AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Letting out a heavy sigh that didn’t do a damn thing to alleviate the gloom pressing down on her, Astrid closed her laptop and made her way down to the practice rink.
By the time she got to the bench, Tig was already stretching out on the ice. He was in practice gear but didn’t have his helmet on yet. His face had gotten leaner over the past five years, harder, more like his dad’s. That couldn’t make looking in the mirror easy for him.
Stomach somewhere between her shins and the earth’s core, she clasped her clipboard close to her chest and took in a steadying breath as her body went into WHAT THE FUCK mode complete with jangling nerves and her pulse going into hyper speed. Yeah, she’d spent her commute into the arena running scenarios about how seeing him again would go until she’d formed some sort of workable plan—one that went straight out the window the second she saw him. Like Mike Tyson once said, everyone had a plan until they got punched in the face.
“Hey, Tig,” she called out, half out of habit and half out of a need to regain control over her reaction.
He didn’t flinch, but he went still, and she held her breath, not sure what to expect. The boy she’d known? The cocky goalie who loved to talk shit to opposing players? The man who dumped her via FaceTime on their wedding day?
He got up from the butterfly position on the ice and skated over to the bench, stopping with a quickness that sent ice shavings up into the air. Jaw clenched, he looked her up and down, his gaze hesitating on the clipboard buttons. Eyes narrowed, he finally looked her straight on, and there was nothing of the Tig she’d known in them.
“I’m here because Coach said I had to be,” he said, his tone matching the temperature of the ice. “But I don’t have the first fucking clue about what you’re doing here.”
She gripped the clipboard tighter, not even pretending at this point that it wasn’t a shield. “I’m here to help.”
“Really?” he scoffed. “How? Are you going to try to guilt me into playing better? Are you going to continue on with the bullshit narrative from the gossip pages that I just disappeared without calling you? Is that your plan, to go back to your friends in the press while you ditch me again?”
She jerked back in shock, a cold numbness making it hard to process what he’d just said. How could he say that? Despite all of the wall-to-wall coverage of what had happened, she’d never talked to the press about it. She never would. It wasn’t anyone’s fucking business but theirs. And just like that, the nothingness feeling gave way to a hot, pounding fury that squeezed her lungs tight.
“You know that’s a lie,” she hissed at him.
“All I know is I never said we were over. I never used the words ‘break up.’ I told you I loved you. Then you stopped answering my calls. You ghosted me,” Tig said as he looked over her shoulder, and his glare became a mocking sneer of contempt. “Oh look, Slice And Dice has arrived. Now this is the guy I’d definitely go talk to if I wanted to know how to become the answer to a fucking trivia question and absolutely nothing else. What’s your part in all this? Are you gonna help me learn how to lose a career?”
Chapter Fourteen
Ever since the incident, Cal had dealt with people’s grim fascination with what had happened. They whispered. They asked questions. They gawked. However, no one had ever called him Slice And Dice to his face. In a way, it was a good thing to have it out of the way. Once people in the hockey world started talking shit about something to you, that usually meant it had lost its gruesome mystique. He was more than ready for that.
“What are you talking about?” Astrid asked, looking from Tig to Cal, wrinkling her forehead in confusion.
“Oh, come on,” Tig said with a dismissive huff before Cal could even formulate a response. “Like you don’t know about one of the biggest flame-out stories in years.”
“Well, considering I have ignored absolutely anything—and I mean anything—that had to do with pucks, Zambonis, and hockey players for the past five years, I really don’t know.” Astrid narrowed her eyes at the goalie and gave him a glare that should have melted the ice under his skates. “So tell me, what are you talking about?”
The snarky, shit-eating grin on Tig’s face disappeared, and he dropped his gaze. It didn’t take a genius to realize what had happened five years ago to make Astrid forsake hockey. The goalie might be a dickhead, but he wasn’t stupid. Of course, Cal still wanted to enact a little high-sticking-stop-annoying-her lesson on her behalf anyway.
Astrid turned to him. “What is he talking about?”
Cal’s thigh began to ache. It wasn’t much, just a twinge, but enough to remind him it was there and it was never going away. “It’s nothing.”
Tig’s head snapped up, his mouth agape. “Are you fucking kidding? It’s the stuff of nightmares.”
Or of Cal’s actual life. Both could—and were—true, not that he’d admit that to anyone.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Cal said, the pang in his right quad building with each word until it was a dull throb.
Jones let out a squawk of disbelief. “You almost bled out on the ice.”
“The skate never hit the artery,” Cal said, fighting the urge to rub the heel of his palm against the scar from the first surgery when the doctors had gone back and reattached the muscle. “That was bullshit reporting.”
“You still left more than a liter of blood in the crease,” Jones shot back.
Cal would have liked to call Jones out on the exaggeration, but he’d seen the pictures. The most popular showed his shredded pads laying askew on one side of the goal and a huge splotch of dark red staining a third of the blue semi-circle in front of the goal.
At the time, he hadn’t realized what exactly was going on. All he knew was that when he tried to get up, it was like his leg wasn’t even there. He’d just laid there on the ice looking up at the top of the Rage’s arena wondering how bad it was. One look at the trainer’s ashen face as he sliced Cal’s hockey pads off and he’d known the word bad wasn’t going to be enough to describe his injury.
“Cal?” Astrid asked, her eyes huge with shock and concern.
He didn’t talk about the incident. Not with Blackburn, who’d been hit from behind and slid into the crease skate first, slamming into Cal and slicing through his leg pad and thigh protector. Not with his family, who’d been with him through three surgeries and nearly a year of rehab. Not with Coach, who’d gotten him his first goalie coach position when it became clear that Cal’s time between the pipes was over. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t have the fucking words for it because hockey was all he was supposed to be or want or do.
