Page 31

ERIK

F or the record, I did not snooze while Kayden was bench pressing four hundred pounds like he said.

He just lost control of the barbell so quickly that I couldn’t react in time.

Okay, I had a bit of a brain fart. Happy now?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve got to be quick on my toes for safety’s sake.

Look at the other side of the coin, though.

I told him from the start that four hundred pounds was way too much to try and bench.

Stick to three hundred. But Kayden didn’t listen.

He had to be a hero and an Olympic strongman. Big freaking surprise.

Yeah, I asked him about telling the guys about us.

I would do it again, too. That’s not moving the goalposts no matter how my boyfriend wanted to twist things.

He might not have accused me of that this time, but I knew he was thinking it.

Look, I didn’t get into a relationship so I could hide it from everyone.

I only wanted to be normal and open like any other couple.

We’d had a La Nova pizza delivered to his house because his roommate was once again not home.

La Nova’s pizza was heavy stuff, but we could bury it easily, enough thanks to our physical activity—on and off the ice.

Kayden, to his credit, kept himself hard-wired to focus on hockey and winning, and constant sex seemed not to slow him down.

Keeping up that kind of heat was no easy job, but he had to slow down sometime, and this was one of those moments.

Sitting in front of the TV, we watched Netflix with a pizza box open on the table in front of us. We’d sunk deep into the couch cushions, bundled up in each other’s arms, kissing with greasy lips.

These moments didn’t normally just end with kissing either.

Like, the smooching could leap to sex or we might only strip out of our clothes and fondle each other.

In this case, I felt Kayden’s hand grope my crotch, making my dick go hard, but I was in no hurry to shed my clothes.

I squeezed and kneaded Kayden’s hard-on through his track pants, stoking his fire, as he kissed my cheek and neck.

I could live in moments like this forever.

“I love you,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

And he kept kissing me, not quite like I’d said nothing at all, but might as well have. I released his hard-on, pushed his hand away from my crotch, sat up, and turned on a light.

“What the fuck, dude” Kayden sounded like he’d awakened from a nap when he spoke.

“Look, we’ve got to talk.”

“This is gonna be about telling the world we’ve been jumping up each other’s asses, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t, but that’s a really poetic way of putting it, don’t you think?”

His eyes fell shut, and he stood up. Even Kayden knew when nookie was no longer in the cards, but that didn’t stop an erection from tenting the front of his pants.

I pulled my eyes away from his crotch, so I wouldn’t succumb to any urges. I’m strong-willed but still human.

“If that’s not it,” he said, “then what’s the problem?”

“The problem is that I just told you I loved you.”

“That’s not a problem. You’ve said that before.”

I gritted my teeth. Sometimes I didn’t know if my boyfriend meant to be mind-blowingly obtuse, if he worked at it, or goofiness just came naturally.

“I know I’ve said it to you before,” I said. “Lots of times. Problem is, I’ve never once heard you say it back.”

“I get some sort of prize for that, don’t I?”

“The Silver Pig award, maybe.”

“Come on, be nice.”

“No one hands out prizes to the emotionally stunted.”

“Come on, bro. It takes a lot of restraint to have not said it by now.”

Again, I’ll refer to my previous question about whether his goofiness came naturally. I even wondered if he’d said something stupid just to change the subject. You know, because I would be too busy trying to figure him out.

“I’m just saying that I’ve put my heart on the line a bunch of times now,” I said. “It shouldn’t be like pulling teeth to hear it back.”

“God, doesn’t this sound familiar?”

“Wait, is this another moving-the-goal-posts complaint?”

“No, I’ve had girlfriends that said the same stupid thing.”

“What, that you’re a pork product with no emotional depth?”

“No, the love thing. And shut up.”

He waved his hands when he spoke like I’d knocked him off-kilter.

“Then I’m on to something,” I said. “And it’s not stupid, Kayden. It’s a really important thing in any relationship. I told the girlfriend I had in Canada that I loved her all the time.”

“Did you actually love her, though?”

“Of course I did.”

“Then why aren’t you with her right now?”

“Because we…well…I don’t know!”

I stood up and found myself pacing because I was no longer winning the argument?

