Chapter 2 #2
That was the thing about us. We were separate people, different in almost every way, but somehow we’d gotten tangled up in each other’s lives until I couldn’t imagine going through a game day without him.
Without taping my stick at his stall and adjusting his pads, running plays together, knowing that when I looked over my shoulder on the ice, he’d be there.
No one got me like Marco got me.
My father had never understood the way I played. Too instinctive, too emotional, too in-the-moment. He’d wanted me to be more cerebral, more calculated, more like the player he’d never quite managed to be himself.
Three years we’d been doing this. Three years of building something that felt less like friendship and more like… I didn’t even know what to call it. Partnership. Brotherhood. The kind of connection where you didn’t have to explain yourself because the other person already understood.
It hadn’t started with anything dramatic.
First road trip. Late night to Vancouver.
I couldn't sleep—never could on planes—so I fidgeted and shifted and tried to make conversation with the guy sitting next to me.
Marco. Quiet, guarded, polite, but clearly not interested in talking to a stranger at thirty thousand feet.
He had a book open on his lap and kept glancing back down at it, a gentle dismissal I probably should have taken.
I didn’t.
Instead, I dug a deck of cards out of my bag and set it on the armrest between us. “Poker?”
He stared at the cards for a long moment. Then he closed his book, took the deck from me, and started to deal.
We didn’t talk much that first game. We didn’t need to. The cards filled the silence—shuffling, betting, the quiet tension of hands being played. I won the first hand. Then the second. Then the third.
Marco played the way he played hockey—smart, analytical, patient.
He watched me carefully, trying to read my tells, calculating odds.
But poker required instinct as much as calculation, and I’d been playing since I was a kid.
I could bluff when I needed to, could read the subtle shifts in his expression that told me when he was unsure.
By the time we landed, I’d won every significant hand. His chip pile had dwindled to almost nothing.
“Well.” He stared at the cards like they’d personally betrayed him. “That was humbling.”
I laughed. “You just need more practice reading people.”
“Apparently.” But there was a spark in his eyes.
The next flight, Marco pulled his own deck out of his pocket first. Held it up with the smallest hint of a smile I’d ever seen on his face. “My deal,” he said.
And just like that, we had a thing. Our thing.
No grand conversation, no dramatic moment of connection.
Just a deck of cards and two stubborn guys who kept showing up for each other, flight after flight, until one day I looked up and realized Marco Morelli had become the most important person in my life.
I’d had friends before. Teammates I grabbed dinner with, guys I’d go out drinking with after wins. But this thing with Marco was different. Deeper. The kind of friendship where you didn’t have to perform, didn’t have to be “on,” could just exist in comfortable silence and know it was enough.
“Savard.” Boucher’s voice cut across the locker room. “You see the rumors online?”
I looked up. He was leaning against his stall, arms crossed, that smirk on his face that I’d learned to hate.
I hesitated to take the bait, but finally asked, “What rumors?”
“About you being traded.” He said it loud enough that half the locker room could hear. “Social media’s got you going to Boston. The Athletic Report says Toronto’s interested too.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“You didn’t know?” His smirk widened. “Bob Macaulay posted about it this morning. Colorado’s taking calls on you. Performance concerns, apparently.”
The air left my lungs. Bob Macaulay. That wasn’t speculation—that was as close to confirmed as hockey news got.
“I’d check your phone if I were you,” Boucher continued. “Might want to know which city you’re moving to.”
Beside me, Marco had gone very still.
“Better turn tonight around, Savard,” Boucher added, pushing off his stall. “Hard to trade a guy who’s actually producing. But a first-liner who plays like a fourth-liner?” He shrugged. “That’s just dead weight.”
He turned his back on me, leaving his words hanging in the suddenly quiet locker room.
I grabbed my phone from my bag with shaking hands. Pulled up social media. And there it was, posted six hours ago:
Hearing Colorado Glaciers taking calls on RW étienne Savard.
The tweet had two thousand retweets. Five hundred comments. Everyone had seen this. Everyone except me.
“étienne.” Marco appeared beside me, his voice quiet.
I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t look at anyone. Just stared at my phone, at the words that might be a death sentence for my time in Colorado.
“Forget about it,” Kinnunen said from across the room. “Just noise. Play your game tonight.”
It wasn’t noise, though. If Bob Macaulay was reporting it, it was real. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tossed my phone into my duffel.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Let’s go.”
But I wasn’t ready. The trade rumors sat in my chest like a stone, and no amount of adrenaline could shake them loose.
I played terribly—two turnovers, no shots on goal, minus-one. The electricity I’d hoped for never came, and Marco’s disappointed glare stabbed me in the gut when Morrison scored off a pass just as I’d been warned. By the third period, Coach had cut my ice time.
In the locker room after we lost, no one said anything. They didn’t have to.
The post wasn’t just a rumor anymore. It was a prophecy.