Grady used the middle-finger emoji on Baller instead and dropped the phone on the end table. “You ever think we need to get better friends?”
“Todd is not my friend,” Max promised direly, and then squawked, “Gru,no.”
Grady turned his head far enough to catch the tail end of a wet willy in process. He snickered into the couch.
Day two went better, maybe because they were no longer paying for the night before. Then again, day one was weights and day two was hockey drills.
Running drills against Max was one thing. That felt familiar, like an old pair of sweatpants. But they ran drills together too, learning to read each other on the ice. Even before they got together, Grady would’ve known Max by the way he skated—he’d paid a lot of attention, because Max could get him to lose his cool, so Grady’s best defense was knowing where he was at all times. He would’ve sworn he could distinguish the scraping rasp of Max’s blades on the ice.
The first time he and Max combined for a goal—against the Canadian women’s national team goalie, who was nineteen and already headed for the Hall of Fame—Grady got goose bumps. It had taken them five tries. Max crashed into him for a mock celly and they spun around, laughing; then he stopped and turned to Amelie. “Finally fooled you.”
She squirted her water bottle at him, not intimidated in the least, and swatted Max’s skates with her stick. “Get out of my crease.”
Grady liked her immensely.
In an eyeblink, a whole week passed, filled with working out and Max time and Gru time and the odd family dinner. The first night, Max and Grady got tapped for cleanup duty and had a reprise of their Florida water fight. The second night, Max waited until his parents went out to throw the ball for Gru. Then he shoved his hand in Grady’s pants.
Grady only realized the summer was slipping away from him on the second morning of the second week, when Max asked if he should book a hotel in Colorado because their altitude training was less than a month away.
“I always book the condo a year in advance,” Grady told him, awash with both relief and sudden panic. That meant he only had three weeks left to figure out how to ask Max to marry him, or he’d have to wait until after Colorado. There was no way he was doing that when he was sharing a condo with his sister. She’d kill them both.
“I love that about you,” Max said with a lusty sigh. “Wanna make out?”
Grady did, but they’d be late to training. “Rain check,” he said ruefully. “I don’t want to do extra jump squats.”
Max made a face, but he said, “Yeah, good call, save the energy for after.”
Grady hid his grin.
But once they got to the gym, he didn’t have to hide anymore, because it took all his muscle control to deal with the sadistic workout Todd had planned. Even the warmup yoga seemed designed to make Grady twitch, if only because it showcased how flexible Max was and he’d worn the gray sweatpants.
Grady had strong feelings about the gray sweatpants. He also had strong feelings about anyone else seeing Max wear them. It was difficult to focus on his form instead of Max’s.
No, notdifficult—it was hard. It had been hard all fucking week. Grady should probably give Max shit for not wearing properly supportive underwear. But if he did that, he would be admitting that Max had distracted him, and Grady wasn’t doing that.
He might possibly consider buying Max a jock strap for purely aesthetic reasons and then fucking him in it, though. As a for instance.
Eventually, as they did every day, years of experience took over and Grady hit his stride. He couldn’t do single-leg lateral jumps while looking at Max’s dick unless he wanted a broken ankle.
In fairness, Grady didn’t think Todd was a sadist because his exercises were too intense or involved too much weight. He thought Todd was a sadist because his exercises combined muscle groups in a way that allowed for the same results as doing two or three different exercises. Grady liked efficiency, and the tactic made sense since hockey required the use of multiple muscles at once. He also liked that he got as good or better results from less gym time, and thus had more time to fuck around with Max.
He didnotlike that the time he did spend working out made him feel like his body might spontaneously combust, but it seemed like a reasonable price to pay.
Finally they moved on to weights. In just forty more minutes, he could be done for the day, and maybe he and Max could do something romantic and Grady would find the perfect moment to casually whip out the Proposal Hat—
Okay, no. The hat did not have proposal vibes unless there was a ridiculous bet involved. Maybe Grady could just say,So hey, what are you doing July 10 next year?Obviously Max would have no idea what he was doing on that date, because Max was a normal person who hadn’t spent the past two weeks staring at the calendar to determine which date would work best for a summer wedding. And thenGradywould say—
“Max Lockhart! What do you think you’re doing, bro? Put that down.”
Grady glanced over to find Max guiltily trying to hide Todd’s portable speaker behind his back. What was it playing? It sounded familiar.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Max claimed. “This song was playing when I got here.”
Todd huffed. “We do not work out to Taylor Swift.”
“We could.”
“Not to ‘Lover.’”
