Boise Boy

There Lawson was, looking ridiculously hot again.

We’d spent the morning grinding out buckets of sweat on our exercise bikes in Lawson’s living room, pedaling a hundred miles to nowhere while the TV rolled through ever-more dire Shark Week programs. I’d kept up a full-throated criticism of the shark facts getting spewed because, while the special effects were awesome, my catalog of shark knowledge was not increasing in value. 

“The Aboriginal Australians used to leave all kinds of rock carvings across the continent warning people not to go in the water because of all the Great Whites. Know who didn’t listen? European explorers.”

Lawson was so sweat-soaked he looked like he’d gone for an open-ocean swim. He arched his eyebrows at me, waiting. I could give Lawson a hundred weird facts a day, and he’d still be listening as his head hit the pillow and his eyes drifted closed. He’d smile, too, and then ask me for more.

Ask me how I know this.

“Did you know there are two separate shark populations in Australia?” I said. “The sharks on the eastern half don’t go west, and the sharks on the western half don’t go east. It’s like some Daddy Shark, a billion years ago, laid down a duct tape line at Adelaide and said there’d be a spanking for anyone who tried to cross.”

Lawson laughed. We were thirty-seven miles into our carpet ruts, but at the sound of his laugh, my heart shot off like a fourth grader’s science fair rocket project. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. Hel-lo, max heart rate. 

I rose from the saddle and sprinted, face down to hide my flush.

Lawson slowed and came to a stop while I tried to break magnetic fields. He was breathing hard, and his t-shirt was drenched. So soaked, apparently, that he needed to peel it off and toss it aside. His tanned skin—thanks, Rocky Mountain sunshine—glistened across the absolute mountain range of his jacked trapezius.

My eyes burned holes in the bike’s display, counting up tenths of a mile as Lawson downed his Gatorade.  

Our summer had been anything but conventional. Normal offseasons mean you’re doing the delicate dance of recovery-meets-strength training. Rest the skate muscles, power up the core. Weight lifting and couch potatoing, and lots of face stuffing. 

But we had escaped from the world and fine dined on dry hot dogs and Lunchables while I tried to get my head and my heart pointed in the same direction. When we came down the mountain, there’d been a necessary catch-up period of eating absolutely everything in sight, and an equally impressive total dedication to crushing reps and powering through our V02 max. 

It was jock heaven: all the food and muscle groups you could cram into a day, with your best bro at your side and semi-quality nature documentaries to guide the way.

Which meant that now, as summer wound down? After six-digit calorie days and thousands of pounds of weights? Lawson was jacked. Truly shredded, looking like he was Hulking out in slow motion, muscles popping out from his forearms and his quads and his biceps like he pumped up with air each morning. Morgan was the largest of us all on the Outlaws, but Lawson was catching up to him in solid mass, never mind the missing two inches in height. He’d met—beat—Morgan in pectoral depth earlier this week, according to my super scientific measurements of cheek-laying-on-chest.

My pituitary gland was born lazy, and it never seemed to get with the competitive program I’d bullied the rest of my body into. Something about being a preemie, born small, so tiny Dad’s got a photo of me curled up in one calloused palm when I was fresh and new. I’ve always been the smallest: the littlest kid in the front row of the class photo, the shortest kid on the team. Shrimpy, Pipsqueak, Happy Meal. It took real dedication to pack on the pounds in high school. When other school athletes were effortlessly downing protein shakes and lean chicken and rocking the sleeveless tank look, I was shoveling ice cream every time I passed the fridge, adding a Big Mac on the side of each meal, and slamming a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a pound of peanut butter a week, and I never wore a tank top. My little biceps twigs were shy. 

Thank God for the farm, Mom said, because I could eat the mortgage in eggs alone. 

Years helped. The difference between sixteen and seventeen years old was 22 pounds. Seventeen and eighteen, another 13 pounds, eighteen and nineteen, 16 pounds. I’d waltzed into my twentieth birthday under my goal weight, but that was because Lunchables and mile-high sunsets don’t pack on the weight.

Know what else is good for building muscle? Other than smashing max plate loads and caloric intakes in the six-digits?

Sexual frustration.

And wasn’t that a brand new feeling? I’d had my share of good luck kisses and backseat romps in high school, and a truly epic send-off from a sweet girl named Molly before hopping on the bus to Boulder. For nineteen years old, I’d had no complaints.

Then—

Well. Plugs got yanked. One of the first? Desire.

For a while, that wasn’t something I missed. There’d been too much else to deal with. Too much else to learn and do and be. Hockey player, teammate, friend. Best friend, eventually.

But, slowly, the weight of what was missing grew heavier than its presence. I noticed what wasn’t there. I noticed the emptiness, the flatline dullness inside me instead of the ignition I should have been chasing. I had always been slower to get up to a full burn and scorch, but I could get there. 

By the time I was stewing about my inability to wanna do it like they do on the Discovery Channel, I should have felt like an open prairie going up in flames every time I caught sight of Lawson’s shadow. Instead, there were maybe a handful of embers gasping for oxygen, fading as quickly as they sparked. 

It was frustration, all right, but a totally different kind.

I honestly thought that part of me might have died. Maybe it died early. Maybe unrecoverably. Fear replaced frustration. Was I broken?

Time, Dr. Hailey said. Time and patience, and we worked on dusting off those plugs I’d yanked out and putting them back into place. Time.  

It was a few days after Lawson and I had come down from the mountains, and after our birthday detour back to Boise for one last hurrah with my parents. We drove all day to Boulder. The rest of my rookie house bros were still out of town, visiting family and going on their own vacations, and when we finally got home, all we did was pour ourselves into Lawson’s bed and cuddle up, full best bros style. There was no pillow on earth better than Lawson’s pectorals, and he clearly thought his lips on my hair was some doorway to nirvana, because if we had an idle moment, I’d be in his arms and those lips of his would be right against my scalp.

There was never a question about if I was going back to my place or installing myself at Lawson’s. Obviously, duh, c’mon: I was staying at Lawson’s. 

I clung to Lawson like I was a baby koala, watching reality get painted into place around me in thin layers: down from the mountains, back to Boise, back to Boulder.

Baby koalas maintain physical contact with their carers for the first entire year. They never let go. Fact checked, Animal Planet.

It was morning, a super-duper lazy morning. I was burrowing into the blankets while Lawson was making coffee and banging around the kitchen, making french toast and strawberry milkshakes for us both. I’d driven the bulk of the day before, and we’d spent all of Wyoming planning out the rest of our summer. Food and fitness. Calories and crushing it. Protein and pumping iron. Appies and nappies, snipes and sandos, caffeine and creatine. It was going to be the summer of dreams, and it was going to begin right after this date I had with my snooze button.

I was good and comfortable in bed, face-first in Lawson’s pillow, breathing his scent down deep. That crisp, clean shampoo smell, mixed with that brisk soap smell, mixed with the warm him smell, like sunshine and hockey pucks and old leather. God, he smelled good, so good, way better than any jock should—

And it happened. Right out of the blue, right then and there, like I was a brand new teenager and my body was bursting to show off and prove it could be alllll that it could be. My eyes snapped open—sleep? Ha!—and I flipped to my back, yanked at the waistband of my boxers.

Well, hello there.

Too many Nike t-shirt slogans had been bouncing around my brain. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just do it. Get up and go. Work HARD. 

Sure thing, bud. Soon as I got something to work with. (If I ever did again.)

But there I was, all pumped and primed and ready for some quality Me Time. 

I went for it with both hands, like I was a kid grabbing Halloween candy. My eyes rolled back, and my breath left me in a long, slow punch, and I turned my cheek against Lawson’s pillow and burrowed in.

God, Lawson.

I rewound time and re-lived every one of our kisses. Oh, the bow of his lips against mine, and the plump fullness of his mouth moving across my own. Remembered the all-encompassing sweep of his arms as he held me. The granite solidity of his body against mine. Felt, too, the imprint of all 192 kisses he’d left on top of my head, and how he’d sometimes sigh into my hair, whispering words he thought I wouldn’t hear. 

I whimpered. This wasn’t going to take long at all. My eyes closed, and everything got blurry in my mind, white-hot and blazing, memories trading places with daydreams and desires. My head tipped back, and my hands went faster, and—

I was dizzy after, panting, staring at Lawson’s ceiling as the world spun. Was that… Was this… Were things— Was I—?

Delightedly, the answer seemed to be yes. My last, lingering, flickering plug was seated, and I was back. Wheels, snipes, and cellies for me, biscuits bardownski, top shelf. Oh yeah, baby. Doing it like the good ol’ Discovery Channel was back on the menu. 

It’s just—

You see—

The problem was—

After 100,000 calories and three weeks of bike riding the equivalent of Saskatchewan, and I had no clearer idea how to take this puppy out for a walk. I’d zoomed from desolate internal wastelands to finale fireworks, zip zap zoom any time a breeze blew within five hundred miles. Did a door open somewhere? Oh yeah. Did I walk a little quickly? I needed a moment.

Was Lawson on my mind?

Yes. Yes, all the time. Every minute, every second. Thoughts of him melted down my neurons. Smelling him? His sweat, his deodorant, his body wash, the warmth he left behind on his sheets? Boing, spring city. Seeing him? Watching him bust those personal records, punch through his bench press max and then sweep his hair back and throw me a grin? I needed a duct tape jockstrap and a bucket of ice.

So why not pull Lawson in and let him in on the secret I’d been smuggling around for a few weeks now? I didn’t need to play five-on-one hockey under two blankets, smothering my moans as I huffed Lawson’s pillow.

Well… Because.

Because I didn’t know if this would last.

And because I was scared out of my mind, afraid to hope that I really was all plugged in for good and too terrified to find out that I was wrong, and absolutely paralyzed at the thought of making a move that could end everything. I thought Lawson and I were solid. Like, to the end of time solid, Morgan and Shea solid, there for each other always. But what if… What if I was wrong? 

Time, Dr. Hailey had said. Time heals. And once time has healed, you become responsible for engaging in your future. For creating the life you want to lead. For finding your happiness.

So that was the real question: what came next? What was I building? What happiness was out there, ready for me to engage with?

I’m no expert on relationships, but even I knew Lawson and I had done things all backwards. We’d gone all in on the ‘I do declares.’ We’d plastered our lives together like we were two pieces of duct tape with the sticky-sides facing. We had slept arm in arm and leg in leg together every night since our forfeited Game 2 of round one in the playoffs (minus those four awful nights when Lawson was in Winnipeg). And we’d kissed, and—

We’d kissed.

We were everything to each other, except lovers.

Maybe, for most people, that was one of the steps you took before the “I love you for all time” declarations, but I’d never been conventional. I worked with what I got: five foot ten-ish inches, 187 pounds, a 3/8ths hollow on my skate blades, and a left-handed shot.

The allure of perfection has always tantalized me, though. I chased it my whole life, like perfect was an end-goal, something I could catch up to and grab, or find on a map, or hold in both hands. Once I got there, everything would be magical. The next achievement, the next team, the next league. That would be perfect. The NHL, obviously, was going to be perfect.

Perfect is an illusion, Dr. Hailey said. Perfect is for the night before sweet sixteen parties and watching Ferris wheels. Real life comes with pitfalls. Even in sports, when you visualize your perfect game, you always put in the work to imagine how to handle all the thousand and one mistakes that happen out on the ice. There’s no such thing as a perfect game, or a perfect life.  

So the Outlaws were not everything I’d imagined—at first—but now they were more than I’d ever dreamed. And when I used to lie in bed, imagining my big NHL star future, maybe I had pictured a petite button-nosed brunette on my arm once. But it turned out, the person of my dreams was a 6’ 3” Albertan, built like a refrigerator with oak tree thighs, capable of a textbook butterfly and with one of the best kick saves in the league. He made me look like a spunky little redhead on his arm, the cute one to his holy moly hotness.

Perfect changed every day. Perfect used to be five minutes away from Shea, once. I’d been so sure that, being left alone, would be perfect, so much so that I’d started to resent Shea’s ceaseless care and his devoted friendship. Just five minutes. Just five.

Then perfect was Morgan: Morgan telling me I had potential. Morgan spending his afternoons on the ice with me, downloading every hockey thought he’d ever had into my brain.

Perfect became an afternoon with the boys, a video game tourney, Lawson’s homemade pizza. Logan’s honking laugh as his face turned burgundy. Gavin’s little girl shrieking hello with both of her hands going full-speed jazz. Shea and I shooting the breeze. My first NHL goal.

And Lawson. Lawson, part of it all, the heartbeat beneath my days. The smile I skated for at the end of the rink, and the laugh I dedicated myself to teasing out a minimum of ten times a day. The eyes I needed I see, so soft and sweet and caring. Lawson was my rock star goalie, my mentor, my game buddy, my road roomie. My stay-up-until-dawn-talking bestie, my pillow on plane rides, my dealer of Red Vines. He was my teddy bear, my brick wall, my cornerstone. My safety. My security. My every waking daydream, and every moonlight-soaked fantasy dream, too. He was perfect, and I fell in love with him completely.

Maybe eternal perfect didn’t exist, but maybe what I was chasing wasn’t the all-around perfect of a place or a space or a time. Maybe what I was searching for was what was perfect for me.

And Lawson was perfect for me.

Which meant I wanted to be perfect for him.

You always start small and work your way up. The first time I ever lifted, my dinky little weights were only five pounds each. Yesterday, I was curling fifty pounds. Eating a whole box of cereal in one day used to be an accomplishment, after that first time I spewed Lucky Charms all over my mom’s van. Now, an entire box of Reese’s Puffs was a light snack.

Weights and reps. Aerobic and anaerobic capacity. Calorie mountains. Olympic naps. Lawson and me, morning, noon, and night. Kisses and smiles, hand holds and daydreams. Lunches and dinners (and protein shakes and boiled eggs and peanut butter toast). Falling asleep in each other’s arms and waking up in the same place. 

We were going to make this work. We were going to turn this into forever.

Before summer was over, I was going to make love to Lawson.

Lawson was still watching me trying to rip the flywheel from the frame of my bike. I pounded out another hundred non-existent yards and then sat back in the saddle for a cool-down spin, squeezing water into my open mouth. You’d think I wouldn’t miss with a target that large, but I did, dribbling all down my chin and across the front of my t-shirt. 

I’d swiped a bunch of shirts from Boise before we left. These were tight now, the cotton stretching across my pecs and my shoulders, and looking—I hoped—kinda hot.

Discovery Channel was winding up their afternoon tale of shark woe. Credits were rolling. “You know you can tell a shark’s age by counting rings on their vertebrae? And lady sharks can get knocked up by two different mister sharks at the same time.” I waggled my eyebrows, wiping my chin with the hem of my t-shirt. Lawson’s eyes darted to my belly, to the exposed skin beneath my navel. His gaze hit me like a sparkler, embers dancing down beneath my waistband, down toward—

“There’s a place in the Pacific called the Great White Shark Café,” I blurted out. “Way out where no humans go. No one knows what goes on out there, but all these sharks go and  hang out every year.”  

“You need to write the content for these guys.” Lawson wasn’t looking at my waistband anymore. He was focused on the control of his bike, punching buttons like he was cycling through the screens. “You know way more than all these episodes we’ve watched.”

It had been a long Shark Week, and I’d been a busy bee, working day and night as Lawson’s personal shark fact checker. “If you go cage diving, you can attract more sharks with acoustic effects than with chumming the water.”

“There is no amount of money anyone could pay me to climb into a cage and wait for a shark.”

“Aww, you don’t want to experience all of that?” On the TV, a shark swam menacingly close to a cage, chasing a fish head and eyeballing the cage diver clinging to the bars.

“Doesn’t that look like someone might be teaching the sharks that there are tasty humans inside little boxes at the end of a food rainbow?” The shark thrashed again, going after more fish head chum, flashing all of its very giant teeth for the camera.

“You wouldn’t hold my hand in the belly of a shark cage?” I pushed out my bottom lip, and my gaze caught and stuck on a bead of sweat traveling down Lawson’s throat. We could go to the Bahamas. We could wade in the shallows and pet a shark, one of the docile ones, not one of the ones that want to eat you. One of the ones that are smaller than your thighs, Lawson, my God, those thighs. I’d need four hands to go all the way around them. He’d look so good in a pair of those tiny James Bond swim shorts—

“I’ll wait in the boat.” Lawson winked, grinned. “With a big bottle of tequila and a Xanax.” He slid off his bike, all of his muscles rippling, and stretched, his arms high over his head, his shoulder blades reaching for each other like they wanted to kiss, and his delts perky and firm and as round as softballs. 

