“Okay,” Jack says. He sounds deceptively calm as he takes a few steps forward and throws himself onto the bed next to Connor, lying on his stomach and propping himself up on his elbows. “What are we watching?” Connor doesn’t answer immediately, just messes with his computer for a few seconds, and then spins it so that Jack can see what’s pulled up on the screen. It’s porn, which is what Jack expected. That’s what people watch to jerk off; it’s what he watches and of course it’s what Connor McDavid watches. He didn’t actually think that Connor jerked off to hockey highlights or something.

"I, uh, basically want Eichel to blow wide-eyed girl!McDavid's mind. And for him to be kind of a dick about it." Connor's attempt to buy herself a vibrator is thwarted, but there's still a happy ending.

McDavid sits back up. "Is this what your head is like all the time?" he demands. Jack shrugs. "Sometimes I think about hockey," he says.

Jack has tried deflection, dismissal, and flat-out denial, but nothing seems to be able to dissuade the media from the McDavid-Eichel rivalry narrative, which is why he agrees when Connor suggests trying a new tactic: pretending to be friends.

Jack Eichel has 99 problems and Connor McDavid is... well. More of them than he thinks. In which Jack hates Connor McDavid, who he's never met, quietly pines after the cute girl he always sees in the gym, and has no idea that these two things are related.

Either way, there was someone or something to blame for the fact that Jack ended up sending Connor Fucking McDavid a dick pic. Perhaps it was the universe as a whole.

Jack feels the metal bite into his wrist. There’s more resistance than there should be, and with a growing sense of horror, Jack looks down to see that Saader has locked him into one of the cuffs belonging to a pair of hot pink, fuzzy handcuffs. The other is around the wrist of fucking Connor McDavid.

"How about," Connor says, real low and warm, dangerous and tempting. Jack's stomach drops straight through the floor. "I'll let you blow me, and we'll worry about labels later."

There's more than one reason that Jack wanted to go first.

The text just says, hope you’re doing well, when Jack sees it in the preview screen. That’s why he opens it. A week past his surgery, the well wishes have slowed to a trickle, but he’s still getting a sporadic few messages per day. Some of them, like this one, are from numbers he’s forgotten to save over the years. So he opens it. Only. It’s not just a text message – there’s that, the text he already saw. But also, above that... a nude.

Obviously, everybody knows that there is no blessing without a curse, or a curse without a blessing. It’s the universe’s handy little trick to keep things balanced, so that nobody can ask for too much for free, so that nobody can curse their neighbor without also doing a little good. A matched set. It just that Connor’s starting to think that he really, really did not grasp this concept when he was six years old. ... Jack’s quiet for a long moment. “I’ve never seen a curse like this,” he says finally, and Connor shakes his head, blood draining from his face. “That’s because,” he says, horror settling low in his belly. “Jack, that’s because I’m the curse.”

When the PR team makes them do a couples quiz for the team's YouTube channel and Connor gets every question about him right, that's when Jack has to acknowledge to himself that, yeah, maybe they've become friends. or, Jack and Connor get drafted by the Seattle Kraken.

"Yeah, I think it's better that way than in front of a bunch of cameras. I mean, it's better to be a little bit low key about it."

Everybody knows about the bet.

“You kissed me the night before we got drafted,” Connor says, unbuckling Jack’s belt and making light work of yanking Jack’s jeans down to his knees. With Jack’s thighs and his penchant for tight fitting pants, it’s an impressive move. “Blew me in the men’s restroom right after dinner.” “Fuck you I did not,” Jack grunts as he lifts up his hips to help Connor strip off his boxers.

Jack has a huge dick. Jack is a huge dick. Unfortunately, he's also the best lay of Connie's life.

Connor’s still not really sure how to handle having this kind of reputation, about it spreading past the O.

The first time Connor sees him, in person, he’s wearing a backwards hat and holding a Frappuccino. He looks eighteen and very much not like a member of the undead.

"I kissed McDavid and then we won a game," Jack blurts out. He flexes his hand nervously. There's a suspicious silence on the other end of the phone line, but Noah is probably not laughing at him. Out loud.

ack says, "We've talked about this so much I'm not even sure it turns me on any more." Connor pulls up at a red light. "Liar," he says.

nice hatty, the text says. No capitalization, no emojis, nothing. Jack doesn’t even have the number saved in his phone. Originally that was out of pettiness, but what it actually means is Jack has Connor McDavid’s number memorized without even having tried. Apparently that’s what happens after a year and change of seeing it pop up on his lockscreen. It’s not even like McDavid texts him that often. Once they’d gone three months without speaking. Which is fine. They’re not really friends, exactly. They are sort of coworkers, and they have eaten each other’s cum, but they’re not, like, friends.