Chapter 24
twenty-four
BEN
I’m not watching the game.
I’m watching her.
The Boston College arena is a hostile cauldron—enemy jerseys, chants designed to rattle visiting teams—but Cass is impossible to miss. She’s sitting maybe twenty rows back from the glass, a small island of black leather and ripped denim in a churning sea.
My chest does this weird, warm squeeze every time I glance up there.
She came. She’s here. She’s watching me.
Normally, away games make my hands shake when I grip my stick. Walking into a building where everyone already hates you is its own special kind of hell, and the acoustics in this place seem designed to turn every jeer into a physical assault.
But tonight, the usual spiral is… quiet.
Because this isn’t just another game.
This is the first time we’ve stepped outside the bubble. For weeks, we’ve existed in this perfect, private world—her helping me debug Theseus, me sketching power supply fixes for her amp, both of us sleeping tangled together in my narrow bed.
But this?
This is the public.
It’s the first time my teammates get to see me with her for real. It’s the first time drunk assholes in the stands get to notice she exists. It’s the first time the fragile thing we’ve built—whatever it is—gets stress-tested against the full weight of other people’s opinions.
What if halfway through the second period, she looks around at the drunk assholes and thinks, This is what dating a hockey player means? What if she decides the guy she’s gotten used to doesn’t exist here, and all that’s left is exactly what she’s always avoided?
I know this crowd’s reputation—vicious to visitors, prone to throwing things, chanting obscenities that would make a sailor blush—and having Cass, sitting there in her leather jacket and combat boots, is like waving a red flag in front of a particularly stupid, drunken bull.
Please just leave her alone.
The buzzer sounds and Coach yells my line number, so I vault over the boards. The cold air slams into my lungs, and for a few seconds, the only thing that exists is the puck and the play. Hockey is simple like that. Find the puck. Move the puck. Protect the net. No second-guessing. Just action.
If only life was so simple all the time.
I make a clean pass to Nash, who takes it into the offensive zone with his usual reckless speed. We cycle the puck, methodical and controlled, and Schmidt threads a perfect shot past their goalie—a laser that hits the top corner with a satisfying ping—and the red light flashes.
Our bench erupts.
The crowd groans.
I glance up at Cass as I skate back to the bench, and she’s on her feet, clapping, a fierce grin splitting her face. She sees me looking and does this ridiculous little fist pump, and the warmth in my chest blooms into something intoxicating.
The second period drags on, with body checks, line changes, the relentless roar of the crowd. And when I block a slapshot that hits my shin guard hard enough to hurt and clear the puck with a deliberate pass, Cooper skates past and gives me a helmet tap as I head to the bench.
“Nice play, Kell.”
I nod, still breathless, and collapse onto the bench between shifts. My lungs are burning, my legs are screaming, but I feel good. Then, during a break in play, the arena’s sound system blasts a terrible pop song. I’m against the boards, catching my breath, when I hear it.
“Hey, look! Somebody’s Hot Topic goth doll got lost!”
The words slice through the noise, and my entire body goes rigid.
No.
I whip my head toward the sound. A group of drunk guys—maybe four or five of them, all wearing Boston colors—are sitting a few rows behind Cass. The ringleader, a broad-shouldered guy with a backwards baseball cap, is leaning forward, his voice loud enough to carry.
“Yo, Morticia! You know this is a hockey game, right?” His voice booms. “Not a My Chemical Romance concert?”
His buddies laugh—ugly, braying sounds—and I watch Cass’s spine stiffen. Her shoulders go rigid with tension I can feel even from the ice, but she doesn’t turn around to acknowledge them, and I know it’s because she doesn’t want to make a scene.
“Hey, sweetheart, you lost or just slumming it?” He guffaws. “Bet you give killer head with all that black lipstick—”
The words hit me like a blindside check, and for a split second, the world narrows to a single point of white-hot rage. Because this is it, the public test with my girlfriend for the first time since Mia, the first time the world has given me the chance to stand up for her.
For the first time in years, the wave of panicked paralysis doesn’t come. The familiar short-circuit—the one that turns me into a stammering mess, the neurological traffic jam that makes my body an alien tangle of limbs—never triggers. Instead, a cold, focused anger cuts through the static.
My brain doesn’t betray me.
It just… clears.
The anxious, overthinking Ben steps aside.
In his place, someone I barely recognize steps forward.
And this guy is someone calm, someone dangerous.
I skate toward the boards closest to them, slow and deliberate, like I’m just catching my breath during the break. My teammates don’t notice—they’re guzzling water, listening to Coach bark instructions—but my eyes are locked on the ringleader’s smug, alcohol-flushed face.
I stop directly below him and lean against the glass.
He’s still laughing with his buddies, oblivious, so I tap my stick against the boards. “Hey,” I yell. “That girl you’re harassing?”
The guy blinks as the grin slides off his face.
“That’s Cass,” I continue, like I’m introducing someone at a dinner party. “My girlfriend. And I’m doing the math on whether I climb up there now—so everyone gets to watch—or if the whole team just finds you in the parking lot after we win.”
I let the pause hang there, cold and deliberate.
His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows hard. I can see the exact moment the threat lands—his eyes flick to the bench, where Rook and Nash are watching with predatory interest, and where Stiles leans into the bit by waving his stick at the asshole.
“We’re a very hands-on group,” I add, my voice dropping even lower. “Especially after a good game.”
The heckler’s face goes pale. “Yeah,” he finally mumbles, his voice stripped of all its earlier bravado. “Yeah, man. My bad. We’re cool.”
“Good.” I give him a single, curt nod before I push off the glass and skate back toward the bench.
As I approach the bench, Nash skates up beside me, his expression somewhere between shock and awe. He doesn’t say anything, just gives me a look—the kind you’d give someone who just did something completely out of character and utterly badass—before skating past to take his shift.
I glance back at Cass, and our eyes lock through the glass.
Her expression is stunned—wide eyes, parted lips, like she can’t quite believe what she just witnessed me doing, and the fact that I did it for her. For a second, she just stares at me, and then the tension drains from her shoulders.
Her mouth curves into the most devastating smile I’ve ever seen.
She doesn’t say anything. She can’t, not from up there. But she presses her palm flat against her chest, right over her heart, and then points at me. The gesture hits me harder than any body check ever could, and as I reach the bench, Rook gives me a firm, approving helmet tap.
“Beautiful, Kellerman.” He grins, and there’s genuine respect in his voice.
I don’t respond. I just turn my attention back to the ice.
But I can feel it. The shift. The team’s respect, in response to my statement that I’m not the protected little brother anymore. I’m not the guy they need to shield from the world. I’m a man who protects his own, and they saw it.
The game resumes, and I throw myself into it with a ferocity I didn’t know I had. Every shift is faster, sharper, more aggressive. I’m playing out of my mind, fueled by adrenaline and fierce, possessive pride. I’m a demon on the ice, and it’s the best game of my life.
I’m everywhere.
During the next TV timeout, I glance up at Cass again, and she lifts her hands and forms a heart symbol with her fingers, holding it up so I can see. My grin is immediate, uncontrollable, utterly shameless. I mirror the gesture back, my gloved hands forming a clumsy heart against my chest.
The crowd around her probably thinks we’re insane, but I don’t care.
For the first time in my life, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.
I just care about her.