Puck My Heart (Power Play Off the Ice: Snowed In for the Holidays)

CHAPTER ONE

HUX

I stared through the snowflakes obscuring the traffic heading in the other direction as I drove out of town and ignored the empty passenger seat at my side. That was easier than figuring out how to lie to my best friend.

Yeah, I’m so full of shit.

“Still there, Hux?” Solace’s voice crackled a bit.

I threw the windscreen wipers on to their fastest setting and frowned. The forecast hadn’t mentioned heavy snow, but then I’d been distracted after a media mess I’d had to fix when our mascot—now former mascot—got his stupid ass drunk. Not the worst of faux pas perhaps, but he also decided to assault one of the go-to puck bunnies the boys loved to flirt and fuck around with, and…

Well. Let’s just say she won’t be fucking around with anyone for a while. Certainly not hockey players.

“Yeah. I’m still here.” I released the steering wheel to rake my fingers through my hair. The longer strands fell over my eyes, obscuring my view of the quickly whiting out road. “Sacking Benny when he was in handcuffs was shit.”

The in-car stereo system went so quiet that I thought the line had dropped out.

“There was no coming back from what he did, man. You know that.” Solace’s deep voice sobered.

My goalie had been my best friend for years, since before we made the team together, and he’d been my sounding board since I pulled the captaincy for the Chimeras.

“I know.” The heel of my hand thumped the steering wheel. “Fucking waste of his life, and now he’s fucked up hers, too.”

Tabitha, the girl that Benny assaulted, would be in hospital for a while. Luckily, she was surrounded by family and friends, but she’d told me flat out she never wanted to see another hockey player ever again.

I didn’t blame her.

“You did the right thing by the team.”

“For the team,” I echoed. Yeah, because that was the first thing I thought of when I walked into her too-white room full of bleeping machines. Said no human ever to the traumatised female in the bed. “Being captain is a shit job sometimes.”

“Just like being goalie is shit too,” Solace reminded me. “Nothing like watching the great Huxley Radfield getting his ass whooped when I’m back up the other end of the fucking ice yelling at you when you’re too riled to hear me.”

“Shouldn’t you be giving this advice to Shannon or Deuce?” I snorted but as usual, Sol had managed to drag me out of my slump. “Thanks, man.”

“Not a problem. We’ll see you soon, then?” His casual tone didn’t slip by me.

My shitty cloud descended along with a wind that whipped my truck halfway across my lane. “Fuck. Yes,” I replied, yanking some measure of control back on the steering wheel. “In this weather I’ve got no idea how long it will take me to haul ass up there. GPS says four hours, but?—”

A cloud of white obscured the world, and I was talking to a dead phone.

One bar flickered, and my reception died along with my visibility.

“Shit,” I muttered to the empty passenger seat, wishing for the first time I’d brought someone with me. Not that I’d want anyone in the truck on a day like today. Especially this damn weather. Too close to the day?—

Fuck, no.

I refused to go there. The team shrink might have words about avoidance but my life was all hockey by design. Go Chimeras. At least I did, until I had to take an enforced break.

This sojourn along memory lane to the house our parents bought together in the Ozarks when we were kids and visited the month we were drafted to the Jericho Chimeras would be hard enough with Sol’s family there, and mine absent. I hadn’t been back to the cabin in years. This time, I traveled alone.

Lights came at me from the wrong direction, breaking me out of my reverie. I swerved back into what I thought was my lane in time to avoid a head on collision and considered canning the entire trip. But that meant going home to an emptier apartment on Valentine’s weekend. All I’d think about was the girl our mascot had ruined. How to fix the media when I couldn't do anything else. Hell, I’d probably make it worse, which was why Coach enforced the trip I tried to cancel in the first place.

More headlights came at me, along with a blared horn.

Fuck, maybe this isn’t my lane after all.

