by N. J. Lysk
“Ugh, yeah,” Colleen agreed with a theatrical grimace. “If I never have to watch another video of surgery, I’ll die happy.”
Chapter Six: Uriel
Uri wasn't going to do anything with it, but he was curious. He'd always been curious, that was why he'd done well in school, really. That and David's excellent grades to compete against—if his brother hadn't decanted for the sciences when Uri had chosen the arts, he'd have probably ended up with a P.H.D before realising there was nothing to win other than knowledge itself.
It was his lunch break, which he normally worked through like the workaholic Thomas had guessed him to be. But all work and no play made for a great recipe for burning out, Esti insisted.
Of course, Esti had probably come up with the saying for Ruth’s sake alone, and Ruth normally said that reading philosophy books wasn’t work for her.
But everything felt like work to Uri today. Except typing ‘London hockey team’ into the search engine of his computer.
The engine helpfully reminded him that his local team was called the ‘Hell Flames’, he could just about imagine Thomas’s indignation if he found out he hadn’t even known that much...
The photo of the team loaded almost too fast and left him squinting for blond hair. There was more than one light-haired player but he zoned into the right face almost at once despite the low quality of the image. Zooming in hindered more than helped identification but it didn’t matter, something about the posture of the man’s body just... He found the list of names next.
Thomas Kiau.
Could that be right...? He pasted the name onto the search engine and waited.
His heart stuttered when the dimples and bright green eyes cleared up. Dammit, he was beautiful.
He clicked the window shut, staring at his abandoned sandwich to resist re-opening it.
He knew he was being ridiculous; he’d spent a few hours with the man, this reaction was completely disproportionate.
It’d pass soon enough, he knew. He’d only slept with a stranger once before—a disappointing experience—and he hadn’t had sex with anyone for too long, clearly, if he could develop such intense emotions over such a short period of time.
It’d pass.
But he could write down the name. He tended to forget names even when they weren’t as strange as ‘Kiau’ and even if looking him up had been easy... He thought about emailing himself, but that would leave an email in his outbox that had nothing to do with work. Paper he was sure to lose, so he took out his phone instead, created a new profile and filled it out. Because he was an inveterate perfectionist, he ended up opening the search engine again to check the spelling. Then he saved it.
And then he checked he’d saved it properly.
But there were two ‘Thomas Kiau’ in his contacts. How...? He opened the top one, then almost choked on air when he saw there was a number there.
A mobile.
“Uriel?” he fumbled and dropped his phone, with such bad luck that it fell on his lap but slid right onto the floor anyway with an ominous sounding clatter. Why on Hades did they have tiled floors in an office?
He barely bit back a swear word in front of one of the firm’s partners. “Mx Yave?” he asked as solicitously as he could manage when he could barely breathe through his hammering pulse.
“Oh, you’re having lunch,” his boss said with an apologetic smile. “Never mind, come by my office when you’re done?”
Uri was fairly certain Mx Yave meant it, but there was no way he’d be able to eat the remaining half of his sandwich, and if he had broken his phone after finding Thomas’s number on it... Well, he didn’t think he would be in the right state of mind to listen to a work proposal afterwards.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I can come now.”
“Eager as usual,” Mx Yave commented, teasing but approving. Company policy or not, they were all there to work their arses off—you didn’t make it into one of the top firms in London taking long lunch breaks, that was for sure.
Uriel got to his feet, careful to slide his chair backwards so as not to knock on the phone. He didn’t pick it up, though; if it wasn’t...
“Should I take notes?” he asked, even as he picked up a yellow pad and his favourite pen—a heavy stylographic his mothers had given him as a graduation present.
Mx Yave gave a complacent nod. “You’ll like this one,” he promised, waiting until Uri was by his side before starting for his office.
BECAUSE FATE LIKED playing with people, once Mx Yave dismissed him, he ran into Jun on his way out of his boss’s office. “Hey,” he greeted, starting to sidestep.
But Jun’s presence was apparently no coincidence, he reached out and squeezed Uri’s arm—a gesture that might have lingered longer if he hadn’t been an alpha, Uri suspected.
Not that Jun had particular reason to remember Uri’s orientation—he might have looked willowy and delicate, the ideal for male omegas, but he was a beta and long past the age when that could change. He also looked a lot tenser than usual. “Can I talk to you?”
“Sure,” he said. He didn’t need to think about it; Jun was the only close friend he saw regularly—both at work and outside it, and Uri knew the second was mostly due to Jun’s efforts. He glanced at the offices—sound and scent-proofed—that lined the corridor. “You wanna...?”
“Yeah, I— It’s kind of personal.”
Uri didn’t ask any more, just led the way to the next empty interview room. Jun closed the door behind them but instead of sitting on a chair, chose to lean back against the conference table in the centre of the room, crossed arms contradicting his relaxed posture. “Maybe it’s not the best time, but yesterday sucked monkey balls, and I just—” He settled his hands down on the table, gripping it and exhaling slowly. “You don’t talk much about the adoption centre, but I figured you’d know more than me.”
Uri gave himself a second to see if among the rambling, Jun had actually bothered to mention what he was talking about. “You forgot the topic,” he said after a moment.
