Howie
Today’s game day drive to the arena feels different as I sit stewing beside Rookie, death metal cranking.
I know why I feel off. I’m one thousand percent aware that Ella will be taking the bus home from Mercy Hospital after dark, alone, and her brother either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.
I adjust my tie in the rearview as I sit at a light, spying the fans already lined up for security. Rookie sits beside me, thumbing his phone and chewing the hell out of a piece of mint gum.
"Hey," I say, merging onto the road. "Can you text Ella and make sure she takes a cab home tonight? And that you’ll pay for it? I don't want her walking around Uptown in the dark."
Jason snorts without looking up. "She's fine, dude. She's been getting herself around since she got here."
"She works in a trauma center, Rook. She sees what happens to people walking around alone at night."
"Ella's tough. She's from Minnesota. This is barely cold.” He locks his phone and shoves it in his pocket. "Besides, she's a big girl. She can handle herself."
Something about the way he says "big girl" — careless, almost dismissive — hits me in a way I wasn't expecting. I keep my eyes on the road.
"Speaking of roommates,” Jason says, shifting in his seat, "you owe me a smoothie. That was my last bag of protein greens, and I know you drank one the other day because I weigh that shit.”
"I'll buy you more greens."
"It's not about buying more. It's about the rules, Howie. My stuff is my stuff. I let Ella stay, I let you have the couch situation, but the fridge is…"
"You let Ella stay," I repeat.
"Yeah. I did. She needed help, and I stepped up."
The words sound like a puck to the glass—jarring, violent. I feel my hands tighten on the steering wheel. I should let it go. I should nod, change the subject, turn up the music, and focus on the prep.
But I've never been smart. I'm the guy who says yes to everything, and I'm about to say something I can't take back.
"You stepped up," I say. "You offered her a couch in a room with no curtains. You didn't pick her up from the airport. You didn't get her a game ticket. You don't know what bus she takes to work, or what time her shift starts, or that she saved a kid's life her second day on the job."
The silence in the car is enormous.
"She takes two buses, actually,” I continue, and I can hear my voice getting harder.
"At five in the morning. In the dark. In January.
To a trauma center where people come in with stab wounds and overdoses and internal bleeding, and she stands there, and she handles it, and then she gets on the bus and comes home and studies for the most important test of her career on her phone because you wouldn't lend her your laptop. "
"She can use the—"
"You said no, Jason. She asked, and you said no. Because of your rules. Your stuff, your food, your fridge, your smoothie."
Rookie's jaw is tight. He's staring straight ahead. "She never said any of that to me."
"Because she never asks for anything! That's the whole problem!
" I smack the steering wheel, and the horn blares.
A pedestrian jumps, and I mouth “sorry” through the windshield, but I can't stop now.
"She doesn't ask because she learned a long time ago that asking doesn't get her anywhere.
She just figures it out herself. The bus, the studying, the food, she handles all of it alone because nobody in her life has ever shown up for her. "
"That's not—I show up. I told her to come to Pittsburgh. I gave her a place to—"
"A couch, Jason. You gave her a couch, and she was expecting a room. You’re a multi-millionaire.”
We're at a red light. The arena is three blocks away. I can see the lights from here, the crowd filtering in, the scalpers working the corner. My pulse pounds in my neck, and I know I need to stop talking, but the dam is broken.
"Your sister is the most capable person I've ever met. She does an exceptionally difficult job. And she thinks she’s stupid because she has test anxiety when really she just doesn’t even have the right materials. And she thinks she’s the black sheep of the family, Rookie. It sucks.”
The light turns green. I drive. The arena parking garage swallows us, and I pull into our spot and kill the engine. Neither of us moves.
Jason is quiet for a long time. Then he says, very carefully, "Why do you care so much about my sister?"
There it is. The question I can't answer honestly. The honest answer would detonate everything: the friendship, the team, the living situation, the taste of Ella's mouth that I can still feel on my lips and tongue. God, the feel of her body against mine.
"Because I live with her too," I manage. "Because someone has to notice, and you're not."
He flinches. I see it—the micro-movement, the jaw, the way his eyes drop to his hands in his lap. I landed a hit, and we both know it.
He nods once, stiffly, and gets out of the car. I get out, too. We walk into the arena without speaking, through the tunnel, past security, into the locker room where the rest of the team is already suiting up.
The vibe follows us like rink stink. Spinner looks up from taping his stick, and his eyes bounce between us. He opens his mouth and, for once, closes it. Mayhem is already dressed, sitting on the bench, and he watches us walk in quietly, but I can fucking tell that he feels the tension.
I go to my stall. Rookie goes to his. Three stalls apart, and it might as well be a canyon.
I'm pulling on my base layer when I feel a presence beside me. Mayhem, fully padded, smelling like athletic tape and Icy Hot.
"Whatever that is," he says, low enough that only I can hear, "put it in a box. You've got two and a half hours to hold it together.”
"I'm good."
"You're not. But you will be." He taps my shin pad with his stick and walks away.
I gear up. Tape my stick. Lace my skates. Go through the motions that have been the same since I was six years old, and try to put the argument in the box like Mayhem said.
Across the room, Rookie is doing the same thing. His jaw is still tight. He hasn't looked at me.
Then Grentley, of all people, the man with the emotional range of a parking meter, walks between our stalls and says, "If you two are going to have a lovers' quarrel, do it after we win.
" He doesn't stop. He doesn't look back.
But the sheer audacity of Josh Grentley making a joke breaks something loose.
A few guys laugh. Spinner cackles. Rookie's mouth twitches. I catch his eye, and something lifts.
I hold out my fist. He looks at it for a beat. Two beats. Then he bumps it, hard enough that I feel it through my glove.
“We’ll talk about this later," he says.
"Yeah. No shit.”
We're not fine. But we can play.
Coach calls us in. We huddle. We break. We hit the tunnel, and the noise of eighteen thousand people fills the concrete corridor, and I let it drown out everything except the burn to destroy Philly and their smug mascot.
But underneath the adrenaline and the anthem and the roar of the crowd, Jason's question sits in my chest like a bruise that hasn't finished forming.
Why do I care so much about his sister?
Why have I spent every moment since the sex lesson replaying the feel of her body under my hand, against my chest, beneath me?
All those glorious curves pressed against me, quivering.
She said she’d never been touched, yet she knew how to unravel me.
She had me begging for more, and she didn’t even realize it.
Ella Rujkowski, with her insistence on using my first name, is becoming a major distraction. If I’m not careful, this could mess up my game and my relationship with my best friend.