Page 18 of Line Change

I straighten away from the wall. “Does Korolev know about this?”

“It was his idea.”

That stops me. “Korolev wants a cat.”

“He sent me the shelter link and said the house is too quiet when I’m at work. Which is rude, because he’s the one who retired and made it quiet. Anyway, there was this orange one who bit him.”

“So that’s the one you’re getting,” I say. Korolev would take the bite as evidence of sound judgment.

“Obviously. Vasya says we have to think about it. He’s been thinking about it by looking at the cat’s picture every twenty minutes.”

I smile before I can stop myself. A few months ago, almost every conversation Grayson and I had ended with one of us pissed off. Usually him. Sometimes both of us. Now he calls Korolev Vasya as if nobody ever called him anything else, and I’m the person who hears about their possible cat before our mother does.

I didn’t know what to do with the two of them at first. Korolev was my teammate and friend. Grayson was my baby brother, even if he was twenty and had made it clear what I could do with that opinion. Korolev is closer to my age than his. It felt strange.

They’re happy. I can hear it every time Grayson says Vasya. I don’t worry about them much anymore.

“How’s Arizona?” Grayson asks, moving on before I can ask when they plan to decide.

“Hot.” Sweat is already drying under the collar of my shirt from walking across the parking lot.

“At least that means it’s warm.”

“The one good thing about Seattle is that the temperature isn’t identical to the one in Satan’s buttcrack.”

After a pause, Grayson says, “That doesn’t sound very Saint Pope.”

“Tell Korolev he can send that to whoever drew the halo.”

Grayson laughs. It’s too loud through the speaker, and I move the phone away from my ear until he stops. “I have to go. We’re on in an hour.”

“Okay. Try winning again. It seemed popular.”

“I’ll mention it to the team.” I check the time and push away from the wall. Grayson is still talking about how the cat only bit Korolev a little when I cut in. “Don’t let him eat anything important.”

“We don’t have him yet.”

“You called it him.” Grayson hangs up on me.

I go into the locker room feeling more like myself than I have all week. It lasts until Fraser pulls his shirt over his head across the room.

I look down at my skates. I’ve woken up hard four more times since the dream on the plane. Four. I’m counting because numbers are facts, and facts are easier to deal with than Fraser naked in my head.

The second dream had his mouth on my neck. In the third, he was on his knees between my legs, looking up while he opened my pants. Two nights ago, I dreamed his tattooed hand was wrapped around my cock and woke with my own fist tight around myself through my underwear.

Last night, I had him facedown beneath me. The ink over his shoulder moved every time I drove into him. He kept pushing back for more, swearing into the pillow, and I had one hand on his hip and the other around his cock.

I woke before I came. My erection didn’t go down until after a cold shower and fifteen minutes of game video.

It’s not helping that I see him almost every day. My brain has picked a convenient body and keeps using it. Fraser talks about sex the way other people talk about lunch, touches whoever is closest to him, and wears his shirts open far enough for the ink on his neck to show. He put his fingers on my tie at the poker night and made this into a subject. The dreams are an extension of that.

Stress has to go somewhere. Across the room, Fraser shoves an arm into his base layer. The fabric pulls over his back, then his shoulders. His tattoos disappear last.

I tighten a skate I’ve already tightened.

We play well enough to still be tied when the third-period clock runs out.

It’s not clean hockey. Arizona clogs the middle, hooks without getting called, and turns every fight for the puck against the boards into three men trying to occupy the same square foot of ice. Fraser takes an elbow to the mouth halfway through the second and comes back to the bench grinning with blood on his teeth.