Page 111 of Body Check

His whole body was so tense now Dakota’s muscles ached in sympathy. He wanted to reach out, touch Gavin, but he was afraid if he did, Gavin would pull away.

No, right now, Gavin would have to be the one to come to him.

“I—I had been dating this guy. He was not a good person.” Gavin laughed hollowly. “And that’s putting it mildly. He was involved in all sorts of shit. Shady, fucked up stuff I probably didn’t know the half of. But he was hot, and he liked to get fucked. We’d get high together and I’d fuck him and …” Gavin closed his eyes. “It wasn’t good but itfeltgood, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Dakota said softly.

“We started hanging out with this group of older guys and sometimes Thad tagged along. I knew he was trying to protect me, trying to keep an eye on me to keep me from totally going off the rails but I … I also think to some degree, all hockey players are adrenaline junkies,” Gavin said.

Dakota let out a soft laugh. “I can see that.”

“And we thrive on chaos and intensity but—but when that follows you off the ice, it gets … ugly. It pulls you down into shit you—you never would have dreamed about doing. I was chasing that, chasing the thrill of doing things my brother loathed. Things he was horrified by.”

Gavin smiled, a wry twist of his lips that was the saddest smile Dakota had ever seen. “And then I found out Dillon—the guy I was seeing—was going to steal things from the place he worked. This wasn’t the first robbery they’d done but it was definitely going to be the biggest. He worked for a small mom-and-pop electronics store, and he knew the owner was sometimes lazy about locking the back door and was a little hard of hearing. He had it all planned. On his day off, he was going to have some of his buddies come in at the end of the day while the owner was in the office, counting the money from the register. They’d leave the cash but take as many high-value small electronics as they could get their hands on.”

Dakota nodded.

“He wanted me to take part. I was supposed to drive the getaway car. He was going to be somewhere else at the time. At some bar. He was going to pick a fight with someone, make sure plenty of people saw him there and he had an airtight alibi.”

“I tried to talk Dillon out of it. I guess I did have some sort of moral compass after all because I couldn’t—I couldn’t sit there and let him rob some poor helpless old man. I tried to tell him it was a bad choice and I wanted no part in it but he wouldn’t fuckinglisten.”

Gavin looked over at Dakota, his expression agonized. “When I couldn’t talk Dillon out of it, I figured the best thing I could do was try to keep it from escalating.

“But the problem is, Thad overheard the tail end of us arguing. And he came to stopme.”

Queasiness grew in the pit of Gavin’s stomach as he let the words spill out, confessing the whole story for the first time.

“It all went wrong from the beginning. I was parked in the alley behind the store, but they were taking too long and I went inside to see what was wrong. They were taking more stuff than they should have—more than they’d agreed on—and soon after, Thad showed up and the police arrived right in the middle of it all. Everyone scattered and Thad and I got away but … the police, they had a rough idea of what one of the guys looked like. Approximate height and weight and hair color. There was some grainy footage of a guy running away in a black leather jacket and getting in a car. They also found footage of the fucking license plate of that car and …”

Gavin closed his eyes, the queasiness growing.

“It was the vehicle Thad and I shared so the registration got traced back to us. And that damned leather jacket … Thad stole the jacket from me. It was mine but he took it and when the police showed up asking questions, he confessed. Brought the coat out as proof it was him. He was trying to protect me.” Gavin’s voice shook.

“He—he confessed. He said he was the one who was involved with those guys, and I had shown up trying to stop him. He made me out to be the good guy.”

Gavin’s chest heaved as he struggled to drag in a deep breath.

“They took him in for questioning and he was over eighteen, so our parents didn’t have to be in the interrogation room with him. Hell, before they even found out, he’d agreed to a plea deal, said he’d turn on the other guys for a reduced sentence and—that was it. He was arrested for attempted robbery.”

Gavin’s voice cracked. “And I let him do it all. I let him take the fall for it. Forallof it. He was my brother. My twin brother. How could I let him do that?”

Gavin couldn’t breathe at all now, couldn’t do anything but gasp for air, heart pounding, eyes stinging, regret coating his tongue like a bitter pill he couldn’t choke down or spit out no matter how hard he tried.

He could dimly feel Dakota’s hand on his back, rubbing softly, but it was like he was outside himself now, like he wasn’t even inside his own body anymore.

“I got a chance to talk to Thad after and I argued with him, but he said I was the better player. He said it would be a waste of my talent if I let myself go to prison instead of the NHL. He sacrificed his entire fucking future to protectmeand I went along with it.”

“The arrest, when Thad went to jail … my parents were so fucking angry. They were so disgusted for what they saw as me dragging him into the whole mess andfuck, I was disgusted with me too. I still am. He was my fucking brother. How could I let him …”

Gavin let out a choking noise, unable to continue.

He registered the soft squeeze of Dakota’s hand on the back of his neck, and he blindly reached out, latching onto Dakota and burying his face against his shoulder. He clutched at him desperately, needing that anchor, needing his touch.

Dakota rubbed his back softly as the long-buried emotions poured out in heaving gasps and sobs, regret and self-hatred dampening the collar of Dakota’s shirt. His skin.

When Gavin had nothing left, he lifted his head, bracing himself for the disgust or disappointment he expected to see on Dakota’s face. But there was none. There was only soft understanding, a tender affection and concern that made Gavin try to pull away because didn’t Dakota understand?

Didn’t he know Gavin didn’t deserve any of that?

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