Zip zap zoom. Whale sharks’ skin is as unique as a fingerprint. Sharks are older than dinosaurs. Hippos kill more people each year than sharks do.

My heart—and another place—wasn’t getting the memo. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

“I need to get my oil changed before we head over to Gavin’s.” Lawson was still stretching, and my brain needed a West Coast delay to process what he was saying. “Do you want to grab smoothies while we wait?”

“Oh, I can do that.” It was 800 miles from Boise to Boulder, and we’d detoured off the edge of the world for a while. That many miles put a dent in an oil filter’s life. I should have offered sooner. “I can totally change that for you.”

“Yeah?”

“’Course. My dad taught me. It was one of my chores. Had to change the oil in the truck and the van every six months.” I wiped my face with my shirt hem again. “It’s easy. C’mon.”

***

Summer in Boulder is glorious. A hair under ninety, bright and beautiful, with a warm breeze to cut through the honey heat haze. 

Of course, after a marathon bike session and thirty minutes toiling beneath the hood of Lawson’s truck, all that sunshine and warmth was as welcome as— 

Well, as a great big shark. Or an inconvenient boner.

My shirt was a goner, too soaked to be useful as clothing anymore. It made more sense to use it as a rag. Shirtless halfway through the filter change, I ended up with oil smeared across my ribs and across my belly. I checked the dipstick and scrubbed my fingers, and then turned to Lawson.

He was hanging off to the side, quiet while he watched me work. Based on how he peered over my shoulder and said not one single word, car maintenance to him was like nailing Jell-O to a tree. Alberta boys were supposed to be the country folk of Canada, with the truck nuts and the camo gear and the backwoods hunting, but I’d apparently gone and found the one ‘Berta boy who had spent his whole life making ruts between the classroom and the hockey rink, no detours, save for a part-time pizza delivery job that he quit when it cramped his skate time. A prairie boy, Lawson was not. 

I grinned, rubbing at the oil soaking into my cuticles with my t-shirt rag. “All done.”

Lawson was a little flushed, red from his cheekbones down, and he’d shifted so the front fender hid his hips. His eyes kept darting from the engine block to my hands, my hands to my throat, my throat to my chest, before they’d smear away and slide to the ground. His flush kept deepening, moving from a paintbrush of maroon across to looking like he’d been dip-dyed, head to… well, where I could still see him, since he was hiding a bit.

“That was, uh.” His voice came out like a growl. He coughed, wrapped his hands around the edge of his open hood. “That was cool.”

He looked glorious like that, caught in summer sunlight slanting in from the driveway, arms overhead, muscles popping all fat and ripe like peaches across his upper body. Now I needed to hide my hips, tuck myself and my smuggled surprise right against the bumper and count to ten. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

“Happy to be of service. Brody’s Bodacious Bumper to Bumper car care, here for all your needs.” I grinned and bumped my thumb against my chest.

Lawson went center line red, as big and bright and fast as the goal lamp lighting up after a clapper. He froze, his eyes locked on mine before they snapped to my bare chest. He swallowed, long and slow, and the muscles in his forearms flexed.

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

It could happen here. How many pornos started like this? Having trouble with your car, sir? Well, lemme take a look… whoops, I dropped my wrench, lemme just grab another one… Here, use this one. Bow chicka wah wah, drop the bass. We were halfway there already, both of us overheated and flushed and super mega awkward, our hips twisted away, our hearts pounding, our breaths coming short and sharp. I could slide around the bumper, slip between the cage of his arms, loop my hands around the back of his neck—

Nervousness and fear slithered around in my belly like I’d shoved ice worms down my shorts. As fast as I was ready to go, I was suddenly not, and my intricate garage fantasies were replaced by all the ways everything could go so wrong. Was I really all there? Really ready? Was Lawson? Sure, my mind was going for the gold, but he’d been a perfect Victorian gentleman, averting his gaze from all of my scandalous ankle flashes. The most he did was lovingly stroke my t-shirt covered back or lay his palm on my knee while I was sitting shotgun in his truck. Did he want to hop on the Brody train? Like, really? 

“We should get ready for the party,” Lawson finally said. How long had we been averting our gazes, staring-not-staring at each other’s glistening muscles and full lips? “You want to shower first?”

“Sure.” I pushed away from the truck and rolled my shoulders.

Lawson stayed right where he was. “I’ll finish up.”

All the finishing up that was needed was to drop the hood, and, yeah, that was a stretch for me to reach, but—

But Lawson was still hips-plastered to the fender, and…

I smiled. Felt heat skip down my spine, curl deep in the center of me. 

Maybe not now. Maybe not today, even. But soon. It would be soon.

Inside, I left a big glass of ice water on the kitchen counter for Lawson, then ran upstairs, trying to beat my personal stair-climbing record of 1.3 seconds. I stripped in the bedroom—our bedroom? Lawson’s bedroom?—and kicked my dirty clothes into a pile. Into the shower I went, turning the water cold. Showers were tough situations on normal days. All that Lawson smell, and all those Lawson imaginings: him in the shower, sudsing up, shampooing up, slick and lathered and rubbing his hands all over his skin. Maybe him and me in the shower, skin on skin, me wrapped up in his arms, his hands moving over my chest—

I tipped my face into the spray and pressed my palms to the tile, waiting for the burn to melt out of my body.

***

The big team summer blow out party was at Gavin’s, since he was one of the only guys on the team who had a pool. Everyone was there, finally back from their summertime adventures. Logan had a girl on his arm and hearts for eyeballs. Connor looked very tan and very muscular, and he said he’d spent a month rock climbing and back country hiking in Wyoming. He looked like he’d killed a bear while he was out there, too, and then ate every scrap, and then wrapped himself in the fur and absorbed the bear spirit, because, damn. I thought I was doing good with my caloric intake, but clearly I was wrong. 

Gavin, Julia, and their kids had spent part of the summer at the beach, doing nothing but chasing waves and playing with their daughters. Gavin looked five years younger, every stress line rubbed out of his forehead, his eyes bright with perpetual joy and cheerful laughs. He kept close to Julia, wrapping her into his arms and kissing the side of her neck, and his big palm strayed across her belly more than once. Hmm.

We did the back slaps, the holler hugs, the run-and-jump into each other’s arms. We felt up each other’s bulging biceps and slapped at thickened slabs of abs, complimenting each other on our summers of smashing it. Morgan pulled me into a dangerous, everlasting noogie, and I nearly suffocated between his thick and furry pecs, but I went for the purple nurple and scrambled my way to freedom, doing the tuck and roll across the lawn toward the safety of Gavin’s daughter playing with her water pad.

Then we cannonballed into the pool.

Twenty hockey guys, a handful of wives, and a mess of little kids can create a homemade wave pool in about a minute flat. We got a good swell going, between the animal house wrestle-fest going on in the deep end, the laser pass NERF football happening over the death-wrestlers’ heads, and the little kids on floaties riding the rise and fall in their donut rings. Julia put on Gavin’s party mix, which included most of our locker room hits, and when the guys weren’t trying to drown each other, they were singing along at top volume. At least, until someone climbed onto someone else’s shoulders and shoved them underwater, and the wrestling shark attack splash fest began again.

Off-key bellow-singing, what sounded like sharks at full attack mode, a chorus of Ohhhh and Broooo, mock cries of agony when the NERF football lasered into your shoulder at Mach 3 and you went limp in the water, high pitched giggles and screams from the little kids, and another big cannonball splash, emptying the pool of another hundred gallons of water. I hoped Gavin’s neighbors were on Mars.

Someone bro bro broed everyone to attention, and a call for Chicken was thrown down. “Teams!” Morgan shouted. “Teams, form up!”

Of course, Shea and Morgan were on the same team, so it seemed right to grab Lawson and play against them. Shea hefted himself onto Morgan’s shoulders, his thick thighs squeezing Morgan’s head and neck. Morgan sneaked a kiss against Shea’s exposed skin where his bathing suit had ridden up, and he grabbed hold of Shea’s legs like he was in anaconda heaven.

I climbed Lawson like a tree, slithering up his back, squeezing my thighs and hips around his waist and crawling up his massive shoulders inch by inch. Lawson went completely still as I porpoised up, no help at all, not until I was settled, finally, on his shoulders with my thighs locked against his ears. He grabbed my legs and held, like he was trying to root me to him. His thumbs dipped, high enough on my leg that they caught—and then slid beneath—the hem of my hiked board shorts.

He’d never touched me there. His hands had never touched the skin on my tender upper leg, had never wandered past an affectionate knee clasp. But now— bare skin on bare skin. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. It was zero-point-seventy-five inches of contact, two calloused thumbs against my sensitive inner thighs, but it was him, and he was touching me. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. 

Board shorts are no place to hide a boner. And, hoisted on the shoulders of the love of your life, surrounded by your most favorite teammates in the world, isn’t the picture perfect Kodak moment for your amazingly awesome lust to come roaring back. Zhuuum, there goes the lightsaber. Ludicrous speed.

Saved by a splash, or, more accurately, a tsunami, followed by a bellow and a charge. Morgan sent a wall of water toward the two of us and then took off like he was charging through peanut butter. The water was up to his and Lawson’s chests, and they were both weighed down—Morgan more than Lawson, sadness—so elegance was not part of Morgan’s attack.

Shea was all hands on his attack, grappling and pinching and going for an illegal armpit tickle. I protested, cried out, “Hey!” and got slapped with a splash to the face by the peanut-gallery-slash-splash-zone-operators-slash-referees. All they were really doing was making gorilla noises and hurling water, so that was kinda close to what some NHL refs do during games, too. Beneath us, Lawson and Morgan were wrestling and trying not to drown. Shea’s legs tightened as I tried to unbalance him, and Morgan spaced out to Jupiter for a handful of seconds. Lack of oxygen or something else, I wasn’t sure. But I did it again, and again, and finally, I got Shea unbalanced enough and Morgan distracted enough that they both tumbled sideways, toppling into the deep water by the waterfall and pool slide. 

Cheers rose, and I threw my arms over my head as Lawson and I were showered in splashes. Lawson’s hands stayed glued to my thighs.

I had to get down, though, because saved by the splash was only going to work once. The easy way to dismount would have been to unhook my legs and slide down Lawson’s backside, but do I do things the easy way? No, I do not. I went forward, rising like I was climbing out of a saddle, used Lawson’s hip bone as a step, and then slipped body-to-body down the front of him.

Every part of us touched. My thighs moved in slow motion, skin against skin as my trunks rode up, and those sensitive inner thighs of mine ran right over the Swiss Alps of his chest, in and out and in and out of his curvaceous muscles. Then down, over his ribs, his obliques—my thighs were around him, my legs were around him, ba-bump, ba-BUMP—until my feet dropped and the rest of me followed, and my stomach, my much less impressive chest, and my shoulders bumped their way own Lawson’s utterly magnificent body. 

I ended up standing on his toes, the water up to my neck, with his arms wrapped around me. Both of his hands were on my back, palms against my lats, fingers arrowing down the valley of my spine.

He was wearing sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes, but he had that open-mouthed shocked Muppet look going on. Water dripped off the ends of his hair, ran down his jaw and his chin and over those full, open lips. We were body to body, so close water wasn’t even flowing between us. The pool was cool, but not cool enough, and I had seconds before I had to get out of there.

I threw him my best smile and lovingly bit him on the shoulder. He gasped when I lurched out of his arms, a hitch in his breath and a little moan all wrapped together, and as I sank beneath the surface, his fingers lingered on me, trailing across every micron they could before I was out of his reach. Underwater, I ottered to the pool steps, trying to get as much coolness flow across my flaming nerves as possible. One Mississippi… Two Mississippi…

I treaded water on the bottom of the shallow end, watching my teammates’ legs as they got the next round of Chicken set up. Morgan and Shea were holding hands underwater. Behind me, the little kids were kicking in their floaties, their legs short and squat like ducks paddling on a pond. I tickled Gavin’s daughter’s foot, and I heard her shriek from deep water four feet down.

She calmed when I swam up in front of her, relaxing from Baby Battle Stations Red Alert to ‘come play peekaboo with me’ in two seconds flat. I did, popping up and down around her floatie, tugging on her chunky toes and delicately dripping water over her pool hat as she sounded off in happy shrieks. 

“Butterfly” by Crazy Town rolled across the back yard, and I bopped my head to it, singing along with lyrics and performing for Gavin’s daughter. I’d heard this song once, sometime in my life, but that’s how it worked with me. Lyrics and facts and trivia and nonsense were always sticking to me. Pokemon? Heck yeah, man, I got that Blastoise with the base HP of three hundred and an attack of two-fifty-two. Dendrochronology is the science of determining a tree’s age by studying its rings. Colorado is known as the Stegosaurus State. When I got the call-up from the Outlaws, Dad ordered one of those little kid dinosaur birthday cakes with a giant stegosaurus painted on it in piped icing. A stegosaurus is what he and I went to go dig up on our daddy-son trip when I was a kid, and I always thought, always, that if hockey didn’t work out, I’d go back to digging up dinosaur bones with Dad. Maybe Lawson would want to dig up dinosaur bones. I should ask—

The lyrics I was singing to a two year old suddenly hit me. Ohh, steg-o-saurus. Bet Lawson could make my legs shake if he gave me his sugar. Or, if I gave him my sugar, could I get his legs shake-shaking? Sealed with a kiss, yes, please. 

Oh my God, I had to get out of there.

Julia, Gabe’s wife, and Logan’s girlfriend were all sipping virgin frozen daiquiris and sitting on the pool steps within arm’s reach of the little ones, so I hauled out of the pool, grabbed a towel out of the mountain dumped on the lawn, and wrapped up into the sun-heated cotton. With the knot firmly tied over my waist, I collapsed into the patio hammock and stared at the summer sky, my arms and legs starfished out, deep breathing as I tried not to find the shape of Lawson’s muscles in the ridiculously buff clouds flexing overhead.

Someone was obviously feeling the early 2000s because R. Kelly’s “Ignition” played next.

Being in love was hard. Being in love and being twenty years old was even harder.

That wasn’t true. Being twenty years old was amazing. I’d been on this earth for two whole decades. How strange to think of it that way. My first decade had been so different from my second. Fire truck toys to junior gold medals. What would the next ten years look like? Well, the first six were locked up, at least. I’d signed a six year contract with the Outlaws, with a verbal promise that I’d never be traded unless I asked to be moved. I had a home. A team. A place. A family here, in addition to Boise.

Lawson signed a six year contract, too, with a no movement clause officially kicking in after about two minutes. I want to play with you forever. Six years was forever, from the horizon of twenty years and five weeks old. We’ll never have to be apart. 

Something settled inside me, like the earth shifting in deep time ways, moving into rock layers that were going to stand for millennia.

After the mountains, when Lawson and I ran out of hot dogs and Lunchables and I said I was ready to step back into the world, as long as I was taking that step with him at my side, we drove to Boise to celebrate my birthday. Mom and Dad were delighted to see us again. Well, first they told us to go hose off behind the barn and then take a long shower, and then they were overjoyed. Mom and Lawson grilled a huge birthday feast of steaks and potatoes and shrimp on skewers, and Dad and I played trick shot against the garage door, trying to turn the entire third panel black with rubber marks.

Lawson kept distracting me, though. I kept looking over at him, at his goofy grin and how my mom made him laugh that ridiculous giggle, where he curled his shoulders and dropped his chin, like he was trying to keep it in until a snort burst out of him, every time, every single time. It was one of the top three laughs Lawson had, second to his huge belly laugh and the quiet laugh that only I ever got to hear, when it was just the two of us—

“Did I ever tell you how I met your mom?” Dad was watching me and grinning, spinning his hockey stick in his hands.

Parents aren’t supposed to have history. They’re like dinosaur bones: they’ve been there forever, exactly like that. I scowled. He laughed at me, and then he started talking.

When he was done, we were both leaning against the bumper of his truck, scraping our stick blades against the gravel and staring at ants marching for a lost Dorito. I knew, of course, that I was a lot like my dad. A lot like him, like you could just shrink him with a ray gun and, poof, there I was. I was certain there were going to be questionable fashion trends I’d embrace wholeheartedly later in life, like a braided rat tail and an Indiana Jones hat, or even a bowling shirt.

