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“So don’t.” Cole kissed him, slowly, and then not slow at all, and shoved Ford’s jacket off his shoulders. “We’re careful. We’ve been careful. We’re allowed to have this part.”

Ford quit arguing. He led Cole upstairs and then down the hall to the bedroom, mouths and hands the whole way, banged a shoulder off the doorframe and didn’t care. He got him down onto the bed with himself over top, and for a while, there was nothing in the world but Cole underneath him, warm and solid and coming apart, louder than he ever let himself be anywhere else.

He got Cole’s shirt off and his own after, and the drag of skin on skin pulled a sound out of Ford he hadn’t made in years. Cole’s hands were everywhere at once, careful and greedy both, learning him, and when Ford worked a thigh between his legs and pressed down, Cole’s hips came up off the bed. He swore into Ford’s neck like it had been startled out of him.

“Ford.” Cole’s voice had gone rough all the way to the bottom. His hands went still on Ford’s hips. “Your pace. I meant that.”

“I know you did.” Ford got a hand between them and worked Cole’s belt open. “Not the last part. Not before a six a.m. bus with your knees in my back the whole ride.” He put his mouth to Cole’s jaw, his throat. “But I’ve been careful about you for a year. I’m done being careful tonight.”

He got a hand on his cock, and Cole’s whole body arched up into it. A groan punched clean out of him, his forehead dropping hard to Ford’s shoulder. It was the first time either of them had let it past mouths and wanting, and Ford felt the difference land higher than his hands. It was in his chest, in the plain fact of Cole letting himself be touched like this, letting Ford watch what it did to him, none of the guarded quiet he wore everywhere else in the world. Ford read him the way he read a shooter, off the hitch in his breath and the grip of his hands, and gave him what the sounds asked for. When Cole got a hand on Ford in return, sure and clumsy at once, Ford stopped thinking about the hip and the bus and the whole back half of his life for the first time in weeks.

They took each other apart in the dark, unhurried and greedy, and stopped short of the last step, the one they’d both quietly decided, without ever once saying so, was worth more than a rushed hour before a road trip. After, Cole laughed into his neck, wrecked and easy.

“So much for slow,” he said.

“That was slow. Restrained, even.” Ford grinned at the ceiling. “You should see me when I stop showing off.”

“You picked slow.”

“I’m aware. Past-me was an idiot.”

Ford rolled to his side and pulled Cole in against him anyway because he didn’t have it in him to let go all the way. They lay there tangled in the dark, breathing each other down. Cole’s heartbeat came back down under Ford’s palm, slow and steady.

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“What scares you worse? The surgery, or what comes after?”

“After, for sure.” Ford’s voice cracked, and Cole knew how much the vulnerability cost him.

Cole didn’t say anything in response. He pulled Ford’s arm tighter around himself and pressed back into him, and that was answer enough. Ford lay there with his bad hip, a bus to catch, Cole warm along the length of him, and knew he’d already decided. He’d decided back on Thanksgiving night, in the kitchen, and everything since had just been him catching up to it. He was done trying to talk himself out of it.

Deciding had been the easy part. He’d done it lying down, in the dark, with nobody watching. The hard part was tomorrow: walking into that room, standing three stalls from Cole, and giving away nothing, when hiding what he felt was the one thing he’d never been any good at his whole life. He had a season to learn how. He was already dreading how bad he’d be at it.

ELEVEN

The Stags were up by a goal with four minutes left, and Springfield was throwing everything they had at the net. Cole had killed a thousand plays like it. What made this one different was the twenty-three-year-old in the Stags’ crease, not two years removed from college hockey and playing the biggest minutes of his life. A point shot, a scrum in the blue paint, and then the puck squirting loose with Halsey lunging the wrong way as a Springfield winger wound up on the doorstep with half the net to look at.

There was no time to think. Cole dropped into the lane and blocked the shot with his body. The puck got him square on the thigh, one of those freak shots that catches at the wrong angle and drives through the padding like it isn’t there. His leg went dead from hip to knee. It didn’t matter. The puck never got near Halsey, and that was the only part Cole cared about. He went down. He got back up. He finished the shift with his leg throbbing. The Forum came up off its feet, their cheers roaring to deafening levels as Cole sprinted to the bench for shift change.

That puck was going to leave one hell of a bruise. He got to the bench and dropped onto it. The first face he found was Ford’s, down at the far end in full pads with his mask in his lap, relegated to backup for the night. This was the arrangement Ford had built with Theo the week before. Hand Halsey a start here and there, keep Ford off the ice on the nights the schedule gave them room, get everybody to the offseason in one piece.

Ford had been ducking out of the back half of practice all week to work with Theo and the training staff, and he’d made his peace with his new normal. Game nights were different. Dressing in full pads and parking it at the end of the bench while somebody else took his net was the first real test of the whole thing. Cole could see from across the ice it was killing him, quietly. They were one soft goal away from the Stags’ first loss since Thanksgiving, which Ford would inevitably put on himself despite not getting a minute of ice time. So Cole had made himself a wall in front of the kid all night because keeping Halsey upright was the only way to keep Ford content.

Deluca leaned over his shoulder and said, “Way to put your body in front of it, Englund,” gruff enough that Cole preened under the praise despite the pain. Deluca didn’t hand out compliments during games. He’d once watched the man tell Vargas a hat trick was “a start.” Cole took the praise and tucked it away.

Riggs cracked him on the helmet. “You’re out of your mind. I’m not sure you got the memo, but Deluca’s not in the market for another goalie.”

They ran the last couple minutes off the clock. It wasn’t pretty. Halsey coughed up a fat rebound inside the last two minutes that should’ve been buried. The only reason it wasn’t was Russ throwing himself across the crease to clear it off the line. But the kid made the one save he had to make, a glove snap from Springfield’s top winger that came out of nowhere, quick as a mousetrap. Raw, God-given reflex, and nothing you could teach a goalie who didn’t already have the instincts. For half a second, the Forum forgot he was green and just roared. Cole hated not being out there to help. At the far end of the bench, Ford’s shoulders came down an inch, the first easy breath the man had let himself take since warm-ups.

When the horn blared, the bench came over the boards in the best kind of chaos, guys piling toward the net, toward Halsey, who stood there looking like somebody had handed him a trophy and a live wire at the same time. Somewhere in the chaos, Novo got an arm around Cole’s neck and hollered that he was certifiable. Beaudry was jumping around like a kid at a birthday party. Cole let himself be dragged into the middle of all of it.

In the locker room after, Cole peeled off tape, answered Riggs’s dumb questions, and took the bag of ice Theo pressed against his thigh without being asked.

Theo crouched in front of him and pressed two fingers into the thigh, assessing the damage. Cole hissed through his teeth.

“You’re damned lucky that puck caught you in the pads,” Theo said. “You’ll hate life for a week. Keep it moving on the road so the muscle doesn’t seize.”

He taped the ice in place and stood, giving Cole a look that lasted a beat longer than the injury called for, flat and unhurried. Cole had the brief cold thought that Theo saw more in this room than he let on. Then Theo moved off to Carter’s shoulder.