Chapter 1 Bohdan
Bohdan
Of all the home remedies for a migraine, the combination of lavender and peppermint oils on my neck and temples is usually my favourite.
But they aren’t doing shit right now.
I think the opponent might have been too great—five hours of live on-air commentary under blinding studio lights after a night of next to no sleep.
I’m not thinking when I press my fingers to my temples, like the pressure might will the oil to sink further into my skin and fix my broken brain.
It doesn’t work.
I’m certainly not thinking when I take those same fingers and press them against my eyes, groaning in frustration and leaning back in the chair I sat in for two hours this morning while someone flipped the waves of my hair to the left, and then to the right, tugging on them so they curled over my ears just so.
The oil doesn’t fix whatever the fuck is going on in my head—but it does come off my fingertips and somehow get all over my eyeballs.
By the way it burns, I’m guessing it’s the peppermint.
“Kurva.” Fuck.
“That doesn’t sound good.”
I blink, eyes still stinging, the figure leaning in the doorway recognizable because he’s the only asshole who could get away with wearing a brown suit and still be taken seriously when he’s commenting on plays during the biggest hockey games of the week.
That happens when you’re AJ Stone and you have a perfectly respectable, perfectly long career with two Stanley Cups, and no one’s seen you splayed out on the ice before they have to cut to commercial because everyone thinks you might be dead.
I squint, shrugging. “It’s not.”
AJ tips his chin towards my fingers, back digging in at my right temple. “You alright?”
I nod, pressing my fingers down again before running them through my hair, trying to flatten it. Like a wave might rest on top of the scar in the exact trajectory it snakes across my skin and hide it from him, even though I know he knows it’s there.
Everyone in North America who watches professional hockey knows it’s there.
“Lights bugging you?” he tries again.
“Nah.” I give a noncommittal jerk of my chin and stand, grabbing my suit jacket from the back of the makeup chair. “No sleep last night.”
I’ve already lost the only two things I loved because of this. The last thing I need is for everyone in broadcasting to know I can’t hack it under bright lights, and I’ll lose the last thing I have a modicum of fondness for.
He nods, but there’s a flash of sympathy behind his eyes; they darken for a moment, like he doesn’t quite believe me.
He shouldn’t.
A crease scores between his brows, and he nods again, thoughtful. “You were great tonight. And those one-to-one segments did huge numbers.”
Before I can answer, he pulls a rolled-up magazine from the back pocket of his suit and points it at me, grinning. “Probably helps with numbers when you look like that.”
“Weren’t you just in a cologne commercial with not one, not two, but three unnecessary shirtless scenes?” I offer him a wry look, shrugging my suit jacket on before rolling my shoulders.
My specialist tells me I clench my jaw too much when a migraine starts—referred me to another psychiatrist because he said it seemed psychological—something about misplaced frustration.
I never went, and he was probably right.
You could flick a quarter off the muscles in my neck, and my traps always start to ache around hour three.
AJ smiles, pushes off the door, and hits the magazine against his abdomen. “Airbrushing. I’m thirty-seven now, Novotnak. Not fresh off the ice like you.”
A brow lifts. “Sounds like a washboard to me.”
He crosses the room with this easy grace—one hand still tucked into the pants of his suit, the other wrapped around the magazine—and it’s not because of the general superiority of whatever makes up the muscles of a generational athlete, it’s the type of ease you see in someone content.
Happy with life and their lot in it.
Tossing the magazine onto the desk in front of us, he tips his chin. “One of the techs dug this up.”
I don’t have to look to know what it is.
But I do anyway.
I even reach forward and pick it up—like I don’t have a copy in a frame stashed in the back of a closet somewhere at home.
Like it isn’t framed in my parents’ sad, abandoned shrine to me that’s just a closed-off room now.
Like a copy doesn’t sit somewhere in my grandparents’ place in Brno, even though they can’t read it.
Like she didn’t make me a collage of the thing when she was nineteen and I was twenty-one.
There I am.
Twenty-one-year-old Bohdan Novotnak. Gloved hands wrapped around the top of a championship-winning stick.
We were superstitious back then—said we wouldn’t pose with anything but the ones we’d actually played with, even though they were covered in ugly, frayed, stained tape we just kept wrapping over.
Golden-brown hair a bit more wild, styled to look like it was fresh from a postgame shower.
Top scorer in the entire NCAA standing between his two linemates and best friends.
Smiling. Happy.
No scar.
Girl of his dreams waiting for him back in that shitty apartment she shared with her best friend.
“You still talk to them?” AJ gestures towards the two people flanking me, pointing at each of them in turn. “Valdez and Choi?”
“Every day.” I swallow, roll my shoulders out, and toss the magazine back onto the desk. It skids across the lacquered surface until it knocks into a bottle of hairspray and rests just under the mirror, the reflection of that old me staring up mockingly.
AJ cocks his head, considering the me standing in front of him and the me immortalized on that glossy piece of paper that somehow hasn’t lost its shine in the last nine years. “Valdez, Novotnak, and Choi. Once-in-a-generation kind of thing. Lightning in a bottle. You and Choi went—”
“First and second in the draft.”
“And Valdez?”
I grin, despite the whole fucked-up, heavy thing. Talon’s been the same since the day I met him. “He skipped the whole thing and took a lot of money to go play in Sweden. He just decided to retire, actually”
“Retire? He’s, what, thirty? He get injured or something?”
Shaking my head, I fish my phone from my suit jacket and thumb through my texts until I find the gaudy invite he sent around. It only went to four people: his sister Tia, Jay, me, and Sloan.
Talon’s Retirement River Cruise
You are cordially invited to the party of the century
Meet me in Barcelona and help me celebrate my retirement in style!
