Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid, Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationship:

Troy Barrett/J.J. Boiziau

Characters:

Troy Barrett, Jean-Jacques Boiziau | J. J. Dagenais

Additional Tags:

Strangers to Lovers, One Night Stands, Size Difference, Hopeful Ending, canon adjacent.., mtl 2015 cup win, Gratuitous Smut

Language:

English

Series:

Part 7 of j.j.'s bisexual adventures

Collections:

anonymous

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-09 Words: 7,669 Chapters: 1/1

the city of all my best mistakes

Summary

His hair's longer than he usually kept it. Not by design, it just hadn't gotten cut and now it curled a little at the back of his neck and that was different enough to maybe matter. He's in a dark t-shirt and jeans. No hat, no jersey. Nothing with a name on it.

He looks like himself with uncomfortable contacts and slightly overgrown hair.

He turns off the bathroom light.

Troy visits Montreal while Cup celebrations are in full swing, hoping the business of the city is enough to provide cover while he meets up with a guy from an app. Only the guy doesn't show, and who takes his place happens to be no other than J.J. Boiziau.

Notes

i'm inventing ships that have never been seen before. please enjoy my rookie troy x cup winner jj fic! unlike my other wips i only started working on it on the 28th as opposed to a whole month ago lmao

Montreal, June 2015.

Troy is twenty years old and standing in a hotel bathroom in Montreal staring at himself in the mirror with brown contacts in, and the contacts are uncomfortable and he still looks like himself.

That's the problem, probably.

He'd bought them at a pharmacy outside Toronto the day he decided to come here, which had felt practical in the moment and now feels like the kind of decision you made when you were convincing yourself of something. Brown contacts. Not even a color that did anything dramatic, just brown, because his own eyes were blue and blue was more specific. He blinks at himself. They feel like his eyes are wearing something tight and unwelcome. He's had them in for an hour.

His hair's longer than he usually kept it. Not by design, it just hadn't gotten cut and now it curled a little at the back of his neck and that was different enough to maybe matter. He's in a dark t-shirt and jeans. No hat, no jersey. Nothing with a name on it.

He looks like himself with uncomfortable contacts and slightly overgrown hair.

He turns off the bathroom light.

He doesn't really think about why he chose Montreal. He'd been doing that thing he did where he didn't think directly at a decision, just kind of… orbited it, let it happen, booked the flight from a practical standpoint and packed a bag from a practical standpoint and gotten on a plane. Toronto after the second round exit had been a specific texture of bad, the locker room, the flight back, Dallas making the kind of comments to reporters that Troy's job was to laugh along with, and then the hotel room after and the silence. He'd needed to be somewhere that wasn't Toronto.

He'd ignored that it was Cup season.

His phone says the guy is three blocks away.

He pockets it and goes.

Three blocks in Cup-night Montreal is not three blocks. The streets have that quality that playoff games had but multiplied, louder and messier, red and blue everywhere, people singing things he can't make out, a crowd spilling off the sidewalk and into the road. He shoulders through it, head down, and the contacts are doing their itchy useless job, and it takes fifteen minutes to cover what should have been five.

The club is dark and loud and too crowded in a way that would normally require Dallas pulling him through the door. Troy's been in places like this before but always with the Guardians behind him, always with the specific cover of being someone's linemate, someone's teammate, one of many. Here he's just standing at the bar with a beer he ordered mostly to have something to hold onto and watching the door.

He checks his phone.

The guy's gone quiet.

He'd confirmed twice today—this morning and at four in the afternoon—and gotten yes both times, still on, can't wait, and something else that had made Troy set the phone face-down on the mattress for a while. He checks again. Nothing. He gives it ten minutes. He gives it another five. He's at twenty minutes and he's going to leave, he's decided that, he's going in thirty seconds.

He's at twenty-four minutes when the energy of the room shifts. Troy's been in enough situations that required him to track a room to notice it; the crowd making a kind of unconscious space, bodies adjusting. He doesn't turn around right away. He registers it. He keeps looking at his phone.

Then he turns around.

Montreal Voyagers. Not all of them, four or five—jerseys he half-recognizes, faces from games and pressers—celebrating with the particular energy of a team that had just won the Cup two days ago and owned it. They're moving through the room toward the bar with the authority of people who expected room to be made.

Troy turns back to the bar.

He takes a slow breath.

He is a Toronto Guardian who just went out in the second round and he's standing in a bar in Montreal on Cup night with four or five Voyagers twenty feet away, and he has brown contacts in that do absolutely nothing, and the guy who was supposed to be here is not here. He does a quick and practical calculation about exits.

And then he sees J.J. Boiziau.