But the way he talked about finding Mom, and knowing, down deep inside of him, that she was it, that she was the rest of his life… 

We both stared at Lawson and Mom, working the grill and smiling.

Dad said he’d been a firecracker of a young man, bouncing all over Idaho and working the rodeo circuit. He loved the chase, the bright lights, the barrel races, the dust flung up from boots and hooves. He was all over the legal and the not-so-legal setups, when rodeos popped up in the middle of a farmer’s field and disappeared by dawn. My mom would never be caught dead at an illegal rodeo, but Dad swears that’s where he met her. She was in a denim miniskirt—pass the brain bleach—and sipping on a beer with three of her friends, watching the hands helping with the horses. Her friend was the forward one, calling out to the cowboys and wolf whistling, but Dad’s eyes locked onto Mom, and that was that. He missed the entire rodeo, spent all those hours sitting with her on a bale of hay and talking until dawn. He asked for her number, but she gave him her address, said he could write her a letter if he was willing to take the time. He did one better, and he showed up two weeks later, scrubbed clean and spruced up and knocking on the front door of the ranch—our ranch—to ask her father if he could join on as a hand and, also, court his daughter.

Grandpa was not a man who suffered fools, and he raised four daughters under one roof, sheltering their dreams and their paths into their futures until they were ready to choose for themselves. He’d stared Dad down, eyeing him from his boots to his hat to his calloused hands and his dirt-worn knuckles, then told him that the choice was up to his daughter. Mom came down the stairs, saw Dad, and told Grandpa to give him the job. Six months later, they were married. Six years later, I showed up, and when Grandpa passed, Mom and Dad took over the family ranch. All Mom’s sisters had moved away, chasing city jobs.

“When you find who you’re meant to be with, you’ll know,” Dad said. “That hum inside you will shift some. Settle down a bit. You’ll know it in your soul when it’s right, Buzzy.” I shoved my shoulder into his, and he wrapped his arm around me and chuckled. Buzzy had been Grandpa’s nickname for me. Self explanatory, really. I was Dad’s son through and through.

Before—after Coates, but before Game 2 of round one, before everything came out, before Dr. Hailey, and before Lawson and I went up the mountains—everything in my world had been muted. It was like there was a big wad of cotton between me and all my feelings, and even though I knew I cared for Lawson, and I knew that I felt something deeper for him than I felt for all my other teammates… I couldn’t quite get close to what that feeling was. The bad stuff was still inside me, memories and shame and fears like ice stalagmites and stalactites jabbing me anytime I wandered down Emotions Lane. It was easier to not explore any feelings, to live in the moment, hurl myself from the game to the house to goofing off with the team and then back to the game. If we were laughing, I wasn’t feeling bad. And if we were winning, everyone else’s happiness was enough to buoy me into a high tide.

Then it all came crashing down—or, well, came crashing in sideways, if you want to be really technical about it—and…

I knew how I should be feeling, but I couldn’t get there, and the frustration about the mismatch between where my head and my heart were was almost enough to launch me on Rage Rocket out to Neptune. Or bury myself in a black hole, because if I couldn’t really love Lawson back the right way, then… Then did we even have a future? Wasn’t I just holding him back? He deserved someone who loved him with the same intensity that he gave his love, and I… I was really scared. Really, epic scared. 

It happened in the mountains. At first, a little trickle, like a stream had unfrozen and was starting to flow, finding a new path through a raw and unknown wilderness. Moments together fireside, Lawson and I lying in the dark and watching stars spiral overhead while I listened to his heartbeat. And then, all at once, a roar, a gushing, heaving, torrential downpour. Everything came in, like I was standing at the base of an empty Niagara Falls as someone flipped the On switch, and whoosh. There it was: my life and all my emotions, every single one of my feelings, unwound from that cotton bunting and set free. Pride and joy and heartbreak, elation and despair, and hope. All of my tangled and knotted feelings about the team’s exit from the playoffs. My gratitude to Shea, to Morgan, and the overwhelming realization about what I’d nearly stolen from myself: this life, all of this, all this joy.

And love. All of my love for Lawson. 

My love for him had grown steadily throughout the season, sheltered in some safe place within me, far away from the pain and the hurting places. Set free, that love hit me like a firehose, and I basked in the torrential flow of it all. Every memory, every moment, all the laughs and the smiles and the jokes, all the late nights where we stayed up talking or bullshitting or playing video games because neither one of us wanted to let go. All the days at the rink, all the competitions, all the ‘beat you across the ice’ and ‘bet you can’t hit that spot on the glass’ and ‘bet you can’t get Logan right on the ass.’ All the times he looked at me, and all the times I looked back, and all the days I was right there with him, falling in love and singing the same love song in sign language while building our love story out of verbs and future tense.

Time. Time and patience. I’d held on, and held on, and held on… 

And I got my life back. I got myself back.

Now, when I tried to think about the dark times, and all the Before stuff—last summer—all I feel is that deadened, cotton-wrapped dullness. I know, in my head, in my memories, that I felt awful, abysmal, that I’d been down in the depths of a place I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but… the feelings from then were gone. They were all locked up, encased in ice, sealed away. It was like the bad and the wonderful had flipped places inside of me.

My life looked High Def after that, 8k clarity, ultra bright, ultra clear, all around immersive experience. Did air really taste this clean? Was sunshine really this gold? Did Lawson’s kiss really taste like a promise, like forever and happiness and ‘waiting really does mean I’ll wait,’ and ‘this is only the first of a lifetime.’

A shadow passed over my face, blocking out the sun. I frowned, hefted my shades, and glared one-eyed at my interloper as my hammock swayed. The speakers were blasting “Shake Ya Tailfeather.”

Lawson wagged a bottle of sunscreen at me. “You want a re-coat?”

Ooh, hands. Yes, please! Then I noticed Lawson had grabbed one of the spray bottles, which, A+ for thinking of my sun-shy skin, but B- for the lack of hands-on application. I sat up, and Lawson dutifully sprayed me from the roots of my hair to the balls of my feet, making sure to get behind my ears and along my ribs, no matter how I squirmed or wrinkled my nose. And, you know what? Even just that, him a foot away and spraying me with Banana Boat fake coconut, was enough to get me all worked up again. The care of it all, of him keeping track of my eager-to-burn skin and how I popped freckles like they were some kind of hot, and then coming over to make sure every part of me was protected. Forget the hands. A++.

When he was finished, he made me wave my arms in great big circles, air drying myself while he counted down from fifteen. I flopped back with an exaggerated sigh, and then looped one of my knees around the back of his leg. “C’mere.”

On our drive back to Boulder, I’d asked Lawson if we were going to keep what was between us quiet. Did we need to keep us a secret? “You need to tell me if you want to,” I’d said. “Because I don’t plan on hiding anything. I will if you want to, though.” I wasn’t rude.

“But you don’t?”

“But I don’t.” I wanted to run screaming through the streets, bellowing at the top of my lungs. I love Lawson Murray. And, guess what? He loves me, too!

“Good.” Lawson had my hand in his and both were on his thigh. He raised my fingers to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “I don’t want to hide anything, either.”

So in front of everyone, in front of all our teammates, in front of all the wives, in front of Logan’s new girl, I tugged Lawson into the hammock with me. He came down with an “oof” and a worrying creak of the ropes, and the whole frame went wobbly. I grabbed the sides of the hammock—like that was going to do anything at all—and he grunted and shifted and shimmied his way into a more comfortable position: behind me, where I could lay against his chest and he could drape his arms over my shoulders, and we could tangle our legs like Twizzlers and play a lazy game of footsie while the hammock swayed and the emptying of the pool continued, thanks to the orangutan playhouse still going on in there.

I leaned against his shoulder, my head tipped back, watching those biceps-popping clouds drift. Beneath me, Lawson was warm and steady, his heartbeat thrumming and his fingers tracing little spirals and hockey sticks beneath my collar bones. He kissed my temple and my hair. I smiled. 226 head kisses. 

The music changed again, belting out Uncle Kracker’s “Follow Me.” My eyes closed, and I threaded my fingers through Lawson’s and let my mind swim into the deep blue sea.

I loved my life. I loved it more than I thought I ever could. I didn’t love everything that had happened, but I loved this life, my life, and my place in the world. And my place right here, in Lawson’s arms.

***

In the morning, we had our official team check in and medical and fitness testing. Since the house bros were back in town, I went home after Gavin’s party—reluctantly, and deeply torn up, watching Lawson drive away after dropping me and Connor off like he was about to take the Oregon Trail across the continent, not make two right turns and park less than three minutes away.

Everyone being home was awesome, though. We stayed up way too late, sprawling in the living room across our massive sectional, stuffing our faces and catching up on the adventures. We were a sunscreen-scented stink fest, coated in pool chlorine and sweat and Dorito dust, with sandals stinking up the floor and duffels piled in the entryway. It was epic. It was home.

I loved the house when it was full, when all the house bros were banging around. The coffeemaker and the four blenders clanking in the kitchen, guys moving around each other as they shaved and brushed their teeth and showered. Feet slapping up and down the stairs and the thunder of man-boys going full speed. Sneakers squeaking on hardwood and flip-flops snapping, five different playlists floating out of bedrooms and crisscrossing the halls. The fridge door opening and closing—and opening and closing and opening and closing and opening and closing—and then the freezer, when someone went for the ice cream as a late night calorie top off. Home.

Logan and I shared the big bedroom suite, because even though the team had whipped out a mansion for us, ten rookies still meant most of us had roommates. Shea, as oldest, got his own room, but he’d bounced out to Morgan’s, and the guys who wanted to go in for a single room fought it out over a slap shot contest. Connor won.

I liked sharing. I’d had a roommate ever since arriving in Boulder: Shea first, at both the skanky hotel Coates put us in and then at the nice digs Morgan rescued us to. Then Logan and I agreed to share the owner’s suite and Lawson and I got paired up as road roomies, so there wasn’t a single night that I was ever alone. (Until Game 3 of round one, when Lawson was in Winnipeg. But Mom and Dad were down the hall, so I wasn’t totally alone, just…)

There’s a rhythm to sharing space with someone else. I’m a good roommate, if I do say so myself. Clean and courteous, and it’s easy to move around me. Logan and I kept up a running stream of whatever was on our minds as we brushed our teeth and rinsed off the funk and got ready for bed. In the darkness, Logan started talking about his girl, about how he was really, really super into her, and if she was that into him, then he’d better start thinking about thinking about finding a ring.

“What about you?” he asked, after I congratulated him on finding an absolutely awesome girl, and told him that when he wanted to go look at rocks, I was happy to tag along and help because I definitely liked shiny things. “You seem good, bro.”

“Yeah. I’m really good.” I nodded, even though the lights were out and we were in our separate beds, talking at the ceiling. He couldn’t see me. “Really, really good.”

“You and Laws, huh?”

“Yeah.” I could hear the huuuuuge smile in my voice.

“Maybe you’ll buy a ring when we go out, huh?” He was smiling, too.

“Man, he should buy me a ring.”

Logan snorted. “A Ring Pop, maybe. Cherry flavored.”

“I’d dig it.”

“’Course you would. Anything you can stick in your mouth.” I barked out a laugh as Logan went “Aaa-ooooo,” and then the conversation faded when Logan yawned like a lion settling down on the savannah. “Ready for meds tomorrow?”

“Bro, I’m gonna smash it. I’m so ready. I’m gonna astonish you all.”

“What, you’ll be five-foot ten-and-a-quarter inches this year?”

I hurled my pillow across the room. Logan grunted when it flattened his face, but he was still laughing. A few seconds later, he flung it back, which was cool of him, because I didn’t have another one. “Night, man,” he said. “It’s really good to see you happy. And I’m really, really glad for you.”

“Same, bro. Super same.”

Logan drifted off to sleep with the speed of a well-trained athlete, and I dragged my phone in front of my face. One new message, from Lawson Murray <3 

After the heart, I’d added the kiss lips emoji to his contact info. Maybe in the future, I’d add the wedding bells, too.

Lawson: It’s weird not having you here.

Me: Same. Come over. I’ll make a rope ladder out of sheets and smuggle you up into my bedroom.

Lawson: *laughing emoji* You gave me a key. I could come in the front door.

Me: Well, where are you then?

Lawson: *heart emoji* Did you have a good time catching up?

Me: Yeaaaaa, missed my bros a lot. So pumped they’re home and the season is almost here.

Lawson: Want me to pick you up tomorrow? Or are you driving in with Shea and Morgan? Or one of the guys?

Me: I’ll pick you up. <3

Me: And I’ll bring coffee.

Lawson: Throwing in coffee, eh? Can’t wait.

Lawson: Sleep well. See you in the morning. <3

Me: You too, goalie of my most amazing dreams <3 <3 <3

I pulled up a picture from my “Lawson <3” folder on my phone and gazed at the two of us, arm in arm and cheeks mashed together, beaming as I snapped a selfie at the end of one of our meandering hikes on the mountain.

God, I loved him.

***

I pulled up at Lawson’s curb the next morning with my Jeep cover down and my doors off. Jordan Davis’ “What My World Spins Around” was on the radio, and I hung my flip-flop covered foot out of the driver’s footwell and wolf whistled as Lawson trotted down the drive. “Morning, hot stuff.”

Lawson bracketed his hands around the driver’s door and leaned in, pushing me back against my seat. He hesitated, eyeing me until I stopped breathing, and then swooped in, kissing me deep, and slow, and oh-so-hot. His lips moved against mine, teasing me open with little licks and nibbles. I moaned into him, grabbing the back of his neck and trying to pull him closer. He could crawl on top of me, right? Straddle me in this Jeep, surround me, envelop me—

Lawson pulled back. His nose brushed against mine, and he peppered my cheek with a dozen tiny kisses. “Morning, my love.”

Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. I sighed, running my fingers through his hair as I chased him for another bone-melting kiss. “So not fair.”

Lawson chuckled as he circled the front of my Jeep. I shifted, spreading my thighs, and pushed my palm into my crotch to try and hide the sudden tent pole I’d pitched. Compression pants were a lie. Tensile strength didn’t help at all. And the basketball shorts I’d thrown on over top were as helpful as a tissue. In fact, the way the fabric laid, it was like shining a spotlight on my condition.

“You show up looking like this, and you say I’m unfair?” Lawson swung into the passenger seat as his eyes traveled down my body. I was rocking my snap back and one of my tighter workout tees, determined to show off my gains when we got to the rink.

I grinned. “Yeah?”

He cleared his throat and settled in, taking the coffee I passed over. “Yeah.” His voice was a little gruff, a little deep.

“Wicked.”

***

Medical and fitness testing is the bat signal for the start of preseason. Come one, come all, get your height checked, your muscles measured, and your vertical jump critiqued, and do it all with your bros. Last year, medical was no fun at all, more like a field trip to the morgue. This year? Party central. And even though we all saw each other twelve hours ago, and we tried to drown each other and egged each other on into food eating contests while we shoved burgers and pizza in our pie holes, we still cheered everyone’s arrival like each guy walking in the door was a long-lost rock star parading down the red carpet.

We divided up into groups of four and cycled through all four hundred and seventeen fitness stations. If “groups” was someone’s plan to keep us organized, ha. Yeah right. Sure, four of us completed each test at a time, but as soon as someone was finished somewhere, they were wandering over to check out what was happening on the bench press, or cheer on the bike test, or heckle the grip test. A whole crowd formed, poof, like magic, as I stepped up to get measured for my official player height.

Oh, here we go. I rolled my eyes and thought of the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—

“Five feet,” Steve started, “ten and five-eighths inches tall. You’ve grown, Zeags.”

I was prepared for a wave of snorts and groans and heckles, calls of Shrimpy and Get back to the U12s and Juniors is down the road, bud. I was not prepared for the whole group to start clapping and for Morgan to call out, “Yeah, all right!” as Shea whistled and Gavin said “Six-eight on the inside” as he held out his fist for a bump.

Even Logan was cheering, and he slung his arm around my neck and knuckled my ear. “Great things come fun size.”

I loved this team I loved this team I loved this team—

The difference between nineteen and twenty years old turned out to be ten pounds, but that was ten pounds of sheer, hardened muscle, and I was cool with that being my smallest weight gain since puberty’s bomb blast.

