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Something fierce and ten times smarter
John Tavares/Jordan Eberle (and other, unrequited-type things)
R, ~2,700 words
World Championships, Helsinki 2012 - The last time they won anything they were eighteen and in Ottawa, and John has learned a lot since then about things you want versus things you have. (For the offseasonmatch exchange; originally posted here. Thanks to figletofvenice for the beta!)
“Remember the last time we played Kazakhstan?” John asks, handing Jordan another beer.
Jordan grins and clinks the bottle lightly against John’s as John settles onto the mattress next to him. They’d talked briefly about going out, drowning their World Championship sorrows in the traditional way, but somehow a handful of them have wound up in John’s room instead, loaded up with the most promising-looking Finnish six-packs Evander and Schenner could find on their excursion to the local supermarket.
“I remember me and Cody setting you up for at least one goal,” Jordan says. “And Benner getting a hat trick, of course.”
“And P.K. trying to give Benner a hat trick lap dance in the locker room afterward,” Evander supplies helpfully from his spot on the floor. Jamie groans from his armchair in the corner; Luke, sprawled at the foot of the bed, bursts into laughter.
“That I would have liked to see,” he says.
“No, you wouldn’t,” says John, but he’s laughing, too.
Losing sucks, John thinks, especially when it feels like all you’ve been doing all year, and he hasn’t been able to figure out if it sucks more or less when he’s surrounded by the guys who were with him last time he actually won something. It’s weird, too, because this whole situation is so 2009: holed away in a hotel room to drink, Jordan laughing next to him, the guys-even though Luke wasn’t in Ottawa with them, he’s still got a gold medal hanging at home, number four of five, a special one in John’s heart. So yeah, losing sucks, but it’s hard for John to look at these guys and not remember what it felt like to win.
Regardless, his current company is a great distraction from the Slovakia game disaster.
“Your face though, Benner,” Evander is saying, amused. “Our, like, one actually nice quiet kid being assaulted by Subban’s ass, it was a glorious moment for Canadian hockey.”
“I’ve spent the last three years suppressing that memory, but thanks,” says Jamie.
“Besides,” John says, “Ebs was a nice quiet kid, too, eh?” He jostles Jordan with an elbow; Jordan shoves him lightly back.
“Doesn’t count because he was secretly a makeout king,” Evander points out. Luke immediately rolls over to look at Jordan. He raises his eyebrows as high as they can possibly go, delighted amusement written across his face.
“Jordan Eberle,” he says, and Jordan’s cheeks go red.
John laughs with Evander and Jamie, but wraps an arm around Jordan and rubs his back as Jordan hides his embarrassed face in John’s shoulder. “It’s true, though,” John says, “You macked on everyone that year.”
“I was eighteen,” Jordan protests. “I had terrible taste, okay?”
“So much for the good Saskatchewan boy,” says Luke, then, “Oh, god, you didn’t mack on my brother, did you?”
“I didn’t mack on anyone in 2010, geez,” says Jordan, kicking Luke just hard enough to justify the retaliatory smack Luke aims at his foot afterward. “I was way less young and stupid then.”
“And you had some Taylor Hall kid following you around with starry eyes, so it would have been just mean to run around putting your mouth on everybody,” John says, patting Jordan’s head consolingly. Jordan snorts. “It’s too bad he’s not here. I would’ve liked to see that bromance in action.”
“Seconded,” Jamie calls from his chair.
“If Hallsy were here he would be way too busy drooling on John Tavares to be bromancing me.” Jordan drawls John’s name out dripping with excessive awe; John rolls his eyes and elbows him.
“It’s not your fault you’re a legend, Johnny,” Jamie says.
“The magical play of Tavares!” Evander crows, punching the air.
“How is it that I will never live down something I didn’t even actually say?” John asks. He gets no answer: all of his friends are assholes.
“But seriously, Ebs,” says Jamie. “We support all of your romantic endeavors, as long as they’re with Canadians.”
“And not my brother,” Luke says.
“And not Schenner’s brother,” Jamie amends.
