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“So yeah, touchy subject,” I said, trying for casual, but the hitch in my voice was a dead giveaway of just how messed up I was about this. “My mom is kind of a trigger now.”

Mikey opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it closed again. Without warning, he pushed me onto my back and hauled himself on top of me, his whole body pressing me down into the mattress as he wrapped me up in the tightest hug I’d gotten from anyone, maybe ever.

I lay there, stunned, my arms hovering uselessly at my sides for a second before I lifted them around him, holding him against me.

Mikey pulled back just far enough to look down at me, his expression deadly. “I will murder him. Just give me a last name.”

A laugh tore out of me, real and delighted, and I squeezed him tighter. “Thanks for the offer, but I’ll pass.”

“I’m serious,” Mikey said, and I felt a warm rush of affection move through me.

“I know you are.” I curled upward to plant a quick kiss on his lips, then fell back onto my pillow. “If it makes you feel any better, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, Brooks has already lost most of his hair, and works for his father-in-law selling insurance. By all accounts, he’s miserable.”

Mikey’s eyes danced between mine. “Does it make you feel better?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, I’m a professional hockey player having mind-blowing orgasms with my super hot, definitely not straight teammate. I think I won.”

Mikey’s eyes softened, and for a moment it looked like he was going to ask me something, but then he blinked. “Yeah, you did.”

He flattened his body back down onto me and kissed me, slow and sweet … which soon turned not so sweet at all.

Then I flipped us over, slid down the length of his body, and sucked on his cock until he came down my throat and fell asleep with a smile on his beautiful fucking face.

TWENTY

MIKEY

We were a couple of months into the season, and things weren’t looking great.

The Marauders weren’t the worst team in the league, but we were the worst in our division, and that probably wasn’t going to change anytime soon. For every one game we managed to claw out a win, we lost three.

The inconsistency was killing us.

Coach blew the whistle for another drill.

“We looked like shit last night!” he barked from center ice. “We gave pucks away, we stopped supporting each other, and we quit winning races. So we’re staying out here until I’m convinced you remember what good hockey is supposed to look like. What good skating is supposed to feel like.”

From behind me, Morrison muttered something under his breath that would’ve probably gotten a rookie in trouble.

“All right, boys. Let’s get to it!”

When Petras’s whistle blew, I dug my blade in at the blue line, pushed off, and caught Crawford eating shit at the far red line, his skates going out from under him on a turn he’d taken too tight. Better him than me.

“I don’t recall saying it was nap time, Crawford!” Hendricks barked.

“Sorry, Coach!” Crawford groaned, hauling himself up.

I hit the near blue line and looked for Cally out of habit, finding him three strides ahead of everyone else in his group, not even breathing hard from the look of it, which was deeply annoying. The guy treated conditioning drills like a light jog. Meanwhile, I felt like my chest was going to explode.

“Porter! Eyes up!”

I snapped my head forward in time to avoid taking Lavoie out, cutting hard to the outside instead and nearly eating the boards for my trouble.

We ran drills for another twenty minutes—give-and-goes, breakout patterns, then the first power-play unit stayed out while the rest of us watched them butcher the same setup twice before Bell finally barked at everyone to settle down and dragged them through it again.

When Coach finally blew the whistle to signal we were done, I skated to the bench on legs that felt like I had cement blocks for feet, grabbed my water bottle, and squirted half of it down my throat.

Cally dropped onto the bench next to me, breathing hard for the first time all day, and gave me a quiet nod.