Title: Two for Boarding

Series: Minor Penalties, Book Two

Author: S.B. Barnes

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 02/17/2026

Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex

Pairing: Male/Male

Length: 280

Genre: Contemporary, contemporary, gay, bisexual, San Francisco, sports/ice hockey, gay, bisexual, interracial, coming out, over 40

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Description

With fourteen years as the San Francisco Sea Lions’ top defenseman under his belt, Phil Easton is tired. After his coaches push him into playing on a bad knee and he ends up on long-term injured reserve, the chances of having his contract renewed dwindle before his eyes. He’s ready to hang up his skates when head coach Ben Morris shows up on his doorstep to help him recover. As what starts as a short-term boarding situation turns into friendship and maybe more, Phil can’t help noticing a few things about his coach that don’t add up.
Barring a short stint on a college hockey team, journalist Ben Sinclair has never been a sports fan. Every day he spends posing as the Sea Lions’ coach while investigating a scandal at the heart of the Sea Lions’ management, he hopes he can finish the job quickly and move on. But living in Phil’s spare room, growing closer to him by the day, Ben begins to wonder if putting down roots would be so bad. When Ben’s family calls in a favor in the form of taking in his wayward nephew, Charlie, Phil offers his support. The closer they grow, the more Ben relies on Phil for help with coaching and Charlie, going against every instinct he’s trained into himself for two lonely decades.

With his heart on the line, can Ben accept Phil’s offer of a convenient marriage to keep custody of Charlie? Can Phil figure out his own sexuality in time to make the marriage real? And can both of them work together to protect the Sea Lions from a conspiracy going all the way to the top?

Reading book 1 in advance is recommended.

Excerpt

Two for Boarding
S.B. Barnes © 2026
All Rights Reserved

Prologue
The season is off to a so-so start for San Francisco’s Sea Lions. Coach Ben Morris, a newbie to the big leagues, seems to have the mentality of “throw anything at the wall and see what sticks” when it comes to the team’s lineup. This year’s crop of rookies, Diego Lunes (winger) and Kilian Howard (center), are looking decent so far, surprising given Howard’s low draft status. But are they ready for the responsibility of Morris’s line shake-ups, which sometimes happen mid-game? And looking at the other side of the blue line, the only real star the team has to offer is Chris Calabrese, with the remaining D-core getting older and slower by the day. Folks, I hate to say it, but this is not the Sea Lions’ year.

Top comments:

Jefferson Howard: Send Lunes back to San Diego. He’s too reedy and too slow for the big leagues

clions2010: @Jefferson Howard—Send Lunes back to Mexico lol

sealions4lyfe: When will the Sea Lions finally put Easton out to pasture? I’ve seen Swiss cheese with fewer holes than the Sea Lions defense, and he’s the biggest hole out of all of them.

(From “Sea Lions go 3–2–3 in First Eight Games,” by Olivia Starling. Printed in The San Francisco Herald, 11/02/2024)

If there was one thing about professional sports Ben would never get used to, it was the noise.

The editor Ben had worked with in Wisconsin, before he took the job as head coach, had called Ben a shut-in. He’d vehemently denied the accusation—he had no problem getting out of the house and talking to people when work required it. Ben even sometimes enjoyed it. But his previous jobs, if they demanded subterfuge, involved posing as a patient in a hospital or a customer looking to buy large amounts of produce from agricultural businesses.

None of that had prepared him for how an NHL hockey rink sounded on game night.

There was the constant swish and scrape of skates. There was the never-ending dull roar of the crowd. There was the blaring noise over the loudspeakers, shitty music during warm-ups, intermission, and every two-minute break to clean the ice. There was the nonstop babble on the bench—players and staff discussing lines and plays and watching video footage of events that had occurred seconds previously—a din Ben was somehow supposed to speak loudly enough over to convey when line changes ought to occur, something he remained unclear on even after ten games. And then there was Ben’s personal nemesis, the thirty-two slightly different goal horns, one for each team in the league, which combined poorly with obnoxious excerpts from obnoxious songs. It had taken him a month to stop flinching every time the home team scored.

He would never understand why the team needed music in the locker room as well. Surely five minutes of peace and quiet would do a man good. Had he enjoyed the constant noise during the one semester he’d played intramural college hockey? Ben couldn’t remember. He’d only joined the team because his roommate played, and Ben had a crush on him that he was otherwise ill-equipped to handle. His parents had been thrilled by his rare interest in a traditionally masculine pastime. But once he’d managed to score mutual locker room blow jobs, the shine of the sport had worn off, and Ben had happily retired from his hockey career. Even at nineteen, the constant travel, smelly gear, and loud music hadn’t been for him.

Phil Easton, on the other hand, eschewed such concerns. When the second intermission of the San Francisco Sea Lions’ game against the St. Louis Arches started, he immediately began blasting his playlist over the locker-room Bluetooth speakers. At thirty-four, Easton ranked as the oldest player on the team. The playlist, entitled “Gettin’ Pumped,” was composed entirely of songs that had been popular during Ben’s college years, which meant Easton had been a teenager.

Sometimes, it was so very hard to respect these people.

Dmitriyev, the starting goalie, ducked into the supply closet for almost the entirety of the intermission, which proved Ben’s point about peace and quiet. Unfortunately, he’d been around hockey players long enough to have learned the one person on the team you didn’t want to have something in common with was the goalie.

