LOGINPOV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerGunner Jäger lay in wait.Not the kind where he lurked within the crowded belly of a large darkened bar, air thick with arousal from inclined and under-dressed women, waiting for someone welcoming and fuckable to catch his eye and indulge his tastes. And not the kind where he was inhumanely hungry, stalking step by silent step between tangled, leafy underbrush with a lowered spine and forward ears, catching the clumsy sounds of an easy meal, ready to kill and devour his unfortunate prey.No.He just lay.In wait.And wait. And wait. And wait.With a bored eyebrow arching high, he checked an invisible watch, one stuck somewhere between the safety of the thick, dark padding of his glove and the warm, smooth skin of his wrist. He'd been ready for like an hour. And he was getting tired and too warm and too uncomfortable just standing around in full gear and on hard steel blades.Could they get it on already?"You done yet?"His deep grumbly drawl plagued across
POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerAt the other end of the bench, Gunner's words were pinballing around inside Khyle's head as they both unzipped their bags and began to slip out of their street clothes. Shirts first.Gunner wasn't wrong in saying that his body was sought after, in both senses. By men wanting to achieve that level of fitness personified, and by women who wanted to either sleep with him or marry him and have his babies. Either way, he had the body of a gladiator.Well, Khyle, for his part, was not going to look at it. He kept his focus on the space in front of him as he pulled each item from his bag and set it out semi-orderly on the bench, changing as quickly as he could being his entire reason for existence in this particular moment.Stripping and dressing. Efficiently. Alone with Gunner.He shucked off his winter jacket and set it on the hook in front of him before he lifted the hem of his shirt up over his head.How had he not foreseen this?He dropped it on the bench in
POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerLost in thoughts of his own, Khyle noticed it more. The space was usually full of hustle and bustle, young would-be stars striving to make it to the next level, to get noticed, pushed by their will and their parents. But this year's crop were long gone. The morning's practice had already cleared out, leaving Gunner and Khyle free to do their own thing in the home team's dressing room, the very room in which Khyle had spent the last four years of his life suiting up and listening to speeches under his old coach's close supervision before he was called up to the Reapers.Khyle slowed as he entered the dressing room, ghosts of conversations past lighting up like pale silhouettes in motion as his eyes traced a path around the room, along wood benches, across the floor.Gunner caught the shift in him, subtle as it was, the way Khyle's usual sharp edges had gone soft and unguarded for just a moment, the way his eyes moved across the room like he was reading somet
POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThey thought the arena seemed a bit quiet when they finally arrived, the car, and in it, the latest incarnation of their ongoing argument, coasting in a lazy slide around the corner before finding purchase again and winding into the parking lot under the cold and distant eye of the mid-afternoon sun.But when they rolled to a stop right in front of the main entrance, the two men inside the vehicle came to a lurch in their argument and finally took in their surroundings.All of about five cars littered the space around the doors. The building was almost a husk.Gunner's grumbling tenor hacked into their momentary peace first, breaching the lull in their jaded back and forth, the enforcer making zero effort to hide the considerable contempt in his voice."You sure he said to meet him here?" he frowned.Khyle studied the building for a moment."Yesss," he ground out, though he seemed hardly convinced of it himself."It's a ghost town," Gunner complained loudly
POV: KhyleThankfully, Khyle's music was quickly retired, and something less irritating was slid into the CD player.Apparently, Gunner had seen fit to change out the offending CD before Khyle blew a circuit and threw him out of the car. He had sense when he needed to. But it didn't escape Khyle's attention that mixed-X was popped into the passenger door's side panel. For later. The bastard was keeping good on his word, and taking his CD. And that was just weird, because Khyle couldn't figure out why in hell Gunner would actually want to listen to anything that Khyle found erotic.They pulled out of the parking lot and headed to their next destination. The food bank. It was a quick and uneventful stop. Gunner tagged beside him as Khyle carried a box full of dried and canned food, the enforcer lugging the heavier one. They stopped just long enough to give a few autographs once they were recognized, which was pretty much after Khyle had one foot in the door. Then they headed over to the
POV: GunnerGunner swallowed back a real grunt of pain.Somewhere in between shifting gears and checking his mirror and changing lanes, Khyle's bony little elbow had whipped out and drilled into Gunner's shoulder like he was breaking cement. He didn't pull his punches. The pain was bright and sharp, but it was funny. With Khyle on his side now, Gunner found he respected that about him even more.Gunner feigned injury as he was driven off of his prey with a very effective push. Hell, Khyle had practically drilled a hole in his shoulder. He knew the little prick had power, but sometimes he forgot just how much sting he could pack into a hit. He could ignore the fact that the pain he felt in his shoulder gave him a strange sense of excitement. But he couldn't help but chuckle at the twist of discomfort on Khyle's face and those reddened cheeks. And the eyes he gave Gunner, they were almost enough to rip a person to shreds. It gave him a pleasant shiver, but still. It was just a bit of fu
POV: KhyleHe woke up to the sun in his face.Not gently. Not the gradual brightening of a room coming to life around a sleeping person. The full, direct, unambiguous commitment of mid-morning light that had been working its way across his bed for hours and had finally arrived at his face with the
POV: KhyleThe medical staff cleared the ice of Gunner and his scattered equipment with the methodical efficiency of people who had protocols and were running them, and the game resumed around the absence the way games always resumed, because the game did not stop for any individual regardless of t
POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerThe hit had been a thing of specific and terrible physics.Nolan Girard had been lining it up since the second period. That was what Khyle understood later, watching the replay from the bench while everything was still happening in real time in front of him. Nolan had be
POV: KhyleThe penalty box had a particular quality of isolation.Not physical isolation. The box was right there at ice level, surrounded by glass and the ambient noise of the game and the crowd and the specific auditory experience of being in an arena at full capacity with something happening on







