Tempting the Teammate: Teaser Chapter

About Tempting the Teammate

Andrei Sokolov has been my best friend for as long as I can remember.

We have played defense together since peewee hockey. We have been inseparable through every game, every road trip, and every bad decision.

Now we are back for our sophomore year at Northwood U, living in the same teamhouse, chasing the same championship dreams, and stuck in the middle of a brand new mess.

The Arctic Titans have been turned into the stars of a season-long docuseries, and apparently, I am the Ladies’ Man. Andrei is the Bad Boy Defenseman. We are supposed to play it up for the cameras, but being told who to be makes me itch. And when the edits start leaning into our so-called bromance, things get complicated.

Because lately, I cannot stop noticing the way Andrei looks at me when the cameras are not rolling. Or the way I have started looking back.

One kiss turns into a secret. A secret turns into late-night skates, empty locker rooms, and moments that feel too much like falling in love. And the closer we get, the harder it is to pretend it is just friendship.

Andrei says sneaking around costs him too much. I say I cannot risk losing what we already have. But with the whole world watching, I am running out of ways to hide what is real.

Maybe it's time to give them a storyline worth streaming.

Mild Spoiler Warning: Chapter 10

This chapter contains unedited (albeit proofread) text from Tempting the Teammate at a fun but crucial moment in the story. It's a pleasurable chapter on its own, but might be more fun to read in order.

I watched him run his fingers through his thick, short curls, elbows planted onto his desk, eyes a little red with strain, and the notes from today’s lectures scattered before him.

“You’re never gonna focus on the essay if you keep looking us up,” I said, feeling like a hypocrite for lecturing him on something I was failing to do just as badly.

Lately, it was impossible to unlock my phone without a slew of slow-motion shots from Blades of Northwood edited to some cheesy, romantic song that was trending on that particular day. Every single one of them ended with the shot of us exchanging a perfectly innocent look during our first interview together.

I racked my brain to remember if there had been more to it. We’d been talking about our friendship since we were peewees. I’d remembered the time Andrei used his hockey stick as a guitar to make fun of my misguided attempts at guitar lessons, but he’d lost his balance and fallen right on his ass.

I guess mischief made my eyes twinkle like a love-sick teenager because the amount of sudden zooms into the grin on my face upon mentioning that memory was ridiculous.

Just the other day, I’d read a new story about us. It began with the words straight out of Blades of Northwood, with the retelling of that very memory. The prologue wasn’t particularly long. Just after the opening shot, the author cut to us changing in the locker room, and it was my gaze that wandered over the lean cut of Andrei’s torso. The towel I supposedly wore around my waist had failed to conceal my cock entirely and Andrei noticed it, lifting one corner of his mouth into a little smirk.

I quit there.

Not that I was so insecure and touchy that I couldn’t plow through some fan-fiction that had me and my best friend doing nasty things to each other. The truth was, they were portraying me as a plank-pulling devil—not far from the truth—but Andrei was smirking coolly far too much. I knew my best friend. He would never have survived such an encounter looking so cool. He would have burst into flames at a mere mention of something naughty.

Andrei didn’t do well with sex talk in any circumstances. I just couldn’t see him nodding and winking at my dick.

Not that I could see myself getting hard around him just like that. The idea was…gross. He was like a brother I’d always wanted. He was like a twin spirit fused permanently to me. He was my whole other half.

He was also a guy, I reminded myself, scrolling through a few more tags that had appeared in my notifications. Heart fluttered all over my screen.

“I need a cold shower,” Andrei said as he pushed himself away from the desk, the rickety chair under him creaking.

He was peeling off his T-shirt before he even stepped into the bathroom. He tossed it on his bed, slipped into the bathroom, and shut the door. He hummed some song I’d never heard. The noise of water hitting the tiles drowned his voice, and I continued the scroll of doom.

There we are again, I thought, running into the images from Toby’s edit. The fucker had posted them right after playing the reel to us, and it put him squarely on the map as part of the main cast. His profile exploded with attention, in no small part thanks to the fact that he had plugged the GriffDrei hashtag.

Just this morning, Dad called me for our weekly chat. He didn’t ask, but everything he said had an air of a question around it. And when he asked about Andrei, I could hear the expectation bubbling in his voice.

“Were you on Instagram, Dad?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he asked innocently.

“Andrei’s fine. We’re both fine. We’re just getting the wrong kind of attention.”

“Son, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Dad said seriously, and I nearly rolled my eyes right out of my skull. It was bad enough that I’d been looking at Andrei for signs of truth in the goddamn fanfics, now my own father wanted to know if I was secretly hooking up with my best friend.

Jen Harding emailed us to book an afternoon next week for a buddy day shoot. It would be for an episode that heavily featured the two of us. She explained that every trope would get an episode with more focus, and apparently, the Casanova trope I’d been given at the start no longer mattered so much. We were all about GriffDrei.

