Page 58 of On Thin Ice

Especially when he walked back into the locker room and Ramsey was sitting on the bench like he’d been waiting for him.

“Hey,” Ramsey said.

“Hey,” Finn said shortly.

“You know we don’t think any less of you, right? We know how solid you are.” Ramsey’s voice was so gentle and careful, and Finn hadn’t thought it was possible, but now he felt even worse.

Overreacting and overemotional.

“Right,” Finn said, swallowing the lump in his throat.

“It’s taken us almost a whole fucking season to be able to do that to you.” Ramsey kept going because he didn’t know when to stop. That was Ramsey for you. “You realize that, right?”

He realized it, sure, but it wasn’t like that really helped.

“Yeah,” Finn said.

Ramsey shrugged, like he’d done what he could and he didn’t know what else to do.

Finn burned under his skin. Anger and frustration and all that fucking lust that he hadn’t been able to scorch off.

He wanted to call Jacob and say,fuck doing the right thing. Just do me. Make me forget. Make me not think for a whole evening.

But he couldn’t. And not just because Jacob would chuckle in that uncomfortably tight way he did whenever Finn pushed and then say, even more gently than Ramsey, “You know we can’t.”

Yeah, he fucking knew it.

He was walking to his dorm room in only a T-shirt, hoping the heat of his anger would dissipate with the freezing air of an unexpectedly rain-less December night in Portland when his phone rang.

For a second, Finn froze. What if it was Morgan?

You’ll just ignore the call,he reminded himself.Like you’ve done a dozen times before.

But it wasn’t Morgan. It was Jacob.

Finn didn’t know if that was better or worse, but he was in no mood to be a fucking saint, so he picked up.

“Hey,” he said shortly. “What did I tell you about actual phone calls?”

“They make me look really old.” Jacob chuckled—but self-consciously, not uncomfortably, not like Finn had pushed him into a place he didn’t want to live in. That was something, at least. “I know. I thought I’d risk it. You didn’t answer my text and I wanted to make sure we were still on for dinner tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Finn said shortly.

The dinner where Jacob would plan his coming out. The coming out that he’d share with his eventual, yet-to-be-named boyfriend.

Everything burned.

Finn didn’t want to be that boyfriend; hedidn’t. It would be a mess, a true fucking disaster. But he already knew it would hurt if he ever saw Jacob and the phantom boyfriend out together.

He’d wish it was his hand Jacob was holding; his ear Jacob was murmuring into. His body that Jacob took apart when they returned to Jacob’s house, to Jacob’s bed.

“You okay?”

Ramsey had essentially asked the same question, and he’d ignored him. He should ignore Jacob too, but the pull, inevitable and nearly irresistible, to confess how terrible practice had been, was hard to ignore.

Jacob would understand. It felt like Jacob was theonlyone who could understand.

“No. No. Not really.” Finn choked back a sob. Leaned against a tree, halfway to his dorm. “Had an absolute shit practice.”

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