“Your mother is a saint,” Bash said.
“My mother chain smokes and bought lottery tickets with my allowance money.”
“I take back what I said. You look disheveled.”
“Good morning to you, too.” Robbie patted the back of his head self-consciously, flattening the unruly hair.
“You didn’t go home last night, did you?” Bash said conspiratorially as he buzzed them into the Rink with his student ID badge.
Robbie grinned sheepishly. “Spent the night with Clarisse.”
“Ah,” Bash said as they walked into the Rink’s lobby. Automatic lights turned on. “Was it fun? Were you a gentleman? Are you going to see her again?”
“Yes, yes, not sure yet, but hopefully,” Robbie said as they walked towards the locker rooms.
“Good. I want no other details about last night.”
Robbie laughed. “I know. Straight sex is gross and all that.”
“I did not say it is gross. I said I don’t want to hear about it.”
They quickly changed into their hockey gear and went to the ice. It was smooth and freshly cleaned. They stepped on and began to skate some warm-up maneuvers. They were an hour early for the non-mandatory practice. As captains, they had to get there early anyway, and Bash had asked Robbie to help him get back into full shape for the games. They ran drills and maneuvers until Bash felt his old skill coming back. His shoulder was tender and still sore, and he knew he couldn’t push himself too hard.
The doctors told him he had had a type III AC joint separation. Basically, in the NCAA Championship game last year, his shoulder had been royally fucked when he was knocked to the ice just before shooting what would’ve been a winning goal. His injury had cost the team the championship and meant weeks in rehab. Sometimes he still had nightmares of the nauseating, white-hot pain that had shot through his body when he hit the ice.
“What about you?” Robbie asked when they stopped for a water break before the other guys arrived.
“What?” Bash asked, not following.
“Have you had any action recently?”
“Sex?”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “Yes. Sex.”
“No.”
“Really?”
Bash capped his water bottle. “Is that so hard to believe? I can keep my cock in my pants.”
Robbie choked on his water. “I know you can. I just was wondering, if after Neil, you’d gotten back out there.”
Neil was a graduate student pursuing his M.D. in physical therapy. He spent a lot of time working with student athletes, which was how Bash had met him. They’d dated on and off for most of Bash’s junior year. The sex had been pretty good, though not as adventurous as Bash preferred, and the romance hadn’t been there. They’d broken up amicably a week before Bash’s injury. Neil had been one of the PTs assigned to work with Bash in his recovery. It had been awkward at times, but they both tried to be professional about it.
“No one since Neil,” Bash said. No one serious, at least. There had been plenty of hookups since Neil, including a delightful night when he was in Amsterdam for a week in the summer and had gone to Spijkerbar, stored his clothes in a locker, and fucked three different men in one night.
That was how Bash preferred his sexual liaisons: quick, hot, and anonymous. Someday, he supposed, he’d want a relationship, but not yet. He was twenty-two, and there would be plenty of time for that later, when he wasn’t in college. If things went according to plan, he would join the NHL team, the Seattle Killer Whales, after graduation, and someday he could add a male partner to the gaggle of WAGs.
“What about Adonis?”
Bash slipped on the ice. “What about him?”
“Clarisse’s friend, the figure skater,” Robbie clarified, as if Bash didn’t know who he was talking about. “You know, he was there at trivia the other night.”
“Right,” Bash said. For a moment, he had thought Robbie somehow knew about the conversation Bash and Adonis had had in the locker room—a conversation that Bash hadn’t stopped thinking about, mostly because he couldn’t stop thinking about how beautiful Adonis had looked.
“What about him?” Bash repeated.
