Coming in First Place (Between the Teeth Book 1)

by Taylor Fitzpatrick

  By the time David’s down to his briefs, Lourdes is as well, looking almost uncertain. “C’mere?” he says, and David walks over, doesn’t flinch when Lourdes puts a hand on his jaw, pulls him in for a kiss, though he pulls back before Lourdes can deepen it.

  “David,” Lourdes says, lips almost brushing David’s, and David wants to tell him he’s not allowed to call him that either, but it emphatically does not feel like the time.

  “Lie down,” David says, instead, and Lourdes does, shifting his hips up to slide his underwear off, cock half-hard, plumped up against his belly. David stares for a second until Lourdes shifts, and when David meets his eyes, Lourdes’ cheeks are flushed.

  “Can you just—” Lourdes says, and David kneels on the bed, curving one hand over Lourdes’ knee, incongruously skinny when he’s muscle everywhere else, broader than David, who can’t put more weight on no matter how hard he tries, reaching out for the small bottle, which is indeed lube, and slicking his fingers.

  “Turn on your stomach,” David says quietly, and Lourdes does, grabbing a pillow and sliding it under his hips, which David wouldn’t have thought of.

  The lube’s cool, though David doesn’t really understand the implication of that until Lourdes is sucking in a quick, uncomfortable breath when David presses his middle finger against him. “Cold,” Jake says when David stills, afraid he’s already done something wrong, something telling.

  “Sorry,” David says., then wonders very seriously for a moment what the hell kind of person Lourdes is that he takes something that’s rightfully David’s, and David is the one apologising all night.

  “S’cool,” Lourdes says, taking another breath in, shakier this time, when David presses his finger in. Lourdes is tight, almost painfully so, so tight that David wonders how he’s actually supposed to get his dick in.

  He goes slowly by necessity, Lourdes relaxing incrementally around him, until he says, “You can use another,” and David does, unable to stop looking at the clench of his hole, the muscles of his ass, the long line of his back, unbroken by anything other than a few moles, his head pillowed on his arms, mostly hidden by the fall of his hair.

  Even with his face obscured, he’s responsive, hips shifting up against David’s fingers, at first incremental and then more when David’s three fingers deep, his breath hitching into a caught moan when David presumably hits his prostate.

  His muscles are tense, coiled, but he stays open around David’s fingers, practically greedy, and this wasn’t supposed to be punishment, David isn’t a monster, but it bothers him, the way Lourdes takes it, as easy as David is with him, though in Lourdes’ case, he’s probably that easy for everyone. David’s only easy for him, and he hates that about himself.

  “Fuck me,” Lourdes says, muffled into his arm, and when David stills, more distinct, “David, fuck me.”

  David pulls his fingers out, fumbling for a condom, wrinkling his nose when he has to wipe his fingers off on the sheets before he can manage to get it open, fumbling with the lube’s flip top like it’s rocket science. It doesn’t help that he can’t stop looking at where Lourdes is open, and slick, where he’d been tight around David’s fingers and will be tighter around his dick.

  “David,” Lourdes says, sounding impatient, and David slicks himself, looking out at the wide open Las Vegas night just so he isn’t looking at Lourdes.

  “Get up on your knees,” David says, voice miraculously steady, even if his hands aren’t. Lourdes does, and it’s easy, it’s so easy to wrap a hand around himself, guide himself into the tight clutch of Lourdes’ body, which takes him in like he’s meant to be there.

  “Just — slow,” Lourdes says, voice as shaky as David’s wasn’t, and there isn’t really another option. Lourdes is so tight around him David feels like he’s in a vise grip, though he’s never associated that phrase with the positive before.

  David’s slow until he isn’t, until he can’t be, a hand on Lourdes’ hip, another on his cock, half-hard until David gets his hand around it, which gets Lourdes’ breath back to a panting, uneven pull, gets Lourdes tightening around him every time David rubs his thumb against the tip of his cock.

