Page 1 of Pucked Up

CHAPTER

ONE

BODEN

“Hot guy,twelve o’clock. I bet you could buy him a shot of Midori and he’d suck your dick.”

More than once a week, I wanted to take Tiago by the back of the neck and smash his face right into his plate just to shut him up. He wasn’t my usual wingman, but Ford ended up working an overnight inventory shift at his supermarket job, and Tucker was home with a migraine.

So that left Tiago—one of Jonah’s teammates who hung around at the rink long enough that I could consider us friends.

And he wasn’t terrible at helping me hook up, but he also had retinitis pigmentosa with, like, four percent of his visual field left. I wasn’t sure I could trust his judgment when it came to spotting hot guys in a dimly lit bar.

Especially since I was also very, very picky about who I considered hot.

Luckily, it didn’t seem like the stranger at the barwas paying attention to either one of us, which meant I could take my time looking him over. I couldn’t see much, but what I could see was nice. He was broad-shouldered with dark hair and a cut jaw. He spoke to the bartender and made him smile, which meant he was either nice or flirty.

I could deal with either. It really wasn’t going to be up to me to snag this guy. It was all going to be him and whether or not he was a shitty person who cringed at disabled bodies.

It was why we were tucked in the corner at a table where I could effectively hide my wheelchair. I hadn’t been sensitive or ashamed about my disability in years, but it did make hooking up…complicated. I usually gave them time to speak to me before the “big reveal,” as Tucker always called it. And then it was either good to go, or they’d make some shitty, polite excuse and then run out like bats from hell were nipping at their heels.

I was so used to it, but it was getting frustrated because I didn’t date, so my pool of one-offs was starting to feel a bit limited around town.

It would be easier if I didn’t have such strict rules, but I couldn’t hook up at work because I didn’t fuck hockey players. I knew better than to eat where I took a shit. I didn’t even go for the guys in the Blind Hockey League. They were far too close to home, and I didn’t want the drama of when shit went sour.

And shit always went sour.

So it was that, or I would have to start paying for it, which really wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Itwould make things less complicated, though the hell it would unleash after would make me regret everything.

I was the son, and the grandson, of two fairly famous hockey players, and I couldn’t deal with the shitstorm that would rain down on me and my family if anyone found out I’d developed a hooker habit. Also, my grandfather would disown me, and I was sort of counting on his inheritance to get me through the rest of my life since NHL money was never going to happen for me.

It was bad enough when I’d come out of the closet. He didn’t speak to me for nearly two years. It wasn’t until I was in Paris for my first winter Paralympics that he showed his face, and he only looked somewhat approving after I was holding the damn gold medal.

Of course, eight years later, and here I was—banned from competing again. My father managed to calm him down, putting most of the blame on himself and my grandfather for never adjusting their expectations about their hockey heir.

Or whatever the fuck I was supposed to be for them.

When I was born, they’d expected a perfectly proportioned hockey prodigy. Instead, I was a twenty-eight-week preemie with the cord around my neck and brain damage that left me with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy with a side dose of childhood non-epileptic seizures and hearing loss.

It led to my parents’ divorce because my dadblamed my mom, and my mom blamed my dad. I grew up between two homes and two parents who were nothing but unkind and bitter toward each other. They both remarried—my mom’s sticking, my father’s, well…not so much.

From my dad, I learned how to make a wedding look more expensive than it really was, how to hide debt and a drinking problem, and if I ever wanted to hit on college-aged women, I had a fucking arsenal of pickup lines in both English and Quebecois.

From my mom, I learned that love didn’t need to be everything, that any problem could be solved with toxic positivity and feel-good Facebook memes, and life would make sense once she finally got her perfect little trio of tow-headed girls that she’d always dreamed of.

Which happened when I turned ten.

I was just the awkward, confused, angry little shit that bounced between houses and forgot French when I was in Quebec and English when I was in Montana.

Moving to Massachusetts was the best thing I ever did, and while I did low-key still blame Ford and Tucker for dragging me down their path of self-destruction in Beijing, which led to my getting banned from the Paralympics for the last eight years, I still loved them.

They were more family than mine had ever been.

And where my father always thought I wouldn’t ever have sex unless I had a fat wallet to pay for it,these guys reminded me constantly that I could get what I wanted.

I just had to be myself: hot, aloof, and a total dick.

“I’ll go tell him you want to buy him a drink,” Tiago said, hopping up from his chair.

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