Page 20 of Delay of Game

But it had been a really long time since then, and things were different now. He’d worked hard to turn over a new leaf when he arrived in Philadelphia, as tough as it had been to resist temptation, and now, seasons later, he was busy mentoring rookies, not embarrassing the front office or his teammates.

The fact that Mom and Dad still saw himthisway, even after years of working to show everyone they’d been wrong about him—it stung.

They chatted a little longer, about Catie’s high school team and Carrie’s tryout with the Montreal professional women’s hockey team, but Zach couldn’t shake the feeling that she was mostly keeping him on the phone to see if he sounded like he was wasted. Hewasn’t. He was just tired. From the game, and of this: of being treated like he was still an irresponsible child when he’d done the hard work of growing up all on his own.

“Hey, Mom, I gotta go,” Zach said, and hung up abruptly before she could answer.

He couldn’t really afford to spend too much time worrying about his parents. He had to check into his hotel room and get unpacked, handle all of the usual shit he had to handle on the road. With the last few versions of the collective bargaining agreement, players who weren’t on their entry-level contracts didn’t have to have roommates if they didn’t want to. Some teams still asked their players to do it. Voluntarily of course. To be self-sacrificing and save money,of course. But the Cons had deep pockets for all the team had been scraping the bottom of the barrel of the standings for so long, and so the guys had been given a choice.

Nate chose to room by himself, which wasn’t surprising. It wasn’t because he was the captain or because he was full of himself, it was just, Zach thought fondly, that he was shy and reallyneededhis quiet downtime after the games. He’d put in his appearances at the team hangouts, because he was the captain, but Zach was probably the only one on the team who knew how relieved he was to escape after.

Nate never seemed to mind when Zach showed up and knocked on the door, though. He opened it almost immediately, the same way he always did. Zach saw that he was already dressed for bed. He wore his ratty Cons playoff T-shirt and a pair of soft joggers that hung low on his hips, so old the elastic was shot, left nothing to the imagination. His feet were bare. He smiled when he saw who it was, and for a second Zach was punched in the stomach by just how fucking hot Nate was.

It wasn’t just his body, huge and burly and with a solid core that sometimes Zach just had the urge to touch, it was everything about him. Individually it was like all of his features should have been too big for his face—the strong nose, hooked with the bump at the bridge where it had been broken, the full mouth, the huge blue eyes fringed with thick eyelashes, a few shades darker than his hair. He had light freckles, just a smattering of them on his nose and his shoulders and across his shoulder blades.

And when he smiled, it was like his whole solemn, worried face just lit up, like you could finally see what he was like inside. The way Zach knew him.

Zach had been doomed since the first training camp.

“Hey,” Nate said, and blinked. “You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah, uh... My mom called. I just—you mind if I crash here with you tonight?”

“Of course not. Come on in.”

“Thanks,” Zach said. It was stupid, that his parents thinking about him like that upset him so much.Heknew what he was about. Nate knew what he was about. The team knew what he was about. That was the important thing. It was so fucking dumb, that he was in his midtwenties, and he still cared so much about what his parents thought about him.

“Do you...want to talk about it?” Nate asked, hesitant. He slanted a gaze sideways at Zach, always anxious about pushing too much.

“No,” Zach interrupted. “God, no. Like, the last thing I wanna do is talk about it. I’d be down for just, uh. Watching a movie or something.”

Nate was looking at him again, shrewd and worried and kind, and said, “Whatever you want, buddy.”

With anyone else, the normal thing to do would have been to sit apart, each of them with a queen bed to themselves. That was what Zach did whenever he normally hung out with hockey buddies, even the hockey buddies he was hooking up with. That was—well, the normal thing to do. Two bros chilling two beds apart, because they weren’t gay. Even if theywerekind of gay. Or at least bi. Or even horny enough not to care about who was sucking whose dick.

He wasn’t sure when things had shifted with Nate, but he didn’t have to ask anymore, didn’t have to question it.

He flopped down on the bed Nate had been sitting in, the blankets displaced by his body, wriggled around until he got comfortable. Nate sat down next to him, more deliberately, and flipped through the TV channels, looking for something both of them would like. They couldn’t usually watch comedies because Nate got such awful second-hand embarrassment sometimes that he had to turn them off, so the options were limited.

“You know,” Nate said, halfway through. Zach, who hadn’t even been watching the movie, was already half-asleep, his face smashed against Nate’s bicep. “Your parents are gonna have to get over it sometime.”

“Huh?” Zach mumbled.

“Never mind.”

“Mmm. ’Kay.”

At some point in the middle of the night Zach woke up, pressed against Nate’s muscular back. His breathing was deep and even. Zach, like a fucking creep, sat up a little, peered over his shoulder. In sleep, Nate’s anxious face smoothed out into something calmer, although Zach could still see the way that the dark circles under his eyes were carved in deep, the way his eyelids looked almost bruised. The captain was always tired. He often slept with one hand tucked underneath the pillow, a posture that almost reminded Zach of a little kid and gave him weird, protective urges.

Zach exhaled. It was pressing his luck every time he did this, every time Nate let him wake up in the same bed and smiled at him in the morning like what they were doing wasn’t weird as hell. Like what had happened back in September, the thing they’d never talked about again, wasn’t lurking in the back of his head every time.

He sighed. He should go back to his own room. He should really, really go back to his own room. In his sleep, Nate made a soft, quiet noise, and turned over toward Zach. His arm looped over Zach’s waist, a heavy, comforting weight over Zach’s body.

Zach should really,reallygo back to his own room.

He didn’t.

By mid-November Nate felt like the team had started to get the hang of things and the new guys were all integrated in. One of their longtime wingers, Clark, had gotten a necessary hernia surgery and would probably miss the rest of the season. They called up Adam Belsky, a defensively sound middle six kid who’d been playing the last two seasons in Allentown, to handle it. It had taken Belsky a few weeks to get into the rhythm of things, but now he fit in as seamlessly as you could hope. Gags had calmed down on the ice, although between him and Netty, the team hangs after games were dangerous places to be. At least, Nate thought a little doubtfully, he was fitting in.