Chapter 2 #2
The room cracked open with laughter again, and I let the sound move around me without fully joining it.
This was the part people never understood about Hockey House, about us, about the strange social machine KFU had built around the Fury.
From the outside, it probably looked ridiculous.
A bunch of overgrown boys with scholarships, draft talk, team-issued gear, too much attention, and a house on Athlete Row that had somehow become more myth than residence.
But KFU worshipped winners, and the Fury had been winning long enough for the whole school to start confusing us with tradition.
Hockey House sat at the end of Athlete Row like it owned the street because, in a lot of ways, it did.
Football had size. Basketball had flash.
Baseball had their loyal little ecosystem.
But hockey had the mythology. Frozen winters, sold-out student sections, pink-black-and-yellow Fury merch everywhere, girls in cropped jerseys at games, old alumni with deep pockets, and a campus that acted like our season was a civic religion.
My father hated it.
Not the popularity. Harrison Mercer loved popularity when it could be monetized, polished, framed, and handed back to donors as legacy.
He hated the mess of it. The cheap beer, the music, the bodies packed into rooms, the lack of control.
He had spent my entire childhood building towers in Manhattan with his name etched into marble and glass, creating spaces so cold and perfect they felt less like buildings and more like warnings.
Mercer Development did not do chaos. Mercer men did not do chaos.
We did control, achievement, precision, silence, and the kind of success that looked impressive in photographs because nobody could hear how empty the room was.
Hockey House would have made him itch. Which was probably one of the reasons I tolerated it.
“Captain and alternates,” Coach Little said, pulling me back before my thoughts could go anywhere useful or dangerous.
“This part is on you. I don’t care how talented this roster is.
Talent is cheap if discipline doesn’t come with it.
Mercer, Decker, Lawson—you set the standard.
I suspect you’ll have Wade and Rider acting as additional alts.
If freshmen act stupid, that’s on you. If this team comes in soft, that’s on you.
If somebody’s ego gets bigger than the crest on their chest, handle it before I have to. ”
Briggs raised a hand. “For clarification, when you say handle it—”
“I mean leadership, Lawson, not whatever felony-adjacent nonsense just formed in your head.”
“Good note.”
I looked across the room at Ryan Decker my closest friend since we were freshmen on the ice together.
He sat near the wall with arms folded and a face that suggested he considered smiling a waste of body energy.
He gave me one short nod. He understood.
He always did. The team could laugh, party, and let the campus turn us into a spectacle, but when we stepped inside the glass, everything narrowed.
That was the cleanest part of my life. Boards, ice, puck, bodies, timing.
No guessing. No smiling because someone expected it.
No pretending warmth existed where it didn’t. Just motion and consequence.
Hockey made sense in a way people rarely did and Bliss Bennett made less sense than most people, which might have been the problem.
Or the appeal.
I didn’t like how quickly the thought of her adjusted the pressure under my ribs.
I didn’t like that one casual sentence from Easton had changed the mood of my entire night.
Ten minutes ago, I would’ve gone to Hockey House because it was expected.
Captain shows face. Captain keeps freshmen from being idiots.
Captain makes sure nobody breaks anything expensive, embarrassing, or attached to a donor’s kid.
Now I was calculating possibilities I had no business caring about.
Would she come with Aura and Charm? Never mind.
I knew the answer because she went everywhere with Aura and Charm.
Would she wear her hair down if it was raining?
I hoped it was in that sloppy ponytail thing girls did to us on purpose.
Would she stand near the kitchen where she could see most of the room, or would she let herself relax on the back deck if the crowd wasn’t too bad? But I knew the answer there too.
She would be on guard because she was always on guard.
Would she smile at me like we were just friends of friends, or would she look at me the way she sometimes did when I said something low enough for only her to hear, like she was trying hard not to enjoy me?
Easton shifted beside me, and I knew from the smallest change in his breathing that he was watching me.
I kept my voice quiet. “Stop looking at me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m looking near you.”
“You’re bad at lying.”
“And you’re suddenly very invested in morale.”
I turned my head slowly.
Easton’s grin was almost respectful in its cruelty. “What?”
“Say it,” I murmured, “and I’ll make sure Briggs knows you spent twenty minutes picking a shirt last week before seeing Aura at The Sin Bin.”
His expression flattened. “That was private.”
“It was pathetic.”
“It was navy. She likes navy.”
“She ever tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. She looked at me twice.”
“She was probably checking for exits.”
Easton’s mouth twitched, but something in his eyes sharpened because we both knew what I’d said. Not about Aura.
About Bliss.
He knew me too well to miss the direction my brain went when I wasn’t watching it closely enough.
Before he could say anything, Coach Little clapped his hands once, hard enough to snap the room back into silence.
“Last thing,” he said. “This season is going to be loud. Draft talk, rankings, media, scouts, NIL garbage, social media nonsense, all of it. Some of you want attention until you actually get it, and then you realize attention has razor-sharp teeth. Mercer knows that better than anyone in this room.”
Every head did not turn toward me, but I felt the awareness shift anyway.
I stayed still.
Coach wasn’t wrong. Attention did have teeth.
It bit into schedules, privacy, family dinners, interviews, relationships, expectations, and whatever part of your life you thought still belonged to you.
I’d learned that young, first as Harrison Mercer’s son, then as the kid with the private coaches and expensive skates, then as the player everyone decided was headed somewhere before I’d even had a chance to decide who I was without a stick in my hands.
The NHL had been less of a dream and more of a destination entered into my calendar before I was old enough to question the route.
I wanted it.
That was the complicated part.