Andrei stepped out of the bathroom in a pair of white boxer briefs, rubbing his hair with a towel. He opened the closet and rummaged through his clothes.

“Going out?”

“Library,” he said.

I didn’t ask more questions. It was becoming difficult to talk about the most mundane things because there was always something that would remind one of us about the virality of the thing we’d always taken for granted. Somehow, our simple, loyal friendship was blown so out of proportion that we were almost starting to lose it.

As Andrei tossed the towel on the back of his chair, I watched the way his pec stretched and his bicep extended before curling. He was a pale shade of bronze, summer fading from his skin, and as lean as the stories described him. “Cut like Michelangelo himself had carved him,” one short story had said, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I’d always been aware of Andrei’s good looks. This was nothing new. Sure, I’d never before noticed the way my mouth went dry around Andrei or the way I couldn’t quite tear my gaze off the curve of the small of his back or the drowning pain in my chest that flared out of nowhere at the sight of his lean torso, but I’d never been a particularly observant person anyway. It could have been going on for years, and it meant nothing.

Andrei bent down to push each leg through his sweatpants, then yanked a hoodie down his torso, concealing the last of his bare, smooth skin before packing notebooks into a backpack and heading out.

As the door shut, my gaze lingered on the space where he had just stood.

I shook my head. I needed a shower, too. Lying in my bed and testing myself with thought experiments would get me nowhere. I needed to wash off the cold sweat that had covered me the moment Andrei had stepped out of the bathroom, drops of water still holding onto his collarbone.

I wondered what went through his head when he discovered the edits.

He was the only person on the planet with whom I could speak virtually telepathically, yet I couldn’t decipher his feelings about this.

Andrei had never been open about girls, dating, and sex. All I knew was that Andrei had stuff to do outside that I wasn’t invited to. Clearly, he didn’t want me to meet the girls he hooked up with.

I had invited him to some of the more casual dates of mine. In high school, when I’d dated Summer Jennings for those two months leading to a disastrous prom dance, I’d invited Andrei out with us from time to time. It had felt like a logical thing. I had wanted my best friend and the girl I really liked to get along. But Andrei had always been busy.

And I knew better. I knew Andrei’s schedule. I knew what he did in his spare time. I knew that his “busy” meant he would spend the night developing photos he’d recently taken on his vintage film camera. If he’d wanted to be invited again, he would have come up with a better excuse.

Eventually, I’d stopped trying to get him to meet my girls. I’d mainly stopped because he never wanted to, but I had also come to realize that my relationships didn’t last long enough to justify the effort.

For his part, Andrei had never invited me to meet his dates. If he was secretly married to some sorority chick, I hadn’t gotten the wedding invite.

And that was fine. It was totally fine. I just needed to keep telling myself this, and it might eventually become the truth.

I hopped out of my bed and stretched, my mind circling back to the core question. Was he grossed out by the fiction about us swirling online? Sure, he had been born here, he’d grown up here, but maybe it didn’t sit well with him that people wrote stories about him being gay.

Me? I didn’t care. I’d never been curious like that—at least, not until I’d read a particularly explicit passage that described what I felt when Andrei entered me. Show me a guy who wouldn’t freak out a little reading that, I dare you.

I pulled my hoodie over my head and tossed it over the back of my chair, then peeled the sweatpants off my legs next.

I really needed to stop letting this get under my skin. If I wanted to go around saying it didn’t bother me, then I had to act like it. And if it bothered Andrei, then I needed to know why. Was it because he secretly subscribed to some primitive ideas or was he particularly grossed out because it was us? And if that was the case, why? We’d been friends long before anyone looked at us twice.

I strolled into the bathroom and pulled down my boxer briefs, stepped out of them, and lifted them with my right foot, grabbing them with my left hand. I glanced at the mirror and figured I needed a haircut. I’d needed one a month ago. My hair had always been shaggy and wild, but I was getting startled by my own reflection these days.

I turned the water on, twisting it all the way to hot so the bathroom could steam up.

I lifted the top of the laundry basket and tossed my underwear inside. The boxer briefs landed on top of Andrei’s. Black with the print of red lips. I’d bought him those as a joke. He’d gone the shade of Red Delicious and rolled his eyes.

I swear I didn’t pick them up. I had no idea why they were hanging from my left hand the next time I blinked. I tried to work some spit into my mouth, but it was dry as ash, parched like the desert ground.

My other hand was on the doorknob, turning the lock, as Andrei’s underwear hung before my face.

It had to be some kind of space-time warping episode because I couldn’t remember making the move, and I couldn’t come up with a reason why I would bring the red-kissed boxers closer to my face, yet there they were.

The first scent that tickled my nostrils was the softener. Lavender. We used the same one, but I could only ever smell it on Andrei. That was why I started using it.

There had to be more. Beneath the lavender. Deep in the soft, gentle fabric.