To no one’s surprise, Morgan shredded the pull-ups station, and no one came close to his numbers… until Lawson stepped up to the bar. Suddenly we were all back, everyone crowded around, clapping and cheering and urging Lawson on. Just three more, just two more, just one more, and he’d beat Morgan. 

No one was cheering louder than Morgan, bellowing as Lawson strained for that last… final… rise… and hold… and he did it. Lawson beat Morgan’s pull-up record.

Morgan dragged him into a bear hug when he was done, and Lawson tried to wrap his jelly arms around Morgan’s shoulders as he grinned. Morgan punched him in the chest and called him an absolute unit, then massaged Lawson’s shaking shoulders as Lawson downed a Gatorade.

Shea kicked everyone’s butts on the one-legged weighted squats and balance board, which everyone expected. His center of gravity is different from the rest of us, and it’s so large, it captured Morgan in its orbit.

My V02 max was the best on the team, coming it at a roaring 64. I pumped my arms over my head and started rapping “All I Do is Win,” but my performance was muted by the astronaut breathing mask still strapped to my face. No one heard me, sadly.

And Morgan reclaimed his top dog champ status on the vertical leap. Dude’s got springs in his calves, I swear.

After meds and testing, it was time for our first team meeting, and we all paraded into the dressing room. Our room, the room, the room that changed us from nobodies to best bros for life. I still remembered when Morgan walked in for the first time, checking on each of us rookies after yet another horrible practice. He’d checked us over like he was making sure we weren’t actively dying. He wasn’t even team captain yet, but he was already doing the most. Don’t tell anyone, but Logan kept the wrap that Morgan used on his ankle that afternoon. He pulls it out when something really hurts, like it’s a holy relic that has special healing powers.

We hunkered down in our stalls, beneath our shiny nameplates and our pressed and perfect jerseys. The room sparkled, absolutely glowing, lit up like Christmas in July and ready for excellence. Lawson was seated on my left, Gavin on my right. Across from the three of us were Shea and Morgan, same as last year.

Morgan rose to address the room, and we all gave him a rowdy and ridiculous standing ovation. It took him ten seconds to be well and done with that, and he glared at us as we kept going and going, watching as he rolled his eyes and flipped through his notes and eventually tried to walk away so we wouldn’t see the way his eyes were getting bright and misty.

He got through the boring stuff first, passing out the game schedule and practice times, rink hours, fitness days, weight sessions, and cafeteria menus.

We had six preseason games to play, five on the road and one at home. This year, the road games were exhibition shows, and we were headed to tiny markets where hockey wasn’t established yet. We were going to play in smaller barns, like where we all played in juniors and when we were in school, places that maybe held a thousand people if you got them to huddle up close with their bleacher buddy. Places like Grand Junction, Colorado; Broken Bow, Nebraska; Wichita, Kansas; Cheyenne, Wyoming… and Boise. 

Morgan was looking at me when he read off the last away exhibition game. He winked as I went full shocked Pikachu, mouth open in a perfect O, rocking forward with my hands up over my head, double pumping the ceiling. This was my dream. My bros, my buddies, my team; we were all going to play at my home. We were probably going to play on the rink I’d learned on, even. There’s not that many in Boise.

After the business was done, Morgan started going around the room, asking everyone to share about their summers. We all knew bits and pieces from being up in each other’s business in the team chat, sharing photos and funny stories and videos almost every day. But this was about adding flavor to the sauce. Logan talked about taking his girl down to New Orleans, and Gabe told stories about his family maxing out their days at Disneyland and Universal Studios. Gavin was buzzing at my side, and I knew what he was going to share before he opened his mouth. “Julia is pregnant,” he said, beaming. “We’re having another baby in January.”

Then it was my turn, or, well, Lawson and my turn, since we’d spent the summer together. “We went to Boise—” I started.

“Aww yeah,” Morgan cut in. The light in his eyes gleamed, way, way too pleased with himself. He was leaning forward, hands on his knees, poised like he was ready. “So, Lawson, you met Brodes’ ‘rents, huh?” His grin kept growing, Cheshire-cat huge. Beside me, Lawson froze. “Did you bring a gift?” Morgan asked.

I threw my head back and howled.

***

After lunch, we had our first official meeting with our new head coach, the Colleen Shattenbaum. All of us were puppies on cocaine walking into that meeting room, first-day-of-school excited, perched on the edge of our folding chairs as she waited for us to get settled. In front of each of us was a binder, emblazoned with the Outlaws logo and the words Team Playbook. Coach Shattenbaum.

“Good afternoon, gentleman,” she began. “I’m honored to be here today as your coach.”

Well, she had that all backward. We were the ones honored by her being there.

“I cannot wait to get to work with you all, together as a group and individually. My goal is to build on everything you have that already makes you guys great. I’m here to elevate your game, and our game, and to bring us higher, and higher, and higher, each and every day.” 

She found Morgan in the front row and smiled. “Who can tell me what’s the most important day in hockey?” Her hands were up, open, asking us all to answer.

“Tomorrow,” we said in unison.

“That’s right. And this is our tomorrow. Yesterday was last season. It’s time to move forward, and climb higher, and keep sharpening our game, every bit that we can, until we are unstoppable.”

Everyone applauded for that. She waited us out, and then said, “I’m going to be absolutely straight with every one of you, and I expect each of you to be completely straight back to me. I call it like I see it. Every day, I expect maximum effort and maximum compete. I want you hungry. Not just hungry to win, but hungry to improve. We get better in the margins, and I want you hunting down every little thing you can do to make yourself the best. That’s the kind of fire I want to see out of each of you. Now, from everything I know about you boys, dedication is the fuel inside your hearts.” She closed her fist in front of her chest. “Passion is not your problem.”

More applause, more cheers, more wolf whistles.

Gavin and I shared an excited look. My heels were bouncing, toes tippy-tapping on the carpet, the playbook jumping in my lap. On my other side, Lawson had one arm around the back of my chair and was rubbing circles into my shoulder blade with his thumb. They were getting faster, which was Lawson’s only concession to showing off how excited he was, too. Goalies, man. Ten guys skating down the ice at full speed, ready to chuck a puck at their heads at ninety miles an hour, and their heart rates slowed. I loved Lawson, but I still thought he was half-alien.

Coach Shattenbaum smiled. “We’re going to have a hell of a season, boys. I can feel it.”

I could, too.

***

Practice that week was awesome. Coach was everything we’d dreamed of. Brilliant, tough, intense, and dedicated to drawing out everything we had inside of us, even the things we didn’t know were waiting there. 

Coach wanted to get to know Lawson’s style, and she asked for one-on-one time with him after one of our practices. I hung around, too, first by the bench, then at the other end of the rink, flipping pucks and trying to balance my stick across my chin as I skated the goal line on one skate. Then Coach realized I wasn’t going away, so she hauled me down the ice and put me to work. 

“Shoot on net, Zeags,” Coach said. “Show me those elite goal scoring hands. Laws, don’t let him get any in.” 

So there we were, me trying all my fancy best shots, pulling out my spin-o-ramas and my Michigans. Lawson went beast mode, diving across the net and glove saving out of thin air, growing 17 inches in a moment to bat my shot away and then kick out the rebound. He was on fire, and even though I was trying my best to show off for Coach, Lawson made me look like a junior leaguer. 

I was so proud of him. Yeah, I love to win, and I want to be the best, always. That’s my DNA, same as all competitive athletes. But I wanted Lawson to be the best, too. He was summiting his own mountain next to mine, and we were helping each other climb to greatness. I’d never stop cheering for him, or chucking pucks at him, or try to squeeze a biscuit across the elbow and blister the paint, even if he stopped me each and every time. 

Coach called a huddle up after an intense twenty minutes, and she ran through all the good things that she saw, then gave us the weak points straight up for us to work on, too. “Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll get after it.”

The room was already cleared out by the time we dripped sweat across the carpet to our stalls, and we were alone as we stripped our gear. I put on some pop music nonsense and bopped along with the beat, and we sang the chorus together while popping our practice jerseys and our pads toward the laundry bins. Nothing but net, zing. 

We showered fast, doing the head to toe quick scrub while we shouted over the stall walls and tossed the soap bar to each other. On the ice, Lawson had looked like nothing in the world bothered him, like my spin-o-rama and my triple dog deke or my Datsyuk were majorly unimpressive, but over the roar of the water, he admitted his heart rate had actually gone up a smidge. “I thought you had me beat on that roll in from the left.” He was all wicked smiles as he spoke. “But I managed.” 

I snorted. Managed. Yeah, okay, sure. That’s what we’ll call that elite performance. I glared as I slumped against his stall, towel knotted around my hips. He shook the water out of his hair like a dog and grinned. 

There was nothing sexual about showering after practice. For weeks, my every roving thought had been about what getting body to body with Lawson would be like, but now, faced with him wrapping a towel around his hips and slinging his hand through his hair, my thoughts about that were orbiting the planet around the star furthest from. 

Maybe it was context. The rink was our office. This was work. And, we’d both been showering day and day out with teammates for half our lives. Most of the time, the dressing room shower smells like ass and freshly ripped farts, mixed with the minty scent of Crest toothpaste and cheap hairspray, and the floor looks like it’s crawling with athletes’ foot. I don’t care who you are, there’s nothing sexy about freeballing in shower shoes. That long, slow slide down someone’s shapely legs, watching the calf hair trail all wet and slinky down to… a pair of soaked Crocs, or Dollar Store slides? Record scratch, let’s jump back. It was an anti-boner zone. 

We split in the player’s lot, playing the kissing game as I smothered Lawson against his truck door. He had errands to run, and while I was perfectly happy to tag along to Trader Joe’s, pump his gas for him, and play DJ in the passenger seat while serenading him with my sick karaoke, Lawson told me to go spend time with my bros, since I’d seen tons of him that summer and way less so of the others. 

But when I walked into the house, all my bros were gone. The house was empty. I was alone.

A perusal of the house bros chat—bicep emoji, dumbbells emoji, house emoji—coughed up an explanation. Over at Gabe’s, over at Gavin’s, meeting with their agent, at the mall, going to the movies, on a date. My bros were busy. The team was still all-in together, but the clenched-fist hold we had on each other from last year was relaxing. The baby koalas were letting go. 

I blended up a protein shake with ice cream and drank right from the blender’s jug, swinging my legs as I sat on the counter. Where had this house come from? Did the team really have a mansion in their back pockets? And, what, no one else had lived here? It would be just like Coates to not let us move in and keep us locked in that skanky hotel, but, surely, one of the other guys on the team must have known about this place if it existed before we moved in. But they’d look as surprised as we had that day in the locker room when Morgan told us we were moving. And at that barbeque, too. No one looked like they’d been here before. So, nah, this was something new. All for us. But how? And why?

It seemed like something Kathy would do. She did a lot of little things behind the scenes that had helped us come together through the season. Before our first roadie, she’d given everyone custom-made Beats headphones with the Outlaws logo and our jersey numbers engraved on the cans. It’s thoughtful things that always hit my heart like a sledgehammer, and something like that—not a big thing, not anything flashy, but something kind and generous and cool all at once—had helped give me a big boost of confidence to take a leaping mental hopscotch forward.

But still. A house? I’d looked up the title once. Some LLC owned the property. Me, LLC. I’d rolled my eyes. Ridiculous name. No creativity. 

I washed and dried the blender and left it for the next bro, then trotted upstairs and flung myself face-first into my bed. Comforter and mattress tried to suffocate me, but I prevailed, heaving to my back and going full starfish as I stared at the ceiling. 

This was a familiar pose. And every time I ended up here, my brain always went straight to my most favorite topic: Lawson. 

Which… Actually… 

I dug my phone out of my back pocket with the two-fingered lobster pinch, then pulled up my chat with Lawson. 

Me: How’s errands? 

Lawson: Good. Heading home. Got you that mochi ice cream that you like. 

Me: Sweet. *Kiss emoji*

And then, abruptly, with no teasing lead in or joke or cute little fact, I texted—

Me: Hey, no one is here right now. 

Lawson: Yeah? 

Me: Yeah. Got the house to myself. 

Me: You wanna come over? 

We could be alone any time we wanted at Lawson’s. Access to privacy was not an issue. But in all the time we’d been friends, Lawson had never come up to my bedroom. He was perfectly polite, like a good Canadian boy, and he’d said something once about respecting our privacy and our space and that we all had roommates. 

But Logan wasn’t here right now.

Lawson: You sure? 

Me: Yeah, totally. 

Lawson: I need to put this stuff in the fridge. 

Me: I got fridge room. Come over, you can borrow a shelf. 

Dots danced and disappeared. Danced and disappeared. 

Lawson: Omw. 

***

Lawson came into my bedroom like he was Indiana Jones entering the Temple of Doom.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” I said, bowing like I was an usher at Buckingham Palace.

He took everything in, those weird wide-open goalie eyes soaking up my and Logan’s space. Because the house was ridiculous-sized, the owner’s suite was also huge, easily large enough for the two of us to feel like we had our private areas. It was obvious where the king bed was supposed to go in a normal setup, against the big wall opposite the fireplace, but we’d put giant metal racks there to hold our gear. On the top shelf, I’d stuck the teddy bear mascot from my last USHL team, still rocking the juniors logo. I’d carted that bear on every road trip, taking photos of the bear’s journey to snap back to my parents. It had been easier for the bear to be homesick than it had been to admit that I sometimes was. Mom made a care package for my bear before one of the longer trips like she was in on the joke that I was the big tough kid taking care of little Beary-Bear. At fifteen, it had been adorably sweet. At twenty, with the man I loved fingering the teddy bear’s thready nose, it was kinda mortifying. Beary-Bear was never part of the landscape when I visualized my NHL Cribs special.

Logan’s bed was shoved against the wall by the bathroom door, and mine went into the half-octagon punch out on the other side of the room. I liked to wake up surrounded by windows, looking up into the sunlight and the tangled tree branches outside the bedroom.

While Lawson explored, I plopped on the end of my bed, bouncing a bit on the mattress. This had been an impulsive ask, a ‘hey, why not?’ and now that Lawson was in my bedroom… My nerves were zip-zapping, my muscles fired up like I was about to take the ice before a game, and my mind was hurtling through a thousand different daydreams I’d had of Lawson and me, right here, just like this.

When he was finally done inspecting our gear racks—how long does it take to study some old sticks and skates and helmets?—Lawson joined me. He sat down gingerly, like he was afraid the bed might be booby-trapped or something, his lips sucked in between his teeth and his fingers curled into the tops of his thighs.

“Lay back and catch the view.” I sprawled, wiggling my shoulders until I was just so, head on my pillow like I was going to take a nap. “It’s the best part.”

He gamely followed my lead, twisting carefully into place beside me. I watched his eyes roll upward, scoping out the sweet panoramic wrap of nature that surrounded us. “This is cool. But how do you sleep in?”

I rolled to my side and faced him, cheek against the pillow that we were now sharing. “I only really sleep in when I’m at your place.”

“What about pregame naps?”

I shrugged. “I sleep like a rock. I dunno, there’s something about nature that is soothing, you know? I like lying here and feeling like I’m floating. Like the world doesn’t exist outside these windows. That’s calming to me.”

Lawson hummed, and he breathed in and out as he watched a butterfly bounce from branch to branch. “I get that.”

Lawson was gazing out the windows, but I was gazing at him, lost in the rise and fall of his chest and the stretch of his cotton t-shirt. I could see the thick cords of his trapezius through the fabric. The rounded curve of his solid pecs, and the bulge of his biceps where they strained at his sleeves. His shoulders were boulders. His Adam’s apple was a jagged peak, lifting and holding, holding, because Lawson had stopped looking outside and was watching me now.

Whoops. Caught.  

He rolled to his side and mirrored me, slipping one hand beneath my pillow and laying in the curve of his elbow. I spider danced my fingers across his chest, tracing figure eights beneath his collar bones. His pulse, a steady drum beat at the side of his throat, sped up.

Then—

Lawson pulled his hand out from under my pillow, a t-shirt in his grasp. Not any old t-shirt, though. His t-shirt, one I’d swiped from his dirty laundry basket the morning I knew I wasn’t going to head back with him after our first practice. It had been living under my pillow for a week now, my secret piece of Lawson I kept close while I was sleeping. I liked to hold it, mash it to my face, breathe in the scent of him. Minus the mountain range beneath my cheek and the drumbeat of his heart, it was almost like being back in his arms.

