Page 114 of Hockey Bois
Nick made a face.
“What, you don’t like them together?” Brady teased.
He couldn’t exactly tell Brady about the jealousy thing, considering that 95% of the reason Nick had anything to be jealous about was that he and Brady had never happened. If things had gone differently, maybe he could have talked about it. If he didn’t still have this stupidly inconvenient crush on Brady, if the whole mess were out of his system, maybe then…
Nothing was out of his system. His system was damn full.
“Just getting used to it,” he grumbled, and drowned out his annoyance with a long squirt from his water bottle. “They’re annoyingly cute together. It’s weird. When Terry asked me to set him up with Gail months ago, I kinda… didn’t think they’d click? Now I feel guilty I didn’t get them together earlier.”
Brady nodded. “If I’d seen them separately, I don’t know that I would’ve pictured them together, so I get that. No need to feel guilty; they got there on their own time. For all you know, this was better, more organic or whatever.”
“I am going to ignore the fact that you said ‘organic’ to describe my cousin’s relationship to your D partner.”
“…you’re making this sound like some weird soap opera.”
“Going to ignore that, too.” Nick stood and stretched, his back cracking and his muscles protesting the sudden movement. He probably shouldn’t have lingered in the dark, abandoned parking lot with the cute boy for so long.
He always was a sucker for cute boys, especially cute boys that liked to talk about hockey.
“I should head home,” he said. His back would kill him if he didn’t. When had he gotten so old?
Brady followed suit and stood up. He dumped the last bit of beer onto the grass and tossed the can in a nearby trash bin.
“Yeah, same. You good to drive?”
Nick made himself actually check if he was. “Yeah, I’m good. You?”
“Yeah.”
In a true sign of his sobriety, Nick gave an awkward wave and walked off to his car (thankfully on the opposite side of the lot from Brady’s). More and more, he felt himself learning to resist the draw of Brady’s gaze. The spark was still there, the desire, the possibility of falling completely head over heels for the guy, but Nick was able to rein it in.
Mostly.
To be fair, it’d taken him months to get this deep, it would probably take months to get back out of it again.
Proud of himself, he ignored the pang in his chest.
*
“I will fucking smack you, you snow my goalie again,” Little Douche snapped and crowded into Nick’s face.
Nick gave him an obvious once over. “I got a cage on, and you don’t even have a visor. You really wanna start shit when you wouldn’t even be able to hit me?”
Little Douche’s mouth dropped, and he took a step back, suddenly aware of how exposed he was if it came to a fight.
“You don’t hit people,” he scoffed, his bravado returning with each word. “Last I heard, yougethit.”
“Yeah,” Nick admitted, “and what happened to the guy that did that, huh?”
“Back it up!” the ref said, preventing them from escalating a completely pointless pissing match. Nick wouldn’t get into an actual fistfight, and despite the implications, he wouldn’t let Brady (or anyone else) get into one on his behalf.
Still, it wasfunmaking Little Douche squirm. If he was too busy looking over his shoulder, he’d fuck up on the ice, and Nick could take advantage. As much as he enjoyed watching Little Douche scamper off to his side of the ice, taunting him wasn’t nearly as gratifying as embarrassing him on the scoreboard would be.
“I’m gonna need another hat trick,” Nick later said to Brady on the bench. “You gonna send me some passes to make that happen?”
“I realize that of everyone on this team, I care the least about superstitions and jinxing people, but that’s bold talk for someone who’s had half a shift and spent that time nearly getting into a fight.”
His heart skipped a beat. Brady’d seen that? “I didnotalmost get into a fight.”
