Page 32

Doug's equipment room is a cage at the end of the hall behind a steel door with a keypad. Dane knows the code. Of course he does. It's racks of skates and boxes of tape and a sharpening machine on a workbench, and it smells like metal and leather and the burnt-hair smell of skate blades on a grinder.

He punches the code. He holds the door. I go in.

It shuts behind us with a heavy click.

He doesn't turn the light all the way on. Just the one over the bench, a bare bulb that buzzes. He stands with his back against the door in his pads, mask off, his hair wet with sweat. I stand by the workbench in full gear minus my helmet and gloves.

"Take it off," he says.

I know what he means. I start with the jersey. Then the shoulder pads. I go faster than I did on Monday, because my hands are shaking, and I don't want him to see. Elbow pads. I sit on a box of tape to get my skates off and I tear at the laces, and he doesn't say anything, he just watches me. Then the pants. The shin pads. And then I'm in my compression shorts and my T-shirt and socks again, on the cold concrete, with goosebumps all up my arms.

"Shirt," he says.

I pull it over my head. I drop it.

He comes off the door.

He's still in his leg pads and his goalie pants, his chest protector, the whole top half of him huge and armored and solid, and he unbuckles the chest protector and pulls it over his head and drops it on the floor with a thump. He's in a soaked gray T-shirt under it. I can see the shape of his shoulders. The dark sweat down the middle of his chest.

He walks up to me until I'm backed against the workbench.

He doesn't touch me. He just stands there, close enough that I can feel how hot he is, and looks at me. At my face. At my mouth, at the cut on my lip. Down my chest. Lower.

I'm hard. I've been half hard since the corner, and now I'm all the way there, my cock tenting the front of my compression shorts like a flag, and he looks right at it, and I feel my face go hot all the way up to my hairline.

"Hands on the bench," he says.

I put my hands behind me on the edge of the workbench. Cold metal.

"Don't touch me," he says.

"Kind of the point of this, isn't⁠—"

"Don't," he says, "touch me."

I shut up.

He puts his hand flat on my stomach. Just under my navel. His palm is huge and rough and hot and my whole body jumps like he's hit me with a cattle prod.

He doesn't move it. He keeps it there, and he looks at me.

"You want this," he says.

He says it flat. But he's watching my face, and he's waiting.

I almost laugh. I almost say something smart. And then I look at his face, and his face isn't ice anymore. It's tight and strained and he's breathing through his mouth, and there's a little line between his eyebrows, and he's asking. He wants to know.

"Yes," I say.

His hand slides down.

He pulls the waistband of my shorts down under my balls and wraps his hand around my cock and I stop breathing.

"Oh, fuck⁠—"

He strokes me once. Slow. Base to tip, his thumb dragging over the head, smearing the wet there down the shaft. My hips jerk forward into his hand and he puts his other hand flat on my chest and pushes me back against the bench.

"Don't move."