I Lost a Bet to My Hockey Rival, Now I Wear His Number novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Cabin

The cabin had one bed, one wood stove, and forty acres of frozen lake outside the window.

Nash had been inside for ten minutes when Gaspard shut the door and said, "Take off your boots."

"That's your opening line?"

"It is snowing on your socks. Your feet will freeze."

"My feet are fine."

"Sit."

Nash sat.

Gaspard knelt on the plank floor in front of him, in the long dark coat and the gray wool hat he'd worn off the plane, and unlaced Nash's boots with quick, sure fingers.

He peeled off the wet socks and rubbed each foot between his palms until the skin went from white to pink.

It was the most ridiculous thing Nash had ever watched, and he could not breathe.

"There is a fire," Gaspard said, to the floor. "I made it before you came. It will be warm in ten minutes."

"You drove up a day early."

"Yes."

"To light a fire."

"To have the bed made." Gaspard looked up. His nose was red from the cold, and the gray eyes were startling. "There is only one."

"I saw."

"Is it a problem?"

"Do I look like I'm complaining?"

"You look like you are wearing my jersey in a log cabin."

"That's the rule."

"That is the rule." Gaspard rose to his feet, took Nash by the hand, and pulled him up off the chair. "Take off everything else."

The room was small and the stove was red, and the whole windowed wall of the cabin was a silver sheet of frozen lake.

Nash undressed with his back to it.

Coat, flannel, jeans, socks.

Soon he stood in nothing but the jersey.

LACHAPELLE ran across his back, and the 29 sat over his heart, and the hem barely brushed his thighs.

Gaspard watched him the whole time with absolute attention.

"You are doing that on purpose."

"What?"

"Standing like that."

"This is how I stand."

"You stand like a man who has been told he is beautiful since he was twelve years old."

"I have been told."

"Who told you?"

"My mother. My coach. A guy in a bar in Providence. Fourteen thousand people on the internet."

"They were correct." Gaspard unbuttoned his own coat, and it fell. "Get on the bed."

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