Across the Pond

by R. J. Scott

  “To the only man I know who can have a lady on his arm before he takes a seat.” Ryker snorted, lifting his bottle of beer in a salute.

  The others joined in, the giggly blonde on my arm blushing and rubbing her hand over my chest. I lifted the cold one Vlad passed to me, drank some, and then led Ms. Booty out to the small dance floor, one hand on her lower back, the other holding my beer. When I turned, my gaze made a fast round of the room. Sebastian was seated at the bar, his gaze on me, his expression inscrutable. Fuck that enigmatic Brit and his stupid secrets.

  I leaned down to whisper something into my dance partner’s ear, my eyes locked with Sebastian’s.

  “You’re the prettiest woman in here,” I told her, sliding an arm around her waist, leading her curvy body closer to mine. Sebastian sipped at his drink, something in a tumbler with a few ice cubes. “You come here all the time?”

  “No, first time! Oh my God, you hockey players are so sexy.” She fell into me, big breasts tight to my chest, red lips skimming along my jawline, long nails slipping into my hair. “I bet you have a big stick.”

  I snickered, patted her ass, and then twirled her around so that she was plastered to me, her back to my chest. She squealed in glee when I pulled out my phone and held it over our heads, tilting it to the perfect selfie angle. Her lips morphed into automatic duck lips, which made me want to scream, but I smiled wider, making sure the dimples showed, and I snapped several images. Then, because I was a gentleman, I let her choose the best one.

  “This one, Alex, this one! You can really see how great my tits look tonight.”

  Before my mother’s or Father Delgadillo’s voice could sound off in my head, I hurried to post the shot to my Instagram page. I added a short explanation:

  Ricky Martin isn’t the only one! #Latino #player #Raptors #livinlavidaloca #hockeyplayersgotallthemoves #crimsoncactus #dancedancedance

  CamelPhat’s newest blared to life. I kept her out on the dance floor through two songs, leading her back to the table, then helping her to get her ass into a seat. Not an easy task, as she was one drink away from spilling onto the floor. Gaze darting around the packed bar, I found the seat where Sebastian had been sitting. Some big dude was sitting there now. As my dance partner began fawning over Vlad, I slipped away, giving the guys a nod at my watch, then inching from the table.

  “Dude, hold up!” Ryker shouted over a hot number by Dog Blood.

  “Uhm, what am I to do with this?” Vlad asked, jerking his chin at the blonde now sound asleep in his lap.

  “Get her into a cab,” I yelled as blue and green lights rolled over the sweaty crowd.

  I tossed a twenty to the table, clapped our captain on the shoulder, waved at Jens, and made a beeline for the door. Ryker fell in beside me, dancing along to the music until we were outside, and even then he continued shaking his money maker. Dude had moves, I had to give him that. The two of us blinked at Colorado exiting a skinny alleyway, a crude smirk on his rock star pretty face. A dude and a chick stumbled out into the glow of the streetlights on our goalie’s heels, both tugging their clothes back into place and blushing madly when they spied us gawking at them.

  “It’s got to be the tats,” Ryker commented as Colorado gave us a wink before going back inside to do whatever it was he did at night. Drink and fuck multiple people of every and any gender. Great. I was still carrying my V-card in my wallet, along with a condom my older brother had given me before I’d left for college. Life was so unfair.

  “Everyone loves a rock star.” I sighed, feeling dirty and sticky like a fly strip in a seedy brothel. Ms. Booty’s perfume clung to my skin. It was musky. I needed a shower.

  We walked back to the barn, Ryker blathering on about some new third-person shooter game that he thought we should all start playing. His nose was buried in his phone so I could let the Alejandro the Playah Persona drop a bit.

  “… called Mecha Metal Corps Elite. Look at the graphics.” He waved the cell in front of my face while we waited for the walk signal at the corner.

  “Sharp.” How had Sebastian known I was gay? Was that even what he meant? Secrets. What secrets?

  “We could form a squad and play against other players. Playing games together is a real team-bonding experience. The Railers play Pokémon Go, and it really helped them come together as a team.”

