Benoit (Owatonna Book 3)

by RJ Scott

  “I like to bite cupcakes.” That wasn’t stupid at all, Ben. My God, you dumb ass. “I mean I like to bite sweet things.” Stop talking. Stop talking right now!

  “Yeah, me too.” The air crackled between us. I felt cold and sweaty, hot and chilled, all at once. “Come on, let’s go find some sweet thing to sink our teeth into.”

  He limped along, using one crutch in hand and his jazzy fedora on his head as all my resolve went up in smoke. The man had such a fine ass.

  We are fully engulfed. Repeat, we are fully engulfed!

  I was toast.

  Six

  Ethan

  Eating cupcakes, drinking coffee, and sitting opposite Benoit had been the most erotic experience of my entire damn life. The way he smiled, the animation with which he spoke about teaching, and the absolute dedication he had to hockey were intense. After an hour of soaking in his passion, I think I felt less than him in a lot of ways. I’d lost my passion for the game when it was pain and loss more than joy and wins. I wasn’t even getting the ice time that I was used to now, and I knew that was because I was becoming less useful. Less fast. Less inspired. Just less.

  Finished at the age of thirty-two when many in other careers were moving upwards was just something that people in professional sports had to deal with. Sitting opposite Benoit, though, had reminded me of the fire that still burned in my belly, a fire, which I hoped would carry me on to the next stage of my career.

  He was so incredibly serious about his hockey, to the point where we spent most of the chat dissecting a highlight reel backhand glove-high shot I’d used in a game against Vancouver more than four years ago. Which proved two things to me. One, that he was a hardworking goalie who wanted to learn his craft. Two, that he had evidently looked me up on YouTube or had known about me before or whatever. It simply meant he was interested in me in a hockey way. Now all I needed to do was turn the spark of attraction between us into a flame. Because I wanted that interest to extend to us in a personal way and to taste him so badly.

  When we’d left the café, hands brushing every so often as we headed back to the college, I’d been turned on, confused, lustful, tired, and utterly overwhelmed. And that had just been over coffee. Now, lust-filled confused-me was dressed as a zombie, complete with guts hanging out and fake decaying-skin makeup, taking cover behind the bench in the quad. How the hell was I going to handle the fact that Benoit had just hurdled said bench and was now only a few inches from touching me and taking me out of the game. He’d drawn the human-team straw, and when it came to me being part of the infected zombies, that was giving him an unfair advantage because he only had to shoot me, and I was done in the game.

  He held up his Nerf gun.

  “I have one,” he called out, and Ryker vaulted the same bench, landing in a crouch and leveling the gun at me.

  “Aha!” Ryker announced loudly. “One more down.” I was actually pathetically grateful because fuck, my leg was sore, even if I was mostly just shuffling around. But even as Ryker went to shoot me, Benoit caught his hand.

  “He’s mine,” Benoit announced. “I’m keeping him and running tests to find a cure.”

  That was some diversion from the script, which consisted mainly of half the participants trying to take the other half out.

  Ryker side-eyed him. “You’re what now?”

  Benoit released Ryker’s hand. “Trust me, I’m a world-famous scientist who can use this particular zombie to find a cure for the entirety of the human race.” He said it so damn seriously, that Ryker and I exchanged glances. Then Ryker snorted a laugh.

  “Goalies are fucking weird,” he announced. “Later, Mr. Scientist.” He ran off, letting out a blood-curdling yell, jumping groups of studying bystanders sprawled on the grass, and then vanishing around the corner.

  Benoit raised a single eyebrow. “You coming quietly, advanced-zombie-who-can-think-rationally?”

  “Is that what I am?” I asked and looked down at the fake entrails. “My guts are hanging out.”

  Ben poked at my chest with the Nerf gun. “But your brain is intact.” He threw his head back and let out a manic laugh just like any crazy ass scientist losing his shit might do. I liked this Benoit, the one who forgot his focus and let out his inner child. I raised my hands above my head.

  “I surrender.”

