Page 18 of Man Advantage

“I am a goalie.”

“Yeah, on the ice. Unfortunately, you leave every bit of grace on the ice,” Cole said, and Ford laughed, low and easy, and the tightness Cole had been carrying all morning eased a notch.

Ford came up behind him while the second batch cooked, set a mug down by Cole’s elbow, and put a hand flat on his back, right between the shoulder blades, warm through the T-shirt. He didn’t say anything. He just stood there a second with his hand on Cole like he’d wanted to for a while and was finding out he was allowed, and then he grabbed two plates out of the cabinet.

Cole must have gone quiet because Ford bumped their shoulders together. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere.” Cole turned the pancake on the griddle and didn’t look up. “Not used to a morning being this good, is all. Keep waiting for the catch.”

“Yeah. I’ve got a few of those myself.” Ford looked at him over the brim of his mug as he took a sip. “I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and panic about kissing my teammate. I’m too old and too tired to want something this much and then talk myself out of it.”

Cole made himself hold Ford’s eyes instead of dropping them to his coffee. “Okay,” he said. “I believe you.”

“Was that so hard?”

“Excruciating.”

Ford grinned and let him off the hook, and they carried the pancakes to the table and actually sat down to eat them, which almost never happened. No practice, no Charlotte to run anywhere, nowhere either of them had to be until Sunday. Cole couldn’t remember the last time a day had that much nothing in it. Halfway through the stack, he brought up what he’d been circling since he saw Ford’s calendar.

“I saw on the calendar that you’re meeting with the specialist on Monday morning,” he said.

Ford’s jaw tightened. “Yeah, but I’m not sure the time’s going to work. We have practice, and everyone’s going to be rusty after having most of this week off.”

“You’re going.” Cole wasn’t going to let it go this time.

“Carter’ll rat me out to Deluca if I don’t.” Ford’s tone was dry, but his knuckles had gone white around his cup.

He swallowed hard as he stared into the distance. Cole reached over and covered his hand, and neither of them said anything about the fact that Monday might be the day a doctor told Ford his days in the net were coming to an end.

Cole worried about that too. He wasn’t scared of Ford slowing down, or of what the team would have to do without him, or any of the hockey of it. He was scared of what having hockey taken from him would do to Ford. He’d watched him dodge reality since February, watched him smile his way through days Cole knew were excruciating.

“Whatever he says Monday,” Cole said, “we’ll deal with it. You don’t have to go through this alone.”

“I know.” Ford turned his hand over under Cole’s. “I’m not sure you realize how much it means knowing I won’t have to deal with this shit on my own.”

“We’re teammates.” He leaned over the table and pressed his lips to Ford’s. “And I don’t just mean on the ice. We’ve done a pretty good job keeping the house going since I moved in. This is just an extension of that. I want to be the person you can turn to for a long-ass time.”

The corner of Ford’s mouth turned up in an almost-smile before quickly dropping. “I’m not ready for the guys to know about us. I don’t want you to think I’m trying to keep this a secret, but we don’t need that sort of distraction right now.”

“Agreed. We keep it off the ice and out of the house when Charlotte’s home until we both say otherwise.”

“That works.” Ford reached over and thumbed a smear of syrup off the side of Cole’s hand, unhurried, like he’d been looking for an excuse to touch him and finally had one.

“There are rules though,” Cole said. “If we’re doing this.”

“Rules.” Ford’s mouth twitched. “You’ve got rules already. Did you stay up making a list after I passed out last night, or have you been working on them for a while now?”

Cole ignored him, knowing Ford was trying to make light of things. “Fine, there’s just one rule. You quit hiding the pain from me. I won’t say a word about it at the rink, but when we’re home, you drop it. You let me get you ice, and don’t fight me about it. And you quit going up and down those stairs four times on a bad night, counting under your breath like I can’t hear you through the wall. That’s the deal.”

Ford was quiet for a beat. “That’s a hell of a first rule.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll take it,” Ford said, low, and the tightness went out of his shoulders when he said it, like it had cost him less than he’d braced for. “God help me.”

They ended up on the couch by mid-morning because they had a whole day of nothing in front of them, and neither felt like spending it being useful. Ford pulled up a Black Friday tab and pretended to hunt for the bike Charlotte had been campaigning for since October. Mostly he just argued with Cole about the color. Cole said the pink was a trap, that she’d want purple by spring. Ford said Cole underestimated the kid’s loyalty to pink. Twenty minutes went by, and neither of them added a single thing to the cart, and Cole couldn’t have cared less.

Somewhere along the way, he’d ended up with a hand on Ford’s good knee, and Ford had left it there. The two of them kept bickering about bike colors like the contact was not only normal, but it was all either of them needed. Because it was. Not the kissing. This. A Friday with nowhere to be, a kid’s Christmas list open on the screen, and permission to touch.