14. Rhett
RHETT
As I raced around the rink, practicing my backwards sprints with my stick over my shoulder, I watched the entire transaction unfold between Coach and Victoria.
The way she trembled pushed an anger through me unlike anything I’d ever felt before.
The pale nature of her face told me she had been bombarded by those media assholes just like Coach and I were early that morning when we showed up to unlock Caldwell Arena for practice.
It wasn’t going to stay this way.
Three things I was going to do before the day was out.
One. I was going to find out who from the press had her phone number. Coach said someone had been calling her since five a.m., and that was a number that should not have been in any reporter’s contacts.
Two. I was going to talk to security about her routes through the arena. The press had figured out which entrance she used. That was going to change today.
Three. I was going to find her. Not to comfort her. Not to fix anything. Just to make sure she knew that whatever this was, she wasn’t alone in it.
Three things. Achievable list.
SKADOOOOOOSH!
“Get your head in the fucking game, Stone!” Moose shouted.
“Yeah, Stone!” Jett exclaimed as he rushed past me after checking me into the damned fall of the fucking rink. “Quit staring at those high heels over there and get your ass back in practice!”
I heard the guys barking laughter, and it pushed anger through my veins.
Did none of them know how Victoria and Brynn were practically being tortured by all of this?
I rumbled as I shoved my facemask visor back down.
I whipped around, my blades shrieking across the ice.
But even as the puck slapped against my stick, tagging me into a game of ‘let’s see how many pucks Moose can take before he pisses himself,’ I still heard the clacking of her heels against the floor.
I slapped the puck toward Moose and immediately let my eyes follow Victoria down the hallway, where she disappeared out of sight.
Jett came whipping around and checked me to the fucking ice.
“Come on, Captain!” he bellowed as he skated circles around me. “Get your head in the game! Let’s get moving! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
I muttered as I shoved myself up onto the ice and ripped my helmet off.
I tossed it to the ground as the puck came flying in from my purview and I stuck my puck out with one hand.
While I eyed Jett, watching as he came to a skidding stop next to our home bench, I eyed him down as I skated toward Moose.
I dodged everyone that came at me without ever having to look at them.
Jett crossed his arms and grinned, holding eye contact with me the entire time.
I jutted around the guys on the team that threw themselves at me.
I shot that puck between their legs, routing around them while I kept my angry eyes on Jett.
And as I slapped that puck into the goal, past Moose, without ever once having to look at it, I pointed my stick toward Jett.
“Fuck! You!” I exclaimed.
He fell apart in laughter as he pushed off the wall, coming to pat me on the back. “There’s our captain!” he said as he patted me on my padded chest. “Now come on! Let’s get these sprints under our belts so we can go die in peace!”
“Die in peace! Die in peace! Die in peace!”
The team chanted, and it made my head fall back with a bark of a laugh before Coach’s piercing whistle sounded three times through the air.
“And since you guys want to stand around gawking at each other’s asses,” Coach bellowed as he slammed his way back onto the ice, “you can do double sprints so that your asses look great! LET’S GET TO IT!”
“Guess you can’t hide the hots you got for Miss C now, huh?” Jett asked with a grin as he brushed past me, his hands clasped behind his back like he was some kind of prima ice ballerina.
“I will bench you, Stone!” Coach exclaimed as he blew into his whistle again. “Get to it!”
The rest of practice moved in a blur. I may have been temporarily distracted by Victoria, but that didn’t last long. Not only did I sprint circles around these fuckers, but I managed to get even Jett winded before Coach finally blew on his whistle and gathered us into the locker room.
It was the first speed Coach made that I didn’t even fucking listen to.
My mind was elsewhere.
“Oh, and one last thing,” Coach said as we all started dressing down.
Everyone groaned while slamming their lockers closed, but I just kept piecing myself together.
I had to go find Victoria.
“Our game this Friday is the big one,” Coach said.
“Detroit Pirates. Our greatest rivals, and the only other team in our division that’s undefeated, and that was with their starting line sick at the beginning of the year.
Winning against them won’t be easy. It’ll all come down to who wants it more. So who wants it more?!”
“We want it more!” Jett exclaimed.
Coach’s downturned frown surveyed all of us before he bellowed again. “I said who wants it more?!”
“We want it more!” the team exclaimed.
Coach grinned and said it again. “Who wants it more?!”
I stood to my feet and slammed my locker closed. “We want it more!”
“Who wants it more?!”
“We want it more!”
“WHO WANTS IT MORE?!”
“WE WANT IT MOOOOOORE!”
The stomping of our feet was peppered with the sounds of some of the guys pattering their hands against the metal locker doors.
I joined in with the team, leading them in a rousing chant that filled us with a second shot of adrenaline by the time the team poured back into Caldwell Arena.
