Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
Game Misconduct - A serious penalty that results in a player being ejected from the game.
Taz
The road trip started in Vegas, but it was almost like I didn’t care.
Not the crowd—though they were loud enough, hostile in the way only a building full of fans who'd watched you celebrate on their ice ten days ago could be.
Not the cold—my cold, the one that usually sharpened everything into crystal clarity the moment I settled into my crease.
Not the rhythm of the game, the pulse and flow I'd been reading since I was sixteen years old and first realized the ice spoke to me in a language no one else could hear.
All I could feel was the absence of him.
Ok. Get some sleep yourself. The empty apartment.
I tried not to listen to the announcers, but it was hard.
“Well, with their last win, the Colorado Dragons are in a position to secure a wild card spot for the cup playoffs.”
I should have been ecstatic, but at that point, I didn’t care.
“And that’s huge for this team after the last few seasons they’ve had, Brian. But the job’s not finished. There are still a lot of games left on the schedule."
I sighed and tuned them out. Tapped my posts and settled.
The first shot beat me clean. A wrister from the top of the circle, nothing fancy, the kind of shot I stopped in my sleep.
Except I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't even present.
I was standing in a bar hallway listening to a man with a forgettable face explain, with the patient courtesy of someone dismantling a bomb, exactly how much it would cost me to love someone.
Walk away from Cinder Adair.
The puck hit the back of the net and the horn blared, and I didn't even flinch. I tapped my posts. Reset. Tried to find the cold place inside me where the goaltender lived—that clean, empty chamber of pure reaction where nothing existed except trajectory and timing.
It was gone. Filled with something hot and wretched that my dragon kept trying to freeze and couldn't.
"Everything okay, Rees?" Ash murmured as he skated past. I pretended not to hear him.
The second goal came four minutes later.
A redirect off a screen that I should have tracked through traffic but didn't because my eyes kept drifting to the bench, to the medical staff area where Patel was sitting in the seat Cinder should have occupied, and the wrongness of that image was so visceral it made my chest physically ache.
Two-nothing. First period wasn't even half over.
Cole glanced at me during the TV timeout, and the look on his face—not anger, not frustration, just quiet, searching concern—made me want to crawl out of my own skin.
He knew something was wrong. Of course he did.
Cole read people the way I read shots, and I was broadcasting distress on every frequency.
I pulled my water bottle, squirted it over my face, and stared at the jumbotron without seeing it.
The cold pressed against my ribs, restless and agitated, my dragon pacing in tight circles like a caged animal.
It wanted Cinder. It wanted the steady warmth that anchored it, the heartbeat that matched its rhythm, the hands that touched without flinching.
And I'd sent him away. Told him to sleep in his own apartment.
Watched him offer me the exit and taken it like a coward because a man in a hallway had shown me a phone screen and said forty-eight hours, and I'd believed—
No. I hadn't believed him. I'd calculated.
That was worse. Believing was passive. Calculating was a choice. I'd listened while he'd explained exactly what would happen. And the only variable I could control was distance.
So I'd created distance in the short space of a day.
Inch by inch, text by text, silence by silence.
Not because I'd stopped loving him—God, the opposite, the feeling was so enormous it was crushing me from the inside—but because loving him and keeping him close meant risking everything for everyone else.
I felt like I was dying.
The third goal was my fault in a way that was almost poetic.
A two-on-one rush that I committed to too early, sliding across the crease when I should have held my ground, leaving the far post gaping like an open wound.
The shooter didn't even have to pick his spot.
He just put it where I wasn't, and the lamp lit up behind me for the third time, and the Seattle crowd roared with the particular delight of an arena watching a goaltender come apart in real time.
Three-nothing. Halfway through the second period.
When the buzzer went and I headed to the locker room, Coach followed me in. His eyes were sharp but not unkind.
"Taz," he said quietly, low enough that only I could hear beneath the room noise. "Talk to me."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're three goals against on twelve shots, and two of them were saves you make with your eyes closed." He paused. "What's going on?"
