Like You’ve Nothing Left to Prove (Breakaway #2)

by E.L. Massey

So he notices when things start to go wrong.

And the realization is both terrible and a little cathartic: Eli is worth it. Eli is worth risking hockey. Not at some indistinct time in the future, but now. Right now. “He’s my boyfriend,” Alex says. “Please, he’s my boyfriend. You have to let me see him.”

He considers apologizing but can’t bring himself to do it because he’s not sorry. It worked. He’s holding Eli’s hand right now, and he can’t be sorry for that.

He’d forgotten about the real world. Or maybe Eli is the real world, and all of this is just bullshit.

There’s a pair of (probably) teenagers in rainbow morph suits, dirty dancing in front of a man with a sign about Alex going to hell.

“Uh, yeah?” Alex says, tightening his grip on his stick. “I’d be a pretty shitty boyfriend if I wasn’t.”

“But I have warning for other teams if the league do the wrong thing. Anybody say bad things about Eli, my aim very good.”

“Oh, me?” Martel throws his thumb, cavalier, toward Okezie. “I’m just here as moral support for my boyfriend.”

he’s seen all too closely how tenuous Eli’s existence is.

Love is the fire of life; it either consumes or purifies.