  Benoit leaned in. “And you agree to me experimenting on you?” He was all growling and up in my face, and I wanted to reach out, grab him, and kiss him right there, stage makeup and witnesses be damned. But if I reached out and touched him, I could win this face-off as part of the game, but fuck, I was so invested in whatever he wanted to do to me.

  Jeez, I’m glad my entrails cover my erection right now.

  “Uh-huh.” That was pretty much all I could manage by way of an answer because fuck, Benoit was all kinds of hot and sexy and—

  “Stand up,” he ordered and stepped back and away, holding the Nerf gun on me. “I’m taking you back to our HQ.”

  I stood, using my crutches to steady myself, and he even held out a hand to help me before slipping back into character. He patted his pockets and frowned. “I don’t want you knowing where our HQ is,” he said and held up the gun. “Shut your eyes, zombie.”

  The thought of being blindfolded, of having Benoit run the scene, imagining me in bed, maybe tied up and unable to move, and I was leaking. All it would have taken was for me to carry that image to a private space, and I could jerk off in about three pulls. Hell, I might not have even gotten my hand on my cock. I shut my eyes as fast as was humanly possible or zombily possible.

  “Turn around,” he ordered and placed his hand on my arm, guiding me, reassuring me under his breath that it would all be okay.

  All I could think was that it would be okay as soon as I had my alone time.

  I wanted to open my eyes when my crutch hit something hard, but I forced myself not to, and he murmured the single word “door” before helping me up and over a step. We hadn’t walked far, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what door it was. Then he encouraged me backward, and I felt a wall.

  “Can I open my eyes?” I asked, assuming we were still in character and that I was in the human HQ and that, probably, one of the team would be here as well, waiting for an explanation as to why a zombie had been brought back.

  “No,” Benoit said, and his voice was hoarse. I felt him shift, his hand trailing down my arm, resting on my hand.

  “I’ll be a good zombie,” I teased, and I had more to say. This whole speech in character about how I could be the start of new zombie-human relations, hoping to go for humor, but he didn’t let me talk.

  Instead, he crowded me, his weight pushing me into the wall, holding me there. I was off-center, my eyes still shut, and then he cradled my face.

  “Fuck,” was all he said, and then we were kissing.

  I didn’t know if he wanted to guide this or if he wanted me to respond, but when he shifted a little and inserted his thigh between my legs to part them, I could feel how hard he was against me, and it was game over. He deepened the kiss, licking and sucking his way into my mouth, teeth clashing. I gripped his ass, trying to pull him closer, wanting him inside me. I’d never wanted to kiss someone so desperately, and I clawed at him as he held me still.

  I was so close to coming in my pants, right there in wherever the fuck we were. The whole team could have been watching, and I wasn’t able to stop. We were on fire, and I was burning up.

  “BEN! Where you at?”

  Ben pulled away from me. “Go away, Scott!” he shouted back.

  “Why are you—?”

  “Tomatoes,” Ben interrupted.

  “What?” Scott shouted. “Seriously?”

  “You heard me. Tomatoes.”

  There was grumbling, but no more shouting, and I assumed Scott had gone. Then Benoit let out a huff of a laugh. “You can open your eyes now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  I want to do some more kissing, and
maybe if you just put your hand on my cock, I could come.

  He pressed a kiss to my lips and then nuzzled my nose. “Open your eyes.”

  So I opened them and tipped my head a little so I could kiss him as gently as he’d kissed me. I blinked as I checked my surroundings, the gloomy area under the stairs, away from prying eyes and far from being found out.

  “What was that about tomatoes?”

  Benoit smiled then and stepped away from me, losing the weight of him leaving me bereft. “It’s a code word from when we were first met, me and Scott, and it’s morphed into a ‘don’t come near right now I’m busy.’” He cupped my face again, looked so serious.

  “What?” I asked because it seemed as if he was going to say something really important.

  “We’re doing this, then,” he murmured.

  “I want to. Do you want to?”

  He took my hand and pressed it to his chest. His heart was beating so fast, the same as mine.

