“Please,” Dawson said. “You’re in love with him.”
Nate choked on his breath.
“Don’t even bother denying it. You were staring at your phone like you couldn’t wait to talk to him. Like if you yearned hard enough, what you wanted would just materialize.”
“I don’t yearn,” Nate insisted, frowning. What else was he going to call what he’d been doing for weeks? For fuckingmonths?
“Sure,” Dawson said, chuckling under his breath. “Deny it all you want to, but you know who you’re really denying in the end?”
“Your inner gossip?”
“Shut up, that’s not me. That’s Aidan. And Levi. Or Aidan-and-Levi cause they’re like some package deal kind of shit these days.”
“Sure it’s not.” Nate was relieved he’d managed to distract Dawson, but there was still that bright fucking red exclamation point in the back of his head, an alarm that wouldn’t stop blaring, whenever he thought of what Dawson had said.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice that you changed the subject,” Dawson grumbled.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Nate said, as nicely as he was able, with half of his brain melting down at the possibility that Dawson might be right.
“Of course not,” Dawson soothed. “Forget I said it.” But the smile he shot Nate as the coaching staff headed towards the front of the room told Nate that he knew exactly how impossible that was going to be.
Coach Dell started the walk-through with a reiteration of the three tenets that he wanted the whole defense to remember for this game against the 49ers.
Containment– specifically of Christan McCaffrey and the 49ers’ insanely dynamic run game.
Patience– the Thunder weren’t going to win every battle, but the idea was they’d win the war in the end.
Work together –Coach Dell was always preaching that their defense had all the pieces they needed to be successful, they just needed to execute but even more importantly, they needed to rely on each other. Let their weaknesses and strengths complement each other.
By the time Zane moved onto the offensive game plan for the week, Nate felt even more externally confident and certain that they’d prepared well for the week. Jordan was playing well, if a little scattered, but he usually pulled it together on game days, and Nate was hoping that this week would be no different.
Plus, now he’d figured out that something about Sterling bothered Jordan especially—put him on edge—and Nate would know to watch out for that. Keep an eye on Jordan and steer him away from Sterling unless there was no way to avoid it.
With his own game plan in place, he touched base with Sterling, checked in with Jordan, met Aidan’s eyes across the room, giving him a brief nod of acknowledgment and then headed back to his apartment.
Toronto was one of the few teams in the league that didn’t require players to stay in a hotel the night before home games, and Nate intended to take full advantage of that. A nice hot shower to relax his muscles. Watch some TV. Spend a long, restful night in his own bed.
Maybe a few texts with Ramsey. Maybe he could even gently encourage Ramsey to send him a good picture, under the guise of wishing him luck. Give Nate something to look at when he lay in bed thinking about the guy he was almost probably, certainly not in love with.
They’d just decided they were dating. The last thing Nate needed to do was freak Ramsey out by throwing out words that would certainly send him running the other direction.
He made it home in decent time, and, after parking in the basement lot, headed up in the elevator to his floor.
To his surprise, when he input his door code into the pad, it beeped insistently at him, indicating that the door was already unlocked.
Nate tensed. The door definitely should have been locked. In fact, he’d set the pad to the highest security setting—to lock the moment it shut.
Carefully, he turned the handle and slid through the small opening he’d made. But the moment he fully entered the entry, he knew it wasn’t going to be a problem and all the sudden tension leaked out of his body.
Admittedly, he didn’t knowwhyRamsey was in his kitchen, humming under his breath in that distinctive way of his, or why the house smelled of tomatoes and garlic, but it wasn’t some crazed fan, at least.
“Hey,” Ramsey said the moment Nate walked into the kitchen. He was stirring a pot of something that smelled delicious on the stove. “I’ll be out of your hair in a minute. I just wanted to stop in and um, fix my favorite pre-game meal for you. For tomorrow. You know, beforeyourgame.”
Nate raised an eyebrow. This was not what he’d expected at all.
“You broke into my apartment to fix me dinner?”
Ramsey ran a hand through his unruly blond curls. It pulled his T-shirt up, showing off his flat, muscled stomach. Nate sucked in a breath, still feeling unsteady and awed that this guy—this clever, unpredictable, brilliant,gorgeousguy—was his.Yeah,the voice inside his brain, the one that sounded painfully like Dawson, said,you’re not in love with him at all. Not even a little.
