#ws2 angst

you hate how your heart tightens at the mention of his name, or how your eyes search for him first. you hate how you have to bite back a love confession when you're on the brink of an orgasm.

because that wasn't what either of you agreed on. it was just sex – purely sex.

and yet here you are, spiraling at the realization that your feelings for will are no longer platonic. over the course of secret meet-ups behind the team's – particularlu your father's – back, you've fallen utterly, embarrassingly, and madly in love with him.

the biggest problem with that, along many others (like how he's literally part of the team your dad coaches), is that.. will doesn't love you back.

you wish there were signs capable of deluding you into believing he reciprocates even a quarter of how you feel, but truthfully, there's nothing.

you could see it in his eyes, devoid of that kind of warmth you hold specifically for him. you felt it in the cold air of your empty hotel room after he leaves—not before cleaning you up and saying goodbye, though. he isn't an asshole.

he just doesn't like you back.

but the lack of signs doesn't stop you from fantasizing about a universe where he loves you too. where you can slip an 'i love you' in a heated moment, and he'd say it back. where he stays until he has to go back before anyone can notice his absence. where he kisses you and it means something.

but that universe wasn't this one.

———————

when the crushing realization finally became too much, you stop joining roadies as often. it wasn't rare for you not to join before—you weren't free all the time—but it became more frequent. the first two roadies you miss, will doesn't contact you, and you hate yourself even more for expecting that he would.

by the third one, he calls.

"hey, coach just said you're not coming. you good?" he asks, concern lacing his voice, but not enough to show that he really cares. well, not ad much as you do, at least.

regardless, the fact he even called made you light headed. you know he was just checking as a friend, but you crossed his mind. that has to count for something, right..?

"uh.. yeah! i'm alright. i'm just catching up on school," you lie. you don't have any classes this week, but will doesn't know that.

"warso actually told me you were free for like– a week?"

okay, what the hell.

and why was your dad airing your business out?

you let out an awkward chuckle. "yeah but there's, just, stuff. you know?"

you sounded terribly unconvincing, and you know will wasn't buying it, but he didn't ask any further.

"alright.. see you when we get back?" and there it is.

you know what he means by that, and your heart drops – not because you don't want it… but because you of how badly you do.

your body shakes, and you don't know if it's from want, or fear. this was a bad idea from the very beginning, and the small voice in the back of your head is pleading with you not to fall back into it.

say no.

say it.

say it.

"..sure," but you can't. you don't have the guts to end this, and right now… you're not entirely sure if you want to.

———————

the day the team comes back, will wastes no time bringing you to his place.

when you make it to his room, he kisses you like he's annoyed you've been depriving him of this, fumbling with the lock to make sure nobody interrupts.

he sighs into the kiss, hand traveling up your head, entangling his hand in your hair. "fuck, i missed this."

your chest aches as you remind yourself, over and over, that he doesn't like you back.

you fall onto the bed, immediately discarding your clothes as he does the same. you shamelessly stare at him as he takes his belt off, looking at the small part of his mouth, the way his curls fall in front of his face, basically screaming at you to brush it away; and his chiseled abs. you can feel yourself growing wetter by the second.

he takes a condom out of his pocket, but realizes he hasn't prepped you yet, and places it on the bedside table.

"been a while since you've taken me, right? what do you want first: my fingers or my mouth?"

fuck.

you don't know how to respond, looking at him with wide eyes and a flushed face. "i- uhm—"

"hurry if you wanna cum, sweet thing. fingers or mouth?" his chain dangles slightly as he hovers over you with a hint of a smile on his lips. he's never asked that before, and you never expected that being given the option would feel this fucking hot.

still, you're flustered, having been caught completely off guard. "m-mouth..?"

he makes an incorrect buzzer sound as he inches closer to your heat, "wrong. the correct answer was both."

he presses a kiss on your clit and you shudder, hands flying to his hair.

"sensitive, are we?" he smiles up at you while sliding his fingers across your cunt. you whine in response.

he pushes a finger in and your thighs instinctively close in on him, but he uses his free arm to pin one of your thighs down. "work with me here, pretty."

he starts thrusting his finger in and out at a brutally slow place, taking his time to press kisses around your inner thighs. sucking, nibbling, biting, then kissing the spot when you hiss.

you start to grow impatient. "will—please," you cry, unable to do anything else other than beg.

