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Just like that. As if I was a lamp.

I shrugged. Whatever. I didn’t have the energy to start another fight, and I just needed to freshen up, and I could destroy him later.

Why did it feel like he’d been looking at my chest, though?

Doesn’t matter. I went to the shower.

I’m not going to describe what happened in the bathroom, except to say that a man has needs after a hard game and there is nothing wrong with taking care of them, and I thought very specifically about a bartender named Marisol I’d met in Vegas last spring. I did not think about anyone with gray eyes. When my brain tried to swap the pictures halfway through, I drowned it loudly in my head.

I was toweling my hair when I heard him through the door.

“What are you doing?”

Oh, damn. Oh, shit.

I froze with the water still running, because the wall was thin, really thin.

“Taking a nap,” I called back, in the most bored voice I could manage. “What does it sound like?”

I turned off the tap, wrapped a towel around my waist, tried to look like a man with nothing on his conscience, and flung the door open. He was standing about four feet away, hands behind his back, face impossible to read. Except… there was something around his mouth. A very small tightness. Like he was swallowing something.

“Relax,” I said. “You wanna join next time?”

Oh my God, why did I say that? Why?

My heart was slamming around in my chest like a trapped bird. I smirked at his expression, and I whistled, and I walked right past him back to the bed, and nobody, nobody, would have known I was dying inside.

I got lucky. He said nothing. But I could still feel his eyes on the back of my head all the way across the room. I decided I was overthinking it. I’ve got a real gift for that.

I sat down on the big bed and pulled out my phone and, like every night, opened Discord.

Okay, this is a secret, and I’m only telling you because I’ve decided to trust you. Nobody knows this, not my team and not my family. Nobody on the planet would guess that the enforcer for a popular professional hockey team spends most of his free time on a server called PuckTalk, under the handle GoalieSlayer88, winding up teenagers and grown adults with the worst hockey opinions the internet has ever seen.

Tonight’s target was a man named Pucksworth who was firmly convinced fighting should be banned from the game.

GOALIESLAYER88: fighting is a sacred tradition invented by God to teach men humility

PUCKSWORTH: YOU’RE WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS SPORT

GOALIESLAYER88: and yet you’re here at 11pm on a tuesday, in my thread, pouring your heart out. someone should check on you

PUCKSWORTH: I HAVE A DEGREE

GOALIESLAYER88: i believe you brother. i believe you.

I grinned like an idiot at my phone. Best part of my day. Man, I loved this.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement.

Maksim was standing by the closet. He’d taken off his shirt. Without any sort of warning, no announcement. He was just… taking it off, calmly, with his back half turned, like a man alone in a room.

I glanced, and it was an accident. Okay, it was a glance.

Well. Well, well, well.

The guy looked… I’m going to be honest, and this is the last time I will ever be this honest, he looked beautiful. It’s a strange word to use for a guy and I know that, but there was no other word for him. He had long pale muscle cut like marble under the lamp, shoulders like a swimmer’s, a narrow waist, and skin that didn’t have a single mark on it, not even a mole or a scar. I was a little thinner than him and had about a dozen scars, and I found that, for no reason, very annoying. What a show-off.

I found myself staring longer than I should have.