Page 44 of Man Advantage

“Yeah, but there’s not wearing a dress, and there’s…” I gestured at Cam. “Not wearing a dress.”

He’d looked down at the tux, then back up at me, eyes full of nerves and worry. “So… does that mean… I mean, is this okay?”

“It’s…” I gulped. “Uh… Yeah. Fuck, yeah. It’s…” I shook myself and raked my eyes up and down Cam’s body and rasped, “You look incredible.”

And then he’d smiled, and my knees actually went weak. Attraction to Cam was nothing new, butthis?Oh my God. It was like one of those movies where someone got a makeover and came out looking like a completely different person who was a zillion times hotter than before, except Cam had been hot to start with.

He cleared his throat, and some shyness crept into his expression. “Do you think anybody will be weirded out?”

I’d instantly been overcome with a sense of protectiveness that usually only reared its head when an opposing player threw a dirty hit on a teammate. The urge to drop gloves and make someone regret his life’s choices.

“If they have a problem with the way you look,” I growled, “they can take it up with me.”

Turned out, no one who mattered had been bothered. Some of the mean girls looked down their noses. Some of the immature dudebros had asked when I’d gotten a boyfriend. But all of our friends agreed with me that Cam looked amazing, and we’d had a great time.

We didn’t stay for the whole dance, though. A few slow dances had turned into a few long looks I recognized from our recent past, and we’d been out of there by eleven. By the time Idropped Cam off long after our two o’clock curfews, we were well and truly back together. I’d been on top of the world, and?—

“Hey. Trev.” Hoes smacked my shoulder, jostling me back into the present. “You coming?”

“I—”

Oh. Fuck. The team was heading out to the ice.

Because it was time to play hockey. Professionally. Well, first we had to do our intros, since it was our home opener. Butthenwe’d have to play hockey.

And my brain was someplace else. Jesus Christ.

As I waited for my turn to be introduced, I kept thinking back to the past. Our reconciliation hadn’t lasted long after that dance. It hadn’t ended badly, just abruptly, with Cam insisting “it’s not you, it’s me.”

A month after that, he’d come out as trans. And if realizing he was a boy had made so many things make sense for me, I could only imagine how it had been for him.

Not long before we graduated, I came out as gay. Several of our friends had joked that now we could get back together for real, but we’d agreed to keep things the way they were. We were both still trying to process so much about ourselves, and we were also heading off to college, and it just… wasn’t a good time. We were kids who didn’t even know who we were; definitely not relationship material.

Looking back, it was so obvious that Cam had been coming into his own as a trans man at the same time I’d been figuring out I was gay. Being the naïve kids we were, we hadn’t understood that, and we hadn’t been able to be what the other needed at that time. Not as a couple, anyway. As friends, absolutely.

But we’d both been so confused about who we were, we just couldn’t process that alongside a relationship. Cam wanted to find his footing in his new identity. He struggled with his bodyimage, with believing he was attractive, with being sexual in a body that didn’t match who he was. He just didn’t have the bandwidth to be involved with anyone beyond friendship.

As for me, I was just a confused train wreck about my sexuality. I was afraid I’d be ostracized as an athlete if I came out. I was afraid that maybe I wasn’t reallygaybecause—in my eighteen-year-old brain—the only person I’d ever been with orwantedto be with wastechnicallya girl.

Yeah. I know. I wasn’t proud of it, and just thinking about that now made me cringe. I was glad I’d never said any of it out loud, especially to Cam. There’d been a lot of things I hadn’t understood back then, and I was seriously thankful I’d kept them to myself. As an adult, I understood that Cam had always been a boy, and that my attraction to him made perfect sense now that I understood my sexuality.

And now, here we were. Older. Wiser. Living in the same space.

And one look at Cam in a suit tonight left me just as gobsmacked and stupid as I’d been that moment I’d seen him in a tux all those years ago.

For the same reason, too—because he was absolutely the most stunning human being I’d ever met. When we’d both been sixteen, he’d been everything in my sixteen-year-old eyes. When we’d been eighteen, and we’d both started really figuring ourselves out, I’d been confused about everything except how undeniably attractive Cam still was.

And now that we were thirty…

Christ. Sixteen- and eighteen-year-old me hadn’t had a clue just how jaw-dropping this man would be after we both grew up.

He’d come to Pittsburgh so we could help each other resolve our crises. I just hadn’t bargained for him igniting another:

How the hell was I supposed to play hockey with this beautiful man nearby?

CHAPTER 14

CAM

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