Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 80035 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80035 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 400(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 267(@300wpm)
In another text, Hank had mentioned that he’d met a few of the coaches and their significant others in Elmwood, and had been blown away by how normal it was to see same-sex couples in town.
This place is wild. JC asked me if I’d met his hockey star husband and two minutes later, I saw Ivan the barista kissing Court in front of the coffee shop. No one seemed to notice.
Except you, I’d replied.
Shrugging emoji. It’s inspiring.
I supposed it was. It made me proud of my town and pleased that Hank appreciated some of the cooler quirks of the Four Forest area. And that he’d made a real effort, like he’d said he would.
Grams reported that my new “friend” had become a regular at Henderson’s Bakery, Rise and Grind, and the diner. She said he smiled and waved like an annoying car salesman.
“He buys a maple cookie every damn day. It’s disgusting,” she grumbled on the phone. “I like him.”
Based on our text messages, I got the impression that she wasn’t the only one who’d thawed toward the new guy. Hank mentioned JC often enough that I could picture the gruff French Canadian leaving his post in the kitchen at the diner to spar with Hank, or bellied up to the counter at the coffee shop chatting with Ivan while he waited for his latte.
Mary-Kate liked him too. “I met the new cowboy.”
Okay, I’d almost veered off the interstate at that one. “The…who?”
“You know, the guy from Colorado we saw at the bar,” she explained. “Hank Cunningham. He popped into the bookstore the other day. He’s even better looking in daylight.”
Yeah, I agreed, but I couldn’t say that. Could I?
“Uh…”
MK had laughed and changed the subject to my game that night and her thoughts on how the playoffs were going. She hadn’t brought up her new guy in Burlington again, and I hadn’t asked. We’d seen each other after my game in Seattle, but she’d been with her family and an in-depth conversation hadn’t been possible.
Fine by me. Hockey was easy, Elmwood was easy, and surprisingly, so was Hank.
In cynical moments, I reminded myself that Hank was just buttering up the natives for his own gain, but then he’d comment about the blooming wildflowers on the hill between the Black Horse Inn and Main Street and how beautiful the lake looked on the drive to Wood Hollow. And that shit got to me.
See, he’d become an unwitting conduit to home. During the most important games I’d ever played, I wasn’t plagued by homesickness, depression, or my old friend anxiety. I felt surprisingly calm and whole. On and off the ice.
My focus was rock solid. I was playing the best hockey of my life, doing whatever was necessary to be an invaluable asset…a go-to scorer, a fierce defender. I was smart, I was tough, and I worked my ass off.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.
We were about to lose the Conference Final.
We left everything on the ice, but we’d been outplayed from the start of this series. Boston had a deeper, younger bench than Denver. They had young superstar talents like Jake Milligan, Sergei Balic, and Ace Turner. We had Trinsky and me…and a few veterans. A number of Condors were injured and worn out, and it showed.
Personally, I’d been nursing a tweaked hip since game one, and I could feel it slowing my transitions off the boards. A half a second loss of speed was the equivalent of swimming in honey with a team as tightly honed as Boston. We couldn’t catch them, couldn’t defend against them. We were just…done.
I hated that this was how my last game as a rookie would go down—with me chewing the fuck out of my mouthguard as I chased Jake Milligan, deking in between players built like Mack trucks only to have him outmaneuver one of our D-men and sink the puck in the crease with deafening precision. Petey never stood a chance.
The score was 4–1 Boston with less than a minute on the clock in the third period.
I growled in frustration. There was nothing quite like getting your ass handed to you by one of your teenage idols. And that was what was happening here. Jake was schooling me the way he had almost seven years ago when he’d started coming around occasionally to help Coach Smitty with practice at Elmwood High.
Jake had been playing in the AHL at the time, and that was enough to impress a group of hockey hopefuls. Sure, Coach had played pro too, but Jake was only a few years older than us and for some reason, that made our own pro aspirations seem doable.
He was a smart, wily player; a lightning-quick skater; and a shrewd strategist. He could suss out scoring opportunities based on the slightest clue: the turn of a wrist, the tilt of an opponent’s stick, the rate of speed they bounced off the boards. I knew I was good, but Jake was better and I’d looked up to him.