“Guess it’s a good thing we’re not skating tomorrow.”
The grin widened. “Have you got plans for me instead?”
His voice dropped even lower, leading me to imagine all the things I wanted him to do to me, and then I shook my head, letting out a rough laugh.
“You’re an idiot.”
“You’re still here.”
The next two hours dissolved into noise and chaos. We hoisted the trophy onto the ice, a heavy slab of metal that took three of us to lift, and screamed until our throats went raw. The locker room later was even crazier.
Champagne that someone had smuggled in got sprayed across the ceiling tiles. Sticks banged against lockers. Someone started a chant that made no sense, and everyone joined in anyway.
Coach let us have twenty minutes of it before he stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled the room silent. “No bars. Half of you are under twenty-one, and I’m not explaining a citation to the athletic director. There’s a diner three blocks south. You can be loud and stupid there.”
The diner was a grimy twenty-four-hour place with cracked vinyl booths and the deep, ingrained smell of burnt coffee and fry oil. It was the kind of place where the menus were sticky and nobody checked IDs.
We shoved tables together, and the whole team filled every cracked vinyl booth in the back. A waitress with tired eyes and a notepad dropped off four platters of pancakes and a pitcher of Coke without asking what anyone wanted. A flask followed the pancakes, passed hand to hand under the table, tipping whiskey into coffee mugs and soda cups. Ten minutes later, the noise swelled, forks scraping plates, Elliot’s voice rising as he launched into a story that had the freshmen leaning across the table to hear.
Meanwhile, I nursed a Coke that was more whiskey than soda, watching Aleksey across the table. He sat with a leg stretched into the aisle, laughing at something Perez said, a real laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes. Every few minutes his gaze cut to me and held there a beat too long before sliding away.
The flask came back around. I passed it on without drinking. The diner hummed with noise, forks clattering, bursts of laughter, Elliot telling some story that had the freshmen leaning in. Nobody was paying attention to who sat where or who glanced at who across the sticky tabletop.
Aleksey caught my eye again. One tilt of his head toward the back hallway, where the restrooms were. Then he slid out of the booth, favoring his right leg, and limped toward the back without looking over his shoulder.
I gave it thirty seconds. Then I grabbed my hoodie off the back of the chair and followed.
The hallway was narrow, lined with health inspection certificates, and smelled of bleach. Aleksey leaned against the wall by the back door, arms crossed, with a feral grin already pulling at the corner of his mouth.
“Took you long enough.”
I rolled my eyes. “I had to wait for Elliot to get to the good part of his story.”
Aleksey huffed out a laugh. “The hotel’s three blocks away. You good to walk?”
“You’re the one with the limp.”
“I can walk it off.”
Outside, the cold hit hard after the sticky heat of the diner. The street was dead quiet, storefronts dark, and only our footsteps could be heard on the salted sidewalk. My championship medal was still around my neck, tucked under my hoodie, the metal warming against my chest. Aleksey walked close enough that our arms brushed on every other stride.
Halfway down the second block, I reached over and hooked my fingers into the hem of his jacket, just for a second. “I need to stop at my room first.”
He glanced at me. “Why?”
“I left something in my bag.”
His brow lifted, but he didn’t push it. Just nodded once and kept walking.
The hotel lobby was empty except for a night clerk who barely looked up from her phone when we took the stairs. Aleksey told me his room number and then peeled off at the third floor while I kept climbing to the fourth, my heartbeat kicking faster with every step.
My assigned hotel roommate was still back at the diner, and the room was dark when I entered. So, I hurried over to flip on the light, unzipped my duffel, and dug past spare tape and compression shorts until my fingers closed around the smallbottle of lube and the condom wrapper I’d tucked into the side pocket before the game.
I shoved them into my hoodie pocket and stood there for a second, breathing. The mirror caught my reflection and the winner’s medal around my neck. Slipping the medal off, I tossed it onto my bed on the way back out of the room.
The third-floor hallway was quiet, the carpet muffling my footsteps as I found Aleksey’s door. I knocked once, and it swung open before I could knock again. Aleksey grabbed the front of my hoodie, pulled me inside, and kicked the door shut behind us.
The room had two beds, one still made, the other already rumpled where I guess he’d been sitting waiting for me.