“I’ve been looking for this.” His eyes were narrowed, but his voice was gentle. And, he was smiling.

“Oh, wow, good thing you found it.”

He huffed out a single breath in the shape of a laugh. “Yeah, good thing. Wonder how it got all the way here, huh?”

I blew a raspberry as I shrugged. “Man, static electricity is a crazy thing. You know a single spark of it can measure thousands of volts? Guess it acts like super glue or something, Velcroing your shirts to my pillowcase—”

Lawson laughed and rolled on top of me, caging me to the bed when his elbows landed on either side of my face. His massive thighs pressed in on around my hips, and I felt him breath in sharply as he stilled. We were nose to nose, body to body, the massiveness of him completely and totally surrounding me, exactly as I’d dreamed. It took everything I had to hold back my groan. So much everything, in fact, that I had nothing left to fight against the immediate, insane boner I popped. Lawson’s hips hovered against mine, but it looked like my shorts were trying to climb a stairway to heaven. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

I tugged at the hem of his t-shirt, slipping my fingers beneath cotton and walking them over the softness of his belly. Lawson was a big guy. Not just strong, not just powerful, and not just buff, but big everywhere. He had a rugby player’s body, and I loved it. I loved the idea of him being my personal shield, a brick wall between me and the world. When Dr. Hailey and I were working together in the beginning, when things were super scrambled and I felt like I was standing in the middle of a room full of torn-out plugs and shredded wires, she had me work on visualization drills. Stop the bad thoughts from reaching you. Build fences in your mind. I didn’t exactly build a fence; I built a goal net and put Lawson inside, and all the nightmares and horrible memories were pucks that he deflected. My hero, in real life and in my mind.

“Hey.” My hand moved slowly up the inside of his shirt, coasting along the superheated skin of his chest. Context. Context was everything. I’d watched him shower an hour and a half ago, no biggie, but here I was, my mind melting out of my skull because my fingertips were tracing the bottom edge of his pec—

Lawson lurched, and he seized my lips in his as he pressed our bodies flush together. I groaned, gasped, jerked, flung my arms around his neck and pulled, trying to get him closer. Not possible; we were sticky-side down, mashed together. It wasn’t our first kiss, or even our hundredth kiss. We’d had so many. We were experts at kissing. But, God, the difference here, in my bed, like this. His lips, dry from the rink, a little bit chapped. The sharp mint taste from gum he must have chewed on the way over, still cool and tingly where my tongue met his.

A shift, his hips moving against mine, our bodies aligning, and—

Lawson moaned, and he broke the kiss as he buried his face in the side of my cheek. “Brody,” he breathed. His mouth was open, lips wet, and broken whimpers fell across my skin as he clung to me. I tangled my fingers in his hair and kissed his jaw, sucked on his throat and ground up into him, into the hardness of him.

Then it was on, it seemed, full throttle. Lawson kissed me like I’d dreamed he would: owning me, taking his sweet, sweet time as he devoured me, sucking on my tongue and my lips and then holding me still while he kept going, keeping me in place so he could kiss me even deeper. I’d never been kissed like that. Hell, I’d never kissed anyone like that. It was a revelation, how much a single kiss could rip me wide open, take me apart and leave me boneless.

While we were busy upstairs, Lawson shifted his hips and his knees, scooting around until he had his knees inside my spread thighs. Uncaged, my legs went immediately around his waist, ankles locking at the small of his back. I pulled him in and rocked upward, grinding against him, and he groaned against my tonsils.

There was some combo of actions that would keep this going. Up down triangle square, or left hand to the back of Lawson’s head to hold him in place, right hand to his t-shirt to yank on it, try and get it up and off and out of the way. Maybe this was it, maybe this was the time. I was all in, and he was, too, clearly. I tugged on his shirt, pulling the back over his head in a tangle, and he got the memo. Lawson rose, tore his shirt off, and then peeled mine off, too, both hands gliding over my ribs and my chest and my arms as he unwrapped me like a present. I full-body shivered and sank into my mattress, hands back in his hair immediately as he plastered us together again. Yeah, this was happening. This was definitely, totally, awesomely happening—

The front door opened. The house alarm chirped, ringing out the “door open” jingle from the alarm control panel in the upstairs hall, right outside my bedroom door.

“Yo!” Connor’s voice shouted up from down the stairs. “I’m home!”

Lawson collapsed, face-planting into my pillow as he trembled. His fingers dug into my hips, squeezing, shaking, every muscle in his arms and legs and core firing. I held on, both my legs wrapped tight around his waist and my arms locking him to me, like I could hold on to that moment and what we’d almost had. Downstairs, Connor was banging around the kitchen. He’d been running errands, had said he would hit up the grocery store on the way home. He was going to see Lawson’s stuff in the fridge. He’d already seen Lawson’s truck parked outside, surely.

“Sorry,” I whispered in Lawson’s ear. “I thought we’d have more time.”

“Don’t apologize.” Lawson’s voice was wrecked. Totally ruined. “Was that… Are you…”

“That was awesome.” I kissed the curve of his jaw, nuzzled his hair. “Been thinking ’bout that for a while now.”

“Me too.”

Connor had put on music. Kendrick Lamar floated up toward us. “Raincheck?” I asked.

Lawson nuzzled me back and rolled to the side. We were still arm in arm and tangled together, but the urgency had flagged, and we were no longer in danger of busting out the seams of our shorts. He took my hand in his and threaded our fingers together. “Raincheck.”

Connor wasn’t surprised to see Lawson when we barreled downstairs, and he greeted us both with a chin tip and a “’Sup bros?” He’d pushed Lawson’s stuff around in the fridge to fit his own milk and cheese and cold cuts in, and he was already halfway through a party size bag of Cheetos as he leaned against the island. “Where’s the rest of the guys?”

“Out doin’ their thang,” I drawled.

“Sucks for them.” Connor spun the last grocery bag across the counter. “I got a party pack of sushi. You guys wanna help me annihilate it?”

The three of us stuffed our faces with California rolls and nigiri in the living room, playing Chubby Bunny and smack talking our way through NHL 23. I won, again, at Chubby Bunny, because no one seemed to remember that I really did have the biggest mouth around. You’d think they’d learn after the banana game, and—you know—after every single day they’d spent alive with me, but they keep wanting to lose, I guess. Fine with me; I was happy to have Connor untie my skates for the next week at practice. Victory had its bennys.

The rest of the bros trickled in, and half the rest of the team showed up, too. Morgan and Shea dropped by, but they were in and out in under an hour, and dressed up in actual clothes, not just shorts and tanks and t-shirts. I smelled date night, and I bounced my eyebrows obnoxiously at Shea when he sat down next to me and I got a whiff of his Dior Sauvage cologne. Josh and Ridley showed up after they scooted, and we expanded our NHL game into a real tourney.

We weren’t totally back into season rules, so there technically wasn’t a team bedtime in place, but we were all pretty excited to show off for Coach, and one of the best ways to fuel those show off muscles is to get your good sleep on. Everyone started making noise about being beat and needing to head home or go to bed around ten p.m. Lawson joined in on the herd heading out, and I walked him to his truck with his groceries.

Should I go back with him? Should we finish what we started earlier? We didn’t have to wait. He had a whole house, three thousand square feet of privacy. We didn’t have to sneak around in my bedroom, waiting for nine bros to be out at the same time. But…

Lawson fiddled with his keys and stared at his sneakers as we leaned against his driver’s door. “I really, really liked this afternoon,” he said. His voice was quiet, and after he spoke, he curled his index finger into my hands, holding on like a fish hook. “I do want… that. With you. I want everything with you.”

“I do, too.”

The smile he gave me melted me completely, turned me into a human puddle. I squeezed his finger and tried to smile back. My heart was pounding.

“We don’t have to, you know, rush,” he said. His thumb was rubbing the back of my hand. “I want you to be good with everything. I never, ever want you to be uncomfortable. And I never want to hurt you.”

It was the same thing he’d said on the back deck, the morning my parents showed up from Boise. “You don’t. You never do.”

He gnawed on his lip, biting back a grin as his cheeks went cherry red. “I want to take that part slowly. I want to be careful, and want everything to be good for you.” His eyes met mine, and held. “Perfect for you.”

“You are perfect for me.” I tugged on his hips and drew him in until we were body to body against his truck. “I want to be with you, every way. I want to be yours, and I want you to be mine, and I want us to last. I’m serious about us, Lawson. Like, super serious.” You’re it. You’re the one. It’s you. I already know. “And since we have forever, we can take all the time we want.” I smiled up at him.

“I love you,” he breathed.

We kissed for a long time, while the moon rose and the stars spun and the rest of the bros tucked themselves into bed, and our entire neighborhood seemed to settle in for the night. I could kiss Lawson for hours, and I could probably totally get off just by a slow and sweet make out sesh with him. One day, we’d try it.

But for tonight, we parted softly, chasing each other with ‘just one more kiss’ and tangling our fingers together, brushing noses and nuzzling foreheads. I got another top of the head kiss to add to my collection—241—and after Lawson (finally) climbed into his truck, I hopped up on the running board to lean in and kiss him one more time through the open window.

“Love you,” I told him. “Want me to pick you up in the morning?”

“Sure.” He kissed me, kissed me again. Smiled against my lips. “I can’t leave if you’re standing there.”

“You found out my secret plan. Darn it.” One last kiss, and then I hopped down to the street and backed up to the curb. We shared a smile, and then he rumbled off, heading down the block and back to his place.

I went through my bedtime routine, moving quietly because most of the bros were already asleep. Logan was out and snoring hard. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and climbed into bed. One last look at my phone, one last scroll through the highlights—

Lawson had texted me: an emoji of a heart and a blown kiss and two guys holding hands.

I texted back a string of hearts, and then tacked on a blown kiss and a biceps emoji and the hearts-for-eyes emoji.

Me: That’s me kissing your muscles goodnight, too.

***

Shea and I finally got a chance to hang out mano a mano. I’d texted Shea and asked for a bro date, one on one time to catch up. His immediate oh hell yes, we need to hang, can’t wait made me feel all warm and bubbly, like crisp soda bubbles on a summer day. We met at Jamba Juice, where we ordered the biggest, baddest, most protein-packed smoothies they had, and we parked ourselves at the corner table.  

Shea looked good. Real good. He was tan and gorgeous, his hair a little longer and highlighted by the sun. Florida had been awesome to him. He was moving around perfectly, too, like he hadn’t shattered his leg into itsy bitsy pieces four months ago. He had a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses on top of his head, and he’d driven up in Morgan’s ride, parking the Winnipeg grime monster next to my waxed and polished beauty. The rock on his ring finger glittered, shooting prisms across the walls of the Jamba Juice. One shard of light hit him in the eyeball, and he blinked, had to shift a little in his seat. Oh, big diamond problems. Sadness.

I tied a knot in the center of my straw wrapper and held out the end for Shea to grab. You gotta play the straw wrapper wishbone luck game. He tugged, but the paper broke early, and I won the knot. Sweet, five minutes of good luck for me, which was awesome, because I kinda needed that shot of luck right now. 

I downed my smoothie—Orange Dream Machine, extra everything that makes it delicious—and rubbed my hands up and down my thighs. My palms were clammy and stuck to my shorts.

Five minutes good luck. I’m holding you to that, straw.

Shea and I always had a closer relationship than the others, right from the start. I loved my bros, all of them, but I loved Shea a little bit more. And that had been true from day one, even before all the horribleness had set in and Shea had taken it upon himself to be my knight in shining armor. There was something about him that just worked for me, and I guess the same about me was true for him. We worked, from minute one.

Later, after we got to know each other’s ins and outs and upside-downs, I kinda figured it might be, at least in part, how similar we were in certain deep-down areas. Our values were aligned, as Dr. Hailey said. We were bros that went deeper than liking the same kind of pizza order or enjoying an all-night video game marathon. Shea and I were the two guys who didn’t jump into the convos that spun up around girls and doin’ it. Not that those conversations were wrong, or they got ugly or crude or anything. I think the influence of so many older, stable dudes—married dudes, dudes with kids, little girls who we all adopted as kid sisters—had an instant effect on everyone. Cute little sisters grew up and became gorgeous women. Gorgeous women who caught our eyes these days were once adorable little girls, baby sisters, and someone’s daughters. The cognitive disconnect that maybe used to exist for gross bros back in the day wasn’t there anymore. 

I found out both of Shea’s reasons for staying out of the hot girl convos early on—not so into the girls, and, hey, not so knowledgeable about the do’, either. Plus, by the time we had that heart-to-heart, Shea was already full speed ahead with his heart eyes for Morgan. When Shea’s mind wandered toward Me Time, he envisioned a blockbuster romance starring our one and only captain.

Shea confided in me that he was gay, that he was a virgin, that he wanted to wait for someone who loved him, and then that he’d gone and fallen ker-splat in love with Morgan, and, if he crossed all his fingers and toes, maybe Morgan would be The One. Guess he’s got flexible toes, ‘cause all that worked out for him beautifully. 

And I… well, I wasn’t super into hot girl talk before all the Before happened—Coates, and all that—and after… Man, I yanked that plug out so hard, I really did think that part of me was broken forever. But I told Shea that I was into both guys and girls, but had only hooked up with girls. Captain Hottie Nurse Baseball with the empty crayon box upstairs hadn’t earned more than a kiss, and after him, no other guy hit up all those right places inside me, or had unlocked my puzzle box of a heart and had me falling head over heels. (No girl did, either, but, you know.)

I had just enough experience to know I knew basically nothing at all, and the sex I’d had between high school and coming to Boulder was really only of the ‘yep, not a virgin’ quality, but nowhere close to the ‘and I know how to do this right’ part. I barely knew how to get down with a girl, and now I wanted to get down with a guy. Not just any guy, either, but Lawson. The guy I wanted to be with forever.

I was freaking my own self out every night, trying to imagine how it would go when we eventually put it all together. Would I be any good? Would I know what to do? Would he like any of it? What if he didn’t? What if I came too fast? Or what if I couldn’t get it up? What if I was so damn nervous that nothing worked at all, and instead of a sweet and awesome lovefest, I hit him in the head with my elbow and knocked him off the bed, kneed him in the crotch, and then farted, and he just decided it would be better to head home and maybe even scoot on out of the Outlaws, too, before that no-movement clause kicked in?

The last week of my late night Google sessions looked like this: how to be good in bed. how to be good in bed for a guy. how to be good in bed as a guy with a guy. great sex with a dude. gay sex tips. first time gay sex make it great. will he still love me if

So here I was with Shea, with my five minutes of blessed good luck.

“Hey, umm.” I chewed on the end of my straw and stared at Shea. My fingers were curled into my thighs. “So, like… can you give me the gay version of the birds and the bees?”

Shea hit an air bubble in his smoothie, and the straw made that garbage disposal churr. 

Give me silence and I’ll fill it. Shea knew me too well. “It’s… Like, I know the mechanics? I mean the ins and outs, you know? What goes where, tab a, slot b…” I was on the babble express and picking up steam. “But what’s it like? And how do you make it really good? Like… when you’re super-duper into someone, and you’re kinda terrified about it being bad because you’ve never really done that… what do you do?”

“You don’t have to do anything.” Here’s the other thing that was super awesome about Shea: I could talk to him about literally anything, and he took whatever I said as if I were asking about the gravitational constant of the universe. Of course we were going to have a serious conversation about the plot arc of Power Rangers and the formative imprint it left on our generation. Of course we were going to debate which chocolate was superior, milk, dark, or white. Of course I could ask him this. “You’ve had sex—”

“Nothing special. Nothing that means anything.”

“It always means something. And when you’re with someone who means everything to you, it can mean more.” Shea’s cheeks darkened, dusted with a paintbrush of crimson. “Like, you know how five-on-one isn’t super special?”

“What, you don’t light candles when you’re feeding the ducks?”

Shea barked out a laugh. “No, I’m not romancing myself when I’m playing a little solo stick handling. It’s just… stuff. But when I’m with Morgan, everything is different. Look, there’s nothing you need to do. Being with someone you love, in whatever way you guys decide to go for it, is going to be special. It’s going to blow your mind, not because of Kama Sutra tricks or whatever, but because you’re with him. It’s all in here.” He reached across the table, where we’d both leaned in, hovering close like we were sharing secrets. He pushed his finger against my forehead and smiled. “I promise. It will be great.”

