Eventually Gabe nudged him up off his lap. “Come on. I owe you five minutes of dancing a year, and there’s only ten left in this one.”
Dante snickered and led the way. Gabe might still be self-conscious dancing with him, even at private events, but it had nothing to do with wanting to hide their relationship and everything to do with how much Gabe hated drawing attention off the ice. Besides, he was not a graceful dancer. That was fine; Dante just liked getting him all worked up, and dancing made it easy.
They watched the ball drop on the big screen until there were just a few seconds to go, and then Gabe turned Dante in his arms and kissed him like he couldn’t wait until the year actually turned over.
Dante wasn’t complaining. New Year’s always felt a little like this—the passing of time, teammates traded, opportunities lost, juxtaposed with the fresh ice of the New Year. And this coming year held a lot of things he’d been looking forward to for a long time. He couldn’t wait either.
He was just thinking they could duck out early and take Crunch up on his suggestion to get a room when they bumped into someone, or someone bumped into them. They broke apart and spared a glance for the couple who’d knocked into them—their coach and her husband.
“I knew I shouldn’t have let him lead,” she sighed, long-suffering. “Sorry, guys.”
Dante grinned and grabbed Gabe’s hand. “It’s okay, his marriage-vows-mandated one dance was up anyway.”
And now he had an excuse to get off the dance floor and nudge Gabe in the direction of home. He knew he had become one of the team’s old men far too young, but he didn’t regret it.
But before they got too far, Gabe pulled his phone out of his pocket—it must have pinged, but Dante couldn’t hear it over the DJ—looked at it, smiled, and put it away again.
Dante raised his eyebrows in question.
Gabe shrugged, still smiling. “She said yes.”
“Duh.” Talia struck him as pretty smart. She knew Chris was a keeper. “They’re gonna have a fun time trying to plan a wedding before Michelle moves.”
“God.” Gabe shuddered. “I don’t envy them that.”
Thank God they’d hired a professional for theirs. “No kidding.” He nudged Gabe back toward their table. “Come on. I want to finish my dessert, have a little more wine, and then—”
Wine.
Communion.
“Ah, fuck.”
Gabe tilted his head.
Dante sighed. As much as he wanted to stand on principle, he could make an exception this once. “I just realized I’m gonna have to go to church.”
13. Valentine’s Day
“YOU KNOW,”Dante said, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with Gabe in a booth in a bar in the Olympic Village, “this is the weirdest date we’ve ever been on.”
“I mean, there was that time we did a TV interview about our relationship,” Gabe pointed out. That had been the summer after their Cup win, when not hiding their relationship turned into kissing each other on the front page of every Canadian newspaper.
“I don’t think it’s a date if someone else is present.”
“That definitely depends on who you ask.” He paused. “And it would kind of make this not a date.”
Dante drummed his fingers on the table and hoped the movement would let him vent some of the energy that had built up over the past six weeks.
It had been a busy time. He’d pulled his groin pretty badly in January, and for a minute it looked like he might not make it to the Olympics after all.
Then there was the wedding complication.
After a game in Ottawa, they’d met up with Chris and Talia, and Dante had unthinkingly inquired after the wedding planning. Twenty minutes of stressed venting later, Dante had learned his lesson. They wanted to get married before Michelle left for the UK, but after the baby was born and she’d had some time to recover. It was a tiny window in high wedding season, everything was booked, last-minute deposits were extortionate, trying to find a caterer without a venue was a nightmare—
Gabe took out his phone ten minutes in and surreptitiously did some texting under the table. Dante was about to scold him for it when the screen lit up with an incoming message and Gabe raised his head again.
“I set you up with our wedding planner.”