For the next four hours I charged through increasingly shitty conditions no puck bunny would ever want to risk as I drove in what I thought was a straight line and listened to nineties metal. When reception died completely on my phone I pulled up a few old pop albums Sol’s baby sister begged to download the last time I visited the cabin. Literally, it was the only music I had stored on my phone. More memories, but only some of those were ones I wanted to forget.

Fuck, I hate leaving civilization.

I really didn’t need the trip down memory lane.

The last time I was on this road my parents drove my older brother Adam and me out to the Ozarks, to the cabin. We went every summer when I was a kid with Sol’s family, then most weekends we could manage together when we first signed with the Chimeras until one year, we didn’t.

Memory lane was a white out blitz. I cursed myself as a fool for not turning around and parking my ass because I didn’t want to be alone this weekend. And because I had something to prove to myself. But right now, that could be a fatal choice.

I strangled the steering wheel as the road shifted beneath me. The wind had buffed my truck about for hours, but this felt different. Not ice, either. Wind, snow—a freaking avalanche for all I knew, I couldn't see shit— pushed my truck sideways as I fought for traction. Foot to the floor—on the brake, I hoped—I yanked on the non-responsive steering as the sign to Riverbrook Creek flashed by.

Years ago, our fathers thought it was hilarious to rename the old property by the three creeks that converged just below the house in a wide pond that iced over every year. Never this late, not by any usual standard. But like all our weather now, shit happened at different times. Hell, we used to skate on the icy expanse while Mom covered her eyes. I remembered giggles echoing off the snow laden trees that surrounded the cabin on a clear day after snowfall.

I remembered thinking I’d never stop going to the cabin with the people who mattered most.

I remembered the crunch of metal compacting around me, looking across at my brother who stared straight ahead, locked where he sat.

My attention lost to the same spot on the same fucking road only a handful of years earlier, the wheel spun hard in my hands, tearing out of my grip. Suddenly the steering wheel wasn’t the only thing spinning. Memories of giggles crashed into the horror of the last time I was on this road, and the sounds of that day.

I wasn’t laughing now.

A string of language better left at the Chimera’s stadium flew from my mouth as my truck slewed sideways. The road I could barely see anyway became a whirl of white, and I said a prayer I never thought I’d say ever again. But this time, I was ready.

Hey, it’s Hux again. It’s been a while. But if this is it, let me take the hurt this time.

Just me. Please.

The truck jerked forward and every inch of air evicted from my lungs as my seatbelt strained and tautened across my chest, but the strap did its job. Suspended forward, I hung in midair for a moment, the world nothing but a blank haze. Then the truck lurched back and…everything stilled.

I stared at the crooked sign to Riverbrook Creek, bent in the middle where my bull bar impaled it, and the snow drift that did fuck all to stop my sideways trajectory. The rockface beyond that still bore the long etched scars of the last accident stared back at me, icicles dangling from the overhang above. A mere hand’s span separated my door from it. I hadn’t even scraped paint off the sides.

Backing the truck up as I managed a stuttered breath and a mangled prayer I checked around, but no one else seemed to be on the road. I sent off a quick message about the conditions to Sol and hoped the information made it through. No one should be out in this shit. Certainly not those with anyone they cared about. For the first time I was glad my passenger seat sat empty.

Thank Christ Sol is late.

That second prayer went heavenward as I inched my way along the two mile drive at a snail’s pace and pretended my hands didn’t shake for nearly careening into the same slice of godforsaken rock that stole the lives of three people I cared for most the last time I came out to the cabin.

The same year when I swore I’d never come back.

Swallowing bile that burned the back of my tongue I pushed forward and hoped no one else was on the road tonight and that unlike me, they all stayed the fuck home. But the glowy light beyond the trees told me I’d be sharing the space with at least one other person tonight.

Now I needed to pull my shit together before anyone else saw the mess the captain of the Jericho Chimeras became the moment he hit a snowdrift.

Happy fucking Valentine’s weekend to me.