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“We should have gone with your plan,” he said, dragging his eyes away. “I let the Wilder news get to me.”

“Fuck Wilder,” I said, nudging his chin back around. “Look, Cal. We were always in a losing situation here. My plan wasn’t sustainable. Your plan was …” I shook my head, chuckling lightly. “Honestly, I still don’t get it, but I don’t need to because you did. The point is, we love each other, and we did something wild that we probably shouldn’t have. But that’s kind of our thing, right?”

He nodded. “Totally our thing.”

“So now, we just have to suck it up and deal with the consequences. ‘Fuck the plan,’ remember?”

Cally’s sad, half-hearted smile grew slowly wider until it was his real one—the kind of crooked, dopey one that took up the whole lower half of his face.

The one I wanted to be the last thing I saw before I left this earth.

“Okay,” he said. “But I actually have a new plan.”

Echoing the words he’d said to me when I told him about City Hall, I said, “Tell me everything.”

Cally and I marched back into the conference room holding hands, our heads held high. Hendricks was gone, but that was to be expected. He had a game to coach, and puck drop had been ten minutes ago. I could only assume he’d marked us as healthy scratches.

I had no clue how the boys were taking all of this, but I didn’t flatter myself into thinking disappearing immediately after blowing everything up was doing us any favors.

Still, we could only tackle one problem at a time, and right now, this was the most pressing.

Voss was exactly where we’d left him, though he looked like he’d aged five years in the time we’d been gone. Silas was pacing the room, one hand tunneled into his hair, the other holding his phone to his ear. He looked frazzled but absolutely energized—like even though we’d made his job harder than it’d probably ever been before, he loved it.

Cally’s dad was leaning back against the window, appearing eerily calm. Bored even.

One of the biggest disconnects I’d had with Robert Callahan was matching the brash, overbearing, egotistical specter that hung over Cally’s life with every other goalie I’d ever known. Goalies were strange, eccentric to the point of insanity. Robert certainly matched the high strung part, but in every other aspect, I found him to be an anomaly.

Until right this second.

Because this was the face of a man where the tighter the game got and the louder the crowd roared, the more locked in he became. He was dialed the fuck in, and nothing was getting past him. He was fully in control of the moment, and anyone who thought otherwise was about to be learn a very difficult lesson.

Cally dropped my hand and leaned over the table, pressing his palms into the wood. “You want revenue? Butts in seats?” He asked Voss, his tone completely even. This was the version of Cally that opponents met on the ice—the guy who couldn’t be rattled, no matter how hard you tried. I just hoped Voss bought the act. “Then you need to exploit us. Sell Pride themed Porter-Callahan merch—jerseys, t-shirts, fucking teddy bears for all we care. And when you sell out, make more and sell them, too. Because you will sell out.”

Voss’s eyes flicked between us, resting a long time on Cally, looking at him in a new light. This wasn’t the Cally who’d stayed at Harvard longer than other guys in his position would have because he didn’t feel like he was ready for the pressures of the NHL. This was a generational player who knew his talent, when unleashed—when freed from the confines of everything that’d been holding him captive—could back up his words.

Cally painted a very powerful picture, but it wasn’t the whole picture.

“What about your teammates? You think they’re going to be okay with you two hogging the limelight? Everything being about hockey’s new power couple?”

I stepped to his side. “Honestly, I think they might be shocked, but once it settles, they’ll get a kick out of it.”

“What makes you say that?” he asked, making me infinitely more interesting than I’d been before.

“Back in L.A., Hale said something about … uh, a thing that happened … maybe cementing us as the queerest team in the league. It’s not important what it was. My point is, not one single guy in that room had a problem with the concept. Hell, half the guys were breaking out their calculators to figure out what percentage would qualify us as the title holders.”

“What we’re saying is,” Cally broke in, taking up the thread of conversation. “The guys might be pissed at us, or they might not be. But if they are, it won’t be because they feel some kind of way about playing on a team that leans in hard to a Big Gay Agenda.”

“You sound like Bell,” I remarked, knocking his elbow with my own.

He smiled down at me. “Yeah, I totally heard his voice when I was saying it.”

“Team dynamics aside,” Silas said, typing something quickly into his iPad then setting it aside. “I want to go back to your idea about the merch. You said ‘Porter-Callahan.’ As in a hyphenated last name?’

Cally’s eyes found his dad’s across the room. Robert’s cheek twitched, and he gave his son a short nod.

“Yeah. We’re married. Exploit it.”

Voss cleared his throat. He really needed to get that looked into. “This is all well and good, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. Winning does.”