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How do you figure out that you’re different and not just crazy? He used to ask himself that a lot. Maybe it was the wild moments of deja vu when a cousin or an aunt would recount a dream he swore he had too. Maybe it was the way the sleeping pills they started giving him in his second season made him feel somehow less rested. Maybe it was clutching the bowl of a toilet, puking his guts up, and already knowing the wild story Patrick’s about to tell him between twisting heaves, a full gatorade from the vending machine and water in a coffee mug with freezer burned ice, waiting at his elbow, for Jonny to straighten back up and wipe his mouth, so he can gruffly hand it to him, like they’re not both terrified about what’s wrong with him.
Maybe he never really believes, maybe he just wonders. Maybe they figure out the right combination of meds and diet and maybe what he sees in Patrick’s dreams never shows on his face, so maybe he’s just imagining it, hoping for something that isn’t really there. Maybe he tucks it away and doesn’t look at it ever again, because if it’s real, then he has to look at the way it makes him feel when he wakes up in the pitch black, one bed over, sheets wet with sweat, and shorts slick and damp with spent come.
He communicates the dreams that feel like they need sharing. The ones heavy with a message.
“Everything you touch is turning to gold tonight,” he says with half a laugh so that Patrick knows he can take it or leave it. But Patrick always listens. He may be one of the few who doesn’t look at Jonny like he’s being a loon. Jonny doesn’t want to examine that one any closer.
Sometimes he’s too late, sitting bolt upright in bed in his cabin on the lake, sound of the gentle waves crashing on the shore, and looking at the clock and knowing it’s 4 AM in Buffalo and feeling that something has gone horrifically wrong. He doesn’t reach for the phone. Just a few hours later and he’ll wish he had.
He doesn’t dream for a long time after that. Almost like he’s being punished for not following his impulses.
*
Patrick hasn’t had sex in a while, and he doesn’t really fantasize anymore.
But tonight he’s imagining his thighs grasped by strong arms, holding him down, spread and restrained by powerful shoulders. There are certain ways you move when you have to keep your partner in mind, but Jonny can hold him still as much as Patrick flexes and thrusts against his upper body, trying to push into that feeling, but Jonny stays firm.
It’s a beauty of a blowjob. Soft wet passes of his mouth, cheeks tightening down around the head, his practiced hand working him. Thumbing up his taint, while holding his cock so he can’t ejaculate. Makes Patrick feel like he’s dangling unfairly on the ledge, that space where you start to think, fuck I’m getting blue ballsed, it’s not gonna happen, into the deep slam back into the earth, body filled with sensation, flooded, coming apart at the seams.
Patrick wakes up with a jolt before his alarm and thinks whoa, what? He rolls over and finds himself checking his shorts guiltily, but aside from the morning-typical boner, there’s no embarrassing evidence of wet dreams. He lets it go and perfunctorily jerks off in the shower, pointedly not thinking of anything at all.
The next time finds him knelt over Jonny’s chest, slamming his cock into Jonny’s mouth. Jonny’s arms are spread by restraints at his wrists holding him to Patrick’s headboard. He’s yanking at them hard enough to make the wood protest and it makes Patrick smile.
He lets Patrick tease him, smack him across the face, call him a dirty slut, groaning, guess who could take it like a bitch too. But when Patrick finishes, he easily snaps the cuffs like he was only pretending to be restrained, and flips Patrick over and rails him. And he comes too quickly. But it’s a dream, and dream Jonny doesn’t lose his erection. He keeps going. Until Patrick is shouting curses at him, twisting under him, dying to come, but also fighting it. Jonny hits the right angle at the right moment for the right number of times, and it’s game over and he’s coming a second time, somehow harder than the first. But Jonny, moving like a machine, doesn’t stop, not even when it strays into over-stimulation.
And Patrick likes it. He takes it into himself, he craves...more.
*
He’s playing well, and he’s sleeping better than he has in months. He wakes up feeling rested and the cold hard data of his sleep tracker app seems to agree. He’s just...having the occasional uncomfortable dream about Jonny. If occasional is once or twice a week since the season started up. Using the lobby wifi and a browser set to incognito, he googles ‘uncomfortable sex dreams about people you know’ and is shamefully scrolling through the Allure magazine link that had popped up first. His other options had been Marie Claire, HelloGiggles, Cosmo, and Refinery29. Apparently reputable science had yet to tackle this subject. Comforting.
The section on “sex dreams about a platonic friend” is not entirely unhelpful. “Perhaps the sex dream is simply happening because this is someone you can't have sex with.”
