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

CHAPTER

ONE

BODEN

“Hot guy, twelve o’clock. I bet you could buy him a shot of Midori and he’d suck your dick.”

More than once a week, I wanted to take Tiago by the back of the neck and smash his face right into his plate just to shut him up. He wasn’t my usual wingman, but Ford ended up working an overnight inventory shift at his supermarket job, and Tucker was home with a migraine.

So that left Tiago—one of Jonah’s teammates who hung around at the rink long enough that I could consider us friends.

And he wasn’t terrible at helping me hook up, but he also had retinitis pigmentosa with, like, four percent of his visual field left. I wasn’t sure I could trust his judgment when it came to spotting hot guys in a dimly lit bar.

Especially since I was also very, very picky about who I considered hot.

Luckily, it didn’t seem like the stranger at the bar was paying attention to either one of us, which meant I could take my time looking him over.

I couldn’t see much, but what I could see was nice.

He was broad-shouldered with dark hair and a cut jaw.

He spoke to the bartender and made him smile, which meant he was either nice or flirty.

I could deal with either. It really wasn’t going to be up to me to snag this guy. It was all going to be him and whether or not he was a shitty person who cringed at disabled bodies.

It was why we were tucked in the corner at a table where I could effectively hide my wheelchair.

I hadn’t been sensitive or ashamed about my disability in years, but it did make hooking up…

complicated. I usually gave them time to speak to me before the “big reveal,” as Tucker always called it.

And then it was either good to go, or they’d make some shitty, polite excuse and then run out like bats from hell were nipping at their heels.

I was so used to it, but it was getting frustrated because I didn’t date, so my pool of one-offs was starting to feel a bit limited around town.

It would be easier if I didn’t have such strict rules, but I couldn’t hook up at work because I didn’t fuck hockey players.

I knew better than to eat where I took a shit.

I didn’t even go for the guys in the Blind Hockey League.

They were far too close to home, and I didn’t want the drama of when shit went sour.

And shit always went sour.

So it was that, or I would have to start paying for it, which really wasn’t the worst idea in the world. It would make things less complicated, though the hell it would unleash after would make me regret everything.

I was the son, and the grandson, of two fairly famous hockey players, and I couldn’t deal with the shitstorm that would rain down on me and my family if anyone found out I’d developed a hooker habit.

Also, my grandfather would disown me, and I was sort of counting on his inheritance to get me through the rest of my life since NHL money was never going to happen for me.

It was bad enough when I’d come out of the closet. He didn’t speak to me for nearly two years. It wasn’t until I was in Paris for my first winter Paralympics that he showed his face, and he only looked somewhat approving after I was holding the damn gold medal.

Of course, eight years later, and here I was—banned from competing again. My father managed to calm him down, putting most of the blame on himself and my grandfather for never adjusting their expectations about their hockey heir.

Or whatever the fuck I was supposed to be for them.

When I was born, they’d expected a perfectly proportioned hockey prodigy. Instead, I was a twenty-eight-week preemie with the cord around my neck and brain damage that left me with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy with a side dose of childhood non-epileptic seizures and hearing loss.

It led to my parents’ divorce because my dad blamed my mom, and my mom blamed my dad. I grew up between two homes and two parents who were nothing but unkind and bitter toward each other. They both remarried—my mom’s sticking, my father’s, well…not so much.

From my dad, I learned how to make a wedding look more expensive than it really was, how to hide debt and a drinking problem, and if I ever wanted to hit on college-aged women, I had a fucking arsenal of pickup lines in both English and Quebecois.

From my mom, I learned that love didn’t need to be everything, that any problem could be solved with toxic positivity and feel-good Facebook memes, and life would make sense once she finally got her perfect little trio of tow-headed girls that she’d always dreamed of.

Which happened when I turned ten.

I was just the awkward, confused, angry little shit that bounced between houses and forgot French when I was in Quebec and English when I was in Montana.

Moving to Massachusetts was the best thing I ever did, and while I did low-key still blame Ford and Tucker for dragging me down their path of self-destruction in Beijing, which led to my getting banned from the Paralympics for the last eight years, I still loved them.

They were more family than mine had ever been.

