#daley

It had felt good to get back to the rink, to spend the day running drills until he was exhausted. He wondered if getting knocked on his head again would get everything he lost back…

He remembered most of the team now, some of the newest players still just names to him. Everyone was cool about the whole thing. It had become a running joke that whenever Hux didn’t know something, it had gotten lost in the amnesia.

The only thing that felt off, was the way Carver kept watching him. They’d joined the team around the same time but they’d never been close, not that Hux remembered him all that well. Vague snippets of him making shit jokes. He was pretty sure he didn’t like the guy.

But when he got out of the shower after practice, Carver was there waiting.

Huxley pulled on his clean clothes, ignoring the guy and saying buy to Parker and Corey as they headed out.

“So, you really lost it?” Carver asked when it was just the two of them.

“What?”

“I thought you were just making it up… You know, like an excuse to get out of it?”

Huxley pulled his hoodie on. “Out of what?”

“Out of your marriage? Or I guess out of this… us…”

Huxley froze. “Us?”

Carver closed the distance between them in a few long-legged steps. They were close in height, but Hux was bigger. Carver reached out and curled a hand slowly in the front of Huxley’s hoodie. “Us,” he said again, looking him dead in the eye and putting all the heat he could into the word.

Huxley blinked.

He looked down at the hand gripping his hoodie and then up at the guy.

“No one knows,” Carver pressed. “We’ve been fucking around for months and—”

Huxley laughed. He didn’t mean to, it just came rolling out of him.

He brushed the guy’s hand off his hoodie and went back to collecting his things. “You’re full of shit, dude.”

Carver looked honestly pissed. “I have proof.”

“The hell you do.” Hux continued to laugh, shaking his head.

Carver scrambled to grab his phone, pulling up something and turning it to show him.

Hux looked, frowning slowly at the photo of himself in the shower of the locker room. His hair was shorter, so it had to have been from a year back. He looked at Carver. “You’re saying you took a picture of me while I was soaping up and that proves…”

“You knew I took it. We—”

“What are you after, man?”

“What?”

Huxley put his bag on his shoulder and cocked his head back, waiting. “What are you trying to get right now? Is it a joke or are you an asshole?”

Carver turned red. “You and me—”

Hux shook his head. “There’s never been a you and me.”

“I thought you said you had amnesia?” he snapped, an edge like he was proving something.

Huxley huffed a breath, a thin laugh. This guy was just trying to prove he was faking it? “I don’t have to remember anything to know that I’d never be with you, dude. You’re a jerk. And I’m married. I might not know what’s been going on the last few years, but I know myself.”

“You’re faking it!” Carver shouted when Hux started walking away. “You fucked up in that game and just don’t want to admit it!”

Huxley rolled his eyes and walked out of the locker room. He’d seen the footage of the game, the one where he fell and all hell broke loose. He hadn’t fucked up anything. It was a freak accident and, yeah, his team lost that night, but that wasn’t on him.

When he got outside, he spotted David’s truck and the man himself waiting outside it. He met him on the way and grabbed his bag. “How was practice?”

Hux shrugged. “Great.” And it was, if he just ignored that last five minutes in the locker room. “Do I know Carver?” He got into the passenger seat while David tossed his gear in the back.

David paused, brow pinching. “The forward on your team? I mean, you know him because you work with him…but…” he hesitated the way he always did when he was about to tell Huxley how he had felt about people and things before. Huxley loved that pause. David didn’t want to tell him how to feel, didn’t want to influence him now with who he had been before.

“I don’t like,” Huxley said. It wasn’t a question or a statement about the past.

David laughed a little. “Yeah, sounds about right. What did he do now?”

For a split second, Huxley wondered if he should tell him or not. But if he didn’t tell David, who would he tell? He turned in the seat, his legs out of the truck and knee bumping David’s hip. “He said we were having an affair before I fell.”

Whatever amusement had been on David’s face was gone. “That’s not true.”

He said it more like a fact, like he was reassuring Huxley, than he was trying to stave off some horrible possibility.

Huxley realized David would have known. He would have smelled it on him, wouldn’t he?

“You’re not that kind of person,” he said. “If you wanted to be with someone else, you would leave me first. You wouldn’t…and definitely not with that guy. You don’t even like him.”

Huxley exhaled, that sentence feeling like a punch to his stomach. The idea of leaving David physically hurt. But the fact that he knew him the way he knew himself—believed in his character and the sort of person he was… Huxley leaned out of the truck and kissed his husband. David kissed him back, relaxing into that contact. Huxley could almost feel some of the other man’s anger drain away.

When he broke the kiss and sat back into the passenger seat, David dragged a breath and rumbled. “You didn’t do anything,” he assured Huxley, clearly still pissed that someone had tried to take advantage of his amnesia.

“I know.”

David nodded, closing the door and walking around the truck. He got into the driver’s seat. “Why would he make that up?” he asked, still not a shred of doubt toward Huxley.

Hux sighed and buckled up. “Something about proving I’m faking the amnesia.” He honestly wasn’t that mad. It was stupid. He wasn’t faking anything and he didn’t need to prove anything.

David reached out and ruffled the back of Huxley’s wet hair. It was an almost subconscious thing he did something when Huxley’s hair was down. It was the reason he hadn’t tied it up yet. “I’m sorry he was a dick. But aside from that, practice was good?”

He nodded, missing that touch when David started the truck and pulled out of the lot. “You still up for the trip this weekend?”

Huxley beamed. “Hell yes.” A bunch of them were going camping. It was something that had been planned before. It used to be a pack thing, but now it was a pack thing plus some of Huxley’s friends. David said it was still a pack thing—that packs grew with families, even when not everyone in the family was shifter.

Huxley reached out to settle a hand on David’s shoulder, wanting that contact and knowing it was okay to take it. They were taking baby steps every day. He wanted all of his memories back, but he’d also realized that he’d make new ones instead if he had to. David was worth it. “Oh!” He lurched forward when he spotted the familiar café.

David tensed, startled.

Hux pointed, tapping the window. “It’s been forever. Let’s go in. I’m so hungry I could die.”

-

It was a good thing they’d just stopped in traffic, because he would have slammed the breaks when Hux shouted “Oh!” like that.

He looked between his husband and the shop fronts of the street. He was pointing at the café they used to go to regularly for years. It was their usual. His heart raced but he reminded himself that Hux had probably gone before they met. He huffed a laugh to cover up that gut punch, nodding and turning on his blinker to get to some parking. “You never get real food when we go there so I don’t know why you’re saying it’s because you’re hungry…”

Huxley laughed. “Like your muffin is better? It’s cake, man. You know it’s cake, even if they throw a bunch of berries in there.”

His heart squeezed and so did his hands on the wheel, but he didn’t want to break the moment. Hux didn’t seem to realize what he was saying. They hadn’t been to this place since the accident, but he knew David’s usual order.

“Cupcakes are cake, muffins are bread,” he said what he always said when they talked about this.

Huxley was still smiling, watching the sidewalk. “Streusel is basically frosting.”

“In what fucking universe is streusel a frosting?”

“It’s the topping on a cake.”

“So are strawberries but we don’t call them frosting,” he countered, parking.

A little more clear version of Nix: