24. Bruno
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bruno
The chill of the rink cuts deeper today. Not just in the skin, but in the bones, in the breath, in the way the air refuses to warm no matter how many laps I take. It’s like the cold has teeth and it’s gnawing on all of us.
Rowan hasn’t said more than two words since we stepped onto the ice. Not even a grunt when Thomas tripped into him during warmups. Just silence and a look in his eyes that could shatter glass.
And Thomas… he’s all twitchy energy, like someone wound him up too tight and then snapped the key. His passes during drills come fast and sharp, too aggressive.
He nails me in the shin once during a 3-on-2 breakout and doesn’t even flinch. Doesn’t apologize. Just skates on like nothing happened.
Like the game’s the only thing holding him together.
We rotate through high-intensity puck control drills, tight turns around the cones, puck tucked close, stick barely breathing. Then it’s sprint transitions: blue line to red line, back, again, again, again.
My lungs are a furnace. Legs screaming. Sweat freezing against my skin.
Coach isn’t letting up. He’s watching us like a hawk, jaw tight, that clipboard clenched in his fist like he wants to snap it in half. We’re less than a week from the championship, and we’re falling apart.
And then it happens.
Jack misses a wide-open shot on goal, wide, sloppy, his stick too high, too slow. He mutters something under his breath on the glide back to center.
I almost miss it. Almost.
But I hear the word “ Jinx ” come out of his mouth.
Then “ drama .”
Then something that sounds a hell of a lot like, “ Rowan’s too whipped to play straight. ”
It’s like lighting a fuse.
Rowan doesn’t even hesitate. His gloves hit the ice with a sound that cracks through the rink like a gunshot. Jack barely has time to react before Rowan’s on him, fists swinging, teeth clenched, a snarl ripping from his throat.
Jack’s helmet goes flying.
Thomas is in the mix a heartbeat later, coming in from the side with that chaotic speed that makes him dangerous on and off the puck.
He doesn’t even care who’s in his way. He just knows someone insulted her.
“You don’t get to talk about her!” he shouts, eyes wild, voice sharp as shattered ice.
They collide. It’s chaos. Elbows, fists, grunts. Sticks clatter to the ground, the crash of it echoing around the empty arena like a warning bell.
“Shit,” I hiss, already skating over.
No time to think. Just move.
I wedge myself between Thomas and Jack, shoving hard with both arms as Thomas tries to lunge again.
“Enough!” I bark, chest heaving.
Thomas jerks back, panting, his helmet hanging lopsided.
“He basically called her a slut, Bruno,” he growls, voice shaking. “You heard it.”
I did.
It’s still ringing in my ears.
Rowan’s got a split lip and blood trailing down his chin. Jack’s hunched over, cradling his shoulder, face twisted in pain. It’s hard to say who got the worst of it, but we all look wrecked.
Coach’s whistle explodes through the air. One long, furious blast.
“All of you, off the ice. Now!”
His voice is like thunder in the silence that follows. Even the boards seem to flinch.
We skate toward the bench like we’re walking to the gallows. My breath’s fogging in front of me, my gloves are shaking, and in my chest, there’s this hollow ache.
We’re unraveling.
Right here.
Right now.
And if we don’t pull ourselves together, we’re not just going to lose this game.
We’re going to lose everything.
The locker room feels like a tomb.
No music. No chirping. No bullshit jokes about who smells the worst or who botched their tape job.
Just the wet, dull thud of gear hitting the floor and the sound of our breathing, harsh and uneven, echoing off the tile like we’re all trying to pretend we’re fine and failing miserably.
I sit on the bench, hunched over, fingers working at the knots in my skate laces like they’re the only thing holding me together. Left over right. Tug. Undo. Right over left. Repeat.
If I move slow enough, maybe I won’t have to talk. Maybe I can just sit here and let the silence stretch out until it swallows everything that just happened.
But of course, I’m not that lucky.
The door creaks open, and Thomas strides in like a storm front, chest puffed, jaw tight, still radiating heat from the fight. His cheeks are flushed, eyes too bright, like he’s either about to yell or punch another wall.
His locker slams shut behind him with a metallic crack .
I barely flinch.
“What the hell is going on?” he spits, voice sharp, cutting clean through the stale air.
I look up, calm on the outside even though my stomach’s twisting in knots. “With what?”
He scoffs, dragging a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “Don’t do that. Don’t pull the stoic shit with me. Not right now.”
