5
Easton
The Furnace was already loud enough to feel personal.
The first game of the season had the student section packed in neon while bass rattled through the locker-room floor, and every few seconds, the building shook like the crowd was trying to prove it could tear the rafters loose before we even touched the ice.
Inside the room, tape ripped, skates hit rubber, sticks knocked against stalls, and Briggs was already sweating through his underlayer like the building had wronged him on purpose.
“Whoever just kicked my blocker owes me an apology,” Briggs announced from the goalie stall, half-dressed in pads and glaring at the floor. “And before anyone tries to victim-blame me, I know what assault feels like.”
Rider looked up from tightening his laces. “You tripped over your own bag.”
“My bag has been hostile since sophomore year.”
Cade didn’t look up from his stick. “It learned from you.”
Briggs slapped a hand over the center of his chest protector. “First game back with alternate captain Cade, and he’s already abusing morale.”
Cade’s tape kept moving around the blade in clean, even passes. “You’re questioning morale while arguing with luggage.”
“I’m the backbone of this team.”
“You’re the loud organ no one can identify,” Rider said.
“Appendix,” Cade added. “Mostly useless until inflamed.”
The room cracked open with laughter, and Briggs turned toward him like he had been betrayed by blood. “Appendix jokes before puck drop feel medically insensitive.”
Cade finally lifted his head. “You want emotional sensitivity from a locker room?”
“I want basic respect.”
Rider leaned back against his stall. “You want mozzarella sticks and attention.”
“Both are foundational needs.”
I kept wrapping tape around my stick and let them go.
Usually, the noise helped by pulling me out of my own head because there was always someone chirping, someone laughing, or some freshman needing me to tell him where to stand, where to skate, and how not to look like the entire building had marked him for public execution.
Tonight, every sound landed wrong.
The C on my jersey felt heavier than it had all week, my pads felt tighter, and the crowd sounded too loud. My phone sat in my bag with three unanswered texts from my mom because I had already read the first one and knew the other two were worse.
Ma: Made it to the hotel. Vivi’s okay, but the lobby lights bothered her. Skylar says she’s fine, which means she isn’t. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be there early.
Don’t worry about us.
My mother only said that when worry was already bleeding through the floorboards.
Briggs’s voice cut across the room again. “Captain looks like he’s deciding which one of us to kill first.”
I pulled the tape tight and tore it with my teeth. “You’re making a strong case for yourself.”
Briggs nodded. “Good. Sarcasm means you’re still functional.”
Cade shot him a look.
Briggs paused. “Emotionally speaking, I have located our captain.”
Rider’s attention shifted toward me. “You good?”
“Game night.”
“That wasn’t an answer.”
“It was the answer you’re getting.”
Cade set his stick down and leaned back, his eyes on me instead of the tape. “You slept?”
“I’m dressed and vertical.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“You and Rider should start a club.”
Briggs raised his glove. “Can I join if it comes with snacks?”
“No,” Cade and Rider said at the same time.
Briggs muttered something about oppression, but he stopped smiling after that.
I could handle the chirping, Briggs turning every emotion into a team emergency, and Rider watching me like he was waiting for the exact second my spine cracked.
Their silence was worse because it meant they had all decided something was wrong and were trying to determine who had the right to say it first.
Cade won because he always did when the room got too heavy.
“You’re still thinking about the Sin Bin.”
My hand stilled on the stick.
Briggs’s head turned slowly toward him. “Bold opening move.”
Rider leaned one shoulder against his stall. “Correct one.”
“I’m thinking about the game,” I said.
Cade’s expression didn’t change. “You’ve retaped that blade three times.”
“I like it clean.”
“You like control,” Rider said. “Different disease.”
I looked at him. “You all done?”
“No,” Cade said. “You’ve got your mom and sisters in town, you’re still working North Cut, you’ve got the C tonight, and after what happened with Aura, you’re walking around like one wrong breath will split you down the middle.”
The name hit the room harder than it should have.
Aura.
I bent my head and pressed the tape flat around the blade. “I’m not talking about her before a game.”
“You don’t have to talk about her,” Cade said. “You’re already doing a pretty loud impression of someone not talking about her.”
Briggs, for once, didn’t make the easy joke. He shifted in his pads, his face serious beneath the mess of blond hair falling across his forehead. “She got under your skin.”
I laughed without humor. “She’s been under my skin for over a year. The Sin Bin wasn’t special.”
Rider’s voice lowered. “That line was.”
I didn’t ask which line.
I knew.