The thing about J.J. Boiziau is that he takes up more space than seems fair. Troy knows his stats the way he knows every Voyager's stats: obligated familiarity, two seasons of watching Dallas hate this team from across the ice. Plus-minus. Shot percentage.  The way J.J. shifted his weight back before a hit, half a second of telegraph that Dallas could never read but Troy always could. You learned the guys you played against. You especially learned the ones you weren't supposed to be watching.

He'd never been on the ice against J.J. directly. Different lines. But there was a difference between watching someone on a stats sheet and watching them in a room, and J.J. Boiziau in a room—collar open, not in his jersey, making people automatically give him space without asking—was not a stats problem.

Troy knows he's good-looking the same way he knew anything uncomfortable about himself. From the corner of his eye. At a careful distance. Filed away under do not examine.

He looks at his beer.

He should leave. The guy isn't coming and there are Voyagers in the room and the right move is clearly to go back to the hotel and order something from room service and watch bad television. Troy is going to do that. He's already putting the beer down.

Someone comes through the crowd from his left and hits him hard enough in the shoulder that he pitches sideways. He reaches for the bar and misses it and there's a moment of fumbling before a hand catches his arm—not grabbing, just steady— fingers wrapping around his elbow from somewhere above him and stopping the whole thing before it went further.

Troy looks up.

He has to really look up. That's the first thing, J.J. is right there, close enough that the height difference is immediate and real, six-foot-seven meaning Troy has to tip his head back at an angle that would be embarrassing if he were thinking about it, which he's not quite doing yet because his brain is doing something slow and stunned.

J.J. is looking down at him. He's got a small smile that looks like it happened automatically, without decision, and his hand is still on Troy's elbow.

"Hé—careful," His accent is Québécois, warm, and he doesn't let go.

Troy's brain offers him nothing useful.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," A beat. "Thanks."

J.J. is looking at him. Not a scan, not the quick courtesy check of someone making sure a stranger didn't hit the floor. No, he's looking at Troy the way you looked when you'd already made up your mind about something, and Troy has seen that look in exactly  one context before. His thumb is still resting on the inside of Troy's elbow. Warm. Not going anywhere.

"You look like you need another drink," J.J. offers.

"I have one."

"Mm." J.J. tilts his head. He still hasn't looked away. "The one you barely touched."

He had been watching. Troy had been standing here for twenty-four minutes and J.J. Boiziau had apparently been watching him. And J.J. hadn't known who he was when he started—which means J.J. had just been looking at Troy, in a room full of people celebrating something enormous, looking at him the way you looked at someone you—

Troy clocks it. The thing he's been orbiting.

J.J. was flirting with him.

J.J. Boiziau, Montreal Voyager, six-foot-seven, objectively extraordinary-looking, was standing in a bar with his hand on Troy's arm and he had been watching him and now he was—

"Stay for one drink," J.J. flags down the bartender without taking his eyes off Troy. "It's Cup night. You don't leave Cup night early."

Troy opens his mouth to say no. He says: "Sure."

J.J. smiles. He flags down the bartender without taking his eyes off Troy and gets two drinks without asking what Troy wanted, sets one in front of him. His hand finally comes off Troy's elbow. Troy's arm feels the absence of it, which is—he's not thinking about that.

"I'm J.J..”

Troy looks at him. He can feel the recognition forming in J.J.'s face—the pause, the recalibration, something behind his eyes sharpening—and he waits for it.

"Barrett," J.J. realizes.

"Yeah.”

J.J. looks at him for a moment. Not with whatever Troy had been braced for… no smirk, no edge, no the-Cup-chirp that anyone in Montreal had a right to tonight. Just: registers it, files it, and then looks at Troy the same way he'd been looking at him before he knew.

That's the part Troy doesn't have a place to put.

"You here alone?" J.J. asks.

"Looks like."

"Bien." J.J. nods toward a ledge against the wall, away from the worst of the crowd. "Come sit. You're going to get flattened standing here."

Troy goes and sits.

The conversation is easy in a way that Troy doesn't have a framework for. They chirp each other—the second round, the Cup, the gap between them—and J.J. chirps cleanly, not mean, the way someone chirped when they had standing to do it, and Troy gives it back because he's good at that and  J.J. laughs at his better lines with the genuine laugh of someone who appreciated a good shot regardless of where it came from. Troy tells a Dallas story that stops before the parts he couldn't say and is still, independently, a decent story. J.J. tells something about his team. It's just—normal. Two guys at a bar.

Except it isn't, because J.J. keeps looking at him.