  David will be damned if he gets off before Lourdes does, bites his lip between his teeth just to have the sting hold him back. He would sink his teeth into Lourdes, wants to, but it’d probably backfire, and he’d get off balls deep in him, mouth against his shoulder blade.

  “Please,” Lourdes says, under his breath, over and over, like he doesn’t even know he’s saying it, and nothing would make David happier than having Lourdes beg and doing the opposite, but he can’t stop, riding the edge and trying to take Lourdes with him. It’s a near thing, but Lourdes does come first, spilling hot into David’s hand, and David can’t help jerking into him, once, twice, before he comes buried in the clutch of his body.

  Lourdes sinks down to his elbows, and David’s pulled with him while he catches his breath, until he pulls out, tugging the condom off. He ties it, grabbing the empty wrapper and throwing both out in the bathroom trash, washing his hands, and comes back to Lourdes still on his stomach, blinking at him with half-lidded eyes.

  “C’mere,” Lourdes says, when David starts to look for his underwear, like he thinks, what? That they’re going to fucking cuddle now?

  “I have to go,” David says, finds his briefs near the foot of the bed, tugging them on with unsteady hands. He can’t believe they did that. He can’t believe he did that.

  “You don’t,” Lourdes says, frowning and sitting up. “I mean unless you’re going back to the reception. I can come, then.”

  “No,” David says, flatly, finds his pants closer to the door and jerks them on, not bothering to buckle his belt. “I’m not going to the reception.”

  “Then will you just come here?” Lourdes asks.

  David finds his shirt, curses himself for not wearing an undershirt, debating whether the risk of walking down the hall with an open shirt is acceptable. Probably not. He starts buttoning from the top, hates how long it’s taking, the way Lourdes keeps looking at him.

  “David,” Lourdes says.

  “Stop calling me that,” David snaps.

  Lourdes is silent. “It’s your name,” he says finally.

  “And I never gave you the fucking right to call me by it,” David says.

  Lourdes is quiet again, and David just has time to think, hopeful, that he’s decided to shut the fuck up and let David leave, before he speaks. “I know things are — weird, I guess, right now. But we’re friends, right? Or not friends, maybe—”

  “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are,” David says, “Whether the fact that everybody loves you for some reason got to your head or something, but we’re not friends. I can’t stand you.”

  He finishes buttoning his shirt, finally, grabs his suit jacket and looks back at Lourdes, who pulled his underwear on at some point, and is looking at him, stricken.

  “Enjoy the award you don’t deserve,” David says, and if Lourdes has a reply, David doesn’t wait around to hear it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  David has a shitty night of sleep. He flies out of Las Vegas on the first plane going northeast rather than his scheduled evening flight, transferring in Detroit, which feels unpleasantly ironic, considering that’s Lourdes’ hometown. When he gets back to Ottawa it’s to a quiet, empty apartment, a routine that feels empty. No matter what David does, it’s never going to be good enough.

  He trains as hard as he can, until his trainer starts to hint about quitting if he keeps it up, because he doesn’t want to be the sort of trainer who injures his clients. It’s probably an empty threat, given the amount of money David’s paid to have him one-on-one on a daily basis, but it does make David slow down enough to catch his breath.

  He’s mostly caught it before the headlines take it right away again. David doesn’t read hockey blogs anymore; before he even made the U18s they were talking about him, and anything nice they might have said
was drowned out by insults he remembers to this day. But hockey blogs are one thing, the national news is another, and the first NHL player to come out as gay is national news in Canada.

  It’s a fourth-liner on the Leafs. His name doesn’t ring a bell with David despite the fact he played them three times last season, but obviously Riley wouldn’t have played against David’s line. He looks normal. Brown eyes, brown hair, slightly too big ears. Ordinary. In the picture that leaked, the picture that outed him, his arms are around another guy, mouth occupied. David’s struck most by the fact he just looks like a normal guy, that he wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t told, that there are people out there like him and he can’t even tell.

