Twenty-one-year-old Bohdan Novotnak. Gloved hands wrapped around the top of a championship-winning stick. We were superstitious back then—said we wouldn’t pose with anything but the ones we’d actually played with, even though they were covered in ugly, frayed, stained tape we just kept wrapping over.
Golden-brown hair a bit more wild, styled to look like it was fresh from a postgame shower.
Top scorer in the entire NCAA standing between his two linemates and best friends.
Smiling. Happy.
No scar.
Girl of his dreams waiting for him back in that shitty apartment she shared with her best friend.
“You still talk to them?” AJ gestures towards the two people flanking me, pointing at each of them in turn. “Valdez and Choi?”
“Every day.” I swallow, roll my shoulders out, and toss the magazine back onto the desk. It skids across the lacquered surface until it knocks into a bottle of hairspray and rests just under the mirror, the reflection of that old me staring up mockingly.
AJ cocks his head, considering the me standing in front of him and the me immortalized on that glossy piece of paper that somehow hasn’t lost its shine in the last nine years. “Valdez,Novotnak, and Choi. Once-in-a-generation kind of thing. Lightning in a bottle. You and Choi went—”
“First and second in the draft.”
“And Valdez?”
I grin, despite the whole fucked-up, heavy thing. Talon’s been the same since the day I met him. “He skipped the whole thing and took a lot of money to go play in Sweden. He just decided to retire, actually”
“Retire? He’s, what, thirty? He get injured or something?”
Shaking my head, I fish my phone from my suit jacket and thumb through my texts until I find the gaudy invite he sent around. It only went to four people: his sister Tia, Jay, me, and Sloan.
Talon’s Retirement River Cruise
You are cordially invited to the party of the century
Meet me in Barcelona and help me celebrate my retirement in style!
I didn’t answer.
Neither did she.
I hold the phone out for AJ and watch his eyes move across the screen, the corners of brown skin crinkling before he cracks a grin and looks up at me, eyes wide. “Retirement river cruise?”
“That’s Talon. The only thing he ever really took seriously was that”—I point my chin towards the magazine—“and it’s only because of me and Jay. He wanted it for us. Not for him.”
“You’re telling me that an NCAA-calibre athlete, part of probably the best line collegiate hockey’s ever seen, two-time Frozen Four champion didn’t want to win? Hard to believe.” Doubt creeps across his brows when they come together.
“Then you haven’t met Talon Valdez. He’s one of a kind.” I shrug again, glancing towards the unanswered invite before pocketing my phone again.
AJ clears his throat, eyes flicking back to the magazine before they land back on me. “You going?”
I can feel my pulse behind my eyes now, and I take a slow blink. AJ didn’t come here to show me an old magazine or to ask me about my best friend’s penchant for theatrics, and I wish he’d cut to the chase so I can go home and lie in the dark with a stupid ice wrap on my head. “Undecided. Trying to figure out my next move with my agent.”
I’ve been joining panels and shows as a guest analyst while I've floated about unmoored in the world over the last year.
When I think about what I planned for my life, it certainly wasn’t a forced retirement from professional hockey before I turned thirty.
I definitely wasn’t sitting behind an analyst’s desk, lights that made me uncomfortable beaming away over top of me while my thirtieth birthday came and went with no consequence.
I wanted to be the man standing in front of me—to play and play and play until I felt my body start to slow just the slightest bit so I could leave on top.
“That’s actually why I came to chat. I was just talking to Zane, I know this was just an as-needed, part-time thing for you. Working as an analyst is usually a gig for retirement, but ah—”
