Chapter 34
thirty-four
BEN
The arena is trying to murder me with noise.
Thousands of people screaming, the thunder of stomping feet, air horns bleating like dying goats—and I’m reasonably certain my mom is covering her ears right now, probably wondering how her quiet son ended up in the middle of this beautiful, deafening disaster.
Two to two.
Five minutes left.
National Championship.
I’m spent. My legs are heavy, and there’s a bruise blooming on my jaw from a second-period collision that I barely remember—some asshole’s elbow, I think, or maybe a shoulder, or possibly a small meteor—but there’s no way in hell I’m quitting now.
It’s been three weeks since the Firehouse—three weeks since I won Cass back—and I’ve spent every practice since then clawing my way back onto this ice. And tonight, I’m back on the first line, fueled by the certainty that comes from knowing you finally have something worth fighting for.
The puck slides behind our net after a scrambled defensive play—bad bounce off the boards, nothing anyone could have predicted—and I’m the first one there. My hand closes around my stick, and everything else fades to static.
The pressure becomes fuel.
I look up ice, but I don’t see players.
I see vectors.
Their center is cheating toward the boards, creating a passing lane that looks tempting but actually feeds directly into a trap at the blue line. Their left winger is out of position, probably exhausted. Their defense is pinching hard, aggressive, and hungry for a turnover.
Which means there’s a gap behind them if I can thread it.
The game unfolds before me like a circuit diagram. Input, output, resistance, flow. Every player is a component with predictable behavior patterns based on fatigue and positioning. Every gap is a potential pathway for the signal to travel.
I know exactly how to fix this.
I’m not just confident.
I’m commanding.
When I break out of the zone with the puck on my stick, the first forward comes at me like he’s been shot from a cannon, all aggression and no subtlety. He’s telegraphing the check from three strides away, probably running on pure adrenaline and the desperate hope of forcing a turnover.
But I’ve got him covered. I pull the puck to my backhand, let him commit to the hit, and slip past him with a toe drag that would have made my sixteen-year-old self weep with joy. He crashes into the boards behind me with a satisfying thud, and I’m already scanning for the next variable.
The whistle screams—offside on their end, a minor infraction that buys us a faceoff in their zone. When the other team calls timeout, I coast toward the bench, chest heaving, sweat dripping into my eyes, and that’s when I let myself look, just for a second, for the first time all game.
The glass near the neutral zone is packed with humanity—a wall of red and white, faces twisted in screaming passion—but my eyes find them instantly. It’s an impossible gathering of every fragmented piece of my former life, finally soldered into one functioning unit.
Cass is in the front row, wearing my jersey. The jersey swamps her small frame, the hem hanging past her hips, but she’s made it work somehow—tied at the waist, sleeves rolled up—and she looks fierce and beautiful and absolutely mine.
Next to her is Anya, holding a handmade sign that reads “TEAM THESEUS” in precisely measured block letters. She’s cheering with an enthusiasm that looks almost painful on her normally stoic face, like she’s been practicing in a mirror and hasn’t quite worked out the mechanics yet.
Next to her are Joel and Milo. They’re both wearing PBU Hockey shirts that look freshly purchased, and they look deeply uncomfortable in them. Joel is actually cheering, his mouth open in what might be a roar of enthusiasm but Milo looks half a chance to fall asleep.
And next to them—
My mom.
And she looks so incredibly, impossibly proud.
The faceoff whistle yanks me back to reality.
Nash taps his stick as he streaks down the wing. “Let’s go, Sasquatch.”
“Cut left,” I call to Nash. “I’m going wide.”
He doesn’t question it. Doesn’t hesitate. Just adjusts his angle and trusts that I know what I’m doing. We win the faceoff, the puck comes to me, and I carry it into the offensive zone, feeling the expectations pressing down on my shoulders.
Two defenders converge on me. Big bastards, both of them, skating hard with murder in their eyes and the desperate energy of men who know their season is on the line. I deke the first defenseman with a move I’ve practiced a thousand times in empty rinks and late-night sessions.
Weight shift to sell the fake.
Head fake to commit him.
Blade angle adjusted by three degrees to protect the puck.
He commits to the check, lunging at where I used to be.
I’m past him before he realizes he’s been sold a bill of goods.
The second defender is smarter. He doesn’t bite on the fake. He’s positioning himself to cut off my lane to the net, and he’s doing it well—feet set, stick down, angle perfect. So I alter the signal path, recalculate, look up…
And see Schmidt is open in the slot.
I drop a no-look, backhand pass that threads between two defenders like it was designed by a physicist with a grudge against probability. The puck hits Schmidt’s tape with a satisfying clack, and he doesn’t hesitate—one-timer, top corner, bar down.
PING.
The most beautiful sound in hockey.
The red light flashes.
The horn screams.
The crowd loses their collective minds.
And I just set up the championship-winning goal.