“That means so much to me, you guys,” Jordan deadpans. Evander grins winningly from the floor; John throws a pillow at him.
They wind up going through all of the beer as they reminisce, and then finding a Finnish dubbed version of one of the Terminator movies on John’s television that everyone agrees they should probably watch, and then it’s almost an hour of weird Finnish television before Jamie claims exhaustion and calls it a night.
“Lamest, Benner,” Luke calls after him, but it’s not long before he’s yawning, too. Evander lasts a little longer; the movie’s almost over when Jordan notices that he’s actually dozed off on the floor. John gets up just enough to nudge him awake and kick him out: they’ll say their real goodbyes tomorrow.
The thing is, though, John doesn’t feel tired at all, just a little buzzed and restless, so he’s glad when Jordan comes back from a bathroom break and flops back down on the bed instead of announcing it bedtime. He’s got his phone in hand, finishing up a text message before he looks up.
“Helsinki’s no Ottawa, huh?” he says, giving John a look that says he gets where John’s head is: he knows what it’s like to muscle your way through the season with a basement-dwelling NHL team and then fly across the ocean to lose in the quarterfinals. It’s a far cry from an undefeated gold medal run, but the WJC was on an entirely different stage: Europe’s no Canada, and Helsinki’s no Ottawa.
“Understatement,” John agrees.
Jordan nods. “Like, I haven’t made out with anyone in Helsinki.” He makes a face with the joke, but John laughs, more at Jordan’s embarrassment over his younger self’s exploits than anything else.
“You know you absolutely floored me that tournament?” John asks. Jordan’s lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows to look at him. “I mean, hockey-wise, you were great and all, but all I’d heard was that Jordan Eberle was such a nice kid and then you were just makin’ out with half the team.”
Jordan rolls his eyes, but he’s grinning a little: he is still clearly just a little pleased with himself. “Not half the team. Like five of them or something. And Boychuk doesn’t count because he was a really, really bad kisser.”
John shakes his head and sighs. “It makes me a little sad I was being all faithful and shit, you know? Maybe I, too, could have made out with Canada’s Hero Jordan Eberle.” He’d thought about it, at the time, being on a line with this firecracker kid with great hands, this seriously competitive kid who was all about laughing and kissing away from the ice, and he’d thought it would be fun, but he was also eighteen and already in love with his best friend.
“Right,” Jordan says with a laugh. “Except how Tubes and I were both convinced you were shacked up with P.K. that whole time, and it wasn’t until me and Hallsy spent a week our rookie season nursing Sam through the breakup that I realized we were wrong.”
“Hey,” John protests mildly. “That breakup was amicable as fuck.” It’s true: he and Sam keep in touch better now than they did when they were trying way too hard to stretch the boyfriends thing across the continent. They broke up, but they’re still best friends. They’ll see each other over the summer, like always, and John will probably still want to kiss him, but it will be good enough just to hang out that it won’t really matter.
Jordan shrugs. “Yeah, but hey, any excuse to watch Slapshot and drink an entire case of Molsons in one go, right?”
“Absolutely,” says John. “I could go for some good Canadian beer about now.”
“I could go for any beer I can pronounce the name of,” Jordan says. His phone beeps and he looks down at it, grins a little. “Hallsy says hi.”
“Tell him hey for me,” John says, and watches Jordan type. “How’s he doing?”
“Good.” Jordan pushes himself up to sit cross-legged, one hand still curled around the phone on his knee. “You know he’s had that shoulder problem since he was sixteen? He’s gonna be unreal next year.” His voice is full of soft pride in a way that John understands intimately, a little jealously, in the way that happens when someone has something that you don’t anymore.
“You guys are the real deal, eh?” he asks.
“I hope so,” says Jordan, giving him a crooked kinda grin. “I’d really like to start winning sometime soon.”
“No, I mean,” says John, then stops and actually thinks about it. Jordan looks at him strangely, then sort of straightens up, as if he’s realized the question and is bracing himself to answer, and John immediately feels guilty for assuming. It just always seemed so obvious to him. “Never mind. Sorry.”
