Page 71 of Over the Line

The thing was, that conversation in the hallway and everything surrounding Chris’s fight had been a reminder of my role as captain. And that role didn’t end when the buzzer sounded. I was supposed to set an example to my teammates, especially the younger guys. They’d put a C on my sweater, and I took that seriously.

Here in the locker room, I peeled off my jersey and dropped onto the bench with a bottle of electrolytes. As I drank, I stole a glance at Chris. Oblivious to me or my ridiculous brain, he was laughing about something with Drizz and a staff member.

While we’d talked outside, he’d been Kanes and I’d been Saints. Player and captain. Teammates.

My involvement—such as it had briefly been—with his dad hadn’t even crossed my mind. It hadn’t mattered.

The other side of that coin was that when I’d been with Garrett, I hadn’t thought about hockey, the Phantoms, or Chris. I’d been this hockey player for as long as I could remember, and whenever it counted, that was exactly who I was.

But my God, it had felt amazing to step out of that persona and, if only for one evening, just be… me. No worrying about cameras or hot mics. No worrying about setting an example. No thinking about hockey at all. I could just lose myself in the moment and the man whose touch made my heart race.

And I’d given that up. I’d told him we couldn’t do this.

On some level, I was still sure we couldn’t.

Are you really willing to jeopardize everything for sex?

No, I wasn’t. And more and more, I didn’t think I was really jeopardizing anything… or that it was just for sex. If all I wanted from Garrett was sex, then I could’ve talked myself out of this. It would’ve sucked and I’d have still been frustrated, but I did possess a reasonable amount of self-control.

The problem was that my distraction didn’t fade after I’d finished jerking off to thoughts of him. An orgasm could relax me, sure, but it did absolutely fuck all for the empty space beside me in bed. And on the couch. And at my kitchen island. And in the fourth bay of my garage.

I loved sex as much as the next guy, but it was the closeness that I craved. The companionship. The conversations with someone who somehow looked at me like a friend and a lover instead of Liam St. Clair of the Pittsburgh Phantoms.

Talking to Garrett was easy. Being with him was easy. Bantering with him was easy. I liked the chill vibe we’d had from the start even before anything physical had entered the equation.

Yes, I absolutely wanted to strip him down and rail him over the nearest flat surface. I wanted to run my tongue over every inch of that body. I wanted to blow him until he came so hard he almost blacked out. I was absolutely horny for him and wouldn’t try to deny it.

But I also wanted to make him laugh. To sit on the couch and watch hockey and shoot the shit about whatever. I wanted someone to text and FaceTime when I was on the road and climbing the walls of my hotel room. One blissfully relaxed evening with him—not to mention all the texting and talking since then—had made me realize just how alone I’d been, and I ached for more of what I felt with him.

Was it really so bad, getting involved with a teammate’s father?

Even if it was, after almost twenty years as the face of the Pittsburgh Phantoms, could I be forgiven for doing this one thing for myself?

We tilted the ice hard in the third period. Barns barely had to do anything because all the action was in Kansas City’s defensive zone.

We hammered their netminder with puck after puck, and he made some pretty impressive saves.

Not quite enough, though—Temo scored four minutes into the third, bringing us to 5-3. Less than a minute later, Chris got us our sixth. After that, Kansas City tried to break away and make a run for our zone, but they didn’t get far.

They did, however, draw a penalty. A bullshit one, of course; as much as I wasn’t playing my best tonight, that was not interference.

“He had the puck!” I shouted at the ref on my way to the box. “How is that interference?”

“It was interference,” the douchecanoe in the striped jersey said flatly.

Flailing a gloved hand at the guy who’d drawn the penalty, I repeated even louder, “He had the puck!”

“You want an unsportsmanlike to go with it?” the ref growled back. He was really eager to dish those out tonight, wasn’t he? Fucking dick.

I just rolled my eyes and continued into the box. Yes, it was bullshit, but I didn’t need to make the situation worse by adding another offense. Ugh. Fine.

I dropped onto the bench in the box and grabbed a water bottle. On the Jumbotron, the alleged interference was replayed in slow motion. I’d hip-checked the guy in the neutral zone, and—dude, come on, he’d just barely lost control of the puck a fraction of a nanosecond before we made contact. Interference, my ass.

The crowd apparently agreed—their booing vibrated the fillings in my teeth and the Plexiglas encasing me.

Our penalty kill set up, and I watched restlessly from the box as they fought off the fourth best power play in the League.

Eighteen seconds after the puck dropped, it squeaked under Barns’s pad, and the goal light came on.