The Ugly Stick (Stallions Hockey Romance #1)

Chapter 1

LIV

“You must be a magician,” a man’s voice whispers. “Because whenever I look at you, the whole world just disappears.”

It’s almost midnight and I’m carrying a tray that’s extra-heavy from five coffees and five glasses of ice water. But I still stop and turn to the little old man with the thick glasses and bushy white mustache who’s sitting at the counter and smiling up at me with mischief in his eyes.

“Good one, Mr. Russo,” I tell him with a smile. “How are you tonight?”

“I’m just Mel, sweetheart,” he scolds me fondly. “Mr. Russo was our mailman. And I’m always better as soon as I see you.”

He’s been coming here ever since I started working and he always, always has a cheesy pickup line for me. Even back when no one else noticed me, Mel Russo would tell me heaven had to be missing an angel, or that I must be a broom because I had swept him off his feet.

I suspect that losing Mrs. Russo a couple of years ago is what has him up nights at the local diner, drinking bottomless coffee and pretending to flirt. He’s just lonely. I’ve been there myself.

“Let me just drop these with the kids and I’ll be right back with your coffee,” I tell him.

“Go on, sweetheart,” he says. “Take your time.”

I hurry over to a cluster of orange Naugahyde booths that could be retro but are actually just really old.

It’s just after midnight, but time takes on a different quality in a twenty-four-hour diner where the air always carries that same scent of coffee and French fries, and the low chatter of the customers provides a peaceful soundtrack at all hours.

The only real difference between night and day here is the view through the front windows overlooking the parking lot.

A table of some more regulars has gathered in one of the big corner booths.

These are high schoolers, but probably not the ones most people would picture.

While the cool kids are out at night going to away games and parties, or the really adventurous ones even sneaking off to the clubs in Philly, these guys come in here to talk about stuff like Dungeons and Dragons, their hopeless crushes, and the local band scene—the whole conversation peppered with silly quotes from classic episodes of The Simpsons that probably aired before they were born.

They only buy coffee, they take up my table all night, and they tip about as well as you’d expect.

But I don’t mind. Probably because I would have given just about anything to have a crew like theirs when I was in high school.

“Hey, guys,” I say, setting the drinks down carefully in front of them as well as a bowl of creamers, since they always go through a ton of them.

I’ll need to bring another bowl by at some point, and probably refill their sugar, even though the container on the table is almost full now.

But this will keep them squared away for a while. “Anybody hungry?”

“Nah,” one of them says, pulling his coffee close.

“Nice job on the creamers,” another says with a big smile.

That earns him a hard elbow from his friend.

The rest of them are all convinced this one has a crush on me.

But I know enough to see that he’s just well-mannered.

Plus, there’s a girl at school he talks about constantly.

I’m not sure why the others haven’t picked up on it yet. I guess it’s more fun this way.

I hurry behind the counter and quickly pour a cup of coffee for Mr. Russo—no creamers for him.

I don’t want to hurry the sweet old man, but I know I should put his order in now, since I’ve only got a few minutes before the late-night rush starts.

The bar down the street closes at midnight, so anyone who doesn’t want to head home has only one more place to go, and that’s the good old Bluevale Diner.

I can already see the first sets of headlights in the parking lot.

“Here you go,” I say as I slide the cup and saucer across the counter and ask the question I already know the answer to. “Anything to eat tonight?”

“Grilled cheese sandwich, please,” he tells me. “Extra pickles.”

“You got it,” I tell him, turning to the window.

But Dante, the cook, just nods to me. Mr. Russo’s sandwich is already on the grill, a plate with extra pickles waiting for it.

I turn back to catch up with my favorite customer, but before we can say much, a few more sets of headlights flash in the front windows and the bells over the door begin to jingle as the first of the crowd shuffles in.

This is when I make my real money, but it’s my least favorite part of the night. The bar people always bring a different energy. For the next hour or two, it will be packed and noisy in here.

“Look alive, people,” Dante sings out. “This is not a drill.”

I nod to him as my manager, Robert Cassock, leads the first group of people to their seats.

Robert is good to work for, even if he’s a bit serious.

No matter the size of the crowd, or if the HVAC system is on the fritz, the bathroom is flooded, or even if the weather is so bad that cars are sliding into the icy parking lot sideways, Robert is always neat and calm.

I swear I could spill a tray of drinks on him and somehow his white button-down shirt and thin black tie would stay spotless.

I take a deep breath and head over to greet the first table. The two couples in jeans and sweaters are laughing and talking so heatedly that they don’t even notice me.

“Well, either he’ll lose it on the ice again and actually murder someone,” one of the men says, not remembering to use his indoor voice, “or the Stallions will be unstoppable.”

“Either way, we don’t want to miss it,” the woman beside him confides in the woman across from her, who nods back. “The Stallions are looking good this year, and he might be enough to take them all the way.”

“You just want Caleb Stone to take you all the way,” her friend teases, then snorts with laughter at her own attempt at wit.

The first woman barks out some sort of comeback, but I’m not really listening anymore. Just the mention of Caleb Stone is enough to practically knock the wind out of me. And suddenly, it’s like I’m right back in high school with Bluevale’s golden boy.

Back then, they called him a god on the ice, like any teenage boy needs that kind of ego boost. But it wasn’t all just talk.

Just about every little boy in Pennsylvania dreams of being a professional athlete someday.

