“What did Marcos say?” I ask, unable to believe that he’d be on board with Nate playing hockey like this. From what I’ve heard about him, he’s protective of my friend.
“We’re going to be late to the meeting, Mick. We’d better go,” Nate says, neatly deflecting the question and stepping around me to unlock the door. His cheeks are red with a faint blush, though, which tells me everything I needed to know. He hasn’t told Marcos he’s intending to play.
Miserably, I follow him from my dorm and lock the door behind us. He keeps up a near constant stream of chatter as we walk toward the hockey complex, plastic bag swinging at his side as he tells me about his summer. Almost every single person we pass says hi to him.
“Here, look,” Nate says, holding his phone out to me to show me a picture. “You can take it and swipe through if you want. I had the best summer, Mick, seriously. Best summer of my life.”
Carefully holding his phone so I don’t drop it, I frown. “Is this new?”
“Oh, yeah.” A laugh. “I fell on the other one and it broke. Thank God all my pictures saved to the cloud. I would have been devastated to lose all of those.”
The reminder of him falling from the horse tightens my already painfully constricted chest. It’s a little hard to breathe. Trying to distract myself, I do as he asked and look at the photo album he has pulled up.
Marcos with a baby horse. Marcos riding a full-sized horse. Marcos sitting in the grass. Marcos at a campfire. Marcos’ butt as he bends over something on the ground. I glance over at Nate who’s smiling sappily down at his phone, watching while I scroll.
“Is this an entire album of pictures of your boyfriend?” I ask.
“Yeah!”
“Are you in any of these?”
He frowns, evidently thinking hard. “There are a couple selfies in there. But the star of the show is Marcos. I mean”—he pulls the phone out of my hand and looks at the picture I’d landed on—“look at him! Babe. Total babe.”
“He is handsome,” I admit. He also looks serious, which is a bit of a surprise. Nate’s default state is a high-energy level of nonsense, but I suppose maybe that’s why he was so drawn to Marcos. Coach Mackenzie did say once that Nate needed a handler to keep him in line.
We reach the hockey complex and I see Vas striding toward us, coming from the opposite direction. He notices us and waves cheerfully, not yelling out the way Nate does. We wait for him.
“Hello, my friends,” he greets us once he’s close enough to talk normally. He pats Nate’s shoulder, which makes him flinch and makes me feel like I’m going to cry. I’m about ten seconds away from yanking his shirt up to show Vas what he’s hiding.
“Hey, buddy! How was your summer?” Nate asks cheerfully, holding the door open for us.
“Oh, it was very enjoyable, thank you for asking. And you?”
Nate fires up at once, repeating everything he told meabout how great the past couple of months have been. I can’t help but smile at the animated way he’s talking, and the slightly perplexed way Vas is listening.
Coach isn’t in the locker room when we get there. Instead of peeling off and sitting in front of our respective stalls, the three of us stick together and take a seat on the nearest open bench. Most of the guys are here and chatting with each other, with a few new faces sitting quietly in the corner. They’re probably freshmen this year; new enough that they aren’t comfortable joining in on the first day.
“And you, Micky?” I turn at the sound of Vas’ voice. He’s looking at me, leaned forward slightly to see me around Nate. “Did you enjoy your summer?”
“Yeah, it was good. I mostly worked a lot, and just hung out.”
“Hung out” in this case meaning sat in the bedroom I’d rented, avoiding my summer roommates and reading my way through a library’s worth of books. Vas smiles.
“That is nice. I am happy to see you again. We shall have a good season, yes?”
“Yeah, maybe,” I agree quietly, already feeling the first spikes of dread at the thought of the season ahead. We haven’t even stepped on the ice and I’m ready to quit.
Coach Mackenzie walks into the room, and is greeted jovially by some of the returning guys. He smiles and raises a conciliatory hand, as though trying to keep the exuberance to a minimum. I press back against the locker behind me, willing myself to be small and unnoticeable. Coach isn’tmean, but he’s stern and his facial expressions are hard for me to read. He always looks annoyed, and even though his words don’t often match that, I can’t help but be nervous because of it. What if one day he reallyisannoyed or angry at me?
A man I’ve never seen before follows Coach into the room, and my face immediately flushes hot. He ispretty—curly brown hair that shines under the artificial light of the locker room, and big brown eyes that appear to exactly match the shade of his hair. Even from here I can see the freckles on his nose and cheeks, the tasteful cousin to my own ridiculously over-freckled skin. He stands a step behind Coach, hands tucked into his pockets as he scans the room slowly. When his eyes meet mine, he smiles in a friendly way.
Blushing, I look away and once more will myself to disappear into the wall. Jesus, the man just caught me staring at him like a creep.
“All right, boys, settle down,” Coach Mackenzie says, lips twitching as though he wants to smile at whatever it was Nate just said. “Thank you for coming in on short notice, and a day early—I’ve got a few announcements I wanted to cover with you before we really get going tomorrow.”
I chance a quick peek at the brown-haired man. He’s still standing silently next to Coach, eyes on the side of his face as he listens just as intently as the rest of us. He’s so tan, made more apparent by the white SCU polo shirt he’s wearing. Next to him, Coach looks frightfully pale. I wonder what he was doing all summer, to get that sort of tan. I wonder if it’s only his arms and face, or if the rest of him…
God! Stop it!I look down at my feet and try to think of things that might make my blush calm down. My body is so hot, I’m going to start sweating in a minute. First Nate and now this guy—are they trying to fucking kill me?
