Page 10 of Price of Victory
RHETT
I slammedmy stick against the wall and plopped down on the bench with misery dripping in beads of sweat off my brow. Had I not buzzed my hair off, it would have been matted and soaked after the burn of today’s drills.
“You killed it out there,” Lennox said with not a small touch of sarcasm. “Hell, you murdered it in cold blood. Strangled it until it purpled. Laced it with arsenic.”
“Yeah, I’m hearing you loud and clear,” I growled.
He ripped his pads off and tossed them by his duffel. “Seriously, what the hell got into you?” he asked in a quieter tone, his long curls dark and heavy with sweat. “You’re not such a vicious player.”
“Maybe I’m trying to qualify for something that’s due kinda soon,” I said. They used to joke that I never fucked the puck but made love to it. The meaning had gone over my head until today. Today, I fucked. And I fucked up.
He strolled into the locker room like a ballet dancer performing the most challenging number with the grace of the angels. I fucking hated his pretty face and his whole act.
“Oh,” Lennox said as he followed my gaze to the trimmed figure of Aiden Whitmore making his way through the lockerroom and getting tapped on his shoulder. “Let me call Oliver, and we’re having drinks after the shower.”
“I’m fine,” I said in the least convincing voice ever uttered.
“I don’t believe you,” Lennox said, shaking my shoulder reassuringly before he continued undressing for the shower.
Aiden was undressing, too. And he wasn’t even awkward about it. Hell, he wasn’t businesslike as we all were when taking our clothes off. Sure, nobody gave a damn in the locker rooms, and it was all cool between the guys, but we avoided eye contact, and we kept the towels near us. Not Aiden. Never Aiden. He peeled his jersey off like he was in a commercial for some beach refreshment. His skin was perfectly bronze after a summer he probably spent flying between the Maldives and Bali and Hawaii. And the tan went all the way.
I hated myself for noticing that.
He undressed to bare skin and strolled past me. I could feel the weight of his gaze on me as I forced my eyes to obey me. Even so, I couldn’t not see it from the corner of my eyes, swinging with every step.
I bent over, elbows planted on my knees and fire roaring in my gut.
The first time I hated Aiden was at the age of thirteen. It had been our first encounter, and it had remained burned into my memory for all time. An outdoor gala just as my family’s wealth and influence had been reaching new heights, and invitations to such things had become more common. They’d put me in a tailored casual suit and tacked on a slim tie around my neck. But when we arrived there and I was sent to other prospective heirs to family empires, all the boys wore preppy sweaters and old-money pants with the casual air of someone who hadn’t stepped into a tailor’s parlor but had the tailor on retainer.
“Aren’t you a little too old for the First Communion?” Aiden had asked me before I’d even introduced myself.
My fists had closed so tightly I’d almost cut my palms with my nails. If I’d said something back, it hadn’t been clever or memorable. What I remembered were the days in which I’d continued our argument in my head. Oh, I’d come up with a million quips to toss back at him, except he was nowhere in sight. And six months later, when we’d seen each other again, he’d acted like he’d never seen me before. I’d been having an imaginary argument with some fuckface who didn’t even know I’d existed.
I grabbed my towel and soap and headed for the showers, trying not to think about the fact that Aiden was in the stall right next to mine. The water was scalding, which was exactly what I needed to burn away the memory of his perfect bronze skin and the way he moved like he knew everyone was watching.
The second time I hated Aiden was at fifteen, at some charity tennis tournament my mother had insisted I attend. I’d been playing varsity hockey by then, captain of my high school team, and I was proud of it. I’d worked my ass off to earn that position, spent countless hours on the ice when other kids were playing video games or whatever.
Aiden had sidled up to me during the auction portion of the evening, still in his tennis whites from the exhibition match earlier. “Heard your team lost to St. Ignatius last week,” he’d said with that trademark smirk. “What was it, five to one? That’s got to sting.”
My jaw had clenched. We’d had a bad game against a team we should have beaten, and the loss had been eating at me all week. “One game doesn’t make a season.”
“Maybe not, but I heard their coach saying your defense looked like swiss cheese. All those holes.” He’d made a little whistling sound, like a puck flying past a goalie. “Good thing you’ve got next year to figure it out. If you can keep the captaincy, that is.”
The casual cruelty of it had made my blood boil. He’d done his research, knew exactly where to hit to make it hurt the most. “Like you’d know anything about real competition. What’s your sport again? Oh, right, trust fund management.”
He’d just laughed, that rich-boy laugh that said everything about how little my opinion mattered to him. “Careful, Morrison. All that aggression on the ice might give people the wrong impression.” And when that wasn’t enough, the fucker winked. “Maybe we cross sticks on ice someday.”
Even now, standing under the hot spray, I couldn’t figure out what the hell that was supposed to mean. But it had stuck with me, needling at me for years afterward.
The third time I hated Aiden was at eighteen, when I’d overheard him talking to some Harvard-bound asshole at another one of those endless social functions. They’d been discussing their college prospects, and when someone mentioned Westmont’s hockey program, Aiden had made some comment about “safety schools for people who couldn’t get into real universities.”
I’d worked my ass off for that hockey scholarship. Westmont had been my dream school, not my safety, and hearing him dismiss it so casually had felt like a personal attack on everything I’d achieved.
The water pressure was perfect, pounding against my shoulders and washing away the sweat from practice. But it couldn’t wash away the memories, or the awareness that Aiden was just on the other side of that thin shower wall, probably looking like some kind of fucking Greek god under the spray.
The fourth time I hated Aiden was at nineteen, at that charity gala where he’d trapped me by the bar and asked if I wanted to get some air. Not because of the proposition itself. I’d been getting those kinds of offers since I’d figured out I was gay, and I knew how to handle them. It was because of the way he’d doneit, like he was so confident in his own appeal that my answer was a foregone conclusion.
“What makes you think I’d be interested?” I’d asked, trying to keep my voice level.