  “We’re not the Railers, Ry.” Did I look gay? Act gay? Smell gay?

  “Well, duh, I know, but we will be someday, and the first step to building that kind of family dynamic is to work on team-building shit. Like this!” Again, the phone was shoved into my face. “There’s a phone app game that we can play on the road, and there’s a game for the PC or your preferred game system. We could get some of the guys to sign up. You can have twenty people in your battalion. Then you go out in squads of four to blow the shit out of other players.”

  “You know those violent video games are the cause of all the mass shootings in this great country of ours, right?”

  He gave me a stone-cold glower. “Yeah, no. I think not.” We crossed the street, the mirrored sides of the Santa Catalina Arena now in sight. “So, you onboard? We could get Henry signed up too. Then he could play with the team when we’re on the road. That will make him feel more connected to everyone.” He’d hooked me with Henry. I loved gaming, I really did, but I’d never been big on those MMO type of things, preferring to play by myself to unwind. “Well?”

  I looked over at him. Curls hung into his expectant eyes. If he hadn’t been taken, and I was living somewhere instead of the back of the closet, I’d have totally asked him out. But he was and I was, and so it was friendship, which, more than likely, was the better option. Romance was for other people, out people, who could experience love and sex openly.

  “Sure, yeah.”

  He pumped the dry air with a fist, then punched me as hard as he could in a friendly you-rock! sort of way. Still hurt. “Awesome! Okay, so when we get home, you download the app, and we’ll get you set up. I have my mech suit ready. Check this bitch out! I chose sterling silver for the primary color, then added a touch there on the com panel.”

  We stopped by my Jeep. Yes, the mech suit was cool. Silver. Big guns. Then I spied the small bi flag over the com panel that housed the communication uplinks for his mechanical war suit. My gaze flew to Ryker tossing his bag into the back of my car.

  “You put the bi flag on your mech suit?” I asked, watching him for any sign of concern or uneasiness. There wasn’t any.

  “Sure, yeah, why not? It’s part of who I am, and it lets the other LGBT players out there know that I’m one of them. When you make yours, you can personalize it as well.”

  “What are you saying? That I should put a rainbow flag on mine or something?”

  He never flinched at my outburst. “Dude, you can put whatever on your suit, and I will not care. Wear the bi flag or the trans flag or the rainbow flag. Go with nonbinary, pan, omni, which I totally think Penn is because he once said he would fuck an alien as long as they didn’t have tentacles, because he has a tentacle thing. Wear the ace colors on your helmet. Whatever flag you fly, wear it, and I will be cool with it. And hey, if you’re straight, I’m cool with that as well. Just be you, okay, the real you.”

  I glanced up at the reflective sides of our rink. “Yeah, I can’t do that,” I whispered as he started prattling on again over the new team game idea.

  “… tomorrow you hit up Vlad about setting up the battalion, and I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if Coach salutes.” I threw him a flat look. “See what I did there with the flags and the flagpole.”

  “Burro.”

  “I know that one! That means donkey. Hey!”

  “Get in. I want to go home and get some sleep.”

  Sleep didn’t come easily. It teased, and it tempted, dancing just out of reach all night with worrisome questions about Sebastian and his knowledge of my “secret.” The longer the night wore on, the edgier I grew. By the time the morning was pinkening
the sky, I was wound tighter than a monkey in a piñata, to quote my cousin Héctor.

  The road trip done we headed home, but even back in Tucson, Ryker was bouncing around the house, all sorts of cranked up about this stupid game idea. I could barely stay awake long enough to eat my eggs and wheat toast. I stopped at the same coffee shop where I’d been last night with Sebastian and slammed back a jumbo Death by Latte, the jolt of all that caffeine might get me through morning skate. I wished we had optional skates, but we sucked far too badly to have the option of ditching any kind of practice. Nerves twanging and hands shaking, I bolted into the dressing room, wired for sound.

  Vlad glanced up from tying his skates, his pale blue eyes going round when I flung myself at him like a squirrel on diet pills.