While they all turned right with some of them headed to the weight room for a nice cooldown workout, I turned left.
I wanted to know how Victoria felt about waking up alone this morning after what happened between us last night.
I didn’t even get five steps down the damn hallway before Coach barked behind me.
“Stone!”
I turned and watched him crook his finger at me. I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and walked back over to him.
“What’s up, Coach?” I asked.
He looked at me for a long moment. Not angry exactly. The look of a man who had already done the math and didn’t love the answer. “I saw you coming out of her room this morning.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said. “You’re a grown man and so am I and we both know that ship has sailed.” He crossed his arms. “But I need you to understand something.”
“I’m listening.”
“That woman has been holding this franchise together for fourteen years alone. She buried her husband, raised her daughter, and built something out of nothing while the whole city watched and waited for her to fail.” His jaw tightened.
“Brynn is just now starting to breathe again after everything the media put her through. If this goes sideways, it doesn’t just hurt you. It lands on all of them.”
I held his gaze. “I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve known it since day one of this team, Coach.” I kept my voice even. “Why do you think I waited?”
He studied me for a long moment. His expression went quiet. Not quite approval but close enough.
“Be careful with her,” he said finally. Quieter this time. Like he actually meant it as advice and not a warning.
I nodded. “Anything else?”
He swept his eyes down my body before pushing past me. “See you back at the house.”
“The hell happened to you, Stone?” Jett asked with a smile on his face as he cranked out some pull ups. “You look like someone gave you something to think about.”
I dropped my bag in the corner and picked up hand weights without answering.
Coach’s words were still sitting in my chest, not heavy exactly but present.
That woman has been holding this franchise together for fourteen years alone.
I knew that. I’d always known that. But hearing him say it out loud, a man who didn’t hand out words like that without meaning them, landed differently.
“Stone?” Jett asked.
“Just do your damn workout,” I said as I started my curls.
Jett knew me well enough to drop it. That was one of the things I actually liked about him, buried underneath all the shit I had to tolerate on a daily basis. He knew when to push and when to shut his mouth, and right now he chose correctly.
The weight room settled into its rhythm.
The clank of plates. The low grunt of effort.
Someone had changed the music while I was in the hallway with Coach, swapping the screaming stuff for something with a bass line I didn’t recognize but could at least think over.
I moved through my sets without counting them, my body on autopilot, my brain still chewing on the conversation I’d just had.
That woman has been holding this franchise together for fourteen years alone.
He wasn’t wrong. He’d never been wrong about it.
But there was something about hearing it in Coach’s voice.
A man who said exactly what he meant and nothing more.
Who had watched Victoria for months the same way I had.
Who understood the weight of what she carried in a way that most people in this building never would. That made the words sit differently.
I racked the bar and stared at the ceiling.
Three years. I’d spent three years making sure that when this happened, whenever it happened, she couldn’t point to a single decision I made that put her at risk.
Not a contract dispute. Not a roster conversation.
Not one situation where she could look at me afterward and wonder if I’d been playing a longer game at her expense.
I kept myself out of every room where her name came up professionally.
I showed up to every practice, every game, every obligation, so that no one could ever say that what I felt for her cost this team anything.
I did all of that because I knew what it would cost her if I didn’t.
Jett dropped down from the pull-up bar and grabbed his water bottle.
He didn’t look at me. He took a long pull and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, casually, in the tone he used when he was being deliberate about sounding casual, “You know she’s going to make this hard on herself. ”
I looked over at him.
He shrugged one shoulder. “That’s just what she does. She’ll find seventeen reasons why it’s a problem and talk herself into most of them.” He took another drink. “Doesn’t mean she’s wrong to. Means you’ve got to be patient.”
“I’ve been patient for three years, Jett.”
“Yeah, and look how that turned out.” He grinned at me sideways. “I’m just saying. Don’t get cocky because you got her to crack once. She’s going to rebuild those walls about four more times before she stops.”
I picked up the hand weights again.
He wasn’t wrong about that either. I’d known it since the estate.
Since the weight room. Since the shower where she stood under the hot water and cried without apologizing for it and then looked at me like she still wasn’t sure she was allowed to.
Victoria Caldwell didn’t surrender anything easily.
She made you earn every single inch, and then she second-guessed whether she should’ve given it to you at all.
That was fine.
I had the time.
I finished my last set and dropped the weights back onto the rack. Rolled my neck. Grabbed my bag off the floor. Jett was already moving to the next thing, which meant he’d said what he had to say and considered the conversation closed, which I respected.
I headed for the door.
“Stone.”
I stopped with my hand on the frame.
“She’s worth it,” Jett said. Not grinning. Not performing anything. Just Jett, for once, being entirely straight with me. “That’s all. Go find her.”
I didn’t say anything.
I turned left out of the weight room.