Page 61 of Two for Charging

“Chris chose everything,” Luca said because he didn’t want to be cute or have people knowing how badly he wanted to match Chris at all times. He instantly felt bad about it. Luca couldn’t see Chris’s crestfallen expression as he navigated his way into the Chewbacca outfit, but he knew it was there, and he had caused it.

Howie, frowning, looked away from the mirror where he’d been placing pointed tips on his ears and shimmery glitter on his arms. “Since when do you call him Chris?”

Since he had his tongue down my throat and his hand on my dick. “You know I think hockey nicknames are stupid. Why does Peter Pan need to be covered in body glitter?”

Looking at Luca as if he was the stupid one in this equation, Howie explained, “Fairy dust. Obviously.”

Chris made a choking noise, and Luca turned to help him get the costume on right. He’d rather ignore Howie anyway, or else he might give his feelings for Chris away. If Luca had to put money on anyone fucking up and outing a teammate to the press, he’d put it on Howie.

The guys with kids arrived first. Ollie Gustafsson’s two sons, dressed as characters Luca vaguely recognized from Fortnite, tore through the house searching for the dog. Once they had found her, they absconded to the garden to play fetch.

“They’re going to get their costumes dirty, and then Hilde will murder me,” Ollie said over an alcohol-free beer with the air of a man prepared for his fate. Hilde was already taking pictures with Nieminen’s girlfriend and therefore apparently unable to watch the kids herself.

Vanderbilt won best costume in a landslide. He showed up as a scarecrow holding his tiny daughter in a fluffy lion onesie. Cheryl, on his arm, wore a checkered blue-and-white dress and had her long blond hair in pigtails.

Based on Chris and Mooney’s reactions, Luca inferred the costumes referenced a movie everyone on this continent had seen.

Howie, who had been very convinced of his own costume, wandered morosely to the drinks table afterward.

“I voted for you,” Luca told him, which made Howie hand him a glass of gin with a bit of alibi tonic and then pour himself another, even more generous glass before clinking them together. In a manful demonstration of character growth, Luca didn’t tell him he had no idea who the Vanderbilts were supposed to be and had voted for Howie by default. Instead, he accepted the drink and the toast. This turned out to be Luca’s first tactical error of the evening.

As time wore on, sitters arrived to pick up children and infants. Baby Lily held out a long time, dozing first on Vanderbilt’s shoulder and then, when his arm fell asleep, on Dmitriyev’s. Around nine, Cheryl conscripted the goalie to help her put the baby to bed in the travel crib she’d brought, at which point Vanderbilt went for the liquor and everything escalated.

Luca started to have an inkling of how the night would end when Tom, dressed as a very beleaguered Winter Soldier to Jax’s Captain America, drank a Jello shot. As he swallowed, he made a face that Luca could empathize with and then returned to the den, where he resumed hiding with Phil and Ben.

Howie, who passed soused around 8:00 p.m. and headed for sloshed before midnight, spilled his drink all over Chris’s costume. The gin-soaked fake fur smelled awful, and since Chris had decided his major function at the party was to give everyone as many hugs as possible, he had to change. But he couldn’t get out of the costume by himself, so Luca accompanied him to the guest room to help.

There, Luca realized he’d made his second tactical error. The guest room shared a vent with the bathroom beside it, and the sounds of Dmitriyev and Cheryl Vanderbilt having rushed, passionate sex were unmistakable.

Chris made a face. “I hoped they would stop when the baby got here,” he muttered.

“You knew about this?”

“Doesn’t everybody? They’re not, like, subtle.”

Luca never would have guessed. “Does Vanderbilt know?”

Chris shrugged.

Keeping his voice low in case the lovers could hear them as well, Luca asked, “Is Lily his?”

Chris shrugged again. “I don’t want to know. Help me with this?”

In his third and worst tactical error, Luca unzipped the Chewbacca suit.

Underneath it, Chris was shirtless.

The combination of alcohol, a soundtrack of overdone, porn-adjacent sex noises, and the bare planes of Chris’s muscular back seduced Luca into trailing his fingers all over the available skin, stroking and touching everything he could reach.

Chris inhaled sharply.

For a beautiful moment, Luca thought he enjoyed the touch.

“That tickles.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Luca pulled his hands away as if Chris’s skin was burning hot. It might as well have been, for him.

“’S okay.” Chris stripped out of the suit, leaving only his light blue boxer briefs with red, green, and yellow bunches of balloons. In profile, Luca could see the swell of the pouch where the cock he could not stop thinking about rested. It was no bigger or firmer than usual. Luca’s presence, his touch, had no effect on it.