Page 39 of Home Ice Advantage

He was shocked how easy it was to accept that maybe, his entire life, he just hadn’t realized that he was queer until Eric Aronson pushed him up against a whiteboard.

Ryan’s life had had weirder things happen, but that was probably up there.

The road trips and travel had been a good excuse not to go home for Thanksgiving. There weren’t games on the day of the holiday, but Ryan had begged off, saying he was tired and had preparation for the game the day after.

He had ignored the barrage of text messages from his brothers and from Dad, all of them talking shit about how he thought he was so important now that he was back in the major leagues again, and he wasn’t evenplaying, he was just coaching. Ryan read every single one of them—he never had read receipts on because he didn’t like to give anyone the satisfaction—and sighed. He was definitely going to have to go home for Christmas. And that wasn’t even counting his divorce hearing, right smack in the middle of the month.

Even phone calls with Murph had gotten awkward. Whenever Ryan started talking about the team, it all looped back to Aronson, and he could hear Murph starting to check out. As much as he tried not to, it happened anyway. It was like any small space left in his brain that wasn’t occupied with hockey had suddenly been filled with Aronson: the way he frowned and the way he smiled, the way his body felt under Ryan’s and inside of it, the way it was so easy to piss him off and get a reaction out of him.

Aronson, though: he had turned out to be exactly the kind of distraction Ryan hadn’t known he needed. Sure, he was still an obnoxious little shit in practice, especially now. They had a kind of competition going, who could shoulder-check who accidentally the most times without anyone noticing, and Ryan was winning. And then they were on a western road trip in the beginning of December—Los Angeles and San Jose and Vancouver—and it was even easier not to think about what was waiting for him later in the month.

They landed in Los Angeles, where they’d be staying for the game against the Blades and the Arsenal. The first night, the coaches—with the exception of Heidi, who didn’t always travel with the team because sometimes she was working with their minor league affiliate in Providence—went out to dinner. Ryan didn’t remember much of the conversation because all he could think about was Aronson, about what they could do after the check was cleared and they made it back to the hotel.

The thing was that Ryan had thought he knew about sex. He’d been having it for over thirty years at this point, but the thing was that he was learning he didn’t know much at all. The thing was that Aronson was constantly surprising him. It wasn’t just that he seemed to understand instinctively how to make Ryan do and say absolutely insane things, with his tongue and his hands and his dick. It wasn’t just that he seemed to be driven equally as insane by the things that Ryan did to him even when they were fumbling and awkward.

Somehow, it just worked.

“Do you ever think that you’ve... I don’t know. Kind of lost your mind or something?” Ryan asked. He was lying on his back where he’d collapsed after pulling out, still disgusting and sweaty and red-faced.

Aronson was sprawled on his stomach, eyes half-closed. Ryan took a second to admire the way he looked like that, the funny hockey proportions gone to seed—his broad shoulders and muscular ass and incongruously lanky body. Some hockey guys waxed; Aronson was hairy from his neck down to his ankles. His curls were dark with sweat and without his glasses, he looked younger, somehow, less intimidating.

“Pretty much every day,” Aronson mumbled. “Only explanation I can come up with for you, anyway.”

Maybe earlier in the year Ryan would have been upset by that, or even a little stung. But the more he took a pit stop to the end of the evening in Aronson’s bed, the more he was starting to realize that Aronson was more bark than bite. He reached out, experimentally, ran his hand down the length of Aronson’s back. Aronson didn’t pull away, just opened one eye and looked at Ryan a little warily, like he wasn’t sure what he was doing.

“I’m not gonna be able to go again,” he said.

“I can’t, either,” Ryan said, surprised. “I don’t know, I just—wanted to touch you.”

Aronson gave him another one of those looks, not quite suspicious, but definitely measuring. There was something going on behind his eyes that Ryan couldn’t decipher. His back felt tense under Ryan’s fingers, so he took them away. It felt like the weird kind of precipice moment where whatever was going on between them could nosedive very sharply south, depending on the way Aronson responded. Instead, he rolled over onto his back, looked up at Ryan with a wry smirk twisting the corner of his mouth up.

“You’re kind of a slut for any kind of physical affection, huh.”

“What?” Ryan demanded, stung, and kind of—embarrassed. He wasn’t sure what it was about this whole thing—whether it was having sex with another man, whether it was just Aronson—that always made him feel so off-balance, but sometimes, he felt like a teenager again, awkward and unsure.

“Like this,” Aronson said, sitting up. He ran his hands down Ryan’s sides, and Ryan shivered but didn’t pull away. He couldn’t pull away. Aronson’s hands made their way farther down, tracing his thighs, warm against Ryan’s skin. “See? You fuckinglovethis.”

Ryan thought about retorting,It’s been a while since anyone actually enjoyed touching me, but that sounded even worse than whatever Aronson was probably thinking. So he just shut the fuck up and let Aronson touch him.

Aronson’s face had started out with that mocking little smirk, but the longer it went on, the more Ryan’s body swayed unconsciously into his hands, the more his expression changed. Ryan had lost track of the time; lost track of how long Aronson had been touching him. It didn’t matter. By the time Aronson’s fingers closed around his dick—hard, again, which seemed impossible—the noise Ryan made, an involuntary gasp, sounded completely unlike him.

“See?” Aronson said, again. “God, you...you really...” His voice didn’t sound mocking anymore, though. It was rough and ragged, and when Ryan finally opened his eyes again, Aronson was staring at him, like he could take Ryan apart just by looking.

“I thought you said you wouldn’t be able to go again,” Ryan managed, before Aronson’s mouth came down on his again, and then neither of them was talking at all anymore.

It was really like his body, which had had very limited, unexciting sex for the past five years or more, had suddenly developed a mind of its own. Like a tree withering away in a drought turning greedily into a rainstorm.

Against all of his own logical thoughts or desires, there he was, in Aronson’s room again after the games. And there Aronson was, letting him in, even while he was saying shit like, “This doesn’t changeanythingat work, this doesn’t changeanythingabout the way I feel about you.”

“And what’s that?” Ryan asked, trapped between the wall and Aronson’s body, his legs hooked behind Aronson’s back. Since the first time they’d done this, it was like Aronson secretly enjoyed making the point that despite Ryan’s muscle and history and awards, Aronson could manhandle him easily. Not that Ryan was complaining.

“You annoy the shit out of me,” Aronson said, teeth digging into the dip of Ryan’s neck, right against the muscle. “You’re the most annoying, frustrating little—”

“Okay,” Ryan agreed, the hand he had fisted in Aronson’s hair yanking his head back up. That was going to leave a bruise tomorrow. “You’re also pretty fucking terrible,” he managed, although it came out a lot fonder than he’d intended it to sound. “You really have to—have to stop that, someone’s going to ask questions—”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Aronson asked, dumping him onto the fluffy hotel comforter, and Ryan had to admit that, secretly, he had a point.

The next day, the boys lost to the Blades, which wasn’t surprising: the Beacons were rebuilding, and the Blades were nearly done. Ryan was going to need to tell them to watch it around the net. There was a fine line between battling for the puck, and slashing at the goalie’s glove so hard that one of the Blades’ big forwards lost his mind about it and the Beacons earned costly fightingandinstigator penalties.

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