"You’ve been gone for weeks," I said.
"I had things to handle."
I turned to look at him. He was watching me with that unreadable expression, the one that made me want to put my fist through it just to see what was on the other side.
"You could have shown up," I said. "Any morning. You knew where I'd be. Instead you just vanished and let me show up to an empty rink every day like an idiot, waiting for someone who wasn't coming."
"What do you want me to say?" He shifted in the seat. "That I'm sorry? I'm not. I had to leave. I left. I'm back now."
"And I'm just supposed to be grateful you came back?"
"You can be angry about it," he said softly. "I'd rather you were."
"Why?"
His hand came up, and his thumb found the edge of my split lip. The touch was barely there, just a brush of skin against the swollen edge, and I flinched anyway.
"Because you're better when you're angry," he said. His eyes were fixed on my mouth. "You played like you wanted to kill someone tonight."
His thumb pressed harder against the split, and the pain flared fresh, bright and sharp. I sucked in a breath, but I didn't pull away.
"I watched you beat that man's face in," Joel said. "I watched you bleed all over the ice and keep swinging anyway." His thumb dragged across the cut, slow, and my pulse throbbed in my lip where he was touching me. "I couldn't stop thinking about it."
"About what?"
"What you'd taste like after."
My cock stirred against my thigh and I hated how fast my body answered him, how little control I had over any of this.
"You're fucked up," I said.
"I'm not the one who started a fight because he was angry at someone in the stands." His thumb was still on my lip, still pressing into the split, and the pain was starting to blur into something else. "You wanted me to see it. You wanted me to watch you hurt someone."
He was right.
I started the truck.
I drove for ten minutes without saying anything. His hand was on my thigh the whole time, his thumb tracing circles through my jeans, moving higher every few minutes until he was brushing against my cock through the denim. I was fully hard by the time I pulled off onto the same stretch of empty road where we'd been before.
I killed the engine. The silence was loud after the rumble of the truck.
Joel climbed into the back seat without being asked, and something about the assumption of it, like he knew exactly how this was going to go, snapped the last thread of my patience.
I followed him over the console and shoved him down onto the bench.
For a second, we just looked at each other. Joel was underneath me and I had one hand fisted in his jacket and the other braced against the cold window. He wasn't fighting me. He was just watching, waiting to see what I'd do, already knowing I'd give in.
"I shouldn’t want you like this." My grip tightened on his jacket.
His hand found the back of my neck, fingers cold from waiting in the parking lot. He pulled me closer until our foreheads were almost touching. “But you do. You hate it, but you do.”
His other hand dropped between us and pressed against my cock through my jeans, grinding the heel of his palm against me until my hips jerked forward.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to shove his hand away and drive him back to the main road and leave him there the way he'd left me.
Instead, I kissed him.
It was more teeth than tongue, and I bit his lower lip hard enough to make him grunt. His hand tightened on my neck, and he kissed me back just as brutal, and for a few seconds, it was just that: both of us trying to hurt each other with our mouths.
