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“Is that how you guys have a cabin to stay in?” Andi asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “My parents left it to me.” I tap my shoulder. “I screwed up my shoulder in the first game of the season. I’m resting and training on my own here in town until I recover. The team came to spend the holidays with me in my hometown.”
“That’s so sweet. I can’t wait to meet everyone. Is the whole team at the cabin?” Andi asks.
“Just the starters,” I say. “There’s the three of us, then Nolan, Maddox, and your brother.”
“So tell me about everybody. Do you guys have cool nicknames? Wait,” she says, turning in her seat to face all of us. “Let me guess them.” She starts with Liam, who is lounging in the back and grinning. “I bet they call you Hollywood.”
“More like shitstain,” Carter laughs.
“And you,” she says… “Joker.”
“Oh, come on. That’s way too edgy for me. You can call me Heartstopper.”
“No,” Liam laughs. “Nobody is allowed to call you that.”
“And you…” she says, looking me over. She takes a long time, tapping her lips in thought. “You’re harder to figure out. I’m going to have to think about your nickname.”
“Oooh,” Carter says. “How come he gets to be hard to figure out? I can be mysterious. You know I don’t even like chocolate. I bet that raises all kinds of questions about my troubled past, doesn’t it?”
“Sorry,” she says. “You’re very mysterious, too.”
I keep my focus on the road, but my thoughts are spinning. Part of me thought maybe my heart had permanently frozen over after Sarah. I decided to put all my passion into hockey this season. I wanted to leave it all on the ice. Play my ass off, clear my head, and move on with my life.
And then I had to fuck up my shoulder. My stick ended up hitting an opposing player’s skate during a slapshot and tore something deep in my rotator cuff. I can still live a mostly normal life, but it’s going to be several months before I can swing a hockey stick again. For the first time in years, I’ve had to look in the mirror and see just plain Jesse–not Jesse the hockey player, or Jesse the teammate. Now all I see is Jesse, the guy who couldn’t keep his girlfriend from running off. I see the guy who doesn’t know who the hell he is without hockey.
Now this?
I’m gripping the wheel so hard my knuckles have gone white. I’ll be fine. The runaway bride sitting beside me is probably going to get bored with Frosty Harbor after a day or two. She’ll go back to her pretty little life and I’ll be left to brood alone, just the way I’d planned.
My teammates haven’t said it, but I know they’re aware I’m not in the best place right now. It’s why they are making sure to spend as much time in town as they can while I’m here rehabbing. Contractually, I’m not obligated to go to games injured, even though I know I should be dragging my ass to them to support the guys. None of them have said a word about it, so far, and I wonder if they ever will.
Either way, I’ll spend Christmas with my teammates here in Frosty harbor. Then they’ll go back to finish out the season and leave me to wallow. What more could I want?
But instead of the silence I’ve come to expect when I ask that question, I find my eyes sliding to the girl in the passenger seat of my truck. I jerk them back to the road, grip the wheel harder, and wonder if I’m really that stupid.
3
ANDI
“So they said you took a bump to the head?” The woman asking is in her thirties, with mousy blonde hair and a doctor’s coat on. I’m in a room that looks about a hundred years old and sitting on a chair covered in crinkly, disposable paper. Her name tag reads “Dr. Knight.”
“I think so,” I say. “I might have crashed my car a little bit.”
She clicks her tongue. “Take a deep breath for me.”
I breathe in while she listens. “I noticed Jesse Prince brought you in. Are you two a couple? The word around town was that he had taken himself off the market after things with Sarah went south.”
Well, then. Apparently small town doctors also deal in gossip. “Um, no,” I say. “He’s my brother’s teammate. They came to rescue me because I’m too poor for ambulances.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t want a ride in our ambulance anyway,” the doctor laughs. “Those two meatheads refuse to use GPS and they’re always getting lost. And if they’re not getting lost, they’re trying to seduce female patients.”
“And they still have jobs?” I ask.
She leans in my face, shining a light in my pupils and breathing her coffee breath in my nose. “Well, Frosty Harbor isn’t exactly a booming labor market. Sometimes you just have to take what you can get.”
“I see,” I say, hoping that isn’t the mentality that landed Dr. Knight her position. “Does it seem like I have a concussion?”
