Max
We’d agreed not to meet up tonight. The day after tomorrow was our first game against Florida, and Tampa Bay were coming off a full seven-game battle to get to this round against us. I’d made the very adult decision of resting up tonight, and promptly missed the hell out of Ben. I’d watched some shit film on Netflix, too wired to watch something good, too distracted to stand up and get the remote control, which had fallen off the side of the sofa and out of my reach. Ben had actually bet me that I couldn’t go one night without sex; the amount on the table was ten dollars. I wasn’t going to lose.
Practice today had been odd-man rushes; we were shit-hot on those, and Stan still hadn’t let anything in. As a team we were positive, and there was a cautious excitement in the room. I could focus on hockey, think about hockey, anything not to think about Ben and sex.
Still, I wished Ben were there, or that I was at Ben’s because he had this way of calming me down and centering me. Of giving me a purpose outside hockey that wasn’t just sex.
I was hoping he’d call at some point, like a love-sick teenager, but he hadn’t so far. Apart from one random text about waiting in line at Walmart, there had been radio silence. He really was taking me at my word that I needed to sleep and focus on the next game where we had home-ice advantage. Yesterday’s barbecue had been an eye-opener. Most of the team had attended, although no one had eaten anything that could remotely give them food poisoning, just in case.
When the phone rang, I dived for it, connecting the call before it reached my ear.
“I knew you’d phone,” I crowed triumphantly. “That’s ten you owe me.”
“Max.”
The tone shut me down, cut my good humor to nothing, and I sat up from my slouch.
“Ben? What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t have called,” he said after a small silence.
Fuck this. I was up and pulling on a jacket, passing my phone from one hand to the other, always keeping it at my ear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked again, and pushed my feet into my sneakers, shuffling around until they fit properly. My chest was tight. “Is it the shelter? Has someone broken in again?”
I’d spoken to the security company, and they’d assured me they’d upped their systems and added in some drive-by's. I couldn’t help feeling as if it wasn’t just the shelter that was being targeted, and I didn’t like it one little bit.
“No.”
His voice was small, and I grabbed my keys even as I listened to what he wasn’t saying. There was fear in his tone, and I wasn’t ready to sit there and just listen to that. I was out of the door within a minute and standing outside Westy’s apartment. He had a unit in the same building as me, rented, both of us unsure of our permanent place on the team. Of course, Westy would be picked up—he was fucking awesome. But I was done. I needed to be done.
I knocked on his door even as I spoke to Ben.
“Where are you?”
“I came home,” he said.
“I’ll be there in ten.”
A sleepy-looking Westy answered the door, and it looked like he was going to curse me out at first for waking him up, and then his expression changed when he got a good look at me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, looking past me, probably expecting some disaster where he could see it.
“I need you to drive me somewhere.”
He didn’t argue. I was acting like a madman, but he still grabbed his keys and we took the stairs to the parking lot.
I didn’t want to drop the call. “Talk to me, Ben,” I pleaded.
Westy side-eyed me as we pulled out of the parking lot, but I wasn’t about to explain.
“I’ll wait for you,” Ben said, sounding regretful, then he disconnected the call.
“Ben? Ben!”
This wasn’t right. This was so far from right.
“Where am I going?” Westy asked at the exit to our building. I needed to get my head around which direction we needed.
“Ben’s place. You remember where it is?” Westy had been at the barbecue, but would he recall the intricate directions to get there again? He reached over and selected the last destination in his navigation system, and I didn’t have to give him any directions at all.
Westy never questioned me once. Luckily, the roads to Ben’s place were deserted for the longest time until we entered the neighborhood and slowed to almost nothing before parking outside his place. There was no sign of his aunts’ cars, and I hoped to hell it wasn’t one of them who’d been hurt or died or something. Westy followed me out of the car. I didn’t stop him; hell, I wasn’t sure what I was going to find.
Ben opened the door as we reached it, and fuck, he looked shaken.
We stepped in, Westy shut the door behind us, and I managed to get Ben in my arms all in the same weirdly coordinated action.
“What happened?” I asked again, and Ben gripped my shirt tighter and buried his face in my neck. Westy slid past us and disappeared into a small kitchen, coming back with a bottle of whiskey and a glass. He gestured to the living room, and I carefully, slowly, guided Ben into the room and sat him on the sofa. He pulled me down with him, and Westy took a seat on the coffee table in front of us.
I wasn’t convinced I wanted Westy seeing Ben like this. Shouldn’t I be protecting Ben from someone seeing him so damn vulnerable?
“What happened?” Westy asked, his tone firmer than I could have used given that my worry was all wrapped up in fear.
“I think…” Ben looked up at me and grasped my hands. “Rolf.”
