Chapter 7
Alaric
Afew days after my date with Kyle, I wake up to find my phone is a small bomb.
It rattles on the nightstand, buzz after buzz, until I flip it over and the lock screen becomes a waterfall of mentions.
Clips. Cropped photos. Circles and arrows drawn by strangers.
The kind of viral detritus that says a story broke while I was sleeping and the ocean decided to throw me around for fun.
I don’t open anything at first. I just lie there on my back, staring at the ceiling, counting the seconds between pings. Three seconds. Two. Four. My chest tightens with each one.
Finally, I unlock the phone.
The first thing I see is a feed post from a hockey gossip account, the kind that always knows which winger unfollowed which fitness model. “Ice Prince + Thorn? Silver City’s Steadiest Pair Seen Out Late at Diner.”
There are three photos: me and Kyle in the neon glow, heads leaning in over milkshakes; a second of him with his arm around my shoulders, our faces out of frame; and one shot that’s basically the back of my head as I’m getting into his truck.
The caption is all winks and rhetorical questions: Bro night or something more? Comment below.
I scroll. Another account has it too, this time brightened to make the colors pop like a comic book.
The comments are a storm—half people shipping us, half people arguing about the word friends.
Someone posts a four-photo collage of us on the bench in previous games, heads bent together, a frame-by-frame of a laugh I didn’t know looked that soft.
Someone else comments that the Titans’ defense pair finally makes sense. I try to laugh and can’t.
A team email lands in my inbox. SUBJECT: Statement Regarding Hale they don’t need evidence beyond a feeling.
I toss the phone face down and sit up too fast. My head swims. The scent of last night’s rain blows in through the cracked window, cool and clean, and I breathe it in like medicine. Practice is in an hour.
I take the world’s fastest shower, scrub my teeth like I’m fighting a stain, and put on the plainest hoodie I own.
In the mirror, my face is its usual calm mask, but under the skin I feel like a power line fraying in the wind.
I jam a beanie over my hair and tell myself three things, the same way I count before a faceoff: skate, listen, don’t react.
Downstairs, the lobby TV is tuned to a morning sports show. I angle my body away from it, but the anchors’ voices still follow me out through the revolving door: “…photos of Hale and Thorn… Titans say just friends… a lot of chemistry on the ice…”
I walk faster.
By the time I hit the rink, the gossip is already ambient, the way cold is ambient in these buildings.
The guys are loud—louder than usual, which means they’re anxious and covering it.
Someone wolf-whistles when I step into the room.
Someone else sings a romance song from a kid’s movie.
I roll my eyes, lift a hand, and walk through it like weather.
Kyle’s at his stall, tying his skates. He looks up the second he senses me, the way he always does, shoulders relaxing. He’s smiling, but there’s worry threaded like fishing line behind his eyes. He nods at the empty space next to him. “You good to lace up here?”
I drop my bag and sit. “Sure.”
He leans in, voice low. “Coach wants us to ignore it. Media guy put out a thing, you saw? ‘Just dinner.’ He said he’ll run interference if anyone tries to make it a press scrum after practice.”
“Great,” I say. It sounds ungrateful because my mouth can’t find neutral. He squeezes my shoulder under the guise of adjusting my shoulder pad strap, then lets go.
“Al,” he says, lower still. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For not being more careful.” He glances around. Most of the guys are pretending not to listen. “I should’ve parked in the back. I didn’t think. I just—” He huffs a tiny rueful breath. “I wanted to show you a good time.”
“You did,” I say, and I mean it. “I had fun.”
That pulls a genuine grin from him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I add, because I can’t help rewarding him when he’s this open, “The milkshakes were objectively excellent, and your taste in 80s rock is objectively terrible.”
He laughs, which unclenches a muscle in my back I hadn’t noticed. He watches me a beat longer. “So… you good?”
“I’m fine.”
He hesitates, then leans closer, his whisper barely audible under the scrape of skates and the thud of gear. “Let me make it up to you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” He swallows, suddenly shy. “Come over Saturday? Movies at my place. I’ll cook. We can lock the door, turn off our phones, pretend the world’s just us for a night.”
Something in my chest tugs hard. Just us. It’s a soft promise, and I want to crawl into it because it sounds like sleep. It sounds like quiet. It sounds like not being a trending tag.
