Chapter 1
Theo threw his phone across the room when the notification came in.
ROWAN FOLEY SIGNS SEVEN-YEAR DEAL WITH THE SAN JOSE SERPENTS.
Fuck, he thought. “Fuck,” he shouted, curling into the kitchen table chair in his mom’s apartment in Oregon.
“What now?” Michelle McCann asked her child from the kitchen, where she was pouring ingredients into a KitchenAid mixer, ready to make a big batch of chocolate chip cookies for her kid to take with him to San Jose when he reported for duty. “Don’t say Rowan.”
Theo winced. There was a rumor Rowan wasn’t signing with Texas again, and instead was shopping around with a handful of teams. Theo had been stewing on it, praying Rowan would go back home to Calgary, or maybe sign in Las Vegas, where the rumors were especially strong.
New York would be good, too. It would be great to have him in a different conference.
Now, Theo had him on the same fucking team.
“He signed to the Serpents.”
“Oh, honey.” She turned the beater on the mixer off and grabbed a couple of beers out of her fridge.
It was four o’clock. They could have a beer.
She sat next to her son, who was hunched over the kitchen table, shoulders round in defeat.
She gave him a little back scratch. “You really don’t think that it will be nice to play with him again? ”
“Playing with him isn’t really my concern.
” What happened on the ice was separate, and he would be an idiot to complain about having the best player in the league—possibly ever—on his team.
Potentially on his wing. He could deal with Rowan if they only ever hopped over the boards at the same time.
Unfortunately, players spent way more time together off the ice than on it.
“It’s been eight years, honey.”
“And I’ve spent every one of them trying to establish my own career, separate from him. And I thought I’d finally managed that in San Jose. I don’t get why he would sign here. He knows I’m here.”
“He does. Maybe he just wants to play with you again.”
“Or he wants to be on a team that’s a contender this year.” Theo was finally playing good hockey on a good team. Couldn’t he just have this to himself?
“Or both.”
“I don’t know what to do. It’s going to be so fucking awkward.”
“You can’t just be friends again?”
“We were never just friends ,” Theo said. His mom knew the depth of his relationship with Rowan. How it had absolutely destroyed him when Rowan stopped talking to him.
“I know, baby. Maybe it’s time to figure out how to be just friends.”
“I don’t want to be his friend.” Rowan had shattered his heart into so many pieces that it had never healed back into a solid shape. It was still in fragments. “I don’t want to listen to him talk about all his fucking awards, and all his records—”
“Has Rowan ever talked about shit like that?”
His mom had a point. “Well, no. But God, that first year, all I heard about was NHL this NHL that.”
His mom put a hand on his. “I don’t think he did that to hurt you.”
“Nothing has ever hurt more.” Maybe other men in their 20s wouldn’t talk to their moms about their ex-non-boyfriend, but Michelle and Theo had always been close.
Only child to a young, single mom. The two of them had been through some shit together, including Theo’s years-long broken heart.
It made Theo a little sad that he was stuck with his asshole dad’s last name and not hers.
He thought of changing it along with her when she legally changed it back to her maiden name a few years prior, but Theo already had LANE on the back of so many hockey jerseys.
“Maybe he’ll surprise you.”
“I don’t want to be surprised.” Theo was already grumpy about it. The anger he used to protect himself from the pain of the situation was flaring up again. He could feel the rolling boil of it in his chest. He didn’t know how he was going to be professional about this.
“You’re going to have to figure something out.”
“I’m going to ignore him.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. They both knew that ignoring Rowan wasn’t an option.
Theo was fucked.