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“Are you done, Knox?” a referee screamed in his face.
Sean blinked a couple of times and looked around him. The buzzing receded and he flexed his sore hand. The ice around him looked like a yard sale filled with hockey gear. The benches for both teams had emptied, and KO and a Buffalo player were still throwing punches in the corner.
“Yeah,” he said between big panting breaths, and the arms holding him fell away. Blood dripped from Sean’s nose and he wiped it on the back of his hand.
“This isn’t over, Knox someone,” Ed yelled as his teammates skated with him off the ice.
“Bring your mom next time, Ed!” Sean wiped blood from the side of his mouth and winced. “She has a better right hook than you.”
By the time the ice was cleared of players and gear, a variety of penalties were called; the most serious ejected Sean from the game. The adrenaline that had pumped through his veins as he’d whaled on Ed began to fade as a team trainer stuck a plug up his nose. The corner of his left eye stung, and a trail of blood had dried on his neck and the front of his jersey. Someone handed him a towel and he hung it over his head. He looked down at his right hand packed in ice and couldn’t remember how it got there. That whole fight had been stupid. So damn stupid. Chaos.
“What the fuck was that?”
He pulled the towel from his head and cracked open his good eye. John Kowalsky stared down at him as if he wanted to finish him off. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? That dance of yours resulted in thirteen penalties. KO and Marty are cooling their asses in the box for twenty-five minutes.” His scowl got more thunderous by the second. “That’s some kind of fucking record! You were brought on this team to add points, not empty benches!” He folded his arms across his chest. “Explain that to me.”
“He said Lexie is sloppy seconds.”
All the air went out of John and his hands fell to his sides. “Jesus, Knox.” He sank to the bench next to Sean. “I was afraid of that.”
For instigating the fight with Ed Sorenson, Sean sat out the next game, too. It was the first time in his life his name had been dropped from the roster for misconduct. These kinds of things just didn’t happen to him. He was a franchise player; he put points on the board. Unless he was dog-sick and unable to lift his head from his pillow, he played every game. He’d never been dropped, ever, until he’d met the runaway Gettin’
Hitched bride.
He’d always known Lexie would cause trouble if he let her. He’d known she was drama and chaos. He’d known it all along. He’d known she could mess up his career, too. He’d been right about everything, and he’d let her into his life anyway.
For the first time in his life, he’d let his personal life interfere with his career. For the first time in his life, he’d let a woman mess with his head. He didn’t know when or how Lexie had slipped into his brain and taken over, but it had to stop. He had to stop it.
When he was eligible to return to game-day practice, he was more focused. More determined and ready to give the Chinooks one hundred percent.
He felt good as he stepped on the ice for the first time in two days. His passes were sharp. His shots perfectly timed. His attention focused . . . then he remembered that it was Monday. He glanced at the big clock on the scoreboard. In an hour, Lexie would officially open the doors to her new store in Bellevue. At some point during her grand opening, she’d announce that he and Lexie were no longer together.
I’ll say we had an amicable split and are going our separate ways, she’d said. Then it will all be over.
The two of them would be done for good. The charade over. I can’t be your pretend girlfriend, she’d told him. She said other things, too. She’d said that he made her heart pound really hard. She’d said that she saw him. No one had said that to him before.
“Are you going to shoot that thing or stare a hole through it?”
Sean glanced across his shoulder at Stony standing on the centerline beside him. She’d said she loved him. Ridiculous. No one fell in love in so short a time. It took more than two months. Six at least. Maybe even a year. Not that he was an expert, but two months was just crazy. Like the woman herself. Lucky for him, she was some other man’s crazy now. Without a word, he loaded and fired three pucks into the net.
“You look like someone ran over your dog.”
Some other man’s crazy. The thought of her being some other man’s crazy felt like a big truck ran into his chest. The thought of any man but him touching Lexie suddenly made him feel crazy. It spun his head and made his face hot.
He took off toward the other end of the rink, dangling a puck in the curve of his blade as he skated a familiar pattern between orange cones. He wanted peace. He didn’t want crazy. Not in his life. Not in his head. Not hitting him like a truck.
The cool air brushing his cheeks and pushing his hair from his forehead felt good against his flushed face. He shot into the net, then skated around the boards and picked up another puck on the goal line. This time as he approached the cones, he plowed over the first and tripped over the second, almost falling on his ass. Chaos and crazy rushed across his hot skin, squeezing his chest and making him drop his stick. He’d never felt so muddled in his life. So out of control, not even when he’d listened to Lexie’s schemes or read her bossy texts. Not when he listened to her laughter or crazy stories of making clothes for chickens or chasing pigs.
He shoved one glove in his armpit and picked up his stick. He would never hear her laughter or wild stories. He would never touch her face or kiss her lips. The thought of another man looking into her eyes as he made love to her made him stop in a spray of ice. The thought of Yum Yum jumping in another man’s lap and crunching his nuts as she searched for the perfect place to lay her hairless body brought him upright.
Lexie was crazy but his life without her was the worst kind of crazy. It made him want to beat his head against a wall. In two short months, she’d caused him nothing but drama. Hot, sweet chaos that he couldn’t imagine living without.
The thought of her never waving to him from the third tier squeezed his chest and sent him skating toward the tunnel. He stepped onto the mats and moved past the rack of carefully honed hockey sticks. He’d wanted a life without chaos. He didn’t know what that felt like or what it meant anymore. He only knew that he wanted a life with Lexie in it.
In the dressing room, he unlaced his skates and shed his gear. Perspiration soaked the armpits of his practice sweats and wet his back where his shoulder pads had rested. He quickly exchanged the sweatshirt for a Nike hoodie and grabbed his running shoes. He headed out of the locker room, hopping on one foot and then the other as he moved down the tunnel toward the exit. He needed to breathe. He needed fresh air. He needed to stop her.
John stuck his head out of the manager’s office and called after him, “Where are you going in such a rush?”