Patrick can accept that explanation. Although he’s pretty sure if he told anybody that he’s having sex dreams about Jonny because he can’t have sex with him, they’d find it pretty damning. He can’t have sex with Angelina Jolie either, and it’s not like he’s dreaming about her.
“You look like you’re trying to blow up your phone with the power of your mind,” Jonny tells him when he finds him.
“Hmm?”
Jonny raises his brows. “You good?”
Patrick clears his throat and thumbs the article off the screen. He’s too flustered to even come up with an excuse. “Sorry, just some um, weird dreams lately.”
“Oh?”
He darts a look over at Jonny’s face and he looks oddly intent, so Patrick races to reassure him, “Nothing bad.” He scrubs his hand over his mouth. No, definitely not bad, he thinks as he quickly looks Jonny up and down. Just, weird. And very inappropriate. Even now he has the strangest sensation that he knows exactly what Jonny’s mouth will taste like, what his cock will feel like in Patrick’s palm, the way his lids flutter right before he’s about to come.
Amend that: extremely inappropriate.
Looking concerned now, Jonny starts to say, “Kaner—”
“Hey, I just realized I left my backup charger with Shawzy, lemme go grab that from him,” Patrick interrupts. “See you on the bus?”
“Yeah,” Jonny says and it comes out easily enough, but he feels the weight of Jonny’s eyes on him as he walks away.
*
Sleep doesn’t come easily for a couple of nights, and if he dreams, he doesn’t remember them. Patrick weighs whether that’s a good or a bad thing. He’s still playing well, but he feels like he’s burning the candles at both ends. He’d welcome a sex dream about Jonny right now if it meant he got better rest.
“You look like shit,” Shawzy says, skating up to him on the ice.
Patrick snorts. “Thanks.”
“So does Jonny,” Shawzy tells him.
As if drawn by the sound of his name Jonny pivots to face them. He does look a bit drawn, blue bruised circles under his eyes like he hasn’t been sleeping either.
“What was that?” Jonny calls.
“You look like shit!” Shawzy calls back.
Jonny shrugs. “And yet, alway better than your ugly mug,” he tosses over his shoulder as he turns back around, not sounding even the slightest bit sarcastic.
“Did I just get brake checked about my face by Captain I’m So Goodlooking,” Shawzy asks with a delighted cackle.
“That was stone cold,” Patrick confirms.
“Might’ve been the most uncharitable thing I’ve heard him say in a long time,” Duncs adds, wheeling up out of nowhere, stick braced across his thighs. “What’d you do this time?”
“Me?” Shawzy says, “Nothing!”
*
Finally, a few nights later, he crashes hard, and sure enough, he dreams.
This one reminds him of an old porno they’d seen accidentally when scrolling through channels at a hotel. They’d been a little drunk, and a lot stupid, and the next morning, Patrick had woken up and realized, and had to rush down to the hotel concierge to pay for it so that Tony wouldn’t see Surprise Squirting Ballerina on the bill. He’d been fully ready to bribe whoever it was to get the charge removed, so just his luck it was a middle-aged woman. She’d cackled and taken his fifty, and said something mortifying about the porn being safer than sex anyway, and all of that had stuck harder in his memory than the actual film.
But it did still come back to him occasionally, jerking off in that artificially cool room with Jonny just a bed over. It was a DP/DV with a chick that had tits the improbable size and shape of grape fruits, and to this day he has no idea why they’d stopped on it? He remembers the bottom guy had seemed oddly gentle, tucking her hair back behind her ear, kissing up her chest and gentling her when the guy in back pulled his cock from her ass and stuck it in her cunt in a long slow slide.
Only tonight, Patrick’s sitting in place of the girl, with Jonny underneath him, already splitting him open on his cock. There’s a backwards ballcap on his head, the one he was wearing earlier today when Patick was awake.
Jonny’s tongue slides over his lower lip, lids heavy over his eyes. “You still think about this too, huh?” he says, a strange smile ticking at the corner of his mouth.
“What—”
A familiar hand wraps around his throat, squeezing, and pulling him back against a solid chest. And in that bizarre way of dreams, Patrick doesn’t question how Jonny is also behind him, easing his cock alongside the first one while Patrick shivers and shakes.
His alarm jolts him awake and his first thought is extreme annoyance because he didn’t get to come, and only after, staring down at his erection in the shower, does the inevitable ‘what the absolute fuck was that?’ kick in.
