Page 11 of Pucked Up (Punk as Puck #2)

CHAPTER

FIVE

BODEN

I didn’t like being angry at my friends. It made me feel wildly unsettled. But I was pissed off. No, it wasn’t anger, really. It was betrayal. I knew Ford was following me home from the rink, and I knew that Tucker was going off to God only knew where. Maybe to Ford’s place to crash on his couch.

Maybe he would be staying with Amedeo—his pseudo husband, who had shown up in the last week to disturb the harmony of our home. I wanted to hate him for it too, but it was impossible to feel anything other than pity and empathy for the wild-haired man with his big doe-eyes and nervous stammer.

And if Tucker was fine with this outcome—a random stranger calling himself husband after their drunken night in Vegas—who was I to stand in the way of that?

It wasn’t like I had my shit together. I’d fucked our coach, who no longer remembered me, and now I was on the verge of being thrown off the team entirely .

My only option was to apologize to Hugo and ask him to give me another chance. And frankly, I would have rather stuck a rusty pitchfork in my eye and be done with it all than prostrate myself in front of that man.

Never mind the idea of kneeling in front of him gave my dick all sorts of ideas. The fucking traitor.

The game had been a shit show. It was easy to forget that these guys hadn’t gotten into this kind of hockey to throw and take punches like I’d been dishing out. I was too consumed by my anger to realize I’d gone too far until I had Marser pulling back and giving me a look of total betrayal.

He was also someone I’d have to call and make up with. But not tonight.

Not now.

Right now, I wanted to know why my boys didn’t have my fucking back. Yes, I was acting like a child, but they’d promised, goddamn it. They promised to help me take Hugo down and make him regret ever accepting this job. Now they were implying it was a good hire?

Bile was sitting uncomfortably in the back of my throat as I pulled into my parking spot and got out. I left my chair in the back of the car and yanked my crutches out of the trunk, ignoring my hockey bag for the moment.

I could see Ford’s tentative approach, leaning on his cane, his face a mask of trepidation. But no matter what I said or did, he was going to follow me inside. We were going to have this out .

The apartment was a little too cold for my liking as I threw the door open, and I left it hanging there as I headed into my bedroom to change out of my post-game sweats. That was yet another mark of how much this life didn’t feel like it was mine.

I should have been in a suit. There should have been a presser. There should be a goddamn audience not made up entirely of players’ moms, partners, and kids. I deserved more. I wanted more. I craved it to the point I could taste it at the edges of my tongue.

But I knew I wasn’t helping myself with how I was handling this Hugo situation.

“So,” Ford started.

I shook my head, not turning toward the door where he was hovering. I was tempted to yank my hearing aids out, but he knew I could still hear him well enough in a quiet room like this. He wasn’t as easy to fool as everyone else.

“We’re doing this tonight,” he said.

“You don’t want to wait for your fucking partner in crime?” I asked, throwing a T-shirt over my head.

He scoffed. “Don’t be a jackass.”

My eyes stung, and I took several deep breaths before I turned to face him. “You were supposed to have my back.” Oh shit. My voice was cracking.

Ford looked shattered. “Bodie?—”

“Don’t fucking Bodie me. You promised to have my back.”

“Yes, but you’re being unreasonable, and you know it! You’re going to lose everything all because you don’t like that this guy walks comfortably on two legs.”

Everything in me screamed to tell him the truth.

That he was someone who had made me see God in the ways I’d always craved, only to have that ripped away by circumstance.

That he was a plant sent here by my dad because that fucker couldn’t just let me live my life.

That he was proof that no one trusted I could do this on my own merits and that no one was willing to give me a chance.

Except…shit. Hugo had said as much tonight in the parking lot. He knew that Brian hadn’t done his job, and he made it very plain he wasn’t going to do my dad any favors for me unless I’d earned it.

“You have no idea what this is like,” I told him.

His mouth opened, then shut. Bowing his head, he took several steps toward me and curled his fingers around the back of my neck. “Tequila.”

“Ford,” I warned.

“Tequila,” he said again. “I know you have a very expensive bottle somewhere in here.” Then he let me go and dove for the bed. I tried to catch him, but my legs twisted in on themselves, and I hit the ground, catching myself with practiced ease.

