5. Jordan
JORDAN
The ice sounds different when the stands are empty.
No roar, no organ blasting through the speakers, no twenty thousand voices chanting the goal song.
Just the scrape of blades cutting fresh ice, the crack of composite sticks meeting pucks, the sharp echo of boards rattling when someone takes a hit.
Practice strips hockey down to what it actually is—speed, physics, violence wrapped in precision.
I take the puck at center ice and drive it forward, crossover steps eating distance, the cold air burning my lungs the way it's burned them since I was seven years old.
My body reads the play before my brain names it—Luca cutting left, the gap opening between their third and fourth defensemen, the angle I need to thread the pass through. Stick blade kisses rubber. The puck snaps across ice and lands flat on Luca's tape like I put it there by hand.
He buries it top shelf. The goalie doesn't move.
"Beauty!" Luca shouts, circling back with his stick raised.
I don't celebrate. Never have. I skate back to position, reset, wait for the next drill.
This is my last season. Every rep matters. Not because I'm sentimental—because I want to finish clean. No decline, no visible age, no whispers that I stayed too long.
I want to walk away while I'm still the best version of myself, and that means every practice has to look like the ones I ran ten years ago.
The whistle blows.
Coach Brennan's voice cuts through the cold. "Scott."
I skate to the bench. He's standing with his arms crossed, the clipboard tucked under one elbow, his face locked in the permanent scowl that made him a legend in this league before I ever laced my first pair of skates. Gray hair, stocky build, the look of a man who hasn't smiled since disco died.
"That pass was two seconds late," he says.
I nod. He's right. Luca was open earlier. I hesitated.
"Your head somewhere else today?"
"No, Coach."
He stares at me. The stare that says I've been doing this thirty years and you're not fooling anyone. But he doesn't push. Brennan respects earned respect, and I've earned enough that he gives me room to fix my own problems.
"Thursday's Game 3," he says. "I need you sharp."
"I will be."
He holds my eyes another beat, then jerks his chin toward the ice. "Go again."
I skate back. Line up. The whistle blows and my body takes over—muscles moving through patterns I've drilled ten thousand times, the game unfolding in angles and speeds my brain stopped needing to calculate years ago.
This is what I'm good at. This is what I've always been good at. The ice makes sense in a way nothing else does.
Except this morning, in my pool, Jessica made sense too.
I shut that down. Focus. Drive. The puck's on my stick and I'm moving, weaving through traffic, my edges biting hard as I pivot around their second defenseman and fire a wrist shot that rings off the post and in.
Luca skates past and slaps my shoulder. "There he is. Welcome back."
I don't answer. I'm already skating back to position.
The locker room smells like it always does—sweat, equipment, the menthol someone rubbed on a pulled muscle, the faint chemical tang of whatever industrial cleaner they use on the tile.
I drop onto the bench in front of my stall, center position, captain's nameplate bolted above it. Pads off. Skates off. Tape peeling away from my socks in long sticky strips.
My body's cooling down, heart rate dropping, the burn in my legs settling into the dull ache of muscles worked hard and recovering fast.
I've done this so many times the routine is automatic—gear off, shower, street clothes, bag, car. Twenty years of the same sequence. This is my last season of it.
I don't let myself think about that either.
"You're smiling."
I look up. Luca's standing three feet away, still half in his gear, grinning like he just solved a puzzle.
Dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, the manic energy of a man who's never met a silence he couldn't fill.
"I'm not smiling."
"You smiled. Twice. During practice. I saw it."
"You need glasses."
"I need answers." He drops onto the bench beside me, too close, invading space the way he always does. "Who is she?"
"Who's who?"
"The girl. The one making you smile. You never smile. You're like a robot. A really good robot, but still." He waves a hand. "Now you're over here grinning during drills and I want a name."
I pull off my jersey, toss it in the laundry bin. "You're seeing things."
"I'm seeing you seeing things. You hesitated on that first pass. Brennan called you out. You never hesitate." He leans in, voice dropping to a stage whisper. "Is it serious? Are you in love, Cap?"
"Get out of my face, Marchetti."
He laughs, loud and shameless. "It is serious. Oh my God. You're blushing."
"I'm not blushing."
"You're blushing. Nate, he's blushing."
Nate's standing at his own stall ten feet away, methodically unlacing his skates. He doesn't look up. Doesn't say a word. Just glances at me, holds it for half a second, then goes back to his laces.
