Page 31 of Forbidden Hockey

I shake my head.

“Held down?”

Nod.

“Marked, branded, owned?”

Breathe, Dirk. Fucking breathe.Nod, nod, nod.

“You’d look even prettier with a fat purple hickey down the crease of your neck,” he murmurs. “Would you like it if Sophia spread your legs wide, bent you over his desk, and turned you into his personal fuck toy?”

My eyes flick to the desk in front of me. “Yeah,” I whisper. “Fuck, yeah, yes.”

He exhales slowly, afraid to move too suddenly. I’m glad I’m not alone with that. My body’s so ridged it aches.

“It’s a nice fantasy,” he says.

“It is.” I swallow and lick my lips.

“Sophia can’t, though. It canneverhappen, Dirk.”

I hate the way he stresses “never”, but he’s right. I needed him to say it.

“I know.” All too fucking well. “But if you expect an apology for what I did tonight, you’ll have to wait for the Orcas to win a Stanley Cup.”

That’s the equivalent of hell freezing over. They’ve never won a Stanley Cup. Probably won’t, ever.

“Wasn’t expecting an apology. I’ve never apologized for any of my jealous behavior, and I never will.”

“What does that mean, Trav? You plan on being jealous all the time? Letting that fester between us?”

“What other choice do we have?”

He’s right. I know he’s right, but I don’t know how long I can live like this. “D-Dash won’t care. He won’t.”

Trav scrubs a hand over his face. “Most likely, he won’t. But I’ll care. If a man twice my son’s age tried to date him, I’d make sure no one ever found his body.”

Of all the reasons we wouldn’t work, that’s the worst one—his own damn morals. But I know he’s right. Hunt will feel the same way.

He continues adjusting scheduling and time-off requests on his laptop, and I finish my cashout, placing it on his desk. He looks up as I’m about to leave, and my heart races like it always does.

“Night, Trav.”

“See you tomorrow.”

And we carry on.

It’s official. We’re doomed. We can’t be together, we have to live in denial, pretending the obvious doesn’t exist. It’s just as well. Sure, we have these moments where it seems like something might be within our reach. But we always return to reality.

In no fucking universe am I telling my brother, the only real parent I’ve ever had, that fate decided to screw with me and hit me with the kind of chemistry that ruins lives with a man twice my age. I don’t know what kind of mental gymnastics Trav’s doing, but he’s clearly as horrified with his own feelings as Hunt would be should he ever find out. We know how wrong ourmassive age gap is in the court of public opinion, so all we can do is toy with it. Fantasize about it. Let our hearts break over and over again.

But we tread further over the line every day—‘cause, yeah, we’re already way over it. Pretty soon, we won’t even be able to see the damn line.

One of us is going to fucking snap. Both of us will pay the price.

Chapter

One