4. KAI
KAI
The Score
Six years of one-night stands here and there, and I've never once woken up still touching someone.
Normally, I’m on the other side of the bed trying to make sure the hookup girl doesn’t mistake one night for an invitation to more. My schedule doesn’t include a stranger in my bed past sunrise.
But today, I wake with my arm around Ava’s waist.
She's turned in her sleep, her back against my chest, my arm around her waist like I put it there on purpose. Her hair smells like citrus. Her breathing is steady and soft.
Her hand finds my arm, presses it closer.
I don't move.
That's new.
I lie there feeling the warm weight of her against my side, listening to her slow breathing. Her presence is so grounding, I want to keep holding her like this.
She turns and stirs after a while, her eyes opening. She blinks, confused for a second before her face settles into recognition. Then she tips her face up to look at me.
There's a faint crease on her cheek from the pillow. Her hazel eyes are softer in the morning light, less guarded than they were at the gala. They look closer to green in the morning light.
Her hair's come loose from whatever knot she'd had it in last night, chestnut brown spilling over my pillow. It’s longer than it looked under the gala's chandeliers.
She's tall even lying down, the kind of long-limbed that makes her impossible to lose in a crowded room.
There's nothing performed about her like this. No designer posture, no room to manage. Just a woman taking up space in my bed like she has every right to be here.
"You're a morning person," she says, voice still rough with sleep. It's not a compliment.
"I'm a hockey player. Morning is relative."
"It's six-thirty."
"That's practically afternoon."
She frowns like I've said something offensive, then drops her face back against my chest.
"I'm leaving in ten minutes."
She doesn't leave in ten minutes.
She's still lying on her stomach at seven, scrolling through her phone while I make coffee in the kitchen. I can hear her from here; a quiet hum when she finds something, a sharp exhale that might be a laugh.
I bring her a mug. She's propped up on her elbows, hair pushed out of her face, wearing my shirt without having asked permission. The shirt hits her mid-thigh.
She takes the mug without looking up. Then she looks up.
That shirt on her body unlocks a whole new kind of hunger in me.
I know what I want.
I want to see her again. Hell, I want to fuck her again.
But it’s more than that.
I want to know Ava. Really know her.
The realization catches me off guard.
I sit on the edge of the bed. “Give me your number.”
She blinks. "What?"
"Your number. I want to see you again. Go out with you."
The smile she's been managing threatens to break loose.
"Kai..."
“Your number, Ava.”
She recites it. I grab my phone and dial, listening to hers ring from her bag across the room.
“Save it.”
She pulls out her phone and looks at my contact, then at me. Something in her expression softens.
“I’ll text you. I want to take you out.”
Her lips twitch. “Don’t they all say they’re gonna text?”
“Well, I fucking mean it.”
“Okay, big guy. If you say so.” She still sounds skeptical.
She slides off the bed and takes my shirt with her into the bathroom. By half past seven, she’s back in her dress, her hair twisted into a knot at the back of her neck.
I walk her to the elevator and kiss her goodbye.
She still looks like she doesn’t quite believe me.
That’s fine.
She will.
After the elevator doors close, I head back inside to get ready for practice.
I'm five minutes late to the ice, which for me is the equivalent of not showing up at all. Coach Brennan glares at me from across the rink without saying a word.
I get on the ice and Wyatt is immediately beside me, helmet already crooked the way it always ends up by the second lap.
"You're late," he says.
"Obviously," I retort.
He falls into stride beside me. "What happened? Did you finally score with someone? The interior designer from the gala. Yeah? The one who was cool about hockey."
"Shut up, Wyatt."
"That's a yes," he says in a delighted tone. "Easton, it's a yes."
Easton glides past on my other side without looking up from his stick tape.
"I know. Riley introduced them."
Wyatt processes this for several seconds.
"You set our captain up and didn't tell me.” He places his hands on his chest. “I'm deeply hurt."
"You'll recover," Easton says.
“Nothing happened,” I say.