Jordan shrugs. “It’s fine. Can’t always get what we want, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” says John. He takes a long look at Jordan: he knows the Oilers had a rough end to their season, and now this, and John feels like-he’ll always feel a little bit responsible for everyone he’s worn a letter for, but he and Jordan have a lot in common as far as the weights on their shoulders, and John occasionally thinks it would be really nice to be eighteen years old again.
“Hey,” John says, and scoots closer, curls a hand around the back of Jordan’s neck, and kisses him. He feels Jordan’s lips quirk up into a little grin as he huffs a laugh that is both pleased and strangely relieved.
“You know this isn’t Ottawa, right?” Jordan asks, leaning to follow John and kiss him right back when John goes to pull away.
“It’s Helsinki,” says John. “It’s not like anyone’s ever gonna know.”
“Right.” Jordan sounds amused, but he’s fisting his hands in the front of John’s t-shirt and hauling him in closer, so John’s pretty okay with it.
Jordan kisses thoroughly-he kisses really well, and when John tells him this, he laughs and says, “Well, you know, practice makes perfect.”
John laughs. “Oh, so that’s why you worked your way through the entire team that year-”
Jordan shoves him, feigning insult, and John just lets himself go with it, falling back against the pillows, because of course Jordan follows, grinning, and they stretch out on John’s bed together. John rucks up Jordan’s shirt at his sides and gets his hands on his skin; Jordan squirms against him, and John thinks, yes, this was definitely a good idea.
He winds up, at some point, rolling them over to press Jordan into the mattress under him. Jordan’s got hands in John’s hair and is grinding up against him, his thigh pressed warm against John’s hip. John feels like they’ve been kissing for hours and that he could keep it up for even longer than that: the warm affection he has for Jordan isn’t the same as the overwhelming love he’s had most times he’s done this, but it’s strangely comforting, and-well, Jordan’s good, so that’s a definite bonus.
“Hey,” Jordan says, muffled against John’s mouth, “lemme,” and shifts so he can get a hand between them, slipping it under the waistband of John’s sweats. His hand is dry, but he doesn’t try to jerk John off with it-no one likes a dry handjob-he just wraps it around John’s dick and squeezes gently until John groans involuntarily and jerks forward into his grip.
“Yeah?” asks Jordan.
“Yeah, just-” John wriggles out of his pants, kicking them off so Jordan has easier access when he spits in his palm and reaches down again. The slippery friction takes John’s dick from interested to involved pretty quickly, but Jordan keeps his strokes even and methodical, just enough to keep the slow burn building in John’s gut.
“You can do me when I’m done with you,” Jordan says, biting at John’s lip, like it’s just that easy-and it kind of is, John supposes.
When he comes, ten minutes later, gasping into the crook of Jordan’s neck and shoulder, John has to take a moment to catch his breath before he can even think about returning the favor. Jordan’s still in his sweatpants-his sweatpants that now have John’s come streaked across the top of them where they’re sitting low on Jordan’s hips, which John would feel bad about except for how he’s pretty sure Jordan knew exactly what he was doing. It’s quite the visual.
“Hey,” says John, dragging his eyes up to Jordan’s face: his mouth is all red from making out and his cheeks are flushed, but he grins when John meets his eyes. “Can I go down on you?”
“Go for it,” Jordan says, his laugh a little breathless.
John hasn’t sucked someone off since-well, since he and Sam broke up, but he figures now’s as good a time as any to end that dry spell in his life. He feels a little awkward at first, because he’s never has a natural talent for sex the way he does for hockey, but then Jordan makes this low, pleased noise in his throat, which is pretty good encouragement as far as John is concerned.
Jordan doesn’t seem in any hurry to get off, and it’s not like they have to rush, so John takes his time, taking breaks to jerk Jordan off and just mouth at the head of his cock when his jaw gets tired. Jordan never gets loud, but his breathing gets harsh and shallow and when he’s really close he says, “John, John,” and John doesn’t pull off but he doesn’t swallow; he waits until he’s done sucking Jordan through it and then goes to spit in the sink.
