“Really?”Phil asked skeptically.“More than your own dad?”
“Waymore than my dad.”
Ben swallowed heavily.Philwasdad material.Good thing he hadn’t accepted Phil’s proposal.Ben couldn’t rob him of the chance to be a dad.He’d said he wouldn’t parent Charlie, but he couldn’t help himself.He had already bonded with the kid, found common interests, made sure Charlie found friends.Not marrying Phil might deprive Charlie of the connection they had made, but marrying him meant depriving Phil of the chance to find his own family.
“We can take this to my apartment,” Tom offered, eyeing the couch anxiously, where Nieminen and Gustafsson had put their feet up on the coffee table.Rosalia had cleaned it yesterday.Weren’t Europeans supposed to have good manners?Or did being a hockey player trump etiquette?
Phil waved him off.“I ordered food.It’s fine.Just slipped my mind this year.And with the knee, I kinda thought…”
“You’re not off the team yet,” Tom said fiercely.“C’mon, old man.You shouldn’t be standing.”
Jax watched them go fondly, which tugged at the unresolved déjà vu bothering Ben.
“So,” Jax said, turning to Ben.“I brought a lot of eggnog.Like, a ton.Will you be okay with us drinking it?”
Ben blinked.“You’re all of age, aren’t you?”He craned to see who all sat on the couch.Howie’s copper curls peeked out from the corner of theL.“Keep the strong stuff away from Howard, and we’re fine.”He knew Howie almost certainly drank with the team on road trips and when they went out, but with Charlie just upstairs, Ben had to act as if he cared about legal drinking ages.
“Seriously?It’s the literal opposite of the meal plan.”
“Oh.”Right.Ben vaguely recalled something about dairy in the team nutritionist’s emails.“I can make an exception for the holidays.”
“Sweet!”Jax bustled off to the kitchen, lugging a bag filled with several large plastic containers and what looked to be two handles of rum.
Things went downhill from there.
Mats and Luca got into a heated debate in Italian before the food got there, something to do with European politics no one could follow.Even Breezy bowed out, saying he knew none of the politicians and his Italian suffered when he drank.
No one could be bothered to wait for Ben to get plates and silverware, so they ate their food straight out of the takeout containers using chopsticks with varying degrees of skill.Gustafsson got Szechuan sauce on the couch cushions; Jax managed to fling a wonton straight across the room when he got too excited about whether velvet was an appropriate fabric for a walk-in suit or not.
Breezy had brought his game console, and he didn’t appear to mind it getting covered in takeout leftovers as he hooked it up to Phil’s TV.He then lost three successive rounds of a racing game Ben was a decade too old to recognize before Jax insisted on playing something they all referred to asChel.
It turned out to be hockey, but as a video game.
By then, Ben had drunk two glasses of Jax’s eggnog, and the battle for food had been so intense he’d eaten maybe half of three appetizers and no main courses.“You’ve gotta be kidding me” slipped out of his mouth before he could stop himself.
Luckily, Jax, Breezy, Mats, and Nieminen were occupied squabbling over who got to play as the Sea Lions.Ben picked up the cover of the game.On it, a very serious picture of Tom with Phil next to him in profile stared back at him.
He giggled.
Phil snatched it out of his hands.
“I remember that photoshoot,” Tom said morosely.“It took all day.They made us record all these slice-of-life interview segments.”
“Sounds like scintillating content,” Jax said, staring at the screen as he decided whether to play as the Carolina Twisters or the Toronto Huskies.“What did you even talk about?Twenty-four ways to beat up on yourself for not carrying a whole team on your shoulders?”
Tom elbowed him in the side.“It wasn’tthatbad.”
“Eh.”Phil scrunched up his nose, and Ben wanted to kiss the bridge.He didn’t because he and Phil weren’t doing that anymore.Also, an entire hockey team sat right there beside them and would have some strong opinions about how cute Ben thought Phil was.“It was pretty bad.I think we talked about our favorite sports drink flavors for about twenty minutes.”
“Right, I remember.Yours is yellow because you’re a psychopath.”
Phil reached across Jax to smack Tom on the upside of the head.The ensuing jostling made Jax click save before he was ready, meaning he had to play the Ottawa Mounties, which in turn made him jostle both Phil and Tom, and then Ben had to get up off the couch.Four rowdy hockey players turned it into unstable ground.
He watched as everyone with a controller settled into the game.They were in playoff mode, going for best of seven, and they took itsoseriously.
When Nieminen, playing as the Sea Lions, lost in the first round, everyone else booed, including Phil and Tom.
“Wow,” Ben said.“Do you guys have any hobbies?”He took a long sip of his third eggnog—it was delicious; he’d have to ask Jax for the recipe—and missed the moment where Dmitriyev turned to eye him suspiciously.Dmitriyev had already drunk four glasses, but as both a Russian and a goalie, he was stronger than alcohol.
