His younger brother Beck was one of the most frequent commenters. I hadn’t seen him in a decade, but the last thing I’d heard was that he’d joined the Winnipeg Wapitis. We’d sometimes played with him when we’d been at their parents’ place. When the lake behind their house froze over in winter, their dad, who’d been a pretty successful goaltender in his day, carried two goals and a mountain of pucks out there and the people from the village met for friendly games. Even back then Beck had been a fantastic goalie.
Damn, I missed the Hennessys. I’d lost my parents early and had found my place first with the Pumas,then with the Caribous. Linden’s family had welcomed me with open arms. Their son’s best friend… It had been like coming home. I fit right in with their flock.
I never knew if they’d suspected the depth of my feelings for him, and I had never asked. Especially not after…
I tried to lose myself in a book, but my thoughts scattered like chickens over grain.
Was I wrong for kicking Nate out of my life when everything in me pulled in his direction? It was like he’d sunk a hook into my heart.
I sat up and rubbed my wishbone where I felt the tug of…something. The rational part of my brain pushed the thought away, but it crept inside my head in those unbidden moments, when I chopped wood, while I cooked, or when I lay in bed at night and tried to fall asleep.
Not even jerking off helped.
No, because you see his face before your inner eye and all you can think about is how beautiful he was when he opened for you.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nate
Ihurt. Everything from my body to my heart hurt as I dragged myself into the locker room after practice. I had wrecked myself to stop thinking about Vee.
Yeah, that worked really well.
Six weeks later, I still missed him like I had on that day when Bo had dragged me off to his favourite bakery.
I got out of my skates, peeled off my clothes and protective gear, and limped into the shower.
We’d played the Osterfeld Gators two days ago, and I’d pushed myself harder than ever.
The pain and exhaustion helped my brain rest, at least for a couple of hours. But as soon as I got off the ice, my brain latched onto Vee again without fail.
My soul hurt even worse than the bruise the size of my palm Chase Fucking Harper had given me on my thigh. He was a cocky asshole, but that man played hockey like a god. Another thing I’d never admit out loud.
I snorted and held my face in the shower’s spray, desperate for the warm water to soothe my sore body.
I tried a few times in the last six weeks to find his cabin but had no luck. He had taken me there in the dark, and I’d been too distracted by everything that had happened to remember anything on the way back to Veitsreuth.
I was still tempted to get lost in the forest again. The hopeless romantic part of me hoped that Vee would come for me. It was getting colder though, and I definitely didn’t want to die from cold exposure in a Bavarian forest.
When I hadn’t been able to find Vee’s house the last time I’d driven out there—how the hell was I supposed to tell one part of these Bavarian woods from another—I had screamed for him for what felt like hours. In the end, my voice had given out before my heart had been ready to abandon the mission.
At one point, I convinced myself that he didn’t even exist and that my brain had just invented him as a trauma response.
And my brainwasgreat, but it could never have made up someone so perfect.
So I did what anyone with ADHD and a slightly unnatural talent for sleuthing did: I searched his name on Kraken and dug up every shred of information I could find.
The top hits were from the Franconian Forest Protection Service website. Vee worked on a team withFrederik Müller, who I had talked to on the phone. I was surprised to find that he was another Elvertritsch. Unlike Vee, he was softer around the edges and had a burnt orange and dark blue plumage. The picture showed their only human colleague sandwiched between Frederik and Vee in all his rugged glory. The caption told me that he was called Johann Schaller and had a dog named Brutus. I filed the information away and kept digging through newspaper articles and blog posts.
I found Vee planting trees with a group of kids who all looked up at him in amazement. There were pictures of him leading a group of pensioners on a hike through the forest, and the most recent one was an update on mushroom poachers who had turned out to be some kind of moss creatures who needed the mushrooms for healing purposes.
But what interested me more than moss people and mushrooms was Vee’s hockey past. Except what I discovered made me wish I’d never started looking. It finally made sense why he’d lied to me, but the reason for it? It was fucking terrible.
Vitus Kolb had played for the Pumas in his youth. The few videos I found showed a D-man with bite. God, he’d been so good. At a game against Canada’s junior hockey team, he’d been scouted. 19-year-old Vee had packed his bags and moved to Vancouver. He had played there until a year before my career took off, or we might have played each other.
The final puzzle piece I had needed was a post on a newspaper website about the tragic death of a young hockey player on Vee’s team. Linden Hennessey, a promising winger, had had his throat slashed in a terrible accident.
A violent shiver raced down my body, and I turned the water warmer.
