Save of the Game (3 page)

It was nice to have someone at the apartment after the grueling days of training camp. Though he could tell Ethan was startled when he walked in on Riley doing a split on the living room floor, stretching out his lower back after practice.

“Fuck, man,” Ethan said, eyes wide as he took off his sunglasses. “Somehow that doesn’t look the same when you do it on the ice while wearing all that gear. Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Nope.” Riley grinned up at him. “You mean you can’t do this?”

Ethan fell onto the couch in a sweaty, tattooed heap. “I can’t do anything, seems like,” he muttered. “I had to stay after so the coach could tell me I’m in danger of losing my spot if I don’t make some kind of improvement. In four days.”

“Improvement in your skating, or what?” Riley asked and stretched forward again. It felt good. His muscles were warm and limber, without a single strain or pull. Ah, the beginning of the season, when nothing hurt, and there wasn’t any pain to ignore and play through.

“I guess? The coach did say I’m good for team morale, and so he doesn’t want to cut me, but I have to stop smoking so much.”

Riley sank down on the floor and turned his head. “So much? Or at all?”

Ethan clearly didn’t want to answer that, making Riley think it was the latter. “You look like that chick from
The Exorcist
, dude. If you start crab-walking, I’m out of here.”

Riley flipped on his back and pushed up off the floor. “The power of Christ compels you!”

“Quit it,” Ethan laughed, and Riley could see him grinning even though he was currently upside down. “Why can you do that?”

“Practice.” Riley carefully lowered himself to the floor. It would be bad if he strained something showing off.

Since that was exactly what he was doing.

“Maybe you could teach me, and I could do that on skates. That’s improvement, isn’t it?”

“Over what?” Riley shifted into a different stretch, one that wasn’t him on the floor with his legs wide open.

“Uh.” Ethan put his hands behind his head and slid down on the couch. “Lying flat on my back because I fell over?”

Riley snorted. “Maybe you should just go in early or stay after and do some drills. I remember Lane did that.”

“Isn’t that because nobody liked him?”

“Nah. This was after he got called up for a few games in Syracuse. He came back all gung ho and wanting to skate faster.” Riley shifted again, breathing out and counting the stretch in his head. He’d already done that set, and he wasn’t sure why he was doing it again.

Showing off. Right.

“Okay, that’s never going to be me.” Ethan shrugged and slid lower. “I bet that feels good. Stretching like that. My back hurts, since I’m an idiot that drinks too much and smokes. Why am I a professional athlete again? I should’ve been a boxer. They don’t have to be on ice skates.”

“That’d be cool, though, if they did.” Riley patted the floor next to him. “Come here. I’ll show you.”

“How to box on ice skates?” Ethan winked. “Rad.” He got on the floor with Riley, wearing his usual jeans and a white shirt. He told Riley he had white T-shirts because he could clean them all easily with bleach. “Can I do this stretch in jeans?”

“If you’re a male stripper,” Riley joked and cleared his throat. “So I hear.”

“Is
that
how you afford this sweet apartment and the new car and all that coconut water?”

Oh, shit. This was going back to the money thing. “No. I get the coconut water in bulk. And you can try it in jeans, but it’d be better if you were wearing sweats or something.”

“Okay. One sec.” Ethan went to his back on the floor, undid his jeans with one hand and then pulled them off while he arched his back and wriggled his hips—somehow managing to get his shoes kicked off as he stripped down to his boxer briefs.

Riley felt his face flush, and he wasn’t sure why. He’d seen guys in various states of undress his whole life, given how much time he spent in a locker room. None of them took their jeans off like that, though. “Now who’s the male stripper?”

“Are you kidding? I’d be terrible at that. Although I guess I could give it a shot if this hockey thing doesn’t work out. They’ve got strip joints around here for dudes to work at. Right? I like Florida. This is a sweet apartment, and New York is way too cold in the winter.” He sat up, looking expectant. “You okay?”

No. I’m not.
Riley gave an easy shrug, using the same tricks he did in goal to stay loose and relaxed. “Sure. Watch.” He showed a few of the stretches to Ethan, who was one of the most inflexible people Riley had ever seen.

