I wasn’t delusional. In this one week, girls had thrown themselves at Patrick like he was a rock star. And Patrick loved it. I was certain that he obliged them very happily once I was out of the picture. His littleexercisehad shown me as much. He’d flirted with that girl with ease and confidence I could never muster—the good thing was that I didn’t need to. Not even all of the confidence and charm could land me the guy I wanted because he just didn’t play it that way.
A hand waved before my eyes and snapped me out of my wandering thoughts. “Earth to Shane,” he said. “You’re galaxies away.”
I thrust my hand up, slipping my fingers under my glasses and rubbing my eyes. “Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m tired.”
Patrick wore his gym clothes, a matching T-shirt and shorts and a pair of spotless sneakers, and he was just a snack. His legs were tanned and mostly smooth, with some light goldenhair scattered along the taut skin. His calves were defined, and so were his quads. I didn’t dare mention his ass. I’d seen his workout. Other than hip thrusts, that ass was all genes and conditioning. He didn’t put a lot of effort into it, whereas I carved out a day in the week to do squats, hip thrusts, abductors, stairs, and a whole slew of exercises, only to end up with a butt you’d call cute in the best of circumstances and under a great light.
“I was rambling anyway,” Patrick said. “Doesn’t matter.”
“No. Tell me,” I said.
“It’s the pacing,” Patrick said. “It’s easy to have a burst of energy if you spare yourself enough.”
I noted this down and urged him to continue telling me about it. It wasn’t how I imagined interviewing him, his face red with heat and brow slick with sweat, distracting me in all the most painful ways, but it was good material. “And when you have this burst of energy, especially on ice, are you thinking about the spectators?”
“We mostly do drills. No audience, remember?” Patrick chuckled. He shook his hands off, timing the rest before he did another set on the bench press.
“There are always spectators,” I said. “Your friends, your rivals, the coaches. Someone’s always watching.”
He shook his head, but not emphatically. “I play for myself. I want to be good at it.”
I nodded and hesitated, then let the question slowly roll over my tongue. “And who decides if you’re good at it? You?”
Patrick blinked, then laughed and slapped my shoulder. “Got me.”
“I’m not trying to get you,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”
“I guess…” He fell silent, eying me and the bench press next to me. “I guess I play for the others a little bit, too. I shouldprobably pretend to be really noble and talk about how it’s all for the sake of the sport, but oh well.”
I chuckled. “I don’t think so. It’s totally normal to want to have your talents seen. Everyone wants a witness when they’re good at something.”
And Patrick wanted to be seen no matter the price. It was a reckless, desperate need to be noticed that I hadn’t expected to discover here. Walking naked in front of me just because he knew without a shred of doubt that he had a big dick anyone would envy wasn’t a flex as much as it was a call to be seen and approved of.
I’d already composed a list of questions for another time.
Patrick lay flat on his back and inhaled before lifting the bar with heavy weights mounted to each side. He did his set, and I watched. One, two, three, four… His chest rose and fell in a perfect rhythm. His feet were planted flat on the floor, and his knees spread apart. The skin of his inner thigh was completely smooth, the shorts lifting a little as if to torment me on purpose. And the mound where his cock and balls were packed into his boxers was so easily noticed that I wondered if he even knew he was doing this.
Was it just second nature to him? Someone blessed with good looks, great talents, loads of charm, and a dick that size didn’t have a clue about the struggles the rest of us had. To him, it had to be the most normal thing when his T-shirt lifted a little, and a flash of skin appeared, and everyone drooled over him.
When he finished his last set for the day, we went into the locker room. He wasn’t naked around me anymore, not after that first time. Not after he’d guessed I was gay, and I confirmed it. But stepping into the locker room was like walking through a mirror into a dream.
In an instant, I was on my knees, and the lights were nearly all out. He reached over and untied the knot of the towel aroundhis waist, revealing his thick cock, while I opened my mouth as wide as it could go—nowhere near wide enough to take all of him.
“Be back in a minute,” Patrick said, stripping down to his underwear and heading into the bathroom.
He returned quickly, his hair wet and his body slick, and turned away from me to take off the towel around his waist and put on clean underwear. I looked away, especially because Patrick turned his head to a profile, partly adding me to his field of vision as he did so.
When he was dressed, he acted just fine. He invited me for dinner with his friends, but I passed on it. I wasn’t going to shadow himeverywheresooner than I strictly had to. We were still trying to find a rhythm.
I carried the smartwatch to download the data for the day and wipe it clear for tomorrow. It had been a whole week, so I felt confident I would see some patterns. The smartwatch sat on a pile of books in my dorm room while I organized my notes, and then I imported all the data into a spreadsheet.
Looking at the timestamps in my notebook and the levels of Patrick’s pulse and speed of movement, I had expected to see these flares of energy he exhibited on ice clearly correlating with his physiological responses. I frowned at the data splashed on my screen and in my notebook.
I couldn’t have been wrong every day, even if I’d made an error somewhere.
In the drills, Patrick’s heartbeat picked up a little. For a practiced athlete in great condition, these numbers were perfectly fine. Those little wins showed me a spike that was almost negligible, but it existed. The rough contacts with other players correlated with very little in my data.
I looked through his exercise routines. Running was an obvious one, although Patrick’s pulse didn’t go wildproportionately to the speed at which he was running. Resistance training did little. But then, as if to compensate for its calm, his heart seemed to hammer like a fleeing rabbit after workouts.
