Karter snatched his towel. He didn’t say another word, turning and walking straight toward the locker room.
As I watched him go, a dark sense of intrigue mixed with my frustration.
My focus was shot; there was no way I was getting a safe lift in now. I abandoned the idea of a workout entirely, grabbed my bag, and trailed him into the locker room. By the time I stripped off my cold sweats, the showers were already running. Thick clouds of white steam rolled off the wet tiles as I stepped under the hot spray in the senior players’ section. Tilting my head back, I let the intense heat melt the tight knots out of my shoulders.
Now you’re wasting my time.
Karter’s voice replayed in my head. I scrubbed soap over my face and looked through the white haze.
The team rules worked the same way every year. Upperclassmen took the hot shower-heads on the far wall. Freshmen got the freezing ones near the door. It was basic hazing, designed to make the new guys bow their heads and learn their place fast.
I found Karter right away. He stood directly under the ice-cold spray. Goosebumps covered his lean back. He chewed his bottom lip, but he didn’t shiver, and he didn’t complain.
“Hey Karter!” I called out over the hiss of the showers. “Water cold enough for you over there?”
Karter didn’t flinch. He stayed planted under the icy spray, shoulders squared against the cold, and reached for the soap. “It does the job.”
“A cold shower’s supposed to do you good,” I let my words hang in the steam. “But, I’m pretty sure such a good boy like you has enough of that already.”
“Guess I’m overqualified.”
The flat retort annoyed the fuck out of me. I glanced around at the other faces in the room, but the other freshmen kept their heads down, pretending not to hear. “Then go run to your brother’s place if you want a warm bath,” I said.
He rinsed his hair, letting the freezing water run down his back in sheets. “Nah. I think I’ll stay right here.”
“Suit yourself.” The words came out tighter than I meant them to. “But don’t expect a medal for suffering.”
“I’ll settle for a towel.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. Half a smirk, gone before it registered.
And then he turned around, facing me full on.
Most freshmen glued their eyes to the wall, but Karter kept his locked on my face. The water cut tracks down his chest, slipping over the lean ridges of his stomach, and my palm throbbed with the phantom memory of his heart-rate jumping against my grip, back in the weight room.
The heat crawling up my neck suddenly had nothing to do with the steam as a tight knot caught in my throat.
This was the one guy I wanted to destroy—the rich kid playing tourist in my miserable life—and my exhausted body was betraying me by wanting him.
I forced a harsh breath out through my nose, clamped my teeth together, and pasted a sneer on my face to cover the slip.
Karter didn’t look away. Didn’t backdown. He just stared back, unbothered, before calmly turning around to grab his soap.
My palm pressed flat against the wet wall tiles. The cold ceramic bit into my skin, anchoring me in place when every other instinct screamed to cross the room and wipe that calm off his face. Breaking this guy was going to take way more effort than I bargained for.
Instead, I reached out and turned off my water. I had to get Karter Johnston out of my head.
The rest of the day was a blur of exhausting classes and brutal afternoon practice. By the time I dragged myself into work for my graveyard shift, my legs felt like lead.
The commercial freezer units buzzed a loud, uneven rhythm down the frozen food aisle. And the painfully bright store lights beat down on my head. My shoulders burned as I pulled another can of soup from the cardboard box.
It was pushing two A.M., and I’d been awake for over twenty hours. It had totally wrecked my body. Sleep felt like a lifetime ago. Stripped of the hockey attitude I usually carried, I was nothing but a tired guy running on fumes.
“Zotov, you are moving entirely too damn slow,” Derek yelled from the end of the aisle.
“I’m stocking them as fast as they go up,” I said, sliding a can onto the metal shelf.
“Stock faster. Those shelves look bare, and I want this entire pallet cleared by three.”