Riley ended up trying to push him lower in the stretch by half climbing on Ethan’s back. They laughed, and it was perfectly fine—guys being stupid and horsing around—until Riley realized, with a vague sense of unease, that he was hard.

And he was wearing track pants, so it wasn’t like he could hide it.
What the hell?
Before he could figure out if Ethan had noticed or not, Ethan saw the time and jumped up.

“Oh, man. I gotta shower. Lawry’s picking me up to go to that bonfire at Sloany’s. He swears Zoe’s okay with it. I hope he’s right.” Ethan gave Riley a friendly smile. “You want to come with me?”

“No thanks.” It didn’t seem to Riley like Ethan had noticed Riley’s hard-on and was trying to get away from him, because Ethan moved suddenly like that all the time. Besides, guys got worked up when they were… worked up. Nothing really wrong with it. All about blood flow, et cetera.

“Okay. Well, you’re invited, you know. I never see you out after practices and stuff.” Ethan leaned down to pick up his jeans. “I guess that’s why you’re actually good at hockey. Unlike me.”

“I think you’re good,” Riley said. “There’s more to the game than skating. Besides, that was a pretty cool trick with your jeans.”

Ethan’s grin was unabashedly wicked. “You’re good for my ego.”

“I’m not going to let you score on me at practice,” Riley informed him, stretching again because his little blood-flow problem didn’t seem to be going away.

“Seriously, you should come sometime,” Ethan continued, and Riley had to hide a wild laugh because, yeah, that was the plan—as soon as his chatty roommate took himself off to his shower. “You’re hilarious, and I don’t think anyone really knows that but me. And hey, did you know people thought you were dating Courtnall?”

Riley didn’t know what to say, though he was aware of the rumor. “Why is it I was supposedly dating Lane, and everyone thought Lane was dating Sloany’s girlfriend?”

“People like complicated love triangles? I don’t know. Maybe they thought you were all three dating. My sister knows some people who do that. Sounds like a lot of work. And man, I’ve lived with two sisters. Why would I want two girlfriends?”

“That wasn’t two girls,” Riley pointed out. Then he wondered what the fuck he was talking about… and why.

“Right. Backup. That might be better.” Ethan strolled into the kitchen with his jeans slung over his shoulder, and pulled a Pepsi out of the fridge.

Riley cleared his throat. “You’re going drinking.”

Ethan sighed, put the Pepsi back, and took one of Riley’s coconut water boxes. “This stuff is gross, Riley.”

“It grows on you. And Martin Brodeur drinks it,” Riley told him, mentally chiding himself for his inability to stop talking. And he was still hard.

“Who?”

The look of horror on Riley’s face made Ethan laugh. “Kidding, kidding. Hey. I can’t wait until the Rangers play the Devils, but I doubt we’ll get that broadcast down here. There may be an important preseason baseball game happening somewhere they need to cover.”

Riley had actually signed up for the Center Ice package so he could catch Devils games. But he didn’t say that. The memory of Ethan’s stubbornness over Riley buying him a cheeseburger was fresh in his mind. It seemed better to spring it on Ethan with the game already on, so he wouldn’t ask any questions. “The Rangers suck,” he offered instead.

“Fuck you,” Ethan said cheerfully and headed for his bedroom. He left the door open and dropped his jeans on the floor. Riley could see him pulling at his boxer briefs on his way to his bathroom.

What the hell was he doing?

Riley got up, went to his room, and closed his door. He pulled off his track pants and his underwear and sprawled on his bed with his laptop. He was suddenly very curious about why he was turned on right then.

The idea of being attracted to men had never bothered him, even if it’d never happened to him before. Riley had known Lane was gay before he saw him with Jared, just from the way Lane shied away from normal physical interactions between teammates. Riley spent a lot of time focusing on body language as part of his position.

Riley wasn’t one for casual hookups, but he’d been with a few girls, and he definitely enjoyed it. As for guys… he’d never been with one. He’d thought about it, after talking with Lane, even considered some of his teammates and if he’d make out with them or not. He concluded that he wouldn’t
not
make out with them. But that didn’t seem like a very compelling case that he might be bisexual. At most he wasn’t
not
bisexual. He just wasn’t sure.

Until Ethan, apparently.

