Breaking the Ice

MM Hockey Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at your favorite retailer

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Coming Out, Bi Awakening, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Slow Burn, Closeted, Mutual Pining, Found Family

Length: ~96,000 words

Series: Standalone (with crossover characters from the Jace Wilder hockey universe)

He came out to his best friend. Three weeks later, his best friend kissed him in the kitchen — and changed the rest of both their lives.

Mark Rothstein has spent ten years pretending to be straight.

An NHL right wing on a progressive team, traded out of a conservative organization that taught him to keep his mouth shut, Mark has built his entire adult life around a performance. The girlfriends his publicist sets up. The smile he practiced in front of a hotel mirror at twenty. The four anonymous men in four hotel rooms in four cities he doesn’t play in. He is twenty-eight years old, lonely as a shut door, and the only person who has ever made him feel even a little bit like a real human being is his best friend Chris Dalton — who is, of course, completely and devastatingly straight.

Until Mark comes out to him on a Tuesday night with Thai food on the coffee table and a decade of held breath behind his teeth.

Until Chris drives home, sits in his parking garage for seven minutes, calls his sister at six in the morning, and figures out — with the self-awareness of a golden retriever — that he has been in love with Mark Rothstein for years and never had a name for it.

Until Chris walks into Mark’s kitchen three weeks later, paces in his socks, and tells him the truth.

Now they have nine months to figure out how to be a couple before the world finds out — and a teammate who is not on their side has decided he is going to make sure the world finds out a lot sooner than that.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friends to lovers with five years of mutual obliviousness
✅ Closeted MM hero coming out to his straight-identified best friend
✅ Bi-awakening hero figuring it out alongside his fiancé
✅ Praise kink, good boy trigger, soft top/sub dynamic that reverses
✅ Hidden relationship → public outing → going public on their own terms
✅ Hockey playoff run + Stanley Cup + center-ice public kiss
✅ Hyphenated last name marriage on a back lawn in Michigan
✅ HEA guaranteed (and a bonus chapter wedding night that is too hot for Amazon)

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including praise kink, light bondage, and emotionally-charged first-time encounters), strong language, depictions of homophobia (including a slur shouted by a fan in a public arena), an on-page anonymous tabloid outing, and references to a closeted past in a conservative sports organization. There is one fight on-page that involves real emotional injury but no physical violence between the leads. Heat: 5/5. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Performance

“Marcus. Quick word?”

I knew the voice before I turned around. Ellie Weston, beat reporter for The Athletic, and the particular shade of smile she wore when she was about to ask a question I didn’t want to answer.

I gave her three seconds. Set my bag on the bench. Unzipped the top of my warm-up jacket — not enough to look like I was posing, enough to look like a man unwinding after a win. Every motion a decision. Every decision the same one.

Don’t let them see.

“Ellie.” My smile had been practiced so many times it no longer required thought. “Make it quick. I smell like a locker room floor.”

She laughed the way reporters laugh when they want you to feel comfortable. It didn’t. “Two questions. Sunday night. Charity gala in Toronto.”

“I was there.”

“You were photographed with Anya Delacourt.”

“I was.”

“She’s a Victoria’s Secret model.”

“Is she.” Beat. Beat. Smile. “I don’t pay attention to that kind of thing.”

Ellie’s pen was already moving. “Any comment on the nature of your relationship?”

I looked at her the way I’d been trained to look at her. Open face. Relaxed shoulders. Eye contact just long enough to read I’m telling you the truth and just short enough that nothing hungry could leak through.

“Anya’s a friend of the organization. We both did the auction. She was kind enough to let me escort her to her table.” A shrug, calibrated. “That’s the story. I know it’s less interesting than the other one.”

“So not dating.”

“I’m dating hockey, Ellie.” The line I’d been given two weeks ago by the publicist. I delivered it like it was mine. “And she’s a demanding girlfriend.”

Ellie laughed again — real this time, or a better fake. She clicked her pen shut. “Off the record? You’re boring.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s a tragedy.”

She patted my arm and walked off toward Sasha, who was holding court in front of three cameras and the open mouth of his locker, shirtless and explaining his save in the third period with the kind of enthusiasm that made him beloved by beat reporters and beloved by everyone, really. Sasha was easy. Sasha was the kind of man who’d been himself so long he didn’t know any other way.

I stood there with my hand on my bag and my face in the smile and felt, for a half-second, the familiar crack somewhere in the center of my chest.

Then I closed it up. Reached for a towel. Walked toward the showers.

