Page 125 of Practice Makes Perfect
I’d given Linc everything I had.
And he’d handed it all back without even looking me in the eye.
thirty-one
LINC
The ice whispersunder my blades.
Scrape, hiss, scrape, hiss.
Each stroke burns in my quads, but I push harder—harder than I would at practice, harder than during a game. I deserve the burn, the ache, the punishment. A fitting penance for walking out on my team. For crushing Em’s heart like it was nothing, after she’d only just started to trust men again.
“Faster,” I mutter to myself, voice caught by the frigid air. My uniform jersey sticks to my back, sweat freezing into patches of stiff fabric. The empty community rink echoes with nothing but the sound of my skates carving patterns of self-loathing into the ice.
I didn’t even shower. I just grabbed my gear and drove, finding this deserted rink twenty miles from campus. A place where no one would look. No coaches, no teammates, no mothers waving glitter signs, no scouts watching my every move.
No Em with her hopeful eyes talking about family dinners.
The memory of her face—the confusion giving way to hurt giving way to fury giving way to despair—makes my stomach clench. I push into the turn harder, forcing the deep edge until my ankles scream in protest, but I manage to keep my feet.
I can’t do this. Us.
Four words. That’s all it took to demolish in seconds everything we’d already built and everything I’d still hoped to build with her in future. I’d watched the light drain from her eyes, that beautiful spark extinguishing because of me, because I’m a coward.
My phone buzzes against my thigh for what feels like the hundredth time. I ignore it like I have the others. Mom’s called eight times. Coach twice. Maine left three voicemails. The game would have finished an hour ago, and I’ve got no idea if we won or lost.
All I know is that Coach tried to stop me, and I told him to get fucked.
So that’s probably my NHL career gone, too.
I’ve read the texts. Lea’s have gotten increasingly creative in their threats to my physical wellbeing. The last one promised to, and I quote, “rearrange your internal organs into a modern art piece called ‘The Death of a Fuckboy’”, but there’s been nothing from Em.
Just silence.
And I haven’t been able to build up the guts to text her, either.
What would I even say?
I abandon the center of the ice, building speed along the boards. The wind of my own making burns my eyes, but I don’t slow down. Instead, my mind shifts back to theothertopic dominating my thoughts for the last few hours, how my mom sent emails to Coach behind my back.
How she’d manipulated her way into getting me the co-captaincy.
How nothing I’d accomplished wasreallymine.
I launch into a brutal crossover, cutting hard enough that my inside edge digs a trench in the ice. It’s a mark that I’ve made,at least, not one that I didn’t earn. Unlike the co-captaincy. All those hours of extra practice, all the shit with Mike, the leadership I thought I was showing—none of it mattered.
I got the ‘C’ because of my mom.
The sound of the heavy rink door opening cuts through my thoughts. I don’t bother looking. Probably just the night manager coming to kick me out. I’d slipped the teenage attendant twenty bucks to let me skate after hours, but his shift might have ended by now.
I turn for another lap, but something catches my eye.
A figure standing at the boards. Big, silent, familiar.
I skid to a stop, sending a spray of ice crystals arcing through the air, because the man standing there is just about the last person on Earth I would have expected to see. My dad, standing with his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, watching me with those quiet eyes.
What the hell?
