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Marcus is twenty-three and half-concussed when it finally occurs to him that he might actually kind of sort of be really into dudes.
Like, fucking dudes.
Being fucked by dudes.
He’s at home for once, recovering from a pretty brutal head slam into the penalty glass that had resulted in an emergency MRI and about twenty minutes of acute memory loss—and he’s got blackout curtains on his windows and a tiny porcelain trash can next to his bed and it’s been ten days since he’d even thought about touching his dick and he’s bored, god damn.
Marcus and Wood go way back.
Way back.
They’d been in juniors together, attended training camps and played invitationals and exchanged glares from the silver and bronze blocks at Worlds, always on opposing teams with opposing agendas, but Wood had been such a fucking standout, even then, and Marcus—Marcus had just liked to win. They’d both had reputations.
Wood, the consummate perfectionist whose stick was like a phantom limb, movements swift and technique the kind of good that surpassed raw talent and veered right into prodigal workhorse territory; and Marcus, the brawler with the bulk and the size and the temperament to really make an impact in a scrummage for the puck.
Wood scored goals; Marcus started fights.
Wood’s wild-eyed focus was a direct and often hilarious counterpoint to Marcus’s dirty elbow throwing, his smirking trash talk and his lazy skating and his barely-legal shoulder checks.
Wood had grown up in, like, the Yukon, or something, learned to skate on a frozen pond in his parents’ backyard, spoke frenzied French and oddly accented English, called his mother twice a day and folded his fucking socks when he packed for away games and drank dark, molasses-colored lagers by the pitcher on the rare occasions they managed to get him out of the goddamn gym. Meanwhile, Marcus had grown up being shuffled between his mother’s six-thousand square foot McMansion in east Texas and his father’s skyscraping condo in downtown Chicago, learned to skate while being kept busy with some bullshit summer camp at an indoor rink, hadn’t spoken to either of his parents since draft night and had never done his own laundry and was careful about drinking anything, ever, because brain injuries and alcohol were about as friendly as Marcus and Wood had been before they’d become teammates.
Because they had.
Become teammates.
Marcus had made it through prospect camp, played 33 games for Boston, and then been unceremoniously traded the morning after he’d taken an unholy hit to the back of the head.
But Wood—Wood had gone top five in the draft.
And five years later, Marcus still thinks that Wood’s the only one who’d been genuinely surprised by that.
Asshole.
A week into Marcus’s convalescence, Wood shows up smelling like ice and sweat and that weird Canadian antiperspirant he sprays in his fucking gloves.
He scowls at Marcus like it’s Marcus’s fault he isn’t better yet. Like it’s Marcus’s fault he isn’t back on that god-awful third line with the rookie Russians, isn’t standing in a huddle on the ice and clenching his fists and envisioning all the ways he could tear off the obnoxious little white felt ‘C’ stitched onto Wood’s jersey with nothing but his fucking teeth.
“Are you dizzy right now?” Wood demands, stuffing a six-pack of lemon-lime Gatorade into Marcus’s fridge. He’s already cleaned up the empty bags of salt and vinegar chips on the kitchen island, transferred a load of laundry to the dryer, and planted Marcus on the couch with a steaming bowl of quinoa. “Have you told the doctors?”
“Fuck off,” Marcus groans, scrubbing at his forehead with the heel of his palm. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if his head hurts because he’s got a concussion or because Wood never shuts the fuck up. “I’m not dizzy, I’m—tired.”
Wood’s scowl deepens. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I’m not—not tired tired, I’m—you know.” Marcus gestures vaguely around his living room. “Tired of this.”
“Of the quinoa? It’s a high-protein food, Flint, we’ve talked about—”
“No, dipshit,” Marcus huffs, stabbing the tines of his fork through a rubbery square of grilled chicken. “I’m tired of being stuck here while my team gets to—gets to skate. And practice. And play games. And get, you know, screamed at by your delusional ass in the locker room. That’s what I’m tired of.”
