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But I’m not doing better.
I’m letting Ruby distract the hell out of me, and I don’t know why. I glance over once and she actually waves at me—while she’s holding the guy’s hand.
I mean, could she have given me a bigger “screw you”? I don’t think so. I’m surprised she didn’t show up wearing a Blasters jersey and waving a sign that said Go Blasters with their stupid stick-of-dynamite mascot on it.
Rowan’s waving a giant hand with the Rovers fingers on it, so at least one member of that family wants our team to win.
A fucking football player. Really. That’s who she chose.
I’ve even confided in her about how my family was all football, all the time, and how choosing hockey made me the official freak of the Saul family.
The Blasters left wing slams into me so hard my teeth rattle, and I let out a roar of rage, and the next thing I know, the two of us are rolling around on the ice and the shrill sound of the referee’s whistle is blaring in my ears.
We both get a penalty.
I scramble to my feet and skate off to the penalty box, or the “sin bin” as we call it, my stomach churning. This is going really badly. The only good news is that the left wing is also in the sin bin, so the Rovers don’t have to play outnumbered.
But it still sucks.
And screw Ruby for messing with my head on the most important game of my career, with my family watching.
She could have at least given me a heads-up that she was bringing her new boyfriend.
Or, better still, she could have not brought her new side-piece to the game. Why would she do that, today of all days?
Damn. This is the first time I’ve realized how strong my feelings were for her.
Well, that’s on me. I’ve managed to spend my whole life avoiding the dread sickness known as “catching feelings.” I’m the son of two parents who are so wrapped up in each other that they might as well have been on their own planet. I never thought I’d find anything like that, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. It felt as if it was all-consuming.
And now here I am, risking the most important game of my life, because I let myself care about a girl who I thought was different than any woman I’d ever met.
When the break is over, I leap to my feet.
And I give it my all. I throw myself into it with everything that I’ve got. But hockey is a game that’s mental as well as physical, and if you’re not one hundred percent focused, you might as well throw open the gates to the city and let the enemy march right in.
I keep screwing up, missing opportunities by just a microsecond, and that’s all it takes for the Blasters to skate right over me. Yeah, the Blasters are constantly playing dirty—they’re clipping, they’re slew-footing, and they get their share of penalties—but I’m off my game and I can’t blame them for everything.
In the end, we lose the game 6 to 5.
It’s close. It’s really close. It’s heartbreaking, because any one of our missed opportunities could have turned the game around. The Rovers fans groan and shout in disappointment. And I can’t even look at my teammates as we skate off the ice, the pain of our loss hovering over us like a dark cloud.
“Good game,” our goalie, Logan Long, says sympathetically as we head back for the locker rooms.
“Thanks, but I sucked.” I shake my head in disgust.
“No, you didn’t. I saw you out there. You kicked ass,” he insists, which just makes me feel worse. Yeah, I tried hard, but obviously not hard enough.
How could I let this happen? How?
“More like I got my ass kicked, but I appreciate it,” I mutter.
After the game, my family is supposed to go out for what should have been a celebration dinner. Now I’m going to have to put on something resembling a happy face and listen to their commiserations and then go home afterwards and maybe punch a hole in the wall.
Even worse is the fact that this is just about the only time that anyone in Devil’s Fork would have bothered to watch me play, and this was the result. This will clinch my reputation there for sure. I can just imagine the murmurs of sympathy and pity my mother will get next time she goes to her ladies’ club luncheon.
The whole team is in a grim mood. It was incredible that we’d made it this far, because we’re a newer team and we were up against the best of the best. We were the scrappy underdog in every sports movie you’ve ever seen—but this movie didn’t have a happy ending.
The hallway is crowded with family, girlfriends, and press. Always the press. They’re the last people I want to see right now.
