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Damn. For as irreverent as my friend could be, he had his moments of being profoundly and jarringly right on the money.
Fortunately, he wasn’t smug about it. He just clapped my arm, told me to have a good night, and headed for his own car.
With a sigh, I got into my truck, put my jersey and jacket on the passenger seat, and started the engine, but I didn’t pull out of the space right away.
Instead, I checked my phone.
Tanner:Hey!Should be out of here in an hour or so. Meet me at my place?Fair warning – my back is being a bitch again tonight. Might just be a low-key night. (sad emoji)
So sex was mostlikely off the table. But he still wanted to see me. Still wanted me to sleep next to him.
I exhaled, rolling some tension out of my shoulders. Maybe Darren was right. Tanner and I had spent way too much time together and had way too much sex for this to be just something for him to stave off boredom. We also spent way too much time texting and FaceTiming when he was on the road, and the way that man kissed me and begged for my dick whenever he’d been gone for a while?
And there were also times, like tonight, when sex wasn’t an option, but Tanner still wanted me there. In his condo. In his bed.
Okay. Yeah. Darren was on to something.
Holy shit. Maybe thiswasreal.
I smiled to myself as I started out of the parking space, my ex-fiancé’s voice blessedly silent.
Maybe I really was enough for the most amazing man I’d ever met.
Chapter 20
Tanner
The playoffs were soclose I could taste them. I could already feel the never-ending chaos, the hardcore jetlag, and the emotional roller coaster that was the postseason.
If we won tonight, we’d clinch the second wild card slot in our division’s playoffs. If we lost, then we had to hope New York and Tampa both lost in regulation, and we absolutelyhadto win our next game.
No pressure or anything.
Especially not when we were down two goals at the beginning of the third period.
Sitting on the bench, I tapped my skate restlessly and turned my stick between my gloves as I chewed furiously on my mouthguard. My teammates were similarly animated, shifting and squirming as we waited for our shifts and prayed like hell the guys on the ice made something happen.
Minneapolis had us on our heels, though, and it wasn’t looking good.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Bens growled beside me as he tapped his stick rapidly against his boot. “What the fuck?”
I nodded along as he spoke. We were better than this. And we werenotmissing our playoff berth because we lost to a team that was well out of contention in their own division. “Comeon, guys,” I muttered.
A Minneapolis forward faked a shot, drawing Adamo to the left side of the net before sending the puck to one of his guys. The recipient had a wide-open shot at the now-unguarded side of the crease—
Or, well, he would’ve had that wide-open shot had Nilsson not come out of nowhere and snatched the puck away.
It had barely touched his stick before he saucer-passed it into the neutral zone where Bucks had materialized. In a heartbeat, every ass in the arena was out of every seat, the roar of the crowd drowning out my teammates and me shouting “Go, go, go!”
Bucks tore into the offensive zone with two Minneapolis defensemen on his heels, but they were no match for him. The goalie—a six-foot-five brick wall who’d kept us to a single goal all night—was poised and ready, stick and blocker up as he twitched from side to side, trying to anticipate Bucks’s next move.
I held my breath as Bucks closed in on the goal. He was an incredibly predictable shot—always, always,alwaysgoing for the top shelf—and I hoped like hell this would be the moment he finally listened to the goalie coaches and changed things up.
A few feet shy of the crease, he bobbled the puck. He didn’t lose it, but he lost control of it for a costly second. The entire audience gasped in the same instant my heart dropped. I could feel the “aww, goddammit” radiating off everyone in the building as—
Bucks tapped it injustunder the goaltender’s pad.
His celly included a fist pump and what was probably a primal scream, but I doubted anyone heard it. Not over the deafening cheers. I swore the arena was shaking, and I was dizzy with adrenaline when my teammate came by for fist bumps. I’d have to ask him later if he’d really bobbled the puck, or if that had just been to throw off the goalie. From the sly, shit-eating grin on his face, I was pretty sure I had my answer.
