Page 98 of Play Dirty

“You are,” I cut in. “Shift half a step earlier and he doesn’t have it.”

A pause. Then:

“Fine,” he muttered.

That was new. Two weeks ago it would’ve been an argument. Now? They listened. Not all the time, not perfectly. But enough that it mattered.

Practice bled into practice. Drills into repetitions. Repetitions into something sharper, cleaner. Less reactive. More intentional.

And through it all — I stayed busy. On purpose.

Because if I stopped? If I slowed down? If I let myself think?

I’d think about Grayson’s hands on me. About the way Ares had kissed me. About the way Sebastian had looked at me on the bus.

So I didn’t stop. I worked.

The house didn’t.

Zack nearly set the kitchen on fire trying to ‘improve’ a frozen pizza. Dorian laughed so hard he choked on a beer and blamed me. Asher watched everything quietly, like he always did — like he was putting pieces together no one even saw.

Life kept moving. Loud. Messy. Unapologetic.

And I stayed just outside of it.

If Grayson walked into a room, I found a reason to leave. If Sebastian sat too close, I buried myself in work. If Ares—

I didn’t think about Ares. Not when I was awake.

The first game without him was… strange. It was quieter. Not literally, because the crowd still roared and the ice still echoed with collisions and shouts.

But something else about it felt different.

We played tighter. Cleaner. Less chaos, and more control. Grayson adjusted fast, because that’s what Grayson did.

“Keep it simple,” he called out on the ice. “We don’t need hero plays.”

We didn’t. We won by one. It wasn’t pretty, and we weren’t dominant.

But the victory felt earned.

Back on the bus, the energy was different. Less explosive, more focused.

“We’re getting there,” Caleb said, nodding to himself.

“Yeah,” Zack added. “Minus our resident psychopath.”

A few players laughed. I didn’t.

The second game came fast, with a short turnaround and long travel. Sebastian was better. Not perfect, but better. His timing was still just a fraction of a second off, like he was reacting instead of anticipating. But the gap between those two things was smaller now.

Mercer saw it, and so did I. But I also saw the way he avoided looking at me. That didn’t feel great.

We lost that one. Close game. Hard-fought.

Still a loss.

“Should’ve had that third,” Dorian muttered in the locker room.