Wyatt shakes his head. "Something happened with Ava. I called it, didn't I? I said you two…"
"If you finish that sentence, you're running double shifts."
The threat is empty and everyone knows it, but it gets Wyatt to grin and shut up anyway.
Theo appears from the defensive zone, big enough that the bench shakes a little when he leans on it, beard trimmed neat despite looking like he hasn't slept in a week. His blue eyes cut to me with the faintest trace of amusement.
"You good, Cap?"
"I'm fine."
"Sure." He skates off without pushing it.
Jordan skates past and taps his stick against mine, that permanent asshole smirk already firmly in place.
“Looking almost human again, Captain.”
“Fuck off.”
He laughs and keeps skating, entirely too pleased with himself.
Brennan catches my eye from across the rink before he raises the whistle, voice carrying flat across the ice.
"Kai, whatever's got you late better not be on the ice with you tonight."
"It won't be."
"Make sure of it."
He blows the whistle. The conversation dies.
Good. I don't need to be talking about Ava Hartley on the ice. I need to practice hard while thinking about the game tonight. About Raleigh's forecheck and their left winger who's been running hot for three weeks.
I think about Ava for the first forty minutes anyway.
Sometime after practice, I catch myself working out logistics instead of watching the replay on the board.
Dinner reservations need two weeks’ notice at the places worth taking someone. I have tonight, a text, and whatever I can pull together on short notice without making it look like I didn’t try.
I settle on the small Italian place on Fourth. It doesn’t take reservations, and it doesn’t need them.
Decision made, I make a mental note to text her after the game and shove Ava out of my head until then.
By the time the puck drops, I’m completely focused.
The game is a grind from the very start.
Raleigh comes out physical, which I expected. Their left winger is fast and mean in the corners. By the second period, I've taken two hits that would have flattened a smaller man.
I'm not a smaller man.
I win the faceoff, drive it to Easton on the right, call for it back in the slot. I get it back. I put it on net. It goes in. The goal horn sounds and the bench erupts.
I skate back to center ice while Wyatt loses his mind behind me.
Seven minutes into the third, I'm forechecking hard along the boards when their defenseman steps up. I see him late. I turn to take it on the shoulder.
But he’s already committed and the angle is wrong. He body checks me, driving me into the boards.
My head snaps back. The ice rushes up. Everything goes white.
Then nothing.
***
Later, I wake up to voices and a light in my eyes that’s too bright and invasive. I don't recognize the ceiling. There are panels and tubes hanging somewhere above.
Someone is touching my head. Another person is talking in a low, controlled voice.
"He's opening his eyes."
My throat is dry. I try to sit up but a pounding headache stops me.
“Kai!” The voice sounds panicked. “Kai, can you hear me?”
I try to answer.
But I’m already drifting off into nothingness.
Time stops meaning anything after that. Voices come and go. A light gets checked, a pillow gets adjusted, someone says my name and waits for an answer I can't give.
I surface once, maybe twice, though I can't tell how far apart. Each time the ceiling is the same, and I'm gone again before I can hold onto it.
The next time I wake, I can see the people clearly.
My mother, Laura, is in the chair closest to the bed, her light brown hair pinned back. Her warm brown eyes are fixed on me with that afraid but controlled expression she's had since I took my first bad hit. Her face is wet.
My father, Charles, is standing at the foot of the bed. Dad's the kind of big that used to make refs nervous. Even now, he looks intimidating with his arms crossed, his heavy brow pulled into a frown.
Mira, my younger sister, is curled into a chair. She’s holding a cup of coffee she's not drinking. Her dark hair is loose, eyes wide with fright.
"Welcome back," Dad says.
I look around at the white walls, the machines beeping steadily around me, and rack my brain to recall what could have gotten me to the hospital. But I come up with nothing.
"What happened?" My voice sounds like gravel. “Why am I in the hospital?”
"You took a bad hit. You're okay." Mom reaches for my hand like I might disappear if she doesn't hold on. “You’ve been in a coma for weeks, but you’re safe now.”
Weeks.