And where my father always thought I wouldn’t ever have sex unless I had a fat wallet to pay for it, these guys reminded me constantly that I could get what I wanted.

I just had to be myself: hot, aloof, and a total dick.

“I’ll go tell him you want to buy him a drink,” Tiago said, hopping up from his chair.

I almost stopped him, but the guy at the bar who’d started casting me careful looks was totally my type. Now that I could see his face properly, I saw he had a sort of Mediterranean vibe with dark olive skin, bright, dark eyes, and a smile that made his eyes crinkle in the corners.

He probably had a name like Rodrigo or Guiseppe—not that I’d ever learn it because one of my rules for the one-and-done night was that we didn’t exchange details like names or phone numbers.

But he was someone I’d like to take my time with, so I hoped he could come up with something sexy for me to call him.

I had a hotel paid for and my Uber app ready to go if I started drinking and the guy so much as nodded my way.

Watching with my breath in my throat, Tiago jumped onto the stool beside him and leaned over. His gaze flickered back in my direction, though I knew he couldn’t see me from there, and he shot a smarmy little grin my way.

I saw the way the stranger’s spine went a little straighter when Tiago spoke, and I could see when he tried to steal another glance at me. That’s right. Reel him in .

Tiago slid my card across the bar toward the bartender, and the stranger said something I couldn’t make out. I was pretty goddamn good at reading lips too, so it was extra annoying. But I could see he had an accent.

It looked almost…French? Which was something I recognized, considering my entire dad’s side of the family almost exclusively spoke French. But his accent was not Quebecois. It was the snooty, fancy-ass Parisian French that was still a mystery to me.

I took a breath, then let it out as the stranger ran his thumb around the pointed edge of the card. It had my rules on it: pick a fake name, promise to wear a condom, accept that there won’t be any details, and if he ever saw me in public again…no he didn’t.

I got turned down more than my offer was accepted, but this man spun on his chair fully, and his dark gaze found mine. Christ, he was pretty . Definitely older than me, which made my small stature and baby face feel even worse.

But hey, we weren’t going to parade ourselves around for public consumption, were we? And I was pretty sure he’d be more than happy with my body once he got my shirt off. My legs were tiny and skinny as fuck, but my upper body was thick, and I had a decent hockey ass with plenty to grab.

I worked myself into exhaustion for this body, damn it. Not only was I bound and determined to win my way back into the Paralympics and hopefully get a pro league contract in the next year or two, but I wanted people to stop looking at me like this giant fuck-up.

I wanted something more than just…this.

I was a community college advisor, and most of my day was taken up by trying to convince students not to take classes they didn’t need and would delay graduation.

Or convince them that yes, they did need to take college math.

Or explain to them a thousand times over why dropping a class two-thirds of the way through the semester would, in fact, affect their GPA.

It was hardly the star hockey life that my dad and grandfather had envisioned for me.

It wasn’t the life I envisioned for myself.

So I got my kicks where I could—and sex like this was scratching a very, very deep itch. I wasn’t opposed to the idea of falling in love, but that person would have to be special. They would need to understand that my little family here would always be the most important thing to me.

And that my goals mattered. I wasn’t about to sacrifice them for anyone. I’d already fucked up once. I wasn’t doing it again.

So…anonymous was easier. Safer.

Better.

The man tapped the card on the bar—I couldn’t hear the sound, but I could easily imagine that little tap-tap it made hitting the marble. He didn’t look at Tiago again. Instead, he slipped off the stool and sauntered over with a grace I would never feel in my own body .

My legs started kicking under the table, but they were strapped down, so there was no way for him to notice. Yet. I folded my hands beside my empty drink as he gripped the back of the chair across from me and gave it a tug.

Unfortunately, I could hear the squeak on the tiles, and it made the sides of my jaw hurt.

“Apologies.”

I couldn’t help a small laugh. Yeah, the fucker was French. “It’s fine,” I answered—it was in my tongue, Quebecois, and his eyes widened, and he dropped down a little harder than he might have intended because I was pretty sure he bit his tongue.

I almost laughed at that, but I did have some self-control.

“French?” he asked.

I shook my head.