of marks that were still there almost a week later, although they were faded to the purple-yellow stage of bruising that meant they’d soon be gone, and Eric pressed his fingers against them in the shower that morning while Ryan looked at him reproachfully.

“They’re almost gone, Eric, you’ve made your point.”

“Should I make it again?” Eric asked, only half joking.

“No,”Ryan said, severely, “I don’t want more bruises this week. Murph’s visiting with the kids today and it’s already pretty ridiculous that I look like this.”

“He is?” Eric tried to remember if Ryan had mentioned the visit before but came up blank. “I don’t think you said anything about it.”

“We’d been talking about it for a while,” Ryan said, squinting against the spray of the shower. He still had fluffy soap bubbles clinging to his body, and Eric ran his finger through the ones on his chest, just to watch him shudder. “And he had some free time with their schedule and a school in-service day, so I told him to just come up.”

“So I’ll get to meet the famous Murph?” Eric asked. It was half-teasing but half...he didn’t even know. There was really no reason he should feel the way that he did about it. There was really no reason he shouldn’t even be able to describe the way he felt about it.

“Of course,” Ryan said, like he was surprised Eric would even ask. “I told them to come to practice. And that we could all go out for dinner later on, if they wanted.”

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