David pulls back, sitting up, the taste lingering on his tongue. He watches Lourdes catch his breath, flushed from his cheeks down. It figures that he’d look good like that, panting like he just finished a hard shift, lips red from being stretched around David.

He stares, and then he realises how that must look, David sitting there watching Lourdes as he comes down, so he reaches for his briefs, still tangled in his pants, gets up to put them on.

“Heading out?” Lourdes asks, voice gravelly, and that sends another burst of heat through David, not angry, this time, just satisfied, because he’s the reason Lourdes sounds like that.

“Curfew,” David says, abrupt, even though it can’t be for some time, and Lourdes probably knows that.

“Cool,” Lourdes says anyway, sitting up. “See you in a month?”

David looks up from buckling his belt. Lourdes is grinning at him with those red lips, white teeth, and David loathes him for thinking that David is going to fall at his feet, let him come to David’s home ice and fuck him on his own turf. This was a mistake, that’s becoming more and more clear as David puts himself back together, buttoning his shirt while Lourdes just lounges there, unabashedly naked, because he looks good like that and he knows it.

This was a mistake, but he can’t really quite regret it; he has it out of his system now, can get back on the ice in a month and face him and hate him, pure and clean, and know that he’s managed to make him a panting, red-faced mess, and that it’s never going to happen again. David can get back to playing better hockey than him, can beat him that way, and now he knows something about him he wouldn’t want getting out, even though it’s not something he could ever use.

“Call you a cab?” Lourdes asks, when David’s put himself back together, Lourdes finally tugging his jeans on.

“I can do it myself,” David says, and leaves Lourdes’ room without bothering to look back.

CHAPTER SIX

It’s out of his system.

That’s what David tells himself whenever he’s overwhelmed by self-loathing, disgusted that he acted just like everyone else, swooning at Jake Lourdes’ feet. It’s what he tells himself when he jerks off in the shower, determinedly trying to think about anything other than the wet heat of Lourdes’ mouth, the way the muscles of his thigh jumped under David’s hand, the salt-bitter taste of him on his tongue. It happened, and it won’t happen again, because it’s out of his system.

Lourdes is slumping, which helps. His whole season has been a glut of goals and then dry spells, so unreliable it’s a marvel that people are talking about him like he’s a marvel. He has pretty nights, he has pretty weeks, and then he sinks down into mediocrity, adds nothing to the box score except a couple shots, maybe, a couple hits, a couple penalty minutes, an unchanging points total.