Light the Lamp by Catherine Gayle

How could I be unfaithful to Liv when she was dead?
    The sense that I was cheating wasn’t going to stop me from flirting, though. I couldn’t seem to make myself stop. Noelle was so different from anyone I’d ever known before. She fascinated me. Thank God she was flirting right back and enjoying it as much as I was—if she’d been honest with me this morning, that is. But that didn’t mean we needed to jump into bed together, so I needed to find somewhere to sleep other than on the couch.
    “ We’ve never put anything in that third bedroom by mine other than a couple of boxes my parents sent to me,” Babs said. “You could have it. I can clear the boxes out.”
    Now that we’d finished with practice for the day, he was in his stall and putting on his clothes. His was in the row opposite mine. When I’d joined the team, they’d put me next to Nicklas Ericsson, the top goaltender on the team and a fellow Swede. On my other side, they’d put RJ. Having Nicky and RJ on either side of me and Babs not too far away gave me a little sense of comfort within this dressing room. I knew those three guys and Soupy best out of all the boys on the team. I hadn’t been the new kid on the block since my rookie season, so it had been a long time since I’d felt like the odd man out.
    I pulled a clean T-shirt over my head. “I guess I could find somewhere to buy a bed while I’m out shopping with her today. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to get something like that delivered on short notice, though.”
    “ You need another bed?” Zee asked. Eric Zellinger, the team captain, had just come back into the locker room from the showers. He came over and stole RJ’s seat, since RJ was still tied up with the reporters in the media scrum. “Dana and I just decided to turn one of my guest bedrooms into a gym. We’ve got a full bedroom set that we need to find a new home for—hardly been used. It’s yours if you want it. We just need to find a way to move it from my house to your condo.”
    Cam Johnson grunted. “That’s easy. I’ve got a pickup.” Jonny sat down in his stall so he could put his shoes on. “You and I can load it, and Babs and Soupy can help me unload it at their place.”
    “ How the fuck did I get roped into this?” Soupy asked, but he didn’t sound upset.
    “ Because Babs is still fucking half asleep after taking Katie to prom, and I don’t want to have to carry a bed all by my fucking self,” Jonny said.
    “ I’m not half asleep.”
    “ You’d be even more awake if you’d gotten her home earlier, dipshit.” That came from David Weber, Katie’s dad and the oldest guy on the team. He said it with a grin, though. Webs was always giving Babs a hard time, but I didn’t get the sense there was any real bite behind it. His daughter was in high school, and now she had leukemia. It was only natural for him to bark at young guys like Babs.
    Babs turned around in his stall and busied himself with putting things in his gym bag. “We weren’t late,” he mumbled.
    “ Doesn’t matter,” Jonny said. “Soupy’s helping.”
    A few of the guys grunted, and that was that.
    It shouldn’t have surprised me that the boys were so willing to help, even though I was the new guy on the team. They were my teammates now, and with every hockey team I’d ever been part of, teammates were more like brothers. Like family. They helped each other out when help was needed.
    But I was still taken aback by how quickly they came up with a solution to my problem and chipped in.
    Now I could feel better about convincing Noelle that she needed to stay with me without her assuming I was just trying to get her into bed.
     
    It had taken more than a mere small effort on my part, but I’d somehow convinced Liam that he didn’t need to buy me an entire closet full of clothes. I’d relented and let him buy me more than I’d felt comfortable with, but mainly because I got the sense that it made him feel good to spend