  That night he does read the hockey blogs. It isn’t exactly hard to find articles about Dan Riley, though the majority of them say roughly the same thing, “About time”, and nothing else. His mother’s back from Moscow the next day, and David takes it easy during training, to his trainer’s visible relief, makes dinner as quietly as he can while his mother takes a nap on the couch.

  He wakes her when it’s ready, clearing his throat from across the room until she startles, coming to the table when he mentions dinner. He’s just taken his first bite when, instead of saying something about the weather in Moscow or remarking about how beautiful the Kremlin is, she says, “I assume you’ve heard about that gay young man in your league?”

  David tries not to choke on his bite, swallowing with effort. “Yeah,” he says, belatedly. “It’s pretty big news.”

  “I hope your league treats him with the respect he deserves,” his mother says, looking over at him like he, personally, was planning on doing otherwise. “I know organised sports are very homophobic.”

  David swallows hard around nothing, twice, trying to keep silent, before he can’t. “What would you know about my league anyway?” he asks. She knows as much about the NHL as she knows about him. “You don’t even watch my fucking games.”

  “David,” she says.

  David drops his fork on his plate. “I’m going to my room,” he says before he says something else he might regret. “I’ll leave for Toronto tomorrow.”

  “David Benjamin Chapman,” she calls after him, infantilising, and he slams the door to his room behind him, like he’s eleven again, finding out his parents were the only ones who weren’t going to the tournament in Lake Placid, the biggest in his life so far.

  He pulls his suitcase open, then his drawers, doesn’t even bother sorting before he starts shoving clothes in, swiping impatiently at his eyes. She always does this to him. No matter how hard he tries not to care about what she says, what she doesn’t say, she always does this to him, makes him feel like a child again, a child who can’t understand why his mother doesn’t love him. He hears footsteps in the hall approach then pause, and he grabs a fistful of socks. He could leave tonight; there’s no way there isn’t a bus or train heading to Toronto in the next couple hours even if he can’t get a flight.

  “I understand you’re disappointed that I don’t have the time to watch your games,” his mother says, voice ringing clear through the door. “But it’s a very large time commitment and you know how time consuming my job is. I would like you to act like an adult and come out and finish your dinner, because you are behaving like a spoiled child right now.”

  “Fuck off,” David yells, hoarse and choked, and he hears her finally retreat. He finishes packing what he can, doesn’t bother going to the bathroom. He can pick up toiletries in any drugstore, and if he doesn’t leave in the next five minutes he’s going to break down and sob like the child his mother is accusing him of acting like, the child he always reverts to when he comes home, trying to get any attention from her, any praise.

  He shoves his laptop into his backpack, hauls it on, pulls the door open gently, and practically tiptoes to the front door, and it might have worked if his mother wasn’t sitting on the living room couch.

  She looks up from her laptop, taking in his suitcase as he shoves his feet into the nearest pair of shoes, then sighs. “This is childish, David,” she says. “I taught you better than this.”

  You didn’t teach me shit, David thinks, wants to say, but doesn’t, because he was taught better, just not by her. I’m gay, he thinks, and doesn’t say because the words choke him even in his head. Wants to know if she’d be so high and mighty about the homophobia of sports if she knew her son was gay, but that would probably just exacerbate it, and she’d love that, a chance to say ‘my gay son’ instead of ‘my hockey player son’, use it to buy her some minority credibility. It’d be better for her career.

  “I’ll find different lodgings next offseason,” David says stiffly, and she stands, but he’s already out the door, walks straight to the Greyhound station a kilometre away because he doesn’t want to stop long enough to book a flight, check the rail schedule, can’t stop or he’ll have to let it sink in.

  There’s a bus into Toronto within the hour, and David buys a ticket, a can of pop from the vending machine, a sub because he barely had any dinner, and it’s too long a trip to ignore eating. It tastes like cardboard, though he doesn’t know if that’s just him or if it’s supposed to taste that way.