I buried my nose in the folds of Andrei’s boxer briefs in search of it. Cautious not to lose the scent of it, I inhaled it all. Yes, far too much lacender, but it was there, under the surface, the very thing that made my heart thunder. Musky and nearly impossible to detect, the scent of sweat and sex and something excitingly new that I could only describe as Andrei himself, filled my lungs and my soul. I drew on it like it was the fountain of youth, sucking in the most I could, my lips kissing the soft inside of the fabric.

What the fuck was wrong with me?

Red alarms blared inside my head, but I squeezed my eyes shut and parted my lips, not quite tasting him, but feeling the movement of the fabric against the tip of my tongue.

When I next opened my eyes, Andrei’s boxers were in the basket again, lying on top of mine. I bent down quickly, panic piercing my heart like icicles. I tucked his boxers under mine and hoped to god Andrei hadn’t memorized the exact creases and folds he’d left in the basket because I sure as hell couldn’t recall anything.

I stepped into the shower with my heart still pounding against my ribcage and my cock harder than it had ever been. It ached with every throb that sent it swaying, its sweet pain spreading down into my toes, curling them. My teeth itched and I bit my lip hard as the hot water splashed against my flesh.

I could have sworn I felt every drop land on me. It was like being on an incredibly potent drug that bent reality around you. Every sound was a thousand times clearer, every sight a painting, and every touch a symphony of sensations. It was pure ecstasy.

And when I leaned back against the heated tiles, my right hand dragged down my torso, feeling every muscle constrict under my touch.

It felt good to wrap my fingers around my pulsing cock, pleasure fountaining through me. Guilt was like a saw, hacking away at these wonderful things from underneath, grinding and cutting and hurting the very thing that caused it.

But pleasure was inescapable. Impossible to ignore. It made my fist tighten around the head of my cock, sliding, rubbing, sinning as thoughts of Andrei’s scent lingering inside of me consumed my mind. Was it cum? Maybe pre-cum? Could it be so sweet and tender and potent?

Ah, but it was forbidden. That was what made me lose my mind. It was the furthest I’d gone for a high, the most I’d risked to get a little hard. It was only the fact that I shouldn’t do this that made it so hot.

My head thumped against the tiles, teeth gritted and lips pulled back in pain and pleasure, hisses escaping me through my jaws.

I just had to look away. If I looked away now, I would be fine. Saved. Rescued. I wouldn’t be guilty of jerking off to the thought of my best friend. I wouldn’t use him like this, knowing he wouldn’t want it, knowing it would embarrass him to even imagine it. I just had to direct my thoughts to any of the countless girls I’d hooked up with over the years.

Any.

One.

I could remember one of them.

I had to.

But the sweet, colorful, vivid image of Andrei standing in our room not half an hour ago was burned into my memory so strongly that I couldn’t replace it. Not one girl came to my mind. And the harder I tried to remember any, the clearer Andrei became.

He was no longer the real person I had seen tonight. He was the ephemeral vision of uncapturable beauty that the fan fiction stories said he was. He lay in a bed of rose petals, flames flickering from the red scented candles, and his eyes closed. He lay naked, his hands on his abdomen, moving down, exploring his own body, sliding down his groin until his cock and balls were framed by the space between his fingers and his thumbs.

And I was on my knees, watching while saliva filled my hungry mouth.

I came in a tremendous shattering that possessed my chest. Every muscle in my body trembled with tension. I bit my lip to hold back a cry. Was he out there? Had he come back? Could he feel himself being used by me? Did he know I had just made him into a kink, an object, a sex toy for my own pleasure?

The water splashing down on me washed the cum off the back of my finger, taking it down the drain together with my sweat, but the bitter taste of guilt remained exactly where it had been all along.

Because it had been there. I’d known from the start that this was wrong. Even if I were curious—and I sure as hell wasn’t; I was just drawn to all things obscure and taboo—I knew how wrong it was to use my best friend for this exploration.

Tears got lost in the water running down my face, but I knew they were there. They burned hotter than the shower. They carved their pats down my cheeks as I let them go silently. And when they stopped, I washed myself twice before stepping out.

I didn’t look at the laundry basket. I didn’t listen to the sound of footsteps in case he’d come back. I sprayed myself with my deodorant and stepped out to dress quickly, finding the room empty. I slipped under the cover and killed the light.

Thankfully, Andrei didn’t come back before I’d fallen asleep. If he had, he would have seen the guilt on my face. He would have known I had done something awful. He would have asked me what it was and he would have kept asking until I told him the truth.

Because the thing about Andrei was that I couldn’t lie to him. I’d tried, but he had always seen right through it.

That was why I didn’t go around doing bad things to him behind his back.

That was why I knew he would find out eventually.

Yet with all that settling into the depths of my mind, I couldn’t keep pretending that this was just some obscure curiosity. I couldn’t pretend that the stories hadn’t turned me on before. I couldn’t pretend that seeing him shirtless in our room didn’t tug at my heart harder than any girl ever had.

And fuck, I knew I was going to lose him because of it.

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