Page 39 of Icebound

I calculate the trajectory in milliseconds, and before the crowd can even gasp, I drop down into butterfly. A sharp pain ignites in my groin. Damn, that hurts. My knee pads hit the ice—a nanosecond too late.

The puck goes right in my net.

“Fuck!”

The buzzer howls in the arena, and the stadium erupts in cheers because we’re in Cincinnati’s barn.

Cruz skates up to Nineteen and shouts in his face. “Hey, fucksie, you been in the minors for how long? Huh? You a pretender or what? What?”

“Aw, don’t be mad, you big dumb animal,” Nineteen sneers.

“Hey, I have a question,” Cruz yells, shoving him. “Why do you suck at hockey?”

“Look who’s talking,” Nineteen shouts. “Better get home to those roller hockey championships, Twelve.”

Cruz pushes him again. “You think you’re the only guy that can hit? Let’s-fucking-go! You can’t even stand out here!”

“I ain’t scared of you, Twelve. Not scared at all.” Nineteen pulls back his clenched fist and slams it into Cruz’s jaw, which gives him the excuse he needs to tackle him to the ice. They attack each other like savage wrestlers.

In a rush, I skate over, ice chips flying past my shins, and lift Cruz off him. “Hey, simmer down. Save it for the third.”

“He’s a fucking motherfucker!”

He spits on the ice and gives the guy a face wash, rubbing his nasty-ass glove in Nineteen’s nose before I yank him away to the locker room. His chest pads heave in short gasps, but Cruz skates off the ice with me. Our heavy steps thump down the hall like a funeral procession.

No one says it, but we all feel it.

We're off today, every last one of us, and we have been ever since I ended things with a certain woman, no—girl.

The girl I can’t get out of my head.

But none of that matters because I’m too old for her. Sure, I might be attracted to a twenty-two-year-old, but I’m not going to be a dick and act on those feelings when I know it won’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter how good she made me feel.

There’s no chance I’ll touch her again.

“Fucking hell!” Cruz bangs his fist against the wall as we settle on the benches. The state-of-the-art space smells like a mix of sweat, deodorant, and ass. Tension reeks in the air as we tape our sticks. I sit down on the wooden bench. Cruz follows suit, then Patty.

“What the fuck happened out there?” Cruz says. “You hesitated, and it’s gonna cost us the game. Coach should pull you and get some more offense on the ice.”

I grind my teeth so I don’t yell at the kid. Not a lot of people grasp the mental strength it takes to be a goalie. I have to bear the brunt of everyone’s disappointment because my mistakes draw the most attention. I’m the only player on the ice for the entire game, which takes a toll on my mind and body, and my patience is thinning.

“What about your bad timing on those pinches that led to Forty getting a breakaway in the first period, huh?” I say. “Yeah, I fucked up, but this isn’t all on me. We’re a team.”

“Save it for the ice,” Patty interjects. “But he’s right. We win as a team, and we lose as one.”

We sit in silence, hunched over in our sweat-soaked gear. Normally, we’re blasting some obscure country album everyone hates that Patty always picks, but today, the atmosphere is deader than a cemetery.

Coach Watson strides into the locker room with a menacing frown on her lined face.

She gives each one of us a look, and I swear my balls shrivel. “I don’t think I need to say much. We're better than this. I know it, you know it, and the fans know it. Right now, we're not playing to our potential. We're making mistakes we shouldn't be making. Our passing needs to be sharper, and…”

Everyone listens intently to Coach, but when she’s done with her pep talk and walks out, Cruz throws his visor on the ground. “What the hell is happening? This is a massacre. Who wants to tell me why I signed with the shittiest team in the League?”

“Fuck off!” someone yells.

“Hey, enough of that.” I grip Cruz’s shoulder, pushing my irritation with him aside. “Listen to me. You’re a hell of a player, but you’ve got a tendency to get in your head when you’re pissed. Just because we’re playing like shit doesn’t mean we’ll keep playing like shit. We can turn it around.”

“How? They’ve got three goals on us,” Cruz shouts. “You gonna fart out a damn miracle?”