3. KNOX

THREE

KNOX

I'm a bad, bad man. I need to move my leg away from Easton, not press it closer. These hockey boys take up some room, and I'm a big guy, but even with the five of us, it's a roomy couch, and I could have more space if I really wanted it.

The problem is that I don't.

Connor, Easton, and Lachie all look alike in the way that brothers do. But where I look at Connor and have the urge to whack him across the head or shove him into some bushes, or look at Lachie and want to ruffle his hair or have a heart-to-heart, looking at Easton does not give me the same wholesome vibes.

Unlike his brothers, there's something about his caramel hair, bright gray eyes, and slightly prettier features that make me hot from my scalp to my toes. Which, with my skin, would be sort of a dead giveaway if I hadn't learned to control my blushing when I was a teenager. But I did, so props to me because I can look at the second Kiki brother, picturing all the filthy things I'd do to him if I ever got the chance, and no one in the world knows the images going through my head.

No one, but especially not Connor.

Being murdered isn't on my list of things to do today .

But I will shamelessly soak up the heat radiating from his thigh into mine.

"So, you're the Collective …" I say, and almost every head in the room snaps my way. "Here I was thinking there'd be more … debauchery."

"Debauchery?" Oskar Voyjik perks up.

"Down, boy," Aleks Emerson says. "And you're our ref?"

"So I'm told. Here I am, ready to stand there and look pretty."

Ezra looks me over. "You're doing a top-notch job of it so far."

Connor, whose arm is slung over the back of the couch, subtly pinches my shoulder over and over, reminding me of what he said about Ezra and Anton.

And like they're proving him right, Anton lets out a sexy-as-fuck smile and says, "I love a man with freckles."

Ezra's gasp is dramatic. " Hey . You said I get to flirt with pretty men. I didn't say you could."

"My mistake." Anton looks like he's trying not to laugh. "Can you tell Connor's friend I think his freckles are hot?"

Ezra turns to me with a glare. "You could try being less good at the looking pretty part."

"I'm not complaining," Ayri Quinn mutters beside me before rapidly turning red.

Yep. So glad that doesn't happen to me anymore. And while I'm enjoying that I could get the attention of so many hockey players at once, the one I want to pipe up has gone silent and is playing with his phone. I try to glance at Easton's screen, but he has one of the privacy protectors on, not that it matters.

A second later, he turns the phone so we can all see. "This is Connor and Knox at Halloween. They went as Dumb and Dumber. If you ask me, I can't tell a difference."

"Hey!" Connor protests at the same time as I snatch his phone away. Damn , that's a bad photo. We really went all out that year. Connor cut his hair into that weird semi-bowl cut, and I let mine grow out all scraggly.

"I take it back." Anton lets his laugh go. "You're still the prettiest person in the room, Ez."

"Pretty is overrated," Cody Bilson says. "Gimme weird any day."

"And I sure as hell do."

He and Miles Olsen drink to that, and I turn back to the phone, about to delete the photo. As soon as Easton works out what I'm doing, he grabs my wrist.

"Oh, no you don't."

"There's no way this photo is surviving the day," I say. "Quick, Con. Grab the phone."

Connor goes for it while Easton throws his weight into me, and as the three of us wrestle, Asher Dalton stands, plucks it out of our grips, and takes off to the other side of the room.

A million phones sound or vibrate a second after Asher tosses it back my way.

"There you go. Delete it."

I sigh as snickers break out behind me. "You sent it to everyone in the room, didn't you?"

"Sure did. We queer dudes stick together."

It's on the tip of my tongue to tell them that I'm queer too, but I hold off. It's not like I'm planning on hooking up with anyone in this room, and they clearly have no issue with flirting with me either way.

"Now that we've established Knox is butt-ugly, can you all stop hitting on him?" Easton asks.

"Maybe I was enjoying being hit on." I make sure that no one can mistake my words for anything but a joke, but Easton turns his pretty gray glare on me. I eat my words fast. "Ah, I mean. Bad hockey players. Don't do that. Hit on Connor instead."

