Vet’s Good Boy

An Age Gap MM Hockey Romance

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Age Gap (20 yrs), Praise Kink, Bi Awakening, Mentor → Lover, Forced Proximity, Touch Starved, Forbidden Romance

He came for the mentorship. He stayed for the man.

Dave Sullivan is forty-four years old, twenty-five years into a career that’s about to end, and five years out of a closet he wasted his twenties hiding in. He shows up at five-forty-five every morning to tape his hands in an empty locker room because the quiet is the only thing that still feels like his.

Jordan Martinez is twenty-four, the franchise center the team is rebuilding around, and so terrified of disappearing that he’s the first one in and the last one out every single day. He’s only ever been with women. He doesn’t have a name for what he is. He just knows the first time the team’s veteran defenseman says good, Jordan on the ice, his entire body short-circuits.

Dave knows what hunger looks like on a young man’s face. He’s seen it across a thousand locker rooms in twenty-five years. He’s never been the one it was directed at. He should walk away. He should be careful. He should not, under any circumstances, take a twenty-four-year-old teammate to bed.

He does anyway. Slowly. Carefully. With a praise-kink toolkit that takes a young man apart kindly. With ground rules in his sock drawer. With the absolute certainty that he is going to spend the rest of his life trying to deserve it.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ 20-year MM age gap done with care, not shock
✅ Praise kink as the engine, not the ornament
✅ First time with a man / bi awakening, played for tender intensity
✅ Veteran/rookie, mentor-to-lover, locker-room secret keeping
✅ Light bondage, possessive claiming, body worship reversal
✅ A 44-year-old man with reading glasses on a chain and a sock-drawer rules list
✅ Coming-out arc with allies, not adversaries—because good for them is the whole point
✅ HEA. Real one. Wedding scene included.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, light bondage, praise kink, first-time-with-a-man, age gap dynamics), strong language, sports-related injury, and on-page processing of grief and abandonment. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the opening of the novel right here.

Chapter One: The Quiet Hours

Dave

Five-forty-seven in the morning and the Bridgeport Aces locker room was the quietest place in the world.

I liked it like this. Before the trainers showed up, before the coaches wheeled in their laptops, before twenty-three men filled the air with cologne and shit-talk and the wet slap of tape hitting skin. This hour belonged to me. It had for twenty-five years.

I sat on the bench in front of my stall with my skates balanced on the rubber mat between my feet and a roll of white hockey tape in my left hand. The stall still had my nameplate above it — SULLIVAN 7 — and a stack of clean practice jerseys folded the way the equipment kid had folded them last night. Same way they’d been folded in Detroit. In Anaheim. In Carolina. In the two other stops before that, the ones I could barely remember now because I’d been a different person then. A married person. A hiding person. A person whose whole life was a held breath.

I unrolled six inches of tape and tore it clean with my teeth.

The first strip went around the meat of my right palm. Snug, not tight. I’d learned the difference when I was twenty-three. A kid on the Wings had taped his hands too tight before a game in Philly and popped a blood vessel before the first period ended. Blood everywhere. Gloves soaked through. His career wasn’t the same after, though nobody ever admitted the two things were connected.

I pressed the tape down with my thumb, smoothed the edge, reached for more.

My hands didn’t look like a twenty-three-year-old’s hands anymore. The knuckles on my right were built up wrong from a break I’d never had properly set in ’08 — too stubborn, too young, play through it, Sully — and the ring finger on my left still bent at a little angle because of a stick that had caught it funny in the Calder Cup final in ’11. There were scars I didn’t remember earning. A white line across the back of my wrist. A little divot on my thumb. The pale band where my wedding ring used to live, faded now but still visible if you knew to look.

I knew to look.

Another strip of tape. Around the wrist this time, anchoring the first.

The thing about being forty-four in a locker room full of twenty-somethings is that you start to realize your body is a museum. Every scar is a plaque. Every ache is a display case. Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the left knee, acquired 2013, never quite the same. Please observe the limited range of motion. Please do not tap on the glass.

I laughed under my breath. Quiet, private laugh. The kind I’d only learned to make in the last five years, after the divorce, after coming out, after I’d stopped performing every second of my waking life. Used to be I didn’t laugh at all unless someone was watching and needed to see me laugh. Used to be everything I did was for someone else’s camera.

Not anymore. Whatever else this last season was going to be — and I had my suspicions — at least it was going to be mine.

I finished my right hand. Flexed the fingers. Good. Reached for my left.

Somewhere down the hall, a door opened.

I paused with the tape halfway unrolled. Listened.

