Page 31 of Home Ice Advantage

When he was finally able to open his eyes, Sully had pulled away and was still crouched on the ground, staring up at him. Eric felt slow and stupid, like he was swimming through molasses. Reached out and grabbed Sully’s hair again, just to give it a tug.

To his amusement Sully let him do it, although he rolled his eyes and said, “Well, that was, uh, more than I thought I’d get out of you today, eh?”

“Next time if you want a blowjob don’t fucking bodycheck me during practice,” Eric mumbled.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Sully demanded, and Eric’s cock twitched again at how wrecked his voice sounded, scratchy and throaty. Eric had done that to him. Sully winced and shifted where he was sitting and groaned when he stood. “I’m too fucking old for this.”

Eric, pulling up his underwear and sweats and tucking his dick back into them, snorted. “Yeah, you’re practically decrepit. Geriatric.”

Sully made a noise low in his throat, an amused little hmm. “You weren’t complaining when you were sucking my geriatric dick. And you’re, what? Forty-two?”

“Don’t remind me,” Eric said, and then paused. He felt, for the first time, uncertain. It was one thing to argue with Sully on the bench, another thing to joke around with him after they’d both gotten off. He still felt slow and easy, magnanimous. But this was new ground. He didn’t want to follow up aboutnext time, and he didn’t know whether to—

“So, uh,” Sully said. It was still obvious what he’d been doing. His mouth was still red, his chin a little scraped up from Eric’s beard. His hair was a bird’s nest where Eric had yanked his head around. His clothes were rumpled. “Since we’re here. We never did get a chance to go over the forwards’ tape.”

Eric burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Of course Ryan fucking Sullivan would wheel immediately from blowjobs to analyzing tape. And, strangely, that made Eric feel more at ease, too. Things hadn’t changed so much at all.

“Fine,” he said, “but I still think you were wrong about the way you tried the breakout on the 1-3-1 forecheck they had.”

“That,” Sully said, with a sniff, as he turned back to the whiteboards, “is not a forecheck. That is what we in the business refer to as a neutral zone trap. You know this.”

“Well,youdidn’t know how to get the guys around it, so...” Eric paused. He wondered whether he could shove Sully against the boards again. It was a very tempting proposition. But they did have the work to do, and he would have to be careful about how he separated it. “Fine. The trap. We can’t just do that same breakout again.”

They didn’t touch again, even though Eric’s skin still felt prickly with the sense memory. It went long into the night, that meeting. But strangely, on his way to the car, Eric felt as wide awake as he ever had.

Ryan was slowly accomplishing his goals. The day after what he had started thinking of as the Incidents, he signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment in Allston, reasonably close to the practice facilities where he’d end up spending most of his time. He spent several uncomfortable days in there, sleeping on an air mattress. And then it worked out that the Beacons had a three-day stretch of days without games in the middle of November, so Ryan texted Shannon to ask,Can I come and get my stuff tomorrow?

What time?Shannon wrote back, suspiciously quickly.

Lunch. I won’t be long. I’ll just pack some of it up and then I’ll get out of your hair.

Fine. OK.

While it was somewhat short notice, Ryan was able to book a U-Haul and pick it up so that he could make the drive once the Beacons were finished with their morning skate on the first day “off.” He assumed that Shannon wasn’t going to be there when he got home, which was fine. He wasn’t sure how he would have reacted if she had been. It would be his first time seeing her since they’d broken up, but also since he’d...done whatever he’d done with Aronson.

Ryan figured that he probably should have been freaking out a little more about the fact that he was, apparently, at least slightly gay. There really wasn’t any way around it. Making out with Aronson had been one thing, exchanging blowjobs was absolutely another. That was several steps significantly further along the Kinsey scale than he’d ever thought he would go. But he couldn’t really freak out about it too much when it had felt that electric. That intense.

Sure, Aronson was still an asshole, they still butted heads at practice, especially when it came to Jesse Keen’s ice time and deployment, but whatever he was like at the rink, Ryan couldn’t get out of his head what he was like off it. What his mouth had felt like, the noises he’d made, the way his hair felt under Ryan’s fingers.

Maybe this was what happened when you got old and lonely, that literally anyone who would touch you looked like a sure bet. But Ryan knew, with a kind of stunning certainty he couldn’t entirely track, that it wasn’t just Aronson’s availability. It wasn’t just Aronson’s grudging willingness to blow him. Ryan was famous; Ryan was a Boston legend. If he had wanted to go out and pick up, he could have done it, no problem. He could’ve met women his age or probably even women his players’ ages, if he’d been into that.

He had never really felt the urge to do that.

He’d always been so devoted to Shannon that he’d never even considered it, and then she’d ended their relationship, and then this thing with Aronson had just sort of—happened before he’d had a chance to even recover. The first time without his conscious intention or input, and the second, with the kind of curiosity that ached like a wound. He’d gotten a taste, ahint, and he had just had to know what it was like. And the answer had been...

Ryan’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and he almost fell out of his chair with the shock of it. He’d been really stupidly lost in his thoughts, that was for sure. He managed to keep his balance, fish the phone out and answer. It was Murph, of course.

“Hey, buddy,” Murph said. “Hadn’t heard from you in a few days, so I just thought I’d check in and see how you were doing.”

Ryan looked down at the papers scattered all over the desk, whiteboard ink smudging his fingers, his iPad warning him desperately that it was entering low-battery mode. He thought about sitting on that desk in the middle of the mess last night, about Aronson on his knees, mouth around Ryan’s dick.

“Great, great,” he said, and hoped his voice didn’t sound too weird.

Of course, Murph knew him well enough that he wasn’t fooled. “Really?”

“You’ve seen the games, right? We’re doing great. Still .500 on the season.”

“Sully, bud. I didn’t mean the games.”

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