Page 57 of Him

“Itistrue.” His gaze strays toward the net, where Jamie is talking to Killfeather. “Especially with Mark. He fuc—frickin’,” he corrects. “He frickin’ loves watching me screw up. And then he lists everything I did wrong the next day at breakfast, or dinner, or when I’m trying to fall asleep. He’s all about the mind games.”

I stifle a sigh. “You’re roommates, right?”

“Unfortunately,” he mutters.

“You guys ever hang out outside of practice? Talk about something other than hockey?”

“Not really,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, he talks about his dad sometimes. I don’t think they get along. But that’s pretty much it.”

“You want my advice?”

His expression is earnest as he nods again.

“Try getting to know him. Develop some trust off the ice.” I jerk my head toward Jamie. “The first day I faced off against Jamie—uh, Coach Canning, I mean—I was a total a-hole. Cocky, full of myself. I taunted him every time I took a shot at goal, did a little victory dance every time I scored. I swear, he wanted to murder me by the time practice was over. He told Coach Pat he hated my guts and suggested they send me back to whatever jackass planet I came from.”

Davies snickers. “But you guys are bros now.”

“Yup. And we were roommates back then, too. We were in our room after that first practice and he just sat there glaring at me for a good hour.”

“So what’d you do?” Davies asks curiously.

“I suggested we play a game of ‘I Never’. Took a while to convince him—he was still pretty annoyed with me—but I wore him down eventually.”

I smile at the memory. We’d passed around some cans of Red Bull I’d stolen from one of the coaches and gotten to know each other by saying the craziest things.I never pissed my pants at a Bruins game. I never mooned a bus full of nuns during a school trip to a gum factory. Those were mine, of course.

Jamie’s had been more serious—I’m not an only child. I don’t want to play for the pros one day.Yeah, he hadn’t quite mastered the “never” part of the game, but I hadn’t minded. My thirteen-year-old self was having too much fun getting hopped up on sugar and caffeine. We stayed awake until four a.m. and could barely get up the next morning.

“After that, we were inseparable,” I say with a chuckle.

Davies chews on his lip. “But Coach Canning is cool. Mark is…kind of a dick.”

I swallow a laugh. “You never know, he might end up being the coolest guy you’ve ever met.”

“I don’t know…”

I give him a good-natured slap on the shoulder. “Just give him a chance. Or don’t. Do with that advice what you will.” Then I snap into Coach Wesley mode, blowing my whistle loud enough to make him jump. “Now get back out there and share the wealth, kid. Hog the puck one more time and I’ll bench you for the rest of the practice.”

The week goes fast.

When Jamie and I were teenagers, everything took forever. A summer was a lifetime. But I’m already two weeks into my six-week stay in Lake Placid, and I can’t figure out where the time went.

After dinner with the kids on Friday night, Jamie and I have dorm duty. That just means counting heads and yelling “lights out” when ten o’clock comes. Then yelling it again when they fail to follow through.

By eleven it’s totally quiet. Jamie is lying on his bed texting someone. And I don’t like it. Not at all. So I climb onto his body, straddling his ass, my chest to his shoulders. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he says without looking up.

I drop my nose into his hair and take a deep breath of him. He smells like summertime, and I can’t get enough.

“Dude, are you sniffing my head?”

“Just checking to see if you were paying attention.”

“Mhm,” he says, tapping away on his phone.

I settle in a little further, my dick waking up to the fact that I’mthisclose to Jamie’s ass. Funny how he thinks it’s weird when I sniff his hair, but he’s perfectly fine that I’m about two seconds from dry humping his backside.

Times they are a changin’.