Not constantly. Just… when Troy says something, J.J.'s eyes came back to his face with that particular quality of attention, like Troy was something worth paying attention to, and it made Troy want to look somewhere else and also want to say more things just to have J.J. look at him again. It's a bad combination. Troy's aware it's a bad combination.

"You're funny.”

"Don't sound surprised,” Troy shoots back.

"Non—" J.J. shakes his head slightly. "I'm not. I've watched you on the ice. You know what you're doing." He pauses. "I just didn't expect you to be—" He makes a gesture.

"What."

J.J. looks at him. Considering. "Like this," he says, which is not an answer and is somehow a perfectly complete answer.

Troy looks at his drink.

J.J. buys another round. The bar has gotten louder around them—more people, the music up, the celebration outside getting louder every time the door opened. Troy's halfway through his third beer and the contacts are still uncomfortable and he's been here an hour and he should go. He knows he should go. The guy isn't coming and there are Voyagers in this bar and going back to the hotel is the obvious correct thing to do.

He doesn't go.

J.J. stands up. The height of it is—he's very tall sitting down but standing he's a different thing, and Troy is aware of the way he has to adjust his sight line even from his stool. J.J. puts out a hand. "Dance with me."

Troy looks at the hand. "I don't—"

"It's Cup night," J.J. says. Patient. Certain. "Everyone dances on Cup night."

"That's not—"

"Barrett." He's still holding out the hand.

Troy looks at it. He thinks about the fifteen minutes it took him to walk three blocks and how nobody had recognized him, how loud and dark this room was, how it was Cup night and everyone was drunk and paying attention to each other and not to two guys in a crowd.

He takes J.J.'s hand.

The floor is not really a floor so much as the room itself, packed in and swaying. J.J. pulls him into it and the crowd closes behind them immediately, no retreat available, bodies on every side. J.J. gets one arm up to clear space and the other hand settles at Troy's hip—just settles there, easy, like he's done this a thousand times—and the height math resolves itself with Troy's face at the level of J.J.'s chest. He is looking directly at J.J.'s collarbone. He is aware of the open collar of J.J.'s shirt. He is aware of the inch of skin above it, warm and dark, and the way J.J. smells at this range; clean sweat, something specific underneath it, the particular warm-human smell of someone who has been celebrating all night and somehow still smells good. Troy's brain logs this involuntarily. (Troy's brain is useless.)

J.J. starts moving with the music, and the hand on Troy's hip moves with him, and the natural thing to do—the only thing to do with no space and no escape—is to move with him. Troy tells himself this is normal. He's danced in crowds before. Dallas has shoved him into dance floors at bars with teammates, pressed in from all sides, it's just proximity, it's just the crowd. He tells himself this.

He stops telling himself this when J.J.'s thigh comes forward between his.

Not… aggressive. Or sudden. Just a shift, weight redistributed, J.J. widening his stance a little because you had to, because the crowd kept pressing them tighter—and then J.J.'s thigh is between Troy's and the music is loud and J.J. is very warm and his hand at Troy's hip is exerting just enough pressure to keep them moving together, rolling with the beat, and Troy's hands have landed somewhere on J.J.'s sides and it is—

It is not like dancing with Dallas.

He keeps his face pointed at J.J.'s chest and breathes through his nose and tries very hard to not think about anything specific,  which is not working. J.J. smells good. Unfairly good. Troy is close enough to notice and can't stop noticing, which is its own specific problem on top of the larger problem of J.J.'s thigh right there, warm and solid, and the way Troy's body wants to do something about it.

The song changes. J.J.'s hand migrates from Troy's hip to the small of his back, palm flat, fingers spread—not grabbing, just covering—like he has every right to put his hand there. Like it's obvious. Troy's exhale comes out shallow.

He doesn't step back.

Another song bleeds in. J.J. is moving and Troy is moving with him and J.J.'s thigh is—

It's deliberate now. The pressure of it, the angle. J.J. knows what he's doing. Troy knows J.J. knows what he's doing. The pretense of just dancing has been gone for at least a full song, maybe longer, and Troy's body stopped caring about pretense even earlier than that. He's hard. He has been getting progressively harder for the last two and a half minutes and there is J.J.'s thigh, right there, and the crowd is so packed around them that there is nothing he can do, he can't step back, he can't adjust, he's just—here, pressing into it slightly, his hips rolling on the beat without him fully deciding to roll them, and J.J. feels it.

Troy knows J.J. feels it because J.J.'s hand tightens at his back.

J.J. bends his head, and his mouth is right at Troy's ear, his breath warm through the noise: "Tu vas bien?"

"Fine," Troy manages. His voice is wrecked. He sounds like someone else entirely.