The bathroom mirror gives John a reflection that is ridiculously debauched, his hair sticking up and his mouth wet and swollen. John doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by how he looks-probably it’s just been too long since he got laid. It doesn’t matter, though, because Jordan’s the only one who’s going to see him. He rinses his mouth out with tap water, then splashes some on his face and scrubs it dry with a towel before he grabs a washcloth to take to Jordan.
Jordan is stretched out on John’s bed, his arms crossed behind his head, his sweats tugged back up around his hips. His eyes are closed, but he opens them when John comes back and gives him a lazy smile. John sits down and hands him the washcloth, watches as Jordan wipes at his stomach, the hem of his shirt, the waistband of his pants.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done that,” he says, making a face as he picks at a stain on his sweatpants. “I don’t bring guys around to me and Hallsy’s place, and girls don’t do it for me enough that I pick up a lot that way, so.”
John grins at him. “Well, it’s safe to say you’re not rusty,” he says, then, “It’s been a while for me, too.”
Jordan gives him an odd, amused look, then tilts his head and says, “Well, we’ve always been good at scoring together.”
It’s a terrible joke, but John snorts a laugh anyway. He lies down next to Jordan, not touching but still close enough to be companionable. Their elbows bump when Jordan resumes his previous position; John scoots a little closer and jostles him until he laughs.
“Stop it,” Jordan says. “You’re supposed to be a mature leader.”
“And you’re supposed to be a good Saskatchewan boy,” says John. “What’s your point?”
“That we’re both terrible?” Jordan offers.
John grins. “Speak for yourself, buddy.”
Jordan rolls his eyes, but then he goes quiet for a minute, and he keeps his gaze on the ceiling when he asks, “Is it cool if I crash here?”
“Yeah,” says John. “Of course.” Because he knows it’s not a clingy thing, a sudden ill-timed crush or over-attachment, it’s just that John’s a teammate, and John’s a friend, and John gets where Jordan’s head is right now. He’s been there. He is there.
“Cool.” Jordan gives him a lopsided smile. John smiles back, and closes his eyes.
John Tavares/Jordan Eberle (and other, unrequited-type things)
R, ~2,700 words
World Championships, Helsinki 2012 - The last time they won anything they were eighteen and in Ottawa, and John has learned a lot since then about things you want versus things you have. (For the offseasonmatch exchange; originally posted here. Thanks to figletofvenice for the beta!)
“Remember the last time we played Kazakhstan?” John asks, handing Jordan another beer.
Jordan grins and clinks the bottle lightly against John’s as John settles onto the mattress next to him. They’d talked briefly about going out, drowning their World Championship sorrows in the traditional way, but somehow a handful of them have wound up in John’s room instead, loaded up with the most promising-looking Finnish six-packs Evander and Schenner could find on their excursion to the local supermarket.
“I remember me and Cody setting you up for at least one goal,” Jordan says. “And Benner getting a hat trick, of course.”
“And P.K. trying to give Benner a hat trick lap dance in the locker room afterward,” Evander supplies helpfully from his spot on the floor. Jamie groans from his armchair in the corner; Luke, sprawled at the foot of the bed, bursts into laughter.
“That I would have liked to see,” he says.
“No, you wouldn’t,” says John, but he’s laughing, too.
Losing sucks, John thinks, especially when it feels like all you’ve been doing all year, and he hasn’t been able to figure out if it sucks more or less when he’s surrounded by the guys who were with him last time he actually won something. It’s weird, too, because this whole situation is so 2009: holed away in a hotel room to drink, Jordan laughing next to him, the guys-even though Luke wasn’t in Ottawa with them, he’s still got a gold medal hanging at home, number four of five, a special one in John’s heart. So yeah, losing sucks, but it’s hard for John to look at these guys and not remember what it felt like to win.
Regardless, his current company is a great distraction from the Slovakia game disaster.
“Your face though, Benner,” Evander is saying, amused. “Our, like, one actually nice quiet kid being assaulted by Subban’s ass, it was a glorious moment for Canadian hockey.”
