27. CHAPTER 27
Locke
The problem with playing angry is that it has its benefits. Often, the anger sharpens everything—the read, the hit, the willingness to put yourself in the path of inevitable pain.
For the first forty minutes of this game, I’ve been a machine.
I’ve been clean, efficient, and brutal without getting into trouble.
Rome has been reading me perfectly from the right side, filling every gap I open, and the Seattle forwards have been bouncing off our defensive pairing like they’ve been running into a brick wall.
It’s all great until the forty-first minute.
I don’t even remember his name. He’s a second-line grinder, the kind of player who exists specifically to get under the skin of defensemen like me.
He’s physical enough to be annoying, smart enough to know exactly how much he can get away with before the refs step in, and he’s been in my space since the second period.
There’s been the stick to the back of my knee, the chirping in my ear, and the crosscheck to my shoulder blades that had me kissing glass.
Drip, drip, drip until my bucket of patience overflows.
Under different circumstances, I might be able to manage it. I’ve been doing great for weeks.
But that was before Livia Cross turned my life upside down.
The grinder crosses the crease and clips Rome across the back of the helmet with a forearm that’s either deliberate or reckless. I can’t tell which and it doesn’t matter because I decide not to care anymore once Rome goes down.
Not badly—he immediately pops back up—but he’s shaking his head, slightly rattled. The ref has his arm up calling the penalty and the play is already dead. The grinder is drifting away with his hands outward, pantomiming his innocence, which I find more enraging than the hit itself.
Or maybe I find it more enraging because ever since I walked out of Livia’s office, the fury has been building. It’s aimed at her, at me, and now at this douche from the Storm.
I explode.
I cross the fifteen feet between us.
I don’t run. I don’t telegraph it. I just go after him.
My gloves are off before I fully decide they’re coming off, and I get two fistfuls of his jersey. The crowd noise shifts… higher and more electric and the his eyes go wide because he didn’t see me coming, which is information he should have had.
We don’t last long. The refs are in immediately, bodies separating us before it escalates past the grab and shove.
“Donovan.” The referee’s voice. “That’s two minutes roughing.”
“He hit my guy from behind,” I growl at him.
“He’s already got a penalty.”
“He needed more than a penalty.”
“Two minutes, Donovan. Let’s go.”
I skate to the box.
The home crowd gives me a sound I don’t deserve, a swell of appreciation from the Portland faithful who have decided they like when I enforce on the ice.
I don’t look at them. I sit down in the box and put my elbows on my knees and stare at the ice for the next one hundred and twenty seconds while the team kills off my penalty.
Van’s waiting for me in the corridor, blocking my line of escape from the locker room to the players’ lot.
We won, which should matter more than it currently does. Seattle took a two-goal deficit into the third and couldn’t close it. My teammates are flying on a post-win high with music blaring and towels snapping playfully.
I showered and dressed as fast as possible, keeping my eyes averted so no one would talk to me.
It’s been a week since I called things off with Livia and I’ve already climbed back into my shell and no one is pushing to drag me out.
Not even Livia, who has not attended a game on the ice with us since. Oh, I’m sure she’s here in the arena somewhere, but she’s been keeping her distance.
Which is what I wanted, right?
I even made sure of it when she found me the morning after our “third session” in the weight room.
I was bench-pressing a third set and Rome was spotting me. She stood off to the side and waited for me to finish, and while I wanted to ignore her, I knew she wouldn’t go away until I heard her out.
She was composed when I walked over to her. “Can we talk?”
“I’m in the middle of a workout.”
“After.”
“I’ve got film review after.”
She held my gaze. “Locke. Please.”
I glanced over at Rome who was scrolling his phone and then back to Livia. “Look… there’s nothing to talk about. I need you to let it go, okay?”
“Okay, fine… but you’re going to at least hear me out. You owe me that much.”
I’m not sure if I owed it to her, but I gave it anyway. “Talk.”
Livia took a deep breath and moved in closer.
“I know I pushed too far. I know I used what we were to get you to open up and I know that was wrong, I won’t stand here and argue that it wasn’t.
” She clasped her hands and I saw that her knuckles went white, which told me she was nervous.
“I own that. Completely. No qualifications.”
I simply stared at her.
“But I want you to hear me,” she said, her words coming quicker because maybe she was afraid I’d cut her off. “Because I think you already know it and you’re choosing not to look at it, but what I did in that session and what Adam did to you are not the same thing.”