J.J. makes a low sound—pleased, knowing, the particular register of someone who likes what they're hearing. His hand at Troy's back slides lower. Slow, with full intention. He cups Troy's ass with a broad warm palm, fingers curling, and holds him there, just holds him, and Troy makes a sound into J.J.'s chest that the music eats completely. His hips tip forward on their own—the pressure of J.J.'s thigh catching him just right, the angle of it hitting somewhere embarrassingly specific—and he has both fists twisted in the front of J.J.'s shirt and his mouth is open against J.J.'s chest and he is on a dance floor in Montreal.

"Mmh," J.J. breathes against his ear, rough, private. His hand moves on Troy's ass—not static now, a slow deliberate squeeze, feeling him out, learning him—and Troy's leg shakes once, involuntarily, and he presses closer. He can't help it. His hips are moving. J.J.'s thigh is right there and his hips are moving and J.J.'s hand is on his ass and he's panting against J.J.'s chest in a crowd of hundreds of people and this is—

He is twenty years old. He has done things like this with veryew people, all in private, where nobody could see, weighted down with all the specific gravity of it meaning something he couldn't name yet. This is the loudest room he's been in all year. And J.J.'s hand knows exactly what it's doing.

This is different.

He doesn't examine how.

J.J.'s mouth is at his ear again, voice pitched low, for him only: "Pretty boy." His hand flexes on Troy's ass—deliberate, once, possessive—and Troy's breath punches out of him in a rush, loud enough that he would be embarrassed if he could hear it over the music, which he can't. "You came here for something tonight. Non?"

Troy's whole chest goes tight.

He's right up against J.J. He can feel J.J.'s heartbeat. He's hard and J.J. can definitely feel that and J.J.'s hand is on his ass and he's asking. The music goes on. Troy thinks about saying he doesn't know what J.J. means. He thinks about stepping back and calling the whole thing a misunderstanding. He thinks about Dallas and hockey and the Guardians and the secret that lived in his chest like a stone, and then he thinks about how he's been standing in this room for an hour waiting for someone who isn't coming.

"I was supposed to meet someone," Troy pants into J.J.'s chest. "He didn't show."

There's a pause that lasts one beat of the music.

"Câlice," J.J. says softly, and his hand on Troy's ass does not move. "His loss."

Troy looks up at him. It requires tipping his head back at an angle that under any other circumstances would make him feel ridiculous, but there's no room for ridiculous here, not with J.J.'s hand where it is and the crowd pressed in and J.J. looking down at him like—like that. Warm. Sure. Wanting. Like it's not a performance of something, arranged on an app for some easy sort of transaction, like J.J. is just looking at him the way he's been looking at him all night, since before he even knew who he was.

J.J. dips his head again, mouth brushing Troy's ear. "Moi," he offers, low, the word vibrating against Troy's skin, "I would not have stood you up, pretty boy." He pulls back just enough to see Troy's face. His thumb presses once into the curve of Troy's ass. "Come back to mine."

Troy's heart is going too fast.

"Yeah," he agrees.

J.J.'s smile, up close, is something radiant.

He keeps his hand where it is for one more moment—a punctuation mark, warm and certain—and then takes it back and tips his head toward the door.

The cab is ten minutes. J.J. is beside him and the city is going past the window and Troy keeps his face turned toward it, watching Montreal celebrate the Cup in the streets, watching people spill out of bars and clap each other on the back and wave their jerseys around. J.J. talks—something easy, the Cup run, a specific game, a thing his teammate had said—and lets Troy be quiet, which Troy needs, because his brain is doing several things at once that he can't sort through in a moving vehicle.

He is aware of J.J.'s knee against his the entire ride.

The apartment is high-ceilinged and nice with big windows that look over a street where the celebration was still going on audibly from below. J.J. sets his keys down and turns around and the ease that had been on him all night is still there but something underneath it has shifted, become more direct, the way you got when the question was already answered and you were just moving toward the thing.

Troy gets maybe two seconds to look at the room before J.J. crosses it.

He puts one hand at Troy's jaw—just that, tilting his face up—and kisses him.

It starts slow, then immediately becomes something else. The patience of it is the worst part: J.J. kisses like someone who has already decided and isn't in a hurry, his mouth working against Troy's with a certainty that is more overwhelming than fast would have been. Every point of contact is intentional. Troy's hands find J.J.'s shirt. J.J. makes a low pleased sound and walks him backward until his shoulders hit the wall.

Then J.J. presses in, his full weight, and Troy feels—

He feels all of him. The height again, but different now that there's no crowd between them, J.J.'s chest against his face at the club but now his chest against Troy's chest and his hips against Troy's hips and Troy can feel exactly how interested he is, hard through his jeans, and it pulls a sound out of Troy's throat that he didn't plan.

