This is the ache that’s lived in my spine since we met, when I was sixteen.Then, when we were nineteen and he touched me like I was a sin he was willing to commit.
It’s him, looking at me now with that stupid, cruel, beautiful mouth—and I’m back at camp again, gasping while he licks my name into my neck like a promise we both knew he wouldn’t keep.
“It’s not jealousy,” I rasp, eyes locked on his.“It’s grief.”
His breath stutters.Just barely.
But I see it.
I feel it.
Because he knows.
He knows exactly what we lost.
Not just her.
Not just innocence.
But the idea that we could’ve been something if the world had been a little softer and the hockey world—our world—a little kinder.
If we hadn’t learned that boys like us only get to fuck in shadows and never speak of it in the light.
“Fuck you,” I say, because it’s safer than begging him to not look at me like thator sayingDon’t remember usorI still wake up hard with your name in my mouth.
He smiles anyway.
Slow.Knowing.
Like I just handed him my throat and asked him to press.
He shifts in his seat, just enough that his thigh brushes mine.There’s no space in this car.Nowhere to hide.His voice drops, and it’s suddenly intimate—too intimate.
“Sometimes I do,” he says, eyes locked on the windshield, like he can’t look at me when he whispers in my ear.“Sometimes I fuck myself thinking I’m inside her.Her cunt tight and slick, her nails digging into my back.”His breath hitches.“And you.Behind me.Holding me open.Spitting filthy things into my ear while you fill me so deep I forget my own name.”
My breath punches out of me.
Because I remember.Not the fantasies I punish myself for having some nights.No.I remember him and me.How he tasted.
How his voice broke when I slid inside him for the first time.
How his body bowed, trembling, and how he begged me without a single word.
And I remember how wrong it was.
How scared we were to need it.
To like it.
I should stop, ask the driver to drop me off somewhere around here and just order my own ride.Instead, I notice when his gaze drops to my lap.
“Look at you, Alberto,” he whispers, and it’s not mocking.It’s devastating.“The big guy is hard already ...aren’t you?”
I stay silent.
Because shame is safer than confession.
Because silence is survival, but the asshole doesn’t need me to answer.