  “Yeah. We should… I don’t know… go out or something.” He wrinkled his nose. “Although I have so much work right now, and I need to get my time in at the rink. I don’t know how I’m going to—”

  “Shhh.” I wiped some of the luminous paint from his dark skin and then smiled at him. “I’ll work with you at the rink. Tonight we work on your glove hand and also get to kiss some more? It’s a win-win scenario.”

  He nodded, then stepped away so he was out of reach. The more familiar serious-Benoit was back, and I so badly wanted to tug him into my arms and kiss away the frown.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re… I mean… what will people say?”

  “People don’t have to know right now. We’ll play it by ear and keep it to ourselves if that’s what you want?” He didn’t say anything, so I forged ahead. “I’m not paid by the college. I’m a volunteer, okay? I can pull away from the team if it worries you. I don’t have to volunteer.”

  Benoit moved back a couple of steps until he met the wall and then he leaned there, staring at me. “It’s not that,” he said, so softly I had to strain to hear.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not all rainbows out there, you know, the Railers. They have these guys, and other teams they have pride night, they tape their sticks, they make a show of being supportive, but Ryker says that Tennant Rowe puts up with some real shit. What if…” He stopped talking, and I could see him worrying at his lower lip with his teeth.

  I’d witnessed the kind of insults thrown at Ten. Not by everyone, certainly not by the Boston team, but yeah, casual use of hateful words was rife. He dismissed it, worked it to his advantage, getting the guys who threw it at him all riled up by pretending not to hear them. As to the arenas, the only really bad one was the Raptors, but that had to be something to do with Aarni Lankinen, the asshole who’d taken Ten down.

  No one liked the Raptors anyway.

  “Talk to me,” I pleaded because I wanted to make Benoit’s world safe, and I didn’t know where the hell that came from, but it was an emotion I was pulling up from deep inside.

  “Look, it’s like this. Imagine I’m in net, right, and it’s in overtime, and I have two skaters coming right at me, but I’m angry because they’ve thrown slurs at me all night, and I doubt myself, and I’ve lost my head space, and they get a puck by me, and suddenly they’ve won.”

  Realization hit me at what he was saying. “You don’t just mean winning the game, do you?”

  Ben kicked back with his boot, and it clanged on the old radiator, which was a solid shape in the gloom. “What if I’m not good enough to stay in the zone?”

  The times I’d heard a skater say that, forwards, defense, goalies, coaches with years of experience, what if I’m not good enough? Self-doubt was a vicious circle, and I could see it poking at Benoit as he shook his head a little.

  “Okay, so you’re saying you want to keep this quiet because if teams knew you were dating a guy when you were at NHL level, then they could exploit what you think might be a weakness?”

  “No, it’s not a weakness. But I mean, I’m not lying to anyone. I’ve had boyfriends, but I don’t want to make a big thing of… Yeah, I think so.” He sounded so confused

  “I’ve been in the closet for so long I sleep in the Narnia snow,” I joked, but I was so badly torn. I wanted to tell him to be himself. I wanted that for him and, selfishly, for me. I think I really wanted to come out of hiding, make my mark supporting a team like the Railers.

  Make a difference to inclusion in the world of professional hockey.

  I also wanted Benoit, more than I’d ever wanted anyone.

  But I understood him, and the part of me that listened and agreed ached with the pain of it all. I had ten years on him, I’d seen so much, and I was ready for the next step. He was just starting out, had a long time as a goalie ahead of him.

  He cleared his throat. “And you’re ready to come out, Ethan, to be the man you want to be and make your mark as a gay athlete.”

  “Bi,” I corrected him as gently as I could, “and maybe that is what I want to do, but right now, I don’t know anything about anything.” The future was this nebulous thing that I hadn’t in any shape or form pinned down yet. “Right now, I want to kiss you, I want to watch you on the ice and kiss you some more, I won’t make a big thing of it, but right now, that is what I want.”

  He appeared to consider my words, then nodded. “I’ll meet you on the ice. I’ll text you later.” Then he picked up his Nerf gun from where he’d let it fall and shot me dead in the center of my chest. “You’re dead,” he said. Then with a whoop, he ran up the stairs and left me there.