For a lot of them, it’s football or baseball, but Bluevale is a hockey town, through and through.

And Caleb is the only one from our little podunk school who ever made it all the way to the big show.

The kid was born with ice in his blood, and he was cool on and off the rink. I’m not into sports, so a lot of my memories of Caleb Stone are just of a painfully gorgeous boy strolling through the halls of Bluevale High School like a king, his pack of lords and ladies scurrying after him.

Of course, I’ve also got plenty of memories of him standing by while his girlfriend, Angel, tormented me.

I can still hear her voice ringing through the halls.

Hey, Twiggy, she would call out as I tried to flatten myself to the lockers to pass by without her noticing. Twiggy the Piggy. Somebody got hit by the ugly stick. Ewwwww.

Then her army of pretty handmaidens would laugh and oink at me, and if I was lucky, they let me pass.

But if they were feeling especially nasty, which was most of the time, they blocked my way and I stood there being humiliated until the bell rang and I had to slink into class late with everyone knowing exactly why.

It was close sometimes, but I never let them see me cry. I’m still proud of that.

I’m sure it would have been a real shocker to Angel, but I felt ugly enough on my own.

I didn’t need her help. Like a lot of other kids that age, I had braces and skin problems. And I was really heavy back then.

It’s not easy to find cute clothes for fat girls, and we didn’t have a lot of money to shop for things that fit me well, so I was usually stuffed like a sausage into cheap jeans topped off with the biggest sweatshirts I could find, no matter the weather.

I always hoped baggy shirts would make me invisible. They never did.

I mostly just kept my head down and trudged through my day, but whenever I looked in a mirror, I wanted to sink into the center of the earth.

Eventually, the braces came off, my skin calmed down, and I finished high school.

Better still, I got this job that I really like, an apartment that I love, and not just one, but two really good friends who always have my back.

And a couple of years ago, I started losing weight, for my health. It was tough, but now I’m in those sizes where it’s easy to find cute clothes, and I’ve never looked or felt better. Hailey says I got a glow-up, but it’s more than that. To me, it’s like I’m a whole different person.

I’m not even sure the old version of me would recognize the person I am now. And people sure don’t treat me the same way anymore.

Though I’m not always sure that’s a good thing.

Turns out that I used to have kind of a superpower—people used to tell me who they were right away with their reaction to my appearance. Now, I have to look for other clues that they might be shallow or even downright cruel.

In any event, that awful time in high school is over now and I love my life just the way it is. Most days, I don’t think about Twiggy the Piggy at all.

But now I’m right back there, at the mention of a single name that I haven’t heard in years. And I’m going to have to find a way to get used to it, since I’ll be hearing it a lot more from now on.

Because Caleb Stone, the boy who had everything in life handed to him on a silver platter, has somehow managed to ruin his professional hockey career.

I don’t follow hockey, but you would have to live under a rock in this town not to hear all about how his violent temper on the ice got away from him one too many times.

And at the end of last season, the team said he had talent but had become a liability, and they let him go.

I have to admit that the first time I heard it, the thought did instantly go through my mind that karma had finally caught up to the guy. But no sooner did the thought pass, than a pang of guilt twisted my stomach.

I’m not a mean or vengeful person. I like to think that my struggles as a teen have made me a more compassionate adult.

So my second and more deliberate thought was that maybe he had learned his lesson. And at the time, I really hoped that Caleb Stone would become a better man because of what he’s going through.

I just never hoped he’d be doing it here.

But he’s coming back to Bluevale to play for the Stallions, our region’s beloved minor-league hockey team. And every time I hear his name, it’s like I’m back in that hallway, pressed up against a locker, wishing I could be invisible.

“Hey, baby,” one of the husbands at the table pipes up, rousing me from my haze. “Can we get a couple of coffees here?”

“Do we know what we want?” his wife asks. “Then she can just—”

“Nah, nah,” he says. “We need menus.”

“Of course,” I tell them. “I’ll be right back.”

But they’re already arguing about where to find season tickets for the Stallions.

They aren’t the first people I’ve heard having that same conversation over the past few weeks—tickets for this season have been the talk of the town lately.

The Stallions have been around forever. The stadium is kind of a mess, but it’s a point of local pride that we have a stadium at all. Or at least it was.

Over the past few decades, the Stallions haven’t really given us much to be proud of—they’ve never won a title, and outside of the usual diehards, the fanbase seems to get smaller every year.

There’s even been talk of moving the team to someplace with a stadium that isn’t falling apart if they don’t start putting butts in seats.

But all it took was rumors of the ice god coming home for those tickets to become the hottest commodity since pandemic toilet paper.

Good for Caleb, I remind myself. Hopefully, this time he’ll appreciate all the people who are showing up for him.

But somehow, I doubt he will.

I shake off that ungenerous thought as I hurry back to say hi to Mr. Russo.

Unfortunately, his seat at the counter is empty now. And in lieu of the dollar he normally leaves me as a tip, there’s an envelope. It’s probably just a nice note. I know he’s on a fixed income, so I don’t mind if he skipped the tip this time.

“Hey, Liv,” a man at another table of bar people yells to me. “Can we get some coffees over here?”

I slip the envelope in my pocket, figuring I’ll open it when my shift is over.

Then I put my head down and try to get into the zone.

And I vow to not think about stupid Caleb Stone even one more time during this shift.