"Là," J.J. says against his mouth. Satisfied, quiet, like something confirmed. His other hand slides under Troy's shirt to find skin, warm palm against his ribs, and Troy shivers. "T'es beau."

You're beautiful. Dropped between their mouths like it costs nothing. Like it's just obvious, just true, like J.J. would say it the same way he'd say anything else.

Troy has been looked at a lot. By cameras, by scouts, by Dallas, by reporters pointing lights at him. None of that is what this is. He doesn't know what to do with that so he pulls J.J. back down and doesn't figure it out.

J.J. gets his hands under Troy's shirt and pulls it off—not rough, just certain, the way you moved when the outcome had already been decided—and tosses it somewhere Troy doesn't track. The air hits his skin and then immediately J.J.'s mouth does, at his throat, at his collarbone, moving down his chest with the same unhurried attention J.J. had given everything else tonight. Troy's hands find their way into J.J.'s hair. He doesn't decide to put them there… they just go. J.J.'s stubble drags against his skin, each place his mouth lands registering separately and insistently, and when J.J. bites at the curve of his shoulder—light, just the edge of it, enough to feel—Troy's head goes back against the wall and a sound comes out of him that he doesn't recognize.

"Couche-toi," J.J. murmurs against his skin. Lie down. The low, certain, the tone of someone who expects to be followed.

Troy's knees nearly buckle into something embarrassing. He files that away to deal with never and follows.

They make it to the bedroom, Troy will later account for this in the vague terms of J.J.'s mouth and J.J.'s hands and the warmth of him, all of it blurring together, all of it enough. J.J. sits on the edge of the bed and looks at Troy standing in front of him, unhurried, just—looks, in the way that J.J. did things, like he had already decided to take his time and wasn't going to be talked out of it. The city is still audible through the window. Troy feels the weight of being looked at and doesn't deflect from it, which is new.

He reaches for J.J.'s shirt.

J.J. lets him take it off. He's broad and dark-skinned and well-built in the way of someone whose job required it, and he has a chest and Troy has complicated feelings about chests in general that are not complicated at all really and he puts his hands on it and J.J. watches him do it with an expression like: yes. That.

Troy gets on the bed and J.J. follows, brackets him with those long arms, and they're kissing again but different now, horizontal, J.J.'s weight settling over him, and Troy can feel all of it, how big J.J. is, how warm, the press of his cock against Troy's thigh even through two layers of denim. Troy pushes up against it without thinking and J.J. makes a sound that does something to the base of Troy's spine.

"Putain," J.J. says into the bend of his neck. He rolls his hips, slow, pressing, and Troy grabs his shoulder and feels his mouth open without a sound coming out. J.J. does it again, more deliberate. "What do you want?"

Troy doesn't answer. He reaches for J.J.'s belt.

J.J. catches his wrists before he gets there—not harsh, just stops him—and pins them above his head with one hand. Lightly. He could get free. He doesn't try. J.J. is looking down at him and the room is quiet and Troy is very aware of his own heartbeat.

"Tell me," J.J. says. Not a suggestion.

Troy's face is hot. His whole body is hot. "I want—" He stops. Starts again. "You. All of it."

J.J. holds his gaze for a moment, reading something in his face, then: "You've done this before?"

"Once," Troy admits. His voice stays level. He's proud of that. "Yeah."

J.J. nods. Just that. He doesn't make a thing of it, doesn't adjust his expression, doesn't do the thing Troy had been unconsciously bracedfor. He lets go of Troy's wrists and sits back on his heels and just… looks at him, like they have time, like Troy is worth taking time on.

Troy looks back.

J.J. is—

He'd known J.J. from stats sheets, from film, from games watched at a remove that kept everything theoretical. He'd known the shape of him the way you knew a problem on paper. The paper version had not prepared him. J.J. looking at him like he planned to make good use of the night was not a stats problem. Troy puts that aside, because he has to.

Troy had apparently been thinking about this. He was only realizing it now.

He puts that aside.

J.J. gets his hands under Troy's knees and spreads his thighs, easy, no rush, and dips his head and puts his mouth on the inside of Troy's knee.

Troy's leg jerks.

He didn't know that was sensitive. He didn't know that was a thing at all. J.J.'s mouth is warm and his stubble is rough and he drags it slowly upward along the inside of Troy's thigh and the skin there lights up with it. Troy's hands go into the sheets. His back comes off the mattress slightly. He can feel J.J.'s breath moving up, slow, and his hands are firm on the outside of Troy's thighs holding him open, keeping him from closing them, and Troy's whole lower half is tight with wanting and J.J.'s mouth keeps moving and moving and moving—

And stops.