Wood doesn’t immediately reply, but Marcus sees how his expression changes, flickers with indignation, and then confusion, and then understanding, slow and serious. Wood’s not a people person—he generally has to have most human emotions spelled out for him in incredibly explicit detail—and Marcus isn’t really a sharer, doesn’t like to think before he speaks, doesn’t usually like to think much at all, actually, not off the ice.
But Marcus realizes, after his admittedly uncharacteristic outburst, that if anyone’s going to get how horrible this is—sitting in the fucking dark for sixteen hours a day and taking a steak knife to the cord of his laptop charger so he’s not tempted to use it and counting backwards from 100 every thirty minutes just to prove to himself that he still can—it’s going to be Wood.
Wood, who lives and breathes and bleeds hockey. Wood, who’d been the very first guy off the bench and over the boards when Marcus had gone down. Wood, who’d torn out Marcus’s mouth guard for him, and who’d sat sprawled in an uncomfortable hospital room armchair while Marcus waited for his MRI results, and who’d witnessed Marcus’s brief, too-real moment of total fucking terror when the neurologist had asked him how many fingers he’d been holding up and Marcus hadn’t known, hadn’t been able to form or find the words, hadn’t recognized anything but the hazy ringing in his ears and the lurching pull of nausea in his gut. Wood, who’d listened to Marcus wonder, for the very first time in his life, voice slurred with a truly impressive cocktail of painkillers, if hockey was really fucking worth it.
It is, obviously.
Fucking shit, it is.
“Yeah, man,” Wood says now, sounding oddly subdued. “I’m tired of it, too.”
Anyway.
Wood eventually goes home, and Marcus retreats into his bedroom for another unnecessary fucking nap, and—well.
Marcus has a semi pressed right up against the elastic of his boxers when he goes to lay down.
He stares at his cock for a while, at the unapologetically rigid line of it, at the small, sticky wet spot blooming on the fly of his underwear. It isn’t…urgent. Not really. Arousal is a lukewarm and frankly alien sensation in his lower abdomen, more of a gently simmering buzz than an itch that he’s desperate to scratch.
It’s unexpected, though.
All he’d done that day was bitterly outline old plays on a whiteboard calendar and get all up in his hockey feelings with Oliver fucking Wood.
Marcus’s cock twitches.
He resolutely pulls his sheets up and over his waist.
He’s supposed to be fucking resting, god damn.
Three weeks later, Marcus is cleared for practice.
“Oh, thank god,” McLaggen bleats when he sees Marcus hauling open his locker. “You’re back.”
Marcus quirks a brow. None of the other guys are around yet, it’s way too fucking early, but Wood’s stick is missing from the rack by the door, and Marcus’s whole body is basically thrumming with anticipation. He’s fucking missed this. Missed skating. Missed following Wood onto the ice and boxing him out against the glass and ducking precisely aimed slapshots while they traded off playing goalie. They were both shit at it. It never seemed to matter.
“Excited about something, McLaggen?” Marcus asks, stripping off his t-shirt and rummaging around his bag for his Under Armour.
McLaggen glances furtively around the room. “Wood’s been acting like a fucking lunatic since you’ve been gone.”
“Wood’s always acting like a fucking lunatic.”
“No,” McLaggen insists, stretching his legs out on the bench, “he’s been worse. He’s been crazier, Flint, I swear to god, you should’ve seen him after that loss in New York, I thought he was gonna strangle Malfoy.”
Marcus grunts. “Good,” he replies, biting off a length of tape for his wrists. “Malfoy’s a dick.”
McLaggen pauses. “Point.”
“Besides,” Marcus goes on, “what does Wood being crazy have to do with me?”
McLaggen barks out a laugh at that, playfully jostling Marcus with his elbow, like he’s told a particularly clever joke. “Yeah, what does that have to do with you, Flint?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Marcus asks, lacing up his skates. They feel fucking awesome, Christ.