“I’ve spent the last three years suppressing that memory, but thanks,” says Jamie.
“Besides,” John says, “Ebs was a nice quiet kid, too, eh?” He jostles Jordan with an elbow; Jordan shoves him lightly back.
“Doesn’t count because he was secretly a makeout king,” Evander points out. Luke immediately rolls over to look at Jordan. He raises his eyebrows as high as they can possibly go, delighted amusement written across his face.
“Jordan Eberle,” he says, and Jordan’s cheeks go red.
John laughs with Evander and Jamie, but wraps an arm around Jordan and rubs his back as Jordan hides his embarrassed face in John’s shoulder. “It’s true, though,” John says, “You macked on everyone that year.”
“I was eighteen,” Jordan protests. “I had terrible taste, okay?”
“So much for the good Saskatchewan boy,” says Luke, then, “Oh, god, you didn’t mack on my brother, did you?”
“I didn’t mack on anyone in 2010, geez,” says Jordan, kicking Luke just hard enough to justify the retaliatory smack Luke aims at his foot afterward. “I was way less young and stupid then.”
“And you had some Taylor Hall kid following you around with starry eyes, so it would have been just mean to run around putting your mouth on everybody,” John says, patting Jordan’s head consolingly. Jordan snorts. “It’s too bad he’s not here. I would’ve liked to see that bromance in action.”
“Seconded,” Jamie calls from his chair.
“If Hallsy were here he would be way too busy drooling on John Tavares to be bromancing me.” Jordan drawls John’s name out dripping with excessive awe; John rolls his eyes and elbows him.
“It’s not your fault you’re a legend, Johnny,” Jamie says.
“The magical play of Tavares!” Evander crows, punching the air.
“How is it that I will never live down something I didn’t even actually say?” John asks. He gets no answer: all of his friends are assholes.
“But seriously, Ebs,” says Jamie. “We support all of your romantic endeavors, as long as they’re with Canadians.”
“And not my brother,” Luke says.
“And not Schenner’s brother,” Jamie amends.
“That means so much to me, you guys,” Jordan deadpans. Evander grins winningly from the floor; John throws a pillow at him.
They wind up going through all of the beer as they reminisce, and then finding a Finnish dubbed version of one of the Terminator movies on John’s television that everyone agrees they should probably watch, and then it’s almost an hour of weird Finnish television before Jamie claims exhaustion and calls it a night.
“Lamest, Benner,” Luke calls after him, but it’s not long before he’s yawning, too. Evander lasts a little longer; the movie’s almost over when Jordan notices that he’s actually dozed off on the floor. John gets up just enough to nudge him awake and kick him out: they’ll say their real goodbyes tomorrow.
The thing is, though, John doesn’t feel tired at all, just a little buzzed and restless, so he’s glad when Jordan comes back from a bathroom break and flops back down on the bed instead of announcing it bedtime. He’s got his phone in hand, finishing up a text message before he looks up.
“Helsinki’s no Ottawa, huh?” he says, giving John a look that says he gets where John’s head is: he knows what it’s like to muscle your way through the season with a basement-dwelling NHL team and then fly across the ocean to lose in the quarterfinals. It’s a far cry from an undefeated gold medal run, but the WJC was on an entirely different stage: Europe’s no Canada, and Helsinki’s no Ottawa.
“Understatement,” John agrees.
Jordan nods. “Like, I haven’t made out with anyone in Helsinki.” He makes a face with the joke, but John laughs, more at Jordan’s embarrassment over his younger self’s exploits than anything else.
“You know you absolutely floored me that tournament?” John asks. Jordan’s lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows to look at him. “I mean, hockey-wise, you were great and all, but all I’d heard was that Jordan Eberle was such a nice kid and then you were just makin’ out with half the team.”
Jordan rolls his eyes, but he’s grinning a little: he is still clearly just a little pleased with himself. “Not half the team. Like five of them or something. And Boychuk doesn’t count because he was a really, really bad kisser.”
