Page 22 of Rules of Play

And I wasn’t ready to find out what that meant.

NINE

SHANE

It wasanother week of being torn by the stitches.

Patrick was like Schrodinger’s Flirt, simultaneously brushing me off and dragging me in. You never knew what his current state was because it was never truly current and never, ever static.

He leaned in too close when showing me a silly meme I had no business looking at. He helped me fix my grip on the bench press with hand over hand, skin on skin. He sat so close to me in the locker room that our knees touched.

But then, he swung his head after a passing girl who seemed like his type. He talked about his previous hookups with crass pride. He invited me out, only to bring a friend or ten at the last minute.

I was driving myself crazy as much as he was. We both held the wheel, and the destination was as clear as early morning dew.

When I tried to debrief with him after a game, he seemed too fussy and heated, literally flushed and red-faced, with eyes so glassy that I thought he wanted to jump at me over the table and just dosomething. Then he shrugged and said he wasn’t feeling it tonight and asked if we could discuss it in the morning. He wasthinking of hitting the bar, picking someone up. Those were the moments when I felt like he slapped his refusal of me right into my face.

I didn’t know what this need to prove himself to me was. It kept me up at night just as often as the foggy imagination of the things I had never done in my life, the things I would have let Patrick do to me in a heartbeat if only he leaned in an inch closer.

He tore me apart, and in some small corner of my heart, I knew I liked every second of it.

Except you blew it, I told myself.You reeled him in with a research project and used the excuse to measure his reaction to you.

His heartbeat.

Underneath it all, his pulse throbbed just the same. Every goddamn time he dialed up the charm, anxiety gnawed away at his nerves. He toyed with me as if for the simple pleasure of an increased blood pressure. He teased me as if it were a ride at an amusement park, and he just wanted to feel the thrill of it.

And at the end of the day, I locked the door of my room, closed my eyes, and used him the same way. I used him to get high. The thrill I hadn’t felt for someone in ages.

Being an awkward person with a great deal of fear around undressing, God forbid kissing, or worse, meant I’d done everything under the sun I could do with myself. They lied when they said switching a hand felt like someone else was doing it for you, by the way. They also lied on the website that the silicone felt like flesh. I didn’t know what flesh felt like, but that sure as hell wasn’t it. And after a while, it had all gotten old. I had come to realize that it wasn’t about the tightness of your grip or the size of your toy at all. Those were details. Means to an end.

What I lacked was the substance. The allure.

It didn’t matter if it was real or rubber. It mattered that I needed real hands to close around my hoodie, to undress me like it was somehow urgent, to lean in and exhale a warm breath over my skin and lips. I needed someone’s weight to press down on me, to make us both sink into the mattress, to share warmth.

I needed someone to look into my eyes when they entered me.

And in my nightly fantasies, it was always only Patrick. It was Patrick because I knew exactly what he would look like. He undressed me with his eyes throughout the day, then grinned and dashed away. I knew how intense his blue gaze would be in the moment our bodies met, in the moment he was inside me, in the moment he bit his lower lip and wrinkled his brow and throbbed so deep in me that the sensation reached into my fingers and toes.

I knew all of this because he made it clear. Passing by the boards from where I watched him in the drills and games, his gaze locked onto my face, and he shot me a grin that was unmistakably and exclusively for my benefit. Swinging by my place, he always wore his signature scent and threw his arm around my shoulders. Seeing me outside, he always checked me out and told me I looked good.

If that was all he did, I would have been happy. Like a cat chasing a plushy mouse hanging from a fishing rod, I never would have tired of it. But he needed to deny it later. Every so often, he needed to redraw the line in the sand, even though he’d crossed it countless times.

After the Saints won their third consecutive game in a game that was as thrilling and satisfying as I imagined sex should be, Patrick skated to me first, threw his arms around me, and pulled me into a celebratory hug. It was nothing odd. Guys on the ice were hugging and jumping like mad, their disbelief that they’d pulled it off still swirling around the rink. But as he held on tome, his lips found their way to my earlobe. “You’re my lucky charm, Shane.”

Never had my heart lifted so quickly and so high.

You should keep me, I wanted to say. What came out was, “I don’t think I had anything to do with this.”

Patrick chuckled. “Yeah. I’m just that good, huh?”

The swell of celebration pulled him away from me. I remained where I was with the bitter taste of regret on my tongue.

And when he tossed his stick across the rink in rage a few days later, he was thrown into the sin bin during the drills, and he looked to me with pleading eyes. But my job wasn’t to console him. My job was to poke around his brain and find out what it felt like to slam into another person with ill intentions, knowingly pushing the boundaries of the rules, and to feel vindictive about receiving your punishment. I needed to know how it all worked behind his icy blue eyes.

“We’re facing the Arctic Titans on their turf in a week,” he told me angrily. “And instead of letting me practice, I have to sit here. That’s bullshit.”

I wrote it down.

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