McLaggen scoffs. “You’re—wait, are you being serious?”
“Are you being serious?”
McLaggen freezes with his arms half hanging out of his sweatshirt. “You and Wood,” he starts, and then stops. “You’re. You know.”
“No,” Marcus says blankly. “I don’t know.”
McLaggen squints up at the ceiling. “The two of you—I can’t believe I have to—it’s just. He leaves the rest of us alone when you’re around. Right?”
Marcus reaches for his helmet, careful to keep his expression neutral. Wood’s an obsessive fucking tyrant on his best day. It doesn’t mean anything that Marcus is the only grown-ass man on this entire goddamn team capable of handling that. Him. Whatever. Wood likes to talk hockey, and Marcus likes to talk shit, and there’s a balance there, finely-honed and entirely too easy after so many years together. That’s all it is.
“Sure,” Marcus answers, walking gingerly over to the door. “Glad to be of service, asshole.”
McLaggen’s such a fucking idiot.
Wood doesn’t outwardly react to Marcus’s reappearance on the ice.
“Flint,” Wood greets him casually, like it hasn’t been a fucking eternity since they’d last done this.
“Wood,” Marcus returns, taking a deep, penetrating breath of cold, cold air, holding it in until his chest gets tight and his lungs are partially frozen. “You ready?”
“Warm ups, eh?” Wood retorts, just like he used to. He’s grinning behind the cage of his face mask, though, teeth bright and white against the slick, cherry-red of his mouth. It’s a challenge, Marcus knows, a sly little dig at Marcus’s sloppy morning skates back in juniors. “Unless you’re gonna cheat again.”
Marcus snorts. “Ladies first,” he drawls, motioning to the goal at the far end of the ice. Just like he used to. “Come on. Drop the puck, Canada.”
They’re on day two of a three game road trip when Marcus gets curious.
He’s alone in the hotel room he’s sharing with Wood, nursing a killer headache and a tender new bruise on the back of his skull. They’d won tonight, but Dallas’s entire third line had been built like a fucking brick shithouse and Marcus had taken a nasty hammering for the eleven minutes he’d actually been allowed to play.
Wood, like the closet fucking dictator he is, hadn’t even let Marcus go out to dinner with the rest of the team—had just handed him a bottle of fruit punch flavored Gatorade and a silver ice bucket to puke in before unplugging the TV and fucking right the fuck off to Ruth’s Chris.
And since Marcus has always been a little weird about following orders—Wood’s orders, especially—and his iPad is just sitting there, half-charged on the nightstand between their two beds—it doesn’t really take him very long to grab it, turn the screen brightness down as far as it’ll go, and pull up an Incognito tab in Chrome.
Gay porn.
Right.
Okay.
He can do this.
Messy blowjob, he types into the search bar on SeanCody. He scrolls for a few seconds. A lot of the videos look the same, red-faced twinks on their knees, mouths open and tongues out and hands twisting around improbably huge cocks spitting pre-come across their cheeks. Marcus can’t decide which one to watch. He’s jittery, slightly overwhelmed by so many options, pulse ricocheting fast, and then slow, and then fast again.
He cracks his knuckles. Tugs his basketball shorts down his legs, absently pressing his hand to the bulge in his Under Armour. There’s a vague undercurrent of…heat, maybe, beginning to churn in the pit of his stomach. Maybe he just needs to be more specific. More honest.
Fuck that.
First time anal, he types, gnawing on his thumbnail. This is—well. The results are definitely different, although not quite what Marcus thinks he’s looking for. There’s a thread of familiarity—a sameness—to these videos, too. Skinny young guys being bent over various pieces of furniture, backs arched and legs spread and asses up; bigger, broader, often hairier dudes pounding into them from behind. Occasionally, they’re on a nondescript motel bed instead, arms hooked under their knees, thighs pressed right up against their chests, just—just fucking taking it. Those clips resonate with Marcus more than the others do, but he still doesn’t click on any of them.