“But like… how? How do I actually blow his mind so he really loves it—”

“I’m not giving you tips, man. There’s a ton of websites you can go check out for that.”

“Oh, come on!” I put some whine in my voice, let the light in my eyes glitter and shine. “I bet Morgan taught you tons. You’re super flexible, and Dad seems like the kind of guy who’d be real into that. Plus, I have a running tally of how many times his eyeballs have shot to your Kardashian booty, so don’t tell me he isn’t all about that cake—”

Shea reached across the table and slapped his hand across my mouth. I kept going, mumbling about Morgan getting second helpings of dessert and Shea’s thighs having a touch of beard burn the other day while Shea tried to push my words back in my lips. He was laughing, though, and fuchsia from his hair down, all the way beneath his t-shirt collar. I kissed his fingers obnoxiously, and he sat back, shaking his head as I beamed around my straw.

“It’s awesome when you’re in love. I wanted that for myself, and I waited for it, and…” Shea trailed off. “It’s just awesome when you love the person you’re with. So don’t worry about it, Brodes. It’s going to be amazing. You guys are in love. Anything you do will just deepen that. Be yourself. Be open. Don’t be afraid to talk.”

I snorted and inadvertently blew a bubble into my Orange Dream Machine.

He kicked my shin beneath the table. “Yeah, man. Don’t be afraid to open your mouth and speak up,” he teased. He got serious a second later. “Guarantee you, Lawson wants to do right by you. All this stuff you’re stressing about? He’s stressing, too. I promise. You both want it to be epic, and it will be.”

“But he’s done this before—” My voice was small, like it never was.

Both of Shea’s eyebrows climbed for his Tom Fords. He looked at me like I ate crayons.

“You were never scared? When you and Morgan did it?”

“Never. I knew Morgan. I knew what it meant to him. And you know Lawson. You know he loves you, and he’ll always love you, no matter what. Didn’t you tell me he said he’d love you forever even if you guys never got together?”

“Well…”

“You have nothing to worry about. I promise, Brody. Nothing. You guys are going to be great together. You already are great together.”

I sucked my bottom lip between my teeth and nodded. Played with my smoothie. Dug my fingernails into the Styrofoam sides of the cup. “Okay.” Deep breath in. Hold it… “But, like, is there a best kind of lube? Or, like, what’s the best position for your first time? I read doggy is good, but does position really matter?”

“Google it.”

“Bro, I’ve got, like, freckles all over my butt. You’ve seen my shoulders, yeah? Copy paste that onto my butt cheeks—”

“Dude, I know, we shower together—”

“Is that gonna make him laugh? What if he laughs instead of groans in ecstatic joy? That’s gonna be a serious buzz kill!”

Now Shea laughed, which was exactly what I was going for. I needed to vault out of this conversation on a high note, wrap it up so the tenderness stayed in the center, where I could go back and examine it later. “I’m telling you,” Shea said, “Lawson already loves your freckled cheeks. Hand to God, Brodes. He already daydreams about them. Bet you a pack of Red Vines.”

“You’re on.”

***

We hit the road for our preseason exhibition games, heading north to Cheyenne before flying east. It was party rock on the road for the first three games, livin’ it up style in the plane—playing cards, laughing, hanging out, sharing wild stories of summer and kids and siblings and life—and chill central at the hotels. Broken Bow and Wichita were not at all rock star hang out locales, but it felt like they were because we were back together. We turned a Holiday Inn pool into a fun zone, chillaxing on floats and beating each other to death with pool noodles, challenging each other to ‘biggest splash cannonballs’ and ‘best belly flops.’ We soaked up the sun on the loungers, knocked back a pallet of Gatorade and Topo Chico mineral water, and came away pink with sunburned noses and cheekbones, cramped up from laughing.

We had an early morning flight from Wichita to Grand Junction, and the team showed up to the private terminal like slugs in hoodies. We amoeba-sprawled across the lounge, waiting for the preflight checks to be finalized, little piles of arms and legs and teammates tucked together, everyone using everyone else for pillows and drool catching. I had my feet up, knees hooked across an arm rest, and my head on Lawson’s shoulder. Lawson had his chin on top of my hair and was drumming out the baseline to the country we were both listening to on my arm. We were sharing a pair of earbuds. He was checking messages and making sure all was set in Boise, and I had my eyes peeled for Morgan.

Morgan was up to crazy business. He’d started something on Instagram with Bryce Michel—Bryce Michel, who I still had to pinch myself to remind me that, oh yeah, I played in the same league as that guy, and, oh yeah, I played against him, holy moly roly poly. And then there was Morgan, throwing down chirps and poking at Bryce, putting up photos on Insta of him tying on his skates saying he was on his way to get that Cup. Bryce, unbelievably, played along—this Cup?—and now they had a back-and-forth chirp war in the making. It was full-on “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” vibes, and this was only preseason. Morgan had the crazy eyes whenever he pulled out his phone, too, so this thing was going to last.

Normally, I’d be happy to ham it up for Morgan’s camera, freestyle rap a verse about how the Outlaws were goin’ rollin’, that we were there to snatch stars and walk wins and fill Cups with the overflowing force of our everlasting success, our blistering coolness, our top shelf, top notch, top-of-all-time championship eternalness. I’d do that for him, definitely. Someday.

Not today. Today, I wanted to hang with Lawson, stick to him like super glue coated with honey and wrapped up in duct tape.

Because Lawson’s dad was coming to the Boise game.

Lawson and I knew just about everything there was to know about each other. Long, late nights of insomnia, long walks across the ranch, and long, looping hikes through the mountains gave us plenty of time to talk and to listen. Contrary to public belief, I liked to listen just as much as I liked to talk, and I liked to listen to the people I cared about most of all. Lawson told me about growing up in Alberta, and how everything in his life was focused on making it into the show. He told me, too, about trying to come out to his dad and how his dad told him to stop. Don’t be like that. You’ll never make it if you’re like that. Don’t you want to get out of here, and have a better life than this?

Easy to find that bottle rocket fury and aim it toward Lawson’s dad. Harder to take a breath and remember that his dad was on that video, and he had told Lawson that he had always, always been proud of him. That he watched every game, and that he loved him, too. He showed up at that surprise skate, too, and he and Lawson had clung to each other on the ice after, when our families all tentatively picked their way out to hold onto our hands and give us big hugs and wave at the crowd as everyone just kept cheering. His dad couldn’t stay long—he was in between runs, he said, and had to get back up to Yellowhead—but he’d come down to Boulder to put Lawson’s jersey on and sit in the dark and wait for us to skate out, and then he clapped his heart out while tears had streamed down his cheeks and he screamed his son’s name. 

Lawson had been a huge snot-soaked mess that night, and we’d curled up on the couch with the house bros and let the rest of the team distract us from how Lawson’s heart had been cheese-grated raw.

Now his dad was coming down to see a game. Not just any game, either: the Boise game, a game that was meaningless to stats and records and the win column, but that meant everything to me, and to my family, and to Lawson.

Of course, when Dad found out Lawson’s dad was coming, he offered up the ranch to Paul, said it made sense for all of us to be under one roof for the night we were all in town. It was going to be a full house: Mom and Dad, me and Lawson, and Paul—Lawson’s dad—all under one roof. It was ‘meet the parents times’ one million, and the setup to a romantic comedy—or a horror movie?—about the heroic couples’ parents meeting for the first time. 

“Won’t this be fun?” Dad had asked me over the phone when we were hammering out the details. I’d whimpered. Hopefully?

I wanted it to be awesome. Amazing. Wonderful. Stupendous. I wanted this to go great because I wanted Lawson and his dad to reunite in the way it seemed they both wanted. The force of that hug, and the way they wouldn’t let go of each other, at that final skate. How hard Lawson sobbed after, when it was just him and me in his truck. He couldn’t even speak. He just put his head in my lap and wept.

Last night, my dad started up a group chat with everyone, including Paul, to hammer out the details. Flight times, when everyone was coming in, who would pick up who where, what would they do before the game. Mom and Dad were picking Paul up, and then the three of them would meet us before warm ups at the arena. After, we’d all migrate to the ranch, where Coach had given permission for Lawson and I to stay overnight. 

It was a lot: both our parents making plans, Dad getting chatty with Paul before they’d even met—I think we’re going have to be best friends, Paul. I think our sons are probably going to be hanging around each other for a long time. Wink emoji. Da-ad—and Paul being ultra polite and formal in all his replies.

Paul Murray: I am very grateful to you for opening your home, Mr. Zeagler.

Dad: It’s what family does.

I don’t even have the Ring Pop yet, Dad. Calm down.

When my dad descended into asking Paul what his favorite foods were so they could plan the grill menu and the breakfast bonanza, I texted that we needed to get some sleep, and then I took Lawson and my phones and zipped them into our suitcase. I ordered a mountain of late night sushi to be delivered to our hotel, and I sneaked down to the lobby in my socks to sign for it after curfew, like the absolutely amazing boyfriend that I was.

We stayed up eating sushi and watching ancient “Home Improvement” reruns while we curled into each other on Lawson’s bed. When he was finished, he manhandled me in between his legs and held me against his chest, burying his face in my hair and my traps and hugging me so tight I had to hold my breath on his deep squeezes. Eventually we pitched on our sides, and we fell asleep with him glued to my back, me holding him as tight as I could pull him to me.

Grand Junction first. We had two days until the Great Zeagler-Murray Family Mashup. All we had to do was play the game. One foot in front of the other.

Finally, we were allowed to board, and we shuffled into a conga line up the jetway stairs. Lawson and I slung ourselves into a row near the back, Lawson against the window, me on the aisle. We’d perfected the complicated pretzel maneuver that put me basically in his lap and spread across both seats and that gave him all of the legroom for our row. As a bonus, there was nowhere for Lawson to put his arms except around me, and the only comfortable position for both of our heads was tucked together and sharing a pillow against the bulkhead. 

We’d actually started this before we were dating, in the middle of last season, and the chirps and heckles we got turned real quiet when we ended up having the absolute best naps during our flights. Logan and Connor tried to upstairs-downstairs their seats, with Connor sleeping on the floor and Logan spreading out across the seats, but their feet hung into the aisle and that was just open season for the rest of the guys. Gabe and Ridley played darts off the bottom of Logan’s foot on a flight to Anaheim. Connor got his ankle duct taped to the floor. They tried a modified version of our little sleeping setup, but they didn’t go all-in, which was why it failed. That, and Connor was a wimp about Logan drooling on his shoulder.

Gear stowed, earbuds shared, phone playlist on. Lawson skipped ahead to a love song as I settled in against him, and he hid his face against my neck while he tucked our joined hands into my hoodie pocket. “Thank you,” he whispered.

I squeezed his hands, and 5 Seconds of Summer’s “She Looks So Perfect” played in our ears. “I’m gonna get your name tattooed in an arrow heart, Lawson.”

He nuzzled my hair and kissed the back of my neck, and I felt his smile spread wide across my skin.

I was asleep before the plane began to taxi.

I woke up when we landed—or, you know, when we landed three times, because that one was a triple bounce before the wheels decided to stay down. Groggy, I blinked at the seat back in front of me, the half of Lawson’s shoulder and hoodie I was pressed against, and our tangled legs covered by an Outlaws fleece. The brakes were squealing and the wind was howling against the frame. Our seats were rattling. My most favorite part of flying was the snow-globe-shake wakeups at the end. Not.

Lawson normally slept right through our landings, and I usually waited to tenderly elbow him awake until we were all parked and ready to deplane. Half the guys around me were zombified, and half were looking like they’d really wished they’d spent the past four hours sleeping, but instead, their eyeballs had stayed spackled open despite their best efforts. We wouldn’t be party rock at the hotel this afternoon. This was going to be a ‘collapse in each other’s rooms and watch movies until unconsciousness hit’ night. Sweats and slides and hoodies and Red Vines galore.

I shimmied my phone out of my pocket and flicked through my alerts. Boring, boring, boring—oh hey, Shea.

Shea had sent a video, and as it loaded, I read the message he sent with it.

Shea: Caught this on the way to the bathroom. I can’t wait for my pack of Red Vines when I totally win.

The video started to play. He’d snapped it of me and Lawson curled up in our seats. I was out. Totally zonked, my face turned into Lawson’s throat and lips open, lazy and breathy snoring. Lawson was still awake, but his eyes were drifting shut and he was peppering my forehead with a million tiny kisses. His fingertips were brushing over my hair, lighter than butterfly’s wings. He had no idea he was being filmed. Logan video bombed, cheesing for the camera before he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Lawson and me, and then he made the “aww, swoon” face and drew a heart in front of him. Shea’s hand appeared and shoved Logan out of the frame. Giggle snorts erupted, then were smothered out of existence. Shea spun the camera into selfie mode, and he beamed into the lens. Absolutely shameless, full-on shit-eating satisfaction, as if the entire team hadn’t totally also giggled themselves ridiculous about how he and Morgan were not ten months ago.

Me: You gotta keep the romance alive, man. You know how marriage can kill the spark. If you need tips on how to keep the love flowin’…

Me: Google it.

Four rows ahead of me, Shea snorted.

***

Boise was epic. Beyond epic. It was hometown hero kind of stuff, the rink I learned to skate on filled to bursting. There were cheering sections for me like this was the Olympics, with groups of people holding up bed sheets painted with my name, my number, Boise Boy, Zeags in da House, Bois-E Homi-E. Less epic were the baby photos that got splashed up on the monitor, but the parade of hockey pictures from all my youth and junior teams was cool to see. My phone blew up before the game until it was just constantly vibing and I couldn’t possibly reply—or even read—all the congrats, well wishes, and selfies my friends and old classmates were sending from the stands.

I kept close to Lawson during warm up because, as cool as it all was, it was also pretty overwhelming, too. Coach handed me a special bucket of pucks and told me to go nuts, and I spent ten minutes chucking them over the glass and into the stands. The weirdness wore off, and then I rediscovered my flair for theatrics, and then it was on.

For the rest of warm up, it was the Brody Show. Shots on net, no-look passes, spin-o-ramas and fakes and dekes on one-one-one and two-on-ones. Of course, my teammates had to get their fun in, too, rubbing noogies into the top of my helmet and leaning their elbows on my shoulders like I was a bookshelf or a coat rest. But at the end, they had me do a single lap around the rink, skating for the hometown fans, and the applause that roared was almost as loud as it had been when we were doing that final skate in Boulder. I crossed center ice with my stick overhead, and I found my parents in their seats, the same ones they’d always sat in when I was a kid so I could always find them if I needed to look into the crowd.

The game itself was a blur. We won, awesomely, Lawson getting the shut out with gorgeous saves that looked effortless. Morgan fed me passes all night long, preferring that I score even if he had a totally open lane. Every time, the roof nearly caved in from the shock wave of applause, and sometime during the second period, the crowd began to chant, “Bro-dy, Bro-dy, Bro-dy!”

Can your life peak at twenty? How do you go up from so much happiness? How do you top playing the game you love, with the team you love, next to the man you love, with the family you love, all cheering you on? And the world celebrating you, and your game, and everything it took to get back onto the ice?

There was another time I’d thought something similar: how could anything ever change? At the time, it seemed like nothing could ever get better, and since that was fact, and, thus, there was no hope, why bother sticking around to keep hating life? It was a heart-clenching lesson, so sharp it made my breath stop as I watched another baby photo cycle through the overhead monitor above the ice and heard the crowd bellow out an “aww” before they broke into applause at my eight year old scoring record and my team picture with both front teeth fallen out. I could have missed this. If I had given up, I never would have known how awesomely things could change, and how amazing everything could be.

Shea was beside me on the bench. I reached between us and grabbed his gloved hand. It was awkward. Thick gloves aren’t meant for hand holds. But I squeezed, hard, and he turned to me. “Thank you,” I said.

He squeezed back, hard enough to really feel it, until another baby photo popped up and the crowd “awwwwed” again.

***

The postgame was just as nuts as the pregame, but, finally, the crowds thinned out and the flood of people—okay, maybe like one hundred, two hundred tops—got all their Boise Boy autographs and I’d posed in seven million selfies. Morgan and Shea had waited with Lawson, my parents, and Lawson’s dad, and I hopped over to their group with a hundred-thousand watt smile going full blast.

