Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
January hit like a slap shot. The Renegades stumbled.
An injury bug bit; Elias Johansson missed three weeks with a wrist sprain, and Nick Delgado sat out with a groin strain.
Luke logged big minutes and bruises. Cassie was on the road more than home, spending nights in hotel rooms that all blurred together.
She rolled out her yoga mat in narrow spaces between beds and wrote articles in airport lounges.
When the team lost four straight, panic seeped into the fan base.
At practice, she watched players slam sticks and coaches yell. Luke looked exhausted, dark circles under his eyes.
It was a sharp, ugly session from the start.
Drills reset twice after players messed up the sequence.
Pucks bounced when they shouldn’t have. The pace was uneven.
Cassie sat in her usual spot along the boards with her notebook balanced on her knee, eyes flicking between line rushes and the defensive drills unfolding in front of her.
Luke missed a read on the first rep—stepped up too early, got burned wide. Parker’s whistle cut through the rink, shrill and impatient.
“Again,” the coach barked.
The second rep was worse. Luke bobbled the puck at the blue line, recovered too late, then snapped a pass that landed square on his partner’s skates. A stick clattered against the boards in frustration—someone else, but close enough that it all blended together.
Cassie felt it in her chest anyway.
By the third drill, Luke’s jaw was set tight, his movements rigid.
He was overthinking again. She could see it even from the stands—the way his shoulders stiffened, the fraction-of-a-second delay before he committed.
When the drill finally ended, he skated toward the bench and slammed his stick against the boards, hard enough to draw a look from Parker.
Cassie wrote none of that down.
She didn’t need to. She’d remember.
Practice broke early, not because things had improved, but because they hadn’t.
The players peeled off the ice in uneven lines, some muttering to themselves, others silent.
Cassie packed up and headed down to the locker room, moving automatically through the narrow corridors that smelled like damp gear.
She was already inside when Luke came off the ice and into the room.
He didn’t look at her. Didn’t look at anyone, really. He dropped his gloves onto the stall bench harder than necessary, ripped his helmet off, and ran a hand back through his hair. Sweat darkened the collar of his practice jersey. His breathing hadn’t slowed yet.
Cassie busied herself with Connor Martin, asking about the work he had been doing as of late to improve in shootouts.
But out of the corner of her eye was hyperaware of Luke in a way she hated—the way she clocked the tightness in his shoulders, the way he sat for a moment without moving, elbows braced on his knees, staring at the floor like he was replaying every mistake at once.
She couldn’t ask him if he was okay. Not with this many people around.
She couldn’t tell him she’d seen the effort underneath the mess.
She couldn’t say you’re allowed to have bad days.
Luke exhaled sharply, turning toward Tanner Brooks’ stall where one of the longtime equipment managers, Ronny, was hunched over. Ronny had Tanner’s ancient jock from his days in junior laid out in front of him like a relic—elastic frayed, stitching barely hanging on.
“I swear this thing’s older than half the roster,” Ronny muttered to no one in particular.
Luke said to Ronny, “You ever feel like everything’s just off?” he asked, voice low, teeming with frustration.
Ronny didn’t look up. “This thing’s held together by hope and tape,” he said, tugging at a loose seam. “So, yeah. Constantly.”
Luke huffed out something close to a laugh, then scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” he admitted. “I know the systems. I know what they want. And it’s like my body’s a half-beat behind my brain.”
Ronny nodded sympathetically, still focused on the jock. “Happens when you care too much.”
“That’s not helpful,” Luke said.
Ronny finally glanced up. “Didn’t say it was. Just said it was common.”
Cassie watched from across the room, finished speaking with Connor and now pretending to adjust her recorder. The moment felt private despite being anything but. She hated how little she could do—how her role reduced her to witness when all her instincts wanted to intervene.
Luke leaned back against his stall, arms crossed. “Everyone’s watching,” he said. “I can feel it.”
Cassie caught his eye then—just for a second. He didn’t look away immediately. There was a hint of sadness in his eyes, something unguarded. Then it was gone, replaced by the neutral mask he wore so well in public spaces.
She looked down at her notebook, heart tight.
As she left the locker room, the image that stayed with her wasn’t the missed drills or Parker’s sharp tone.
It was Luke standing beside an equipment manager arguing with gravity and old elastic, trying to explain something that felt bigger than hockey—and finding no language for it at all.
She carried that with her down the hallway, already knowing it would follow her home.