Page 73 of Puck You Very Much
My lips remained shut regardless.
“Jakob?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“No, I can’t let you have another shot at my ass yet. I still feel a little sore from the first go-around, so you be patient like a good little boy, okay?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, you idiot. I want to talk to you about something far more serious.”
I understood that I could well spend the next forty or fifty years striking back at Jakob’s incredible (and often intentional) stupidity. It would probably take years off my life. Even that dreadful thought couldn’t deter me from continuing the conversation.
“What do you want to talk to me about?” he asked.
“You wanted me to talk about what comes next. I’m sorry I wasn’t exactly receptive to it before. You just caught me off guard.”
“Because you’d never thought about it?”
“Right.”
I stopped myself short of saying he’d been my steady piece of ass or maybe just my curiosity. Both possessed some grains of truth but were also totally wrong. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
At the very least, Jakob had been part of my obsession, though even that fell short of an accurate description. Obsession had always been part of my nature. I get preoccupied by what I want. It drives me, just like winning hockey games. Now I found myself fixated on Jakob, but it felt different than the usual infatuation.
“We’ve already said that we’re boyfriends,” Jakob asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t really believe that.”
Jakob’s eyes widened. “What do you mean you don’t really believe that? I didn’t hear any argument from you when the topic came up.”
“That was because…”
Because, at the time, I reallyhadconsidered Jakob a steady piece of ass, at least in my conscious mind. Yeah, I didn’t care if it lasted or not, because Jakob hadn’t grown on me. I hadn’t seen the guy he truly was. And I certainly hadn’t fallen… I’ll get to that shortly. I might’ve sensed feelings that would eventually flower, but they didn’t overwhelm me at the time.
“Look, the more time we spend together, the more I want to make sure nothing ever changes between us.”
“Same here, dude.”
“I just don’t know how something like that is going to work. I mean, I’ve got the team breathing down my neck.”
“Me too.”
“What, you’ve got the Larkin Lions on your case nonstop?”
“No, I mean I have the Remington Riptides on my case nonstop. God, I swear the goons you call teammates were targeting me specifically in that last game.”
Hearing that felt so much like a hook to the gut that I nearly cradled my stomach. I needed to steer the conversation back on track before I wound up spilling the tea about my teammates’ antics.
“The season’s only so long,” I said. “We’ve got to hang on, but not forever. I want to take a big leap after it’s all said and done.”
“What does a big leap look like to you?”
“We can have a real relationship, that’s what.”
“I thought we had a real relationship as it was. You agreed to us being boyfriends, right?”
“I said what I had to at the time.”
