Gabriel’s mouth dropped open. “You’re in the NHL? Holy shit. What team?”
“Boston.”
“Ah. Your team just beat Detroit for the Crawford Cup. We watched it. Wait…” He squinted at Drew and then looked down at his leg. “Are you the guy who got injured?”
“That’s me.”
“Oh, shit. Are you okay?”
“It was just a minor sprain.”
“If I had known, I wouldn’t have made you walk so much today.”
“I don’t mind. Walking is good for me. I have some PT to do, but I’m mostly recovered.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Drew appreciated that, after his initial shock, Gabriel didn’t seem too starstruck. It made Drew uncomfortable when people treated him differently just because he was a professional athlete. Some people, when they learned that about him, suddenly acted like he was a completely different person, and they couldn’t interact normally with him. It seemed like Gabriel wouldn’t be like that.
“Well,” Gabriel continued, “I’d still be down to grab a drink or something, if you’re interested.” His tone wasslightlyless flirtatious this time, as if he was worried he’d misread and that Drew would be offended by his flirting. Drew’s suspicions about this were confirmed when Gabriel continued, saying, “I hope I wasn’t overstepping when I asked you to get a meal. I hope it didn’t sound like I was asking you out on a date. I—”
Drew grinned, suddenly feeling a confidence in romance he didn’t usually feel. “Let me clear up any confusion, then. Gabriel Ackermann, would you like to go out for a drink with me? As a date.”
Gabriel’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, his cheeks flushed. “I’d love that.”
“I’ll text you,” Drew said. “And we can figure something out.”
They said a somewhat awkward goodbye, and Drew slipped into his car, his heart knocking in his ribs, his cheeks warming with excitement and nervousness. Whether it was a good idea or not, he’d just asked Gabriel out on a date. A real date. He was in his thirties, and he’d never been on a real date with another man—he didn’t count hooking up in a resort suite as a date, and that was the extent of most of his relationships in the past. He started the car, took a deep breath, and resisted every impulse to glance over his shoulder and look at Gabriel as he drove away.
Chapter 5
Gabriel
Gabriel watched, a little dumbfounded, as DrewMoreau—who was apparently an NHL star—drove away from Orion’s Belt Hockey Camp. He couldn’t believe what had just happened. Drew had officially asked him out on a date. Who would’ve thought?
He shook his head as he walked back into the Citadel, the main building of the hockey camp. A year ago, when Gabriel had returned to Orion, Michigan, from college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, there was simply no way he could have expected something like this to happen.
He was constantly on the lookout for a meet-cute, and he had had no luck with something like that, especially during this last year in Orion, because the queer population here was relatively limited. Perhaps, he thought, he’d just had his meet cute.
A lack of meet-cutes was one of the many downsides of living in the same small town where he’d grown up. Everyone had known him since he was born, and they thought that meant they were entitled to opinions about how he behaved.
Gabriel had thought he’d escaped the small-town life of Orion when he’d moved to Ann Arbor for college at the University of Michigan. He’d graduated a year ago with a degree in business and had even had a nice job lined up at a consulting firm in Chicago. He’d been more or less out at the U of M, had had a few lovers, and was planning to restart his life as a more openly gay man when he reached Chicago—one of the epicenters of queer midwestern life.
Those plans had changed when, only a week after graduation, while he was still getting day drunk with his friends in Ann Arbor and procrastinating his plans to pack up his apartment, his mother had called him to let him know that his father had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer and things weren’t looking good.
Gabriel hadn’t had to think twice about it. He changed his plans, told the consulting firm he’d have to turn down their attractive offer, said a tearful goodbye to his college friends, and moved back to Orion.
His parents hadn’t asked him to do it. They wouldn’t dare ask something like that of him. They loved him dearly, and they had always told him and his siblings that they wanted them to go and live whatever life they wanted to live. For Gabriel’s two older sisters, that had meant moving away from Michigan: Mikayla was in Indianapolis, and Claire was in Cleveland, Ohio. Gabriel’s younger brother, Jesse, was still in college at Purdue. His sisters were both married, and though they visited when they could, it would be impractical for them to always be around to support their parents.
Gabriel was unattached, had no college debt, and knew the family business. He knew he was the natural choice for who could go home, so that’s what he did. His siblings were thankful for it, and Claire especially had said she knew what he was giving up to go. She knew he wanted to live in a bigger city. She said she would visit as often as she could, but now she was pregnant with her second kid, and traveling was hard, especially since her husband, Mike, worked such long hours and had to take so many business trips.
In the year since Gabriel had been home, his father had undergone months of treatment: chemotherapy and surgeries. The treatment had left him weak and tired. Don Ackermann was only in his late fifties and had always been an active and healthy man. The exhaustion from his cancer was frustrating, but he handled it well. Last summer, he hadn’t been able to run Orion’s Belt Hockey Camp at all because of his illness. Now that he was in remission, he wanted to helm the camp again, but Gabriel and his mother were reluctant to let Don do too much. They’d reached a compromise: Gabriel would act as Assistant Director of the camp this year, and Don would be acting Senior Director. Gabriel had handled everything last year, with some help from his mother, and he appreciated that his father wanted to take control again. He worried, though, that Don Ackermann wasn’t ready.
But the Ackermanns had never been known for their ability to correctly judge their own limitations. If Don Ackermann wanted to do something, he would.
Gabriel’s parents handled most of the office and administrative work at camp, and he had volunteered to handle most of the manual labor, assisting Hank the Crank. He didn’t much like working with the Crank (he was, after all, cranky), but he did what his father no longer was allowed to do.
There were plenty of last-minute repairs to do around camp, some of which wouldn’t be completed because of their lack of funds. Gabriel had seen the budget, and it wasn’t what it used to be.