*
“You’re in a good mood,” Alex observes when he sits down on the plane.
“Hmm?” Patrick asks, pulling out one of his earbuds.
“You’re humming along,” Dylan says, he grins like he’s barely holding back a laugh, “to the Lion King soundtrack.”
Patrick shrugs. “Elton John’s always a classic.”
“Can youuuu feel the looooove tonight,” Dylan mocks, in a surprisingly onkey rendition.
Patrick doesn’t rise to the bait.
“Hang on,” Duncs says, looking up from his latest weird true crime thriller, “did you finally get right with someone?”
“What? No.” Patrick says, even as his eyes slide involuntarily towards Jonny, who’s sitting a couple of rows ahead with Saader. He’s bent over a crossword puzzle, pencil in his mouth, and he’s just gotten the hair at his nape trimmed, making the long arch of his neck look surprisingly vulnerable. Obviously he did not actually have sex with Jonny in any shape or form. He doesn’t even want to have sex with Jonny, but the dreams are just so vivid. He asks, somewhat absently, “Are we taking bets on that now?”
He finally tears his eyes away to find Duncs has followed his gaze, brows raised, a thoroughly amused expression on his face.
“Getting right?” Murph interrupts. “What the hell kind of old man slang is that?”
*
They’re in the showers at Fifth Third Arena, Jonny’s body bracketing him in, back pressed up against the tile, water cascading down all around them, slippery palms skidding. Every single tap seems to be on, fountaining out rivers. He keeps thinking at any moment, somebody could walk in, anybody could walk in. He means to say something about it, but he’s too wrapped up in Jonny’s touch to really care. Let them see as Jonny hikes him up against the wall and fucks inside on a single stroke.
“Oh god,” Patrick says, pressing his cheek to slick tile and groaning. “Of course you can do this.”
“At least here,” Jonny chuckles against his throat.
It’s still dark outside when he wakes up with an all too urgent need to piss. Guess that explains all the water.
*
He takes a bad hit during the game and it must still be on his mind, because that night he dreams of Jonny taking practice runs at him from different angles on the ice complete with shouted instructions. It feels pointless, it was a momentary lapse, the one time his head wasn’t on a swivel in how many years? He doesn’t know why his subconscious needs to school him with a disapproving Jonny, and after a while he’s tired of it, and decides to get the usual show on the road, tossing his gloves aside before Jonny has a chance to reset. Patrick pulls him in close.
Jonny blinks, and stops, tugging off his own gloves. He reaches up to grab Patrick’s hand on his jersey.
“Interesting,” he says, bemused, smoothing his thumb over the back of Patrick’s knuckles. He smiles, and for a moment something deep in Patrick’s subconscious twinges, but then they’re falling to ice that isn’t cold, removing gear with ease.
When he wakes up it’ll just be another weird ass dream he’s left shaking his head at.
*
At the end of practice the next day, it’s Jonny who looks the worse for wear.
“What’s up with you?” Patrick asks as he watches Jonny try to twist out his spine after he’s stripped down to his Under Armour shell and high socks.
“Pulled something in my mid-back, I think,” Jonny says, looking annoyed at himself. “Getting old sucks, eh?”
“Careful where you aim that ‘old,’” Patrick says. “You might be old, I am not old.”
Jonny laughs. “And right now, I feel it.”
“Aren’t you, like, the same age?” Kirby asks, blatantly eavesdropping. “Isn’t that your whole, you know, 1988 deal?”
Jonny presses his lips together like he’s hiding a smile.
“We didn’t do it on purpose!” Patrick protests. He amends, “Well I don’t know what Jonny’s sentimental ass did, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“That is such a lie,” Duncs says from across the room, already out of the showers and toweling down his hair. “Their rookie year they made them write these stupid journal things to promote the league, and lil Peekaboo over there had one entry about fate and their birth year and their jersey numbers. Man, we got so much mileage out of that one.”
“Wait, seriously?” Alex asks, pausing where he’s unlacing his skates. Duncs, Seabs, and Jonny crack up.
“That’s actually really nice,” Dylan offers, and now everybody is laughing.
“I was just trying to fill up space!” Patrick says, face flaming up. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to write!”
“You are so full of shit,” Duncs says. “You had the biggest boner for Jonny those first couple of seasons, and you were so mad about it too. Not that I blame you, considering.”
“Hey, I’m great,” Jonny interjects.
“If I remember correctly it got Sharpy’s panties all knotted up too,” Seabs says. “He definitely expected to be the cool older brother, ready to take you both under his wing, show you the ropes, and then Jonny was Jonny, and there you were, writing 1988 forever in your rookie journal.”
