I kept my mouth shut there more than anywhere else because Bliss would have murdered me with a bar blade and Cade would have helped her hide my body. Everywhere else, Aura got the version of me she thought she wanted.
Casual, cold, and done.
By the end of spring semester, she stopped coming to Hockey House unless Bliss forced her. By summer, I had moved out.
That was the part nobody understood.
They thought I moved because I needed quiet, because North Cut was closer, or because my schedule was hell between workouts, summer classes, shifts at the rink, and driving home whenever my mom needed help with Skylar or Vivi.
All of it was true enough to sound convincing, but none of it was the reason.
The reason was that my room still smelled like her if I let myself remember hard enough. I kept seeing her on my bed in my shirt, standing there with fear in her eyes and pride in her mouth. Every wall in that house had heard me love a girl who treated me like a secret she could survive losing.
The kitchen. The stairs. The back porch. The hallway outside my room where I used to catch her wrist and pull her inside before anyone could see too much.
Hockey House had become a museum of all the stupid ways I had let Aura Clarke matter.
So, I packed my shit into trash bags, ignored Briggs calling me dramatic, and found a shitty apartment on the wrong side of town where the pipes knocked like they had unresolved trauma and my upstairs neighbor vacuumed at two in the morning.
It was ugly but cheap, even with the possibility of stumbling across a hypodermic needle in the parking lot.
It was mine.
Most importantly, Aura had never touched it.
By the time the new season started, I had made the apartment mine, buried everything else beneath work and hockey, and convinced almost everyone I was fine. Now I stood inside The Furnace with a C stitched over my chest and the entire team pounding their sticks against the boards like they had any idea what kind of pressure that letter carried.
Coach Little’s hand had landed heavily on my shoulder ten minutes ago.
“You earned it, Wade.”
Maybe I had earned it by showing up first and leaving last. By playing through bruised ribs and a half-torn shoulder. By keeping freshmen from getting eaten alive by upperclassmen with more ego than discipline. By dragging Briggs out of his own head after bad games, keeping Rider from fighting every asshole who looked at him sideways, and making sure nobody forgot Cade Mercer almost died and still came back meaner.
Maybe I earned it because I had nothing left to give anyone else, so hockey got the best of whatever survived.
“Captain Wade,” Briggs said behind me, his voice too bright, too fake, and too Briggs. “Sounds disgusting. I hate it.”
I turned from my stall and gave him a look. “You cried.”
“I had allergies.”
“You said, and I quote, ‘Our baby boy is a man now.’”
Rider snorted from the next stall, tape caught between his teeth. “He did. Voice cracked and everything.”
Briggs pointed at him. “You shut your emotionally unavailable lumberjack mouth. This is a private moment between me and the coldest bastard I know.”
Ryan leaned against the lockers with his arms crossed, dark eyes steady in the way they always were.
Ryan showing up for this meant something. His schedule was insane now that he played for the Flint Frost—a frozen ice team—and the travel was just as insane on the semi-pro side. He didn’t waste words unless they mattered.
“You good?”
I hated that question more than I hated most people.
“Fine.”
Cade sat two stalls down with one skate unlaced and Bliss’s pink scrunchie around his wrist like he didn’t know half the team had noticed. He lifted his eyes.
