The Bench

Two men. One brother between them. Six years of looking at each other peripherally. And the season Dominik Voss finally looks directly. Oliver Kashani has been the Beaumont Crown's backup goaltender for two and a half years and the Voss family's best-friend-of-the-younger-brother for seven. He has trained his hands to be still. He has been not-thinking about Emil's older brother since he was twenty-two — Dominik Voss, the Halstead Sentinels' first-line center, the one Oliver is paid to stop, the one Oliver does not look at directly. Dominik divorced his wife last November. Sarah figured it out before he did and left him with the kind of grace that made him understand, slowly, that what he had spent twenty-six years not naming was the actual shape of his life. When Oliver moves to Beaumont as the Crown's new 1B goaltender — the city where Emil already lives, two streets from the apartment Emil just bought — Dominik drives the two and a half hours up to help carry a couch up two flights of stairs, and the man whose hands he has been peripherally watching for six years answers the door barefoot in a coffee-stained t-shirt. What follows is slow, careful, and built in the specific small spaces a backup goaltender and a first-line center on rival teams have for each other across a season. A slow-burn best-friend's-brother MM hockey romance with a goalie/skater dynamic, dual close-third-person POV, and a hard-earned happy ending. The Beaumont Fortress, Book 2. Standalone. Enrolled in this complete series.