Page 38 of Home Ice Advantage

Sully was panting, now, his hands grasping at Eric’s shoulders like he had to hold on to something or he was going to fly away. “Fuck,” he gasped, “Aronson, come on, harder, I’m—” And then he opened his eyes, looked up at Eric’s face, and the crooked grin was back. He was laughing, that unrestrained, stupid, joyful laugh of his that was so annoying during practices and felt so different in bed, with Sully’s furnace of a body pinned under Eric’s.

“What’s sofunny,” Eric managed, shifting around so he could press his forearm on Sully’s throat again. That, it seemed, was the right move.

“It just feels—this is what I wanted,” Sully said, still grinning like a loon, even while he was gasping and twisting and sweating, “not to think. Fuck.Yeah, like that,” and then his whole face screwed up in an objectively dumb-as-fuck expression, and he came, hot and wet against Eric’s abs.

It didn’t take Eric long after, the kind of orgasm that knocked him flat on top of Sully’s sweaty body. When he opened his eyes, slowly gathered himself up to pull out, he caught Sully’s tiny wince of discomfort.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m just—well. Shannon and I didn’t really make it that far the last time.”

“Jesus Christ—”

“Sorry, I probably shouldn’t...that was...fuck, Aronson. That was something.”

Eric couldn’t think of anything to say. Sully sat up in his bed, slowly. His body was marked up with Eric’s teeth, from his fingers digging into Sully’s skin. He stretched, slowly, like he was testing out all of his limbs to make sure they still worked. He looked up and Eric couldn’t really decipher the expression in his eyes, just that they were still wide and a little crazy and darker than they usually looked.

Sully said, “Thank you. For, you know.” He gestured around to the crumpled sheets, the sticky mess.

Eric snorted. “Yeah, such a hardship.” He groaned, pulling himself into a sitting position. “You can clean up first, if you want.”

He sat in silence in the bed, listening to Sully in the bathroom, the splash of the sink and the toilet flushing. He wondered, again, why Sully had turned up here looking like a truck had run him over. It wasn’t any of his business to wonder or to care about that.

Sully emerged, still naked, from Eric’s bathroom and started picking up his clothes from the floor. “I’ll, uh, see you at work tomorrow,” he said, awkwardly hop-stepping into his pants.

“Do you want me to see you out?” Eric asked, a little sarcastically.

“Nah,” Sully said, “I know where the door is.”

“Okay,” Eric said, and wondered whether this was the full, real Ryan Sullivan experience. It was not what he had been expecting. But it was almost as annoying.

II. WINTER

Chapter Eight

December

The thing about the end of November and into December, Ryan was finding, was that the team’s results had evened out from .500 to slightly below it. Despite any coaching work that he and Aronson and Petey and Heidi managed to drum into the youth, he still had an entire roster full of underperforming veterans, and he was starting to find that no matter what he did in the practices, they were still essentially the same players. There were a few, like Emil Härmälä, who had discovered new levels of backchecking that they’d never had before. But then there were others, like Jesse Keen, who simply could not seem to put together the lessons that Ryan was desperately trying to teach them.

Sometimes, when he watched Keen in the neutral zone making blind passes to no one, Ryan wanted to drop the determinedly positive face that he presented at practices and even on the bench, and scream. Unhinge his jaw and let loose with the full stable of curses in five languages that he’d picked up over the course of twenty years in the league.

“You’re gonna have to do something about him,” Aronson said, for the umpteenth time, as they sat in an all-hands coaching meeting going over tape. The game had been particularly egregious: a stupid penalty that Keen had taken had led to the game-winning goal against.

“He’ll sit the next game, but there’s not a whole lot more that I can do,” Ryan said. “I can bump him down the lineup, but then he’s just going to be someone else’s problem and our fourth line is going to get caved in even worse.”

“Waive Jesse Keen, waive Jesse Keen,” Petey sang, in the tune and rhythm of “Carol of the Bells.”

“While I do not agree with goyische holiday shit this early in December,” Aronson said, “Petey’s right. Youhaveto make them face some consequences, Sully, or they don’t have any incentive to get better.”

What Ryan didn’t say, immediately, is that they were probably right. What he also didn’t say was that he wasn’t ready to give up on his coaching philosophy, which was still relatively new. He’d put a lot of thought and care into it. Waiving a veteran was a pretty harsh move. While Keen had a one-way contract and would make the same in the major or minor leagues, it was still a statement that wouldn’t go over well. For a man who hadn’t sniffed the minors in at least a decade, it would be a blow, and Ryan couldn’t tell how liked in the room Keen was, whether there would be ripple effects or not.

“He’ll sit for now,” he said, “and we’ll see if that lights a fire under his ass.”

“The man is wearing heatproof underwear,” Heidi muttered, and Petey laughed, but everyone fell silent and moved on to the next issue once Ryan shot them a look that said: we’re doing it.

The other thing about the end of November and December, Ryan was finding, was that road games were a great opportunity to experiment. Specifically, with fucking around with Aronson.

He was actually kind of shocked how easy it was, to follow Aronson back to his room after games; to drag Aronson back to Ryan’s room. He was shocked how easy it was to learn things he never thought he’d like but actually likeda lot. He was shocked that Aronson didn’t seem to mind if Ryan couldn’t stop talking or couldn’t stop laughing; he seemed to think it was funny. Which was something, even if he didn’t actually like it and just wasn’t saying anything.

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