Morgan tugged down the brim of my ball cap until it covered my eyes. “Did you have a good night, Boise Boy?”

“Yeah.” I swept my ball cap around, bill to the back, safe out of grabbing distance. I threw a soft punch toward Morgan, more of a knuckles-to-the-heart fist bump kind of thing, and he grabbed me like he was blocking me, then pulled me in for a bear hug. I hugged him back, extra hard. I’m not dumb; for this preseason exhibition to have happened, someone—someone like Morgan—would have had to put the word into someone else’s—someone like Kathy’s—ear. I didn’t just get lucky that we were having this game here, in my home rink. A lot of people who loved me had worked to make this happen.

Shea and Morgan said their goodbyes to my parents and to Lawson’s dad, and I swapped hugging Morgan for holding Lawson’s hand. My dad was in fine form, decked out in his fancy game suspenders—covered in hockey stick print—with his pearl button denim Western shirt and his mustache twisted in a full handlebar. He was wearing his special hockey game bolero tie, too, with turquoise and abalone shell hockey sticks on a slide. I’m telling you, there are questionable fashion trends in my future that I’m destined to embrace, and it’s going to be equally as horrifying. I hoped Lawson was ready.

Paul looked stiff and uncertain, but he was smiling, and he nodded along as my dad kept up a one-sided conversation. “So, he’s your only lil’ prince?” my dad asked. Paul nodded again, and my dad said, “Yeah, same with us. Just one beautiful babe, so we put all our love into making ‘im perfect. I gotta tell you, Paul, your boy is one fine gentleman. It was a delight having him stay with us this summer. Just a real delight.”

Mom finally steered Dad toward the parking lot, and the five of us crammed into the truck for the drive home.

Guess who got the little seat? Five foot ten and five-eighths inches don’t mean nothing in this group.

Mom had been slow cooking ribs all day, and we dug into a five-star feast as soon as we got home. Dad kept the conversation going while I held Lawson’s hand beneath the table. Paul was polite and kind and very quiet, and he kept looking across at Lawson like all he wanted to do was spend time with his son. 

Mom picked up on the vibes Paul was leaving around, and she took charge after dinner, asking Dad to help her with the dishes while sending me and Lawson and Paul into the living room with a stack of plates and a freshly-made huckleberry pie.

It took some time for Lawson and Paul to ease into things. Lawson, love of my life, keeper of my heart, was not the most communicative man of all time, and the gift of effortless gab had swerved and avoided him during the giving of baby attributes. Strong and silent were going to be the plus features on his player’s card. And, clearly, the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree on that personality trait. More like, the apple had slid down the trunk and rolled around the base, not even separating an inch. Neither one of them dove into conversation.

But it happened, little by little. Lawson asking about home, and about people he’d known, and Paul giving one-sentence updates as his nails dug into the velour of Mom’s armchair. Home turned into talk about Paul’s job, his trucking routes, and him showing a handful of photos of the landscapes and gorgeous sunsets he’d seen way up in the Northwest Territories. He’d picked up long-haul routes after Lawson moved out, making multi-day runs between southern Alberta and across Yellowhead, and then turning north up the Mackenzie Highway. In winter, he’d keep going, crossing the ice roads and traveling north, one of the only trucks to resupply those far flung settlements and outposts through the long and frigid winters.

I offered to get coffee for Paul, and slid out of the family room as a curtain of silence descended between Lawson and his dad. Suddenly, I was second guessing everything. Lawson and I hadn’t hid a second of us. We’d been holding hands and cuddled close and walking arm in arm. Dad had been implying pretty heavily to Paul (and the world) that we were in it to win it, and he expected Lawson to be a part of our lives from here forward, forthwith, evermore. Was that… was that okay? Was Paul okay with all of that in his face? If the goal was to bring him and Lawson together again, was the right way to do that by flinging around how in love we were? Or did it just not matter what Paul thought about it, because he had to deal with reality someday, and the reality was we were in love. Very much in love.

Mom and Dad were cooling their heels in the kitchen, talking softly at the table and giving Lawson and his dad some breathing room. Mom asked how things were going, and I gave her a monumental shrug as I pulled out coffee mugs and sugar cubes. She rubbed my back and told me it would be fine, that Paul was a good man, and that everything would work out. I huffed and grunted and balanced two cups of coffee and a mug of creamer in my arms as I headed back to the living room.

But I heard sniffles on the way, the sound of someone crying, and at first, I sped up—no one makes Lawson cry; I’ll drive us to the airport tonight, put us on a plane back to Boulder—and then I realized those sniffles and choked cries were coming from Paul. I froze like a Looney Tunes character, foot poised mid step, arms locked mid swing, coffee swishing inside the cups as my curiosity overrode the manners Mom had spent years putting into me. I blatantly eavesdropped.

“I was so worried about you,” Paul choked out. “You were miserable in Boulder. I could see it, plain as day. I saw it in all your games, and in all the little clips that the team posted online. Getting off the bus, or walking into the arena, or skating out to warm up. You were so miserable, and I was afraid—” His voice broke, and a wet, weepy sob filled the living room. “I was afraid that was because of me,” Paul forced out. “Because of what I’d said. Because I told you to not be yourself—”

“Dad…” Lawson sounded no better than Paul.

“I was so ashamed of what I’d said to you. And every week I wanted to come rescue you. I thought about driving down and picking you up, and bringing you home, and throwing all your hockey gear away. Because it wasn’t worth it, none of it was worth it, if you were in the NHL but you were that miserable, and it was all because of what I’d told you—”

“Dad, no. It wasn’t you. It was everything else. Yeah, I was miserable, but it wasn’t because of you.”  

By now, the details were all out there, all the gory, gross, and terrible things that Coates had done to everyone. Lawson’s broken ribs had been a big story, and an investigative reporter had done a deep dive into analyzing the security footage at the arena where it had happened, timing when Coates appeared going into the visitor’s dressing room and when he came out, and the camera that had caught him throwing aside a broken goalie stick. Shea and I were still pursuing a criminal case against Coates, and our lawyers said, unless Coates tried to settle, we’d likely go to court next summer. So Paul knew. He knew what Lawson had survived, and what he’d endured.

Lawson, gamely, tried to push a smile into his voice. “And I didn’t actually listen to you, you know? I didn’t stop.”

“Good.” Paul sounded forceful, like he was delivering a verdict. “Good. I’m glad you didn’t listen to me—” And then the tears started coming through his voice in earnest. “You look happy now. You look real happy, Lawson.”

“I am, Dad. I am.” Lawson had that high and thin sound he got when he was fighting back the big tears, when he was barely hanging on. “I love him. Brody. I love him so much.”

“I can tell.” Paul was getting his sobs under control, breathing in raggedy, wet, and deep chokes. “I know you love him. He’s a good guy, Lawson, and so are his parents. They’re great people.”

“Yeah. They are. They feel like family.”

“They love you like family.”

I pressed my forehead against the doorway and closed my eyes, felt my heart melt down the inside of my ribs.

“I was so furious,” Paul began. His voice had shifted from sobs to quiet rage, every letter quaking. “When I heard about everything. So fucking furious. I wanted to find that son of a bitch and drive him up to the Yukon, stake him out on an ice flow and let a polar bear eat him alive. I still think about it, sometimes. I imagine his screams as a bear tugs his intestines out, looking him in the eye as he chews slowly. I imagine shouting at him while he’s dying, telling him that this is for you, and for Brody, and for everyone else on your team—” Paul’s breath hissed in, and he exhaled, took his time before he spoke again. “But I was even angrier at myself. That I hadn’t rescued you. I’d left you there, in that mess, and as much of a failure as I’d felt before, that was nothing compared to after I knew everything. How could I have left my baby boy to suffer like that? I should have driven down—”

“Dad, you didn’t know. And I wouldn’t have wanted to leave. I had a contract. I wanted to honor that. I mean, I wasn’t going to re-sign, but I wanted to see it through, if I could. And if I’d left, then…”

Silence. If he’d left, if he’d gone back to ‘Berta with his dad…

“Then you wouldn’t have met Brody,” Paul finished for Lawson. “I know. And I know you need him. I know you guys are meant to be. I just wish you could have found each other an easier way.”

There were some sniffs and deep swallows, and then Lawson said, “We’re together now. That’s what matters. And everything is so good. The team, and us, and him…” Lawson’s voice went dangerously wobbly. That was my cue.

I waltzed in like I hadn’t been eavesdropping and it really had taken me over ten minutes to pop two coffee pods through the Keurig and brew up some (lukewarm) coffee. “Sorry it took so long,” I blustered. I brought Paul his coffee and handed it to him with a smile.

Paul took a cup in one hand and then wrapped his free hand around mine, squeezing hard as he shot me a tear-soaked smile. “Thank you,” he said softly, and he didn’t mean thanks for the coffee.

The last thing Lawson wanted was coffee, so I ditched his on the table and flopped onto the couch beside him, looping my arm through his and tossing my knee across his thigh. Lawson grabbed on to me with both free hands, holding my arm and grasping my thigh, and he and Paul stared at each other, both of their smiles growing, as I started sharing stories about Lawson and me and our big adventures as we built our life together.

***

Way later—way, way after curfew and lights out—Lawson and I headed upstairs to my bedroom. Mom and Dad had taken out the trundle bed because there was definitely no pretending anymore, and they’d made up a guest bed in Mom’s sewing room downstairs for Paul. Lawson and I slid into my bed, arm in arm, leg in leg, wound up like an octopus trying to tie itself in knots. My cheek was on his chest, and I could count his inhales and his exhales and the steady ba-bump ba-bump of his heart. He had his face in my hair, his lips pressed in a permanent kiss against the top of my head. Did this count as one kiss for my kiss count, or was this like pressing and holding the space bar?

“I’m really glad your dad came,” I said into his throat. “I hope he comes down more. Or we could go up. Visit him. We could go anytime you want. He’s family, too.”

Lawson squeezed me impossibly tighter, all of his fifty arms and legs completely enveloping me, tightening like an anaconda. “I love you,” he whispered.

I kissed the bottom of his chin and his Adam’s apple. “I love you, too.”

I more than loved Lawson, though. There had to be a word for this, for when you loved someone, but then that love got bigger, huger, deeper, and it was somehow something way, way more than it had been yesterday, or the week before. Maybe this is what Morgan and Shea felt when they ran off into the woods and came back married. 

Maybe I needed to start searching the woods, too. Lawson and I could go back to that lake, the place where I told Lawson I loved him for the first time. I could give him a Ring Pop, and we could make a cake out of braided Red Vines as we counted shooting stars and ate hot dogs.

I held on tight as sleep yanked me away, and, all night, I dreamed about wedding bells and hockey rinks, about skating to the net while “Here Comes The Bride” played, about Jumbotrons shouting Boise Boy + ‘Berta Boy. Lawson lifting his goalie mask as I entered the crease, and him tugging me in as I wrapped my stick behind his back and held on tight. Him smiling, me smiling, and our whole big family there, together, clapping and cheering as Morgan said, “I pronounce you the coolest married bros in all of hockey,” and then we kissed, and that kiss was replayed on ESPN and Sportsnet and in Times Square and on EA NHL as the load screen, the coolest hockey play anyone had ever seen, and the best love story of all time.

***

Our last preseason game was at home, under the big lights on the big home stage, with all of our fans packed in and roaring. It was a homecoming, a celebration, a welcome home, a ‘kick the tires and light the fires’ send off. Preseason means exactly nothing at all, but we were walking into our hometown barn with an undefeated preseason record (and Morgan’s budding Instagram chirp war with Bryce Michel) and we were flying. Poor Vegas. They didn’t have a chance.

After the win, the team fell on old times, converging on the house for a postgame chill fest. Hockey was up on the TVs, pizza and wings covered the table, Gatorade and sodas filled the coolers we kept along the kitchen wall, and jazz hip hop floated out of the Bluetooth speakers. I moved from room to room, demolishing a pile of chicken wings before leaning over the back of the couch and laughing with Gavin and Julia, then helping Shea rinse out a pile of bottles and haul the bag out to the recycling bin.

Logan found me coming in from the back yard. He tugged me into the corner of the kitchen, and I saw him shoot a soft smile to his girl, waiting in the dining room. “Hey, bro.” We fist bumped and chest bumped, and then Logan ran his hand through his hair. “I’m gonna spend the night at Kristen’s. Actually, I’m gonna spend the rest of the weekend there. So… the room is yours.” He bit his lip, smothered a grin. “If you wanna, you know.”

I went red-hot, melt-down-hot, like I’d chugged a box of Hot Tamales doused with red pepper. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, man.” He punched my shoulder playfully. “I know how much you like your bed.” Another grin. “So, yeah, we’re heading out soon. I’ll text you before I come home, but, like, it won’t be until late Sunday. So… enjoy.”

We fist bumped again, and then he said his goodbyes to the team and met up with Kristen, and they headed out arm in arm, trotting down the sidewalk to Logan’s car.

I found Lawson chatting with Morgan, and the three of us started replaying the highlights of the game, reenacting the best plays with our imaginary sticks and skates and slapping at each other’s stomachs and biceps and cheering like those super awesome plays had just happened. Eventually, Morgan had to move on, because he was making the rounds as both captain and best friend. He hugged us both and pulled my hat off, then pitched himself over the back of the couch, belly flopping across Ridley and Connor and Gabe.

“Hey.” I tugged on Lawson’s t-shirt hem. “Logan left.”

“Yeah?” He tangled his fingers in mine. I pushed my palm against his belly, right at his waistband.

“Yeah. He told me he’d be gone all weekend. Said he’d text me when he was on his way back.” My eyes rose. “You wanna stay over tonight?”

Lawson pushed my hand hard against his warm skin. My fingers played with the elastic of his shorts, dipped down into the never land of his boxers. His nostrils flared, and he licked his lips as he swallowed slowly. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I definitely do.”

***

We glued ourselves to each other for the rest of the evening. Hands held, my thigh on top of his, us sharing one recliner at the end of the couch. My nerves buzzed, the world bubbling like champagne and twirling on the edges. This was happening. It was definitely, totally happening. 

Guys began to peel off before midnight, heading back to their homes or up to their bedrooms. Lawson and I climbed the stairs while Connor was doing a final trash run through the living room.

I put on some midnight beats and honey-slow electro swing as Lawson shut the door. The bedroom was dark, only the streetlight falling through the window glowing up the space. Even then, Lawson shone like gold, and I could pick out every tiny detail of him that I sought: the halfmoon gleam buried in his heated gaze, the way he rubbed his lips together and exhaled, how he brushed his palms down his shorts and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

I held out my hand. Lawson took it, laced our fingers together. Time slowed. He ran his hand through my hair, cupped my cheek, my jaw, and tipped my face toward his. His breath came in jerks, hot puffs across my skin. “I love you, Brody,” he whispered. All of him pressed against me, warm in the darkness, surrounding me, anchoring me. I clung to him, one hand still in his, the other cemented to his hip, digging in—

Lawson’s lips moved over mine, a whisper, a suggestion of pressure and movement more than a physical weight. I groaned, chasing him, pressing in to get more, more of the curve of his kiss and the taste of his mouth.

The world moved in blinks: us kissing, our arms moving, hands moving, gliding up each other’s back and into each other’s hair and then holding on. Shifting, walking, Lawson guiding me backward until we reached my bed. Him lowering me gently, both of his hands cradling my cheeks as I sat, and as he moved with me— 

But he kept going, until he was kneeling in front of me, both of his giant hands on my knees. We stayed like that, breathing in and out, in and out, locked on to each other, until the track changed and I dragged in what felt like the first breath I’d breathed in ten years.

Lawson kissed my fingers and my wrists and the inside of my elbows, then cupped my face and guided me back as he climbed on top of my thighs, straddling me. I squeezed his biceps, dug my nails into his muscles. He dropped kisses to my jaw, my temple, my forehead, my eyebrows. The tip of my nose, and then my lips, soft and sweet and gentle.

We stayed like that, him above me, me holding on to him, as we traded tender kisses and nuzzles of our cheeks, soft exhales and whispers of each other’s name. The world was a bubble, nothing but velvet darkness and lilting music and Lawson’s touch, delicate and honey-sweet, honey-slow. It should have been huge. It should have been frantic, my heart about to explode, my mind screaming, every other thought freaking out about where I was touching or what to do next or how to move or if I was still looking good or if anything about me was cool and did Lawson really still want me? But it wasn’t; instead of panic, there was peace, and instead of nerves, this felt like I was brushing against nirvana. I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of anything.

