Chapter Four
Tyson Fuller [reading from a notecard]: Favorite bonding activity we ever did with the team? Oh, one time when we had a day off on the road in Canada, the Magpies went to a maple syrup tasting. It was lit.
Damir Denisov: Every year during training camp, we go axe throwing. [He grins] I am the Chicago Firecrackers’ axe-throwing champion, three years running.
Kilian Howard: Oh, uh, good question. Sometimes we go out to eat together, I guess?
Top comments:
grant16rules: Anyone wondering why the Sea Lions haven’t won a cup yet, it’s this right here. Doesn’t matter who’s betting on who, they barely feel like a team.
sealionsfan8216: @grant16rules—You might be right. What would be some good team bonding activities, do you think?
firecrackers_spark: Denisov smiles as if he could kill a man with his teeth and eat him for dinner
(From “Team Bonding, an NHL Short,” posted to YouTube by the official NHL channel, 10/05/2025)
On the plane ride up to Seattle, Luca googled activities to do with friends.
He felt indescribably lame. He wasn’t thirteen and meeting up with a classmate without parental supervision for the first time in his life. Grown adults shouldn’t need to look up how to spend time with friends.
Grown adults also shouldn’t get raging erections from the way their friends moaned over bread and fucking cheese. It had been an act of supreme willpower to stop himself from jerking off into the goddamn kitchen sink yesterday.
He needed to get a handle on his feelings for Chris, and planning activities out of the house was one way to start. It had to be easier not to get too excited in public.
“Okay, team,” Lindy called out as soon as the charter plane reached cruising altitude. She hopped out of her chair next to Phil and stood in the aisle. “Phones away, headphones off.”
It wasn’t as if Luca had achieved anything with his research anyway. He slipped his phone into his pocket and elbowed Mooney next to him until he pulled out his earbuds.
“So.” Lindy bounced on her heels. Her hair, cascading around her shoulders in perfect waves, bounced with her. “Everyone who was on this team last year went through something crazy, huh?”
The rumbling of agreement from the far corners of the plane came from the prospects and the guys on professional tryouts. No one who had been there said anything.
Objectively, she had a point. Luca’s first season in the NHL and midway through, it turned out management had been deliberately sabotaging them for years, and the coaches weren’t real coaches.
Absolutely insane. By the time the team found out what was going on, he couldn’t do much but keep his head down and play his best hockey.
But looking back now, Luca couldn’t remember why he’d been so shocked. The stress of organized crime intruding on their team was nothing in comparison to a playoff run.
Nothing could have prepared him for the pressure of playoff hockey.
He’d grown accustomed to playing for half-empty arenas and half-hearted audiences—a hockey career in Italy would do that.
San Francisco, a football town first and foremost, did have hockey fans, but they seldom had a full house for every home game.
The playoffs were a different beast altogether.
Fans lined the stands so close together Luca could hardly make out individuals from the ice.
The roar of voices and cheers became a constant background with occasional crescendos.
Half the team played through some sort of strain or injury.
For Luca, it had been a pulled calf muscle.
Easy enough to heal if he hadn’t been on the ice for upward of twenty minutes every other night, skating as fast as he could.
The athletic trainers stood in wait every night with a questionably legal and certainly immoral number of anti-inflammatory shots, forcing players’ bodies into submission for one more night, one more game.
Losing in the Western Conference Finals had been gut-wrenching.
Luca hadn’t even been with the team long, but to come so close and fall short…
The craziest part of last season, far more than the coaching conspiracy, was how much it hurt to lose.
A life in professional sports prepared him for loss, but not on such a scale.
No matter who coached him now, they could not change the devastation.
Luca thought Lindy would at least give a better post-loss locker room talk than Ben had. Ben was wonderful with words, but once Luca knew he didn’t care about hockey, he couldn’t forget it.
“When I took this job, I thought I would be getting a team who walked through fire together,” Lindy said.
Luca jerked his eyes up to look at her. She wore a navy pantsuit with a teal pocket square, the team colors.
“Instead,” she continued. “I’ve got a team hanging out in little cliques, barely talking in the locker room. That’s no way to start a winning season, boys.”
“She’s got a point,” Mooney said in an undertone.
“You are going to start making nice with Hayes, then?” Luca asked him.
Mooney snorted.