Patrick throws a roll of tape at him.
“They took each other to the NHL awards,” Duncs says, cupping his hand like he’s telling a secret to the rest of the locker room.
“I wasn’t seeing anybody at the time!” Patrick replies, shooting a ‘bail me out here’ look at Jonny, but Jonny just leans back in his stall and grins, having far too much fun at his expense.
“Man, I feel lied to, ” Murph says, “When I was with the USNTDP, there were all those tall tales about how legendary you were with girls.”
“Excuse me, every last one of those stories is true,” Patrick says, “I did not have a boner for Jonny.”
“You did,” Duncs repeats, “a giant friendship boner, but still a boner.”
“I’ve had friendship boners before,” Dylan says consolingly, patting Alex on the head, who mimes pretending to take a bite out of his hand.
Patrick can only muster a weak, “That’s nice, Dyl.”
He and Jonny actually were really tight those first few seasons. Part of it was the unique position they had on the team, so young and already faces of the franchise in a league that skewed much older, part of it was that they had history. They’d played together as adolescents and Patrick had followed Jonny’s career. He’d been fascinated with him. Jonny had, it had seemed initially, slightly more emotional distance.
He doesn’t know if whatever that was those first few years counted as a friendship boner or whatever, but Duncs’ comments hit differently when he’s dreaming night after night about having sex with Jonny. That’s not...he’d never looked at Jonny that way back then.
Jonny was a giant dork who told bad jokes and got a little too zealous about certain things, but he had an intensity on the ice that Patrick resonated with, and a self-possession that Patrick envied. He knew exactly who he was. In some ways Patrick hadn’t felt he’d ever had the space to figure that out for himself.
In time they’d settled into each other, he’d thought. They had different interests—they liked different movies, and music, Jonny loved to travel in off season, and he was an adventurous eater for all that his diet was limited. Patrick liked Cabo and Hawaii, and he hadn’t even tried sushi for the first time until he was in a scoring slump during the ‘13 cup run when Bicks had invited him out for dinner to get his mind off of it. But somehow someway they meshed well.
Patrick had never considered himself much of a talker, but he never seemed to run out of road when he was with Jonny. So maybe Duncs was right, and that was a bit of a friendship boner. Maybe that’s what the dreams were about too.
*
He smooths his palms down Jonny’s back, pressing downward, working out knots, smoothing out tension and riding his cock along the channel of his ass. Jonny turns his head and lazily, indulgently smiling, crosses his arms above his head, like he already knows exactly what Patrick wants from him.
When Patrick flexes against him in the same moment that he pushes down on a particularly dense knot, Jonny groans low in the back of his throat and shoves his hips back.
“Do you wanna fuck me, Peeks?” Jonny asks, mischief in his voice.
The hard flesh of Jonny’s ass could never be confused for a peach, but the smooth downy skin that seemed to love Patrick’s fingers digging into it, could. He hauls back on Jonny’s hips, dragging him up to his knees. Jonny’s skin is luscious everywhere, supple and sunkissed, even his cock, down the rosy bulging head that skids across Patrick’s palm, unable to keep from fondling him.
His hole just right there, almost ready for Patrick’s mouth.
And he wouldn’t ever do this, he wouldn’t ever do this, he wouldn’t…
But in this cocoon of dreamscape he is, parting Jonny’s cheeks, tonguing him up while Jonny groans and seems almost surprised. He keeps at it until his cheeks and chin are wet all over, and Jonny’s pink hole looks so goddamn inviting for his cock he can’t not slide it inside. The muscles in Jonny’s back go tight in beautiful sharp relief, but he pushes eagerly back into it, taking Patrick deep, and when Patrick reaches for his cock again, he finds Jonny’s hand already there.
“Let me,” Patrick says, and Jonny nods without looking up, dropping both palms to the sheets, and fisting tight.
*
They play a shit game the next night and Jonny and Patrick wind up arguing on the bench between shifts like they’ve regressed to their 20-year-old selves. Duncs, Seabs, and Saader find the back and forth hilarious, but everybody else, including Jeremy, looks at them like the world is ending.
“What is happening?” Dylan asks, sounding thoroughly freaked out, after two periods of non-stop back-and-forth.
“Nothing,” Patrick shouts, cutting Jonny off from whatever stupid thing he was about to say. “Absolutely nothing.”
