Page 6

FIVE

SHANE

I savored the times when he walked in front of me.

It wasn’t often. He usually went shoulder to shoulder with me, setting our pace and chatting endlessly.

Those special moments, on stairs or in a crowd, when Patrick stretched his stride and walked in front, were incredible.

He couldn’t see my face. He couldn’t see how the breezy sea-and-pine scent of his cologne made my eyes glassy with desire and my lips part as if someone was going to kiss them.

He also couldn’t see me scanning his lower back, the firm roundness of his incredible ass, and his messily half-tucked shirt and half an inch of his branded underwear.

For a week, I trailed him quietly, avoiding any further talk of dating and sex.

Not only was it irrelevant, but it was coming dangerously close to making me blush and explode right before his eyes.

The mounting desire was like a guilty pleasure, a sweet sin I could pick up and toy with until it came close to destroying me, then put it away for later. I kept indulging in it.

When he changed in front of me, I looked.

When he lifted weights on a flat bench, his shorts hardly concealing the size of his bulge, I glanced.

When he swirled on ice and pulled off an incredible bait and switch, my heart shimmered. And when he slammed someone into the boards, my throat felt as though fear would strangle me to death.

And when he wasn’t around, I closed my eyes, and I imagined.

The flashes of what could never be would fill my mind, so vivid before my eyes that it felt like I could live my entire life with nothing more than my imagination.

I could feel the touch of his skin on mine when I wanted to.

I could feel the warmth of his lips under my belly button when I wished.

I could even feel his fingers wrap around my cock, squeeze it hard, while he whispered dirty things into my ears.

Going down the road of fantasizing about Patrick was like wiggling in quicksand. It was only pulling me deeper. At some point, there would be no escape.

I wasn’t delusional. In this one week, girls had thrown themselves at Patrick like he was a rock star.

And Patrick loved it. I was certain that he obliged them very happily once I was out of the picture.

His little exercise had shown me as much.

He’d flirted with that girl with ease and confidence I could never muster—the good thing was that I didn’t need to.

Not even all of the confidence and charm could land me the guy I wanted because he just didn’t play it that way.

A hand waved before my eyes and snapped me out of my wandering thoughts. “Earth to Shane,” he said. “You’re galaxies away.”

I thrust my hand up, slipping my fingers under my glasses and rubbing my eyes. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m tired.”

Patrick wore his gym clothes, a matching T-shirt and shorts and a pair of spotless sneakers, and he was just a snack.

His legs were tanned and mostly smooth, with some light golden hair scattered along the taut skin.

His calves were defined, and so were his quads.

I didn’t dare mention his ass. I’d seen his workout.

Other than hip thrusts, that ass was all genes and conditioning.

He didn’t put a lot of effort into it, whereas I carved out a day in the week to do squats, hip thrusts, abductors, stairs, and a whole slew of exercises, only to end up with a butt you’d call cute in the best of circumstances and under a great light.

“I was rambling anyway,” Patrick said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“No. Tell me,” I said.

“It’s the pacing,” Patrick said. “It’s easy to have a burst of energy if you spare yourself enough.”

I noted this down and urged him to continue telling me about it.

It wasn’t how I imagined interviewing him, his face red with heat and brow slick with sweat, distracting me in all the most painful ways, but it was good material.

“And when you have this burst of energy, especially on ice, are you thinking about the spectators?”

“We mostly do drills. No audience, remember?” Patrick chuckled. He shook his hands off, timing the rest before he did another set on the bench press.

“There are always spectators,” I said. “Your friends, your rivals, the coaches. Someone’s always watching.”

He shook his head, but not emphatically. “I play for myself. I want to be good at it.”

I nodded and hesitated, then let the question slowly roll over my tongue. “And who decides if you’re good at it? You?”

Patrick blinked, then laughed and slapped my shoulder. “Got me.”

“I’m not trying to get you,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”

“I guess…” He fell silent, eying me and the bench press next to me. “I guess I play for the others a little bit, too. I should probably pretend to be really noble and talk about how it’s all for the sake of the sport, but oh well.”

I chuckled. “I don’t think so. It’s totally normal to want to have your talents seen. Everyone wants a witness when they’re good at something.”

And Patrick wanted to be seen no matter the price.

