Page 48 of Hot Ice, Tennessee

They looked happy. Really happy.

Yeah, Sanocki. Mason has a lot of friends, because not everybody hates social interactions like you.

Just because you invited him to a hockey game doesn’t mean that he didn’t have other plans.

Even if I was a little disappointed, I still liked something about it. Mason was practically acting like a doting mom, helping everybody else out at the table, constantly making sure they were happy.

“Alright. Let’s do this,” I heard from behind me and I jumped a little.

“Scared the shit out of me,” I told Kane. I’d been in a trance, watching Mason.

“Chicken sandwich time?” he asked.

“Um,” I said, “I was thinking maybe I do want Hank’s BBQ after all. If you don’t mind? It smells really good coming from down the street.”

“You sure?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I could destroy a pulled pork sandwich right now, actually.”

The only messages Mason and I exchanged that week were short.

After sending me a thought-out thank you text the morning after he took the allergy meds, I’d asked him how he was feeling a couple of times, and he told me he was all good. In the middle of the week, he sent one picture of his Clydesdale, Hopper, but when I invited him to grab dinner at the diner, he said he couldn’t.

It was a full week later, right before mynextsummer league game, that he even mentioned coming to one of my games.

For seven days, I’d been letting it simmer, taking the hint more and more with each passing day that there was no shot of anything happening with him. I had kept busy with the flood of homework for my classes and had been putting in extra time working out.

I could lone-wolf it.

Doing things on my own? That was my specialty.

I was in the locker room at the rink, ready to gear up for the next game, when I checked my phone and saw a text from him.

>>Mason: Is this the right one?

He’d attached a map location of the indoor ice rink.

>>Jesse: You got it. You coming? 7 o’clock tonight.

>>Mason: I’ll be there. Understanding absolutely nothing about the game.

I snapped a selfie of me blowing him a kiss, then sent it with a message.

>>Jesse: Thanks, fanboy.

Maybe this was good.

Maybe a steady, kind-hearted friendship was what he needed, and if that was the case, I would be willing to give it. I craved his body like a drug whenever I thought of how good it had felt that night—the way I’d felt thatclick—but if he was done, then I had to be done, too.

I was about to put away my phone in the locker for good when I saw another message come through.

>>Mason: Truth or dare?

A flare of curiosity lit up inside me. A few of the other guys were streaming into the locker room now, and I tucked away into a corner for a second.

>>Jesse: Fuck it. Dare.

A few moments later, his next message came in.

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