John shakes his head and sighs. “It makes me a little sad I was being all faithful and shit, you know? Maybe I, too, could have made out with Canada’s Hero Jordan Eberle.” He’d thought about it, at the time, being on a line with this firecracker kid with great hands, this seriously competitive kid who was all about laughing and kissing away from the ice, and he’d thought it would be fun, but he was also eighteen and already in love with his best friend.
“Right,” Jordan says with a laugh. “Except how Tubes and I were both convinced you were shacked up with P.K. that whole time, and it wasn’t until me and Hallsy spent a week our rookie season nursing Sam through the breakup that I realized we were wrong.”
“Hey,” John protests mildly. “That breakup was amicable as fuck.” It’s true: he and Sam keep in touch better now than they did when they were trying way too hard to stretch the boyfriends thing across the continent. They broke up, but they’re still best friends. They’ll see each other over the summer, like always, and John will probably still want to kiss him, but it will be good enough just to hang out that it won’t really matter.
Jordan shrugs. “Yeah, but hey, any excuse to watch Slapshot and drink an entire case of Molsons in one go, right?”
“Absolutely,” says John. “I could go for some good Canadian beer about now.”
“I could go for any beer I can pronounce the name of,” Jordan says. His phone beeps and he looks down at it, grins a little. “Hallsy says hi.”
“Tell him hey for me,” John says, and watches Jordan type. “How’s he doing?”
“Good.” Jordan pushes himself up to sit cross-legged, one hand still curled around the phone on his knee. “You know he’s had that shoulder problem since he was sixteen? He’s gonna be unreal next year.” His voice is full of soft pride in a way that John understands intimately, a little jealously, in the way that happens when someone has something that you don’t anymore.
“You guys are the real deal, eh?” he asks.
“I hope so,” says Jordan, giving him a crooked kinda grin. “I’d really like to start winning sometime soon.”
“No, I mean,” says John, then stops and actually thinks about it. Jordan looks at him strangely, then sort of straightens up, as if he’s realized the question and is bracing himself to answer, and John immediately feels guilty for assuming. It just always seemed so obvious to him. “Never mind. Sorry.”
Jordan shrugs. “It’s fine. Can’t always get what we want, you know?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” says John. He takes a long look at Jordan: he knows the Oilers had a rough end to their season, and now this, and John feels like-he’ll always feel a little bit responsible for everyone he’s worn a letter for, but he and Jordan have a lot in common as far as the weights on their shoulders, and John occasionally thinks it would be really nice to be eighteen years old again.
“Hey,” John says, and scoots closer, curls a hand around the back of Jordan’s neck, and kisses him. He feels Jordan’s lips quirk up into a little grin as he huffs a laugh that is both pleased and strangely relieved.
“You know this isn’t Ottawa, right?” Jordan asks, leaning to follow John and kiss him right back when John goes to pull away.
“It’s Helsinki,” says John. “It’s not like anyone’s ever gonna know.”
“Right.” Jordan sounds amused, but he’s fisting his hands in the front of John’s t-shirt and hauling him in closer, so John’s pretty okay with it.
Jordan kisses thoroughly-he kisses really well, and when John tells him this, he laughs and says, “Well, you know, practice makes perfect.”
John laughs. “Oh, so that’s why you worked your way through the entire team that year-”
Jordan shoves him, feigning insult, and John just lets himself go with it, falling back against the pillows, because of course Jordan follows, grinning, and they stretch out on John’s bed together. John rucks up Jordan’s shirt at his sides and gets his hands on his skin; Jordan squirms against him, and John thinks, yes, this was definitely a good idea.
He winds up, at some point, rolling them over to press Jordan into the mattress under him. Jordan’s got hands in John’s hair and is grinding up against him, his thigh pressed warm against John’s hip. John feels like they’ve been kissing for hours and that he could keep it up for even longer than that: the warm affection he has for Jordan isn’t the same as the overwhelming love he’s had most times he’s done this, but it’s strangely comforting, and-well, Jordan’s good, so that’s a definite bonus.