That caught me by surprise, because I was indeed lumping her in with Adam. The whole breach of trust thing.
“Adam lied,” she continued. “He stood in front of people who mattered to you and he rewrote the truth to protect himself, then he let you carry the entire weight of what he did. That is one of the most devastating things one person can do to another, and you’ve been carrying it for a long time. I am so sorry that happened to you.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, because talk of my past was making me uncomfortable. Still, I said nothing.
Livia sighed, understanding that wasn’t going to be a conversation, merely a speech. “But I didn’t lie, Locke. I pushed past a line I agreed to respect. That’s a real thing and it was wrong. But it is not the same as what Adam did and you know that.”
“I know it’s not the same exact thing,” I admitted, but my words were clipped. “Still, you betrayed our bargain.”
“Maybe so,” she said in frustration. “But I have never in my professional life crossed the lines I crossed with you. I have never let a working relationship become what ours became. You want to know why?” I don’t wait for an answer.
“Because I don’t do that. Because I am careful and I am professional and I keep everything in the right boxes, and I do not let people in past the point where they can do real damage.
” Her voice was so steady, I almost believed her.
“And then you happened. And I couldn’t keep you in the box. I tried, Locke. I tried and you just kept being you. And the person you actually are when you let someone see it is someone worth every line I crossed.”
That got to me, because it’s been a long fucking time since I’d been worth anything to anyone.
Maybe she sensed a softening, because she rushed on.
“You lost something good once. The best friendship you’d ever had.
You did everything right and it still destroyed you.
And I understand why that made you decide that good things aren’t safe.
” She stepped closer and I almost reached for her.
“But you don’t get to use Adam as an excuse to throw away something real.
You don’t get to do that.” Her voice quavered and I almost cracked.
“That’s not strength. That’s fear. And you are too good a man to spend the rest of your life being afraid of the one thing you actually want. ”
She was breathing hard when she finished and it was a lot to process. But in the end, I couldn’t take the chance with her. Every one of my defenses told me to shut it down.
So I did. “Livia… I appreciate what you’re saying, but it doesn’t change anything. I think it’s just best if we go our separate ways.”
The minute the words were out of my mouth, they felt utterly wrong. I almost took them back, but her expression stopped me.
It was acceptance. Just that easy, I could see she was done trying.
And that felt easier to me.
So, I didn’t say another word and she walked away.
Van falls into step beside me without ceremony as I walk toward the players’ lot door. “Talk,” he demands.
“Nothing to talk about.”
“The roughing penalty in the second.”
“Rome got hit.”
“Rome got hit and fourteen other guys on this roster kept their gloves on.” He steps into my path and halts, forcing me to stop. “You didn’t. What was that?”
I gust out a breath of frustration. “It was nothing. A harmless penalty.”
“It was an unnecessary penalty. You’re lucky it’s harmless or it would be Patrick talking to you, not me.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I scrape my fingers through my hair and look away.
“What about the woman you told me about?” Van asks. “Is she the cause of this?”
My head whips back his way, because yeah… she’s the cause. I don’t give him that though, remaining stubbornly silent.
“Look, man,” he says softly, as if I were a caged animal. “If things went south, I get it. Been there, done that. But you have to get your shit together.”
I say nothing.
“If you can fix it with her, fix it,” he says.
I flinch at that, a visible sign that he clocks and steps closer to me.
“I took Simone’s patience and I ground it down for a year before I got my head out of my ass,” he says.
“She’s a remarkable woman and she never once made me feel like a clock was running.
But there was a point in time where I understood that what I was protecting wasn’t worth what I was losing.
” He taps a finger to my chest. “You’ll get there or you won’t.
But tonight’s two minutes becomes next week’s ten and next month’s suspension, and Rowe will have no choice and you know it. ”
With that, he spins on his heel and leaves me.
I stand in the corridor under the hum of fluorescent lights and let what he said settle. I try to figure out what I’m really feeling.
It’s different from a week ago.
The anger at Livia is mostly gone. It burned through in the first week, the hot version of it, anyway. What replaced it is less definable but somewhat self-directed and shameful.
She pushed too far.
She pushed beyond an agreed boundary using my past.
But she did it because she cares.
And those are things I’m having a hard time reconciling. That is why I’m really angry.
I can’t figure this shit out.