5. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
Ishould leave. The thought had been bouncing around my skull for minutes. Long enough that I should've listened to it.
Instead, I stood outside Lucy's office staring through the glass wall like some kind of creep while my coffee slowly cooled in one hand and my gym bag hung from the other.
This was a terrible idea.
Objectively.
Professionally.
Possibly medically.
Inside the office, Bea's laugh drifted through the partially open doorway. A second later Freya said something I couldn't make out, followed by another burst of laughter.
Lucy laughed too.
I froze. For one stupid second, I was seventeen again. Standing in the hallway outside biology. Waiting for her to finish packing her bag because she somehow managed to fit three thousand pounds of books into a backpack designed for normal human beings.
My grip tightened around the coffee cup. The memory evaporated as quickly as it came. Because seventeen-year-old Lucy would've smiled when she saw me.
Twenty-five-year-old Lucy had written me up before she'd said hello. The thought smacked like a body check all over again.
I shifted my weight and stared through the glass.
She sat behind her desk. A coffee cup near her elbow. A massive bouquet of flowers occupied the center of the workspace beside an oversized pink bakery box tied with gold ribbon. Her glasses rested low on her nose while she listened to whatever Freya was saying.
My eyes snagged on the flowers immediately. Big. Expensive. The kind of arrangement somebody didn't send by accident.
A stupid, ugly flash of irritation hit me before common sense could catch up.
Who the hell was sending Lucy flowers? The thought was ridiculous. None of my business.
And yet my jaw tightened anyway. Because apparently seeing her again had reverted me straight back to the possessive idiot I'd been at seventeen.
Her attention shifted toward Bea and a smile tugged briefly at the corner of her mouth.
The irritation got worse.
Fantastic. This seemed healthy.
She looked exactly the same. And yet nothing like the girl I'd spent the last eight years trying to forget.
The same eyes. The same mouth. The same way she tucked loose strands of hair behind one ear when she was distracted. But everything else felt sharper. Like she'd built walls around herself while I was away.
The weirdest part wasn't her. It was the office.
I looked around the space. There was nothing.
No photos. No drawings. No plants. No stacks of books.
No evidence that Lucy Thomas actually existed inside the room.
Just a desk. A computer. A few organizational binders.
A neutral lamp. Corporate artwork hanging on the wall that could've belonged to literally anyone.
The place looked as if she'd wandered in an hour ago and might disappear again by lunch.
Lucy had never done anything halfway. Not her room growing up.
Not school. Not life. There should've been sketchbooks.
There should've been coffee mugs she was emotionally attached to for no logical reason.
There should've been pens organized in weird little containers.
Plants she was constantly trying to keep alive. Tiny pieces of herself everywhere.
Instead the room felt borrowed. A space she occupied. Not a space she belonged to.
Inside, Bea glanced toward the glass. Our eyes met. Because of course they did. The woman made a living reading people. Her gaze flicked from me to Lucy. Back to me again. Then she sighed. Like she was watching a train derail in real time.
I narrowed my eyes.
Bea's mouth twitched.
Freya followed her gaze a second later. The physical therapist looked straight through the glass and grinned. I knew that grin. That was a problem grin. A second later she pointed directly at me.
Fantastic. Exactly what I needed. Three women discussing me like I wasn't standing six feet away.
I considered turning around.
Then Lucy looked up.
Everything inside me stopped. The hallway disappeared. The arena disappeared. The entire world restricted to those brown eyes finding me behind emerald frames.
And there it was again. That awful, impossible feeling I'd spent years convincing myself no longer existed. Like somebody had reached into my chest and wrapped a hand around my heart.
She knew me.
That was the part I couldn't get past.
Not the write-up.
Not the meeting.
It was the way she'd looked at me.
As if all those years had simply... vanished. As if we hadn't spent years tangled together in the most intimate corners of each other's lives.
Back when I was just Ty. Back when she was the one person who made me feel like that was enough.
Inside the room, Lucy held my gaze for another long second. The hallway suddenly felt too small. Too warm. Too crowded.
I should have left.
Instead I stayed exactly where I was.
Because after years of silence, after one disastrous meeting and one sleepless night, I wasn't walking away again.
Maybe it was the sleepless night. Maybe it was the fact that every time I'd finally drifted off, my brain had decided to torture me. Because apparently my subconscious was an asshole.