Jonny looks like he’s about to say something particularly biting in reply, but then Jeremy calls for Jonny’s line to go over the boards, more to separate them than because of any attempt to line match.
Jeremy cuts him a look. The one that says ‘I’m not even three years older than you, please do not make me have this uncomfortable conversation about maturity with you.’
Patrick knows he’s being a pill. He can’t seem to stop.
*
He dreams of fucking Jonny over a table, his wrists crossed tight and firm in Patrick’s grip at the small of his back. But they’re not alone. The shadowy room is full of young players. The ones that say they worship him and Patrick, the ones who get breathless and starry-eyed. They stand silent, staring now, disbelieving, as Jonny’s chest skids across the table with each forceful shove of Patrick’s hips. They can’t look away as the most respected captain in hockey gets drilled and loves it, lives for it. Who cries out every time Patrick thrusts home, whose thighs are shaking from how full his dick is, how close he is to coming, but...just...not quite there.
“Please,” Jonny begs.
When he pulls back he can see the heavy weight of Jonny’s sac between his spread thighs, already drawing up tight, his little red hole flared open, desperate to grab onto something. Patrick stabs back inside and Jonny gasps, arching, muscles in his legs going momentarily slack under him so that it’s only the face of the table still holding him up.
Do you like them watching you, Patrick wonders, as Jonny groans and twists under his onslaught. Patrick likes them watching that he gets to have this. That this belongs to him.
He gasps and jolts awake, heart pounding too hard in his chest. Patrick can still grasp those feelings, that sensation of ownership. If he closes his eyes lets himself fall back asleep, he might end up right back there all over again. He doesn’t understand any of this anymore. It’s starting to scare him.
*
The stress of their less than stellar record must be getting to him, because the restless nights return. First it starts with the mornings where his wake up playlist starts up, and he can’t believe he’s slept at all for all the actual rest he’s gotten, fitfully tossing and turning, where he can’t quite tell what’s sleep, or thought, or reaching some weird exhausted hallucinogenic state. Did he have that conversation with Jonny in real life? Or was that another one of those stupid weird dream things? He doesn’t remember them well and they make his head hurt, leaving him unsettled. He wishes he could go back to a time when things were easy and he didn’t remember his dreams, or if he did they were stupid nightmares like worrying about the puck not going in at crucial moments, not whatever this is.
He does his best to hold it together through all the punishment his body is taking on the ice, the double-shifting that never seems to stop these days, but without sleep it starts to make him ill and sore all over, head pounding even when he’s sitting still.
That night back in his hotel room, he lies back on his bed, fully dressed, drained, unable to summon up the energy to do more than stare up at the popcorn ceiling. A light knock at the connecting door takes a moment to even register in his brain.
“It’s open,” he calls.
Jonny pushes into the room, holding something out in his hand. A milkshake, Patrick thinks, if the plastic domed lid betraying whip cream is any indicator.
“What?” Patrick mumbles, honestly wondering if he’s seeing things, the great evangelist for all things healthy and natural holding out a dessert. “Are you handing me something stuffed with refined sugars?”
“Just take it,” Jonny says, sitting down on the mattress beside him. “It’s strawberry.”
Patrick salutes him with the cup and then takes a long draw on the straw. It’s a good shake—just the right thickness, made with real strawberries. “Where’d you get this?” Patrick asks, looking at the cup. There’s no logo.
“Grubhub, place called Cold Front,” Jonny says. “Cheers.”
Patrick takes another sip. It reminds him of the early days when Patrick would run to get ice and gatorade on the nights when Jonny couldn’t keep anything down.
“Having trouble sleeping?” Jonny asks, sounding troubled.
Patrick shrugs. “Seems like I can’t cobble together enough of it these days.”
Jonny nods. “I remember what that was like.”
Patrick nods. “I wish more people understood just what it was like for you back then, what you were up against.”
Jonny sighs. “I would’ve been cool if they never had any idea.”
Patrick has a sudden horrifying thought. “You didn’t give that interview to take the heat off of me, did you?”
“It’s not always about you, man,” Jonny says with a laugh, knocking his shoulder. “Figured I had to give some kind of explanation as to why I was interested in all of these sustainable food initiatives.”
“Good,” Patrick says.
“You know it helps if you—” Jonny waves a hand “—set an atmosphere conducive to sleep.”
Patrick raises his brows, unimpressed. “What does that even mean?”
“Like put on some classical music before you go to bed—” Patrick snorts and Jonny bats at him. “Drink your milkshake, I’m completely serious, studies show it helps. Also I know you get cold, but turn the temperature down a little.”