  “Hey, so we have this game thing Ryker wants to do. Guns, mech suits, explosions.” I made the sound of a bomb going off, then flung my hands in the air to illustrate the big bang. “Team-bonding shit like the Railers do, totally fun. Character creation is max, so you can make your suit with a Russian flag on it!”

  “I’m an American now.”

  “Oh. Okay, well, go with the stars and stripes. Ryker put a bi flag on his. Not that I’m saying you’re bi because what do I know?” I snorted, pushed my hair from my eyes, and squinted at him. “You look like that guy in that movie! Yeah, shit, he was this boxer. Rocky fought him. Dude was enormous. Cheekbones you could set a bowl of queso on! Blond guy like you, same kind of hair, all short and military, stern. His eyes weren’t as pretty as yours. Not that I spend time checking out dude eyes. Man, I am cranked. You ever have a Death by Latte over at the Beanery Depot? Shit will make your eyes sweat and your balls wither.”

  “Your crash is going to be painful,” he said, his deep, deep voice soothing in an odd sort of way. “Also, I don’t drink coffee, only herbal tea. As for the game, why are you telling me about it?”

  “Tea? No way! My abuela drinks tea, but sometimes when she’s feeling frisky, she sneaks a little fireball into it!” I slapped his thick arm soundly, then began to snicker. “She’s like up to your kneecap, gray-haired, but can kick your ass. I shit you not. Total badass.”

  “Alejandro, I’m hoping you’ll get to the point of this soon. My morning has been… upsetting.”

  “Duuuuuude, did your girlfriend find out that you put that blonde chick into a cab?”

  “No, she simply could not take being with a hockey player.”

  He sat up. I followed suit. My head swam. “So she left?”

  “Yes, gave me her key and packed up this morning. Hockey is a cruel and demanding lover.” He sighed, stood, and looked down at me. “She’s not the first one to go because of this sport coming first, and she will not be the last.” I looked up, up, up at him. What did they feed Russian babies that made them grow so tall? “Men and women come and go. It’s the life on the road that kills romance.”

  “Sorry, Vlad.” Tears welled up. I dashed them away. “I uhm… are you cool with us setting up a team for this game? We’d like to have the captain behind us.”

  “Yes, of course. We need to find things we enjoy and can engage in as a team. This should be run past Coach as well.” He ruffled my hair, then thumped off, his skate guards shielding his blades from the floor.

  “Yeah, Ryker’s talking to him,” I called from my seat in front of Vlad’s cubicle. He lifted a gloved hand in understanding before he disappeared.

  I shot to my feet, paced the room for several minutes, my nerves jangling, my mind whirling with a thousand problems until it settled on one. Sebastian and my secret. What did he mean by that? Ten minutes passed, other players came in and changed out of their street clothes into hockey gear. I barreled out into the corridor when Jens commented on the fact that I had one shoe on, one off, and my shirt had last been seen in the showers. How or why? Not a clue.

  “I’m going to go see a man about a secret.”

  Jens nodded dully, his long dark hair framing his round little face. Cute face. Nice guy.

  Where was my phone? Fuck. Whatever. I bolted out of the dressing room, ran into an equipment handler, asked him to forgive me, and spun in a circle as my heart began to pound like a steel drum. I had no clue where to find Sebastian or even if he was here, but I figured I could start upstairs, way above the ice, where the owners were to be found in fancy offices. I really did have to locate him before he started talking to other people about my secret. If he told anyone about it, I’d have to kill him and hide his body in the ice.

  I’d seen a magician on TV do that once. Not kill someone, obvs, but hide a person in the ice. Magic ran in my family. My abuela said she could charm people into falling in love with just a whispered spell. She was a bruja and a good one, according to her, so we kids had always listened well to her in case she got angry and turned us into a horned lizard. Oh, my head was hurting. There were too many thoughts in it. I stumbled to the nearest elevator, stepped inside, and rode it all the way to the top floor of the arena.

