Page 20 of The Casanova Complex

He’s usually locked away in his room playing video games on the weekends, which leaves me lots of time to study and take as many scorching baths as I want.

I sink a little further down into the water. After the day I’ve had, I have fully earned this bath.

CHAPTER FIVE

BENNETT

I’m starting to worry that I’ve lost it.

Either that or someone has a voodoo doll with my handsome face on it, and they’re poking the fuck out of it every chance they get.

Or maybe it’s even one of those witches you can book online to curse someone.

I saw an ad for one of those once. Don’t ask me why the algorithm thought I was the target audience.

All I know is that we’re now 0-4, and I’m on the biggest losing streak of my fucking life, and I have no clue how to fix it.

None of my normal things are working.

My pregame rituals. Post-game ones either. I tried meditating like Coach recommended. I’ve tried to watch more tape, put in more time running drills.

I’ve tried everything that I can think of to no avail.

I’ve always been a superstitious guy, even before I started playing hockey.

I can blame my grandmother for that.

Mawmaw Judy always called them “old wives’ tales,” which I now know to be a sexist term, but I like to think of it as women know best and clearly always have.

Growing up, she’d tell us if we entered through one door, we had to leave through the same door. I remember once she grabbed me by the back of the collar before I could run out her front door to play with my cousins because I’d come in through her carport door, just about choking the life out of me before I even made it to puberty.

She’d say that it would be bad luck and to knock on wood when we said something out loud that we hoped would happen so we didn’t jinx it, and if we spilled salt, we had to throw it over our right shoulder.

And I’mma be honest… I used to think Mawmaw Judy was real fucking crazy.

Especially when I learned that my other friends’ grandmothers weren’t making them spit out the car window if a black cat crossed in front of the car while they were driving.

Imagine explaining that to a bunch of fuckass ten-year-old boys.

The point is the older I got, the more I realized that maybe Mawmaw Judy wasn’t so crazy after all.

Maybe she was onto something.

Which is why I have a tried-and-true list of superstitions that I will be carrying with me to the grave, even if they seem to be doing fuck all right now. Like sleeping with my stick tape beneath my pillow the night before a game, carving my initials in the ice beneath the goalpost pregame, or drinking a full bottle of water and exactly two sips of a red Gatorade before I step out onto the ice.

Fuck, I’m worried even my lucky hoodie is losing its magic. I’ve been wearing it before every practice for as long as I can remember, and lately, it feels like everything is just off.

I just… I have to figure out what the real problem is and how the hell I fix it before next week’s game.

No big deal. Easy work.

What’s not easy work?

Reading an almost six-hundred-fucking-page book that’s deemed one of the greatest classic feminist romances of all time.

Yeah, Google told me that cause I had no clue who Charlotte Brontë even was.

I’m not a total dumbass. I have a solid GPA, and I’m passing all my classes, but classic romance is the last thing I’d ever pick up.