"i'm getting there, pretty. just wanna soak you all in in case you disappear on me again," your heart races. what does that even mean?

will doesn't give you the time to think about it before latching onto your clit, sucking gently as he finally picks up the pace of his finger.

his muffled moans causes you to clench. "baby you're supposed to be loosening— shit—"

you tighten around his finger again and he shakes his head in disbelief before slowly adding another finger in.

he lays his tongue flat on you as his fingers quicken before they curl, making your vision blur. "fuck, will– ngh!"

the sensation is overwhelming, a tidal wave of heat and friction that makes your entire body arch off the mattress hits you hard. when your walls squeeze tightly around his fingers again, will lets out a low, guttural growl against your skin, the vibration of his voice sending jolts of electricity straight to your core.

you tighten your grip on his hair, but he doesn't pull away—instead, he presses harder, his tongue working in tandem with his fingers to drive you right over the edge.

"that's it... give it all to me, y/n," he mumbles against you, his breath hot and ragged.

 youe vision fractures into white light as your orgasm hits, muscles pulsing rhythmically around him.

 you let out a broken, high pitched cry, your fingers digging into his shoulders as you shake with the intensity of it. will helps you ride it out, pumping his fingers in shallowly as he pulls back just enough to crawl up your body. his eyes are dark and blown wide, filled with something you couldn't quite name.

 he looms over you, chest heaving as he watches the aftershocks ripple through you—twitching, whining, and desperate for more.

 when you regain most of your vision, your heart crumbles. the only word you could use to describe how he looked right now is devastating.

 sweat glistening on his skin, curls a mess, and that golden retriever charm that still shone through despite the current intensity. he was so, insanely, devastatingly handsome.

 he rests his forehead against yours, deep blue eyes staring right straight into yours, reaching the depths of your soul. the air thickens, and it feels like a million words were on the tip of his tongue—mouth opening and closing multiple times. sensing the growing intensity, the kind that led to saying things you regret leave your mouth, he opts to swallow whatever it was, and places a rough kiss on your lips.

 you moan into it as he does the same, and he reaches for the condom on the bedside table, "now let's see if i can make you scream my name instead of whining it out."

 your heat pulses at his words and is practically aching to be filled as he slides his tip across your slit. in one, slow, heavy thrust, he's filling you completely, and you swear you could feel him in your throat.

 your eyes flutter shut as your body adjusts to the sheer size of him. did he grow a couple inches, or what? jesus.

 will groans, a sound of pure, unadulterated relief, as he buries his face in the crook of your neck, his skin hot against yours. he stills, adjusting to you too, then he nibbles at your neck, making sure not to leave too clear of a mark, but doing so anyway because it makes him feel like you're his.

 "fuck, you're so– tight–" he groans, starting to thrust into you at a pace that had your knuckles white from gripping the bed-sheets. every slow thrust makes you feel every inch of him, and it's driving you insane that you can't be his.

 "will—" you cut yourself off with a moan, "god, it– FUCK!"

  will had pulled away until only the tip was in, and thrusted into you so hard you saw stars. he's reaching into every part of you, fucking you like he's memorizing you—like he's engraving how good your walls feel around him, and the way they flutter around him in ways he's sure would kill him one day.

 you wish he'd just fuck you harder. faster. anything to stop it from feeling so..

 real.

"You said seven," you said.

"Game went to overtime."

"You could've texted."

"I did text."

You picked up your phone. One message, sent eight minutes ago: almost there, don't be mad

"That's not a real heads-up, Will."

"It's a heads-up."

"It's a cover-your-ass text."

"Okay, yes," he conceded, flagging down the server. "It was a cover-your-ass text. But I'm here now." He looked at you properly then — the kind of look that you'd spent four months trying to not let mean anything. "Hi."

You exhaled. "Hi."

He stole another fry. You let him.

The thing was — and you would never say this out loud, not to him, not to anyone — being around Will was fun.

Not fun like a good playlist or a night out. Fun like a live wire. Like the two of you had some private frequency nobody else was on, and every time you were together you both found it immediately and everything just. Crackled.

He talked too much during movies and somehow always had the right thing to say. He remembered the name of your childhood dog and brought it up at completely random moments. He could make you laugh harder than anyone you'd ever met and he knew it, used it deliberately, and you couldn't even be mad about it because it worked every single time.

And then there was the other thing.

The other thing was its own category entirely.

The other thing was the reason you'd driven across town in a snowstorm in November, why you picked up his calls at midnight when you had a 7am the next morning, why you had essentially stopped being able to think straight in a radius of about three feet from him. You weren't going to examine that too closely. The point was it was good — stupidly, inconveniently good — and it made everything else about this impossible situation feel like a very reasonable trade-off.

Most of the time, anyway.

You tried to have the conversation exactly once before you learned better.

