by Avon Gale
Before they ended their call, his father said, “Tell your partner, best of luck in his new environment,” which was enough to make Jared end the call and laugh kind of helplessly for a few seconds.
After that, he stood by the bed, arms crossed, waiting. He had to take the magazine from Lane, because Lane had actually started to read it. “You couldn’t have just started making amateur gay porn?”
“Don’t be weird. Why would I send your parents that?” Lane glanced at him nervously. “Are you mad?”
“Yeah. A little,” Jared admitted. Then he snorted. “My dad said he thought I hit the puck, not that I played catcher.”
Lane snickered like the twenty-one-year-old he was. “Sometimes you play catcher.”
“Why did you do that?”
Lane didn’t look at him. “I just thought they should see a game of yours. But there weren’t any full ones on YouTube, so Zoe and I had to use clips. It was like making a montage in a movie. She wanted to use music, but I told her no.”
“Wouldn’t want to be over the top,” Jared agreed.
“Exactly,” Lane nodded. “I knew you’d agree with that. And look. Maybe I should have said something, but you would have told me not to do it.”
“Well, shouldn’t that have been a clue...?”
“But,” Lane continued, meeting Jared’s gaze, “you’re glad they saw it. Right?”
“I’m not answering that.” Jared threw his hands in the air. “Yes. It was weird, though. My mother actually gasped.”
Jared went around and sat on the bed, next to Lane. He stretched out, hands behind his head. “He told me they didn’t go to any of my games because I never asked them to. And they knew I was aware of their feelings about sports, so they didn’t want to distract me.”
Lane climbed on top of him, proving his instincts about mailing things to his boyfriend’s parents might suck, but his other ones were right on target. “I just need a minute to understand the idea of having to ask your parents to go to a hockey game. I knew some kids who asked their parents not to.”
Jared had learned that when Lane said “I need a minute,” he wasn’t kidding. So he waited patiently while Lane stared off into space and then nodded. “I still don’t get it, but let’s move on.” His hands rubbed up and down Jared’s chest, hips rocking against Jared’s. “Is it distracting, if I’m doing this?”
“Yes,” Jared answered immediately. “Keep doing it.”
“So you never did ask them?”
“What do you think? I guess I should have.” Jared’s eyes slid half-closed. Lane felt so good—a solid weight—his hands warm as they pushed Jared’s shirt up. “I think maybe we’ll talk about that at Christmas. Which... uh. I sort of said we’d go there without asking you about that.”
“I know. I was in the room. It was just five minutes ago.” Lane leaned down and kissed him. “It’s fine. I’ll probably be disowned anyway. I can maybe find some other clips and make another movie for them. How’s that?”
“No.” Jared took him by the back of the neck and kissed him a little more heatedly. “I think I’ll just get them to go to a game of yours. After they take out another mortgage on the house to pay for tickets.”
Lane snorted. “A Marlies game shouldn’t be that much. Do they have a nice car? Maybe a boat?”
Jared got distracted kissing him, but he remembered to say, “Oh, my dad said to ‘Wish my partner luck in his new environment.’”
“My new environment? Oh. I guess he doesn’t know I’m Canadian.” Lane shifted again, turning Jared’s laugh into a moan. “Partner in what?”
Jared pushed up against him. He wanted Lane to fuck him, but he wanted Lane to just do it without him asking for it. “Crime? I wonder this myself a lot, Lane.” He hooked his fingers in Lane’s belt loops to pull him down—hard. “He meant life partner.”
“I do know some things.” Lane bit him on the neck. “Like how you want me to fuck you right now, but don’t want to have to ask for it.”
Jared gave him a thoroughly annoyed look. “Why do you pick up on that, of all things?”
“Because it’s you.” Lane’s smile made something flip around in Jared’s stomach, and happily it wasn’t for the same reasons as that morning. “I’m not good with words and shit sometimes, but I’m pretty good with stuff like body language. And I watch you a lot. Because you’re hot.”