At least they were winning tonight, which meant Ben wasn’t screwing them over too heavily by being here. Of all the things currently bothering him about this job, the responsibility topped the list as the worst. The team actually listened to him and thought he was doing his best to get them to the playoffs. To be fair, he did listen and tried his best. But how on earth would his best suffice when his credentials comprised an alias, a fake CV, and a made-up letter of recommendation he’d half bribed and half cajoled his college hockey coach into providing? If the Sea Lions got to the playoffs, it would be by virtue of their own talents.

Easton shouted something loud and enthused from his position on the bench. Looking up at him, Ben couldn’t help but notice his skintight undergarments clinging to his arms, even with the goofy external skeleton of his chest protector. Add in his tall and lean frame, and if Ben had been in any other venue full of half-dressed, sweaty guys, he knew who he’d be buying a drink, questionable taste in music aside. Sadly, he was in a hockey rink, and he had work to do.

On the other side of the room, Easton hopped down off the bench. He winced as he landed, and sitting next to Ben, Coach Trout’s whole body went stiff.

“Easton!” he barked. “That the knee?”

“I’m fine, Coach,” Easton said.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

The team re-dressed and headed onto the ice for the third period soon after, leaving the locker room blessedly silent for a brief minute before Ben had to go out and watch more hockey.

“You really think he’s fine?” he asked.

Trout snorted. “Fat chance.”

Ben raised an eyebrow.

“You know how these young guys are,” Trout said. “They keep pushing till they lose it all.”

No part of the sentences Trout had just uttered sounded anything like Phil Easton. For one, though younger than both Ben and Trout (an easy feat on a hockey team), Phil hardly counted as young, as evidenced by his music. For another, he was anything but reckless. He saw the physical therapist on staff regularly for his knee, he did a lot of stretching, and Ben had seen the schedule he kept to for weight training. The rigor of Phil’s routine outpaced many of the younger team members, solely to keep the muscles in his quads strong enough to stabilize his knee.

All of this impressed Ben, both the dedication and the resulting quads. The physique hockey built was unfortunately exactly Ben’s type. If only the sport and the culture surrounding it weren’t mired in relentless homophobia.

But Ben said none of that. Instead, he said, “You’d think they’d listen to us.”

Trout snorted again. He clapped Ben on the shoulder as they headed out to the rink.

Progress at last. Trout was a hard nut to crack, mostly because the primary characteristics he displayed on a day-to-day basis (misanthropy and mistrust of everyone under the age of forty) didn’t invite friendly overtures. He’d also been hoping for the job Ben ended up getting, so he treated Ben with veiled hostility and gave him constant unasked-for tips, making Ben’s fake job as a coach that much harder. Trout had played a few seasons in the nineties but retired early after a rotator cuff injury, and he appeared to miss the slower pace and higher aggression of his playing career. Ben had invested two months of research into the game, and if he could grasp the concept “speed and finesse good, breaking skulls bad,” surely it shouldn’t be too much for an actual professional coach. However, Trout’s solution to changes in the game was to work the D-core till they cried every time he got the chance, leading to constant exhaustion and, in Easton’s case, chronic knee pain. No GM in their right mind would hire him on as head coach.

Then again, the Sea Lions’ GM, Martin Pulvermacher, had hired Ben to solve his coaching problem and had handwaved his shoddy credentials to the press, so sanity had nothing to do with his staffing choices.

Ben had been trying to get Trout to trust him for three months now. Bonding over Trout’s lack of respect for his charges counted as a step in the right direction.

On the ice, a fight broke out. Ben suppressed a groan. Why were hockey games like this? It was Crowler, too, the team captain. He never fought. Watching his wildly flailing arms, Ben figured he had good reason to avoid it. “What the—”

“Oh, shit,” Edwards, the offensive coach, hissed, as Jaxon Grant and another Arches player joined in.

Easton barreled into the fray. He succeeded in separating Crowler from the man he’d been trying, and failing, to hit. But within seconds, he crashed to the frozen ground, his leg angled all wrong, and when he tried to stand up, it gave way under him.

Ben winced.

At the mouth of the tunnel, Crowler and Grant handed Easton off to Trout, who supported him toward the trainers to evaluate the injury. Ben doubted the news would be good.

He gave the refs a few minutes to decide on penalties, then reshuffled the lines on the ice so someone would be doing Easton’s job. When the game resumed play, he followed the others down the tunnel.

Easton sat, propped up on an examination chair, his bare leg stretched out in front of him in a position that made his quads even more impressive. Unfortunately, his wincing ruined the whole tableau.

“Verdict?” Ben asked Trout under his breath.

“ACL,” Trout said, not bothering to lower his voice. “Already operated on once three years ago. Not sure how bad it is. It’s too swollen to tell, but he’s not playing the rest of this trip.”

Easton glared daggers at Trout, and rightly so. He sounded unbearably smug.

“Guess we’ll have to call someone up,” Ben said.

“Mm.” Trout took his phone out of his pocket. “Lemme check the roster.”

In the instant before he pulled out the AHL team roster, Ben caught sight of the page Trout had been on before. Ben didn’t know the URL, but he had a distinct feeling he’d only be opening it in an incognito tab when he looked it up later.

It was a shame Easton had gotten hurt, but at least Ben finally knew where to start his research.

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Meet the Author

S. B. Barnes attended college in the Hudson Valley, studying English Language and Literature and Anthropology (although unlike her characters, her time there was not interrupted by crime-solving). She grew up split between the USA and Germany, attending university in both countries before eventually settling in Germany. Today, she works as a teacher and lives with her husband and two cats in an apartment with too little shelf space. Fiction has always been one of her greatest loves, as a reader, as a teacher, and as a writer. While S.B. has been writing for most of her life, this is her first foray into publishing her work.