Keeping Casey (Keeping Him #1) - Amy Aislin Page 0,47

That he was competent. And so, too, were other gay boys who just wanted to play hockey.

“Thanks, man.” Finished copying the assignment down, he slid the workbook back to Ken, shaking out his cramping fingers.

“No problem. The other day, I left the house for the walk to campus and didn’t realize until I got here that I forgot my backpack by the front door. Trust me, I totally get being distracted.”

“You’re in off-campus housing?”

“Well, I’m from Glen Hill, so if my childhood home could be called off-campus housing, then sure.”

“But I thought . . .” Ethan cocked his head. “A couple of weeks ago, you mentioned that you were having trouble making friends.” It was why he’d invited Ken to the Halloween party at the House. The one he wanted to forget had ever happened. “None of your high school friends are attending GH?”

Ken shook his head. “Nope. A couple are at UVM; the rest went out of state. So I really appreciated the invite to your Halloween party. I had a lot of fun. And meeting your boyfriend was . . . interesting.”

“I don’t have a—”

“Not a fan of the glaring, though. If looks could kill, I’d have been a smoldering pile of ashes.”

“What are you—”

“I think he thought I was poaching.”

“Casey? You’re talking about Casey?”

Ken blinked at him. “Do you have another boyfriend I don’t know about? If so, that’s cool. I don’t judge. Never been in a throuple myself, but then, I’m a one-man-at-a-time kind of guy.”

It was Ethan’s turn to blink inanely. How had the conversation turned from life distractions to throuples? “Casey’s not my boyfriend,” he finally said, ignoring how the words burrowed under his ribs.

“Oh.” Ken’s entire body sagged, and his eyes tilted downward. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He sounded it too. Maybe Casey was wrong about Ken being interested in him? “No wonder you forgot your workbook. I’d be distracted too if I’d just broken up with my boyfriend.”

“No, I mean . . .” Great. Ken thought Ethan was going through the fresh pain of a recent breakup, when in reality, he was trying to deal with years of dashed hope and the knowledge that Casey didn’t return his feelings. Possibly never would. “Casey and I were never together.”

“But he said—”

“I know what he said.” Chest tight, Ethan played with his pen. Click, click. Click, click. “We were only pretending to be boyfriends because—” Click, click. Click, click. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, we weren’t actually together.” How would they handle that with Britton, anyway? And the rest of the guys on the team who thought they’d actually been together? He supposed he could just . . . not say anything. Pretend they were still together even though Casey no longer came around. Or would he pretend that they broke up? Of course, he could always tell the truth.

We were just pretending to be boyfriends because Britton’s an idiot, but that’s over now, and can we please move on?

Ugh.

All things he should’ve thought about when Casey proposed this stupid arrangement.

“Are you sure?” Ken prodded, head cocked. “Because he really did look like he wanted to kill me.”

“That’s just Casey,” Ethan said with a casual shrug he didn’t feel. “We’ve been best friends forever. He’s kind of possessive of me.”

“Are you sure that’s all it is? Because—”

“I’m sure,” he interrupted. God bless Ken for being sweet and concerned, but if Ethan had to rehash what he’d been thinking about all weekend, he was going to scream. “Trust me.”

“How do you know?”

Tossing the pen onto the counter, where it bounced into his water bottle with a tinny clink, Ethan blurted, “Because I asked him, okay?” Gazes swung their way and he lowered his voice. “I asked him to be my boyfriend, at the party no less, and he—” laughed. He shook his head, blowing out a long breath that did nothing to ease the constriction in his throat.

Ken winced. “Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. Sorry, too, that I pried. I honestly thought he . . . Anyway. Doesn’t matter. If there’s anything I can do to help . . .”

Ethan shot him a wan smile. “Thanks.”

He didn’t need help, though. He needed distractions. And thankfully, the TA running the lab came into the room, forcing Ethan’s thoughts off Casey and onto properties of gasses.

Ethan breathed in the cold air of the ice rink a few hours later and cued up another puck from the pile Roman had dropped onto the ice. Since they were merely shooting pucks