Chapter 1
June
The guy was hot.
He moved through the crowd at the bar with a confidence that said he knew it too. Knew everyone was watching him and he’d long since made his peace with that fact.
Nate hadn’t come out to the bar looking for a hookup, and even if he was into the hottest guy he might’ve ever seen, he had a feeling there’d be a line out the door for a shot in his bed.
Nate wasn’t into sharing. Might’ve at some point been into the casual hookup scene, but he was tired of putting guys into his phone as “big dick” and “even bigger dick” with no names to be found.
He wasn’t sure the whole marriage-white picket fence-happily-ever-after thing was for him either, but he thought maybe this year he could find some sort of happy medium. Something straddling the line between “big dick” and “monogrammed towels.”
And yeah, this guy, he was definitely more the former than the latter. Slid through the crowd like a hot knife through butter, gaze assessing even as he kept his expression blank, like he was allergic to giving himself away.
A guy who’d never give a thing away.
Nate would never even get his number to put in his phone as “hottest guy with the biggest dick.”
But even if he didn’t, that didn’t mean Nate couldn’t look.
Lane, a tight end and one of Nate’s best friends on the Thunder, had said he was coming out too, but then he’d bailed at the last minute, even when Nate had gone out of his way to mention that Trevor, Lane’s younger stepbrother, new to Toronto and to the team, would be welcome.
Lane had ended up blowing him off, claiming he had a hookup, but Nate had a feeling if he headed over to the apartment he was now sharing with Trev, he’d catch them drinking beer and playingCall of Duty, badly.
Nate had nothing else going on, so he sipped his beer and watched as the bartender flirted with the hot guy. Then poured him a drink.
Hot Guy just shrugged, casually, easily blowing him off. Doing it in such a way that Nate was fascinated, because he was pretty sure the bartender hadn’t even realized it had happened.
A girl approached him next, and she barely got a second glance.
The bar wasn’t full despite it being a Thursday. After Nate finished his beer, he didn’t worry about losing his table when he went to take a piss.
Sure enough, when he returned from the bathroom, his table was unoccupied.
Well. No. That wasn’t quite true either.
There was a fresh beer there, right at the spot where Nate had been sitting and a man in the barstool across. Not just any guy.Theguy.
Nate hesitated. Maybe he was reading the situation wrong.
But then hot guy glanced up, meeting Nate’s eyes, and tilted his head towards the beer.
Nate hadn’t even realized that Hot Guy had noticed him.
He swallowed hard, reminded himself that he wasn’t really interested, even as his heart beat a little faster, and made his way over to the table.
“Hey,” the guy said. “I got you a beer.” He waved over towards the bar casually. “Nicky said this was what you were drinking.”
Nate didn’t know which part of this whole thing was taking him out more—that this guy had come over here, clearly planning it, and yet acting like it was all just casually accidental, or that, up close, he wasn’t hot after all.
He was beautiful.
Blond curls, tousled all over his head. Eyes that turned out to be an unearthly light blue. A face that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those ridiculous perfume commercials he’d tried not to get off to when he was a pimply thirteen-year-old. And the body? He had broad shoulders, filling out his plain white T-shirt, and a narrow waist. Tanned biceps and forearms that made it clear he knew his way around a weight room.
Nate reached out for the beer and took a sip, despite that he almost never took drinks from strangers.
“Yeah,” Nate agreed, mouth suddenly very dry despite the beer. Hehadgame. Hardly a slouch himself, plus he was fairly well known in this town, even though this was only his second year on the Thunder.
