Page 31 of Pucked Up (Punk as Puck #2)

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

HUGO

This was all a giant fucking mess. Micah was so oblivious to the tone of Boden’s voice that he kept digging the hole deeper, and he didn’t even realize it. I liked him, a lot. I meant what I said when I agreed to be his friend, and I was now very aware of why he had the reputation he did.

It wasn’t literal. He just had no idea the part he played in why people assumed he fucked everyone that so much as breathed near him.

It was a shame, but I couldn’t worry about that now.

Every one of my dark secrets was about to come spilling out in front of Boden, but I needed to let that happen.

If I let my focus wander, I’d end up taking his father into an alley somewhere and rearranging his face.

I’d give him a nice little reminder of what it felt like to play a full-contact sport.

For now, I let Boden keep his pace ahead of me, and it wasn’t until the elevator that I snapped. The doors closed, and before I could stop myself, I had him by the front of his shirt, pinned to the elevator wall.

“My room is on the third floor,” he rasped, his pupils blown wide.

I nodded. “Alright.”

“Let me go.”

“Is that really what you want?” I asked because his tone was saying something entirely different.

He swallowed and then—barely noticeable—gave the smallest shake of his head.

So I didn’t. Not until the elevator car slowed and the speaker pinged.

It took real effort to peel my hands away from his body and let him walk ahead of me.

All I wanted was to feel his warm skin against mine, but considering he’d given me very clear signals he didn’t want that anymore, I needed to control myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said as he reached for his room keycard.

He turned his head back. “Didn’t catch that.”

I cleared my throat and pitched my voice a little louder. “I’m sorry. In the elevator…I didn’t mean…”

He shook his head again, cutting me off. Instead of answering, he tapped his card against the door, then pushed it open and walked in. I thought for a moment he might slam it in my face, but then he used his crutch tip to prop it open, and I forced my feet to move.

It slammed shut behind me, the sound making me jump. This was so unlike me, and I hated it .

“Are you married?” he demanded the moment we were alone.

That wasn’t the question I was expecting. I assumed Boden would have looked me up online after leaving my house the morning after he slept over. So either he really didn’t know, or he wanted me to confirm what he’d found out.

“My husband is dead.”

The way he paled told me that no, he hadn’t known. He hadn’t looked me up. Merde. What did that mean?

“Dead? Like…?”

“Dead. Buried. It was about seven years ago now.”

“How?” His voice came out an almost whisper, like he was afraid to ask.

“Pneumonia,” I told him. I walked over to the bed and sank down.

Boden seemed frozen to the spot, and then after several breaths, he set his crutches against the wall and dropped into the chair by the rickety hotel desk. He rested his forearms over his thighs and met my gaze. “Move to the second bed so I can hear you better.”

The second bed was clearly Ford’s from the way it was already a mess, but I settled on the corner, where the blanket had been pulled back, close enough to Boden that if I’d stretched my leg, our knees would have bumped together.

“How long have you been fucking Micah?”

I fought not to choke. “We haven’t fucked. ”

“I know him?—”

“No,” I interrupted sharply, “actually, I don’t think you know him as well as you think you do.

” I was well aware my tone was harsh. Boden flinched, but I wasn’t going to let this one go.

“He also knows that. He knows that everyone assumes he fucks anything that walks. No one believes him when he says he didn’t.

And he’s afraid no one will believe him if he’s ever hurt because they’ll assume he was asking for it. ”

Boden paled. “I would never—I have never?—”

“I know,” I told him quickly. “But you assumed that because he and I were up all night, it had to be because we were having sex.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it slowly. He took a deep inhale through his nose. “You’re right.” I was also not expecting such quick acquiescence, but that told me how much he loved his friend. “Micah deserves better than that.”

“And me?” I chanced.

He stared at me in a considering silence. “How long has your husband been dead again? I missed when you said it before.”

“Seven years. His name is Reid Martin.”

His eyes widened, and he cleared his throat. “ The ?—”

“Yes,” I said before he could finish that sentence.

I really didn’t want to hear it from him.

“ The Reid Martin of the PPHL. The Reid Martin who is responsible for why we’ve all been dragged here this weekend.

” My voice was ragged now, my throat tense.

I felt a wave of grief—not for my dead husband.

