Page 64 of Two for Charging

The bathroom remained silent, so Cheryl must have stayed with her child. Possibly still in the company of their goalie. Luca’s head hurt thinking about the possible consequences that indiscretion might have for the team.

Then he thought of the consequences of his own indiscretions. In the sudden stillness, Luca’s palms began to sweat. He needed an exit strategy now; he’d all but admitted his feelings, and Chris had said precisely nothing about them. With the urgency of arousal past, nothing remained but the empty longing, and Luca couldn’t stand being here alone with Chris while it choked him.

“We should go downstairs again,” he said. “Before anyone gets suspicious.”

Pushing himself up from the floor slowly in a way that should not be the slightest bit sexy but was because everything he did was sexy, at least to Luca, Chris agreed. “You go first. I’ll get dressed and be right behind you.”

Luca slipped out the door without a backward glance. He didn’t deserve to keep ogling Chris, no matter how much he might want to. Besides, it would depress him to see how unaffected Chris remained by the experience.

He had to stop this. He would tell Chris he didn’t need any more coaching the next time Chris initiated. Which he might never do because he wasn’t into sex the same way Luca was, and he didn’t feel for Luca the way Luca felt for him.

Luca couldn’t keep doing this to himself. It had been stupid to start; continuing would be reckless and painful. He ought to stop doing it to Chris as well. If Chris was asexual, as Luca suspected him to be, then he needed less pressure to perform sexually, not an idiot who’d fallen in love with him climbing all over him in a manner akin to a crazed monkey. Luca had to cut him loose for his sake.

For Luca’s own sake, he needed to claw himself back to normalcy. He kept his feelings guarded for a reason. Being around Chris had taught him that not everyone was as mean-spirited and bigoted as his Juniors team had been. He would cherish his friendship with Chris forever, but it had been naïve of Luca to believe, albeit briefly, that he could allow himself the vulnerability of being himself and still have hockey. He had to find a middle ground, a way to be less of a closed-off asshole without getting hurt. If he stayed his current course, he would walk straight into a rejection so bad it would return him to being as angry and bitter as he had been for years. It would ruin his chance at making a place on this team.

Not everyone could be Jax and Tom.

He took a deep, steadying breath at the top of the stairs. It smelled of sugar and liquor, and the hum of voices below grew louder as he descended.

“Luca!” Howie greeted him with a broad grin and slightly unfocused eyes. He hadn’t stopped drinking, then. “Where’ve you been, man? How long can it take to get one man out of a Wookie suit?”

“The zipper was stuck.”

Thankfully, Howie didn’t care enough to question the lie. Instead, he dragged Luca in the direction of the den, where the remainder of the team had piled onto the massive gray sectional.

Vanderbilt, Cheryl, and Lily were saying goodbye in the doorway. Cheryl’s lipstick was smudged, and her hair was a mess, and Dmitriyev didn’t have the decency to pretend not to stare at her.

Lily slept on her father’s shoulder again.

If he was her father.

Luca took a seat next to Mooney and Mara, who had come as Spider-Man and Mary Jane, costume choices so tame they baffled Luca. He’d expected something more shocking. Then again, they didn’t know that half the team was queer. Maybe they wanted to play it safe.

A good call on their parts—one Luca ought to emulate.

The way they sat, sprawled out next to each other instead of with Mara perched decorously on Mooney’s lap or posing for photos, was outrageous enough for most hockey crowds. It took all of one glance to pinpoint Mara as no one’s trophy.

Raging, violent jealousy overtook Luca. He’d spent the last four years denying his identity as a bisexual man, and there Mara was, denying no aspect of herself and all the happier for it. Putting aside his feelings for Chris, locking them away and ignoring them, gave him the same sense of numb detachment, the same lonely, angry sadness. But now, knowing himself all the better for the experience, he couldn’t fool himself into a facsimile of contentment.

Chris would want him to do better than stew in his own anger.

On the other side of the couch, Ben held a wine glass between two fingers and talked a mile a minute. Phil, beside him, looked both long-suffering and amused.

“…and I try to follow along, I promise, but there are things I do not and will never understand about this game. Like, when you were in Chicago, right? That hit against Howie—whatshisface, the tall Russian guy?”

“Denisov is Tatar,” Dmitriyev said with a scowl. Whether Denisov caused his displeasure or he was moping about his lover, Luca could only guess.

“Sure.” Ben waved a hand. “I read four different Reddit threads about that hit, and no one could agree whether or not it was dirty. How is anyone supposed to know?”

“It was dirty,” Phil said. Luca and Tom agreed.

Mooney winced.

“You don’t think so?” Luca asked.

Mooney made a weighing motion with his hands. “Howie had his head down. If he’d seen it coming…”

“I did not have my head down!” Howie sat on the floor, leaning against the couch. Luca could see the glitter on his neck. “I was looking straight ahead, and he came from the side. I looked at the ice for a second—”