He’s fully hard now, though, straining against the center seam of his underwear, and his movements are jerky as he lifts his hips to tug them off. He parts his lips on a messy exhale as he wraps his hand around the base of his cock. Squeezes, just once, before letting his fingers trail up and down the shaft, feather-light and slow.
Christ.
He feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his fucking skin.
Locker room fuck, he forces himself to type, and it’s—fetishistic and clichéd and probably going to give him nothing but a solid wall of tube socks and cheap novelty whistles and bad nineties haircuts, but Marcus—fuck, he’s been not looking for so fucking long, that’s the rule, that’s the code, showers go on and soap comes out and eyes stay up—
It’s the fourth video on the page.
He sees it instantly.
A tall, lean guy with short brown hair is working out his hamstrings on a narrow wooden bench next to a bank of industrial blue lockers. He’s in a comically cropped football jersey and a jockstrap, bent over his outstretched leg, and the sharp, sinuous cut of his lower back—the textbook fucking curve of his ass—the fleeting glimpse of a pink, glistening hole as he flexes, pushes himself down lower—lower—it all paints a stupidly entrancing picture that Marcus very abruptly wants to fucking come all over.
Shit.
He drags his thumb over the head of his cock and sucks in a shaky breath between his teeth.
The second guy saunters into the frame after a few minutes of unbelievably unrealistic stretching. He’s not much taller than the first, just broader, sturdier, darker-skinned and kind of burly, with hulking shoulders and thick layers of muscle sculpting his arms, his chest, his abs. A flimsy white towel is tucked around his waist, and he doesn’t waste any time before reaching out to sweep a proprietary hand down the first guy’s spine.
No build-up, then.
Marcus spits into his palm.
Jacks his cock a little harder.
“—the fuck are you doing, man?” the first guy is asking, feigning irritation.
The second guy kneads the first guy’s ass with a firm, confident grip, crouching down to watch his own fingers dip into the cleft of it; the camera pans in, focusing on the way his thumb taps a lingering one-two-three rhythm against the other guy’s hole. It’s fucking obscene.
Marcus’s mouth floods with saliva.
“Gonna eat you out,” the second guy replies, like it’s a totally normal thing to say to someone in a locker room. “Yeah. Get you good and wet for my cock.” He then spreads the first guy’s ass, holds it open, lets the camera catch the slick sheen of lube gleaming around the pucker of his hole. “Look at this. Fuckin’ ready for it, aren’t you?”
Marcus’s hand tightens around his cock, stroking faster, fuck, faster, twisting his wrist when he gets to the head—
He jostles the iPad.
The video skips forward three minutes.
“Fuck,” the second guy is grunting, scissoring his fingers into the first guy’s ass, tongue flicking out around the rim of his hole, “who would’ve guessed our captain would be this greedy for cock—”
That’s it.
That’s it.
Marcus comes with a shout.
He panics for approximately thirty seconds.
He’s gay.
He’s gay.
It isn’t really a revelation, is the thing. He’s never been that into sex; had struggled, more than once, to see the point in picking up at bars, in taking girls home with him, in rubbing out anything but the most perfunctory of orgasms when he was just a little too persistently hard in the mornings. He can appreciate a good blowjob, of course, and he likes to fuck, likes the physicality of it, likes tight wet warmth around his dick, friction and pressure and suction. The rest of it, though—the tiny waists and the bouncing tits and the soft, soft skin—it’s always seemed so superfluous. Unnecessary. Not quite off-putting, but close enough.
That makes a lot of sense now.