I didn’t answer.
Neither did she.
I hold the phone out for AJ and watch his eyes move across the screen, the corners of brown skin crinkling before he cracks a grin and looks up at me, eyes wide. “Retirement river cruise?”
“That’s Talon. The only thing he ever really took seriously was that”—I point my chin towards the magazine—“and it’s only because of me and Jay. He wanted it for us. Not for him.”
“You’re telling me that an NCAA-calibre athlete, part of probably the best line collegiate hockey’s ever seen, two-time Frozen Four champion didn’t want to win? Hard to believe.” Doubt creeps across his brows when they come together.
“Then you haven’t met Talon Valdez. He’s one of a kind.” I shrug again, glancing towards the unanswered invite before pocketing my phone again.
AJ clears his throat, eyes flicking back to the magazine before they land back on me. “You going?”
I can feel my pulse behind my eyes now, and I take a slow blink.
AJ didn’t come here to show me an old magazine or to ask me about my best friend’s penchant for theatrics, and I wish he’d cut to the chase so I can go home and lie in the dark with a stupid ice wrap on my head.
“Undecided. Trying to figure out my next move with my agent.”
I’ve been joining panels and shows as a guest analyst while I've floated about unmoored in the world over the last year.
When I think about what I planned for my life, it certainly wasn’t a forced retirement from professional hockey before I turned thirty.
I definitely wasn’t sitting behind an analyst’s desk, lights that made me uncomfortable beaming away over top of me while my thirtieth birthday came and went with no consequence.
I wanted to be the man standing in front of me—to play and play and play until I felt my body start to slow just the slightest bit so I could leave on top.
“That’s actually why I came to chat. I was just talking to Zane, I know this was just an as-needed, part-time thing for you. Working as an analyst is usually a gig for retirement, but ah—”
“I’m retired, AJ, you can say it. It’s not a bad word,” I mutter, even though it is a bad word. It’s the worst word, and I’ve spent too much time in therapy trying to get used to the sound of it on my tongue.
Something like sympathy flashes behind his eyes, and he raises his palms in concession.
“Alright. You’re retired at the ripe old age of thirty, still probably one of the best centres to grace the ice, and you happen to be great on television.
With social media, it’s a whole new landscape for networks.
They’re constantly trying to appeal to younger audiences.
You poll great with men and women ages eighteen to twenty-nine. ”
“Fascinating.”
AJ snorts before continuing. “Just a fact, Bohdan. Zane is going to offer to make you a regular at the desk. But just so you know, he’s going to ask for something else, too.
Those one-to-one segments you did with the team fresh off the world juniors, he wants a new show with different coverage.
Something short, clippable. Where you’d—I don’t know, skate around with other players, kick a ball down a field, and talk about .
. .” He swallows, an apologetic shrug to his shoulders.
“Injury. Recovery. Expectations. Mental health.”
It’s a psychosomatic, a figment of my imagination, but the scar along my temple feels like it’s pulsing with the beat of my heart, and a sharp pain stabs at my brain behind it.
I feel my lips curl backward and I give a jerk of my head.
“Zane wants me to . . . what? Be some sort of pseudo talk show host? About mental health in sports?” My nostrils flare with an exhale and I reach down, snatching my duffel bag from where I left it beside the makeup desk.
I need this conversation to be over. “Am I supposed to be some sort of example? Don’t worry, you might lose it all, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel? ”
AJ’s mouth tugs to the side, and he gives a weary shake of his head, hands finding the pockets of his suit again.
“I’m just the messenger. You can’t do that anymore”—he angles his elbow towards the magazine, still askew on the desk—“but you are good at this. You’ve got too much talent to let it all go to waste. ”
“Bit late for that,” I say flatly, pointedly walking past him towards the door.
I’m being difficult. I’m being rude. This isn’t the version of myself I want to be—the one I’ve been stuck with for a little over a year.
Not the me I used to be.
But she’s not here to remind me, and she’s not here to stop me, so I brush past AJ without a backward glance.
His voice stops me when I reach the doorway.
“You could be, you know. An example. That injuries should be taken seriously. That your brain matters. That there’s life waiting after sport.”
I do turn back, about to tell him that I pissed away the only life waiting for me after hockey, but he grabs the magazine from the desk and hands it to me. “Go on the cruise, Bohdan. Celebrate your friend. Think it over. Decide who you want to be now.”
He leaves me standing there, half in, half out of not just the doorway but probably my life, lights beating down on my throbbing head and a brain that feels a bit like it’s bleeding, holding an old magazine with the only version of myself I was ever interested in being immortalized on the cover.
The me who had his whole life ahead of him.
The me who knew with absolute certainty what he was supposed to do.
The me who had her.
I fish my phone from my suit pocket and open the text thread. It’s been named the same thing since college.
The Only Line to Ever Exist—Talon’s doing.
It’s full of mostly unanswered texts from Talon, with the occasional begrudging response from Jay.
Talon: Bohdan, please. I can’t celebrate my retirement without you.
Talon: You’re Czech. You’ll love the cruise. Back to your roots.
Jay: Is the boat even going by there?
Jay: And leave him alone, he’s on-air.
Jay: You know, his job. He has actual responsibilities, Talon.
Talon: Says the guy who’s probably sitting on his couch because he didn’t make the playoffs. Unfortunate run, Jay.
Talon: Novo? Bohdie? Bohder? Please say yes. I need you.
I don’t know who I want to be—certainly not any of those unfortunate fucking nicknames—but I know I don’t want to stand in this doorway any longer.
Bohdan: If it’ll shut you up—you can count me in.