I narrow my eyes. “You know what I mean. Going there with someone in my professional life, even if it were only casual.”
“Who said anything about casual?”
“Stop being so darn Socratic. Stop repeating what I’ve said.”
“Fine.” Viggo clears his throat. “Ollie, while I love a good romantic journey on the road to the HEA, you know your best way to happiness. You know if you’re ready for romance or not. You don’t have to take this anywhere with Gavin, even if my personal hunch is there may be somewhere to take it.”
I frown, suspicious. “Do you have a fever? Have you swapped personalities with someone?”
He laughs quietly. “O, if I’ve learned anything by now in my twenty-five years of meddling existence, it’s this: you can lead a horse to water—and I am very good at leading a horse to water—but you can’t make them wear swimming trunks.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means,” Viggo says patiently, “that you will make your own decision about how to proceed on the path before you, even if your brothers steered you to view it from a slightly different angle. And maybe a little further down the path than you were before.”
“‘A little further down the path’？”
“Oliver, you have to admit you were at the end of your rope. What were we going to tell you when clearly what you’d been doing wasn’t working? I stand by our advice, and I’ll be honest: our primary concern was your well-being. Sure, my romance-loving heart saw the potential for a combustible connection, but as a perk, not the point.” He clears his throat. “At the end of the day, we just want you to be happy. And maybe in his ass-backwards way, Gavin wants you to be happy, too. Why else would he care about what’s going on with your panic attacks? Why else would he comfort you on the plane?”
I swallow nervously. “I really don’t know.”
“Well, I think it’s a good sign. Maybe you and Mr. Grumpypants will end up at least being friends. Man, I really love nothing more than a good friends-to-lovers romance. The longing. The high stakes of risking an enduring friendship for a new kind of love that might not last. The angst. The pining. The will-they-won’t-they—”
“Viggo.”
“Sorry. I digress. What was I saying? Oh, yeah. Friendship between you two—”
“Trust me, I’ve broached the subject. The friend part only. He didn’t like that idea.”
“Hmm.” Viggo sighs, sounding thoughtful. “So you’ve got the hots for him, but you don’t want to fall for him. He seems…invested in you, but he says he doesn’t want to be your friend. And being at odds is no longer allowed, if you want to keep your captaincy.”
“Yes.”
“Shit, son. This has even me stumped.”
My phone buzzes with a calendar reminder. I need to get downstairs to take the bus over to the facility so we can get our training in. “Viggo, lovely as this chat has been, I have to go do my job.”
He feigns a long, drawn-out snore. “Jobs are overrated.”
“Says the guy who has five.”
He laughs. “All right. Go. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
“Text me whenever, okay? You got this, Ollie.”
Viggo hangs up before I can confess that I’m really not sure I’ve got this at all.
Thankfully, I have plenty to keep me distracted the rest of the day. We spend the late morning doing light technical training. Then we break for lunch, during which Gavin sits as far away from me as possible, avoiding me while scrolling through what history dictates is sports news on his phone. After that comes an afternoon spent scrimmaging, which, like the morning, we keep on the light side.
Dinner is more of the same: a catered healthy meal we all share. Normally, I’d enjoy it, except 1） it’s the night before our first game of the season, which makes me a nauseous, anxious mess, and 2） I’m so viscerally aware of Gavin and the fact that we’re about to go back to a room with only one bed, I barely taste the food I do manage to get down my throat.
Taking the elevator with a good portion of the team, I force a smile, throw out a joke that lightens the mood and makes the guys laugh. No one knows that inside, I’m freaking the hell out.
When Gavin unlocks the door with his key and shoves it open, he turns and acknowledges my existence for the first time since he stormed out of our room this morning. “I discreetly inquired about empty rooms with the manager,” he says. “There are none.”
My stomach drops. He’s that eager to put distance between us. I shouldn’t be surprised, shouldn’t feel like I’ve taken a point-blank-range kick to the solar plexus. But I do.
“Ah, c’mon, Hayes,” I tell him, breezing by, then turning, walking backward as I open my arms wide. “It’ll be fun.”
“Fun.” He lets the door fall shut behind him with an ominous thud and tosses his keycard onto the table. “Sure.”
“Listen…” I plop onto the mattress, searching for the right words.
Gavin avoids my eyes, setting a container of food and plasticware on the table beside his keycard.
“I think it’s fair to say things have…gotten out of hand the past few days,” I tell him. “I admit that I’ve been juvenile with those pranks.”
He still stares down at his feet. His jaw twitches. He rubs the bridge of his nose. “And?”
“And…” I sift through what Viggo and I talked about in our meandering way, what I pushed aside while I focused on drills and scrimmaging today. “I propose a truce. I’ll try to chill out with the provocation. You’ll try not to be a ginormous dick.”
Gavin clucks his teeth and shrugs apologetically. “Can’t help what nature gave me.”
My mouth falls open. “Did you just crack a joke? And a dick joke?”
Silence hangs between us for a long, tense moment. “Seems so,” he finally says, strolling over to his bag.
I watch him, stunned and intrigued. The faintest hint of pink is on his cheeks. Holy shit, Gavin Hayes is blushing. And I know I just promised not to purposefully get under his skin, but that was before I knew I could make him blush.
“Did you know,” I ask him, “that, in absolute terms, the blue whale has the largest penis, but relative to its size, it is far outstripped by the barnacle, whose penis can stretch up to eight times the length of the barnacle itself? Pretty nifty evolutionary trick, if you think about it, given barnacles have to fix themselves—”
“Bergman, for the love of God, stop.”
He’s banging around in his bag. His cheeks are now bright red. “Whatcha looking for in there?” I ask.
“Something to gag you with,” he mutters.
I lean back on my palms. “I’m not into gagging, Hayes. Blindfolds are more my thing.”
He nearly drops his bag, saving it at the last minute with those freakish reflexes. “You,” he says, “are a nuisance. A horny, inappropriate nuisance.”
“You’re the one who led with a dick joke,” I point out.
He sighs as he turns with an armful of clothes in his hands. “Trust me, I regret it. Had I known it would lead us here, I never would have said a word. Now I’m going to shower. And while I’m in there, you’re going to eat.”