Page 42 of Puck You Both

There. The muscle under his beard, jumping once near the hinge. I know that muscle. Across two hundred feet of ice, it appears when he takes a bad penalty. Off ice, made a cameo at Frank's while a photographer ordered us closer together. In the shelter, it appeared while we both held the same puck and waited for the other to lie first.

That muscle doesn't mean tired.

It means Patrick Grześkowiak is at the edge of his control and refusing to show it. And there is exactly one person in his life with a documented history of putting him there in enclosed spaces.

I’m doing some fucked up math now. The hitch in his breath. The eyes going down, and down, and down. The voice roughening one word at a time. Fingers that can’t operate a mug. A henley pulled tight against a rhythm I can't see.

The calculation arrives, and knocks the wind out of me—there’s a Theo under that island.

My pulse jumps from resting to third-period in the span of two seconds, heat flooding up my neck and down past my waistband with no layover in between. My whole body goes rigid, prepared to fight. Or flee.

This is a charity call. There is a spreadsheet with forty active cells between us. I combed my hair for this meeting.

For three full seconds I run the data again, ears roaring, because a read this catastrophic deserves review. Breath. Eyes. Gravel. Mug. Jaw. The color-tabbed pages he hasn't touched in minutes.

The read stands.

This entire time… We discussed linens.

Eighteen minutes. It took me eighteen minutes. In my defense, the moss was genuinely overpriced.

In my screen, Patrick has gone still again, and this stillness has nothing to do with whatever's happening under his counter. He's watching me arrive. No surprise anywhere on his face. No scramble. He only lifts his eyes fully to the camera, to me, and holds, the entire screen sharpening around them.

He knows I know.

Worse. He's been waiting for me to get there.

Somewhere in Milwaukee there exists a version of tonight where this man tabbed his pages, chose that henley, let Theo fold himself under the counter, and then sat through vendor mathematics timing how long the league's best-tracker would take to notice.

The thought lands with its own dedicated heat.

Then, under the edge of the call, faint enough to pass for fabric: a wet slide.

Every thought in my head focuses on evacuation.

The sound stops when Patrick glances down. Whatever passes between them takes one heartbeat, and when it resumes, it's slower. Deliberately louder.

Because Theo knows too. There are two of them and one of me, and this was never, not for one line item, a meeting about linens.

My cock surges against my sweatpants hard enough to ache. I grab the table edge with both hands, as though the furniture is the thing that needs restraining.

Patrick's eyes move over my face, unhurried. A read. He takes in the breath I can't get all the way down and whatever my jaw is doing, and then he leaves the next move with me.

The red button waits at the bottom of my screen. One click, and tomorrow we blame the connection, and the useful fiction survives that the most indecent thing on this call was decorative moss.

Patrick would let me have it. That's the worst part. He'd accept the dropped call, send the recap, never mention it, the same way he never mentioned the video room or the office, and the file he keeps on me would quietly grow one page thicker.

Patrick inhales, slow, through his nose.

Below the counter, the sound comes again.

I stay.

His eyelids lower a fraction. "The cylinders," he says, with a control I want to break with my bare hands, "come in two heights."

I look at the spreadsheet. Two product photos sit side by side, one tall and one short, both currently beyond my comprehension.

"Use both." My voice comes out sanded.