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Or at least an interaction that wasn’t actively embarrassing.

“Hey,” Jed called from the doorway.

Remy’s head jerked up, and he dropped his phone. Off to a great start, he thought, dipping down and picking the phone up.

Jed was silent as he and Remy walked down the hall to the garage. Remy wondered if he should say something, but decided that staying quiet was probably his best move at this point.

“So, are burrito bowls okay for you?” Jed asked, finally.

“Yeah, sounds great.”

“Good. There’s a place I like that’s about fifteen minutes away, if you don’t mind a bit of a drive. It’s the best place I’ve found around here that does everything organic and sustainable.”

“Nice.” Was saying almost nothing as bad as spewing words with no filter? Possibly. But Remy wasn’t going to risk opening his mouth again yet, even if he was curious about whether Jed was one of those guys who thought every bite they put in their mouth needed to support their athletic performance or whether he cared a lot about climate change or both.

Jed led the way to a sleek black SUV—a hybrid, Remy noticed, which supported the “cares about climate change” theory. Lily would approve. Which doesn’t matter, because this is two teammates having lunch, Remy told himself firmly.

As Remy settled into the passenger seat, Jed whistled under his breath and steered the car toward the exit. Jed looked more like an executive than a hockey player at the moment, with his neatly trimmed beard and his hair slicked back and still damp from the shower. Unlike Remy, who’d worn his usual puffer over joggers, Jed was wearing a broken-in leather bomber jacket and jeans.

Well-worn jeans that looked soft and pulled tight over Jed’s truly massive thighs, which tensed as he maneuvered out of the parking lot.

Remy’s eyes snapped up, and he caught Jed looking at him.

Damn it. Remy tamped down the urge to blurt out a reason why he couldn’t do lunch after all. But Jed’s eyes were assessing, not angry.

“You spend much time in Denver before this?” Jed asked, maybe taking pity on him. Without waiting for an answer, he started pointing out a few other restaurants as they drove down the road, noting who from the team favored which one.

Definitely taking pity on me, Remy thought. Yeah, this was going to be as bad as he feared.

CHAPTER SIX

JED

Jed was better than most people at blocking out noise and getting the job done. That’s why the Blizzards paid him ridiculous sums of money to throw his body in front of a six-ounce rubber disc night after night.

Make it less weird, Hal had instructed.

That was his job, and it should have been no problem to get it done by taking Remy out for a quick, casual meal. But as Remy sat there looking squarely out the window, Jed realized that it wasn’t going to be so simple.

Remy had evidently taken note of his inability to speak coherently around Jed and overcorrected. And Jed was not a guy who talked a lot at the best of times. The fifteen-minute drive to the strip mall with the burrito bowl place exhausted his store of both Denver-related small talk and team-related small talk, and he didn’t have many other go-to subjects.

The silence wasn’t really the problem, though. Jed could sit in silence with the best of them.

No, the problem was those looks Remy kept shooting his way.

The look in the locker room.

The look as they were leaving the garage.

Jed might not look at people that way himself, but he knew what it meant. For whatever reason, Remy liked what he saw when he looked at Jed. Jed didn’t get it, because when he faced himself in the mirror, he saw a too-big guy with a plain, slightly beat-up face and not much else. But over the years, he had come to understand that he was, in fact, attractive to some people.

And fuck, if that’s what was going on, it was going to be a problem. If Remy was flustered around Jed because he’d looked up to Jed when he was younger, he’d get over that pretty quickly. But if Remy was flustered because he found Jed attractive? Jed did not know what to do about that, especially when he was—aware? Yeah, he would go with aware—of Remy, too. And he thought Remy didn’t know what to do about it either, given the resulting level of awkwardness.

Not a moment too soon, Jed was pulling open the restaurant door and gesturing Remy inside. It was late enough in the afternoon that the restaurant was empty, just the way Jed liked it.

“Hey. You want your usual?” The guy behind the counter gave Jed a smile as they approached.

“Yeah, thanks.” Jed turned to Remy, who was squinting at the menu above the counter. “It’s not on the menu, but I like to get a double chicken with beans, roasted vegetables, and brown rice. He’ll make one for you, too, if you want.”