Okay, this wasn’t the shelter, this was that asshole Rolf, DK’s father, the one who’d beaten his own son. Hell, wait, was this about DK? I looked around me as if I was expecting DK to appear from nowhere, just to reassure me he was okay.
Nothing.
“Is it DK? Is he hurt?”
Ben shook his head. “He’s out with my aunts, and then staying at Skipper’s house," he murmured. “Rolf doesn’t know where that is.”
“What did Rolf do, then?”
“I think… I’m being stupid… He couldn’t have…”
Ben stopped and stared at Westy, almost like it was the first time he realized it wasn’t just him and me in the room, and he tensed. Westy met his gaze.
“Is this a police matter?” Westy asked.
Ben nodded, and Westy was dialing 9-1-1 before I could get to my own phone.
“Police,” Westy said into the receiver. He looked up, abruptly realizing he didn’t know what the hell he was asking for.
“Rolf threatened me,” Ben murmured.
Something roared inside me, and at that moment I wanted to hunt Rolf down and kill him; tear him limb from limb and leave the parts of him in with the dogs. I’d never felt such a murderous rage before, and it left me feeling dizzy with the force of it. I couldn’t hear what Westy was explaining, such was the sound in my head. I pushed Ben away from me a little and turned to face him.
“Tell me everything,” I snapped.
His eyes widened, and if I’d been in less of a temper, or if fear hadn’t stolen my rational side, then maybe I would have seen I was losing control.
He edged away from me, but I gripped his arm. “I’ll kill him.”
He attempted to shake free, but all I knew was that I couldn’t take my hands from him, that I needed that connection.
“Max,” he said, and shook his arm again. “You’re scaring me.”
I instantly let go and scooted away from him a little. Shit, I was no better than the asshole who’d threatened him.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and held up my hands. Westy passed the whiskey to Ben, and I stared at him as he sipped it and then downed the whole lot in one go. Jesus. “Will you tell me…?”
“He says he wants…” Ben glanced at Westy, who nodded in understanding.
“I’m making coffee,” he announced, and vanished into the kitchen.
Ben gestured at the retreating figure. “Were you with him?”
“With Westy? No, I knocked on his door and got him to drive me over.”
“Oh.”
Silence again.
“Tell me what Rolf did.”
Ben massaged his temples and shut his eyes. “I don’t even recall half of it, but he said—at least I think he said—that killing me was an option to get what he wanted.”
The dragon inside me roared loudly again, and I had to physically make myself stay where I was. The cops were the right people to tell. They would come here, make sense of all this, arrest Rolf, and put everything to rights.
“What do you mean, you think you know what he said?” I asked after a little while.
“It wasn’t so much what he said, but the way he said it, and he smiled at this woman who jogged past and anyone looking would think it was just two guys talking, but Bucky didn’t like it.”
None of that made sense, except maybe for the Bucky part. I spotted him in the crate in the corner, curled in a ball, his gaze fixed firmly on me and Ben.
“He knew I was upset, so I thought I’d put him in his bed,” Ben explained, then edged closer to me. I pulled him in for a sideways hug and we waited for the cops in silence.
They arrived at the same time as coffee, and then I had to listen to the story of how that asshole Rolf had likely followed Ben to the park, intimidated him, implied that the way he’d get what he thought he was owed was over Ben’s dead body. I attempted to stay quiet, held him as he talked, and then when it all got too much and I wanted to hit something, I eased myself away.
Standing with Westy, watching Ben explain, I really wanted to hit something. Someone. Anyone.
The cops were thorough. They documented it all, took notice of what Ben was saying. They couldn’t do much about what Ben thought Rolf had meant, but they updated their records. When they left, it was me who shook their hands, and me who tidied up the coffee mugs. Westy left soon after, not even asking if I wanted to be driven home. He knew the score as much as I did.
I took Ben to bed, undressed him carefully, gently laid him down, and held him close.
I didn’t sleep until I heard his even breaths, and I spent most of that time staring at the picture of Ben and his husband, Liam, which was no longer face down.
If Liam was looking down at him now and seeing what an asshole his brother was, I bet he wanted to come back as an avenging angel or some shit like that. I could have reached over and turned the frame, but it didn’t freak me out to see Ben so happy with his husband. If anything, it was comforting to think that I could look out for Ben here, and maybe Liam could keep an eye on him from up there.
When I woke, he was gone, but I heard the noise in the kitchen, smelled the coffee, and he seemed calmer than last night.
“Maybe I overreacted,” he suggested.
“Things always look better in daylight,” I said. “Doesn’t mean they weren’t awful in the dark.”
I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say, but he hugged me, we kissed, and he promised to be careful at the shelter that day.
Practice was a bastard. It didn’t help I was low on sleep and trying to defend against Ten, but I was as useless as a five-year-old on the ice. So much so that Jared called me on it and took me off the ice.