You'd been on his couch, maybe six weeks in. He was showing you something on his phone, a video of Toff attempting to parallel park a rental car in Nashville, which was genuinely hilarious, and you'd been laughing and then you looked at him laughing and thought: okay. now. say the thing.

"Hey," you said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah." He didn't look up from his phone, already pulling up a follow-up video.

"What are we doing?"

He looked up then. Put the phone down. Gave you his full attention, which was almost worse because it was a lot of attention. "What do you mean?"

"I mean—" You gestured vaguely between the two of you. "This. What is this."

He considered it for a second. Or he appeared to consider it. Then he shifted, closing the distance between you on the couch, and said, very close to your ear: "Right now?"

"Will—"

"I'm just asking for clarification."

"That's not—" His hand found the back of your neck and you lost the sentence. "That's not what I'm talking about."

"I know." He was smiling. You could hear it. "What are you talking about?"

You turned to look at him, which was a tactical error because he was right there and his eyes were doing the thing. "You're deflecting," you said.

"I'm clarifying," he said, and kissed you, and the conversation dissolved so completely that twenty minutes later you genuinely could not remember what point you'd been trying to make.

Which, looking back, was entirely the problem. And also, if you were being honest, not the worst outcome.

"You told Toff we weren't coming to his thing on Saturday," you said, standing in Will's kitchen with your coffee while he rummaged in the fridge.

"I told him I wasn't coming."

"He texted me asking why we weren't coming."

Will straightened up, fridge door still open. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"He just assumed. I didn't say we."

"Right, but—" You stopped. The but here had a lot of directions to go and none of them were easy at eleven on a Thursday morning.

"Does it bother you?" he asked. Simple, no edge, just looking at you across the kitchen island.

"I don't know," you said.

He nodded. "Okay." Then: "You want eggs?"

And that was it. Filed somewhere neither of you would look. You said yes to the eggs. He made them exactly the way you liked without asking, which should have felt like a nice thing and mostly did, except you were standing there watching him and thinking: that's the whole thing, isn't it. He knows exactly how you take your eggs and has no idea what to do about any of the rest of it.

There was one night, maybe two weeks before the Chicago thing, where you'd driven over with actual intentions.

Three things to say. You'd rehearsed them in the car. I need us to be clearer. I need to know you think about me when I'm not here. I need more than this. Solid. Reasonable. You were ready.

He opened the door in a t-shirt and joggers, already grinning like he'd been expecting you, and said "perfect timing" and pulled you inside by the wrist and you were very briefly a person with a plan and then you were not.

Later, some unmeasured amount of time later, you were lying in the dark of his room, his arm heavy across your waist, the city doing its quiet thing outside. He was almost asleep. His thumb moved against your side without him thinking about it, slow and warm.

You stared at the ceiling.

What were the three things?

You tried to remember. You could not remember a single one.

You turned your head and looked at him. The line of his jaw in the dark. The way he breathed. The completely unreasonable fact of him.

You thought: I should care more that I forgot what I came here to say.

You thought: I really, genuinely, completely do not care.

You closed your eyes.

The fight, when it came, was stupid. It was always going to be stupid.

The big stuff slid right off because you never quite gripped it long enough to deal with it, so it had to be something small that finally snagged. This time it was a road trip.

"I said I'd probably come up for the Chicago games," you said.

"I know."

"And you didn't say anything when the schedule changed."

"I didn't think—"

"I had to find out through the team Instagram, Will."

He went quiet. Standing in his entryway, still in his coat, and he just let the quiet land between you. That was worse than if he'd argued. Will could argue great — quick and funny and frustrating in a way you almost enjoyed. The quiet was different. The quiet meant he knew.

"I live inside this schedule," he said finally. "I forget other people have to plan around it."

"I'm not other people."

"I know." Gently. "I know you're not."

"Then act like it." Your voice came out steadier than you felt. "That's the whole thing. That's all I'm asking."

He ran a hand through his hair. You stood in his hallway and felt the gap between you widen in that particular way it had, like it had its own momentum, its own ambitions.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Okay."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." That was the exhausting part. "You always mean it. That's sort of the problem."

Something moved through his face, not quite hurt, more like recognition. Like you'd named something he'd been hoping you wouldn't.

Neither of you moved.

Then he stepped forward and his hands found your waist — not a move, just there, warm and certain and completely unfair — and you leaned into him before your brain had any say in it.

"I hate this," you said into his shoulder.

"Yeah." His arms tightened. "Me too."

Outside, it had started to rain.

Cat asked you once, over coffee, how you'd describe it.

"Describe what?"

She gave you a look.

"I don't know," you said.

"That's not a description."

"We're good together in some ways and terrible in others."