“So we’re going to use this flight for team bonding. I want each of you to think up compliments for three other people on the team.”
Again, silence met her words, this time of the incredulous variety.
But if Lindy were someone easily cowed by disbelief, she’d never have become their coach.
“Be specific and be kind,” she said. “You have five minutes. Then I’ll be going through the ranks and asking each and every one of you.”
When no one moved or spoke following her announcement, Phil emerged from the seat next to hers. “You heard the coach.”
Luca and Mooney looked at each other. Luca wondered if Mooney could read the dawning horror on his face.
“I don’t like any of you,” he muttered.
Mooney stuck his full lower lip out as far as it would go in an exaggerated pout.
“Oh, shut up, you do not want to do this either.”
“Got me there, bro.” Mooney pressed his head against the seat back and stared out the window. “I knew today was going to be shit.”
Luca raised an eyebrow.
“Mara’s phone rang at four in the morning. One of the shelter kids was puking.”
Luca raised the other eyebrow.
“What? Sometimes we want to see each other when she’s on call.”
“You are sleeping over already, hm?”
Mooney continued to stare out the window. “We’ve been dating for five months. Of course I sleep over sometimes.”
“Five months? Since last season?” Luca knew he was prickly, especially with other hockey players, but he thought he and Mooney were friends all the same. Five months seemed a long time not to tell your friend about a relationship.
“We kept it on the down-low for a while,” Mooney admitted. “Seemed safer.”
“Because she is bisexual.” Luca said it as blandly as he could, as if it had nothing to do with him. He was a terrible actor, but he had what his sister called “a very solid resting bitch face.”
Mooney exhaled loudly, a big puff of air, and shifted in his seat. “Because I’m a hockey player. Everyone I know is gonna be super weird about her job and, yeah, about her being bi.”
“You don’t care?”
“Of course I care.”
Luca’s heart sank.
“It’s a big part of who she is and her life experience. It would be super shitty not to care. I don’t think it’s bad, if that’s what you mean. I kinda like everything about her.”
Warmth suffused Luca, pleasure for his friend mixed with seething, boiling envy in equal parts.
He wasn’t sure for whom: Mooney, for having the sentiments Luca couldn’t help but feel for Breezy returned, or Mara, for having all of herself seen and appreciated.
He’d long since given up on the concept.
All his past girlfriends had thought him straight, and he’d never bothered to correct them.
It was irrelevant. If he wanted a career in hockey, his bisexuality would have to stay a secret forever.
He could hook up with men during the off-season in Europe, but he couldn’t make more of it than a fling for a week or two.
If his career continued to go well, even that would be off the table.
Which was fine. Luca could live with dating women exclusively.
It would be ridiculous to feel as though not telling the whole world his orientation was a deprivation on par with filling only one lung with oxygen.
He clapped Mooney on the shoulder, trying to find the right reply, both supportive and not out of character enough to give himself away.
Before he could, the deafening sound of a foghorn blasted through the cabin.
Luca cringed in his seat, looking for the source. Was there an emergency? Had something happened?
“Cool app, huh?” Lindy stood between the rows once more, holding up her phone. “Time’s up, boys. Any time any of you says something we all know isn’t a real compliment, I will be pressing the Play button.”
Sinking low in his seat, Luca hoped he wouldn’t be picked first.
“Anyone want to start?”
The plane was silent except for the drone of the motor.
“I can.”
A rush of debilitating fondness swept through Luca. Of course Breezy wanted to go first. He lived for this shit.
“Go for it,” Lindy said.
“Okay. Should I stand up?”
“Oh my God,” Mooney whispered. “Why did he ask that?”
Because he wanted to look people in the eye when he gave them compliments. Because he was tirelessly, fearlessly genuine.
“Because he’s the worst.”
Lindy smiled at Breezy encouragingly, and he stood, stepping out into the aisle to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling of the plane. In his hands, he clutched a sheet of paper, the lid of his green gel pen sticking out of the breast pocket of his loose-fitting shirt.
He had to take Breezy to his tailor one of these days.
His tailor! Going to see Leonora would be a perfect activity. It would get them out of the house, and the threat of public ridicule would keep Luca’s wayward libido in line. And Luca could spend some of his ridiculous NHL salary on Breezy without it seeming odd.