Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
I was mid-demonstration—showing Elias how to keep his top hand loose on a wrist shot—when another kid said, “Holy crap, it’s Drew Dumontier!”
All our heads swiveled toward where he was pointing, watching Drew step onto the ice in his skates followed by Foster and Gordy.
Chaos ensued. Every kid abandoned their positions around me and swarmed the guys.
Drew grinned, clearly loving every second of it. “Heard Coach Liam needed some backup.”
“Interrupting my lesson wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I said you could stop by any time,” I said, skating over to them and fighting a smile. “What are you guys doing here?” I asked Foster and Gordy because while Drew knew I was doing this camp this summer, I hadn’t told the other two.
“Gordy’s in town for a few days,” Drew said. “And Foster was free today, so I thought it’d be fun if we swung by, helped out a little, and showed these kids some of the best skating in Montana.”
The way every kid was staring up at them like they were literal celebrities told me these kids didn’t mind the interruption one bit. I’d known they were CFU hockey fans, but clearly I’d underestimated their love of our team.
“I called you,” Gordy said. “You just didn’t answer your phone.”
I hadn’t answered my phone for a lot of people lately.
“I thought you’d be at your grandpa’s ranch most of the summer.”
While Gordy’s family was from the East Coast, his grandpa lived on a small ranch in Big Sky, and Gordy preferred his time there over spending time with his parents.
“I was, but when Drew mentioned coming to see you coach, I couldn’t pass it up.”
It took a few minutes to get the kids’ focus back on camp.
Drew took over the skating drills and had the kids weaving through cones while he skated backward, calling out encouragement.
He could trash talk on the ice when it was a game, but he’d always been good encouraging kids.
Now that he was a dad, that instinct had only gotten stronger.
He was the kind of guy who showed up and stayed.
Unlike some fathers I could name.
I shoved that thought down and focused on Foster, who’d set up a passing station and was patiently correcting grips and stances.
Foster was always steady and unflappable.
He had a calming yet commanding presence that had made him an easy choice for captain of our team.
The kid he was working with, Theo, was thriving under his attention, and his passes finally connected for the first time all summer.
“That’s it, bud. Nice job!” Foster said, clapping him on the back. “Soft hands. Let the stick do the work.”
“You sure you should be teaching passing?” Drew called from across the rink. “Pretty sure you went five games without an assist last season.”
“Pretty sure I had more points than you, Monty.”
“Defensemen don’t need points. We need presence.”
“Is that what you call it when you trip over the blue line?”
The kids were eating it up, their heads turning back and forth between the two of them. I leaned against the boards, watching my best friends interact with these kids like they’d been here all summer.
Fuck, I’d missed these guys. I’d hardly spent any time with Drew this summer.
He’d been busy splitting his time between work and Harper and Rory, but I’d also avoided him out of guilt.
No one knew me better than he did, and I couldn’t stomach lying to his face about what I was doing behind his back.
Gordy skated up beside me. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks, man. Really feeling the love.”
“I’m serious.” His gray eyes studied me with that unnerving stillness he had. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“What are you, my mother?”
“If I need to be.” He glanced toward the ice where Drew was teaching Elias how to do a proper hockey stop without spraying bystanders—a lesson Elias was gleefully ignoring. “Something’s off with you.”
“Nothing’s off.”
Gordy stared at me for a little longer, but didn’t push further. He never did. He mastered the skill of making an observation, laying it on the table, and leaving it there for you to deal with on your own time.
“Come on,” I said, pushing off the boards. “Let’s give these kids a show.”
The last half hour of camp was the most fun I’d had in seven days.
Not that I was counting.
Because I absolutely wasn’t.
I just knew that it had been exactly a week since I’d last seen Ava. I was the one who wanted the distance, who needed it so I could stop feeling…everything. I wasn’t the guy who could feel anything for a woman. Not like that.
That’s what I kept telling myself.
But even that mantra was doing little to ease the hollow feeling in my chest the longer I went without her.
Drew had the kids running a scrimmage, and the level of play was predictably chaotic.
Mack tripped over his own stick. A girl named Sophia scored on a breakaway that was more luck than skill, but the entire rink erupted like she’d just won the Stanley Cup.
Drew hoisted her onto his shoulders and skated a victory lap while she shrieked with delight.
Joelle was playing defense, and doing it well. She was killer at reading the play, positioning herself between the puck carrier and the net, and cutting off passing lanes. At one point she poke-checked the puck off Elias’s stick so cleanly that Foster actually laughed.
“That kid’s got instincts,” he said when she skated past.
“I told her the same thing.” I watched her rejoin the play, still quiet, still keeping her head down, but she was fully locked in. “She’s a total natural. She just needs to trust those instincts.”
When noon rolled around, the kids weren’t nearly as ready to leave as they were normally. There were several passionate requests for Drew, Foster, and Gordy to come back every single day for the rest of the summer.
“What am I, chopped liver?” I asked with my arms out. Like, come on, way to knock a guy when he’s down. They were acting like we’d never had fun at camp before these clowns showed up.
“Can you guys play a real game?” Elias asked, practically vibrating. “Like, against each other? Please? Pretty please?”
