Page 11 of Two for Roughing

Ketchup eyed him warily, as if waiting for Damir to tell him off for handing out his room number. It was a shitty thing to do, but Damir had gotten the fuck of a lifetime out of it, so it evened out. Thinking about it was enough to dispel a bit of his bad mood.

“It was nothing important,” he said. “Just hockey chirps.”

“Really?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Ketchup snorted. “No way. I know you’re the one who mixed peroxide in Lissy’s beard oil last year. You just have resting grump face so no one realizes how devious you are.”

To maintain his aura of innocence, Damir said nothing.

“Anyway, Howie chirps me every fucking time I see him, and he never comes to visit me afterward to say he’s sorry.”

“I apologized to him after the hit two weeks ago,” Damir admitted. He hadn’t told anyone about it as he wasn’t sure he’d be able to see Howard one-on-one without ending up in bed again. Not when he’d been fantasizing about the blotchy flush all down Howard’s back since December.

With no convenient friend from youth hockey on Howard’s team, Damir’d had to take the direct route of sending Howard a message on Instagram.

He’d been gratified to discover Howard already followed him, and more gratified when Howard had sent him a reply almost immediately. They’d met up in a bar a few blocks from the hotel where the Sea Lions were staying, Howard in a hoodie that would have been inconspicuous if not for his name and number splashed across the back. Damir had wondered if he’d chosen 68 purposefully, to be as close to 69 as possible.

Damir had apologized for the hit, Howard had said he ought to have kept his head up, and they’d chatted about the game for the time it took them both to drink a beer (nonalcoholic, because Damir didn’t drink, and Howard was still underage, which didn’t make Damir feel less weird about the whole event).

It had been awkward because it hadn’t been awkward. The conversation had been as easy as with any other hockey player. Except Damir knew exactly what Howard sounded like when he came, untouched, on Damir’s cock. The dual vision of Howard, relaxed and easy across from him in the bar, and Howard, desperate and begging in his memory, had reminded Damir of the postcards he’d loved as a child, the thick ones with the textured fronts showing one image when they were flat but another when he tilted them.

“How’d he take it?” Ketchup asked.

Damir shrugged and started the car. “Fine. He didn’t think it was a dirty hit.”

Howard had smiled at him in the dim lighting of the bar with his unruly hair peeking out from under his hood. His body language had been relaxed, his broad shoulders open, his hand resting on the table between them. Damir had no reason to think he harbored any resentment.

Ketchup buckled his seatbelt, far too late as always. “Nah, Howie was raised old school about on-ice hits. I remember one time he got totally flattened by this other kid, and his dad watched it happen and went, ‘Oh, yeah, serves him right, he looked down.’ Nuts.”

“His dad was a fan?”

“Coach.”

Damir winced. He’d been lucky once or twice to have a coach he wouldn’t have minded being around if he weren’t contractually obliged to be. But they were in a minority. Even Simmons, Chicago’s current head coach, had a zero-tolerance policy for his players having human emotions if the emotion was anything but aggression.

Damir hoped Howard and Ketchup’s junior coach hadn’t been as bad if Howard had been getting that kind of tough love at home as well. Unless of course… “Wait, was he your coach?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ketchup said. “Not the worst coach I’ve ever had, to be fair, but being the coach’s kid…”

Damir shuddered.

“The first week Howie was on the team, his dad had him make a list of every player’s strengths and weaknesses, and then he read it out in the locker room to let us all know even his thirteen-year-old could see what fuck-ups we all were. Didn’t make Howie the most popular guy on the team, especially when he turned out to be a better player than the rest of us.”

“Why are coaches so pathological?” Damir’s parents had their own problems, but at least they kept out of his hockey career.

Ketchup wiggled in his seat, tugging the seatbelt strap under his armpit. “Fuck if I know. Anyway, I always thought Howie was a decent guy outside of all the pressure. Good to hear I was right.”

“Mm.” What people skills did that teach, being coached at home and at the rink? Not having the slightest bit of separation between his family and what would one day become his job? Especially being gay in professional sports? Damir wondered if Howard was out to his coach father. He would bet against it. No well-adjusted person comfortable with their own identity would turn up at someone’s hotel room and beg for cock based on an on-ice interaction ending with them getting punched in the face.

No, the way Howard had gone about it reeked of desperation and secrecy, albeit poorly executed secrecy. If he was going to be so loud in bed, Howard could have at least invited Damir to his place. Damir had endured so much ridicule on the plane ride home the next day for picking up a screamer that he had pretended to be asleep. Thankfully, Howard’s voice was high enough when he got fucked that it could be mistaken for a girl’s.

Damir wondered if knowing what the other Firecrackers had said about him would turn Howard on. Probably.

The thought of calling Howard on it, telling him he sounded like a girl, slapping his well-rounded ass a few times for good measure, made Damir’s cock thicken. He swallowed heavily and resisted the urge to squirm. Concentrating on driving, he willed his semi down. It was a bit of a disappointment that he’d only had Howard the once. Damir had hoped for more the night in the bar after his apology—but Howard hadn’t said anything, hadn’t begged to be dicked down again. He’d only smiled at Damir crookedly with those pouty lips, looking up at him from under his lashes and—

“Fuck.”