  He gets into Toronto around two in the morning, taking the night bus down to the hotel Dave’s arranged for him during training. The concierge seems unimpressed with his interest in booking a room in the middle of the night, but she warms up considerably once she finds out he’s just trying to extend a month-long stay by a couple days.

  “Our premium suite is unavailable until your original booking date,” she says, suddenly very apologetic. “Would a studio be acceptable in the interim?”

  “That’s fine,” David says tiredly. He just wants to sleep. He would have managed it on the bus if there hadn’t been a crying baby two rows ahead of him.

  The studio’s still impressive, not that David looks around much before he crashes. The next morning he buys replacements for all the toiletries he left behind in Ottawa, calls Dave to confirm the camp details, even though email’s typically their primary mode of communication.

  He’s at fidgety, loose ends, enough so that he’s started checking more hockey blogs for the reactions to Riley. Most are positive, but there are a few that make David flinch, especially a fairly vicious one from a New York City based writer explaining why gay men have no place in the sport. He ends up buying a ticket to the Blue Jays game that night just so he can focus on something else.

  The Blue Jays lose, and David buys a drink at the hotel bar to help him sleep, then another because he still feels wide awake. No one bothers him, so he lingers over a third before he goes to bed, though he can only sleep for a few hours at a time, waking up occasionally with his heart in his throat. Afraid, though of what he doesn’t know.

  The next day he walks under a baking June sun, walks until he doesn’t know where he is, which doesn’t take long, and then keeps going, until he’s sweaty and hot and starting to burn despite the sunscreen he applied before he left. Then he walks back in the direction he came from, takes a cool shower in his room. It doesn’t do anything for his face, which is pink and flushed, sore and hot to the touch.

  He sleeps on his stomach like he always does, and that night he wakes up every few hours just because his face is burning, high thread count pillowcases scratching like they’re burlap. Nothing helps, not the aloe he picked up, not trying to sleep on his back, because all that brings is insomnia, and the last thing he needs right now is uninterrupted hours to think. He has months to go until the season starts and nothing but this camp to do with them, and the more he thinks of options the more he realises how few there are. That he has nothing else to do.

  The following day is another scratch, but it’s Canada Day, and David feels obligated to take part in the festivities. Toronto doesn’t celebrate like Ottawa does, but fireworks bloom over Lake Ontario, and David stays up until they fade before taking an early night, mostly managing to sleep through it, though he’s up
at five, a tight knot of excitement in him, the most he’s felt since the night before the Awards, though the less said about that night, the better.

  The training camp’s outside of the downtown core, and David takes a cab, arriving half an hour early. He’s the first in the room, there before even Caldwell and Majors, the trainers running the show. Players trickle in slowly, some David recognises from the ice, the press, some he doesn’t. Caldwell and Majors seem to know who they’re expecting; they wait until five minutes past the hour, when the last player walks in, and then Majors straightens up and starts explaining their mission.

  David looks over to see who can’t even be bothered to arrive on time the first day, and it shouldn’t be surprising, but is, to see Jake Lourdes leaning beside the door at the far end of the room, drowsy-eyed and slouching. The knot that’s been sitting in David’s stomach for days only tightens, tangles more, becoming unbearable when Lourdes seems to notice he’s being stared at, looking up to catch David watching him.

  Lourdes meets his eye for a long moment, then looks away when someone David recognises from the Panthers touches his shoulder, saying something that makes him laugh quietly, eyes crinkling around the corners. He doesn’t look at David after that, not that David’s checking.

  There are forty-four players enrolled, a pretty even spread between elite players and roster fillers, plus two goalies who must’ve gotten lost or really want to practice their skating and their checks. Caldwell and Majors announce they’re splitting them into two teams to play one another in a game for the public on the last day of camp, that in the meantime they’ll be assigned to one trainer or the other, depending on which team they land on.

  They draw cards from a hat instead of doing something that would better spread out the talent, and David rolls his eyes when it comes to him, pulling out a red card. Some of the guys who must know each other are wandering over to check if they have the same colour, and David clutches his red card and hopes, desperately, that Lourdes pulls blue.