I opened my mouth to say no—camp was over and we needed to clear the ice—but Drew was already grinning.
“What do you think, boys? Two on one, Gordy in net?”
“I’m down. Let me throw on some gear,” Gordy said.
Foster shrugged. “I’ve got nowhere to be.”
I didn’t either. That was the problem. The only place I wanted to be was somewhere I’d decided I couldn’t go.
“Let’s do it.”
The parents who were still lingering moved to the stands, and the kids pressed against the glass with their faces smashed flat, fogging it up with their breath. I grabbed a fresh puck from the bucket and dropped it at center ice.
“Alright. Me and Foster versus Drew and his ego. First to score. Gordy, try to stop something.”
“Try to shoot something worth stopping,” Gordy fired back, settling into his crease.
Drew took the puck first, because of course he did. He deked around Foster with a move that was disgustingly smooth and a little too show-off-y for my taste, but I was ready for it. I closed the gap, angled him toward the boards, and stripped the puck off his stick with a clean poke check.
“That’s my move!” Joelle called from behind the glass, and I couldn’t help the grin that split my face.
“Learned from the best!” I shouted back, then fed Foster a pass that would’ve hit net if not for Gordy’s blocker.
We went back and forth like that for a while, nobody holding back.
Drew and I had been playing together since we were little, which meant he could read me as well as I could read him.
Drew played like he always did, even when it didn’t matter—hard and fast with something to prove.
Foster was more patient, waiting for openings that Drew was too stubborn to close.
And me, I was just happy to be on the ice with my guys, doing the one thing that always made sense when nothing else did.
Hockey was always the one thing that could force my brain to shut up.
On the ice, I didn’t think about my dad or his poisonous legacy or the girl who had taken my world and flipped it on its axis.
I could just be.
It was just me and my friends with a puck and a stick.
I took the puck wide and fired a wrist shot that Gordy snagged with his glove.
“You’re gonna have to do better than that,” Gordy said, tossing the puck back out.
Gordy was a wall. Drew ripped a backhander that looked like it was going top shelf, but Gordy snagged it with his glove like it was nothing. Drew threw his hands up.
“Oh, come on!”
“Told you to shoot something worth stopping,” Gordy said, tossing the puck back out.
The kids had been cheering for Drew, but suddenly cheers for Gordy rang out across the ice, and Drew looked at the kids like they’d just kicked him in the balls.
It didn’t get any easier from there. Foster’s wrist shot from the slot got eaten by Gordy’s pad.
I tried to sneak one five-hole and he shut me down so fast I actually laughed.
The kids behind the glass were losing it every time Gordy made a save, and the guy was clearly feeding off it—he was making bigger, more dramatic stops than he needed to, which was the most personality I’d seen from him all day.
“Showboat,” Drew muttered after Gordy robbed him again with a flashy blocker save.
“Entertainer,” Gordy corrected from behind his mask.
My legs were burning and my lungs felt raw in the best way. Foster had the puck in the corner, protecting it from Drew’s aggressive forecheck, and I found open ice in front of the net.
“Foster! Now!”
He threaded a pass through Drew’s legs—the absolute disrespect—and I redirected it on my backhand past Gordy’s outstretched pad. The puck kissed the inside of the post and crossed the line.
“Goal!” I roared, throwing my arms up.
The kids erupted. Drew swore. Foster skated over and bumped my chest with his shoulder. Even Gordy nodded from behind his mask, which from him was basically a standing ovation.
“Rematch,” Drew demanded. “That redirect was luck.”
“It was hand-eye coordination. But sure, tell yourself whatever helps you sleep at night.”
We stood there on the ice, all four of us, catching our breath, and for one perfect moment everything felt exactly right.
Drew clapped a hand on my shoulder. “We should do this more often. I’ve missed playing with you guys.”
There were nods of agreement before Gordy and Foster skated over to the boards to get some water. Drew hung back.
He studied me, his expression shifting from playful to searching. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t look convinced, but he let it go. Drew could be oblivious about a lot of things—like the fact that I’d been sleeping with his sister all summer—but he wasn’t stupid. He knew something was off. He just didn’t know what.
And I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell any of them. Because the thing that was eating me alive wasn’t something I could explain without detonating every friendship I cared about.
But fuck, I missed her.
I’d convinced myself I wanted silence, but now the silence was deafening.
The guys changed out of their gear while the rink emptied. Drew was telling a story about Rory, and Foster was laughing while Gordy just shook his head. I listened, smiled in the right places, and tried to ignore the thing in my chest that hadn’t faded even with the rush of the game.
Gordy caught my eye as we walked into the parking lot. He didn’t say anything. Just held my gaze for a beat longer than necessary before heading to his truck.
I loaded my gear into mine and then pulled out my phone.
No new messages.
I stared at the screen, my thumb hovering over Ava’s name. I could text her. Instead, I shoved my phone back in my pocket.
“You guys wanna grab some lunch?”
“Only if you’re buying,” Drew said. “You owe me after that bullshit redirect.”
“I’ll buy if it means you’ll stop crying about it.”
This was fine. This was what I needed. Guy time to get my head back on straight. I’d never been fucked-up over a woman before, and I couldn’t let myself start now.