“What the hell?” he asked as we headed for the locker room.
“Didn’t sleep so good.”
Something in my tone must have told him a story of sorts. He didn’t get in my face about protecting Ten, or keeping my fists up, or not slashing the opposition and drawing stupid penalties. He ordered me to the showers and told me to go home.
I promised I would.
I lied.
The shelter was quiet, and I found Ben with the puppies, my man on the floor hugging each puppy that wanted it. He looked up when I walked in and he grinned at me.
Seemed there was nothing in this world that was so bad a puppy couldn’t fix it.
I joined him on the floor and we chatted about hockey, the Cup, the shelter, puppies, and that time I lost two teeth to a hundred-mile-an-hour puck to the jaw.
Not once did we talk about Rolf or his threats, but I made damn sure to mention everything to the security company, and I also might have hired someone to watch the place and keep an eye on Ben. Just in case.
He didn’t need to know that, though.
Second period of our first game against Florida, and I really wished they’d benched me. I’d already spent time in the penalty box, twice, for infractions that had been accidents, not deliberate in any way. My head was messed up and I needed to get back in the game, because I was not going to be the one responsible for the Railers not getting to the final. Seven games in this round, and all we had to do was win four of them. The Stanley Cup was tantalizingly close.
I felt the tap on my shoulder, didn’t even have to look up to know it was Jared. Mads was living up to his name; I could see the tension bracketing his mouth and the confusion in his eyes.
I nodded at him. I knew what he was going to say. This was a tied game at two goals each, and we were so evenly matched it was painful to see. We had more chances, but their goalie was on form and nothing was going in.
All he did was nod back, and when I went over the boards for the next shift, I was focused on the hockey and not on Ben.
The game was ragged. Neither team seemed to have the edge, and there was a randomness to the shots that went into the net. Lucky bounces, hits on the goalies, the net coming off the moorings that held it in place on two separate occasions. The mood was of confusion and madness, and it wasn’t too long before the consistent targeting of our forwards paid off for the other team.
When I saw their D-man push Ten into the boards, I was relieved. Not that Ten was hurt—which he wasn’t, because he clambered to stand very quickly—but because I had a legitimate reason to pummel on someone.
Getting sent to the bin for a two-minute roughing call, I at least felt I had worked out some of the tension inside me. In fact, I was grinning and chirping at Tampa’s D-man, who shouted obscenities at me.
Until the crowd roared, and I looked back at the game. Ten on a breakaway, Ten dazzling the crowd. I could feel the goal on its way, and I stood up, watching. But I could see the Tampa captain, heading right for Ten, just as fast, but the trajectory was wrong. I shouted at Westy to get between them, but he wasn’t placed right where I would have been. Ten was open, vulnerable, and then time slowed for me. With the chilling certainty that they would collide, I couldn’t help the curse of complete horror that left my mouth. Ten must have caught on at the last moment—at least his head was up—but the impact of the two men colliding, sliding into the wall, was enough to silence the arena. A tangle of arms and legs, the two men were utterly still for a moment, and then everything sped up again, the teams rushing to the two of them, helping them to stand.
Fuck. Was Ten injured because I’d felt it so fucking necessary to beat on someone? Was I that much of a Neanderthal the only way I could handle my own pain was to dish out pain to others? I held my breath. I think the entire arena held their breath.
And then Ten was standing, shoving at Tampa’s captain and chirping at him. I didn’t see that happen much with Ten—he was too fast to get caught normally—but to see him standing toe to toe with the guy who’d taken him off his skates had me grinning like an idiot. I looked at the bench, watching Mads standing there with his arms crossed over his chest. I willed him to stare at me, to connect with me over the fact Ten was okay. He didn’t look my way once, but he did squeeze my shoulder when I was back on the bench. He knew what it was like to be in the bin watching the guys you were protecting left vulnerable.
Which just circled my brain back to Ben.
We won the game, but it was only a rebound goal off their goalie’s blocker that took us to victory. There was nothing clever about that night’s game, no finesse.
As soon as I could, I checked my cell. Ben couldn’t come to tonight’s game—he had a shift to cover at the shelter—but DK was with him, and the security company assured me everything was quiet.
There was a text from Ben, a congratulation with an added kiss. And weirdly, one from my mom, who suggested we should soundly beat Tampa quickly, almost as if she knew what she was talking about. I sent her back a promise we would, then turned my attention to Ben’s text. I considered what to write but could think of absolutely nothing.
So, I did what any self-respecting lover did when he wanted to talk to his partner.
I grabbed a cab and made my way to the shelter. No game tomorrow, no practice, just optional skate.
And tonight, I really wanted to spend time with Ben.