And he’s pretty sure the league can’t, like, punish him for being into guys. He doesn’t think they’re allowed to. There are rules, and shit. PR concerns. Homophobic stereotypes to shed. Besides, it isn’t as if Marcus is all that popular of a player—his fan base is small and mostly made up of mutton-chopped dude-bros with beer guts and a penchant for secondhand violence. He’s not a golden-haired pretty boy like McLaggen, doesn’t get swarmed for autographs like that slimy Malfoy kid, isn’t responsible for handling the noisy post-game press like Wood. Marcus could come out. He could. He’s famous enough that it might get a mention on SportsCenter, might lose him some Twitter followers, but ultimately—he’d be okay. His game wouldn’t suffer.
He’d get to keep hockey.
That’s what matters most.
Four days later, Marcus can’t focus during his morning skate with Wood.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Wood asks, spraying Marcus with a delicate shower of ice as he skates over. “Is it your head? Are you dizzy again?”
Marcus doesn’t respond. “I’m gonna try something,” he hears himself say instead, and it’s like a fucking echo chamber, suddenly, his voice carrying around the rafters of the rink, amplified and much too clear. “Okay? Don’t. Don’t freak out.”
Wood blinks. His cheeks are ruddy with exertion, nose pink and mouth open and jaw scruffy with auburn stubble. His resemblance to the twink Marcus had watched getting fucked on SeanCody is absolutely extraordinary. He wonders how he didn’t notice earlier.
“Why would I—”
Marcus impulsively cuts Wood off with a kiss.
It’s not a good one.
Their jerseys are bulky with padding, and they’ve both got their helmets under their arms and their sticks in their hands, making it almost impossible to actually physically touch. Wood tastes like mouth guard rubber and protein bar chocolate, and his lips are chapped. Dry. Hesitant.
But then Marcus swipes his tongue over the ridge of Wood’s front teeth, testing, teasing, and Wood makes this sound, a punched-out loss of oxygen that’s underscored by a near-silent moan, helpless and broken, skates slipping against the ice as his hips roll forward, hands bunching up the fabric of Marcus’s jersey.
It’s the hottest thing that’s ever fucking happened to Marcus.
They have an away game that weekend.
Wood isn’t really being any weirder than he usually is, not around Marcus, at least, but McLaggen and Malfoy both claim seats as far away from him as they possibly can on the flight to Pittsburgh. Wood doesn’t seem to notice, just takes out a dog-eared playbook and a felt-tipped red pen and gets to work. He’s wearing a faded, too-tight grey t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants slung low across his hips. He’s the only person Marcus has ever met who puts his phone in fucking Airplane Mode as soon as he sits down.
Marcus had jerked off the night before to the memory of their kiss—to that tiny little hitch in Wood’s breath, the tentative slide of Wood’s tongue against his, the pinching ache of his cock getting hard in a jockstrap.
An unscented tube of Chapstick falls out of Wood’s pocket during takeoff.
They lose the next day in a 4-3 shootout.
Marcus takes another hit, gets the side of his head slammed into the boards with a sickening, slow-motion crunch—and there’s the rhythmic thud of all the blood rushing to his brain and the tidal wave of cotton-wool fuzziness coating his ear drums and it doesn’t even hurt at first, doesn’t feel like much of anything, just numb awareness of the ice against his cheek and the kaleidoscopic tunneling of his vision and the chemically artificial pine-scent of that god-awful Canadian antiperspirant and someone with heavily callused hands ripping off his helmet and frantically cupping his jaw and—
And the fact that this is really, really, really fucking bad.
There’s a sprig of mistletoe dangling from every goddamn doorway in Malfoy’s gigantic fucking showpiece of a penthouse.
Mistletoe.
Christ.
It’s like an eighth grade dance but with way more liquor and imported marble reindeer statues.
“So,” McLaggen says, taking an uncomfortable swig of beer. It’s a pretentious fucking microbrew. Semi-local. More than likely gross. Marcus is drinking water because Wood had inexplicably brought a case of Evian and it’s not like anyone else was going to touch it. “How’s your—you know. Your head.”
Marcus shrugs. “Not great.”
“Of course. Yeah. Well. It’ll get better, right?”
