Page 21 of Tempting the Teammate
The locker room felt cavernous after he left, too quiet except for the steady drip of a leaky faucet somewhere behind me. I stood there for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d said wrong, but came up empty. Andrei had been in weird moods before, usually when the cameras got too invasive or when Coach pushed too hard in practice, but this felt different.
The walk back to the team house gave me time to think, but I still couldn’t make sense of his reaction. By the time I reached our room, I’d decided the best approach was to give him space and let whatever was bothering him blow over on its own.
Our room felt strange without him in it. Too quiet, too empty, missing the subtle presence that had become such a constant part of my daily routine. I tossed my bag in the corner and flopped onto my bed, pulling up my phone to kill time until he got back from wherever he’d gone to sulk.
The notifications were still pouring in, a steady stream of comments and tags and shares that showed no signs of slowing down. I started scrolling through them more systematically this time, trying to see whatever had set Andrei off so badly.
Most of the content was pretty standard fan stuff. Appreciation posts about the team, screenshot compilations of funny moments from the episodes, and speculation about upcoming storylines. But as I dug deeper, following hashtags and checking out accounts that had tagged me repeatedly, the content got more intense.
There were video edits that focused specifically on Andrei and me, cutting together moments from different episodes to create narratives that the original footage hadn’t necessarily supported. Lingering looks, casual touches, conversations edited to seem more intimate than they’d felt in real life. The editing was sophisticated, professional-level work that transformed our friendship into something that looked almost…romantic.
One video in particular caught my attention, a compilation of moments where Andrei was looking at me during interviews or practice footage, sudden zooms bringing his wandering gaze into focus. The editor had slowed down the clips and added atmospheric music that made every glance seem loaded with meaning. Watching it, I could see why people might read more into our dynamic than simple friendship. The way Andrei lookedat me in those moments was intense, focused, and almost tender.
Had he always looked at me that way? I tried to remember being on the receiving end of those glances, but they seemed like normal Andrei behavior to me. He was intense about everything, paid close attention to whatever had his focus. Of course he looked at me like that during conversations; we were talking to each other.
But the comments on the video suggested other people saw something different.
“The way he LOOKS at him, I’m crying.”
“Griffin is so oblivious it hurts.”
“When will someone look at me the way Andrei looks at Griffin?”
Oblivious to what? I clicked through to the user’s profile and found dozens of similar videos, all focused on moments between Andrei and me, all edited this way.
That’s when I stumbled into the fan fiction.
It started innocently enough, clicking on a link someone had plugged into their bio and promoted through one of the videos. The story was hosted on some platform I’d never heard of, tagged with our names and a bunch of other terms that meant nothing to me. I expected something silly, maybe dialogue about hockey or exaggerated versions of our personalities.
What I found instead made my breath catch in my throat.
The story opened with a scene that was clearly meant to be us, thinly disguised with different names but recognizable in every detail. The text was charged with tension, even if the dialogue was sort of authentic. That was, more or less, how we spoke to each other.
I kept reading, telling myself it was just curiosity, that I wanted to understand what had upset Andrei. The story was well-written, I had to admit, drawing me in despite theweirdness of seeing fictional versions of ourselves in situations we’d never been in.
But as it progressed, as the fictional versions of us moved from friendship to something way more intimate, I felt heat creeping up my neck. The author wrote with an attention to detail that was almost clinical, describing the slide of skin against skin and the “careful mapping of familiar bodies discovering new purposes.”
“He’d imagined this moment so many times that the reality felt like muscle memory, like his hands already knew the landscape of Griffin’s shoulders and the sensitive spot just below his ear that made him gasp.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry. The writing was explicit and growing more so with every sentence, romantic in a way that made my chest tight with something that was starting to feel familiar. But more than that, it felt real in a way that made me uncomfortable. Like the author had seen something in us that I’d missed completely.
I clicked to another story, then another, each one exploring different scenarios but all built on the same foundation: the idea that there was something between Andrei and me beyond friendship, something deeper and more complicated than what played out on camera.
One story focused on the tension of hiding feelings while living in such close quarters:
“Sharing a room with Griffin was a special kind of torture, all casual intimacy and unconscious trust that made Andrei’s carefully constructed boundaries feel paper-thin.”
My pulse was racing now, my skin flushed, but it had nothing to do with the temperature in our room. I tried to tell myself it was just the weirdness of seeing intimate fiction written about real people, about us, but that wasn’t quite true. There wassomething else happening, something in the way my body was responding to the detailed descriptions of desire and discovery.
I tried to tell myself that it was just sexy. Sexy words, nothing else. The fact that it made me hard had to do with me being the subject of someone’s imagination, not that it was “Andrei” narrating the tale.
Heat pooled low in my stomach, and I was uncomfortably aware of my breathing, of the way my clothes felt against suddenly sensitive skin, of the way my dick was hard and trapped inside boxer briefs that were way too tight.
I locked my phone immediately and tossed it aside like it had burned me. This was not happening. I was not getting aroused reading fan fiction about myself and my best friend. That was insane, impossible, completely outside the realm of normal human behavior.
But my body didn’t seem to care about what was normal or impossible. Standing up only made me more acutely aware of my cock, the tight feeling of my jeans against the part of my body that suddenly felt hypersensitive to every touch.
Somewhere out there, people were writing stories about Andrei and me discovering feelings we’d never acknowledged, crossing boundaries we’d never considered. And somewhere in this quiet room, I was lying awake, wondering if the fiction was closer to truth than I’d ever realized.