Jared almost said something about that “sometimes,” but the last bit mollified him enough to let it go. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
Lane was good at that whole... grinding thing. “Are you...?”
“Am I what?” Lane put his hands on Jared’s shoulders, and leaned his head back for a moment while he rocked his hips forward again.
Jared couldn’t answer. He was too distracted by how that looked. “Take your pants off? Take my pants off? Someone’s pants should be off here.”
“Now who’s a rocket?” Lane teased. He had a cocky, punk-ass-bitch grin that Jared secretly thought was attractive. But only because it was Lane. “In a minute. It feels good like this.”
“It feels scratchy and uncomfortable. Is that what you mean by good, weirdo?”
“No, it’s.... I like the part where we both want it really bad, and it’s all tense and stuff.” Lane’s leaned his head back again. “Whatever that is.”
“Foreplay?”
Lane pulled his shirt off and tossed it to the floor. Because he’d decided to tease Jared to death apparently. “Sure. That.”
“I told you there were good reasons to slow down,” Jared said crankily, hands going to Lane’s jeans to get them undone.
Without looking at him, Lane caught his wrists and pulled his hands away. “And now you see why I like going fast.”
Jared was thoroughly disgruntled and really turned on. “So you have learned, grasshopper.”
And Lane opened his eyes, looked down, and smirked at him. “Yeah. Know what else I learned?”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” Jared didn’t mean that in the slightest.
“It’s hot making people ask for things they want.”
Oh, motherfucker. “Lane, I’m older than you.” That’s all Jared could come up with. “Goddammit.”
“Ask me for it. I want to hear it. I think about hearing that. Sometimes in the shower, I get off thinking about you saying it.”
“When—are you sure you don’t have some kind of medical condition? You already get laid a lot. You know that. Right?” Jared’s breath hitched in his throat as Lane rolled his hips down again.
“I’m celebrating after all those years of feeling guilty about being gay,” Lane told him. “I didn’t even look at gay porn. Did I tell you that?” He arched his back, his face flushed, and reached down one-handed to undo the buttons on his jeans.
“Really? I find that hard to believe. Especially seeing as how you look like you’re in one right now.” Jared tried to get his own jeans undone, but Lane wouldn’t let him. “Fuck you. What is this?”
Lane leaned down, kissed him, and dragged his teeth slowly across Jared’s bottom lip as he sat up. “Two things. One, I feel like I am in a gay porno, because I know what I’m doing now.”
“You’ve been pretty good at it from the beginning.” Jared smiled winningly at him. “Wasn’t that nice of me to say? Now take my pants off.”
To his surprise, Lane reached down like he was going to, but all he did was play with the button—the tease. “It’s just weird, because I knew sex would be good when I had it. Or, okay, that the point of it was to feel good. But I didn’t know it kept getting better the more of it that you had.”
“You’re trying to kill me and steal everything I own, aren’t you?”
Lane was still rocking back and forth, his head back, but now one of his hands slid inside his jeans, and it wasn’t fair, Jared was going to murder him. “Really, J, it’s your fault I’m like this.”
Jared undid the button on his jeans, and when Lane tried t
o knock his hand aside, he wouldn’t let him. “If you want it to be useful, ever again, I really need to give it some room.”
Lane snorted and almost giggled like the teenager he’d been until way too recently. Especially given the way he looked right then. “I just feel like I can do this now. It’s like believing in myself. But with sex.”
Jared gave up. “Would you please fuck me, Lane?”
“Yeah.” Lane shifted down and worked on Jared’s zipper, slowly easing it down. “Eventually.”
“I think I like you better as a Rocket rather than a Snail,” Jared said, and their eyes met. “Why are those your only two speeds?”
Lane laughed.
“Don’t,” Jared warned him. He was going to start laughing, goddammit. He knew it. “Don’t say it, Lane.”
“So I’m not Bastian from The NeverEnding Story anymore. I’m the racing snail?” Lane worked his jeans off and licked a slow line up Jared’s cock. “What’s that make you? The dude with the stupid hat that rides me?”
