Page 34
“I know you will.”
Ford stood in the doorway until the car backed out.
Then he shut the door.
When he turned around, Cole had set his coffee on the shelf by the stairs and was already crossing the hall.
He took a fistful of Ford’s shirt and pulled. Ford went. Cole kissed him right there in the middle of the house in broad daylight. He tasted like coffee, and he was in no hurry at all.
He kissed him slow enough that Ford felt every piece of it. The scrape of his jaw. The heat coming off his mouth. The hand that came up and cupped the back of Ford’s skull and held him exactly where he was.
Ford got both hands up under the sweatshirt, flat on his back. Cole hissed at the cold. Then he pushed into it, into him, hips first. Ford felt him hard against his thigh and stopped thinking about anything else in the world.
He walked Cole backward into the wall by the stairs. Cole’s shoulders hit it, and he pulled Ford after him by the belt with both hands, and the sound he made then was one Ford had never once heard him make above a whisper.
Ford went for his throat. Stubble, then the soft under his jaw, then the long line down. Cole’s head went back. It knocked against the wall and stayed there. His pulse was hammering under Ford’s tongue. Ford stayed on it and felt Cole’s whole body pull tight. Cole swore aloud.
“Ford.”
“Mm.”
“We’ve got to be at the Forum by eleven.” Cole had a hand down the back of Ford’s jeans. He took it out slowly, like it cost him. “One o’clock start.”
“I’m fully aware.”
Ford leaned his forehead against Cole’s. Neither of them moved for a second. They were both breathing like they’d just finished a hard cardio session.
“Tonight,” Cole said.
Ford got a hand around the back of his neck and held on, then made himself let go.
Cole picked his coffee up off the shelf and drank some of it like nothing at all had happened. His hand wasn’t steady.
“Go get dressed, Cally.”
Ford went upstairs.
He stripped his bed.
He’d decided on it at four that morning, awake in the dark and thinking about tonight in enough detail that he’d had to get up for a glass of water. Clean sheets. The heavy flannel set, not the ones going thin at the foot. He wanted it right when they got home.
Cole was in the kitchen doorway with his coffee when Ford came down with the armload. He watched him the whole way across the hall. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t smile.
Ford felt the look on the back of his neck the entire way to the machine.
“Ready?” Cole said.
“Yeah.”
The first shot came ninety seconds in, a point slapper through four bodies that Ford never really saw. It hit him high in the chest and dropped dead at his feet. Riggs swept it into the corner before anybody could get a stick on it.
After that, his hands were fine. They usually were, once something had hit him.
He knew where Cole was every second of it.
In the third, Cole came back hard on a forecheck and put a kid from Iron Bay into the boards a foot off the crease. He came up out of it. He skated past the net without looking over and tapped the post twice with his stick. He’d done that every game since October. Ford stopped the next one.
They won four-two. Twenty-nine saves. The two that beat him were a tip and a two-on-one. He ran the tip back twice in his head, decided he’d been half a second late off the post, and let it go.