“Hey,” Jordan says, muffled against John’s mouth, “lemme,” and shifts so he can get a hand between them, slipping it under the waistband of John’s sweats. His hand is dry, but he doesn’t try to jerk John off with it-no one likes a dry handjob-he just wraps it around John’s dick and squeezes gently until John groans involuntarily and jerks forward into his grip.
“Yeah?” asks Jordan.
“Yeah, just-” John wriggles out of his pants, kicking them off so Jordan has easier access when he spits in his palm and reaches down again. The slippery friction takes John’s dick from interested to involved pretty quickly, but Jordan keeps his strokes even and methodical, just enough to keep the slow burn building in John’s gut.
“You can do me when I’m done with you,” Jordan says, biting at John’s lip, like it’s just that easy-and it kind of is, John supposes.
When he comes, ten minutes later, gasping into the crook of Jordan’s neck and shoulder, John has to take a moment to catch his breath before he can even think about returning the favor. Jordan’s still in his sweatpants-his sweatpants that now have John’s come streaked across the top of them where they’re sitting low on Jordan’s hips, which John would feel bad about except for how he’s pretty sure Jordan knew exactly what he was doing. It’s quite the visual.
“Hey,” says John, dragging his eyes up to Jordan’s face: his mouth is all red from making out and his cheeks are flushed, but he grins when John meets his eyes. “Can I go down on you?”
“Go for it,” Jordan says, his laugh a little breathless.
John hasn’t sucked someone off since-well, since he and Sam broke up, but he figures now’s as good a time as any to end that dry spell in his life. He feels a little awkward at first, because he’s never has a natural talent for sex the way he does for hockey, but then Jordan makes this low, pleased noise in his throat, which is pretty good encouragement as far as John is concerned.
Jordan doesn’t seem in any hurry to get off, and it’s not like they have to rush, so John takes his time, taking breaks to jerk Jordan off and just mouth at the head of his cock when his jaw gets tired. Jordan never gets loud, but his breathing gets harsh and shallow and when he’s really close he says, “John, John,” and John doesn’t pull off but he doesn’t swallow; he waits until he’s done sucking Jordan through it and then goes to spit in the sink.
The bathroom mirror gives John a reflection that is ridiculously debauched, his hair sticking up and his mouth wet and swollen. John doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by how he looks-probably it’s just been too long since he got laid. It doesn’t matter, though, because Jordan’s the only one who’s going to see him. He rinses his mouth out with tap water, then splashes some on his face and scrubs it dry with a towel before he grabs a washcloth to take to Jordan.
Jordan is stretched out on John’s bed, his arms crossed behind his head, his sweats tugged back up around his hips. His eyes are closed, but he opens them when John comes back and gives him a lazy smile. John sits down and hands him the washcloth, watches as Jordan wipes at his stomach, the hem of his shirt, the waistband of his pants.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done that,” he says, making a face as he picks at a stain on his sweatpants. “I don’t bring guys around to me and Hallsy’s place, and girls don’t do it for me enough that I pick up a lot that way, so.”
John grins at him. “Well, it’s safe to say you’re not rusty,” he says, then, “It’s been a while for me, too.”
Jordan gives him an odd, amused look, then tilts his head and says, “Well, we’ve always been good at scoring together.”
It’s a terrible joke, but John snorts a laugh anyway. He lies down next to Jordan, not touching but still close enough to be companionable. Their elbows bump when Jordan resumes his previous position; John scoots a little closer and jostles him until he laughs.
“Stop it,” Jordan says. “You’re supposed to be a mature leader.”
“And you’re supposed to be a good Saskatchewan boy,” says John. “What’s your point?”
“That we’re both terrible?” Jordan offers.
John grins. “Speak for yourself, buddy.”
Jordan rolls his eyes, but then he goes quiet for a minute, and he keeps his gaze on the ceiling when he asks, “Is it cool if I crash here?”
“Yeah,” says John. “Of course.” Because he knows it’s not a clingy thing, a sudden ill-timed crush or over-attachment, it’s just that John’s a teammate, and John’s a friend, and John gets where Jordan’s head is right now. He’s been there. He is there.
“Cool.” Jordan gives him a lopsided smile. John smiles back, and closes his eyes.