Chapter 4
Jamie
I do what I always do. I wake up early and I get on the ice.
I’ve done it since I was little for as long as I can remember — before school, before everything else, skates on and moving before the rest of the world is awake. If I have an early class I just get up earlier. Simple.
The ice at this hour belongs only to me.
Just the pale rink light and the cold that coats everything in quiet, the sound of my blades tracing lines that will be gone by morning; the only proof I need that I exist. There's a stillness here that exists nowhere else in my life.
This is the one place I have never had to explain myself.
It has never misread me. It has never let me down.
I start with laps to warm up, then move to puck work. Shooting, retrieving, shooting again. Faster each time. I’m trying to get into the rhythm of it, trying to let the repetition smooth everything out the way it usually does.
Instead I find myself getting angrier with every lap. I bury the puck into the goal harder than I need to. Then again. I stop in the middle of the ice, chest heaving, and press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“Fuck.”
He’s in my head.
Rhys Callahan, who walks around this campus like he built it.
Who transferred here from Eldridge with a decent reputation and strong numbers and the audacity to act like starting over means nothing, like being new to a team is just a minor inconvenience rather than something you genuinely earn your way through.
He’s talented — very, frustratingly talented — and he absolutely knows it, and knowing it makes him think he doesn’t have to fall in line like everyone else. The problem is he’s right that he’s that good. That’s what makes it so hard.
If he was just difficult I could deal with it. But he’s difficult and skilled and every time I try to actually reach him we end up chest to chest and yelling, and I skate away feeling like I lost something I didn’t know I was competing for.
We have been playing like shit ever since he got here and I’m running out of ideas on how to fix it.
Because I’m avoiding the truth. We’re a good team that plays like a bad one and I know why.
I’ve been circling around it in my head for months and finding somewhere else to throw my thoughts at because the answer requires me to do something I don’t know how to do yet. Or even want to.
Rhys Callahan and I are the two best players on this team. Period. And we play against each other instead of with each other and everyone else absorbs that tension and plays worse because of it and the whole thing falls apart.
That’s it. The whole problem put simply.
So I’m pushing everyone harder and harder, trying to make up for this rift somehow. Trying to find literally any other solution than working closer with Rhys. Because everything is a joke to him.
Like I’m a joke to him.
I skate to the boards and step off the ice.
No good coming out here wound up like this. I’m just burning energy I don’t have. I sit on the bench and start pulling off my gear, and my brain keeps going even though I’m telling it to stop.
He transferred here at the start of the fall semester and within weeks everyone loved him. Coach, Kowalski, most of the roster — they all gravitate toward him like it’s effortless. And for him it probably is.
What people don’t expect — until they’re standing close enough to realize their mistake — is the rest of him.
Six foot two. Built the way that comes from years of actual work, the kind of body that has a history written into it — broad shoulders, the cut of muscle through his chest and arms and stomach that only comes from discipline and repetition.
Dark hair that curls slightly only when it's wet.
Dark eyes — not black, not brown, something in between that shifts depending on the light and his mood — that miss absolutely nothing.
And the tattoos. Too many to even count.
The snake that moves across his abs when he breathes, scales disappearing beneath his waistband like it's going somewhere. A hockey stick running the length of his forearm. A spaceship sitting below his left pec. And across his knuckles, in clean block letters:
PUCK FACE.
Like a warning and a joke at the same time.
Everything seems effortless for Rhys. Including the thing that costs me the most just to think about.
He’s openly gay.
Just like that. Just — out. Unbothered. Takes up exactly as much space as he wants and dares anyone to say something about it, and nobody does, because everyone loves him and it’s fine, it’s all completely fine for Rhys Callahan.
I’ve been squashing that same part of myself down for so long I’m not sure I remember what it felt like before I started.
Not because I’m embarrassed — I stopped letting myself think about it in those terms a long time ago.
But because I’m more realistic. I would only ever admit it to myself.
Who I really am. Just like my father taught me, I shove that shit way deep down and don’t let anyone ever see it. Especially no one this close to me.
I know what I have and what I don’t. School has never been my thing, was never going to be my thing — if hockey disappeared tomorrow I’d have nothing to fall back on, no plan B, no safety net. This scholarship, this team, being captain — that’s the whole of my future.
A gay captain in college hockey. In a locker room. In this sport. That shit follows you. But I guess some people don’t really care about that.
I pull off my skates and set them down carefully.
Rhys probably isn’t thinking about the NHL.
Rhys probably has options — a degree he’s actually good at, a family with money who supports him, some kind of life outside the ice that he could fall back on.
Good for him. I mean that. But I don’t have that luxury and I never have.
I have one dream. One shot. And I have worked too hard and given up too much to let anyone get between me and it.
Even someone who makes it look so easy to just be.
Especially him.