“Just for that, Courtnall? I’m fucking you with my Eastern Conference ECHL Champions hat on.” Jared smacked him lightly on the side of the face, and he filed away the information that it made Lane’s eyes flare hot. “New rule. No more references to that damn movie—ever—in bed.”
“In bed, or just sex? And what if we’re having sex in the locker room? Or the Mazda? Or the living room. Or hey, maybe the penalty box. Wouldn’t that be hot?”
Jared was too much a hockey player not to be immediately intrigued by that idea. His assent was hidden somewhere in the moan he gave when Lane took him in his mouth again.
Just to be contrary, Jared got on his hands and knees when Lane fucked him. Lane did not know all the tricks. Damn it. Jared still had a few to show him. He thought about putting Lane on his back and riding his cock, but then he remembered that racing-snail comment and decided to wait until he had the hat.
Chapter 12
Jared knew that Lane was a little disappointed when he was sent to the Marlies after training camp, even though they’d both known he was starting the season there and would likely play most of his games with the Leaf’s AHL affiliate. And as much fun as Jared had been having being a retired hockey player in Toronto, he also knew that once Lane’s season started, he was going to have to have something of his own to do.
Lane was a little overwhelmed by the new team and the new environment, and Jared understood that. He remembered what it was like to go up to the AHL, as he’d spent a season there. So he took care of looking for an apartment and figuring out banking shit. That was boring, but Lane was really grateful. And also, unlike normal people, being exhausted made him want sex even more than usual.
They ended up in an apartment half the size of Jared’s in Savannah, because apparently everything in Canada was really expensive—not just hockey tickets. And it only had one bedroom. But it came furnished, and the bed wasn’t too small. So that was really all they needed.
Jared hung up the picture of his glorious goalie moment and did, indeed, send the guys in Savannah a picture of Lane’s scowling face. He hung up his Flyers invitation and Lane’s Maple Leaf one, and then spent the afternoon wondering if that was too sappy. Lane mentioned it was cool, so Jared left them there.
They bought an Xbox and a copy of NHL 14, and Jared made calls about coaching jobs and dealt with the headache of emigrating to a new country. He wasn’t worried when Lane introduced him as a roommate or a friend, instead of a boyfriend. He kept telling Lane that, because he could tell it bothered Lane not to say who Jared really was.
“You have always picked the right time to come out,” Jared told him. “I wonder if I can make my goalie get into a fight with yours.”
They had serious conversations while playing video games. It gave them something to look at if things got awkward.
“If yours is Patrick Roy, maybe.” Lane was quiet for a moment, eyes following the movement on the television. “What if it never feels right, though?”
“Then it never feels right,” Jared answered, shrugging. “It really doesn’t bother me, Lane.”
“It bothers me, though,” Lane said. “You passed that puck to my team, dude. That’s like the third time you’ve done that.”
“Maybe the controls are different in Canada.” Jared shot Lane a quick glance. “That was a joke.”
“I know. I didn’t laugh because it wasn’t very funny.” Lane scored while Jared was busy scowling at him, and threw his arms in the air. “Suck it, Shore.”
“You gotta ask me a lot nicer than that, pretty boy,” Jared shot back and hit him in the head with the controller.
A few days later, Lane handed Jared a stack of tickets. “Here you go.”
“Thanks. I’ll sell these, and we can afford a bigger bed.” They were tickets for all of Lane’s Marlies home games.
“I got three seats for all season. If, by the middle of the season, they’re still empty, you can sell two of them. Do we have any chips?” Lane tried to change the subject, which he was terrible at, so Jared ignored the attempt.
“The other two were for your parents. Yeah?” Jared knew Lane had talked to them a few times since they’d moved into the apartment. They hadn’t visited, though admittedly, it was a small space where two guys lived. It’s not like there was anything there super exciting, unless you liked Dr Pepper and video games.
“Yup. I told them that I’d sent them tickets for seats twenty and twenty-one, and the guy in twenty-two was my boyfriend.” Lane shrugged, his jaw tightening. “I don’t know if they’ll come or not, but what can I do?”