Every time my eyes closed, Lucy was waiting for me. Laughing. Smiling. Looking at me the way she used to.
Earlier, when I pushed through the locker room doors, I felt like I'd already played a full sixty minutes.
Music pulsed from somebody's speaker near the back of the room. Laughter echoed off concrete walls and rows of wooden stalls. Equipment managers moved through the space carrying armfuls of gear while the steady hiss of a skate sharpener drifted from somewhere deeper in the arena.
The air smelled like coffee, athletic tape, fresh laundry, sharpened steel, and a thousand other things that somehow only existed inside a hockey rink.
For most of my life, stepping into a locker room had settled something inside me. No matter what else was happening. The second I walked into a rink, the noise in my head usually got quieter.
Hockey had always made sense.
The routines.
The rituals.
The guys.
It was the closest thing I'd ever had to a reset button.
Not that morning. That morning I walked into the room carrying Lucy around in my head like a concussion.
Everything felt slightly off. Slightly blurry. Like I was moving through my normal routine while somebody else's life played on repeat behind my eyes.
I dropped my gym bag beside my stall and reached for my coffee. My patience was already hanging by a thread. Somehow, even before the guys started talking about her, I already knew I wasn't making it through the morning unscathed.
I'd barely made it to my stall before Zee's voice cut through the room. "Okay, but seriously. Nobody told me Hockey Ops was hiring supermodels now?"
A few guys laughed.
I ignored it. Or at least I tried to.
I focused on my gym bag and started pulling things out. Water bottle. Practice gloves. Extra tape.
Normal routine.
Normal morning.
Then Marco looked up from across the room. "The new girl?"
"The owner's daughter," Zee clarified.
"I bet her mom is a smoke show," Marco chuckled with a devilish leer. "Ezra's got game."
More laughter.
I rolled my shoulders. Focused on literally anything else. I unlaced one skate. Then relaced it for absolutely no reason. Took a drink of coffee that had already gone lukewarm. Dug through my bag looking for tape I already knew was there.
"Pretty sure that's how people get fired," Jonah muttered.
"She's technically forbidden fruit," Victor Petrov added.
Someone threw a roll of tape.
Petrov looked entirely too pleased with himself.
Forbidden fruit. For some reason that was the one that got me.
My jaw locked. Because suddenly I wasn't hearing teammates chirping before morning skate. I was hearing strangers talk about Lucy like she was some random woman they'd passed in a bar.
I looked down at the stick in my hands and realized I'd been retaping the same section for nearly a minute.
Across the room, Marco kept talking. "All I'm saying is if ownership keeps pulling out these new, young hires, I am changing my stance on nepotism."
A few guys laughed. A few groaned.
I stared at my stall. Counted to ten. Because for reasons I couldn't explain, I wanted every single one of them to shut the fuck up.
Not because they were saying anything particularly awful.
This was hockey. This was locker room nonsense.
The kind of conversation I would've participated in any other year.
But every word felt wrong. And I couldn't exactly explain why.
Couldn't tell them they'd spent the last fifteen minutes talking about the girl I'd once loved.
Couldn't tell them she'd been mine long before she became Ezra Thomas's daughter or Hockey Ops or the woman sitting behind a desk upstairs pretending not to know me. Couldn't tell them any of that.
Across the room, I caught Alois looking at me once. A brief glance over the rim of his coffee cup. The same look he gave rookies right before they made a bad decision.
Then another voice cut through the room. "Watch your mouth, De Luca."
The entire locker room went quiet for half a second.
Alois didn't even look up again from where he was sitting. Just kept drinking his coffee.
Marco shrugged. "Only having some fun, Müller. No harm done."
"You know what you are fucking doing," Alois replied.
Several guys barked out laughs.
Marco pressed a hand dramatically to his chest. "That was rude."
"You deserve rude."
"I was complimenting her."
"You were embarrassing yourself."
"Same thing."
"It is not."
Marco looked around the room. "See? This is why nobody invites him anywhere."
Alois finally lifted his eyes. "Leave them out of your stupid jokes." The sentence landed like a brick.
Marco lifted both hands. "Fair."
The conversation finally started drifting toward hockey. Road trips. The opposing goalie. Some argument about fantasy football that had somehow survived into January.
The office door opened.
The memory shattered instantly.