Footsteps. Skate guards on concrete — that specific clop you couldn’t mistake for anything else. Light steps. Someone trying to be quiet, which meant someone who thought he was alone.

Not a trainer, then. Trainers didn’t try to be quiet. Trainers banged through doors with coffee in one hand and a laptop in the other and didn’t give a shit who was sleeping.

A player.

Which was strange, because I was the only one dumb enough to show up at this hour.

Usually.

The footsteps came closer. Stopped at the locker room door. Hesitated. Then the door swung open, and Jordan Martinez walked into my morning.

He had his stick over his shoulder, a half-laced skate in each hand by the blade guards, and a look on his face that said he’d been planning to have the whole room to himself. He got three steps in before he saw me sitting there and stopped cold.

“Oh,” he said. “Shit. Sorry.”

“For what.”

“I didn’t — I thought—”

“You thought you were alone.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not.”

He stood there holding his skates. He was wearing grey practice sweats and a faded Phoenix Coyotes hoodie with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and his hair was still damp like he’d showered before driving in, which meant he’d been up even earlier than I had. Twenty-four years old and already keeping monk hours. I knew that look. I used to wear it.

I nodded at the stall next to mine, which was three down from his own. “You can come in. I don’t bite.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Martinez. Come in. Sit down. Tape your hands. It’s a free country.”

He moved. Not quickly. He walked past me to his own stall and set his stick in the rack and lowered his skates to the floor with the kind of deliberate care you use when you’re aware of being watched. Which he was. I was watching him. I couldn’t help it.

Not because of anything. Just — you live in locker rooms long enough, you learn to read a room by reading the bodies in it. And his body was telling me a story I’d read before.

Shoulders up around his ears. Jaw working. That specific tightness in the lower back that comes from sleeping badly because your brain won’t stop running plays.

Pressure. That was what I was looking at. Just a whole lot of pressure crammed into a five-ten frame that was already carrying more muscle than a center his size had any business having.

He sat down on his bench and started unlacing the skates he’d walked in with, which were the skates he was about to put right back on. I watched him realize what he was doing and stop.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” He dragged a hand down his face. “Just. Early.”

“It’s always early.”

“Yeah.”

He looked up then, and our eyes met across the bench for maybe two full seconds before he looked away again. Found his tape. Ripped a strip off with his teeth the same way I had.

Something moved in my chest. Small and quiet. I ignored it.

We taped our hands in silence for a minute. It was a comfortable silence, or I thought it was. Hockey players knew how to be quiet together. It was one of the few social skills you got issued along with your first pair of pro skates — how to share a room with another man and not feel like you owed him conversation.

I finished my left hand. Tore the tape off. Rolled the remainder back up and set it on the bench beside me.

“First one in,” I said. “Last one out?”

He didn’t look up from his wrist. “Something like that.”

“How long you been doing that.”

“What.”

“First one in. Last one out.”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, still not looking at me. “Since juniors, I guess.”

“Since juniors.”

“Yeah.”

“Hell of a long time to be the first one in, Martinez.”

He did look up then. Just a flick of his eyes. Dark brown, I noticed. Tired around the edges. A kid’s eyes in a face that was trying very hard to be a man’s.

“It’s what it takes,” he said.

“What it takes to do what.”

“To stay.”

He said it simple. Flat. The way you’d say it’s what it takes to keep the lights on. And I understood him immediately, the whole shape of him, because I’d been twenty-four once and I’d believed the exact same thing. It’s what it takes to stay. Not to win. Not to be great. Just to stay. To not be the guy they sent down. To not be the name crossed off the roster on some Tuesday in November when management decided they needed cap space.

I’d been taping my hands at 5:47 in the morning for the same reason, once.

I hadn’t realized I’d stopped.

“Martinez.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t have to prove anything to me.”

He went still. Actually still, the way an animal goes still when it hears something it doesn’t understand.

“I didn’t say I was trying to—”

“I know you didn’t. I’m just telling you. You don’t.”

He stared at me. I let him.

I’m a big guy — six-two, broad through the shoulders, and even at forty-four I still took up more space than most men in a room. I knew what it felt like to be looked at by me. I’d spent a long time being careful about it, back when I was still pretending, because the wrong kind of look at the wrong kind of guy could end a career. These days I wasn’t pretending. These days I just looked at who I wanted to look at and let the chips fall.

I was looking at Jordan Martinez.

And Jordan Martinez was looking back.

It went on a beat too long. Maybe two beats. Long enough that I watched something flicker across his face — something small, something he caught and covered almost as fast as it showed up, but not fast enough to keep me from seeing it.

I’d seen that look on a thousand faces.

Just never directed at mine.

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