Page 40

He huffed out a laugh, his hand going up to tunnel through his hair before he remembered it was gelled back. “You know what you look like,” he grumbled.

Someone laid on their horn behind me, and I snapped my eyes back to the road, easing my foot down on the gas. “Yeah. Weird looking.”

I was a professional athlete. My body wasn’t up for debate.

But my dad was this blond-haired, blue-eyed All-American guy People Magazine routinely included in its ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ issue, even years after his retirement. The only things I’d gotten from him were my height and hockey skills.

Otherwise, with my dark hair, freckles that covered practically every inch of my skin , sharp, high cheekbones, and an overly wide mouth, I was the spitting image of my mom.

On her, that added up to catwalks and magazine covers. On me, they were just … odd. So much so that when I was fourteen, one of my teammates told me that I looked like an alien. And in college, one of my friends’ roommates someone had called me a Picasso. It hadn’t been a compliment.

Mikey snorted and stretched his arm across the center console to shove my shoulder. “I’m a straight man, Cal, and even I can see what a smoke show you are.”

My whole body went hot and tingly, my gut doing that swooping thing that reminded me of the drop on a roller coaster just after you’d crested the top peak. But then my brain processed the other part of his statement—the one that meant no matter how badly I might want Mikey, I would never have him.

Which was fine. Really. I’d made peace with the fact that nothing was ever going to happen between us.

There was simply no world in which Mikey woke up one morning and thought to himself, “Today seems like a great day to explore my sexuality. I wonder if my very good friend Hunter Callahan would drop to his knees and suck my dick.”

A guy could dream, though.

A guy had dreamed, in fact, and I’d had to tip the cleaning staff an extra fifty dollars because of it, asking them to change the comforter out for a new one.

“I don’t know about that,” I mumbled, flipping on my blinker to make a left turn at the intersection at the top of the street.

“Well, I do, and I’ll prove it to you.”

“I’d rather you not.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mikey rub his hands together. “No, we’re totally doing this. Once we land in Toronto, we’ve got the rest of the night to ourselves. We’ll go out—hit up a club or something. I guarantee we can find you a girl who’s into all that—” he waved his hand up and down in my direction “—within the first ten minutes. If I can’t, drinks are on me the rest of the night.”

“Mikey, no.” I shook my head as we came over a hill, water visible in the distance. “That’s not … I don’t like …”

I blew out a breath, frustrated and angry at myself for not being able to come clean with him. To just be honest.

But I could never tell Mikey the truth—couldn’t tell anyone—that I was …

Gay! my subconscious screamed. You’re gay, asshole!

“Hookups aren’t really my thing,” I said from between gritted teeth. “Never have been.”

I dragged my attention back to the road in time to see I’d drifted into the opposite lane and tugged on the wheel to right the vehicle.

“Hey, no. It doesn’t have to go farther than flirting. Maybe boost your ego some. Let the ladies of Toronto prove to you how insanely hot you are.”

A woman hitting on me would not boost my ego. It would only prove how awkward I was when I wouldn’t know what to say—or worse, when I wouldn’t say anything at all. And then, at the end of a long and excruciating night, I’d go back to my hotel room alone, tied up in knots because the person I really wanted was down the hall, maybe with a girl of his own.

I was spared from having to say anything in response to that when my new place came into view. I slowed down, turning into the driveway of a three-story cedar-sided building wedged between two clapboard houses the developer had said were over a hundred years old.

Mikey leaned forward to look up at the building through the windshield as I drove toward the gate to the underground garage. “This is it?”

“This is it,” I said, clicking on the little white box clipped to my visor. Eventually, my front license plate would be programmed into the building’s security system so that the garage opened automatically whenever I approached.

I drove down the ramp, turned into my assigned space, and put the engine in park.

“Wait,” Mikey said, glancing around with a confused expression on his face. “How’d you get a clicker to come down here?”

“Uh,” I stammered, already fucking up my plan and we hadn’t even made it upstairs yet. It had never even occurred to me to have a cover story for the garage. “The, um, the agent dropped it off at the hotel while we were at morning skate.”