Fair Warning
"Tell me again why I'm doing this?"
Steve threw me an amused glance as I asked the question for what had to be the tenth time. "Stop messing with that," he admonished me in lieu of answering, batting my hands away from my terribly askew bow-tie. I let my hands fall to my sides as he took over, averting my gaze so he wouldn't see my blush as the backs of his fingers brushed against my throat. "Because," he repeated with infinite patience, "You love your community, and you want to give something back to the people that have given you so much."
"They've never given me anything," Sean complained as he gazed moodily into the mirror, working an obscene amount of gel into his soft curls. "Can I leave?"
"No," Steve pronounced, smiling with a certain benign sadism.
"Bastard," Sean groused, twisting a curl into place. "I can't believe I'm being punished like this for being single."
"Well, you should have married that nice girl that proposed to you last month. Why didn't you? Oh, right, she was twelve." I hid behind Stevie just as the bottle of gel went sailing over my head and smacked into the wall. It wasn't just an excuse to touch him. Honest.
"Fuck you, Boyd," Sean murmured darkly, scowling as Steve and Jiri burst into fits of laughter.
"They're ready to start," Brendan informed us as he ducked behind the curtain, moving to stand beside his captain. "Aww, don't they look adorable?" he cooed, earning dark looks from all of us.
"Let's just get this over, eh?" Jiri muttered, clearly uncomfortable. He kept playing with his handkerchief, running it through his hands over and over until Brendan finally took it from him and stuck it resolutely in his jacket pocket.
"What if some wrinkled old lady buys me and tries to have her way with me?" Sean demanded, looking around the room with wide, panicked eyes.
"'Have her way with you'?" Brendan repeated. "You sound like such a girl. Who says that?"
"It could happen!" Sean protested, looking not at all pleased at being called a girl by the alternate captain.
"I'd hope you could fight her off somehow," Mathieu Dandenault replied drolly. "I know how difficult it is, as a hockey player, to fend off those little old ladies."
"You all suck," Sean grumbled, pouting. He looked poised to say more, but just then Chelios's voice rang over the PA system. "Okay ladies, I think we're ready to begin. First up, at twenty-one years of age, number two, Jiri Fischer." Jiri shot us all a deer-in-the-headlights look before taking a deep breath and disappearing between the curtains.
And so it went for the next hour, my teammates being called forward in no particular order, sweating and squirming on stage as women fought over them, until at last I was the only one left. I squared my shoulders and tried to look unintimidated as Cheli called my name. "Head up, kid," Brendan offered encouragingly as I braced myself to go on stage. "It'll all be over soon."
"And now the last bachelor of the evening, twenty-four years old, number twenty-one, Boyd Devereaux."
I ducked through the curtain and instantly wished I had never come to Detroit, never become a hockey player, never done anything that had inevitably brought me to that stage.
I'll spare you the gory details. It took about ten minutes in all, ten of the longest, most uncomfortable minutes of my life. The lights were hot and bright, shining directly on me, making it impossible to see all but a small section of the crowd. I have no idea how much I sold for--I couldn't even tell who won. I was just glad when it was over.
I descended the stage with leaden steps, feeling like a condemned murderer on his way to the chair. Without the last meal.
"Easy, Boyd, breathe." I glanced up in surprise to see Stevie smirking down at me, looking highly amused. "You'll give yourself a panic attack that way."
"Umm, yeah," I muttered intelligently, blushing as I felt my stomach flutter. "Er, you didn't happen to see who bought me, did you?" I asked, casting a nervous gaze about the room.
"Actually, I did see," Stevie replied with a teasing wink as we ambled companionably down the hall together.
"Oh, yeah?" I asked, without much enthusiasm. I glanced around again to find the mystery woman and was startled to find we were alone. "Who?" I began to ask, but at the same moment Stevie crushed his mouth to mine and swallowed the sound.
Oh. Oh.
"Oh," I said dumbly as we parted for air. I wasn't sure what to do. I opened my mouth to speak and felt myself dangerously close to babbling. "I'm going to start babbling idiotically any second now," I assured Stevie, feeling like the singular biggest dork in the universe.
"I suppose I'll have to shut you up, then," Steve acknowledged with a resigned sigh. I nodded happily, my eyes fluttering closed as our mouths reconnected. I was suddenly grateful as hell that I'd come to Detroit, become a hockey player, all the things that had brought me to that stage.