ログインPOV: GunnerHe turned left, making no effort to turn on the hall light. He knew his way around this place fine in the dark. The floors were clean. He wasn't going to stub his toes on anything.And he sure as hell didn't believe in monsters and things that went bump in the night. The world was a scary enough place with the people that inhabited it. Him included. Why make things up?A few steps further down the hall, Gunner reached the open doorway of his bedroom and stopped dead.His lungs stilled. He swayed against his own heartbeat, and all his concentration turned inward. Ghostly voices from the past moved over his shoulder through the darkness. He couldn't stop them. He never could, in the dark, in the quiet, when there was nothing left to redirect him."I'm telling you, you are getting too rough.""Paaaa." A growled warning. "I said don't start on me again. I'm doing my job.""You were not this rough before you became a big shot star.""Hn." A side glare. No argument."This coach
POV: GunnerHe could feel the cool snap of crisp air filling his lungs, the whispered scrape of sharpened blades slicing against the ice, and the stretch and pull of muscles so powerful that it would take hours of punishment to exhaust them.But only in his mind.Gunner settled himself deeper into the guts of his couch and folded arms heavy with knotted muscle into a rigid weave against his chest, face set in an unimpressed scowl as he watched the game play out from the relative solitude of his apartment.He inhaled slow and deep, held it, and exhaled just as slowly. He could feel an acid growl building, an uprising of resentment tightening things in the depths of his chest and throat. But he kept it to himself.He wasn't alone.The neighbors down the hall had insisted on dropping in with a six pack of beer.He had wanted to say no. He had been saying no, in various forms and with varying degrees of politeness, to most of the world for the past week. But the neighbors were decent peop
POV: KhyleBy now, the two men were sitting in what was more or less a comfortable silence.Kensei had drifted toward the bar to settle the tab and have one last conversation with his favorite member of the staff, leaving the two of them with the quiet and the fading noise of a bar that was winding down for the night. Gunner's lazy gaze had slid away from the waitress's overexposed backside and drifted toward the flat screens, the flickering images of a sports highlight reel moving through without demanding anything from either of them.Khyle took a pull from the bottom of his third and final beer of the night. Lite beer. He had no use for hangovers, and he had a game tomorrow. Though he usually preferred coolers to beer, he hadn't been in the mood to take the inevitable commentary from present company tonight. In present company, his tastes would absolutely have been scrutinized.He was thinking about the evening, taking a quiet inventory of where they had started and where they were
POV: GunnerGunner stared at the screen, but the images were far beyond his awareness.The kid was doing it again. Making him think on things he had tried not to give too much thought to. Before Santos had showed up, Gunner had been an enforcer and a ladies' man. Plain and simple. But was it?For Gunner, dating, more like the revolving door arrangement he'd been running since he was seventeen, had been nearly a pastime. Until recently.He didn't want an easy casual thing. He liked fire. He liked challenge. If a woman didn't have that then he slept with her once or twice and moved on. When one had enough life in her to hold his interest he'd give it a real shot. But that was rare. Even Jordan hadn't been enough, and she had quite a bit of fire in her. The women he'd properly dated in his twenty-five years, he could count on one hand. And none of them had stayed around for more than a few weeks or a couple of months at best.He always gave them the heave-ho because not only did they fai
POV: KhyleKhyle fiddled with his drink as he considered the question.Now that Kensei was gone, the bluenet had regressed, his attitude turning like a switch, the lazy cockiness resettling over him the way it always did when the social lubricant of a third person was removed from the equation. Khyle felt a little less comfortable himself, but he wondered if Gunner was just hiding behind it the way he hid behind most things.As for the question about his love life, he was reluctant to go there with Gunner. It seemed like information the man would find a way to use against him. And even though he wanted to find a way to smooth things over between them, somehow his current lack of a sexual life didn't feel like something he wanted to share with the blue-eyed womanizer sitting next to him. But seeing as he was the one who had called this little party to order, Khyle finally decided he might as well lay his cards on the table. They were supposed to be getting to know each other. And Khyle
POV: GunnerGunner was beginning to get a complex.Every time he looked over, Khyle's eyes were on the tabletop, his beer, or their team captain. But it felt like the whole time, the moment Gunner's attention was elsewhere, those brown eyes were glued to him. Studying him. Mapping him out. He was sure of it. He had a sense about these things. He knew when he was being watched.But it was the way he was being watched that was getting to him. His gut was telling him something specific and he refused to pay it any attention and instead chalked it up to his partner's overt concern. The mother hen routine. That was all it was.His jaw clenched as he thought about it. He didn't need the orange head worrying about him. His ma had been taking plenty good care of him. She called twice a day and had him at her dinner table every other evening despite his insistence that he was capable of feeding himself. Nothing replaced her cooking, she'd said, and her boy needed his strength. He'd had the goo