Leave it to Kayden to hijack the conversation, especially when I had him on the ropes. Worse, he’d actually raised a good point this time.

I had been in love with her, at least at the time. Things change. People change. Sometimes we’re meant to take different paths and wind up with different people.

Maybe even different sexes , my inner voice told me.

In fact, if I’d stayed with her, Kayden and I almost certainly never would’ve found each other.

And I could’ve played hockey for other schools.

Maybe it was fate that brought me to Buffalo, but I couldn’t tell my boyfriend that.

He didn’t think in those terms. My love for Kayden felt more intense and powerful than for my ex-girlfriend, but I couldn’t mention that either.

Yeah, I get it, he was a hockey player, but then so was I.

Some of us can manage having feelings and expressing them freely.

“The whole I-love-you thing is overrated, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No way, dude. It’s one thing to say it. It’s another to actually show it. That’s all I’m saying.”

Now my head was spinning. Kayden acted like that made more sense than anything in the world. Thank God I knew him far too well to ever buy that bullshit.

I wanted to turn my back to him. I couldn’t let him see disappointment on my face. He could be such a pain in the ass. And I knew what he was about to say. He was going to tell me that we wouldn’t be having this argument if I hadn’t brought up something that didn’t matter.

“You know,” he said, “if you hadn’t brought up the whole love thing, we wouldn’t having this argument right now. Not like it’s a big deal.”

See? I could practically read his thoughts.

“You don’t have to make it sound like such an inconvenience, Kayden.”

“Excuse me, but you’re a hockey player. You’re not supposed to get all mushy. Do you think all the other guys on the team scold their boyfriends for not telling them that they love them enough? Yeesh!”

“The other guys on the team don’t have boyfriends. At least none that we know of. And what are you talking about? You haven’t told me you loved me at all.”

“But you know how I feel.”

He made it a statement, not a rhetorical question, the way guys like him tend to. That statement was just as dangerous, though.

“Maybe I don’t. Maybe I’m just a piece of ass to you.”

I said it mostly to challenge him now. If he wanted to be an insufferable pain in the ass, I could be every bit as difficult.

“The problem is, I know how I feel,” Kayden said. “You know how I feel, but it’s hard to come right out and say it.”

“What the hell are you talking about? You say it all the time.”

“I’m not following.”

“You said it to Ryan Detenbeck after a win one time.”

“So?”

“And you said it to Braxton Wilson.”

“That’s nothing.”

“Nothing? You slapped him on the ass after you said it. For crying out loud, you told Coach Harrison that you loved him after practice one day.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, you did. Trust me, I noticed.”

“You didn’t notice. You kept score.”

“Call it whatever you want, babe. You still can’t say it to me.”

Now Kayden’s eyes widened, and he combed his fingers through his hair like I’d pushed him to the brink of insanity. Next, he would stomp out of the room, telling me it was nothing, that he could say it anytime he wanted. I knew better.

You’ve got to challenge guys like him. I knew what I was doing.

“It’s because you’re scared, isn’t it?” I asked.

Kayden, who’d half-turned, snapped back to me, and I saw the growing fire in his eyes.

“Why does everything go back to fear with you?”

“You didn’t answer my question, babe. And besides, you’ve always hesitated pretty massively before each new step in this relationship. You wouldn’t be doing that if you weren’t terrified deep down.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes, it does. It means that with each milestone, you’re inching closer and closer to the point of no return.”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“No, I’m not. If you weren’t scared to death, you would’ve had no trouble coming right out and saying it by now.”

“Just shut up and eat your pizza, would you?”

Kayden had lost the argument. That was the telltale sign. He wouldn’t admit it or wave a white flag. Of course not. He was Kayden Preston. Instead of showing an ounce of humility, he would shut the conversation down, offering no further defense, like any further dialogue was beneath him.

The argument might’ve ended, but my concerns remained alive and well.

On one hand, I couldn’t complain. We’d had a great relationship one way or another.

It’d already beat the relationship I’d had with my ex-girlfriend back in Canada, both in terms of sex and intensity.

On the other hand, I wanted to embrace the future we could have.

That had always been my reason for “moving the goalposts” as Kayden liked to say. He could become complacent.

But how could we have a future if Kayden was emotionally unavailable?