I let that sit for a long while, waiting for it to feel real. It doesn’t, not yet.
"The game?" I ask instead, because it’s easier than the alternative.
"It's over."
"Score?"
A relieved laugh comes from my father. "He's asking about the score."
"We won," Mira says.
I smile. “That’s great. Coach is sure going to make me captain after this.”
My parents and sister stare at me in alarm. A slight headache starts at my temples.
"What aren't you telling me?" I ask.
“You just rest,” Mom says gently.
I remember then that I was supposed to call someone. I can’t place who. The call could have been urgent.
“Where is my phone?”
Mira gives it to me.
The phone looks old even though I just bought it and it’s the latest 2022 model. Maybe it got damaged somehow.
I’m about to scroll through my call log and contacts to jog my memory when I notice the date, May 2026.
Nah, it can’t be. Something is wrong with my phone.
“What day is it?”
“May fourteenth, twenty twenty-six,” Mira and Mom say at the same time.
I give them a quick glance. "It's twenty twenty-two. I need today’s date so I can type in the correct detail on my phone.”
Dad and Mom exchange a look.
“Kai, it’s not,” Mira says sharply.
"It's March twenty twenty-two. We're in the final stretch of the season. I remember…"
I stop. I remember practice. I stop. Practice. The constant chatter in the locker room. The sharp blast of the coach's whistle. The feel of the puck on my stick in the slot.
But the edges of everything feel strange, like a picture slightly out of frame.
Weeks, Mom said. A few weeks out of March puts us somewhere around April.
"That doesn't add up," I say. "If I've only been under a few weeks, we should still be in March. Maybe April."
My father moves to the side of the bed. He has more grey at the temples than I remember.
"I know it doesn't feel that way," he says.
"Weeks isn't four years."
"No, it isn't."
"Then what the hell happened to the other three years and eleven months?"
"Your doctor will explain everything when she comes in," Mom says. "But baby, your brain has been through a lot of trauma. You're going to feel confused for a while. That's normal."
But the confusion doesn't fade. It deepens.
Days pass in fragments. Doctors come and explain using words like "retrograde amnesia" and "traumatic brain injury".
I hear them but they don't stick, sliding off something in my mind that isn't working right.
The hospital has a rhythm to it that I learn against my will: the early vitals check, the shift change, the specific sound the monitor makes when one of the leads shifts loose, the regular changing of the bandage wrapped around my head.
Mira brings food my mother sends from home.
My father asks pointed questions of the doctors and writes the answers down.
I sleep more than I've slept in years and wake up each time hoping the four years will be there. Each time they aren't.
My mother sits with me constantly. She talks about things I don't have any memory of. People I've apparently known for years. Events that didn't happen yesterday.
A week into this nightmare, Mom is alone with me for the first time. I ask about the team.
“They brought flowers when you were unconscious,” she says. “And they’ve been told they can visit now you’re awake and stable.”
My forehead scrunches.
“You don't need to worry about that," she says quickly.
I don't say what I'm actually thinking, which is that I'm not worried about the team. Four years of my life is sitting somewhere I can't reach, like a room with the door taken off its hinges.
I'm thirty-two years old according to my doctors and look older. But I feel twenty-eight.
I close my eyes again because the lights are still too bright and the room is still too loud.
"Is there a girlfriend somewhere we should call?" Mom asks. "Someone who'd want to know?"
My eyes open.
I search my mind. There’s no memory of anyone important.
I think about it the way I'd think about a game I'm trying to recollect: methodically, from the beginning. I go through the last year I can reach and find nothing that fits that description.
"No."
She nods, her shoulders slumping.
But a slight sensation of warmth goes through me. I recall a hand pressing my arm closer in sleep.
“There might be someone. Maybe I…”
She perks up, leaning forward slightly. “Maybe what?”
What if it’s the memory of a movie or my imagination playing tricks with me?
“Maybe nothing. It’s just my imagination coming up with false images,” I say.
"Are you sure? You might be regaining your memory."
"I'm sure."
But I'm not.