Troy makes a sound he absolutely does not mean to make. J.J.'s mouth is right there—he can feel J.J. breathing—and J.J. has simply stopped, and the absence of it is worse than the heat of it was, and Troy's hips tip up toward nothing.

Then J.J.'s mouth moves to the crease of his hip and bites down.

The noise that comes out of Troy's throat is embarrassing enough that he would leave this city over it, except he can't move, except J.J. does it again.

"J.J.—"

"I've got you," J.J. says, easy, against his hip. His mouth moves up Troy's stomach—the soft skin below his navel, which Troy had never thought of as a place that did anything, and it does, apparently it does everything, J.J.'s stubble catching and dragging across it—and his hands slide up Troy's sides, his thumbs pressing into the line of his hip bones. Troy's breathing has completely stopped being normal.

When J.J.'s hand wraps around his cock Troy makes a sound that echoes off the walls.

J.J. strokes once. Slow, full, his grip firm and warm and—his hands are so big, and this is not a new fact exactly but Troy is learning it in a new context—his thumb sweeping up and over the head, dragging through the wet there with deliberate care. Troy's hips follow the motion before he can intercept them. J.J. makes a low sound of approval—the kind that lives in the chest, that Troy feels in his own, and strokes again. Same pace. He watches Troy's face while he does it like Troy's face is interesting. Like what's happening there is worth paying attention to.

Troy can't look away from him. He tries. The ceiling is right there. He can't.

"You're pretty," J.J. says, conversational, like he's noting the weather. "You know that?"

Troy's mouth doesn't cooperate. He shakes his head, which he didn't decide to do.

J.J.'s grip tightens—just slightly, just enough—and his thumb drags back across the head, slow and certain, and Troy's spine goes completely rigid.  J.J.'s other hand spreads flat across his stomach, warm, holding him down lightly while his fist starts to move. He's not going fast. He's not going to go fast. He's going to do this at exactly the pace he wants and Troy is going to—

Troy stops fighting his own hips. Lets them move. Lets himself push up into J.J.'s fist and make the sounds he's making, because the room is dark and warm and the city is loud outside and J.J. is watching him with an expression like Troy is the most interesting thing he's seen all night, which is—

J.J. leans down and puts his mouth against Troy's throat. Right on the pulse. He sucks, hard.

"Câlice," J.J. breathes against his neck, rough, and his fist tightens and speeds up and Troy comes—shaking, his back off the mattress, his hands gripping J.J.'s shoulders like he'll fall off something if he lets go, J.J.'s name tearing out of his mouth, which he'll think about later.

J.J. works him through every second of it.

When Troy's hands loosen on his shoulders, J.J. lifts his head and looks at him. His expression is warm and satisfied in the specific way of someone who had genuinely enjoyed that. He reaches past Troy for the nightstand while Troy is lying there with his whole body ringing.

He'd had one partner. Adrian's hands had been great. This was not the same thing.

He's not going to think about what that means.

"Okay?" J.J. asks.

Troy makes a sound.

"Yeah," J.J. says. He puts his hand on Troy's hip and turns him, easy, onto his stomach. The touch is warm and deliberate and nothing about J.J.'s hands is impersonal, Troy is learning—they're always purposeful, always going somewhere, like J.J. was thinking about it. He presses a kiss to the back of Troy's neck and Troy's forehead drops into the pillow.

J.J.'s mouth drags down his spine.

Every vertebra. His lips and then his stubble, the specific scratch of it against the skin on either side of Troy's spine, and Troy's hands tighten on the pillow. His mouth finds the small of his back and stays there for a moment, just warm and present, and then his hands are on Troy, working, and J.J. talks to him in a low voice—breathe, good, there you go, just like that—and his free hand rubs slow circles on the small of his back while he works, like he's keeping Troy level, and Troy is face-down in the pillow making sounds that are getting absorbed by it.

"How're you doing," J.J. checks in at some point.

Troy makes a sound that is not a word. His legs are shaking slightly.

"Okay," A pause. "Good." His fingers find an angle that makes Troy's whole lower back light up all at once and Troy's hips press back involuntarily and J.J. does it again.

"There?" J.J. asks.

Troy's forehead pushes into the pillow.

"There," J.J. confirms, smiling to himself, sounding pleased. He doesn't stop. He stays right on it, patient and methodical, working, and it builds into a heat that is completely unlike anything Troy's felt before—low and spreading and making his thighs shake, making his fingers numb where they're gripped in the pillow, making him lose all interest in how loud he is.