I was too late. He already had my secret stash in his lap. It was a small box that looked like a pirate’s chest that Tucker had given me for my twenty-fifth birthday. He’d filled it with chocolate coins and tiny bottles of airplane booze, which we used for a grown-up Easter egg hunt the next year.

I meant to throw the box out, but it had its uses .

Like tequila.

And dildos.

“Holy. Fucking. Shit.” Ford lifted his hand, and he was holding one that had little…

villi, the only word I could come up with for the tiny tentacle-like protrusions on the end.

They were very soft and very malleable. And they felt very, very good.

“You into that alien shit? Oh Jesus,” he said loudly, “Micah and Jonah got to you, didn’t they? ”

Oh hell, my secret was out. Micah had sent me an email to my work email of all fucking places, with a link to a Star Wars animated porn full of alien dick.

Micah had cackled on the phone. “It’s not like Jonah and I will get any use out of this one, but maybe this’ll help you unclench every now and again. ”

It had.

Oh God, it had. But no one was ever supposed to know.

“Put that back,” I snapped at him, trying to convince my legs to stop spasming so I could get them back under me.

He grinned and dropped it back down, only to pull out the one that was very obviously meant to be a dragon dick. “Oh, baby. I am taking you to Comic-Con next year. You’re gonna get so much weird dick there, it’s going to be amazing.”

I finally got my body to cooperate enough to lunge forward and snatch the box from Ford’s hands, but not before he pulled out my very expensive bottle of tequila my grandfather had sent me two years ago after his trip to Cozumel.

He gave me a look, and yeah, I didn’t exactly have an answer for why I had expensive tequila alongside my equally expensive custom dildos.

“Are you hiding this from Tucker?”

No. I wasn’t. The one thing I wasn’t afraid of was Tucker overindulging the way he had when he’d gotten in his accident. He wasn’t that same man anymore. He had therapy to deal with his family issues. And he had us.

“I just don’t like sharing my good shit.” Not to mention that I rarely drank. I’d only indulged a few times a year, and I wanted it to be for a good reason.

Though…this seemed like a good reason.

Ford rolled his eyes, then picked at the wax seal with the edge of his thumbnail. “Boden?”

With a sigh, I used my arms to slide myself against the dresser and let the sturdy piece of furniture hold my body weight. “What, Ford? What do you want? Why are you here?”

His gaze met mine, and he looked hurt. “Because I love you, and watching you self-destruct sucks.”

“That’s not what I’m doing, and you know it. The fact that you all are okay with this man—this fucking…this smart-ass know-it-all who pretends like he has any idea what we go through?—”

“Is that really what he’s like?” Ford asked me, cutting me off.

I swallowed heavily. I didn’t want to lie, but I wasn’t sure about the truth. Not yet. With a soft grunt, I rocked my body forward, tucking my knees under me. I had just enough length in my arms to snag the bottle from his hands.

“Okay. I guess this is how we’re dealing tonight,” Ford said.

I sat back again and dug my nails into the wax seal until it came apart.

Tequila was not my drink of choice. A beer every now and again for a tiny spot of liquid courage when I was going in for a hookup.

But I wasn’t going to be at peak performance if I showed up to the rink wasted every morning, and I couldn’t afford to be less perfect than I already was.

Tonight, though, it was drink or start talking, and I did not want to start talking.

The first sip burned as I swallowed it down. I ignored Ford’s laugh as I swiped my hand over my lips, then took another drink. “Why does it taste like cologne?”

Ford laughed again and got up on hands and knees to crawl next to me. The dick box was abandoned beside the bed, and I could only hope to God I remembered to put it away before anyone else came over.

“Drink,” I said, shoving the bottle at him.

He raised a brow at me.

“Drink until you forget what’s in that fucking box.”

He burst into another peal of laughter and took a long shot off the bottle. He didn’t choke the way I did. He just met my gaze and swallowed like he was pulling off a glass of water.

“I hate you,” I told him .

“Try harder because I know that’s fucking bullshit. Be angry, but don’t lie.”

I snagged the bottle back and took another sip. It was too much. I’d barely eaten, and the liquor was sitting heavy at the top of my stomach. “Some days, I really don’t want to be me.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“You can’t get it.”

He blinked at me, then took the bottle back, and another shot went straight down his gullet. “I was adopted.”

Those words felt like a bag of bricks clobbering me on the side of the head. I hadn’t known that. Did Tucker know that?