  Padding along with one sock foot and one shoe foot, shirtless, I began rapping on doors. There were so many of them, all kinds of suites for corporations and rich people with more money than brains. Or was it eggs? Cerebros o huevos?

  “Alex?”

  I jumped and twisted around in the air like a cat chasing a laser. When I landed, Sebastian was there, a foot away, looking whiskery and smelling good. Much better than Ms. Booty last night. He wasn’t wearing a suit, just a flowy white shirt and tan slacks. My gaze found a few dark hairs peeking out of the V of his button-down shirt. “Why are you up here without a shoe? Aren’t you supposed to be on the ice with all the other blokes?”

  “My secret is a secret!” I stated with vigor. “I don’t know what you think of my secret, but it’s mine, and I don’t want anyone else to know my secret.”

  “I never planned to reveal my assumptions to—”

  I reached out to touch his face, the whiskers that were so neatly groomed—designer scruff. Ah, fuck, but it felt wonderful. He wet his lips. My brain met up with my libido in the middle of my chest. I grabbed his chin, yanked his mouth to mine, and felt my heart explode.

  Six

  Seb

  For a moment, all rational thought fled, and then the danger of what was happening slammed into me. I manhandled Alex into my office and slammed the door behind me, hoping to hell that no one witnessed what had just happened. Alex stumbled backward, gripping me to steady himself, his dark eyes wide, his lips parted, and lust sketched on his expression. He pulled hard, and I overbalanced, even as he met me in the middle, and we tumbled arse-over-tit, landing half on the sofa but mostly on the floor. I shoved him away—this was not the time to kiss a man in my office, particularly when it was Alex, and when there was nothing casual about it. He reached for another kiss, and I held him away while at the same time pushing a desk chair with my foot so it was wedged against the door. I was in the only office on this floor, shoved up in the empty space so I could think, but still, anyone could walk by.

  We were at an impasse, me not knowing what the bloody hell was going on, him staring at me as if I was dinner and he was starving. We were both breathing hard, but at least he’d stopped trying to kiss me, and I don’t know how long it took, but the desperation and anger in his eyes diminished until abruptly his thought process cleared. As soon as it hit him what he’d done, he scrambled back from me. Weirdly, all I could focus on was that he had one shoe on and no shirt. He reached the wall and drew up his legs, wrapping his arms around his knees and burying his face in them.

  Had he been drugged? Was he drunk? What the hell had just happened? What was it that happened that meant he wanted to act on the things he kept inside? Was he trying to prove a point? Did he hope to catch me in a compromising position, scream abuse, and get me fired?

  “Alex?” I asked all those questions in just the one single word heavy with meaning, and he stared up at me, his eyes brighter, clearer, and his movements slow.

  “Fuck my life,�
� he murmured and then scrubbed at his eyes. “Fuck,” he repeated.

  I scooted back to lock the door, thankful I’d not raised the blinds in the small window yet. No one needed to witness what was going on with Alex.

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him and waited for him to nod in agreement and then leave me to the rest of my day.

  “It’s not okay,” he mumbled and then cursed in Spanish. The extent of my Spanish was to ask where the bathrooms were, but given the feeling in the tone, I assumed it was a curse of sorts.

  “What happened?”

  “You.” He waved at me and sighed. “With your face and your stubble and everything.”

  Okay, so he still wasn’t making a lot of sense. “I happened?”

  “And caffeine . A lot of caffeine.”

  We sat in silence a moment longer, but abruptly, in a flurry of motion, he stood, and I got my first real look at shirtless Alex. His skin was smooth, but he didn’t have a six-pack like some of the older players. He was all muscle though, but on the slim side, not bulked up at all. Given that I was still nursing an erection after being jumped and kissed to within an inch of my life, I really shouldn’t have been looking.

  “Shit, practice.” He was wild-eyed again.

  I held up a hand and reached for the phone on my desk, putting a call in with Coach, who answered on the first ring with an irritated yes.

  “Just to let you know I was talking to Alex in my office and kept him too late. He’s on his way down to you now. All my fault if he’s late.”