Page 10 of Gap Control (Lewiston Forge #3)

Chapter eight

Mason

P ractice ran long, as it always did when Coach sensed we were on the edge of something—either a breakthrough or a breakdown. By the time I stepped through the arena's steel doors, snow was falling in that tentative, early-season way.

Fat, lazy flakes drifted down like afterthoughts, melting the instant they kissed asphalt but clinging desperately to anything softer: the wool of coat sleeves, curve of shoulders, and vulnerable hollow at the base of someone's neck.

TJ stood on the sidewalk outside the Colisée, his back to me, a study in perpetual motion even when standing still. He was shaking out his hoodie, the shimmery one, with quick, efficient movements.

Despite the bite in the air, he wasn't wearing gloves—typical TJ, as if winter were just another teammate he could charm into submission. I approached, but he didn't notice.

Snowflakes caught in the folds near his collar. He was saying something as I approached, talking to the air about the ridiculous choices available in the arena's vending machines.

His words dissolved under the thump of my own thundering pulse. I wasn't listening anyway. I was too busy examining how his hands moved while he spoke: quick, fluid, and impossibly warm.

A line of snowflakes gathered on his right shoulder. It caught the amber glow of a parking lot light.

My hand moved before my brain could intervene. It was two careful swipes across the hoodie's fabric.

He stopped talking mid-sentence. TJ slowly turned his head to face me.

We were close. Closer than we'd ever been without the protective barrier of helmets, crowd noise, and the beautiful chaos of the game.

Close enough that I saw how his pupils dilated slightly in the dim light.

It would have been possible to count the individual snowflakes clinging to his dark lashes like tiny stars.

He didn't step back. His breath caught the frigid air and hung between us in little puffy clouds. We stood together on the knife's edge of something irreversible.

A few more snowflakes settled on his cheekbones. His mouth—that mouth I'd been trying not to think about for weeks—curved into something that wasn't quite a smile, more like a question he couldn't quite turn into words.

My hand stopped, suspended in the air after brushing his shoulder. My instincts screamed at me to retreat to safer ground, to control the gap between us.

I didn't. The truth hit fast and hard. Being near TJ had stopped feeling like a mistake somewhere between that first hug and laying eyes on that ridiculous hoodie in the snow. Being close to him made sense.

It just hadn't felt safe to admit it to myself. For one reckless, impossible breath, I let myself lean in.

He saw me, and his lips parted slightly. The faint scruff along his jaw looked soft, touchable. His mouth—damn, his mouth. I kissed him.

It was slow and deliberate, utterly without pretense. Not an overly confident claiming of territory or pretentious declaration of intent. Just quietly confident about closing the distance that was slowly killing me.

He froze. Then—miracle of miracles—he melted into me.

TJ's lips answered mine with soft hunger, as if he'd been holding his breath and waiting for this moment. His left hand rested on my chest, the warmth of his palm slowly burning through my coat.

He didn't pull me closer. He was just present, real.

When our tongues brushed, I tasted winter with a sweet undertone. He kissed me back, and he knew how.

Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he breathed my name against my lips. "Mason."

Not planned. Not performed. It was an unconscious exhale of want that slipped out before he could stop it.

It was the most honest thing I'd ever heard.

Snow continued to fall around us, melting where it touched my face, leaving cool trails down my cheeks. The world had narrowed to the soft sound TJ made low in his throat, and how he tilted his head slightly so we fit together better.

I didn't think. That was the glory of it. For once in my carefully controlled life, I acted without a strategy. I gave in to my impulse and didn't want to stop.

Not ever.

Then—

Reality flooded over me like ice water.

Panic exploded in my brain. It was sharp, immediate, and utterly merciless. Everything about the moment was suddenly too much.

My fingers curled into the soft fabric of TJ's hoodie, and then I let go. It was like I'd touched a flame and had to recoil.

I stepped back with the jerky, uncoordinated movement of someone waking from a dream they couldn't quite remember. Cold air rushed in to fill the space where TJ's warmth had been, shocking my system back to awareness of time, place, and consequence.

He opened his eyes, and the startled confusion there hit me hard. My stomach dropped.

"I—" I tugged the words out of my mouth. "I shouldn't have done that."

TJ's brow creased, his lips still flushed from kissing.

I stepped back, my boots slipping slightly on the pavement slick with melted snow. It was a full retreat.

He didn't follow. He didn't reach for me or ask the questions forming in his gaze.

I wanted to say more. My gut wanted me to apologize for wanting and then running. All that emerged was, "I'll—see you later."

They were the most inadequate words ever. He didn't move, and he didn't ask me to stay.

I turned away before I could witness his full response to my cowardice. The walk to my car was like crossing a frozen lake in a thunderstorm—each step dangerous with the surface beneath me threatening to crack at any moment.

My hand shook. I dropped my keys once before I could fit them into the lock. When I finally slid behind the wheel and pulled the door shut, the silence was absolute. It was the quiet that pressed against your eardrums and made you hyperaware of your own heartbeat.

I didn't turn the key.

I sat there gripping the steering wheel like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to earth, my knuckles white against the black leather. My breath fogged the windshield in tiny bursts, creating a partially opaque barrier between me and the world outside.

The kiss hadn't gone wrong. I kept circling that thought, like water spiraling down a drain.

