Page 4 of Iced Up Love: Part Two
No one is playing clean.
Not us.
Not them.
Zach resets in the net, but I can see it in him too, the way his movements are just slightly off, like he’s forcing himself to stay locked in and failing every few seconds. He tracks the puck, adjusts, resets again, but none of it looks natural. It looks mechanical. Forced. Like his body knows what to do, but his head is somewhere else entirely.
Mine is too.
The puck cycles back around, their line pressing hard, and I move to cut the angle off, but I’m a fraction too slow, just enough to feel the miss, just enough to know I’m not where I should be.
None of us are.
And underneath all of it, beneath the noise and the skate blades cutting ice and the crowd roaring every time the playshifts, there’s the same thought, over and over, pressing harder each time it comes back.
She trusted us.
The realization lands heavier now than it did before. She trusted us.
And we left her.
I can see her, the way she looked at us when we left, relaxed, safe, unguarded in that way she only is when she’s with us, like she believed nothing could reach her there.
My jaw tightens so hard it aches.
The clock ticks down in my peripheral, the final minutes dragging in a way that feels wrong, stretching and collapsing at the same time, and every second we stay out here feels like a second too long.
One of their forwards drives into the crease too hard, pushing well past where he should have pulled up, his shoulder colliding straight into Zach as he drops to cover the puck. Zach goes down badly enough that something in my chest spikes instantly, sharp and hot and immediate, and I’m already moving before I’ve thought it through, crossing the distance between us in seconds and shoving the guy off him with both hands hard enough to send him stumbling backward.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
He shoves back without hesitation, his gloves jamming into my chest, and before the refs can get there another body slams into me from the side and everything breaks open.
It isn’t a clean fight, not a dropped-gloves moment with space around it and rules everyone understands. It’s messy and fast and full of too much heat, bodies colliding all at once, hands grabbing jerseys, sticks dropping, players piling in because the aggression has been building all period and this is all it needed to spill over.
Someone grabs at my shoulder from the left and I wrench free, shoving another Vegas player back when he comes too close to Zach.
“Back the fuck off!”
Voices overlap all at once, shouting, swearing, referees forcing themselves into the middle of it, but it takes longer than it should to separate us because no one wants to let it go. Not tonight. Not with all of us already riding too close to the edge.
Zach has pushed himself halfway upright by the time I get a clear look at him again, mask off now, expression tight and distant in a way I don’t like. He looks pale under the lights, jaw rigid, eyes fixed somewhere that isn’t actually here.
“You good?” I ask, low enough that it doesn’t carry.
He nods, but there’s a lag to it, like the question has to travel further to reach him.
“Yeah.”
It doesn’t sound convincing.
Nothing about any of us is convincing right now.
Eventually the refs drag enough bodies apart to force space back between the teams and the game resumes, but it’s already over in the only way that matters.
We aren’t in it.
Not really. Not mentally. Not emotionally. Not in any way that can actually win something like this.