"Nothing. I'll lock it down."
He studied me the way he studied game tape—looking for the thing that wasn't there, the pattern behind the pattern, the reason we’d won or lost. I held his gaze and gave him nothing, because giving him something meant explaining a man in a hallway and a phone screen and a deadline and the fact that my heart was currently located in a Denver apartment I couldn't see but could somehow feel.
Kinkaid exhaled through his nose. Then he turned and said, "Levin. You're in."
The words hit me like a check I hadn't braced for. Not because I didn't expect them—I'd been playing badly enough to earn them three times over—but because hearing them made it real. Made the consequence tangible in a way that texts and silences and empty bed space hadn't quite managed.
I was being pulled. From a playoff-race game. On a road trip I'd fought all season to make meaningful.
Levin was already moving, grabbing his mask, shaking out his gloves with the nervous energy of a backup who hadn't expected to see ice tonight.
He was twenty-four. Good reflexes. Decent positioning.
Absolutely not ready for a hostile building in a game with wild card implications, but that was my fault, not his.
I plodded to the bench without looking at anyone. Sat down. Pulled my mask off and set it down in front of me with hands that were steady only because the cold made them that way—not composure, just ice, doing what ice did when everything else fell apart.
Obviously I followed them all back out, and ignored the announcers.
The bench was too warm. Too close. Players shifted to give me space the way they always did when a goalie got pulled—not out of judgment but out of superstition, like failure might be contagious.
I didn't blame them. Right now, it probably was.
Max settled beside me after his next shift. Didn't speak. Just sat there, breathing hard, his shoulder pressed against mine in that deliberate, wordless solidarity that was worth more than any pep talk. After a minute, he said quietly, "Where's your head?"
"Gone," I said. The honesty surprised us both.
He nodded slowly. "Is this about Cinder?"
My jaw locked. The cold spiked hard enough that frost bloomed along the edge of the boards beneath my gloves before I caught it and pulled it back.
Max saw. He didn't react—he'd seen stranger things from me over the years, though he'd never known why—but his eyes narrowed with a sharpness that told me he was filing it away.
"He wasn't on the travel roster," Max said carefully. "Nancy seemed upset about it."
"He's covering in Denver. Dunn's call."
"Dunn's an idiot."
I almost smiled. Almost. "It's complicated."
"It's always complicated with you." Max bumped my shoulder. "But you've never played like this. Not once. Not even when—" He stopped himself, which meant whatever comparison he'd been about to make was bad enough that even Max's legendary lack of filter couldn't let it through.
On the ice, Levin made a sharp pad save on a shot from the slot. The bench erupted. I watched the kid reset, tap his posts, settle into his stance with the particular intensity of someone who knew this was his moment and was determined not to waste it. Good. At least one of us was functional.
"Whatever's going on," Max said, standing for his next shift, "fix it. Because that—" He gestured at the ice, at the scoreboard, at everything. "That isn't you."
He jumped over the boards and was gone, leaving me alone on the bench with three goals against and a heart that felt like it had been run through a skate sharpener.
Levin held them. Stopped everything they threw at him for the rest of the second and all of the third—fourteen saves, a couple of them spectacular, the kind of desperate, athletic stops that made crowds gasp and coaches exhale.
He was good. Better than I'd given him credit for, and the shame of that realization—that I'd been so consumed by my own crisis that I hadn't properly assessed my own backup—added another layer to the guilt already calcifying in my chest.
Cole and Keegan clawed back two goals in the third.
It wasn't enough. We lost four-three, and the standings tightened by a point, and as I sat in the visitors' locker room afterward, still in full gear because I hadn't been able to make myself undress, I could feel the weight of what I'd done settling onto my shoulders like snowfall.
Not just the loss. The loss was a symptom.
The disease was the distance I'd put between myself and the only person who made the cold make sense.
My phone sat in my stall, dark and silent. I picked it up. Opened the thread with Cinder. Read the last exchange—his measured, careful offer to go home, my measured, careful acceptance—and felt every word like a blade between my ribs.