J.J.'s other hand comes around and wraps around him from behind. Troy is already hard again, already—he doesn't know how he's already hard again. J.J.'s grip is loose and slow and he doesn't speed it up, just keeps it there, keeps both hands going in the same rhythm, and the combination of it is—

Troy can't think. There's nothing in his head except J.J.'s hands and J.J.'s fingers and the heat of the room and his own voice which he can't hear properly.

J.J.'s mouth is at his ear. His breath is warm and rough. "I want to feel you come like this.” His voice has gotten rougher. "Can you do that for me?"

It is genuinely embarrassing how fast Troy's body responds to that.

He's been right on the edge of it for—he doesn't know how long—sitting right there, and J.J.'s fingers are exactly where they are and his grip is loose and slow and his voice is right in Troy's ear and the answer his body gives is not something Troy decided. He comes untouched. Both hands clutching the pillow, hips pressed back hard into J.J.'s fingers, face buried, the sound he makes going straight into the pillow and he's past caring about that. His whole body shakes with it. J.J. keeps his fingers right where they are and his other hand stays, both of them moving, not stopping, and Troy makes a broken sound that means stop, please and J.J. stops.

Everything goes quiet.

J.J.'s weight settles over him, barely, and his hand moves from Troy's hip to rest at his lower back. Troy can hear his own breathing, which sounds wrecked. He can hear Montreal outside.

"Câlice," J.J. murmurs softly, against the nape of his neck. It sounds like a compliment. It sounds like awe.

Troy doesn't move. His face stays in the pillow. His legs are still shaking.

His brain is quiet. Not the deliberate blankness he constructed in locker rooms and on buses and anywhere he needed to perform something—actually quiet, actually empty, like something had been turned off. He notices J.J.'s hand on his lower back, the warmth of it. He notices the sheets under him. He notices the city outside, which is still celebrating because the city doesn't care what's happening in this apartment.

He doesn't try to do anything with any of it.

J.J. shifts and settles beside him, and his hand stays at the small of Troy's back. Not going anywhere. Just: there. Troy stares at the side of the pillow and breathes and doesn't say anything, and J.J. doesn't make him.

Some time passes. Troy doesn't track how much.

"Hey," J.J. says, eventually.

Troy rolls over. J.J. is up on one elbow above him, looking down, warm and unhurried the way he always was. Troy looks up at him.

"Again.” Not a question.

Troy thinks about the hotel. The flight. Everything waiting for him.

"Yeah.”

J.J. brings him back slowly. His mouth at Troy's jaw, his throat. He is systematic about it and doesn't apologize for taking his time—his hands moving over Troy with the same deliberate attention as everything else, relearning him, working him open again with slick fingers while Troy tries to remember what words are. By the time J.J. moves over him Troy is fully unmoored and cannot remember what he was anxious about.

He's on his back. J.J. is above him, braced on both arms, and looks at him for a moment. Not a quick check—the whole look, unhurried. The one Troy has been on the receiving end of all night without quite being able to account for. Troy looks back and doesn't flinch from it.

J.J. presses forward.

Troy breathes through it—concentrates on J.J.'s forehead against his, J.J. watching his face—and the fullness registers everywhere, everywhere, his lower back, his thighs, the backs of his knees, something low in his stomach that he doesn't have a name for. He breathes. J.J. holds still and lets him.

"Good?" J.J. asks, quiet.

Troy answers by pulling him down by the back of the neck.

J.J. makes a sound against his mouth that's almost surprise, and Troy drinks it down. His hips move without his permission—just: more, just: need—and J.J.'s breath changes, and he starts to move. Long and slow and deep, a pace that is not trying to get somewhere, just trying to feel everything between here and there. Troy's legs come up. His hands spread across J.J.'s back and he can feel every muscle shift under his palms with every thrust, can feel how much control J.J. is keeping even now, and it makes something in him want to take that apart.

J.J.'s mouth finds his jaw. His throat. He's got one hand at Troy's hip—gripping now, fingers digging in, and that's going to leave something—and one cradling the back of Troy's head, his thumb pressed warm against Troy's cheekbone like some unnecessary tenderness in the middle of all of it.

Troy stops trying to manage what's happening and just lets it happen.

It's too much. Not the bad kind—the kind where too much and exactly right are the same thing, where every slow deep movement just tips him further and he doesn't want to come back. His mouth ends up against J.J.'s shoulder and he's not quiet. He stopped being quiet a long time ago, somewhere between the second round and right now, and J.J. responds to every sound he makes—a shift in angle, a change in pace—like he's listening, like he's taking instruction. Like Troy is something worth getting right.

