Page 29 of Wingmen

“Is that mean?”

“He’s a legend, so it’s good to be in the same league, I guess. But I’d rather be the first me.”

Elliot only realized that was true as he said it. He watched Drew sip her drink, and tucked it away for later. It was a good line for the press.

When he asked what her favorite food was, she told him, “Officially? Pizza,” and leaned in to whisper in his ear, “but actually? Big, salty, nuts.”

He snorted a laugh, and the hair on his arms prickled. He was tracking all of that: the brush of her breath in his ear, the way she smelled as she leaned in, the way her tongue touched the rim of her glass when she drank. And at the same time, he was looking past her, at the booth Dustin had moved to with Fatima.

He could pick them out well enough in the dark now to see that Dustin was holding her hands across the table. Elliot rolled his eyes and tried not to remember the way his hand looked tented on the pool table with his cue sliding between the knuckles. He tried not to imagine what it might look like wrapped around his cock.

I’ll even blow on your cue, if you want, said Dustin, in his head, and he quickly turned back to Drew. “What’s the craziest thing you know about sea urchins?”

“Oh, don’t get mestarted.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You’re weird.”

“I get that a lot.”

Dustin

“Okay, so you’re born in Kamloops, you move to Vancouver, you go through the QL…H…what is it?”

Dustin smiled over his beer. “QMJHL. Unless you’re French, then it’s LHJMQ.”

She blinked like that made her dizzy. “Say it again?”

“Don’t bother.” He winked. “French is fucking impossible.”

Fatima laughed. She drained the last of her soda, circling her hand in aLet’s get back on topic, motion, then put the empty glass on the table beside the popcorn basket. “You’re trying to distract me again. So you go into the…QM…hockey league with all the letters, and then you go to the NHL. In Vancouver?”

Dustin nodded.

“And then you moved from Vancouver to Denver?”

He nodded again.

“Okay. So how did you get into hockey originally? In Ally-oops.”

Dustin snorted into his beer. It went up his nose, and he wiped his face on his shirt and said, “Kamloops.” And hoped she would forget about the first part of the sentence.

Obviously, she didn’t.

“You skirted around the question again.”

He sighed, still drying his beard. Normally he did a better job of redirecting the conversation away from this, but he felt bad for grilling her about Pakistani street food. “My dad was a coach in the hockey league with all the letters.”

“Oh! Does he still do that?”

“He’s dead.”

Her mouth stuck open and stayed there a moment, and then she said, “Oh. God. Sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”

They sat in the uncomfortable silence. Fatima said, “Now I don’t know if I should ask you about it, or…”

“He had a heart attack.”