“Okay, make myself cold, listen to boring old music, any other suggestions?”
“You could try that turmeric CBD tea that Duncs swears by,” Jonny says.
“It’s just...so...orange,” Patrick replies, making a sour face.
Jonny laughs. “Take my advice or leave it.”
“I’ll try it, I’ll try it,” Patrick says. He sets the milk shake down on the floor and drops back flat on the mattress. He sighs. “If nothing else so I can avoid these fucked up dreams I’ve been having.”
Jonny freezes next to him.
Patrick raises his head off the mattress to look over at him. “Not like...not like your stuff,” he says quickly. “Nothing about the future. I don’t see anything happening to anyone.”
“Ah,” Jonny says, rubbing his hand over his sternum as he stares off into space.
“You’re the only one with the weirdo powers,” Patrick says after a long moment, unsure what has Jonny so bent out of shape. He wouldn’t be territorial over something like fucked up dreams, would he?
“Yeah.” Jonny rolls to his feet without meeting his eyes. “Try to get some rest, kay?”
*
Patrick doesn’t know what does it, the cold, the ‘classical music for sleep’ playlist he finds, or Duncs’s horrible CBD tea, but he starts drifting off again and the dreams blessedly disappear. He’s not sure why he wakes up feeling strangely bereft.
It’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t make sense that it would be a bad thing. The dreams were weird and uncomfortable, and just because Patrick had liked what they were doing in dreams, didn’t mean he wanted to do that stuff in the real world. It was awkward, and sometimes it had made interacting with Jonny kind of uncomfortable. If he’s learned anything from his googling, people dream weird things about weird people where they do weird uncharacteristic things all the time.
Now he doesn’t have to worry about that weird subconscious journey he went on for a few months there. It means nothing. He doesn’t miss it.
*
“Fuck, I missed you,” Patrick says, when he’s got Jonny naked beneath him again. It can’t really be true, after all he sees Jonny nearly every day, but skates and games and daily lunches were not this.
“I did try to stay away,” Jonny tells him, arching as Patrick thumbs his nipples.
“Why?” Patrick asks, but then he doesn’t let Jonny answer.
They kiss and touch for an eternity. The room keeps rotating around them. One moment Patrick’s got Jonny flat on his back, and then the room lurches, and suddenly, Jonny’s backed him up against the wall. They slide across the floor, only Patrick thinks it’s actually the ceiling, and then somehow they’re bouncing back onto the bed again in a tangle of limbs.
“I wonder what this says about me,” Patrick wonders aloud just as the room gives another dizzying jolt, dumping them both on their sides right into a rack of carefully hung shirts and trousers. The closet he realizes. He’s lucky it’s just a dream, and things never hurt in here.
“Hmm?” Jonny asks, lifting his head from where he was kissing a trail down Patrick’s chest, undeterred by the room’s weird gymnastics.
“This,” Patrick gestures, and just then gravity falls out and they slam into the opposite wall before the floor takes a perpendicular tilt and sets them both on their feet, Jonny’s back pressed to the plaster and Patrick leaning against him.
Jonny casts his gaze around them, amused. “Something about power dynamics, I imagine.”
Patrick snorts and leans in to bite him right over one thick trap and then again, further down his throat.
*
“—ner!”
The sound of snapping fingers.
”Kaner, wakeup!” a sudden jolt on his shoulder.
Patrick sits bolt upright, blinking in the suddenly too bright light of the plane’s cabin lighting. He stretches and looks around with a yawn and realizes that almost everybody has deplaned already.
“Jesus,” Duncs says with a laugh, “both you and Jonny were out for the entire flight.”
“Hmm?” Patrick says, he looks over and sees Jonny stuffing belongings into his carry on and then swinging it over his shoulder. He does look bleary eyed.
“Seabs only just got him up. Guess you just can’t stop copying each other,” Duncs says, but Patrick barely hears him, because as Jonny digs out his headphones with one hand, he absently presses his fingers on the other into the exact spot where Patrick so deliberately bit him. It was just a dream. There’s no mark. No angry imprint from Patrick’s teeth. It could be a wild coincidence, but his fingers keep passing over it, back and forth.
“Kaner, are you listening?” Duncs says, loudly enough that Jonny jerks his head up, startled, hand dropping belatedly from his throat.
He catches Patrick staring at him, and his expression goes from surprised to trapped in an instant. And that’s how he knows.
