The Hockey Captain’s Secret Son

Five years ago.  There were two kinds of people at that party: the ones who wanted to sleep with Gideon Marsh, and the ones who wanted to be Gideon Marsh. I was there to write about him, which technically put me in neither category. Technically. The campus paper had sent me to cover the win. "The piece on the man of the hour," my editor had said, with the enthusiasm of someone handing off a job he didn't want to do himself. So there I was — a recorder in my pocket I hadn't turned on, a plastic cup I hadn't bothered to fill, and a hoodie that screamed I'm not here to have fun. I spotted him in the middle of the living room, mid-flow in his own unauthorized press conference, surrounded by a cluster of puck bunnies who seemed far more interested in his pecs than his play-by-play. In person, he was tall. God, he was tall. I mean, it took real commitment to live a life at that altitude — and it took those ridiculous shoulders to hold up the whole Greek-statue situation. His jaw was square, sharp, the kind that doesn't chew so much as crush. A small scar split one eyebrow, giving him a distinctly first-class-asshole look. He pushed a hand through his dark hair, smiling, and three girls sighed in unison when it fell back over his eyes — better than before, obviously. For the record, I was taking notes for the piece. That's why I noticed all of it in such detail. I pushed my way through. "Gideon Marsh? Wren Ashford, campus paper. Got two minutes for the people who can actually spell your name?" He turned. Looked me up and down, still smiling. "The campus paper." He had the voice of a man who finds everything mildly amusing. "Didn't know anyone still cared about that." "They don't. But somebody's got to fill the sports section, so." I lifted the recorder. "Tell me something you haven't already said to the other three hundred people who stopped you tonight." "Pressure is a privilege." He said it with a glance at the girls beside him, ready to nod along to whatever garbage came out of his mouth. A canned line. I hadn't expected much more. "That's it? I expected better from you." He leaned in, like he was about to confess a state secret. "Something I haven't told anyone yet?" He dropped his voice. "I'm hot. And I'm thinking about jumping in the pool. Clothes on or off — depends who comes with me." He threw in a look, for extra charm. As if he needed it. I switched off the recorder. "I'll save that one for the obituary. Hockey prospect drowns in pool the night of his biggest win. Touching." "Then come make sure I don't drown. It's journalism, right? Verifying the facts on-site." He said it laughing. A warm laugh, the kind that lives in the chest. And then his mouth. Those full lips, the upper one lifting just enough to leave the lower one soft and heavy. Anyway. I was just looking for the right way to describe him for the piece, and somehow I ended up in the backyard without noticing how I got there. The pool glowed blue, empty because it was far too cold for anyone with a shred of common sense. He was evidently fresh out of it: he pulled off his shirt with the ease of a man who does it for a living, and — credit where it's due — the torso delivered on everything the shoulders had promised. Scattered scars, muscle built from years of collisions, the pool light sliding over all of it. "You won't actually jump in," I said. "You don't know me." And he jumped. Half-dressed, sending freezing water all the way up to my shoes, surfacing with his hair plastered down and a grin that could've signed contracts. "It's freezing," he said, breathing hard. "I know." "Come in." "I'm working." "You're standing next to a pool with a dead recorder at eleven at night." He braced his arms on the edge, too close to my feet. "Pretty sure the job's done, Ashford." He wasn't entirely wrong. I took off my shoes. I didn't get in — I'm not an i***t, it was April in Massachusetts — but I sat on the edge and slid my feet into the freezing water, and he drifted closer, and at some point the distance between us stopped being measured in inches and started being measured in breaths. "You're different from the usual ones," he said, quietly, the cold plunge having rinsed the arrogance off him and left plain curiosity behind. I'm good at noticing things like that. Occupational hazard. "Because I'm not looking at you like you're a trophy?" "No." He looked up at me, lashes still stuck together with water. "You're looking at me like you want to take notes." "Maybe I'm just verifying the facts on-site. You said it was journalism." I watched the muscles flex under his wet skin, his shoulders rising out of the water — strong, smooth, scandalously functional. He pulled himself up with an irritating ease, like his body had been engineered purely to do athletic things and ruin my concentration. I looked at his mouth — that mouth deserved its own feature article — and he looked at mine, while cold drops fell from his wet hair to the base of my neck. We held it just a second, in silence, like there was nothing left to say. And then he kissed me. Right there, on the edge of the pool, the cold climbing up from my feet and under my clothes everywhere except where he touched me. I couldn't tell you how we got upstairs. I know that at some point we were soaked and shaking in the hallway, and that he pinned me against his door before he even opened it, mouth on mine, hands already tangled in the hem of my wet hoodie. "Take it off," he said against my lips. "You're freezing." "That's your fault. You're the one who jumped in the pool." "And you followed me." He pulled the hoodie over my head, his gaze dropping down my body like he was starving for me. "You keep following me, Ashford." He kissed me again, and this time he didn't stop. The door gave way behind me, and I was inside the dark room, his hands stripping the last of the cold off me. My fingers found the ridges of his stomach — abs hard as fresh-laid ice — and followed them down to the waist of his soaked jeans, and he laughed against my neck when I helped him out of them. A low laugh. Warm. It vibrated through me. He gripped me with those rough hands and made me arch into him before I'd decided to. He lifted me like I weighed nothing and laid me on the bed, and for a moment he just stayed there, looking at me — gray-blue eyes gone dark, breath already short — like he wanted to memorize the whole thing. Then his mouth went down. Throat. Collarbone. My breast, where he lingered long enough to make me dig my fingers into his still-damp hair. Lower, patient, until I ran out of clever lines and started just breathing his name. "Still with me?" he murmured. "If you stop now I'm giving you a one-star review." I felt him laugh against my skin. Then he wasn't laughing anymore, and neither was I. The rest was hunger and heat, chills and force and a tenderness that kept trading places until the whole thing felt like a terrible idea he was making scandalously hard to regret. Time stopped moving, and everything narrowed down to me. Him. The mattress. The whole room. In the morning he was already on the phone when I woke up, a half-packed bag on the bed, his voice different now — the future-pro voice, the voice of a man who'll have a hundred more nights like this one. He looked at me the way you look at something pleasant that already belongs to yesterday. "It was fun, campus paper." Translation: thanks and goodbye. The funny part is, I'd gotten there first. I was already back in my jeans while he was still on the phone. I had zero intention of sticking around to play an extra in his moment of glory. "Relax, Marsh. I'm not asking for an autograph." I fished a shoe out from under the bed. "But if I ever interview you again, try to give me better material than pressure is a privilege." He raised an eyebrow, amused. Maybe surprised I wasn't crying into his pillow. "Try not to drown in the first round of playoffs," I added, already at the door. And I left. Without looking back — not because it cost me anything, but because there was nothing behind me worth looking at. Or so I thought. What I didn't know, walking down those stairs with my shoes in my hand and zero regrets, was that the night hadn't been just one night at all. Six weeks later, two pink lines on a test would explain — far more clearly than Gideon ever had — that I’d left with more than a bad memory. A part of him had come with me. And I swore he would know. I kept my promise. He broke his. And when the moment came, I lied too — with the same ease life had taught me a long time ago. They say lies never get very far. Mine had been walking for five and a half years. His name was Theo.