TJ didn't pull back, laugh, or look at me like I'd lost my mind. He hadn't done any of the things my neurotic imagination had rehearsed in countless scenarios. He'd looked like he didn't want it to end.

That should have been a relief. Instead, it felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing I'd forgotten how to fly.

I let my head fall back against the seat. A memory rushed in. I tried to stop it and not think about Nate, about history's tendency to repeat itself.

It didn't work.

Two years ago. January in Traverse City, when the cold had teeth and the snow fell in buckets. I was still with the Harriers then.

Nate Bradley was a defenseman—twenty-six to my twenty-two. He had dark hair that curled at the edges when he sweated and a brand of intelligence that made everyone else feel slightly less clever by comparison.

He'd offered me a ride home after a brutal practice stretched past ten o'clock. It was no big deal—my usual transportation got caught in the grip of a snowstorm that had turned the city into a slow-motion disaster film.

We'd stopped at his apartment first so he could grab something he'd forgotten. "Two minutes," he'd promised, but somehow two minutes became twenty.

I ended up inside with him, snow melting off my jacket onto his hardwood floors. We stood in his kitchen and talked about nothing important, subjects like hockey, winter, and Coach's increasingly creative profanity.

I don't remember what started to change things. It might have been a comment that lingered too long or a laugh that sounded meaningful.

We stood close, and I inhaled the fading scent of his cologne, like a pine forest in the distance. He said something about my tape job being too precise, and I said something back about attention to detail being underrated.

And then he kissed me.

Soft and sure and completely without fanfare, like it was the most natural progression in the world. I kissed him back without hesitation and without any of the careful gap control that usually governed my interactions with teammates.

It was quiet and uncomplicated and precisely what I hadn't known I'd been wanting. Until the next morning.

I remember Nate's laugh cutting through the familiar ambient noise of the locker room like a blade.

His words were loud, practiced, and performed for an audience.

He said, "Don't read into it, boys. Mason's just like that—detail-oriented.

It doesn't mean he's soft, but he needs to learn that not everything has to mean something. "

He delivered the line to the entire room, but I knew it was meant primarily for my ears. He'd already filed what happened between us under the label "misunderstanding."

It was important to him to clarify, publicly, that whatever intimacy we'd shared carried no weight and changed absolutely nothing about the architecture of our professional relationship. It was a casual dismissal—a preemptive strike against speculation.

He didn't look at me for the rest of the morning unless we were running drills and the situation demanded eye contact between teammates.

I learned crucial information that day about the difference between wanting and being wanted. How someone could kiss you like you mattered and then treat you like you'd imagined the whole thing.

I was quiet after that. Stopped lingering after practice. Stopped assuming that physical closeness meant emotional availability. Stopped reaching for things I couldn't be certain were being offered.

Now, sitting in my car with snow sliding down the windshield after kissing TJ, I recognized familiar feelings. It was the specific variety of stupid that came from hoping when hope was a luxury I couldn't afford.

Except this time, I'd been the one to initiate the ridiculous behavior. I started the kiss, and he liked it. Karma. Now, I was the one running and making it hurt.

I could survive being alone. I'd trained for that. But being seen—and still left standing there? That would break me.

I couldn't handle the risk.

If it was real—if what I'd seen in TJ's eyes was genuine—I had something precious and fragile. If it wasn't, well, I'd just taught myself the same lesson in a different classroom, with me as the teacher, dragging us through brutal lessons.

I didn't drive home immediately.

Instead, I took the long way, driving past shuttered storefronts with advertisements for businesses that had died quiet deaths. I rolled past the old brick laundromat toward the sound I couldn't hear yet but already sensed in my bones.

Lewiston Falls.

There was a small turnout carved into rock—wide enough for three cars if everyone parked with consideration for their neighbors. I pulled in crooked, like someone who'd forgotten how parallel lines worked, and killed the engine.

The river ran dark at the edge of dusk. The falls were a study in beautiful violence—water throwing itself against granite with reckless energy.

I exited the car, and the wind immediately cut through my coat. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and walked to the railing meant to deter jumpers.

I didn't lean against it. I stood and let the cold hit me full in the chest.

The sounds around me were nearly overwhelming—the thunderous crash of water against stone, the whisper of wind through bare branches, and the distant hum of traffic winding through Lewiston.

I didn't hear any human voices—no teammates calling my name.

It was only the falls and me, with the growing certainty that I'd just ruined the best thing that had happened to me in months, maybe years.

When I finally turned back toward my car, my fingers were stiff with cold. My knuckles ached when I reached for the door handle.

I didn't turn the heat on immediately. I didn't turn on the radio, check my phone, or do any of the small things people do to fill the silence when it becomes unbearable.

I drove.

When I reached TJ's neighborhood, I'd almost convinced myself it was a mistake. I was only passing through on my way to somewhere more sensible.

His building materialized on the right, second-story apartment with blinds hanging slightly crooked. His car sat in its usual spot, covered with a thin layer of white.

I slowed, but I didn't stop.

Couldn't stop.

I let my car drift past like a ghost ship navigating by old landmarks I might never visit again. My headlights swept across the sidewalk.

I drove past like a coward. I was the guy who'd finally found something worth having and was too terrified to reach for it twice.