Howie
The bar McKenzie picked has exposed brick, string lights, and a cocktail menu that Spinner studies like game tape. Mayhem takes up way more than his fair share of space in the booth and nurses a single beer, watching the room with a menacing stare.
I thought I could just confess my sins to him over meatballs earlier today, but in the end, I chickened out and just said it’s overwhelming sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three people. Except that the motherfucker read between the lines. I know it.
Ella sits across from me between her friends. She is killing me with that body of hers displayed in tights, and her cheeks are still flushed from the exercise. Every time she laughs at something McKenzie says, I feel it in my sternum like a body check.
I can't stop seeing her in the silk. The arch of her back. The line of her extended leg was thick and round in all the right places. The way she tipped her chin up and laughed and looked like something out of a painting, powerful and suspended, held by her own strength.
I want to put my mouth on the inside of her wrist. I want to trace the silk marks on her palms with my tongue. I want to…
"Howie." Spinner snaps his fingers in my face. "You in there?"
"Yeah. What?"
"I asked if you wanted another round." He gestures at the table, which has accumulated a modest graveyard of glasses. "McKenzie's buying."
"I absolutely am not," McKenzie says. "I'm a nurse with college loans. I make less than your dry cleaner.”
"Then I'm buying." Spinner stands, grinning, and McKenzie gives him a look that suggests Louisville may be permanently in her rearview. "What does everyone want?"
He takes orders. McKenzie follows him to the bar to "help carry," which fools nobody. Aarthi excuses herself for the restroom.
For approximately eleven seconds, it's just me, Ella, and Mayhem.
Ella takes a sip of her drink and looks at me over the rim.
Her eyes say everything her mouth can't in this room full of people.
I look back and try to keep my face in Howie mode, but I can feel it slipping, the mask getting thin, because earlier today this woman came apart under my hand and now she's sitting across from me in a crowded bar pretending we're just roommates.
"You guys are cute," Mayhem says, not looking up from his beer.
Ella's glass freezes halfway to her mouth. I feel my spine go rigid. "What?"
He waves a hand toward Ella. “You and the group." He takes a slow sip. "Nice that you’re making friends."
I stare at him. His face reveals nothing. Mayhem is either the most oblivious man alive or the most perceptive, and I have never once been able to tell the difference.
"Yeah," I manage. "It's good."
He nods. Sips. Stares at the table. Then, so quiet I almost miss it: "Be careful."
Before I can respond, Spinner returns with drinks and McKenzie on his arm, and the moment dissolves into noise and laughter and the safety of a group.
Aarthi comes back and starts grilling Mayhem about what he's reading.
Spinner tells a story about a road trip in juniors, that has McKenzie wheezing.
Ella laughs, and her knee bumps mine under the table and stays there, warm through my denim, and I leave it. I leave it right there and drink my beer and perform Howie Houser, life of the party, man with nothing to hide.
McKenzie asks Ella something about work, and Ella launches into a story about a patient whose roommate put glue in the toothpaste tube, and I watch her friends lean in, rapt, laughing, and I realize: she's funny.
Not just dry-humor funny with me, but commanding-a-table funny.
Her timing is perfect. She does voices. McKenzie throws a napkin at her, and Aarthi wipes her eyes.
Ella glows with it, the pleasure of being seen as entertaining and interesting and wanted for something other than her proximity to a hockey player.
I could watch her all night. That's the problem.
Mayhem nudges my boot under the table. I tear my eyes away from Ella, and he gives me a look that says, louder than words: I said be careful.
The energy level at morning practice is what I’d expect from the Fury in pre-season. We shouldn’t have gone out on a weeknight. Spinner skates onto the ice, singing something off-key. Rookie grumbles about being left out — nobody invited him to the bar, but he was out hunting elk burgers anyway.
"You guys went to a bar without me?" Jason tapes his stick at the bench, looking wounded. "With my sister?"
"We ran into her," Spinner says, which is technically true in the sense that everything is technically something. “She was out with nurse friends. We got drinks. It was chill."
"Who's we?"
"Me, Howie, Mayhem. And Ella's friends." Spinner grins in a way that suggests McKenzie's phone number is saved in his contacts. "One of them is from Kentucky. She does this thing with her…"
"Don't want to hear it," Rookie says.
Coach blows the whistle, and we line up for drills.
I feel decent, a little loose from the beer, a little tight from sleeping on the couch, but my legs are under me, and my head is clear.
