“I don’t want to.”
“I know.” His thumb moves once over the tendon inside my wrist. “Come here.”
He pulls me up, both hands on my face, and kisses me. Slow. His mouth careful. His thumbs tracing my jaw with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be and doesn’t believe I do either. I try to press forward, to find the friction again, and he holds my face still and keeps kissing me like this, unhurried, deliberate.
I stop pressing and he rolls me onto my back. I let him, which I don’t always do, but my hands have stopped arguing with his. He undoes my belt. Pulls my jeans and briefs off together and settles his weight over me, his chest against mine, and I wait for the heat of him to push us back into the pace I understand.
Instead, he puts his mouth on my collarbone. Presses his lips to the center of my chest and holds there, just breathing against my skin. His hand traces up my side, slow, from my hip to my ribs, and rests. Not moving. Not reaching. Just his palm flat against my ribs, warm and steady, the weight of a hand that isn’t asking for anything.
“Teo.” I can’t take the languid pace. I want more, need more. I need the friction and the pace I know how to meet. Instead, he gives me his mouth on my chest. His palm on my ribs. His breath warm and steady against my skin, and the tenderness of it splits something open in me.
He lifts his head. Looks at me. His eyes are too honest but I don’t look away.
I pull him down and we’re skin to skin, his cock hard against mine, the slick heat between us when he reaches for the nightstand and comes back with his hand wet and wraps it around both of us. His grip is sure and slow, his thumb dragging through the slick, his forehead dropped against mine.
“Stay with me,” he says.
His hand works us together. I am watching his face and his eyes are open, his arm braced beside my head. He’s watching me and the exposure of that, two people looking at each other while the pleasure builds, undoes me more than his hand. My hips push into his grip and he matches me but doesn’t speed up, won’t let me chase, keeps the pace his even when my body is asking for more.
His free hand touches my face as kisses me. Thumb along my jaw. Fingers curling behind my ear. The same easy gesture he scatters across every room he enters, except his hand is shaking. The touch that looked effortless at the arena trembles against my skin.
I come with his name pressed between my lips. His hand still moving and his eyes still on me. The orgasm rolls through me slow and devastating and I feel it in my chest, in the hand I have pressed flat against his back, in the breath I pull that sounds like it was torn from somewhere I don’t usually let anyone hear. He follows close behind, his body shuddering against mine, a broken sound pressed into my neck that is quiet and private and nothing like the voice that fills every corridor.
We breathe. His hand loosens around us, rests on my hip. The sweat cools between our chests. He shifts his weight off me but stays close, his leg over mine, his face against my shoulder.
He gets up and heads to the bathroom, bringing back a washcloth for me. Because he knows where everything is in myplace, just as I know his. He settles back on the pillow and reaches for me and I go.
We lie in the quiet. His breathing settles against my shoulder and his hand rests on my stomach, his thumb still. He isn’t sleeping.
The shoulder is nearly cleared. The reason I have for being in the same room with him twice a week is weeks from disappearing, and when it does, we’re two people who work in the same building with no professional explanation for any of this.
I put my hand over his on my stomach. Feel his fingers lace through mine. His grip tightens. The warmth of him is real and has a feeling it didn’t have a month ago, when it was just two people in a bed being happy and the world outside the door hadn’t yet started pressing through the walls.
Chapter 21 — TEO
Coach Bodie keeps us an extra twenty because nobody can kill a penalty today. The power play unit is running us ragged and Mueller keeps drifting toward the slot like he’s got a magnet in his skates and Coach Bodie’s voice cuts across the ice without rising.
“Mueller, stay on the wall. If you’re in the slot, Avi has nobody to pressure.” He doesn’t yell. He just expects you to hear him. “Run it again.”
We run it again. I jump the passing lane and get a stick on the cross-seam and for three seconds the kill looks like a kill. Then Fontenot feeds it through my legs from the point and the power play buries it and I’m staring at the puck in the net wondering how a shot came through my legs when I was standing right there.
“That’s on your gap,” Coach Bodie says. “Close it.”
Hájek glides up next to me at the boards between reps, his stick across his knees. He’s been rotating into the second PK unit all morning with the focus of a man reading the manual in real time.
“When the puck goes D-to-D, do I pressure the puck or do I stay in the lane?”
“Depends on the setup. If they’re running a one-three-one, stay in the lane. Umbrella, pressure. But read the hands first.”
He nods. The half-second where the English catches up to the hockey sense. “I read the hands. But then my feet are late.” He says this like he’s presenting a technical problem to an engineer, not like he’s frustrated. “My brain and my feet are operating on different schedules.”
Fontenot skates past. “Welcome to the pros, kid. My brain and my feet haven’t spoken since October.”
On the last rep, Hájek jumps the lane, reads the hands the way I told him, and clears the zone with a rim that Avi chases down. Clean kill.
I pull my shoulder through its full range during the cool-down. Clean. Full rotation, no catch.
Tyler is in the corridor when I come out of the locker room. He’s talking with Coach Bodie outside the medical suite, tablet open, nodding at whatever Coach Bodie is laying out.