Troy holds on with both arms around J.J.'s neck.

"You feel incredible.” His voice has come apart, the patience in it finally fraying into something real and unguarded. "Vous sentez tellement—" He doesn't finish it. His hips press in harder instead, deeper, and the breath goes out of Troy completely.

J.J.'s pace builds and Troy is so close, has been so close, and J.J.'s thumb is still against his cheekbone, this absurd gentle thing, and his other hand is gripping his hip hard and he thrusts deep and stays—

Troy comes with his hands gripped in J.J.'s hair and his mouth open against his skin and the sound he makes is not something he'll be able to account for later.

J.J. follows a handful of seconds after, his face buried in the curve of Troy's neck, a rough and broken sound pressed right against his pulse.

They lie there after. J.J.'s weight over him. Both of them breathing. The city outside. The light from the window moving slow on the ceiling.

Troy's chest is open. He doesn't shut it down. He's lying under J.J.'s weight in the dark and letting it do what it does—nobody is watching, J.J.'s breathing is slowing against his neck, the ceiling doesn't care—and he's aware of the specific difference between being exhausted and being quiet. He has spent a lot of time exhausted. This is something else.

He stays there. He lets it.

J.J. lifts off him eventually, slow, and rolls to the side and looks at him.

"Good?"

"Yeah," Troy smiles.

J.J. holds his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone who heard more than that. Then he nods and sits up and gets off the bed, and comes back with a glass of water and a warm washcloth and sets them on the nightstand.

"Okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," Troy says.

He means it. He is.

J.J. nods, easy. He leans back against the headboard  and they're quiet in a way that's easy, the ambient noise of the city in the background, and Troy watches the light from the window move on the ceiling and thinks about nothing for a little while.

"You have the parade tomorrow," Troy says eventually.

J.J. grins; the wide one that had happened automatically when he caught Troy by the elbow three hours ago like hisface just defaulted to it. "Best day of my career so far." He glances at Troy. "Et toi? What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Nothing," Troy mumbles. "Sleeping."

"Bien." He picks up his phone from the nightstand and extends it. "Give me your number."

Troy looks at the phone.

"Your number, pretty boy." Still unhurried. Like this is obvious. "Next time you're in Montreal."

Troy takes the phone. Types slowly. Hands it back.

J.J. looks at it, types something. Troy's phone buzzes from the pile of his clothes on the floor.

"Voilà," J.J. says. "Now you have mine." He leans over, easy as anything, and presses a kiss to the top of Troy's head—just like that, warm and unannounced, like it was a thing he did—and then stands and stretches, all six-foot-seven of him, and picks up the shirt from the floor. "I have to be at the parade early. Stay as long as you want, no rush. Spare key is on the hook by the door." He pauses. "I'll get it back next time."

Next time. Like it's already settled.

Troy watches him move toward the door. "J.J."

J.J. looks back.

There's something. There's something that wants to come out of Troy's mouth that is behind a door he hasn't opened in—he doesn't know how long. Something about the hand on his elbow. Something about the way J.J. had looked at him before he knew who he was, from across a crowded room, and kept looking. Something about the fact that Troy's brain has been quiet for three hours and he can't remember the last time that happened.

He can't get it out. That's just how that door worked.

"Thanks," he says.

J.J. looks at him for a moment with the expression of someone who had heard what Troy actually meant, which was different from what Troy said. "De rien," he smiles. "Bonne nuit, Troy."

He goes.

Troy lies in J.J.'s bed.

Outside, Montreal is still celebrating. He can hear it through the window—voices, music, someone shouting something far below, a car horn in the distance, the warm persistent hum of a city with something to celebrate. The light from the streetlamps comes through the window in long strips across the ceiling.

He should get up. He knows the shape of the should—get dressed, get the key, lock the door, walk back to the hotel, fly to Vancouver, call his mom, go back to being Troy Barrett of the Toronto Guardians. He knows all of that. He knows it the same way he knew everything he was supposed to do.

He lies here instead.

He thinks about the spare key on the hook by the door and next time said like it was obvious. He thinks about J.J. looking at him in a bar before he knew his name. He thinks about three hours of his brain being quiet and what that's worth.

He doesn't examine it. He just lies in it, the way you lay in water, and lets it be.

Ten minutes, maybe. Then he gets up, finds his clothes, runs a hand through his hair. He takes out the contacts and blinks at himself in the bathroom mirror—his own eyes, familiar, in J.J.'s bathroom, Montreal celebrating outside.

He takes the spare key off the hook.

He locks the door behind him and steps out into the city, which is still going, still loud, still red and blue and white, and walks back to his hotel in the middle of it.