“Okay,” I say, before I can overthink it. “Saturday.”
His whole face lights. It’s small and startling, like watching a stadium turn its lights on just for you. He nods once, sharp, like he just won a faceoff. “Saturday,” he echoes, and taps my shin pad with his stick, our little ritual. “Let’s go make practice hate us.”
We hit the ice.
Coach has a look in his eye that means we’re about to skate until our lungs beg.
I welcome it. I need the ache to drown out the internet.
We start with puck-protection drills along the wall.
I lean into my edges, feel the bite and release, feel the familiar flow of body and blade.
Kyle and I move as a hinge, sticks in lanes, voices low and constant.
It’s clean, crisp, everything I love about playing with him—two brains agreeing on the same solution before the question is finished.
If the guys chirp, it’s gentle. One of the wingers sings, “Don’t break up on us, mom and dad,” and Kyle flips him off without malice.
A rookie asks loudly if I’m going to hyphenate my last name, and the room cackles.
Our goalie bangs his stick on the post and calls, “No kissing in my crease,” and I pretend to threaten him with a slap shot.
It’s crude and stupid and perfect—this is how hockey says we like you when the world is wild: it makes a joke and then gets back to work.
Halfway through practice, media drifts into the stands, cameras like eyes.
Team PR keeps them behind glass. Coach Ryland glares at them until they pretend the drills are more interesting than me and Kyle.
It helps that Locke is on the adjacent sheet with the Wolves running a clinic of sharpness; cameras love a pretty captain.
We finish with a full-ice scrimmage. I’m at my best when I’m allowed to hunt mistakes, and the ice gives me a dozen.
I pick a pass, read a bounce off the stanchion, lay my stick flat to ricochet a breakout straight up the gut.
Kyle snaps a pass that looks like witchcraft.
The kid on our second line dings the underside of the bar and whoops like a small god.
By the end, I’m drenched, muscles singing. I realize I haven’t thought about the photos for twenty minutes. I haven’t thought about him either, which should feel like an accomplishment. Instead, it feels like holding my breath.
Back in the locker room, the teasing finds a higher gear, but the edges are still rounded. Someone whistles as Kyle and I strip our gear and says, “Save it for the suburbs, lovebirds.” The room laughs. The laughter is relief.
Kyle looks over at me through the curtain of his damp hair and smiles. It’s small. Private. Mine.
He waits until the room thins, then drifts closer, smelling like soap and ice. “Saturday,” he murmurs, like a secret. “I’ll text you the address.”
My stomach does a small, stupid flip. “Okay.”
He hesitates, reading my face. “Can I—?” he asks, and tips his head toward the hallway. I nod. We step just outside the locker-room door, away from the cameras and the echoes and the stink of sweat. The corridor is cold, the draft lifting the hair on my arms.
His hand slides to the back of my neck, warm and careful. He kisses me.
It’s soft. Sweet. The opposite of trouble. For a second, I let it be what it is: a good man giving me something gentle. I breathe him in; I let the moment fill my mouth and my chest, then dissolve.
When we pull apart, he’s smiling, beaming really, like he just got the answer he wanted on a test he studied for too hard.
He presses his forehead to mine for a heartbeat and then he steps back, hands in pockets, boyish and proud.
“See you later,” he says, and the words carry an entire conversation: You okay?
I’m here. We’re fine. We’ll keep it small until it isn’t.
“Later,” I echo.
The door swings and the world swallows us back up. Guys whistle and clap like we won something.
Our captain shakes his head and says, “Rule’s the same as always: you break it in the locker room, you clean it up.” The room groans, laughs. The rule is ancient, half joke, half law. It means: Do what you want, but don’t make it our business.
I dress quickly, pulling on a hoodie with the Titans crest. My phone chimes with a text from PR: Media handled. If you get ambushed, ‘no comment’ is fine. We’ll cover. I send a thumbs-up.
As I shoulder my bag, I flip the phone over and the screen lights with a notification I don’t expect to knot me in half:
Magnus Flint: Don’t go out with Thorn again.
The message arrived two hours ago, but I didn’t see it. It sits there, blue and bare and possessive, like a hand on my wrist. For a second, the hallway tilts. Not because I’m frightened, not because I’m angry, but because something in me flowers open like a match struck in the dark.
He’s jealous.