It probably won’t, but Marcus doesn’t really want to tell anyone that just yet. “Sure.”
“So,” McLaggen says again.
Marcus sighs. “What.”
McLaggen fiddles with the label on his beer; it’s plastered with a mermaid, a trident, and a roaring grizzly bear head. What the fuck. “Wood, uh, took a penalty after you left the ice the other night.”
Marcus shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “No shit?”
“Yeah.”
“For what?”
“Got into it with the douche who—uh, pushed you. Just. Went off.” McLaggen snorts. “Got five minutes for it.”
Something small and hot and unfathomably gentle unfurls in Marcus’s chest. Five minutes. That’s a fucking lifetime in hockey. He clears his throat. “Five minutes,” he repeats. “That’s. Wow.”
McLaggen looks at him askance. “Yeah,” he says, and then, like an asshole, deliberately drawing the word out, “Wow.”
Marcus taps his bottle of Evian against his leg. “Is he. Uh. You seen him around tonight?”
Wood’s in one of Malfoy’s ostentatious guest bathrooms, wrinkling his nose at the bidet while drying his hands on an emerald green spa towel.
“Heard you took a penalty the other night,” Marcus blurts out, because he doesn’t have a ton of self-control and that same crushing surge of adrenaline that usually precedes a really fucking epic win is currently coursing through his veins.
Wood freezes. “Uh.”
“Yeah,” Marcus goes on, quietly shutting the door behind him. The mistletoe gets caught in the frame. “Heard you started a fight.”
Wood swallows. “Might have, yeah.”
“Kind of…out of character for you, isn’t it?” Marcus asks.
Wood’s tongue darts out, the tip of it clamped between his teeth. “Might be, yeah.”
“Five minutes, Oliver,” Marcus continues, relentless. “Five minutes.”
“Are we—” Wood gestures weakly to the space between their bodies. “Are we gonna talk about this, then?”
Marcus licks his lips. “Do we even have to?”
Wood stares at him, gaze locked and loaded and laser focused like some kind of insane Canadian hockey robot—and then he glances up at the mangled sprig of mistletoe peeking out from the door jam, and Marcus’s spine goes a little bit liquid around the edges.
“No,” Wood says, taking a decisive step towards Marcus. “We don’t have to.”
The Friday after New Year’s, Marcus joins Wood out on the ice.
“Flint,” Wood greets him.
“Wood,” Marcus returns, voice emerging cracked and slightly stilted. “You ready?”
A smile twitches at the corners of Wood’s mouth. “Warm ups, eh?” he retorts, flicking the puck back and forth on the blade of his stick. “Unless you’re gonna cheat again.”
Marcus pauses, limbs awkward and heavy under the weight of his dread. He doesn’t know if he’s allowed to have this anymore, is the thing. Morning skate. Hockey. Oliver fucking Wood. “Uh,” he stalls. “Yeah. I mean—warm ups are about all I’m allowed to do now. Doctor’s...doctor’s orders. So. Yeah.”
Wood’s face contorts with several different emotions—Christ, he’s easy to read—surprise, denial, fury, regret, sadness, and, finally, an admittedly scary sort of determination.
“Hockey,” Wood starts, and then grimaces. Coughs into his fist. Peers up at Marcus with his usual brand of absolutely bat-shit intensity, although there’s something…soft about it this time. Not quite so sharp. Infinitely fucking brighter. More earnest. “Hockey will always be there for you, Marcus. You know that.”
And.
And.
For once, Marcus thinks that they aren’t actually having a conversation about hockey. He curls a faintly unsteady hand around the nape of Wood’s neck to draw him forward. To pull him closer. It’s about a lot of things, probably, but not that.
Which is—
Fine.
Good.
Better than good, even.
“Ladies first,” Marcus murmurs, huffing out a laugh. Losing it in the heat of Wood’s mouth. “Come on. Drop the puck, Canada.”