Not Destiny

by N. J. Lysk

  Of course, he hadn’t needed scent to notice Ali Pucio.

  At twenty-four he was already one of the Titans starting defenders and he wasn't shy about announcing his goals or ribbing his teammates. Carry hadn't felt anything but the usual apprehension when they'd first met, but he hadn't counted on how charming Ali could be.

  He wasn’t obvious about it, of course. He couldn’t be, protocol demanded that he let Carry initiate any non-professional interaction between them, for one. But protocol was a set of guidelines, not laws. Ali didn’t speak to him first, but he did choose a chair across from him when the team went out to dinner, and he did glance his way as he told a joke, as if to check Carry’s reaction. At first, Carry had just watched him slant smiles his way and sneak looks and pretended he didn’t catch his scent flaring with interest.

  He wasn’t meant to respond, not when he had no intention of following through—and when following through would have meant formal courting and a bond in the near future that would almost certainly prevent him from playing... Well, it was a simple choice. But it was hard not to notice how dark and thick Ali’s eyelashes were, or to miss the lines of his back when he walked by half-naked in the changing room.

  Ali's fellow defender Harry Villiers had been happy to watch them flirt over dinners with the team and video games marathons and nobody else had said anything. There wasn't anything to say, really. Ali was an alpha and Carry was an omega, but they were professionals and they were on hormone suppressants that would prevent Carry from going into heat. They were just relieving tension, reminding themselves there could be something not because they wanted there to be, but because they wanted the option to be there when they decided they had had enough of hockey.

  Except maybe it hadn't been quite like that: Carry had been only eighteen, in a new city far from the English countryside state where he’d grown up and farther still from the Italian reserves team that’d taken him on when he’d been not yet sixteen but decided not to offer him a place in their actual line-up once he was of age.

  He’d been having heats for three years, but he’d never had sex before—not even with a beta. And he’d wanted to. He’d wondered what someone else’s hands on his skin would be like, what a kiss could turn into if he followed through with it, whether the weight of a body on top of his would feel as right as everyone promised.

  Pucio had only told Villiers, but Villiers had told someone else. Less than a week after losing his virginity, Carry had got the call about getting traded. His agent hadn't said it in so many words, but the message was clear: no team wanted to bet on an omega that would risk getting publicly shamed—and drag his team through the mud in the process.

  He could play, so he could play. Why the fuck would it matter what he did off the ice? What he did in bed? It wasn't like he—

  Patel failed to score off Carry's next pass, and Carry had to grip his stick hard to keep himself from actually smashing it against the floor, or the defender. Or Patel's head. This was only his third game with the Hell Flames and he had only scored once. He had to prove he was doing good work here, or they might decide to send him back to the reserves. Or trade him. He couldn't handle another move; he had barely made it through this one.

  Their line was called out and Avali's sent in. Carry kept his gaze and attention firmly on the empty bench, where at least he could rest a little.

  It took him a moment to process that Patel wasn't cursing the referee for stopping the game.

  Carry actually looked away from the game to stare at him. “What?”

  “That pass was a beauty,” Patel commented ruefully. “But you are just so freaking fast, man. Sometimes it's like you teleport or something.”

  “Thanks,” Carry told him, feeling like he was letting him down by not teasing him somehow, but he didn't know Patel that well and he was very much not ready to joke about Patel wasting his shot. If he had seen it was beautiful, why hadn't he used it to score? “Next time,” he added, trying to be friendly.

  Patel seemed to take his awkwardness in the spirit in which it was intended, and they both went back to watching the game. The Northern Winds had just loss possession to, who else, Keenan Avali. He sped through the ice, a fast player in his own right even if he was not quite as fast as Carry, and the puck stuck to his stick as if magnetically attached. His handling was impressive even in practice, during a game it was like he didn't even have to think about where the puck was for his stick to find it, for his body to follow, putting itself between the puck and his rivals as if out of some protective instinct. Journalists talked about Avali's protective posture, but when they called him a typically possessive alpha, there was always some sign that they were joking and they thought it was kind of cool that Avali was using his instincts to win.

  And win he did. He scored another goal, the last one of the game and the fourth the Northerns' goalie had let through. Avali had scored twice, Bauer and Kiau once each. And Carry not at all. Of course neither had Patel or Diego, both more experienced players. It was obvious their line wasn't working, but the coaches hadn't wanted to mess with the perfect formula that was Keenan Avali, Siuf Bauer, and Thomas Kiau. Carry knew he was in no position to make demands of the Flames. He was new and he hadn't earned it, but it was driving him crazy—it was torture to play a team sport with a line who couldn't read you. It wasn’t their fault, they were both good players, but they’d lost their centre to an injury and it’d been decided Patel could do it instead.

  Carry respectfully disagreed.

  He closed his locker and threw his uniform onto the rapidly growing pile in the corner of the changing room while trying to come up with something on TV he really wanted to watch. But he’d run out of episodes of Spinning during the hellish month of trade negotiations. He’d needed it too badly to ration it. Sadly, fiction couldn't keep up with the awfulness of Carry's reality any more than he could.

  “You coming out with us?” Patel asked from where he was pushing something into his own locker.

  Carry glanced his way, already shaking his head. “Nah, just—" He waved his hand around to give some weight to his rather poor excuse. "Just tired, you know.”

  Patel nodded. “You will get used to it soon,” he promised with a sympathetic smile.

  Carry shrugged, unable to come up with anything to say that wasn't offensive or dismissive. He didn't need to get used to hockey: he had taught himself to play until his body couldn't hold him upright a long time ago, and a month off hadn't changed that. He had kept up with his training, in fact, he had been so antsy he had added reps to the point where he had ended up having to take a day off for fear that he had pulled a muscle on his right arm. Anyway, it wasn't stamina that he was low on, but spirits.

  He wanted to feel like he belonged on the ice, like he was meant to be there. He knew he was, but when he wasn't scoring, surrounded by a team that wasn't really his, it just got hard to remember, to believe.

  Patel wished him a good night and a couple other guys nodded, Kiau gently patting his shoulder as he walked by. Carry hated the gentleness; nobody had been gentle with him in the Titans, not even the alphas. Did they forget he played the same contact sport where people ended up concussed and with broken bones all the time? Players had died on the ice; why did Carry need gentle pats instead of the rough noggies and pushes everybody else got from teammates?

  He didn't, of course, but it hasn't like people ever listened to what Carry told them he needed. If he wanted something, he had to take it for himself. And right then, what he needed was to be alone with a beer and a show and decompress.

  At least nobody expected him to talk to the press anymore.

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