"Dude, don't throw me under the bus."

Oskar rolls his eyes. "Straight men. "

Not straight, but whatever. People are going to assume what they assume, and there's not a damn thing I can do to stop it. I'm not a public figure like the others, so my sexuality matters to me and my partner, and that's it.

I don't give a shit who knows, but I don't go around announcing it to every room I walk into.

When Easton settles back into the couch again, we're not touching this time. It's for the best, and I really need to behave myself, but even the urge to talk to him is strong. Maybe if I take a vow of silence, I'll have an easier time resisting the temptation that is Easton Kikishkin.

Or y'know. Maybe if I actually wanted to resist him, that would make it easier as well.

"Did you have a good flight?" Tripp asks, distracting Connor, who gets up to join Tripp and Dex, who have moved to the kitchen to refill snacks and drinks. Asher's standing with Miles and Bilson now, and after a second, Quinn says, "Ah, I'm going to … I have to …" Then, before he can think of a thing, he gets out "piss" and disappears down the hall.

I turn to Easton, wondering if that was as weird to him as it was to me. He's watching where Quinn disappeared, eyes narrowed slightly.

"Those fuckers."

"Who?" I ask.

East quickly shakes his head. "Nothing. These guys are weird. You'll figure that out soon enough."

"You're the one who was so excited to join the group."

"Hey, they might be weird, but they're my weird."

I pretend to look unimpressed. "And now they all have embarrassing photo evidence of me and Con. Thanks for that."

"Couldn't have them all falling for those freckles of yours, could we?"

I try to read into the tone, hoping to hear something that isn't there. "Doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. "

Easton shoots a quick look toward his brother. "Still haven't said anything to Connor?"

I shrug. "It's not like he doesn't know. I don't think we need some huge conversation about it."

"Uh-huh. But we had a huge conversation about it."

I almost tell him it's because it's different with him, and while now that might be true, when he first messaged me on that app, it wasn't. He was Con's little brother, who was way too young and way too pretty to be looking for men to hook up with.

"You had no one else to talk to back then."

"Just doing your brotherly duties?"

There's that word again. Even in his sarcastic tone, I don't like it. I lean in so we're eye to eye and say, "I'm not your damn brother."

One corner of East's lips curls upward. "Then stop acting like him."

Joke's on him because that's not possible. Not only because Connor and I are similar in a lot of ways but because not acting like him might mean that I slip and accidentally cross lines I have no business crossing.

Plus, there's the whole cockblocking thing I'm supposed to be working on, and Connor did not mean for me to block all these other cocks with my own. This isn't a damn jousting tournament. I'm not winning Easton's honor here.

In fact, I'm about ninety-three percent confident we're going to leave this charity extravaganza with him as pissed at me as he will be at Connor.

But I won't have to witness him hooking up with anyone, so that sounds like a fair trade-off to me.

Boyfriend or no boyfriend, East could have any damn man in this room. I don't even mean because he's the hottest one here, but there's this restless energy to him that draws me in. Which is exactly the reason I need to pull back.

Reluctantly, I lean back away from him, thankful that Connor didn't witness me coming at our friendship with fire. I'm the kind of guy who always tries to do the right thing. It's been years. Years and years since Easton Kikishkin got under my skin, and I plan on it being many more years that he hangs out there and I do nothing about it.

The problem with plans is that you actually have to follow them, and self-sabotage is something I know well.

Need to watch what I eat during conditioning? I'm going to smash down a tub of ice cream.

Need to get up for an early run? I'm going to sleep through all five of my alarms.

Having to pick up my game to make it into the draft? I'll walk away from it all instead.

Keeping it in my pants so I don't lose the best friend I've ever had? This is the one time I need to do the right thing, and the only reason I've held on so long is because of my loyalty to Connor. I clear my throat and push to my feet, intending to join literally anyone else outside of this sexual tension building in my head, when Ezra announces loudly that we're all going out tonight.

Of course we are.

This whole cockblocking plan is going to be harder than I thought.

Because it's not the others I need to worry about. It's me.