"Which ways terrible?"

"Talking." You said it without thinking. "Any time something actually matters we just — orbit around it. Every time I think we're finally going to get there, something happens and then we don't."

"And the good ways?"

You looked at her. She raised her eyebrows.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah."

"Okay but how good."

"Cat."

"I'm just asking for a sense of scale."

"Very," you said, and felt your face do something involuntary. "Which makes it worse, honestly, because I know what I'd be walking away from. But then the Chicago thing happens and I'm like — does he even think about me when I'm not there? Or am I just—" You stopped.

"Just what?"

"Convenient," you said. "I don't know. Easy."

Cat put her mug down. "Do you actually believe that?"

Honest answer: no. That was the part that kept tripping you up. When you were with Will, really with him, laughing at two in the morning, him looking at you like you were the only thing in the room, you felt like the opposite of an afterthought. He made you feel like the whole point. That was exactly the problem. If he were colder, easier to dismiss, you could walk away clean.

"I don't know," you said.

"You should figure it out," Cat said. "Before it stops being fun."

You stared into your coffee. You didn't say: it's still fun. that's kind of the whole problem. it's so fun I can barely think straight and then something like this happens and I don't know if fun is enough.

You didn't say any of that. You just said "yeah" and finished your coffee.

It was after a home game — bad loss, arena emptying fast, everyone's eyes on the floor — that you saw the other side of him.

You came down to meet him and waited outside the locker room longer than usual. He came out quiet, jacket half-zipped, and when he saw you he just stopped.

Something went through his face. Not relief exactly. More like: oh. you're here.

"Hey," you said.

"Hey."

You didn't ask about the game. You'd learned that early. You just said, "Walk for a bit?"

He nodded.

You went a few blocks through the cold, shoulders bumping, not really talking. Will who usually filled every silence, Will who always had something, he just walked. Quiet and close and present.

Around the third block he reached over and took your hand. He almost never did that outside. He held it like it was something he needed to hold.

You didn't say anything about it. You just let him.

Walking back twenty minutes later, his thumb moving over your knuckles, you thought: this is the part. Not the obvious part, though also the obvious part. But this, the way he reaches without thinking. The way he holds on.

You didn't know what to do with that. You held on back.

"I think we're bad for each other," you'd said in the orange-dark of his apartment because he always forgot to close the blinds before sunset.

"Where'd that come from?" he said.

"Nowhere. Everywhere. I've been thinking about it."

"And?"

"We drive each other crazy."

"Yeah," he said easily. "We do."

"That's not a good thing, Will."

"Isn't it a little bit of a good thing?"

You turned your head. He was looking at the ceiling, a faint smile at the corner of his mouth, and you wanted to be annoyed but the smile got you, it always got you. "I'm being serious."

"I know." He turned to look at you. The smile faded into something more honest. "I know we're bad at some stuff. I disappear on you. I know I do it. I just—" He paused. "Out there I don't know what I'm doing. In here I always know what I'm doing."

"That's very convenient for you."

"It's convenient for both of us," he said, and you laughed despite yourself, which annoyed you.

"That's not — I can't — you can't do that."

"Do what?"

"Make me laugh when I'm trying to be serious."

"Why not?"

"Because then I forget what I was saying."

"Maybe that's the point," he said, quieter. Not the deflection version. Something more honest than that. "Maybe I do it because it's the only way I know how to say don't go anywhere. Don't be done with this."

You looked at him.

"I know it's not a great strategy," he said.

"It's a terrible strategy."

"Yeah." He found your hand under the sheets. "Working on it."

You didn't figure it out that night. Or the next one.

You kept orbiting, close and then maddening and then close again, and the big conversations kept almost happening and then swerving. He was still late sometimes. He still went quiet in the ways that made you want to throw something.

But he started texting before games went to overtime. And he started saying we on purpose, looking at you right after like a question, and you'd nod, and something would settle in his face.

One afternoon in February, two hours before warmups, empty arena, terrible hot chocolate, his idea, he said out of nowhere:

"What would actually talking look like. If we did it."

"Probably uncomfortable," you said.

"Yeah. I can do uncomfortable."

"Big claim."

"I've taken a puck to the face."

"That's completely different."

"Is it though."

You looked at him — this person who was genuinely maddening, who made you feel like the only thing worth looking at, who still hadn't figured out how to just say it but was sitting in an empty arena at two in the afternoon asking if he could try.

"Yeah," you said. "I think we could try."

He looked back at the ice. The side of his mouth pulled up — not the grin, the real one.

"Okay," he said.

The Zamboni finished its loop. The ice sat there, clean and unmarked.