Page 120 of The Pucking Date
She said it to her father, no less. Stood up for me. It should’ve been enough. But something in me slammed shut.
She said it to him. Not to me.
Three weeks of bringing her salads, checking on her, loving her from a distance. And she tells her father she loves me while I’m standing in the hallway like a stranger.
And I still don’t know if she’d stay when it counts. Locking her out hurts less than handing her the match.
I pack it down—grief, want, the ghost of her touch—and lace it under my skates.
The puck drops. Ken gets a stick on it, but Liam beats him by half a second, sweeping it back clean to Dmitri.
Dmitri doesn’t waste time. He pivots on a dime and fires a pass up the boards so fast it sings. Adam picks it up in stride and bolts up the wing.
I cut hard across the zone to the left—unnatural still, but manageable. Haven’t run left wing for a few years. Everything’s mirrored, timing’s tighter, space closes faster.
But the moment the puck hits my tape? It clicks.
Blake from the Titans steps into my lane—too slow. I burn past him.
“Little off your game, O’Reilly?” Ken chirps from the right, already catching up.
“Still behind me, aren’t you?”
I drop the puck to Liam at the blue line and loop wide. Dmitri glides in behind, eyes scanning like a sniper. He taps his stick once, a silent read of the coverage.
Liam snaps the puck cross-ice to Adam, who doesn’t even look. He just taps it forward, blind and confident.
Right onto my blade. I take it mid-stride. Go high glove.
The net ripples and the crowd explodes.
I don’t celebrate. Just turn and skate back toward the bench, heart pounding, stick gripped tight.
Liam coasts beside me, bumping gloves once. “Nice shot.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
His look says otherwise, that he knows exactly what I’m bleeding under all that control. But he lets it go.
The next shift is heavier. Slower. My legs are burning now, lungs dragging heat. But I stay on.
The second period’s halfway gone when I hear him.
TJ McGinty. Titans’ second-line winger.
Five-foot-nothing and powered entirely by spite.
He lines up across from me on a draw, mouth already moving. “Nice goal earlier,” he says, tone syrupy. “Daddy would’ve been proud. You know, before he started screwing over half the junior league kids he coached.”
The ref hasn’t dropped the puck yet. My knuckles clench my stick. McGinty leans in. Low. Just for me. “Whole damn league’s still talking. Took their money. Fucked their futures. You’re not him though, right? Just the guy who hides behind his name while everyone forgets what he really was.”
My chest knots, hard and sudden. There it is, the poison I knew would find me eventually. The thing I thought I could outrun, outscore, out-bleed. He says it now, but I’veheard it before. In stares. In whispers. In contracts that never made it to the table.
And for a second—just one second—I wonder if Jessica ever thought it too. If that’s why she kept the pregnancy secret. If she was waiting to see if I’d turn out like him.
If it crossed her mind when she was staring at that test, alone. But I shake it off. She told her father I’m a good man. Said she loves me.
And still…she didn’t tell me. Not until it was too late.
