“Yeah, of course I would. Why do you think I’m allowing you to mooch off of me? There will be perks. Like you traveling with me and bringing our child to all the games. You being in my bed every night, and we can talk about all the violations the refs missed during my games.”
I loved that the two of us could joke about how this all worked. It was a dream come true for me. And yeah, I might return to work sometime, but until then, I was more than happy to do what I was doing currently. I lined up some volunteer work with the local beer league, organizing their rosters and doing paperwork. I’d ref a few local games. I was going to be a sub for the lower league again. But nothing as consuming as what I had done before.
“Do you think we can get me an appointment with the doctor? I just want to clear everything with them before I am cleared to play.”
“Yeah, let’s do that. Then tomorrow you can win that cup, and we can start the rest of our lives.”
Elliot smiled and kissed my lips. He was fully in my lap now, and I held him. “I like the sound of that.”
Chapter 21
Silas
I sat in the stands watching the final game. I was on the edge of my seat the entire game, but now that we were in the final few minutes, I was on my feet.
My whole life was out there on that ice. Elliot, playing center for the team that he loved. He was carrying my child. Living his dream.
The official crew was doing well. So far they kept everything fair, and they knew their stuff.
“You miss it?” Colin asked.
I shook my head. “Not even a little bit.” I was surprised when Colin reached out to see if he could come to the final game with me. According to him, he just wanted to watch for fun, but based on the way his gaze followed his ex-stepbrother Charles, I knew it was more than that.
“They’re going to win,” he said.
I grimaced. “Don’t jinx it. We’ve both seen teams get annihilated with higher leads than this.”
Colin laughed, but he went quiet again fast. We both did.
Two minutes and fourteen seconds on the clock. The Badgers were up by one. One mistake and we could end up tied or worse.
The Badgers were in their own zone, killing the last seconds of a penalty that had my stomach in my throat when it happened. Elliot took a hit. It was clean, but it was hard enough to rattle his bones, and my stomach was in my throat. I gripped the seat in front of me so tight the guy sitting in it turned around to glare. I didn’t care. Elliot had skated it off without so much as a wince. Of course he had, because he was the most stubborn omega ever, and I loved him so much it was stupid.
I watched him now, stick on the ice, body low, reading the play the way he always did. Like the game was whispering to him and he was the only one listening. That was the thing about Elliot that the cameras never quite caught. It wasn’t just skill. It waspatience. He waited while other centers forced. He saw three moves out.
“He’s good,” Colin said. He sounded almost reluctant about it.
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
The penalty expired. Elliot won the faceoff clean, snapped it back to the defenseman, and the Badgers exhaled as a unit, resetting, running out the clock. Sixty seconds. Fifty. The other team pulled their goalie, six skaters flooding the ice, and the crowd behind me surged to their feet.
My heart was a fist slamming against my ribs.
“Here we go,” Colin muttered.
It happened fast, the way things always did when they went wrong.
Charles was on the boards, battling for position against a defender that matched him in size but not skill. The hit came late. Too late. The kind of hit that made the crowd wince in unison before they even fully registered what they’d seen. Charles went down hard into the boards, and then he didn’t get up.
Beside me, Colin went completely still. He gripped my arm.
The play stopped. Refs blew the whistle. Both benches were on their feet, and the trainers were already on the ice, kneeling over Charles in that tight, urgent way that meant it wasn’t nothing.
“He’s fine,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. We’d both seen players skate away like it was nothing from worse hits than that. We’d also seen players have their career ended by hits not unlike the one we just witnessed.
Colin didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the ice, jaw set, arms crossed tight over his chest like he was holding himself together by sheer stubbornness. I recognized that. I’d felt it myself, the first time I watched Elliot take a bad hit in a game I couldn’t control.
Charles moved. Slowly he pushed himself up to one arm, then accepted the trainers’ help the rest of the way. The arena exhaled. Charles kept his weight off his left leg as they helped him to the bench, but he was upright. He lifted a glove to acknowledge the crowd, and the place cheered.