“I’m not playing anything.”
“You didn’t defend her, Bruno.”
That hits me like a slap. No wind up, just pain.
“I stepped in,” I say, forcing the words out through gritted teeth. “I stopped the fight.”
“Yeah, after Jack ran his mouth. After he said that . And you just stood there like it didn’t mean anything.”
My fingers freeze on my skate. “Of course it meant something.”
“Then why didn’t you hit him?” Thomas snaps. “Why didn’t you swing the way you always do when something matters to you?”
I look up, finally, and there’s a ringing in my ears that has nothing to do with the earlier whistle. “Because hitting him wouldn’t fix anything,” I bite out. “Because I’m trying to hold the goddamn team together, not break it worse than it already is.”
Thomas growls under his breath and kicks a glove at the wall. The slap of leather on metal ricochets like a shot.
“Say it,” he hisses.
I shake my head. “Don’t.”
“Bruno.”
My throat’s dry. I taste copper. I don’t want to say it, but it’s been sitting in the back of my head for days now, coiled like a snake.
“Say what’s really going on.”
Damn it.
It’s like he can see right through me.
Might as well be honest, even if it sucks…
“I’ve been thinking…” I pause, the words sticking like tar. “I might need to find a new team.”
Thomas goes rigid.
Like I just told him, I was quitting hockey altogether.
Like I said, I was dying.
“What?” he breathes, blinking like he misheard me.
I finally meet his eyes. “It’s getting too hard to be here. In this city. On this team. Every hallway, every routine… It’s like she’s still around every corner. I can still smell her shampoo when I open the supply closet. And when I see you and Rowan? It’s like we’re still waiting for her to walk through the door with coffee and a crooked smile and her stupid lizard hoodie.”
Silence.
Heavy and absolute.
Then Thomas takes a step forward, his voice low and rough. “I was your friend before she ever showed up.”
“I know.”
“So what? She’s gone, and now we don’t matter anymore?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“It sounds like what you’re saying.”
I drag my hands over my face, palms scraping against the stubble on my jaw. My skin burns from it, but I press harder.
“It’s not that you don’t matter,” I say, voice cracking. “It’s just… everything feels different now. We’re different. And I don’t know how to be around you guys without feeling like a piece of me is missing. Like she’s missing.”
That lands like a body check to the gut.
Thomas flinches. Actually flinches. And then looks at me like I’ve gutted him.
“You think it doesn’t feel like that for me?” he whispers.
I don’t answer.
I can’t.
He curses under his breath, low and vicious, then grabs his duffel and turns his back on me like it’s the only way to keep from breaking something… or someone.
And the silence that follows is somehow worse than the shouting ever was.
I pull my hoodie on and shove open the side door of the arena, the heavy metal groaning in protest. The cold outside hits me square in the face, a slap, sharp and deserved. The kind of sting you don’t shake off because you know you earned it.
The concrete benches by the loading dock are slick with melted frost. I don’t care. I sit anyway, elbows braced on my knees, head down like I’m waiting for a fight that’s already happened and left me too sore to swing again.
My phone’s heavy in my hand. Like it knows what I’m about to do and wants no part of it.
Still, I unlock it, thumb automatically on the screen.
Scroll.
Ally and Kenzie, smiling wide at some rooftop dinner, champagne glasses tilted, sun setting behind them in this warm golden haze. Perfect. Untouchable.
Next, an old photo of the team, from two seasons back. We’re all crammed together in the locker room, grinning with stupid tape mustaches and black eyes, Rowan flipping the camera off, Thomas doing his dumb pouty duck face, me in the middle with my arm slung over Jinx’s shoulders.
I didn’t realize it then. How permanent she’d feel. How easily she’d slide into our world and rewire it.
And then, there she is.
Jinx.
The photo isn’t from us, probably taken by a patient’s parent or a coworker. She’s in her scrubs, crouched beside a little boy in a wheelchair, her face lit up with laughter like she’s got the sun trapped behind her eyes. The kid’s beaming like she handed him the whole damn universe, and maybe she did. That’s how she is. That’s what she does .
My thumb hovers over the heart. Over the place where I could press and say… what? That I see her? That I miss her? That every second without her is this dull, gnawing ache I can’t bandage?
I don’t tap it.
I can’t.
I just stare.
The cold creeps in through the seams of my hoodie, through my jeans, up my spine. I let it. Maybe if I get cold enough, numb enough, I won’t feel this anymore.
