Acts like he’s God’s gift to earth and I’m an inconvenience.
He thinks he’s the only one carrying anything. Like showing up to optional sessions and coming in early and leaving late makes him the only person here who gives a damn. Meanwhile, I’m running on absolutely nothing at all hours of every day, keeping my grades way up, while still putting up numbers that half this team can’t touch.
I roll over and pull the pillow over my face and scream in it.
He thinks he’s so far above everyone else. Fine — lead then. That’s what a captain is supposed to do. Lead. Not lecture. Not push us so hard to the point we’re past exhaustion. If he can’t figure out how to actually pull this team together, I’ll go over his head myself and I don’t care how that looks.
I want to win. That’s the whole point.
The smell of bacon drags me out of my spiral before it can get any worse. I follow it like a cartoon character, barely conscious, shuffling into the kitchen with my eyes half open.
“Blake.” My voice comes out somewhere between a mumble and a groan. “I love you.”
“I know.” He doesn’t even look up from the stove. “Sit down and shut up, it’s too early.”
He slides a plate in front of me — bacon, eggs, toast, assembled with a care I absolutely do not deserve — and I stare at it for amoment with genuine emotion. Blake is honestly my common law husband at this point. He has slightly more capacity than I do right now, so he fills in the gaps without being asked. Cooks, cleans, even reminds me when I have assignments due.
I would absolutely marry him if he were gay. His loss, truly. I’d be an attentive husband. I’d treat him good. But he’s been with Nessa for about three years now, and they’re so in love it’s disgusting. Doesn’t stop me from reminding him weekly I’m here for him when she leaves him eventually.
I decide a plate like this warrants a physical response. I grab him by the shoulders, plant a loud, sloppy kiss on his cheek, deliver a firm spank to his rear, and push him back toward his seat.
He sits down slowly and just stares at the wall.
“I feel dirty,” he says.
“You’re welcome.” I reach for the butter, fighting a grin.
We eat in silence after that, two chem majors preparing ourselves mentally for a full day of calculations that will make the game last night feel like a distant, fond memory, hopefully.
Chapter 4
Jamie
I do what I always do. I wake up early and I get on the ice.
I’ve done it since I was little for as long as I can remember — before school, before everything else, skates on and moving before the rest of the world is awake. If I have an early class I just get up earlier. Simple.
The ice at this hour belongs only to me. Just the pale rink light and the cold that coats everything in quiet, the sound of my blades tracing lines that will be gone by morning; the only proof I need that I exist. There's a stillness here that exists nowhere else in my life. This is the one place I have never had to explain myself. It has never misread me. It has never let me down.
I start with laps to warm up, then move to puck work. Shooting, retrieving, shooting again. Faster each time. I’m trying to get into the rhythm of it, trying to let the repetition smooth everything out the way it usually does.
Instead I find myself getting angrier with every lap. I bury the puck into the goal harder than I need to. Then again. I stop in the middle of the ice, chest heaving, and press the heels of my hands against my eyes.
“Fuck.”
He’s in my head.
Rhys Callahan, who walks around this campus like he built it. Who transferred here from Eldridge with a decent reputationand strong numbers and the audacity to act like starting over means nothing, like being new to a team is just a minor inconvenience rather than something you genuinely earn your way through.
He’s talented — very, frustratingly talented — and he absolutely knows it, and knowing it makes him think he doesn’t have to fall in line like everyone else. The problem is he’s right that he’s that good. That’s what makes it so hard.
If he was just difficult I could deal with it. But he’s difficult and skilled and every time I try to actually reach him we end up chest to chest and yelling, and I skate away feeling like I lost something I didn’t know I was competing for.
We have been playing like shit ever since he got here and I’m running out of ideas on how to fix it. Because I’m avoiding the truth. We’re a good team that plays like a bad one and I know why. I’ve been circling around it in my head for months and finding somewhere else to throw my thoughts at because the answer requires me to do something I don’t know how to do yet. Or even want to.
Rhys Callahan and I are the two best players on this team. Period. And we play against each other instead of with each other and everyone else absorbs that tension and plays worse because of it and the whole thing falls apart.
That’s it. The whole problem put simply.
