Page 26

Sometimes what happens anonymously in a dingy, pay by the hour motel room shows up a month later to reveal himself as your new boss…

* * *

“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 and one of my best friends.

And he wasn’t terrible at helping me hookup, but he was also visually impaired so I wasn’t sure I could trust his judgement when it came to spotting hot guys in a dim bar.

Especially since I was also very, very picky.

Luckily it didn’t seem like the guy at the bar was paying attention to either one of us. It probably had something to do with the fact that 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.

And 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. But I also didn’t do relationships so I had to take sex where I could get it.

At least, where I wasn’t paying for it.

Not that I judged anyone who went that route. But I was still the son, and the grandson, of two very famous hockey legends and I couldn’t deal with the shitstorm that would rain down on me and my family if anyone found out I had 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 the 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. My father managed to calm him down, putting most of the blame on himself and my grandfather for never adjusting their expectations about their heir. Or whatever the fuck I was.

They expected a perfectly proportioned hockey prodigy. Instead, I was a thirty-week preemie with the cord around my neck and brain damage that left me with spastic diplegia with a side dose of epilepsy 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 pick-up lines in both English and Quebecois.

From my mom, I learned that love doesn’t need to be everything, that nothing can’t be solved with toxic-positivity and feel-good Facebook memes, and that she finally got her perfect little trio of toe-headed girls that she’d always dreamed of.

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 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 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 been casting me careful looks was totally my type. A sort of mediterranean vibe with dark olive skin and thick black hair that fell in loose curls which he probably kept short so he didn’t have to deal with the maintenance.

He had broad shoulders and a very sharp jawline which I could appreciate.

He probably had a name like Rodrigo or Giuseppe—not that I’d ever learn it because one of my rules was that it was one and done and we didn’t exchange details. But he was someone I’d like to take my time with.

I had a hotel paid for and my Uber app ready to go if 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 to me, and I saw his smarmy little grin. For a hopeless romantic, the guy was an amazing wingman. I had to give him credit for that.

I saw the way the stranger’s spine went a little straighter, and I could see when he tried to steal a 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. I had to be since I could never hear shit whenever we were in a room with a lot of ambient noise. But he definitely 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 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 the fact that my stature was tiny and I had a baby face 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.

I spent way too much time on it, but I had to. Not only was I bound and determined to win my way back into the Paralympics, but I was ready to put my name out there to be on a league team. I didn’t want to leave the guys and the Wolves behind, but I wanted something more than just…this.

I was a community college advisor, which sounds a lot more interesting than it really is. Most of my day was taken up by trying to convince students not to take classes they didn’t need and would delay graduation, 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 image that little, taptap sound it made. He didn’t look at Tiago again. Instead, he slipped off the stool and sauntered over with a grace I will 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.

The squeak on the tiles 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, but 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 do have some self-control.

“French?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Canadian.”

It’s not like I can hide that part of me. Sticking out my hand, I waited for him to take it. As I expected, his palm is warm and without any sort of real callouses. He has a soft job. A desk job. By the look of his body, he was no stranger to the gym, but it was obvious his hobbies weren’t hard on him.

“So,” he said in French, leaning back. His gaze caught on my hearing aids and then he adjusted himself and instead leaned toward me. “Robert.” He didn’t pronounce the T. It made me feel weirdly homesick. Robert was my middle name and even my American mother pronounced it Ro-bear.

“And you are?”

His brow furrowed in thought. I could see his lips moving, like he was trying out names. Eventually he settled on, “Jean-Luc.”

“Picard?”

His gaze met mine again, then his body shook with laughter I couldn’t hear. “Are you a Star Trek fan?”

“Not in the slightest. But my roommate is.” So was my dad, but I’m not bringing that fucker into this conversation. “You must be.”

“It grew on me after being forced to watch it for several years—every single day.” He sounded wistful and resentful all at the same time. His fingers drummed on the table, and I could feel the vibration under my hands.

There was something about him I liked more than my usual hookups. He was assessing me in ways that most people didn’t. Usually they tried to catch a glimpse of my chair, to study the disability before the man—to see if it was too weird or too much.

“Your friend over there,” he thumbed behind his back, but Tiago was long gone, “said you have a hotel.”

I nodded.

“You do this a lot, Robert?”

For some reason, I suddenly hated my middle name on his lips. I wanted to be Boden to him. But that wasn’t a line I planned on crossing ever. “Yes I do.”