A professional hockey player falls headfirst into fanfiction—and ends up shipping himself with his captain—in this slowburn friends-to-fanfiction-to-lovers romance.

When AHL star forward Will Burns gets sent a fic about him and his best friend (and team captain), he laughs it off. It’s a joke. It has to be. But one late-night scroll turns into another…and another—and suddenly Will’s a little too invested.

Because the fic gets a few things right.

Like how good Théo looks in the locker room. How steady he is under pressure. How he’s always been Will’s person, on and off the ice. And the more Will reads, the harder it is to ignore the truth: maybe he’s not as straight as he thought. Maybe he never was. And maybe what he feels for Théo has never been just friendship.

So Will does what any normal person would do: he dives deeper. He tears through every fic he can find—then starts writing his own. Somewhere between late-night updates and comment threads, he strikes up a flirtatious back-and-forth with Étienne, his favorite Will/Théo fanfic author online.

But when a line in Étienne’s latest fic mirrors a private moment Will knows only he and Théo shared, the fantasy stops feeling so fictional. And Will is forced to make a choice: keep everything exactly as it is—safe, controlled, and unspoken—or risk his career, his friendship, and his heart for the one thing he wants most.