“Oh! Yes, adoption. We want to do it... Well, we think,” he added a little slower. “But the kids we talked to—” He stopped, shaking his head. “Man, it was like they couldn’t have been less interested. Rimini almost cried when we got back home.”
Driving Rimini to tears couldn’t be easy, at least from what Uri knew of his friend’s long-time partner and since they often dragged him to dinner with them, he’d have said he was in a fairly good position to judge. “Okay,” he told Jun. “First of all, kids in adoption centres aren’t in a good place, even if it’s a nice centre and they’re cared for. They’re there because their families can’t look after them, or worse, they aren’t around to look after them.”
Jun nodded, eyes wide. “I know that, I know.”
Uriel silenced him with a raised hand. “Did you guys fill out the questionnaires before going?”
“You think Rimini will let me go anywhere without doing my homework?” Jun asked. “She made me fill them out by myself, and then we compared what we’d written and talked it over.”
“Good,” Uri said, merciless. He’d known more than one adoption to fall through because a couple hadn’t thought it through—for a kid, there was very little more discouraging.
“So how did we fuck up anyway?”
Uri snorted. “How am I supposed to know that? You’d need to tell me all the details. Well, Rimini would have to tell me all the details.”
“You don’t trust me?” Jun asked, fluttering his dark, pretty lashes and affecting an air of innocence his youthful looks would have let him get away with if he hadn’t meant it as a jest.
Uri rolled his at him. Jun was a great lawyer, with an eye for detail that sometimes left Uri feeling as envious as admiring. What he was not was great at summarizing his own experiences. “More like I have a job to do.” He waved his notes as proof.
“Whatever, then you have to come to dinner. Rimini’s trying something new anyway.”<
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Uri vacillated, very aware of the unexpected kindness fate had done him with Thomas’s number. But even if it was still there and he hadn’t wrecked his phone, it’d keep one more day.
Maybe it was better if he thought it through, anyway. And Jun and Rimini needed him. “Twist my arm, why don’t you?” he told Jun.
“Will do if you side with Rimini again about salt,” Jun warned him, then checked his watch. “Dammit, lunch’s over. Let’s head home together at sevenish, yeah?”
HE WAS GRATEFUL HE’D taken notes because as soon as he got back to his desk and discovered the phone wasn’t broken, he forgot about the new case. He breathed out, holding the bulky thing David always teased him for but Uri had never seen a point in replacing. Take that, David, he thought as the screen lit up with no signs of having met the floor.
He had another moment of panic when he got the home screen instead of his contact list, but when he opened up the application, the name was still there, and so was the number.
The number Thomas must have put in there. Because he wanted Uri to call.
Except... why hadn’t he said it was there? The guy was famous, but surely he couldn’t expect any stranger he took to bed to chase after him... He was being absurd, of course, Thomas was just a guy—famous or not, and if he’d added his info to Uri’s phone, there was no other way to interpret that but positively.
There was no way to interpret their night together but positively. Uri might not have had the strongest confidence on his social skills, but he wasn’t questioning the sounds Thomas had made while he’d fucked him against the wall. He shifted on his chair, the memory a little too intense for the workplace.
He should have offered his own number, but he hadn’t. And Thomas had obviously forgotten to tell him about adding his own. One thing was for sure: it’d been a mistake to leave early without making sure they could find each other again.
But now, he could fix it.
RIMINI SMILED AT HIM, pretty brown eyes twinkling. Uri leaned closer for a half hug which lingered a little too long. Not that he minded, Rimini was only physically affectionate with people she felt real affection for and Uri tended to always be low on hugs.
“Thanks for coming,” Rimini said, already heading for the kitchen. It was the biggest room in the apartment and smelled like heaven, assuming heaven smelled like caramelised onions and some spices Uri couldn’t name but was definitely looking forward to consuming. Rimini was either psychic or Jun had texted on the way because a cup of perfectly brewed jasmine tea materialized in front of Uri almost before he was seated. “Oh, thanks.”
“Least I can do.” Rimini spared him a smile in between cutting some potatoes.
“Least he can do,” Jun corrected coming in from the bedroom where he’d gone to change out of his suit. “How many times have we fed him like a king?”
Rimini’s eyebrow could have erased several minor experiences. Jun raised his hands at once in a pacifying gesture. “You. You have fed him like a king, I have... offered him the hospitality due to one?”
“Have you?” Uri demanded, taking a sip of his tea as regally as he could manage. “I have noticed a distinct lack of feet washing, for one.”
Jun groaned theatrically. “Don’t even, man. We’re about to eat! I don’t want to even think about your feet.”
“Boys,” Rimini said firmly. “Back on topic, please.”
Uri nodded at him. “Jun said you went to an adoption centre yesterday; which one?”
Rimini and Jun were the best kind of prospective parents, and the worst. Because when you said (and told yourself) that you were open to any possibility, what you really meant was that you couldn’t narrow it down. And the last thing a child without parents needed was added uncertainty from someone who was offering to come in and take them away from their temporary accommodation.
