Page 81 of Dangle

Taking a tentative step toward him, I sighed when he looked up at me and flew into my arms. He slammed into me hard enough that he knocked me back a couple of steps. Sometimes, I forget my boy spent his life playing and preparing to play a very physical sport, where he beat the shit out of people and took hit after hit, all the while racing after a rubber puck with blades on his feet.

I maneuvered us into our spot on the sofa, cuddling him close. “I figured you’d have to go home over the summer. But this seems different. Has something happened? What I’m not understanding is what has you so upset.”

“I didn’t plan to go home this summer. I arranged to stay in the team’s housing for the summer. I even hired a trainer to work with me here in Manchester.”

“I didn’t realize that. I like that idea. Not sure I want my boy over twelve hours away.”

“I didn’t want to be twelve hours away.”

I kissed his forehead, squeezing him to me, dreading the question I knew needed to be asked. “So, what’s changed?”

“If I don’t go back, my parents refuse to pay my tuition, and Dad said he would report my truck as stolen.”

My eyes closed. But for my military training, I would be losing my fucking shit right now and packing for a road trip to New York.

“Aren’t you on scholarship with The U?”

He shook his head. “No. They offered it, but I turned it down, so the team could offer it to the guys who actually needed it.”

“You’re such a good kid, Trey. Such a good man.”

“Well, that’s shot me in the ass, because if I were on scholarship I would mail the keys to the truck back to my parents and tell them to fucking jump off a cliff into shark-infested waters.”

Laughter bubbled in my chest. I kissed his head again.

“You laugh, but I’m not fucking joking. I’m over this shit. I’m over being talked to like I’m an idiot. My dad literally called me retarded when I told him my plan to stay here this summer. That shit’s not cool.”

“No, it fucking isn’t. And anyone who says it in my presence gets fucking schooled. My youngest aunt who isn’t much older than me, has Down’s, and the way the world talks about herand those like her makes me want to burn the place to the motherfucking ground. She’s no less than anyone else.”

He scooted up my body, fully draped over my chest. His chin rested on his stacked fists. “You are the best human being I’ve ever met in the entirety of my life.”

Wrapping my arms around him, I murmured against his lips. “You make me better, baby boy. You make me so much better.”

We shared soft, languid kiss after soft, languid kiss. Unlike all the other times we kissed, the surge of lust never came. The heat between us stayed banked while we enjoyed each other’s presence and mouths. I hated that his family treated him so poorly. I hated that he needed to make the trip home instead of spending the summer here with me, where I could take care of him and continue showing him how valued he could be, how good and smart and… Fuck.

Yeah. Not going to follow that thought. Too soon, and this will never last. The boy may be worried about getting signed, but I knew he would, and when he did, I would lose him. So no. The word…emotion that rounded out that thought…would not be said. Not even in my damn head.

We parted, and I gazed at him, trying to burn his face and the color of his eyes onto my soul so when he left, the way he made me feel stayed with me. Because somehow this twenty-one-year-old hockey player, the NHL’s Prince of Hockey, had made me feel whole again. I felt like I had as a Marine—ten feet tall and bulletproof with the fucking world at my feet—before life became a rut of the same old same old, day after day and minute after minute until the weight of existing crushed me.

“What?” he asked, a soft smile turning up that gorgeous mouth that I couldn’t get enough of.

“What do you mean, what?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“Just looking at the most beautiful man I’ve ever met.”

“I doubt that, old man. I mean you’re approaching twelve hundred or something like that.”

My eyes rounded. “You little shit!” I growled playfully, digging my fingers into his sides. He writhed and squealed as I tickled the fucking brat. I would show him fucking old. The fucking infant.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” he yelled, twisting even more, trying to slither out of my grasp. “Stop! Stop! Shit! Red!”

My hands fell away. Trey hurtled the back of the couch and raced to the bathroom near the front door, and I laughed at him as he yelled, “I nearly pissed myself, you asshole!”

“That’s what you get for calling me old,” I called back.

I stood up, stretching and popping my back and shoulders, ignoring how every crack seemed to say ‘old man’ in Trey’s giggly tone when he teased me. Little shit made me feel like a kid again and ancient all at the same time.