“If you want me to sit out a game—” Jared scowled. “Wait. No. Fuck that. I’ll sit in another seat, but I’m not missing your games.”
“You’re not sitting in another seat.” Lane’s voice was flat, his eyes as cold as Jared had ever seen them. “Hockey is part of my life, and so are they. And so are you. And if they can’t sit next to you at a game, I don’t want them there anyway.”
Jared wasn’t sure about that, but he let it go. Lane would figure out if he didn’t mean that soon enough, and it was nice to hear Lane standing up for himself.
Lane started the season on the third line, and Jared could tell he was trying to get accustomed to the quicker pace of the game, the faster skaters, and the more physical play. Jared went to the rink with him a few times, giving him a few pointers. “I was always having to keep up with you whippersnappers,” Jared told him, leaning against the boards and watching Lane race around. This was great. He really hoped one of those coaching jobs panned out.
Lane flipped him off as he skated by, but he did listen to Jared and integrated some of his suggestions in his training. When Lane scored his first goal, Jared decided to totally take credit for how Lane flew down the ice. Obviously Jared was some kind of hockey genius and should be hired immediately.
If he weren’t, he was going to wake up one morning and find Lane eating the pillows for nutrients.
Jared’s old coach from Savannah made some calls, and Jared met with the coaching staff of the Markham Waxers, a junior hockey team about thirty minutes from Toronto. Jared hit it off immediately with the staff, who took him for a beer and didn’t blink an eye when Jared said he’d moved there with his boyfriend. Nor did they badger him for information about Lane after they asked “What does your boyfriend do?” and Jared answered, “He plays hockey.”
They loved that he was an Avalanche fan just to annoy people from his home state of Michigan, and used words like “inspirational” to describe his last season in professional hockey.
Jared knew he had the job before he answered the phone, but it was still a relief to get the call.
He’d been with the Waxers for two weeks when, at one of Lane’s home games, he went to take his seat and saw a woman sitting in seat twenty-one. She had Lane’s eyes and his mouth, and was wearing a Marlies T-shirt. There was no one in the seat next to her.
Jared was so happy, he almost hugged her. Ins
tead, he went very Midwestern, smiled politely, sat down, and decided to just let her say something first. She was Lane’s mother. It was probably inevitable.
“You must be Jared,” she said, not looking at him, her gaze focused on the ice where Lane was taking warm-ups with his team.
“Yes, ma’am,” Jared answered. That was the end of their conversation, as the game started up.
By the second period, the game was tied, and Jared wondered what it would have been like to have his mom watch him play hockey like Mrs. Courtnall watched Lane. She leaned forward, she muttered, she yelled at bad calls the refs made. Jared wished she would like him, just on principle.
A few times during the second period, Jared could tell she was looking at him and trying to be surreptitious about it. She was about as good at it as Lane. He smiled once, and she did something that was maybe a smile back before she turned her attention once more to the ice.
The game was still tied, heading toward five minutes remaining in the third, and Lane got the puck and went racing down the ice. Both he and Mrs. Courtnall leaned forward expectantly... and then Lane made an ill-advised drop pass and had the puck stolen off his stick.
“Lane, stop trying to do a drop pass. Just shoot the damn puck,” Mrs. Courtnall muttered.
“Thank you,” Jared said, looking at her. “I told him that yesterday too. He thinks if he just keeps trying it, maybe his winger will suddenly be better at not turning the puck over.”
“He’s been doing that since he was ten,” Mrs. Courtnall told him. “The only thing that’s going to stop him is losing a Stanley Cup game seven... and even then.”
“He’d just do it again, in another game seven, to prove he could,” Jared nodded, sighing. “It’s not even him. He’s good at passing.”
“It’s that he doesn’t communicate.” Mrs. Courtnall nodded. She gave him another considering look, then held her hand out. “It’s nice to meet you, Jared.”
Jared shook her hand. “You too, Mrs. Courtnall.”
“Michelle, please,” she said and sighed. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to meet you before this.”