Page 78 of Home Ice Advantage

Given everything that Eric had learned about him since they’d started sleeping together, it wasn’t surprising at all that he was a cuddler in bed, either: he spent most of the night trying to squirm his way closer to Eric, who inevitably ended up pushed to the very edge of the bed by the time the sun started peeking through the blinds.

Looking at Ryan was a more pleasant occupation than trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do about the job the Railers had offered him. He hoped Ryan was right: that he was a good person who’d be able to do the right thing if it came down to it. He’d been a fighter his whole life, and that hadn’t changed now that he wasn’t putting on the gear and pads anymore. But there was a difference between knowing that you wanted to do the right thing and doing it in practice.

Surely, the other coaches hadn’twantedto actively cover up that kind of abuse. Maybe they had been lulled into complacency by the possibility of the playoffs, by the desire not to get fired and keep their jobs, by the knowledge that someone else would handle it. It was easy to pass off responsibility if someone told you it would be handled. Who was to say the same thing wouldn’t happen to him?

Ryan’s simple, easy confidence in him still warmed his chest like almost no other compliment or honor he’d ever received. But he still couldn’t entirely believe it.

Even beyond that, there were the optics of it. He didn’t want to accept the job and come in to be the Band-Aid, the distraction. He could potentially be the first Jewish head coach in the league in over a hundred years, and that would certainly be a talking point that they could use rather than the ongoing lawsuits. Accepting the job would be an implicit approval of anything the organization did, because there were probably non-disparagement clauses in the contract.

But then there was the fact that he desperately wanted the job. He wanted to have the opportunity to build something long-term, something successful, something that was his. He wanted to prove everyone wrong who’d ever looked at him and called him a goon, everyone who thought he couldn’t do it, everyone who jokingly mentioned his long, long slate of penalty minutes, his lack of hardware or a Cup. Eric knew, deep within himself, that if he had the chance, he could run with it. He could do it. Maybe not the next year or the year after that, but eventually.

Every time he thought about the pros and cons, he ended up right back where he started. He wanted the job. He didn’t know if he could live with himself for takingthisjob. He truly wasn’t naive enough to think that the fact that he was a good person, or tried to be a good person, would be enough to counter systemic, organizational rot.

But other people did it every day. Other people compromised their morals to get where they needed to go. You couldn’t get ahead in the world without being a little ruthless, a little selfish. Right?

Ryan grumbled in his sleep, turning over on his side and pushing himself even more insistently against Eric’s body. He always ran hot, and Eric was normally the kind of guy who liked his space in bed. He’d gotten used to Ryan this way, somehow.

Ryan wasn’t ruthless or selfish. He wasn’t a pushover; there was a spine in there, but he cared about the boys, as a group and individually. He worked with the healthy scratches long after everyone else had left the ice. He had apologizedto Eric when he’d realized what the situation had been. He waited almost the entire season to waive a guy who was barely trying, just because he wanted to draw out the best in him another way.

The shitty thing about the whole situation was that Eric knew he had a clear choice, and it wasn’t the easy one. He just had to get up the stones to make the call.

He ran his hand down Ryan’s arm, wondering what the hell life would be like without him in it. It was funny how he’d wormed his way in there, in such a short amount of time, intertwined himself in every aspect of Eric’s day-to-day, like it was nothing. There weren’t many people out there like Ryan Sullivan, and that was probably a good thing. Eric wasn’t sure if the world could actually handle more than one of them.

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He had a lot of work to do in the morning.

Chapter Fourteen

March

They didn’t talk about it when Ryan got down on his knees to blow Eric in the shower in the morning, and they didn’t talk about it when Ryan made him breakfast afterward. Ryan didn’t want to push too much. He knew it was a big decision and Eric probably needed the space to think through it all on his own. Ryan had a lot of things to think about, too, but they were nebulous, unformed thoughts knocking around in his head like ghosts.

It was the rare Saturday where they didn’t have a game or travel or any practices scheduled in the morning, the kind of day that felt like a holy grail. On a normal morning, Ryan assumed that they probably would’ve spent the day together. Maybe they would have gone out to lunch or walked around the Commons or another park. The spring weather wasn’t warm, exactly, but the bitterness of the winter was starting to fade along with the new plants unfurling in the sunlight.

But it wasn’t a normal day. He watched Eric eat his eggs and toast with his usual single-minded focus, and said, “So are you gonna take some time to go back to your apartment and figure this out?”

“Yes,” Eric said. He sounded grateful, and he looked exhausted, the dark circles that he always had under his eyes standing out a little starker this morning. He wasn’t wearing his glasses yet, and his chin was shadowed with the hint of the stubble that had already started growing in overnight. “I have to think some things through and make some plans and some phone calls, probably.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, trying not to let any hint of emotion bleed through into his voice. He didn’t want Eric to feel like he couldn’t take the job, just because Ryan would miss the hell out of him. Just because Ryan had, what? Fallen in love with him?

Oh, shit. Ryanhadfallen in love with him.

Somehow, in between dealing with the team and his divorce and arguing and sleeping together and meeting their families, Ryan had fallen in love with Eric Aronson.

He wanted to laugh. It was so fucking ridiculous, the whole situation. Part of him wanted to cry, because he’d only realized it right as things were potentially ending. And he couldn’t even tell Eric now, because he didn’t want him to feel obligated to turn the job down, to stay in Boston with Ryan, when he had all of the opportunities in the world elsewhere.

Ryan swallowed hard; of course Eric noticed. He raised his eyebrows. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “yeah, I’m fine.”

Eric was still looking at him with that searching, questioning look he had sometimes, the one that made players in full hockey gear wilt on the bench when they’d fucked up. Ryan had a different reaction, of course: getting half-hard, visible through the boxers. His body’s stupid, automatic response broke the tension.

Instead of asking him another question, Eric laughed and said, “Oh, I see how it is.”

Ryan lifted his chin, and said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

What Eric did about it was exactly what Ryan wanted, and by the time they were ready to say goodbye for the day, Ryan felt lazy and sated and, if not exactly better about the whole situation, then at least distracted. He was probably going to have to deep-clean the kitchen counter later, but it was worth it.

After Eric left, Ryan settled in for what he planned to be a quiet day, cleaning his apartment, going over tape and taking notes, and watching scouting reports from the staff for the next game they were playing, on the road in St. Louis. He was wiping down the counter again when his phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out to see who was calling. And then his stomach sank, because of course it was his fucking father.

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