Riley flipped open his laptop and typed “gay sex” in Google. Then he changed that to “gay porn,” then amended that to “gay porn videos.” That got rid of all the articles. The point wasn’t to read.

Riley stroked himself slowly while scrolling through some sites. Some of the names of the videos made him laugh, but he supposed they weren’t any more ridiculous than straight porn.

Out of curiosity he typed in “gay porn hockey video.” Riley wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the vast majority of the results were guys getting themselves off for the camera while wearing hockey gear—though it looked more like something you’d wear as an extra in the movie
Tron
, instead of on the ice. Was that a thing?

Judging by the number of results he found, yes. Yes, it was.

He tried putting in “gay porn hockey goalie,” but the first result was a
Deadspin
article about a well-known NHL goalie. Sadly there was no video—he looked—and it was also not about Brodeur, which Riley would probably have read, even if he weren’t possibly bisexual.

Eventually Riley navigated through his bookmarks to a folder creatively called “porn I like” and opened it. He clicked on a few links, not really to watch them—except that one with the girls in roller skates, wearing knee socks and pigtails, skating around and falling on each other and
giggling
and then making out, because that one was awesome. He was looking to see if he had some favorite scenario or something that he could translate into a better search term with the word “gay” in front of it.

Riley almost gave up and just got off to his adorable roller-skate girls when he saw the subfolder called “bad game.” That was where he kept more intense stuff, things he watched when he needed to take his mind off a bad night in goal.

The last time he’d watched any of those was the night they lost the conference finals. There weren’t that many videos, but they all had a similar theme—someone who was all wound up, either fighting, angry, or mad and being restrained or subdued in some fashion. Most of them were videos he found on a fetish website that specialized in bondage.

Sometimes Riley felt guilty watching that kind of stuff. He liked girls, and he didn’t want to grab them and force them or tie them to things, unless they were into that. In which case, he’d love to. It made him feel like a bad person, which was why he didn’t watch the videos all that often. There were disclaimers about the actresses giving consent, but he couldn’t help it.

Riley found a similar video that he clicked on simply because the guy on his knees had tattoos and a shaved head, and it…
oh
.

The guy with the tattoos was sucking another guy’s cock. Which, okay. Riley liked blow jobs, so that was point one in the “maybe I could like guys” column. He probably needed to like giving them too, for it to be
two
points, but one thing at a time. Riley couldn’t see the guy who was getting his cock sucked, just his hand on the back of tattoo guy’s neck holding him where he wanted. The guy was saying things like “That’s it” and “Take it” and “More. Come on,” and Riley definitely liked that.

Especially because the guy on his knees was all angry and defiant, and when the camera zoomed out, Riley could see the tattoo guy’s hands were tied behind his back. Another point? Maybe.

Every so often the man would tip tattoo guy’s face up, and he’d say, “Look at me,” and Riley liked that part so much, he watched it three times. He was breathing hard, flushed all over, and the hand on his cock was moving faster as the guy rubbed his thumb over the tattoo guy’s mouth—like he wanted to feel it stretched around his cock. Holy fuck. Was that
Riley
who just made that noise…?

Gradually angry-tattoo guy’s eyes slid closed as he gave it up and stopped fighting. The other man murmured, “That’s it, take it for me.” And fuck, Riley was so close he couldn’t stop. There was a soft groan, and the man hauled “not so angry now” tattoo guy closer with his hand around the back of his neck, choking him with his cock and coming in his mouth.

Tattoo guy was breathing hard, resting his head on the other guy’s stomach. Riley heard the guy murmur, “Do you feel better now?” And the guy on his knees
nodded
and that was it, Riley came so hard he saw stars and moaned loudly through the whole thing.

Because, in his head, the guy on his knees was Ethan, and Riley was the one asking him if he was all right, the one who was calming him down by fucking his mouth so hard he choked.

Riley wasn’t sure exactly how many points in the column that got him, but it was probably a lot.

ETHAN WAS
feeling good, a little drunk and a lot cheerful, his arm around some girl named Sarah or Susan or Suzette? Something with an S, anyway. And she was cute and soft and had thick, blonde hair that smelled like cotton or springtime or whatever the hell girls smelled like.