That look says everything. I see you. I know something's different. I'm not asking, but I see it.
I look away first.
Luca's still talking. "Okay, fine, don't tell me. But I'm just saying—whoever she is, she's doing something right. You played like a beast today. After the first drill, anyway. Is she hot? She's hot, isn't she? She has to be hot. You wouldn't smile for someone who's not?—"
"Luca."
"What?"
"Shower."
He grins wider. "You're not denying it."
I stand, grab my towel, and walk toward the showers without answering. Behind me, Luca's still laughing, saying something to Nate about how I'm "secretly a romantic" and "probably writes poetry." Nate doesn't respond. He never does.
The water's hot and I let it run over my shoulders, washing off the sweat and the ice-cold and the two hours of muscle memory. My body knows what to do here too—rinse, dry, dress, leave. I've done this ten thousand times.
But when I towel off and pull on jeans and a T-shirt, when I sling my bag over my shoulder and head for the door, my brain's already somewhere else.
She's at the penthouse. In my space. The last time I saw her, she was in my pool calling me Daddy and coming apart on my cock, and I left an hour later for practice without talking about what any of that meant.
I walk faster.
The parking lot's almost empty. Concrete floors, dim fluorescent strips overhead, the echo of my footsteps bouncing off cinder block walls.
Expensive cars lined up in numbered spots—Luca's Audi, Nate's Mercedes, the rookie's brand-new Tesla that still has dealer plates. My car's at the far end, black sedan with tinted windows, the kind of vehicle that doesn't draw attention.
I'm halfway there when I see her.
She's standing beside the driver's door. Not leaning, not casual—standing with her arms crossed tight over her chest, shoulders hunched slightly forward.
She's wearing a dress I don't recognize, something simple, and her hair's pulled back. She looks small. She looks unsure. She looks like she's been arguing with herself about whether she should be here and the argument isn't settled.
I stop walking and scan the lot. Empty. No other cars moving, no one walking to their vehicle, no press vans parked by the exit with cameras aimed through tinted glass. The lot's private—players and staff only, no public access. She's alone.
The relief hits sharp and immediate. Her face isn't about to show up on a sports blog with a speculative headline about Jordan Scott's "mystery girl." No one saw her. No one knows.
I close the distance between us. She watches me come, her arms still crossed, pressing against her chest like she's trying to hold something in.
"It hurts," she says before I can ask. Her voice is quiet, almost apologetic. "It started hurting again. I was going to buy the pump—I thought maybe if I just handled it myself you wouldn't have to keep—but I didn't want you getting angry, so I came here instead."
I stop in front of her. Look down at her face. She's not asking permission. She's telling me what she did and why, like she's preparing for me to be disappointed.
She came to me.
She could've bought the pump. Could've sat in my penthouse and dealt with it alone, the way she's dealt with everything alone. But she didn't. She got herself to my arena, found my car, and waited.
"Good girl."
The words come out low and warm, and I watch what they do to her face. The tension in her shoulders loosens. The arms uncross. The flicker in her eyes that says oh.
I reach for her arm, gentle but deliberate, and guide her toward the car. She doesn't resist. I open the back door, tinted windows reflecting nothing but dim overhead lights and empty concrete.
"Get in."
She does.
The backseat's tighter than I expected. I slide in after her, close the door, and the space shrinks immediately—my size in a sedan's backseat, her small frame pressed close because there's nowhere else to go.
The windows are dark. The lot outside is empty. We're alone, but the risk sits underneath everything—someone could walk out, could see the car rocking, could wonder.
I don't care.
She's sitting on my lap now, her thighs straddling mine, the dress riding up as she shifts to get comfortable. Her chest is right in front of my face, swollen and full beneath the thin fabric, and I can see the damp spots where she's already leaking.
"How bad?" I ask.
"Bad." Her voice is tight. "I thought the medication would help faster, but?—"
I don't let her finish. I reach up, cup her breast through the dress, and press gently. She gasps, her whole body jerking forward.
"Shh." I pull the neckline down, exposing her. The skin's flushed, her nipple already beading with milk. "I've got you, baby girl."
I lean in and take her into my mouth.
The first pull brings a rush of warm liquid, sweet and slightly metallic, and she makes a sound—half relief, half something else. Her hands come up to cradle the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair, holding me there.
"Jordan—"
"Shh. Let me."