I would always love and miss him, but this was grief for not talking to Boden about this sooner.

He stared at me for a long time. “ Is it a disability fetish? I know I asked you before, but considering your history, I’m not sure I trust you.”

I blinked, then burst into laughter. “Fair. But no. It’s not.”

“Right, because your former husband and I were a little bit alike in that regard.”

I bowed my head and took a steadying breath.

“We were together when he was drafted into the NHL. He begged me to leave him after his accident. He didn’t want a caregiver.

He wanted a husband. There was no way for me not to be both.

” Closing my eyes, I smiled at the image my memory dragged up.

His fiery gaze locked on me, and the moment he gave in when he realized I wasn’t going anywhere.

“I drew up divorce papers to make him happy, but I could never bring myself to file them. He wanted me to sleep around—to open our marriage. I couldn’t get hard with anyone else, even with Viagra, so we didn’t do that either. ”

When I was brave enough to open my eyes, I looked at Boden, who was staring at my mouth.

“We eventually moved past all the hard parts and fell back in love. Then he got sick, and he died, and it was kind of expected because when he was injured, all of his doctors in rehab told us that was probably how he was going to go. That, or a UTI that got left untreated. He planned his funeral two years before he was gone. I thought he’d be the smaller statistic who lived until he was a wrinkled old man, but he never liked it when I was right. ”

Boden swallowed heavily. “So was I just a way to pass the time?”

“Wasn’t that all I was to you?”

He blinked, and then his lips twitched. “You were a guy in a bar, and I wanted to have an orgasm.”

“Exactly.”

His smile widened. “So…you do know about sled hockey.”

The question gave me whiplash, but I appreciated he didn’t want to know more about Reid tonight.

With a sigh, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and went into one of my desktop folders.

They were old photos I rarely looked at, but I had one—my first PPHL game as Reid’s pusher. “I wore his number, obviously.”

Boden took the phone with trembling hands and stared at it for a long, long time. “Why didn’t you tell me? When I was accusing you of…well, everything I accused you of, why didn’t you just say something?”

“Because I didn’t want to be Reid’s husband in front of the man who had given me one of the best nights of my life,” I confessed.

His eyes shot up to mine. “Hugo?—”

“I’m sorry, mon petit feu. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s true.

I saw you sitting in that conference room, and I realized how badly I’d fucked up.

It was only easy to walk away from you that first night because I thought I wasn’t going to see you again.

” I bowed my head, then looked up at him so he could see my lips.

“Except two weeks later, there you were. And then you were there all the time, and you hated me, and that should have made it easier to shut all those feelings down, but it didn’t. ”

Boden’s cheeks were pink, and his hands were still trembling as he handed me the phone back. “So, are your parents really?—”

“Also disabled, yeah. My dad’s a little person, and my mom’s got spina bifida. They’re both wheelchair users. I know how it looks. I swear it’s not a fetish, and if you need me to…”

“No. No,” Boden said. “I get it. With Reid, it was a freak accident.”

I nodded. “I took care of my parents a lot as I got older. Reid thought I’d resent him for having to step into that role with him.”

“Did you?”

I laughed. “No. It just felt…I don’t know. He was my best friend and my husband. What else was I going to do?”

I knew the answer to my own question only because I’d asked myself thousands of times. I could have left him. I could have abandoned the marriage, and he probably wouldn’t have even blamed me for it. I could have given in to my own trauma of losing the life we had and let that part of it define me.

But I would have never forgiven myself, and right now, I was grateful for that because I wanted to be a man worthy of someone like Boden. Even if he’d never want me back .

“You like me,” Boden said.

“I do.”

“In spite of, well, everything.”

I laughed, shaking my head. “In spite of it. Because of it. I’m not really sure, mon petit feu. The lines between those two things are very blurred.”

“Fuck,” he breathed out, then dropped his face into his hands. “Fuck. Marde! Crisse de calisse de tabarnak!”

“Boden—”

“Shitting shit fuck fuckity fucker,” he said, looking up at me. He was crushed. I’d ruined it by telling him the truth. But, at the very least, I was unburdened.

“You won’t be with the Wolves for long,” I said once his breathing returned to normal. “I have scouts coming for the last few games, and I already have three offers for you. You’ll be getting them in emails soon.”