The water hit hot enough to hurt. I turned it up anyway. Pressed my forehead to the tile. Closed my eyes.

Anya Delacourt. I’d met her for the first time on Sunday. She was twenty-four years old, spoke four languages, and had a girlfriend in Milan she wasn’t ready to go public about either. We’d sat next to each other at the charity auction and she’d leaned over and said, Let’s make your publicist happy and stand close for the photographers, and I’d said Sure, and she’d said Do yours tell you who to date too? and I’d said Every quarter, like a meeting, and she’d laughed — actually laughed, not the reporter laugh — and for ninety seconds I’d felt like a human being instead of a scheduled appearance.

Then the photos ran. Then the story wrote itself. Then my phone buzzed with three different congratulatory texts from teammates’ wives, asking when they got to meet her.

I breathed in through my nose. Out through my mouth. Counted to eight. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine.

“You good, Marky?”

Chris. From the stall next to mine. His voice carried under the tile, comfortable as a hand on my shoulder.

“Always, man.”

The lie came out smooth. I’d been saying it so long my mouth knew the shape of it before my brain caught up.

“You sure? You’ve been weird since warm-ups.”

“Just tired.” I cracked my neck against the tile. “Long week.”

A pause. The sound of water on skin from the next stall. I could hear him turning under the spray, could picture it without meaning to — and that was the trouble, that was always the trouble, that I could picture it without meaning to.

“We’re going to Murphy’s,” Chris said. “You coming?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah yeah or yeah-no?”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Liar.”

“Fuck you.”

“There he is.” I heard the grin in his voice. “Five minutes, Marky. I’m not leaving without you.”

The water ran. He started humming — something off-key, something from the radio this morning that he’d been humming in the car too — and I stood there with my forehead on the tile and thought, for about the ten-thousandth time in five years, I wish you were anyone else. I wish I was anyone else. I wish I could want what I’m supposed to want.

Then I thought, quieter, deeper, in the part of me I’d spent a decade trying to drown: I wish you knew.

I turned the water off.

When I stepped out, Chris was at his stall. Towel low on his hips. Hair wet and pushed back off his forehead. Water still running down the line of his chest, catching in the dark hair there, tracing the ridge of his stomach down to the edge of terrycloth and lower. He had one foot up on the bench, tying the lace of his sneaker, and the shift of his body turned the scar across his left eyebrow into a pale line against the flush of the shower.

I didn’t look. I did look. I’d gotten good, over the years, at the kind of looking that didn’t look like looking. A photographer’s trick. A magician’s trick. I catalogued him in the half-seconds between blinks and then I put my own towel around my waist and walked to my stall and did not — absolutely did not — think about the tattoo I knew was on the inside of his right bicep, the stupid one from juniors that said NO REGRETS in a font his seventeen-year-old self had picked out, the one I’d teased him about for five years while memorizing the exact curve of the letters.

“You coming?” he said. He was rummaging in his bag now, looking for a shirt. “I ordered wings already. If you take forty-five minutes again I’m eating yours.”

“Five minutes.”

“Five minutes Marky minutes or real minutes.”

“Real minutes.“

“Uh-huh.”

He pulled the shirt over his head and the hem caught on his shoulder and rode up and I turned my whole body toward my locker so fast I nearly tripped on my own bag.

“You good?” he said again, softer this time, and closer. I hadn’t heard him cross the three feet between us. His hand landed on the back of my neck — the way it always did, the way it had a hundred times, the way that meant I’m here, relax, I got you in the language of our friendship — and his fingers were still cool from the shower.

It lasted a second. Maybe two.

It lasted exactly as long as it ever did.

Except tonight — tonight it felt like the touch went through the back of my neck and down my spine and straight into the part of me I’d been drowning for ten years, and for a second I couldn’t breathe.

“You’re weird tonight,” Chris said. Quiet. For me. Not the room.

“I’m fine.” My voice came out normal. I didn’t know how. “Long week, like I said.”

His thumb moved once against my hairline. Deliberate. Not deliberate. I couldn’t tell anymore.

Then his hand was gone and he was back at his stall, pulling on his jeans, and I stood facing the inside of my locker with my fingers braced against the metal and tried to remember how to button a shirt.

It’s nothing, I told myself, the same way I’d been telling myself for five years. He’s your best friend. He does that with everybody. It’s nothing. It’s always been nothing.

My chest did the crack again. A hairline. I closed it up.

“Marky.”

“Coming.”

