Page 94 of Two for Roughing

But no, Kilian didn’t want to be that person for Damir, and Damir had to learn to accept it. He scowled at the thought.

“Wow, what crawled up your ass and died?” Ketchup drawled.

Mr. Howard cleared his throat.

In the rearview mirror, Damir saw Ketchup wince.

“Um, sorry, Coach Howard,” Ketchup said. “Denny, what crawled up your butt and died?”

Damir had no intention of answering the question honestly, but with Kilian’s father’s eyes boring into the back of his head, he felt compelled to say something. “Tough call with my agent yesterday.”

At Alliance Arena, they pointed the Howards in the direction of the friends and family section. Damir waved goodbye wordlessly before going straight for the training bicycle. He wasn’t ready to talk to Ketchup about what, exactly, he’d discussed with his agent, much less prolonged exposure to Lissy’s newest locker-room playlist. And if he had to sit in his stall next to Kilian and watch him get changed, flashing his shy smile over at Damir every now and again whenever someone said or did something he knew would amuse Damir, he might explode.

He met up with the team for warm-ups but kept mostly to himself, doing shooting practice on an unsuspecting Petterson and repeating a few of the skating exercises Valeria had taught him and Kilian. He could see Kilian doing the same, and it made him smile despite his mood.

Perhaps Damir’s purpose in Kilian’s life was to teach him how to trust himself on the ice and in bed. Damir’d had other people to learn from—Sasha and Kyrill for the latter and his parents and early coaches for the former. Could Damir be happy with being a stepping stone for Kilian? Leaving an indelible mark on Kilian’s life and then exiting it graciously when they were no longer teammates?

The thought made preemptive grief claw up through his stomach, empty and bitter.

He clenched his jaw and gripped his stick tighter.

As he’d predicted, the game was tight, not because they were evenly matched but because the Firecrackers played slow and lazy, glutted on the holiday break and their own recent success.

They played two periods of frustrating back and forth, leaving the score tied at 1–1. By the third, Damir was ready to bite through his mouthguard out of frustration. He’d told Rocky what the issues were, yet the first D-pair gave up chance after chance to the Fury, forcing Petterson to stand on his head. They ought to be better than this.

The second line skated out for a faceoff after Petterson threw himself bodily on the puck, stopping play and disallowing any further shots on goal.

Kilian got into position at the center, bent down over the puck with his stick in place. The Fury’s second-line centerman skated into place opposite him and said something Damir couldn’t hear from the bench. Kilian straightened, spat out his mouthguard, and answered. The referee gave him a sharp look, and he put the mouth guard in again, returning to game readiness.

The puck dropped, and Kilian stole it away, passing behind himself to Fulls and racing up the ice, but the Fury’s centerman chased after him and grabbed him by the jersey. Kilian stumbled, allowing the man to grab his arms as well, and then the refs blew their whistles, and play was stopped again.

“Yes,” Ketchup muttered beside Damir on the bench. “Two-minute power play. Nice work, Howie.”

The Fury player protested the call, gesticulating harshly at the linesmen.

Kilian held both hands up, shrugging innocently.

Menace.

The debate raged on.

“What the fuck?” Matheson asked a few spots over. “That was blatant holding. How are they still yapping?”

Coach Simmons tapped Damir on the shoulder, and he hopped the boards. By rights, smoothing out rough penalty calls was Lissy’s job as captain, but Damir got sent to do it more and more often. He tried not to think too hard about what that signified.

He skated up to the group building around the referee and the two skaters and shouldered his way through in time to hear Kilian say, “He told me not to check out his ass. I answered to reassure him!”

The linesman looked between the two players. The guy from Minnesota was red-faced and breathing hard, while Kilian looked largely amused.

“Sexual harassment isn’t part of the rulebook,” the linesman said hesitantly, eyes darting back and forth between the two players. “However…”

The Minnesotan opened his mouth, presumably to explain how Kilian’s behavior constituted harassment.

Before the guy got the chance, Damir said, “It sounds as though he was the one to harass Howard. Or do you accept sexual remarks about straight players?”

The linesman looked at him with something akin to relief. “Two for holding,” he said decisively and blew his whistle.

“But—” Mr. Minnesota started. His team captain dragged him away by the elbow, shoving him toward the penalty box.