It was a reckless, desperate need to be noticed that I hadn’t expected to discover here.

Walking naked in front of me just because he knew without a shred of doubt that he had a big dick anyone would envy wasn’t a flex as much as it was a call to be seen and approved of.

I’d already composed a list of questions for another time.

Patrick lay flat on his back and inhaled before lifting the bar with heavy weights mounted to each side.

He did his set, and I watched. One, two, three, four…

His chest rose and fell in a perfect rhythm.

His feet were planted flat on the floor, and his knees spread apart.

The skin of his inner thigh was completely smooth, the shorts lifting a little as if to torment me on purpose.

And the mound where his cock and balls were packed into his boxers was so easily noticed that I wondered if he even knew he was doing this.

Was it just second nature to him? Someone blessed with good looks, great talents, loads of charm, and a dick that size didn’t have a clue about the struggles the rest of us had.

To him, it had to be the most normal thing when his T-shirt lifted a little, and a flash of skin appeared, and everyone drooled over him.

When he finished his last set for the day, we went into the locker room. He wasn’t naked around me anymore, not after that first time. Not after he’d guessed I was gay, and I confirmed it. But stepping into the locker room was like walking through a mirror into a dream.

In an instant, I was on my knees, and the lights were nearly all out. He reached over and untied the knot of the towel around his waist, revealing his thick cock, while I opened my mouth as wide as it could go—nowhere near wide enough to take all of him.

“Be back in a minute,” Patrick said, stripping down to his underwear and heading into the bathroom.

He returned quickly, his hair wet and his body slick, and turned away from me to take off the towel around his waist and put on clean underwear. I looked away, especially because Patrick turned his head to a profile, partly adding me to his field of vision as he did so.

When he was dressed, he acted just fine. He invited me for dinner with his friends, but I passed on it. I wasn’t going to shadow him everywhere sooner than I strictly had to. We were still trying to find a rhythm.

I carried the smartwatch to download the data for the day and wipe it clear for tomorrow. It had been a whole week, so I felt confident I would see some patterns. The smartwatch sat on a pile of books in my dorm room while I organized my notes, and then I imported all the data into a spreadsheet.

Looking at the timestamps in my notebook and the levels of Patrick’s pulse and speed of movement, I had expected to see these flares of energy he exhibited on ice clearly correlating with his physiological responses. I frowned at the data splashed on my screen and in my notebook.

I couldn’t have been wrong every day, even if I’d made an error somewhere.

In the drills, Patrick’s heartbeat picked up a little. For a practiced athlete in great condition, these numbers were perfectly fine. Those little wins showed me a spike that was almost negligible, but it existed. The rough contacts with other players correlated with very little in my data.

I looked through his exercise routines. Running was an obvious one, although Patrick’s pulse didn’t go wild proportionately to the speed at which he was running.

Resistance training did little. But then, as if to compensate for its calm, his heart seemed to hammer like a fleeing rabbit after workouts.

Timestamps…

I looked at them again. The red notebook had shorthand lines of text added to each notable time entry. These were not the moments immediately after Patrick’s workout. His heart didn’t race once he was nearing the end of a session. It came after. It came in the locker room.

My own heartbeat quickened as I thought about it.

Insecurities, maybe? Was he shy and worried in the locker room, afraid of changing in front of someone, doing it to prove to himself he had no reason to be scared?

Or was it something else entirely? The thrill of being watched?

Was he so excited to walk around naked that it could explain a spike in his heartbeat of this magnitude?

And if so, what the hell was wrong with him?

I’d have imagined exhibitionists in a park in the middle of the day keeping it together a little better than this.

Something wasn’t entirely right here. He simply didn’t have a reason for these waves that looked rather like panic attacks. His behavior had been cool and composed all that time, but what was going on inside his chest was a whole different matter.

And it begged to be investigated.

Maybe my approximate time entries and notes missed something. Maybe he’d jumped really fast and high for a few minutes in the locker room, and I’d simply forgotten that.

Or was he actually nervous when I watched him undress?

Because he had been aware of it. He must have.

He’d caught me looking too many times not to know by now.

And maybe, if wishful thinking wasn’t impeding my ability to read my data, Patrick felt something other than sheer cockiness when he took his clothes off right before my eyes.