Gloves fly.
Bodies crash into mine from every direction.
Someone is screaming in my ear.
The clock shows 2:47 remaining, but it doesn’t matter. They’re done. I can see it in their faces—the slumped shoulders, the broken skating patterns, the way their bench has gone silent. We’ve broken them, and the final 2:47 passes in a blur of defensive positioning and desperate hope.
They pull their goalie. They throw everything at us. But we hold.
When the final horn sounds, I feel it.
Champions.
I get mobbed by the guys, and I enjoy the ride before extricating myself from the crush of bodies. As the handshake line forms, my legs are shaking so badly from the sheer overwhelming muchness of everything that’s happened in the last four hours, the last three weeks, the last four months.
The handshake line passes in a blur of gloved hands and murmured congratulations. Their captain—a senior who played his heart out for sixty brutal minutes—grips my hand and holds it for a beat longer than protocol requires.
“Hell of a pass,” he says.
Then I’m skating toward the tunnel, and my focus narrows to her.
Cass.
The concrete corridor swallows me, and the air shifts immediately. The open chill of the rink gives way to humid warmth. Someone has already started the celebratory spray—definitely Stiles—and my jersey is soaked through before I’m three steps into the tunnel.
Nash materializes beside me, champagne-soaked and grinning in a way I’ve never seen before. He wraps an arm around my neck in a gesture that blocks my path, and three weeks ago—hell, three days ago—I would have flinched, waiting for the punchline and bracing for the mockery.
But something in his expression is different. The smirk is still there, but it’s lost its edge. Like a knife someone forgot to sharpen. It’s clear that our relationship is less predator/prey now and more teammate/teammate, which suits me just fine but might take him some time to get used to.
“Your girl is scary, man,” Nash says. “I tried to high-five against the glass during the second intermission, and she threatened to bite my fingers off.”
“She’d do it, too.” I shrug. “Probably start with the pinky, because she likes to build suspense.”
Nash blinks. “Shit, Kellerman, that must be hot in the bedroom, am I right?”
I roll my eyes, because as much as some things change, some people never do.
There’s a pause, and his smirk fades into something almost respectful. “You did good out there, Kell. That pass was fucking filthy.”
I clap him on the shoulder and keep walking. Behind me, I hear him rejoin the celebration, his voice rising in a chant I can’t quite make out. But I’m not listening anymore, and the corridor narrows as I move away from the main chaos, the screaming fading to background noise.
And then I see her.
Cass is leaning against the cinderblock wall near the locker room exit, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral in that way she does when she’s trying not to show too much. My jersey hangs off her small frame like a punk-rock battle flag, the sleeves bunched at her elbows.
She’s surrounded by chaos—equipment managers rolling carts of gear, reporters jockeying for position, family members clutching flowers and banners—but she’s created a bubble of stillness around herself as she stands there waiting.
Waiting for me.
She looks me up and down—the bruise on my jaw, the champagne-soaked jersey, the sweat still dripping from my hair, the heavy silver trophy dangling from my hand like an oversized lunch box—and gives me a little smirk.
“Nice trophy, jock.”
“Nice jersey, punk.” I let my eyes drop deliberately to the stretched collar, the visible edge of a hickey peeking above the fabric. “New tat?”
“I’m going to kill you for that,” she says. “Your mom saw it, Ben, and now she thinks I’m a hussy, so it’s war…”
“Can I surrender later?” I grin. “In bed?”
“You can try.” Her smirk sharpens. “I have terms.”
And then I’m pulling her in closer and her mouth finds mine, and she tastes like that cheap cherry lip gloss she pretends she doesn’t wear—I’m not Katy Perry, asshole—and the particular electricity that is uniquely, perfectly us.
When we finally break apart, she smiles. “You set up the winning goal.”
“I did.”
“That pass was really fucking hot, Kellerman.”
We stand there for a moment longer, wrapped in our own bubble while chaos continues somewhere behind us. My muscles are screaming for rest. There’s champagne drying sticky on my neck and sweat in my eyes and a bruise on my jaw.
But none of it matters.
Because I’m standing here, in the aftermath of the biggest game of my life, with the girl who saw through every mask I ever wore and chose me anyway. They’re not separate people anymore. They’re one integrated system, every component functioning exactly as designed.
Me.
“So where’s the party?” Cass asks.
I raise an eyebrow “You want to celebrate at the hockey house?”
“Sure… for a little…” She grins. “Then we can have our own celebration.”
She grins—that sharp, dangerous, wonderful grin that promised me trouble from the very first day—then steps onto her tiptoes and pulls me down for one more kiss. Then she turns and starts walking, putting an extra sashay on her hips, which I know is to give me ideas.
And it works.
Just like we do.
Because I stayed, accepted the real her.
And she helped me realize my wiring was fine all along.
I just needed to be brave enough to accept it.