Murphy’s at eleven on a Wednesday was mostly ours. Back corner booth. Wings on the table, six plates deep. Sasha re-enacting his third-period save with a french fry. Chris across from me, laughing so hard he had to put his head down on his forearm on the table.

A woman came over. Blonde, pretty, young enough that I felt briefly ancient. She said she was a huge fan. She said her friend had dared her to come over. She said could I buy you a drink? and I said Sure, thank you, because that was the answer you gave in public at a bar when a woman who’d been dared by her friend to come to your table asked to buy you a drink, and I smiled the smile and I took the whiskey when it arrived and I asked her about her job (nursing) and her dog (a rescue, some kind of pit mix) and I was charming in the calibrated way and I was funny in the calibrated way and when she finally drifted back to her friends I felt her hand linger on my wrist and I didn’t pull away.

Chris watched the whole thing from across the booth.

He’d stopped laughing at some point. I didn’t notice when. When I looked up, his elbow was on the table and his chin was on his fist and he was just — looking at me. That steady brown-eyed look he got sometimes when he was trying to figure out a read on a goalie. Mouth slightly open. Forehead a little furrowed. Quiet.

“What,” I said.

“Nothing.” He blinked. Shook his head once, like clearing it. Reached for his beer. “Nothing, man.”

Sasha banged the table. “Did you see her, Marky? That girl. She was a nine.“

“A nine, Sash?”

“Maybe a nine point two. You are a lucky bastard.” He shook his head. “Me, nobody buys me drinks. I am too handsome. It intimidates them.”

“Yeah, Sash. That’s definitely it.”

Chris laughed at that — a real one, brief — but when he set his beer down, he was still watching me. Not hard. Not obvious. Just not looking away.

I knew that look. I didn’t know what it meant tonight.

I picked up my whiskey. Finished it. Ordered another. Smiled at the waitress. Laughed at Sasha’s next joke three seconds after it landed. Did the performance. Did it well. Did it the way I’d been doing it since I was twenty years old and an assistant GM had said, in the hallway outside the scouting office where I happened to be standing, A gay player in this room would be a locker room cancer, and anyone with eyes can see the Rothstein kid is a little soft around the edges.

I was twenty years old. I was sitting on the floor against the wall. I had not yet had sex with a man. I had kissed one, once, at a summer camp, and had thought about it every day for six years.

I had gotten up off that floor, walked into the arena, and played the best game of my life so far.

I had been playing that game ever since.

Chris walked me to my car at one-thirty. Parking lot half-empty. His breath steamed in the cold.

“You sure you’re good,” he said. Not a question.

“I’m good.” I pulled my keys out of my pocket. Jingled them for effect. “Just a long one, like I said.”

“Okay.” He nodded. But he didn’t move. His hands were in the pockets of his jacket and his eyes were on my face in a way I couldn’t read. “Text me when you get home.”

“Chris. I live six blocks away.”

“Text me when you get home.”

“Yeah. Fine. Dad.”

He grinned then — the real one, the crooked one, the one he only ever seemed to show me and his sisters — and the chest-crack opened up again, wider this time, wide enough that I had to physically turn toward my car to keep him from reading it on my face.

“Goodnight, Marky.”

“Goodnight, Chris.”

I got in. Closed the door. Watched him walk back across the parking lot to his own car. He looked back once. Lifted a hand. I lifted mine.

Then I sat in the driver’s seat of a locked car in the cold parking lot of Murphy’s Pub and I put my forehead on the steering wheel and I breathed. In for four. Out for eight. In for four. Out for eight.

I am twenty-eight years old, I thought. I have done this every single day of my adult life. I am so tired I don’t know how I’m still standing.

I texted him when I got home.

made it

His reply came back inside ten seconds.

good

night marky

I looked at the screen until it timed out. Then I looked at it again when it went dark. Then I put the phone face down on the nightstand, and I got into bed alone, and I lay there in the dark of my apartment and I thought about the way his hand had felt on the back of my neck, cool from the shower, for exactly four seconds.

And then for four more.

And then I turned over, and I pressed my face into the pillow, and I went to sleep telling myself what I always told myself.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll figure it out. Tomorrow I’ll start.

I’d been saying that to myself for ten years.

Tomorrow was running out of room.

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Wedding Night — A scene too hot for Amazon

Mark and Chris’s first night as husbands. The honeymoon suite. The black tie that becomes more than a tie. The cuffs Chris bought in November and has been waiting on for nine months. The morning after, the breakfast in bed, and the late brunch where their mothers know exactly what they’ve been doing. The most explicit chapter in the book and the most joyful.

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