Off-Side

Last April he cost twenty-two men their spring by the length of a skate blade. This September the new coach put him on my line.

ROSS

I was thirty-one. Six seasons in the League, five teams, three trips through waivers. I came to Toronto Gales camp on a tryout with one bag on the passenger seat. Everything I owned was in it.

Lachance got there first. He always did. Hometown winger, twenty-six, the loudest man in Toronto. In the last game of last season he was early on the blue line by the width of a blade. The goal came off the board. We missed the playoffs by a point. In the room after, I told him what I thought of him. He called me a store brand in front of everybody.

On day two the new coach wrote our names on the same line. Second line. First power play. And forty-five extra minutes on the ice every morning at seven, the two of us.

I taught him the back-check. He brought me a butter tart. At midnight in a hotel room in Saskatoon I woke up to him on the floor, reading a picture book into his phone in a bear voice, for the kids at the children's hospital. In a whisper. So he wouldn't wake me.

I'd had one rule since I was seventeen. Not a teammate. Not in the room.

I broke it in fifteen seconds.

So I made a list. Nobody knows. It never touches the ice. It ends in April.

REMY

Everybody in this city had an opinion about me, and most of them had been on the radio, and none of them knew I'd been bi since I was nineteen and had never been with a man, because that's the kind of thing you keep to yourself when the whole town has had your number since you were eighteen.

Kirkland parked two rows back so he could watch the door. He drank tea out of a thermos. He was on a one-year minimum deal with nothing past the next time they needed his stall, and I'd said the cruelest thing I could find to him - and then he sat beside me in a penalty box in Saskatoon and told me, calm as a grocery list, that I'd been right.

I have never in my life had nothing to say. I had nothing to say.

A few weeks later he stood in a video room at eleven at night, with me frozen on the screen behind him, and told me the only thing he wanted from me was to wait. So I asked if I could kiss him. I asked first, for once in my life.

He made it a list. I signed it on a napkin.

I'm early for everything. I was early for this too. I already knew how I was going to feel in April.

Eighty-two games. One trade deadline. And a bag by his door that was always packed.

• Rivals to lovers, on the same team
• Forced teammates: the coach put them on the same line
• Secret relationship, with an end date in April
• A secret arrangement on a napkin, then a lot more than that
• Bisexual hero, first time with a man
• Undrafted grinder and hometown star
• Found family in the locker room
• He said it first
• Coming out on his own terms
• Dual POV
• Guaranteed happily ever after

An MM hockey rivals to lovers romance. Toronto Gales, Book One. Every book follows a different couple and reads as a standalone. Steamy and explicit: seven on-page scenes between two consenting adult men, and every one of them asks first. Ross is thirty-one; Remy is twenty-six. Contains on-ice hockey violence, including a sanctioned fight and a facial injury that needs stitches; strong language; and the stress of a professional athlete coming out. Not dark. Guaranteed HEA. 18+.