  Little asshole.

  The zombies lost to the humans, which was inevitable as we weren’t allowed to run much, and the humans were made up mostly of the men’s hockey and the women’s basketball teams, which meant that hurdling and jumping and generally beating zombies was a thing.

  The after-party was good though. Makeup and entrails be damned, I was happy to stand with a couple of the sports advisors, talking shit about hockey and soccer, basketball, and even touching on baseball. My eye kept being drawn to Benoit, his skin clear of the paint that had rubbed from my face to his, and he was very deliberately not looking at me. None of us were drinking, well, not to excess anyway, but it was a fun party full of heroic exaggerations of how the humans had won, alongside sad stories of all the dead zombies.

  As the party was breaking up, I caught Benoit’s gaze on me, but I didn’t react. I promised him we’d keep this quiet, and I meant it.

  Even on the ice later, after dark, just the two of us, me balancing to hit pucks at him, talking through my thoughts on angles as I did, and him stopping all but three shots, I acted appropriately.

  Of course, as soon as we had privacy, I would kiss him so damned hard.

  Privacy and kissing and more couldn’t come fast enough.

  Seven

  Benoit

  I remember when I was young and learning to stand on skates. My father was always close at hand, encouraging me, telling me that skating was like life. It was all about finding balance.

  Ever since I’d taken Ethan as an undead hostage, my life had become radically unbalanced. Kissing him had been a madness that had consumed me, much like a zombie plague, making me act not based on reason but based on primal urges. Instead of focusing on hockey and school, I was now wholly attuned to Ethan, his touch and his taste, the way he smiled, the stupid jokes he told, everything was Ethan. How I’d managed to keep my grades from slipping was anyone’s guess. Thank the hockey gods our first game had come before that fateful night when the dead had been walking around the campus.

  Our last game had been a shambles. We’d lost to a rival from Minnesota, the Duluth Diamondbacks, a much less skilled team. I carried a lot of the weight of that loss, not all of it, surely, but a goodly amount. It was obvious that the team missed Scott and Jacob, and the freshmen were trying, but they’d just not jibed on their lines yet. But all o
f that was secondary to my responsibility. The goalie is the last line of defense. And I had been sloppy.

  Stupid plays had plagued me throughout the game, moronic choices because I was weighted down with school and a relationship that was burning so white hot the mere thought of Ethan made me shiver with want and grow hard. I’d been loose in my crease, unable to tune myself to the pulse of the game or even handle the puck well. Generally, I was to be trusted with the puck, skating behind my net to shove it to a teammate or send it down the ice. Not last night. I’d tried to grab the puck and pass it around the dashers to Ryker. Instead, I fumbled it, and it ended up on the stick of a Diamondback who’d pushed it into the empty net. The fucker then celebrated right on my blue ice. I shoved him off my ice, called him names that my mother would’ve been shocked to hear coming from her baby boy, and poked at the puck in the net with my stick. That loss was tough. The team as a whole had been demoralized. I’d sent Ethan a text after I’d showered saying that I was in no mood to be social. He’d understood. He was, after all, another ice rat. I’d spent the next day, a Sunday, lying around in bed until the sun rose until Ryker raced in without knocking.

  “Get dressed. We have to catch a train to St. Paul to get to the game on time!” He ran back out of my room and thundered up into the attic, shouting about trains and Railers.

  Scott bellowed at him to leave. Ryker laughed madly. I rolled to my side, not sure if going all the way to St. Paul for the Harrisburg-Minnesota game was what I should do. I had schoolwork, and I needed to think about this thing with Ethan.

  “Dude, seriously, get the hell up. We have, like, an hour!” Ryker yelled as he raced past my open door. The door he’d not shut after he’d barged in. When I didn’t reply, he jogged back into my room, threw a sock at my head, and then when I still lay there like a lump, he dumped my hamper over my head. That got me moving. I threw the covers aside and wrestled him to the carpet, jamming a pair of dirty briefs into his face. He bucked me off, and we both lay there, gasping, staring at the ceiling.