Lawson lowered himself, dropping by millimeters until we were duct taped together again. I felt his chest move, the shudder of his breath and the hammering of his heart. I rubbed my thumbs in circles over his temples, and he hummed into our kiss.

I rolled into him, thighs and hips and belly and chest and shoulders moving like a wave, trying to get us even closer than we already were. Lawson groaned, and somewhere inside him, a switch must have flipped, because his hands—that hadn’t gone lower than tender butterfly holds around my cheeks and my jaw—finally slid down my body. They were warm, and his touch was firm, nearly possessive. Grounding, too. And once he got going, Lawson wasn’t shy at all about putting his hands where he wanted them: under my shirt and over my chest, down my ribs, tugging off the cotton and throwing it into the darkness. Gliding his palm down from my knee, curving around my thigh until he reached my ass. There, he palmed my left cheek, grasping it in his hand and squeezing. I rocked into him, breaking our everlasting kiss to throw my head back and moan. He latched his lips to my collarbone and sucked.

I was shirtless, but Lawson was still clothed, and that needed to change. I mumbled something about clothes and off, and Lawson pulled back in a super smooth maneuver, standing and stripping his t-shirt and shucking his shorts and kicking out of his shoes and socks in, like, a blink of an eye. It should have been easy to strip out of my athletic shorts because they were just elastic and slinky fabric, but I got stuck with my thumbs in the waistband when Lawson—gloriously, beautifully, hypnotically naked Lawson—folded himself back onto my bed, lying on his side and propped up next to me. It was beyond sexy. It was illegal-sexy, so impossibly gorgeous that every neuron and muscle inside me just stopped. My brain melted, and my jaw dropped, and I stared and forgot to breathe as Lawson tipped his head to the side and smiled at me.

Then we were kissing again, this time not-so-sweetly. It was the kind of kiss you give someone when they’ve burned out your mind, when you’re imagining filthy, sweaty, amazing things with them, and, oh God. Lawson put his hand on my chest and moved it down, to my aborted attempt to strip. My hands were still frozen, my dick straining at the fabric as a wet patch formed around my crotch.

He helped me finish the job, pulling my shorts and boxers down and abandoning them at my thighs. With my hands freed, I could touch again—motor neurons, wicked—and I got my greedy little fingers all over his chest, trying to feel everything, all of him, instantly. I pressed in close, trying to get us skin to skin like we’d never been, when his hand wrapped around my dick.

The noise I made— None of the other house bros were going to wonder what was going on in here, not after that. Lawson tugged me on top of him, my thighs spreading wide to accommodate the girth of him, my hands going to his shoulders and grabbing, trying to stop the world from tumbling. Lawson was everywhere, suddenly, in between my legs and against my belly and holding my dick, and he had one hand in my hair and the other—

The other grabbed my cheek again. Three of his fingers slipped into my crack, brushing the nether space where no man had gone before.

I’d love to report that I handled this coolly. That I was svelte and amazing, rocking into him smooth as an otter, panting something sexy into his ear as I bit down on his lip and shot him sultry bedroom eyes. I’d love to tell you this was the prelude to hours of porn star banging, but…

But I came immediately, whimpering against his face as I shot all over his fist and painted white stripes up his belly and across his chest.

All at once, I wanted to curl up and fall off the bed, then army crawl into the bathroom and hide in the dark. Will he still love me if I come too soon? It had been one of my Google searches, one of my most mortifying fears, and now—

Now he was groaning, breathing hard, clinging to me like he was on the absolute edge, too. 

“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I didn’t mean—”

“I’m so close, too,” Lawson choked. “Don’t move, or I’ll lose it.”

Well. That sounded like a challenge to me. There was a whole lot I had imagined about getting Lawson into bed—coming too soon not being one of those top ten daydreams—but there was something I’d really wanted to experience. I elbowed his arm away and slithered down, running my hands over his thighs as I settled in between his knees. He sucked in oxygen like he was about to die, and both of his hands flew to my hair, and I licked my lips and—

It was kind of fast. Lawson made a lot of noise, until he jammed my pillow over his face. His thighs shook, and his heels bounced off my mattress, and my lips had to stretch to really fit all of him into my mouth. Yeah, me, who wins every Chubby Bunny contest. Turns out, there’s something that will strain the impressive size of these lips, and that’s the even more impressive size of Lawson’s package. I wasn’t suave, or slick, and the blow job was mostly speed and suction and sloppiness, but Lawson sounded like he was absolutely expiring, and that was A+ work in my book. His hand curled around the back of my head, and his fingers tangled in my hair, and—

And it was a lot, but it was awesome. I licked up what I spilled, and Lawson made noises like he was being lowered into his grave, plaintive and weak and boneless. His thighs spread and splayed, and his hips jerked, and the only thing he did that seemed like actual intentional movement was when he rubbed his thumb in circles at the base of my skull.

We met at my pillow, curling toward each other as we brushed noses and shared smiles and traded lazy kisses. Lawson looked like a mirage, wavering in the streetlight and the moonlight and my mind’s post-orgasmic dreamlight, and I had to reach out and touch him, brush my fingers down his cheek to make sure he was really there. Lawson captured my fingers between his lips, smiling around the tips before he took my hand in his and kissed the pads, one by one.

Tender, languid gazes turned into tender, loving kisses pretty quickly, Lawson drawing me close and wrapping his arms around me until I was sprawled across his chest and our lips seemed intent on making out until the sun rose. I could kiss Lawson for hours—that was another of my fantasies, wasn’t it?—and this seemed like we were on the make out express, until our hips and lower parts got the memo on what was happening up north and they decided they wanted to join the party.

Lawson kept up a steady grope of both my cheeks, too. He kneaded the left and the right like he was making bread, squeezing, grasping, holding, bouncing. His fingers kept dipping into my crack, but never venturing further than a tease, not even when I tried to push into him.

“I love your ass,” he admitted in a whisper, when I shamelessly wiggled back like I was a damn Easter bunny ready for some hippity hop, if he would only go for the gold. “You know you have freckles back here?” He groaned, and his open mouth pressed against my cheek. “I want to kiss each one. I want to put my mouth on you and trace them with my tongue. Open you up—”

I went electric eel crazy, wiggling all against him as he manhandled me to the bed, rolled me from my back to my belly inside the cage of his arms. His lips landed on my neck, then moved down, slowly dragging from my fifth cervical vertebra to my shoulder blade, then back to my thoracic spine—which? Who cared—and further south, his lips a smear of heat, his tongue sneaking out to trace each curl of bone. Bites landed on the sweep of my hips, followed the curve down to my lower back, and then—

He guided my thighs up, spreading them, until my knees were up by my chest and my arms were beneath my pillow and my ass was up, higher than it had ever been, and exposed. His breath moved across my cheeks. Across my hole. The amount of real estate that he had access to, so suddenly, so intimately. If it had been anyone else, anyone else in the universe, I’d be out the window and climbing the tree, but Lawson—

Oh, beans and franks and cheese on a cracker, oh God, oh God. Lawson’s tongue was hot, and wet, and there. Insistent, too, eager to lick and to plunge and to search. Fireworks ignited all up and down my spine, and my thighs went clenched-crazy, muscles catching, releasing, catching. I was squirming until squirming became bouncing, and I turned into a spring, bouncing into Lawson’s lips and his tongue and his mouth, which was moving over my hole, moving inside—

My face mashed into the mattress as I choked back a shout, and my hands grasped my pillow and tried to rip it in two.

Leave it to Shea to leave this part out. It’s gonna be great, you’re going to love it, it’s going to really mean something, no matter what. And, oh yeah, Lawson might suck your soul out through your butt.

Lawson’s hands joined the party, grabbing onto a cheek and spreading them both. His thumbs, too, came running in, dipping into my crack and sweeping up the wetness that Lawson was dribbling all over me, rubbing that spit back into my rim. No, not rubbing my rim, loosening me up. Opening me. For him.

There went my nerves, poof. Zing, zap, every one of them burst into flames, and I groaned, face lifted from the mattress, as I rocked back into Lawson’s hot mouth. Lawson craved every part of me, every tiny little particle and freckle and inch, and along the way of getting into all my places and crevices and tasty spots, he was going to wring out moans and whimpers and cries, too. All good. Two thumbs up. Full speed ahead. I spread my knees wider and arched my back. I was all in with where this was headed. Google Maps didn’t need to spell out the directions.

Lawson circled a finger around my hole, moving it through his saliva slowly, slowly…

“Lube is under the bed,” I gasped. “Get it. Now.”

Lawson bit my butt cheek and vanished. I actually felt the wind. There was a noise from beneath the bed—he knocked over my stack of Sports Illustrated, my old tablet went skittering across the carpet, and a pair of tennis shoes hit the wall—and then he was back, and I heard the click of the cap on the bottle of lube.

The waiting was intolerable. It took, like, zero-point-three seconds for Lawson to squeeze out the lube and get his fingers back where they belonged, into my unknowable valley that he was about to boldly stride into. I backed up obscenely, impatient. If I’d seen that move in a porno, I’d have bit my lip and shook my head, thought, boy, he wants it.

I did, I did, I so did.

The feel of Lawson working a single finger inside was heaven sent. There was no hope of staying quiet, so I ESP’d a quick mental apology to my house bros and shoved the pillow against my face. Maybe this was why Morgan took Shea out to the woods for their wedding-slash-marathon-sex-fest. Maybe Shea needed twenty acres to hide his screams. Parcheesi and Monopoly, my butt. Not when this was on the menu. 

One finger turned into two, and then three. The stretch was sublime, pressure inside and out, heat rising from where Lawson had me hooked on him like a burn. Lawson’s fingers weren’t small. His knuckles weren’t smooth. The big, bony, gnarled roundness of them caught on my rim, each and every time he slid in and out.

I fished the bottle of lube from the mattress where it had rolled against my knee and shoved it blind behind me. “Lawson…”

He got a whole lot more lube all over me, and then all over him, and he pulled out and got both of his big, soaked hands on my cheeks. He bent forward and kissed the cradle of my lower back, right where my spine and my ass mixed and merged, and then he definitely trailed a line of kisses across the swoosh of freckles that ran from right to left. His thumbs rubbed circles into my muscles, slip-sliding into my crack, and then he was moving, and his thighs were against my thighs, and he was right there, oh, right there—

I thought three fingers would be enough—Google said!—but Lawson was a Big Boy, and his first press inward robbed the oxygen from all of my cells. I went face first into the pillow, too shocked even to scream, and he stilled immediately, part in and mostly out, with his hands rubbing firm strokes over my back. “I’ll stop,” he whispered. “We don’t have to.”

“Don’t you dare,” I choked out. “Just— A sec, give me a sec—”

I needed ninety-two seconds, and then it took another full two minutes to get all of Lawson inside of all of me, but, oh my God. Oh my God, when it was all said and done, and the lube had squished and the heat was there and I felt him tickling my kidneys— Oh. My. God.

I needed more than just his thighs and his sack nestled tenderly against my thighs and my sack, so I pushed up, clawing my way through the air until I plastered my sweat-soaked back to his chest. I tipped my head against his shoulder and panted. He was right there, so fast, immediately circling his arms around my chest and holding my face with one hand, the other spreading across my belly and brushing lightly over my adamantium dick. He kissed my neck, my ear, my jaw, my cheek, my eye, the side of my lips, panting my name and the word “love” every other breath. My arms rose over my head, and I dug my fingers into his hair as I moaned, one eternal sound that maybe was trying to be his name.

We moved slowly, gentle rocks and rolls against each other, our love making more about our hands moving and our lips catching, our breaths merging and our voices breaking. He tweaked a nipple and I shivered inside and out, and he thrust forward, bit down on my shoulder and thrust. I lost a year of my life.

Finally, my brain found a mental path to my mouth again, and I started spewing words, things I’d be embarrassed to utter in daylight or when Lawson’s eyes were on me. I babbled about his size, the press of him, how deep he was inside me, how I could feel him stretching me so wide, how I could still feel the stretch of him around my lips. How he’d opened me and I was all his, God, I was all his, for ever, for life, that I loved him, and I loved this, and, oh God, again, just like that. Grind it in just like that, so deep, right there—

Lawson made a sound richer than a groan and hid his face in my neck. “Your mouth,” he gasped. “Jesus, your mouth. Brody…”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I can’t stop. God, Lawson, you make me insane. I want to ride you and suck on your fingers. I bet if you put four of your fingers in my mouth it would feel like I was sucking on you while you were inside me—”

He gasped. His hands flew to my hips and he started thrusting, harder, deeper. “Jesus, Brody.”

It made my eyes cross, made my optic nerves go white, made me imagine crowds roaring and goal nets soaring. “Keep going,” I panted. “Keep going, ’cause I’m gonna come, Lawson, you’re gonna make me come, you’re gonna wreck me. I love you wrecking me—”

“I love your mouth,” Lawson gasped. “I fucking love it.” And he drove in, and in, and then he grabbed the side of my face and turned me to him, and he captured my mess of a mouth in a filthy kiss, all tongue and moans and desperation, and then—

I came apart. My hands flew behind his head, and my fingernails dug into his shoulder hard enough he cursed into our kiss. I striped the air in front of us, shot so high it hit my shoulder and then his shoulder, and my body didn’t know what to do or where to go, chase the front orgasm or the butt orgasm, and I rocked between both clamoring sensations like I was a yo-yo going at the speed of light. Beneath me, behind me, Lawson came, too, and I felt the stretch and the heat and the wetness as he buried himself inside me and erupted.

We pitched forward on my bed like we wanted to break the frame. He stayed inside me, and I jerked when we landed, my face digging into the sheets and one heel kicking out. He gathered me close, holding me to him like I was his most beloved teddy bear, and pressed a thousand kisses to my skin. Nothing, ever, in my entire life had felt like this. Like eternity and spaceships landing and wormholes opening, supernovas going off inside my heart, my retinas shattering like broken glass, and my heart exploding into infinite space, because it was way, way too huge now to fit inside my chest.

We breathed the same. Our lungs inflated and deflated at the exact same time. Our bodies were overheated and center-of-the-sun hot. I was soaked from butt crack to knees, mostly lube, but there was a heat that was all Lawson soaking into me, too. Part of me was liquid. My brain, my heart, the muscles that formerly held me together. Part of Lawson was all goo, as well, and we were mixing in those places, atoms trading spaces, my molecules opening up to allow his molecules to come on in. Make yourself at home. Stay forever.

Lawson brushed his cheek against mine and settled. The playlist had looped, and the song that started up was the same one I’d put on when we began this shindig. Time still meant nothing. I kissed the side of Lawson’s nose and grabbed his hands in mine, sighing the sigh of the very well-loved and the very stretched out. He pulled a blanket over our hips, and I caught his toes in my toes and squeezed. “Love you.”

“I love you, too.” He kissed my ear, the gentle curve of it, and nosed at my hair. “I’ll love you forever.”

Forever sounded like Ring Pops and a campsite on the mountains, hiking back to an isolated lake, and lying on our backs as we watched shooting stars. It sounded like scoring a goal with Lawson as primary assist, and hefting the Cup over my head and then passing it to him, and playing every single year of my career with Lawson on the same ice. Forever. For all time. For you and me, today and tomorrow and the day after.

“Same.” I kissed the back of his hand. “Super same.”

***

In the morning, I ordered a jumbo pack of Red Vines on Amazon and had them sent to Shea and Morgan’s house. On the package note, I wrote, You could have given me a heads up about the thing.

Later, I got a selfie from Shea, him eating a Red Vine with an extremely smug and satisfied smile breaking his face, and a text that said, That would have ruined the surprise. Congrats.

I tossed my phone into a pile of dirty laundry and flopped back on my bed, gazing out of the windows and into the summer sunshine. Lawson came up on his elbow beside me, smiling as he traced my eyebrow with a finger and then kissed the center of my forehead.

I loved my life. 

I loved every part of it, every person inside of it, and every day that I was alive. 

I loved my life, and I loved Lawson, and this was my perfection.

 

---

Thank you for reading!

I hope you enjoyed this second peek into Brody and Lawson’s summer! 

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