Clearer than it's been in weeks, actually, which is ironic given that my life is a ticking bomb of secrets and desire.
We scrimmage. First unit against second unit, full contact, coaches watching from the bench. I'm on the second line with Spinner, running a cycle play along the boards. The puck dumps into the corner, and I chase it, shoulder down, cutting hard to beat the defenseman to the wall.
What happens next takes about two seconds.
The defender, a rookie named Hargrove who outweighs me by twenty pounds, catches my outside knee with his hip as I cut left. It's not dirty. It's not even hard, really. It's just the wrong angle at the wrong speed, my blade catching a rut in the ice at the exact moment his weight hits my leg.
The pain is instant and specific — a hot, bright flare on the inside of my knee, the kind that makes your vision go white at the edges. I go down. Not dramatically, not with a scream. I just fold, one leg buckling, and hit the ice on my side with my stick clattering away.
The whistle blows. Hargrove skids to a stop and says, "Shit, Howie, I'm sorry—" and I wave him off because it's not his fault, and I can already tell this is bad.
Not catastrophic. I've had catastrophic shoulder surgery and a broken orbital bone. This isn't that. But when I try to put weight on it, the knee says no in a very clear voice. The trainer is already jogging across the ice with that look they get when they're calculating weeks instead of days.
"Don't move," he says. "Let me see."
He bends my knee. Presses on the inside. I grab the boards and squeeze until my knuckles crack.
"MCL," he says. "Almost certainly. We'll get imaging, but I can feel the laxity."
I’m not cramming for an anatomy exam like Ella, but I know that word is no good.
"How long?" I ask.
"Depends on the grade. Could be a week. Could be four.”
I lie back on the ice and stare at the ceiling — the lights, the banners, the rafters — and feel the cold seep through my jersey into my back. The team has three road games this week. A swing through Carolina and Florida.
Spinner appears above me, upside down from my vantage point. "You good?"
"MCL."
"Fuck." He taps my chest with his glove. "That sucks, bruh.”
Mayhem skates up behind Spinner, silent, looming.
He looks down at me, and I look up at him, and he says nothing, because Mayhem never says what he doesn't need to.
But I see something flicker across his face — not just concern about my knee.
Something else. Something that says: you're about to be alone in that apartment with her for a week.
I know, I want to tell him. I know.
Rookie skates over last. "Howie. Shit. You okay?"
"I'll live."
"You need anything? Want me to call Benny?” It’s cute that Rookie thinks my agent would respond to this.
"Nah. I'll deal with it." I let the trainer and Spinner help me up, wobbling on one leg, gripping their shoulders. The knee throbs with every heartbeat, hot and swollen already, and I can feel it stiffening as the adrenaline wears off.
Tucker and Alder Stag skate up behind Spinner, the three of them insisting someone call my agent while I’m getting checked out. I hear them joking about how their agent probably already knows I’m hurt, and I wonder again if this Benny guy my dad found was another terrible decision in my long list.
The guys get me to the training room and half out of my gear so the trainer can strap a bag of ice to my knee.
They have me on my back, my leg elevated, when Coach comes by.
He squeezes my shoulder with a “tough luck, kid,” and then I hear the staff read my sentence to him: two weeks, no practice, no games.
I watch the rest of practice through the glass.
Rookie and Spinner run drills. Mayhem lays someone out with a clean check that echoes across the empty arena.
Grentley makes a save I have to admit is beautiful.
The Stag brothers whoop and cheer like they don’t hate Grentley’s guts, and maybe they’re slowly getting over their feud.
All I know is they’re going to take that energy to Carolina tomorrow morning, and I won’t be on that plane.
Micky the trainer insists on a home visit, following me into Rookie’s condo, frowning as I install myself on the couch.
He sets me up with a foam wedge for elevation and texts me rehab instructions I probably won’t read.
“I’ll see myself out,” he says. “And then we’ll see you for PT in the morning, okay? ”
I grunt, and then the apartment is empty. Ella's at work. Jason’s not home from practice and film.
I lie on the couch with my knee throbbing and my head spinning, and I stare at the ceiling where the streetlights used to paint yellow streaks before I hung curtains for a woman I’m not supposed to care about.
And now Ella and I will be alone in this apartment for at least five days, and I can't run, can't skate, can't even walk to Gianna's without limping.
I'm grounded. Trapped. Alone with her.
I press the ice pack harder against my knee and close my eyes.