A million things slotting into place at once, but writ large across his mind is that bizarre reaction Jonny had when Patrick brought up his freaky powers. They weren’t just dreams and Jonny had known.
Feeling suddenly horrifically exposed, Patrick does the only thing he can think of. He bolts.
*
It’s kind of impossible to hide from somebody who can hijack your sleeping brain. Apparently all of Patrick’s new sleep rituals hadn’t ever been able to keep him out.
Jonny finds him in the middle of a frustrating anxiety dream where the team is down one in the third with two minutes left on the clock and every shot he lines up, no matter how perfect, goes wide of net. They’re on a never-ending PP and his arms feel like useless alien jello and he can never seem to move his feet fast enough to retrieve the puck.
“I didn’t mean to,” Jonny says, when he appears next to him on the ice in the rumpled suit he was wearing on the plane. He looks sheepish. “I can’t exactly control it. I tried to do other things when I ended up here, not sex stuff, but you—I tried to stay away.”
“How did you stay away?” Patrick asks.
Jonny looks sad. “First I tried ambien, and then alcohol to interfere with REM, nothing really worked until I decided to just stay awake.”
“Jesus, Jon,” Patrick says, stricken. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“At first I didn’t realize what was going on. Not until the day you mentioned that you were having weird dreams and you were looking up sex with a platonic friend on your phone,” Jonny tells him. Patrick wants to sink through the ice. So much for being stealth.
“And then I didn’t know what to say. ‘Hey sorry, I think we’re fucking in your dreams?’ Sometimes I was so sure you already knew. Others, I dunno. I didn’t know what to say.”
A puck from the opposing team wizzes past Patrick’s ear from the game still going on in the dreamscape. “Can you get us out of here?” he snaps, annoyed.
Jonny coughs. “I don’t actually control it.”
“What?”
“It’s your dream, your construct, I suppose. I can interact with it,” Jonny says as he picks up Patrick’s hand and pulls off his glove, pressing their palms together. He feels real enough, or real-ish, maybe. “But I have to follow your rules.”
He holds a hand out for Patrick’s stick and when Patrick gives it to him, Jonny hooks the puck right off the blade of an opposing d man attempting to skate past and then lines up for a sweet slapper. It looks like it’s on target, right until the very last moment when it hits the end boards with a solid smack, wide of net.
“How are these my rules?” Patrick protests.
“You’re the one giving yourself this dream,” Jonny says with a shrug.
Patrick snorts. “Did I give myself the sex dreams too?”
Jonny looks at him beneath lowered lashes and doesn’t answer.
“You know that’s not what I’m really like,” Patrick says a little desperately, meaning, he doesn’t know what—gay? Into anal penetration? Into Jonny? In love with him, maybe?
“Maybe it is if you could let yourself,” Jonny says, but he doesn’t sound sorry, or disappointed, or any of those things, he sounds like he’s planning on changing Patrick’s mind.
*
When he wakes up the next morning, he’s pretty sure he must’ve dreamed it all and it’s too meta and recursive to bear thinking about, but it feels like the sort of fuckery his subconscious might come up with, that he’s somehow cohabiting his sleep cycle with Jonny. That absolutely has to be a product of free association. He manages to convince himself of this pretty thoroughly, right up until the moment where he actually sees Jonny in the locker room and the initially tentative look on his face that condenses down into that famous grim determination.
So they did have that conversation. So he did guess right when he saw Jonny on the plane. So they were fucking all along. And talking, Patrick realizes. He’d been speaking to Jonny directly when he’d told him how much he missed him, missed the sex. He had to make clear he hadn’t actually meant—it was just weird dream shit.
“Still not really like that,” Patrick hisses at him right before stepping out onto the ice.
Jonny looks taken aback for a moment, before a smirk takes its place. “Care to prove it?”
“Yeah, fine,” Patrick says, and then skates away from him.
There’s special teams meeting after skate, first the PP and then the PK, and the latter Patrick never attends. It would be easy to escape and forget this whole thing. Which doesn’t explain why he’s loitering outside the doors, bag over his shoulder, pretending to play around on his phone while waiting for Jonny to get out. Worse, Jonny doesn’t even look the least bit surprised to see him there when he exits with Saader.
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Jonny tells him, clapping him on the shoulder. Saader nods at them both and makes himself scarce.
“So…” Patrick says, looking Jonny up and down, mouth going slightly dry. This same time last year he wouldn’t have noted the breadth of Jonny’s shoulders, or the hollow of his throat, or his long-fingered hands on his bag-strap. Fuck these stupid fucking dreams.