Maybe my body will forget what it’s like to reach for someone who isn’t reaching back.
My chest squeezes so tight I can barely breathe.
Because the thing is, it’s not just missing her.
It’s that this pain, this hollow, echoing space where she was, it feels like home now. Like a second skin I didn’t ask for but can’t shed. Like I carry her absence the way I used to carry her, close, careful, constant.
I lean back, the chill soaking into my bones, and close my eyes.
Not praying. Not hoping.
Just waiting.
Waiting for Thomas and Rowan to head out, so I can sneak back in without more words that’ll shatter something already cracked. Waiting for the noise in my head to quiet. Waiting for something to feel right again.
Waiting for her, even if I know she’s not coming.
The locker room’s mostly empty by the time I finally drag myself back inside.
The lights are too bright, humming like they’re aware of the tension in the air. My footsteps echo on the tile like I’m walking into something sacred and broken all at once.
The showers are still on. Steam clings to the corners of the ceiling, thick and ghostlike, and somewhere behind the frosted glass stalls, I hear voices, quiet, low, like confessions pressed between teeth.
Rowan and Thomas.
I don’t mean to eavesdrop. I don’t move closer, don’t lean in. But their words carry, bouncing off tile and stainless steel, and before I can stop it, they’re in my chest.
“…don’t think she’s okay.”
“She’s not okay, but what are we supposed to do if she won’t let us in?”
“I don’t know. I just… I miss her.”
That one hits the hardest.
Miss her.
Like it’s that simple. Like it’s not this bleeding thing inside me that won’t clot. Like it’s not waking up every morning and reaching for someone who isn’t there, feeling phantom touches, hearing phantom laughter.
Missing her doesn’t even come close.
Then Rowan, voice stripped bare:
“Feels like we had her. And then we didn’t. Just like that.”
That is what it feels like. A door slammed shut between breaths.
One moment, her smile. The next, silence. And none of us have figured out how to pry that door back open without hurting her all over again.
I hear them still, words and water and footsteps, but I tune them out.
Not because I don’t care. Because I care too fucking much.
I can’t keep doing this thing where I treat every fragment of a sentence like it’s a lifeline. Can’t keep riding the sharp edge of “maybe she’ll come back,” and “maybe she won’t,” and “maybe we broke something that was never ours to hold in the first place.”
I’m worn down to the marrow.
Miss her so deep it’s in my bones, in the cracks between them.
And the cruelest part? I get it. I get why she left. Why she’s scared. Why this, the three of us, is too messy, too big, too much.
Especially with the media breathing down our necks.
I get why she built the wall. But understanding doesn’t make the ache smaller. Doesn’t make me want her less.
I haven’t looked at another woman. Haven’t even thought about it. Not when everything in me is still wired for her.
Not when I walk through every day like I’m half a heartbeat behind where I should be, like I left something vital in her hands and haven’t figured out how to ask for it back.
The showers shut off.
I hear the clink of locker doors opening. The soft rustle of damp towels, the hollow creak of leather bags being zipped. It’s quiet, but not peaceful. It’s the kind of silence that fills your ears when you’re trying not to cry.
Thomas walks past first, in jeans and a hoodie, towel in his hair like he just couldn’t be bothered to dry it properly. He stops in front of me, and I feel his eyes before I see them. Studying me. Checking the damage.
“We’re thinking of hitting up Kingston’s,” he says finally, voice light, too light. “Just one drink. Blow off some steam. You in?”
Rowan’s behind him, dragging his jacket over his shoulders, the fabric sticking to his still-damp shirt. His gaze flicks to mine. It lingers.
It’s not a question, not exactly, but it’s not not one, either.
He’s asking if I’m okay, if I’m still here.
I want to say no. I want to say I don’t have it in me. That my chest is still an echo chamber of everything we lost.
But the way they’re looking at me, like maybe they’re hanging on by a thread too, makes me pause.
Maybe we’re all pretending. Maybe this is the only way we know how to keep the seams from splitting.
“Yeah,” I murmur, pushing up off the bench. “Alright. One drink.”
Rowan gives a small nod, tight and unreadable.
Thomas claps a hand on my shoulder, quick, firm, like he’s afraid that if he doesn’t touch me, I’ll disappear.
We walk out together. Three guys in hoodies and damp hair, trying to pass for normal.
Pretending we’re just teammates.
Pretending we’re not bleeding.
Pretending a drink can hold off the collapse just a little longer.