It had replayed in my head since the second she walked out of the bar and left me sitting there with tepid water in my hand and something rotten in my chest.
You don’t get to take what I survived—when you don’t know what I survived—and twist it into a personality flaw.
I pressed the tape down too hard, and it wrinkled beneath my thumb.
Cade saw it. “East.”
“Don’t.”
“She was right about that part.”
My head came up. “You want to do this right now?”
“I want you on the ice with your head in the game instead of back in that bar hearing her say it again.”
Briggs looked between us. “I think you deserved to be pissed at her, so my vote is to get out of your head.”
Cade’s eyes stayed on me. “That doesn’t mean he deserved to use whatever she lived through as a weapon.”
“I didn’t know!” I snapped.
The room stopped moving around the edges.
I hated the way my voice carried, the way the freshmen went still, and the fact Cade didn’t flinch. I hated Rider’s eyes softening slightly, like anger didn’t scare him when he knew where it came from.
“I didn’t know,” I said again, quieter. “I still don’t.”
“You don’t need to know to know you hit something bad,” Rider said.
Briggs nodded once, all humor gone from his face. “Sure, but if he’d understood what the fuck he was hitting, he wouldn’t have pressed on that nerve. He was taking another shot in the same fight they’ve been having for months.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“No,” Briggs said. “It’s supposed to make you stop treating one blind swing like proof you’re some kind of monster.”
Cade picked up his stick and stood without coming closer or making a show of it. “You can be hurt without making her pay interest on it forever.”
The sentence landed beneath my ribs and stayed there.
I wanted to throw it back at him and say he didn’t know what it felt like to love someone who made you feel stupid for wanting more.
His girl had chosen him loudly, publicly, and in every way that mattered, while mine had looked me in the eye after a year of giving me pieces of herself and made me feel like I had imagined every soft second between us.
Cade wasn’t the enemy, and that was what made it harder.
He wasn’t standing across from me trying to win. He stood there with an A on his chest, telling me the truth because he cared enough to risk me hating him for it.
I looked away first. “My mom can’t know I’m like this.”
Briggs’s face changed. “Gayle is here already?”
“Hotel. She’s bringing Skylar and Vivi before warmups.”
Rider’s brows pulled together. “How was the hotel?”
“The lobby lights hit Vivi wrong, and Skylar’s pretending she isn’t pissed that Mom wouldn’t let her wear the skirt she packed because it’s forty degrees outside.”
Briggs’s mouth twitched. “Skylar is terrifying.”
“She’s fourteen.”
“Fourteen-year-old girls are terrifying. That’s known science.”
Cade’s voice softened. “Your mom okay?”
That was the question I had been trying to avoid.
I reached for my helmet and checked the straps even though I had already checked them twice. “She says she is.”
Briggs groaned. “That means no.”
“She worked yesterday, drove today, and will sit through a sold-out arena with Vivi wearing headphones and Skylar acting like she doesn’t want to be here when she absolutely does.”
I looked at my gloves and laces, at anything except their faces. “That’s why I don’t want this conversation right now. She’ll look at me for half a second and know if I’m falling apart. She always knows.”
Rider nodded. “Moms do that.”
“Gayle does it like a crime-scene investigator,” Briggs said. “She once asked me if I was dehydrated from across a parking lot.”
“You were,” Cade said.
“I had one headache.”
“You ate gas-station nachos and called it lunch.”
Briggs frowned. “They had protein.”
“They had regret,” Rider said.
Despite myself, I nearly smiled, but my phone buzzed inside my bag before it could happen.
Cade noticed my eyes shift. “Answer it.”
“I don’t need to.”
“If it’s your mom, answer it.”
“I said I don’t need to.”
Cade’s jaw tightened. “Captain isn’t code for martyr.”
Briggs made a sound beneath his breath. “That’s actually kind of good.”
Rider nodded. “Annoyingly good.”
I ignored all of them and grabbed the phone. Mom’s name lit the screen.
I pressed the call button before I could talk myself out of it. “Hey.”
Her voice came through soft and tired, with arena noise faintly behind her because she was already inside the building. “We’re in. Vivi’s doing okay. Security let us use the side entrance like you said.”
My shoulders dropped a fraction. “Good. Where’s Sky?”
“Trying to pretend she isn’t taking pictures of everything.”
“She wearing the jacket?”
“She is, and she hates that I made her. Say thank you, Mom.”
Skylar’s voice rose in the background. “I look like a youth pastor.”
Briggs snorted from three stalls away.
I turned my back to them. “Tell her youth pastors don’t wear cropped leather.”