“Your place or mine?” Jonny offers easily.
Patrick snorts. “Yours.”
*
“So,” Patrick says, sitting on Jonny’s bed, looking around.
Jonny’s moved so often in the last few years, that he hasn’t been in his bedroom in a really long time. Now they’re both in this building, with similar floorplans, and nearly identical layouts for the master suite, but they have very different feels. There are plants everywhere in Jonny’s room—
potted palms, hanging plants trailing leafy curled vines on the walls, and medium and small varieties Patrick can’t name littering nearly every flat surface. They stand out, gem-like against the fashionably dark walls. The bed is lower to the floor and covered in a pile of pillows, and there are books littering both end tables. But the most surprising thing is the semi-sheer curtains hanging at all four corners of the bed from industrial fittings fixed to the high ceilings.
“So I can keep the windows open at night,” Jonny says, from where he’s leaning against the wall, watching Patrick take it in. “Even in the colder months.”
“You’re a freak,” Patrick says almost by rote. It’s a beautiful room. The bed, with its fluffy high-loft duvet and soft washed cotton linens, is practically an altar to the god of sleep. Patrick’s room seems almost anodyne in comparison to this.
“Do you want to take a nap first?” Jonny asks, amused.
Patrick rolls his eyes. It had seemed such an easy task. How many times had they done this by now? Patrick had dreamed of rimming him, of fucking Jonny in front of people, and somehow this was tripping him up worse. Part of it was that they’d often started off right in the middle of the action, naked, sometimes mid-fuck. Bridging that gap was a lot harder in the cold light of reality.
“Just, take your clothes off,” Patrick grumbles, bending over to untie his white Common Projects Achilles sneakers.
“You know, we could start a lot slower than that,” Jonny says, but obligingly pulls his sweater off. He’s wearing a tight white t-shirt underneath that makes his biceps look amazing.
“Whatever,” Patrick says, tugging Jonny in by his waistband and dragging him in for a kiss he already knows he will not enjoy. Jonny dodges his mouth, laughing, hands going to Patrick’s waist.
“Hey, hey, c’mon,” he says gently when Patrick makes a frustrated noise. “Peeks, the only person you’re fighting here is yourself.”
“Christ,” Patrick whispers, dropping numbly back to sit at the foot of the bed.
Doesn’t Jonny realize that Patrick knows that? He wouldn’t be here, pretending it was a chore or otherwise, if he hadn’t wanted to be. He’s not a moron. He was happy in those dreams. He’d only woken up unsettled and disturbed, because it was a part of himself he’d tried not to know for a very long time, and a part of Jonny he’d never thought Jonny was willing to give. And then Jonny was so easy in it, he’d known and he wasn’t scared. It had spun Patrick for a loop.
“I’ve had a lot longer to get used to it,” Jonny tells him almost like he knows what Patrick is thinking. He drops to his knees at Patrick’s feet, bracing his arms over Patrick’s thighs as he looks up into his eyes. “I started seeing what was in your dreams many, many years before I ever could participate.”
“Is that the only reason you’re interested?” Patrick asks, brow quirked.
“You’re ridiculous,” Jonny says, sounding both fond and irritated by equal measure.
Patrick opens his mouth to reply, but Jonny leans up and cuts him off with a kiss, just a simple press, but it lingers, sending a rush of heat through him. Patrick finds himself tangling his fist in the neck of Jonny’s t-shirt and tilting his head so he can part his lips and taste him.
They kissed in those dreams, but Patrick doesn’t remember feeling it. He doesn’t remember thinking Jonny was particularly skilled at it, or unskilled for that matter, either. But fuck is he good at it, the slow flex and dip of his tongue light, letting Patrick dictate the pace until his own lips and tongue are buzzing.
After a while, the position gets awkward, so Patrick backs up on the mattress, tugging at Jonny so that he doesn’t get any ideas about stopping, sinking back into the duvet and plush mattress. When Jonny’s frame slots together against his own, it’s both familiar and novel, and Patrick is flooded by the sweet shock of how right it feels. A shiver travels through Jonny’s frame, and Patrick knows he’s not alone, practically undone by a little fully clothed frenching.
The kiss breaks naturally and Patrick blinks up into Jonny’s dark eyes.
“Fuck,” Jonny says. “I’ve wanted this for a very long time.”
“You could’ve said,” Patrick says, reaching up to cup Jonny’s cheek.
“Oh?”
Patrick smiles. “Your dreams do have a funny way of coming true.”
*