Page 62 of Off The Ice

I laughed at the way she blushed after she said it.

“The fittest guy you’ve ever seen?” I smirked.

“Well, in person, yeah,” she said, blushing. “But then again, I don’t know any other professional sports players.”

I was glad she didn’t. Guys like my teammates would take way too eager an interest in her.

“But anyway,” she rambled. “I mean, even if you had to stop playing hockey, you have all of the opportunities in the world to dowhateveryou want after!”

“But I don’t know what I want to do,” I responded, uncomfortable with the question.

Life waslong.It stretched on past the point of being comfortable sometimes. Who would I be when my body couldn’t do the only thing I’d ever needed it for? What would my life be like when my hockey days were a thing of the past, left behind in the age of unattainable youth?

“Sometimes,” I admitted, “it feels like the rest of my life will be just too much time I have to fill.”

“Isn’t that exciting? I mean, you could do anything. You could find a new passion or follow a new dream, or if you were really that attached to hockey, you could coach a team or find some way to still be involved in some other way.”

She was right, but how could I tell her that everything else would feel so insignificant in comparison to what I had already done? How I felt like I was being demoted into a life of insignificance. That hockey was the only thing that made me feel worthwhile.

“Well, what about you besides teaching?” I deflected. “What else do you want for your life?”

“Oh, you know.” She shrugged, apparently doing some deflecting of her own. “The normal things. Nothing as glamorous as the life of an NHL player, I’m sure.”

Some part of me wanted to press her, to ask what exactly that entailed… but I didn’t know her like that and couldn’t bring myself to pry when that was the very thing I hated most that people did to me.

We sat in silence for a moment, both aware that we were creeping around things we’d rather not talk about but content to let it be. For now.

“So, pizza,” I said, landing on a safer subject. “Is it like your favorite food or something? Since you claimed to have outeaten the state of Massachusetts in it?”

“Actually, no.” She laughed. “It’s just the only thing I really ever ate growing up.”

“Theonlything?”

“Well, no,” she said. “But it was definitely a top staple in the house. My mom wasn’t much of a cook, and pizza was easy to order or throw in the oven with little effort.” She shrugged, apparently still enjoying the dish she’d eaten more times than I cared to believe.

The idea of it struck me as… kind of sad. Even in my mom’s darkest days after my father first left, she still managed to throw together some type of meal for me and Maggie to come home to.

“Sorry I brought you to have more of it, then,” I said guiltily.

“No!” She held her hands up. “I really do love pizza a lot. And this.” She held up the last slice in our box. “Is better than most.”

Before I could get another word in, Cassie looked behind us toward the back of the restaurant before telling me she was going to the bathroom and would be right back.

I nodded, watching as she disappeared down the hallway before slipping my phone out of my pocket. The guys’ group chat was flooded with texts that I didn’t bother to sort through, and I had the usual text from Brody that seemed to pop up every time I looked at my phone.

This time, it was a link to some online social media thread. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have even bothered to click on it, except for the text that came along with it.

Brody:U and ur girlfriend are making the rounds on the internet??

My stomach tightened, and morbid curiosity had me clicking the link that brought me to Twitter.

@sam_3xo: met liam brynn at a bar and he’s an asshole.

Pretty tame and consistent with what everyone else wrote about me, but when I clicked on the girl’s profile picture and zoomed in to see the redhead from the bar, my blood boiled.

In all fairness, I had been pretty polite about her harassing me. I didn’t think it counted as me being an asshole becauseI rejected her advances, but apparently, I was alone in that mindset.

I read down the thread that had multiple responses, retweets, and likes.

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