Uri didn’t really remember being in the adoption centre, at six he’d retained the memory of the bunk beds and the older girl who’d been assigned to help him acclimatize—his mothers had taken him back to visit Emman until she’d got emancipated at seventeen, though, so he could have just made up the rest to fill in the blank.
He didn’t remember his biological mother and grandmother at all, not even when he looked at the pictures the social worker had collected from their flat when he’d been taken in. It was a natural enough reaction to trauma, and yet...
Well, it bothered him a little. And he’d been one of the lucky ones to get adopted early by people he could adapt to well. If in his head, he knew Ruth and Esti weren’t his mothers by blood, in his heart it was something he needed to remind himself of.
Jun and Rimini had at least thought about the practical considerations; any child who did not yet attend school was too young for them to look after with their jobs, even if Rimini’s position at the university as a food researcher was a morning only commitment except during conferences. They had a spare room in their flat, which they’d justified so far because Jun’s mother lived too far to visit unless she slept over, but which said potential grandmother was also happy to give up in favour of a grandchild to spoil.
“So you just did an interview with each of them?” Uri checked.
“Is that not how it’s done?” Rimini was frowning a little over the perfectly crumbly puff pastry, even though it was so good Uri was almost offended on its behalf.
Uri shrugged. “Some centres do it like that, but think about it like a first date; you meet someone for the first time and you have to make conversation, only in this first date there’s a hell of a power imbalance.”
“Oh,” Jun said, voice going a little high.
“Yeah,” Uri agreed. “So at the adoption centre where I volunteer, they put the pressure on the parents instead. You go in and chat to all of them, not knowing anything about their background, just meeting them on their turf, really.”
“And then?”
“Then if any of them want you back, you get a second invitation.”
“That’s brilliant!” Jun said, so enthusiastically he sent a piece of broccoli flying across the table.
Rimini laughed and Uri almost choked on the pie as he joined in; he could almost taste their anticipation and joy.
Chapter Seven: Thomas
Thomas didn’t think much of Carry and Keenan missing morning practice. According to Coach they’d been there earlier on their own, which was always a plus as far as Thomas was concerned. He did his best not to assume it had anything to do with their hormones, but they were so bloody intense about each other that... Well, it was hard to spend as much time around them as Thomas did and not notice.
They were handling it, anyway. He’d seen the change after he’d left them alone a couple days earlier. Maybe they’d needed a little help here and there while they sorted themselves out, but they seemed to have figured out how to talk to each other without him having to stand by and prompt them to keep the conversation flowing.
That afternoon, they proved him right in the oddest of ways: somehow they’d got Coach to place Carry in Patel’s line, putting Diego on Keenan’s left instead. It was all well and good for strikers to practice playing on their weakest side, but he couldn’t see why Keenan and Carry wanted to play away from each other when they’d apparently made an effort to come in early to practice playing on their own. And they’d most definitely play together on their next game, they were too good for the coaches to use them any other way.
It was a good practice, energizing and fun and they only lost by one point, which wasn’t enough for anyone to mock them for.
He thought about cornering one or both of them—probably one, and probably Carry, but he couldn’t quite think of how to ask. Keenan’s crush was both obvious from Mars and in direct contradiction to his insistence that he was not sexually attracted to men. But Carry... well, someone had just as clearly screwed him over real bad and even if he did feel something for Keenan other than the irritation most people seemed to bring out on him, he was likely to deny it.
It was none of Thomas’s business anyway. As long as their hockey was okay, they had every right to pine away like lovers separated by fate or something equally dramatic. So, once again, he got changed and let it go.
NOT DOING ANYTHING seemed to be doing the job just fine... Until they got to the Trinity Titan’s rink in Polska and it all fell apart. Sven warned them ahead of time that Carry would be targeted by their ex-teammates, which Thomas wasn’t that surprised about. Carry was only nineteen and burned badly enough it’d taken months to coax him into opening up even a little, it wasn’t hard to guess the team who’d traded him as fast as bureaucratically possible was behind his twitchiness.
Thomas knew something was wrong the moment he saw Carry’s skating had lost its characteristic smoothness—maybe someone who hadn’t been watching the man skate for the last few months wouldn’t have noticed, but Thomas paid attention.
To his eye, it was an altogether different player stopping at the other end of the line. To make matter worse, Keenan also seemed out of sorts, which was as per the course with their strange connection. He gritted his teeth and tried to rally them, but even though Carry managed to receive his pass quite well, the Titans were keeping too close to him. A moment later, the Titan’s d-man, Villiers, slammed into Carry, sending him crashing to the ground hard enough Thomas’s teeth hurt in sympathy.
He’d have gone to him, but Keenan got there first and like on the bench earlier, their conversation seemed too private to intrude. In theory, it was absurd, they were speaking about the game and Carry’s health, nothing... But Thomas had kept his distance for too long. Carry didn’t go out for the break he probably needed. He seemed okay, if not better than before, and managed to get around Villiers with the puck.
And then Puccio got in his way and he fell apart. Not that he was obvious about it, he simply lost the puck. Except Carry’s stick handling was normally impeccable and Puccio hadn’t even done anything sophisticated—apparently, when it came to Carry, he didn’t need to.