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So…a brutal, exhausting extra practice added to our schedule, just for funsies.
Then racing the storm rolling in as I try to accomplish my stocking up.
Milk to buy.
Generators to buy gas for.
Toilet paper to hoard.
The only good thing about the coming storm is that I won’t have to talk to anyone.
That’sthe real perk—not having to interact with any of the assholes who make up the Sierra’s locker room.
I have exactly three teammates I like—Knox, Riggs, and Leo. And I haveexactlythree teammates I like because I only have three who aren’t total trash humans or emotional vampires or who don’t fuck around on their wives and girlfriends.
Three.
Three perks hidden amongst twenty-three PIAs…and I have to win games with those pains-in-the-asses because that’s my fucking job as a professional hockey player.
As the captain of this team.
It would be a hell of a lot easier if I was playing with the Breakers or the Gold. They have this player-prioritized, family-first mentality that is not my experience, that hasneverbeen my experience as a professional athlete.
I’m a commodity. A resource to be consumed until my body gives out.
Always have been. Probably always will be.
Definitely if I stay with the Sierra, that’ll be the case.
My phone rings and I glance at the screen mounted in the dash, see that it’s my mother, andsonot in the mood to deal with her bullshit, I reject the call. The wind is picking up and it’s been a long enough couple of weeks without thinking about the shit show that is my family.
That’s my career.
I get paid an obscene amount of money to carry a puck around the ice.
I also get paid indecently to put my name on a vodka brand, to pitch socks, and to model underwear.
My life issohard.
“Yup. Sohard,” I mutter dryly, squinting out the windshield of my SUV, glad that I’m almost home. I’ll drink some of my “shit-tasting” vodka my friends like to give me a hard time about, put on a hockey game for a team whose schedule isn’t impacted by the incoming Snowmageddon, and forget about Coach, about practice, about the fact that, from the outside, everything in my life seems like it’s going perfectly, but, inside it, things feel…
Off.
“Fuck!” I growl, whipping the steering wheel hard to the left, nearly sending it into a skid, but thankfully the hockey gods have provided me with four-wheel drive and snow tires, and—since I grew up navigating through exactly this type of shitty weather—the ability to keep my vehicle under control.
Keep it under control and manage tonothit the object in the road.
No.
Thepersonin the road.
“What the fuck?” I snap, pulling to a halt and throwing my gearshift into park. I hit the hazards as I get out to prevent an accident on the off chance that someone else drives up—fucking unlikely, considering that we’re supposed to be buckling down and bracing.
Not standing in the middle of the road trying to get mowed down by an SUV.
In a fucking blizzard.
“What the actual fuck?” I say, somehow madder than I was before.
