I smiled, let go of his hand, and wrapped my arm around his shoulders. “Is all right. We’ll be together.”
He sighed, but didn’t speak. I pressed a kiss to his forehead. For a long time, we just sat like that.
Then Taylor tensed. “Shit. We’re out in public. I don’t?—”
“I don’t care.”
He looked up at me, his eyes tired but clear.
“If people find out…” I half-shrugged, smoothing his hair.
He swallowed. “Are you sure? Because I don’t mind, but if you’d rather…”
“I thought I did. But… now it just doesn’t seem as important.” I tilted my head. “Areyousure?”
He nodded slowly, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he were trying to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. “I’m dating Vasily Abashev.” He struggled to pronounce my name, thanks to the state of his mouth, but he got it out. “I just hate that things went to shit right after we got started. We didn’t even get a chance to enjoy being together before…” He gestured at his face, then my leg.
“I know. It sucks.” I pulled him closer and kissed his temple. “We can still be together, though. It just might not be as fun as the other night. Not for a while.”
“Dammit,” he grumbled.
I chuckled. “I still want to do this, though.”
“Me too.” He looked up at me again. “Guess this will give us time to get to know each other. And we won’t be on the road for a while.”
“It will. I think we’ll be fine.”
He nodded a little, then relaxed against me.
Someone walking past shot us a look I couldn’t quite read. I was still kind of fuzzy from drugs, pain, and lack of sleep, but I wasn’t even sure if I could’ve read their mind on a good day. Maybe they recognized us. Maybe they just weren’t expectingto see two men cuddled up together. Or, hell, maybe they were wondering what the fuck happened to us, since we were probably a sight.
It occurred to me that if someone snapped a photo of us and posted it online, people would know we were dating. Even if they didn’t immediately recognize Taylor, anyone who knew how I’d gotten hurt would quickly realize that the man sitting next to me—the one with the broken jaw and my arm very comfortably around his shoulders—was Taylor Wilson. They would know that I was seeing someone else within the Seattle Rainiers organization. Not a teammate right now, but possibly one in the future.
And since we’d both been in Vegas prior to coming to this club, I could see rumors flying that something had started before one or the other of us came to Seattle. Maybe that was why I’d come to Seattle—to be with my boyfriend who’d been traded to Everett.
During my time with Drew, the thought of those rumors flying would’ve had me panicking and wondering how in the world I could ever do damage control.
With Taylor… I don’t know. It just didn’t bother me. If people knew, they knew. If rumors started spreading, then rumors started spreading. I had nothing to hide, and Taylor clearly didn’t feel the need to hide me. That was a huge switch from what I’d had before.
A season or two ago, I’d have worried about being openly gay on a team managed by Jack Hayes, but his homophobic ass had been fired before I’d signed with Seattle. There were multiple openly gay players on the Rainiers. Hell, the head equipment manager—Jack Hayes’s son, no less—was marrying one of my teammates this summer.
And apparently the Orcas had pretty much clocked Taylor and me from the start. If the Rainiers found out we weretogether—oh well. If the public found out—fine. I just wasn’t as stressed about it as I thought I’d be.
I’d always expected that it would take a long, long time for me to trust again after Drew. And maybe, to some degree, it would. Taylor and I had only just started seeing each other—hell, even getting to know each other. Relationships took time, and trust took time to build, but I wasn’t anxious about it with Taylor. I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop. We’d take our time and see where things went, and by some miracle, he didn’t seem to think it was a massive imposition to be patient and let things happen organically. Even now that sex was off the table for a while, he was still leaning against me. He’d been asking for me at the hospital, driving Coach Bower, Ryan, and the nurses nuts until Ryan finally acquiesced and rolled me over to his room.
There was no telling where things would go with Taylor, especially not this early on, but I wasn’t stressing over it. I was looking forward to seeing where the future took us.
Even while we recovered from our injuries, we had months to just be together.
And when we both eventually returned to the ice…
I believed to my bones that I’d still have this beautiful man.
EPILOGUE
TAYLOR
Six months later