I wanted the ice, the speed, the pressure, the violence cleanly contained by rules and boards. I wanted the draft. I wanted the league. I wanted to be so good nobody could argue about it.
I just didn’t want all the hands that came with being wanted.
Coach’s voice lowered slightly. “Protect the room. Protect each other. Protect the standard. Everything else is noise.”
The meeting ended ten minutes later with chairs scraping, guys standing too fast, voices overlapping, and Briggs immediately announcing that if Coach didn’t want felony-adjacent behavior, he needed to stop making crime sound athletic.
The room spilled into motion around me, but I stayed seated for half a second longer, letting the disorder arrange itself before I stepped into it.
Easton remained beside me because, unfortunately, loyalty sometimes looked like harassment.
“So,” he said, drawing the word out. “Party.”
I grabbed my phone off the desk. “Preseason party?”
“Pre-semester pre-party.”
“You already changed the branding.”
“I refined the mission.”
Briggs appeared over the row in front of us, twisting around with a grin already loaded. “Please tell me Wade invited Aura by calling it a pre-semester pre-party. That’s the most game he’s had in two years.”
Easton pointed at him. “Nobody asked you.”
“Nobody ever has to. I arrive where I’m needed.”
Rider came up beside Briggs, water bottle in hand, expression smooth as ever. “Aura’s coming?”
Easton tried to look casual and failed in a way that offended me personally for being so fake. “Possibly.”
Briggs slapped a hand over his heart. “Our boy is growing up.”
“She’s bringing friends?” Rider asked, and his gaze slid briefly to me because Rider, unlike Briggs, usually noticed things before making them everyone else’s problem.
I slid my phone into my pocket. “Why would I know?”
Briggs’s grin widened with such immediate violence that I regretted speaking.
“Oh, I don’t know, Mercer. Maybe because your soul left your body the second Wade said Aura, because Aura means—”
“My soul is intact.”
“Barely. I saw it hover.”
Easton laughed under his breath.
I stood, forcing Briggs to step back because I had two inches and twenty pounds on him and occasionally enjoyed reminding him. “If you’re throwing a party, keep it controlled.”
Briggs gasped. “Controlled? At Hockey House? During a pre-semester pre-party? With freshmen arriving feral and emotionally unsupported?”
“Yes.”
He looked at Rider. “He says controlled like he doesn’t live with us.”
Rider shrugged. “He means no broken windows, no fights, no ambulances, and don’t let Tyler Neely drink jungle juice because he still looks like his mom tracks his location.”
“That kid is absolutely going to puke in a planter by ten,” Briggs said.
“Not if you don’t feed him liquor like a thirsty raccoon,” I said.
Briggs stared at me for a beat. “You know, you use raccoons in examples a concerning amount.”
“They’re useful comparisons for someone so simple-minded.”
Easton stepped into the aisle beside me. “Party starts at nine. Aura said she’d stop by after dinner.”
“Stop by,” Rider repeated, amused. “That’s what girls say when they want the legal right to leave immediately.”
“She won’t,” Easton said.
I looked at him. “You don’t know that.”
“No,” he said, and this time his grin came back slow. “But she’s bringing our girl Bliss, and Bliss loves a hangout.”
The room around us kept moving, but I felt that sentence in a way I didn’t allow onto my face.
Briggs caught enough of it to make a pleased sound. “There it is.”
“There’s nothing,” I said.
“Sure.”
Rider’s mouth curved faintly. “He didn’t say there was something.”
“He didn’t have to,” Briggs said. “Mercer gets all serial-killer calm when Bennett comes up.”
I gave him a flat look. “Find a better phrase.”
“Emotionally constipated but with cheekbones?”
“Worse.”
“Romantically haunted?”
Easton nodded thoughtfully. “Closer.”
I walked past them toward the door. “All of you are useless.”
“Yet you keep feeding us so we won’t leave,” Briggs called after me.
That was the unfortunate truth.
I kept them because they were loud where I was quiet, loose where I was controlled, and loyal in ways none of us ever said directly because saying things directly ruined them.
Easton knew how to have my back without demanding explanations.
Briggs could turn pressure into a joke before it crushed the room.
Rider saw too much and spoke just enough.
Ryan kept everyone honest by looking permanently unimpressed.
They were idiots, but they were my idiots, and there were very few things in my life I could say belonged to me without money, expectation, or bloodline getting there first.
What I brought to the table was loyalty. Extreme loyalty. I was willing, able, and ready to fuck shit up if anyone fucked with mine. Hockey House belonged to us. The Fury belonged to us.
And tonight, if Easton Wade’s two-year exercise in emotional self-destruction worked, Bliss Bennett would walk through our front door courtesy of his lovesick ass being head over heels for Aura.
The thought should not have made the rest of the day rearrange itself in my head but, it did anyway.
By the time I stepped out of the arena building, the rain had softened into a fine mist that clung to the pavement and turned Athlete Row glossy beneath the gray afternoon light.
Across campus, students moved in clusters under hoodies and umbrellas, dragging suitcases, laughing too loud, already acting like the semester hadn’t begun until they found somewhere to make a mistake.
KFU looked alive again, messy and wet and over-caffeinated, with Fury banners hanging from light poles and pink-and-yellow decals bright against the concrete.
I headed toward Hockey House with Easton and Briggs arguing behind me about whether navy counted as a seductive color.
I should have been thinking about preseason systems. I should have been thinking about Coach Little’s warning, the rankings, the scouts, the pressure building around my last college season before the draft swallowed whatever remained of my private life.
Instead, I thought about Bliss Bennett in my house, laughing with my friends, pretending not to notice me noticing her.
And for the first time all day, the noise in my head did not feel like noise at all.