Page 40 of Zero Pucks Given
Hewinkedat the camera.
I groaned and went home, leaving my free beer unfinished at the bar.
20
Grayson
It felt great to return home after being on a long road trip. Nothing soothed my soul more than sleeping in my own bed, in my own condo, without Mason sleeping five feet away.
He was abouttwentyfeet away in my condo, but there were two very important walls separating us.
After struggling on the previous road trip, this one had been a lot better. As a team, we were meshing at the perfect time. My personal performance had been outstanding, earning me Player of the Month honors. Moods were high, something that was extremely important as the regular season ended and the playoffs began.
But most importantly: I had gotten Josie out of my head. I accomplished this by deleting TikTok off my phone and erasing our text history. She was still a contact in my phone, but I couldn’t obsessively re-read our past conversations.
Once all that was done, the dreams stopped. Then it was easy to focus on my career, which I had been doing the entire time.
I let myself sleep in the next morning, a luxury I rarely got to enjoy. I usually spent my off days catching up on all the little chores and tasks in my life that got shoved to the side during hockey season.Buying groceries, doing laundry. Stuff like that.
But this morning, I couldn’t muster the energy. I didn’t want to do anything. I ate breakfast and then slumped onto the couch and hit play on whatever show I was currently binging.
Mason got up, had breakfast, and left. He returned some time later, laughing when he saw me.
“What?” I asked.
“You haven’t moved in the past six hours.”
“Six hours? It’s only been…” I trailed off as I saw what time it was. I’d been vegging on the couch all day.
“No judgement,” Mason said. “We all have days like that. Veg away, buddy.”
Except it wasn’t just one day. I’d had a lot of days like this before our most recent road trip. Aside from hockey-related activities, I’d been extremely unmotivated for the past month.
I’d been telling myself there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Hockey was my job, after all, and everything else was secondary. If I wanted to spend my free time mindlessly watching TV, then that was okay. Especially since our team was doing great and I was playing like the MVP of the Surge.
But no matter what excuses I made, I knew I was in a weird kind of funk.
We had practice at the Frost Bank Center the next day, with a game the day after that. I was looking forward to hitting the ice—I even got there early because I wanted to hone some of my skills. We only had a few games remaining in the regular season before the playoffs began, and I was hoping that would help knock me out of my funk.
But before I could even take my shoes off, Bob from Marketing came barging into the locker room.
“Fun police is here,” I announced, even though the locker room was otherwise empty.
“Fun police?” Bob made a face. “We just hosted a family skating event this morning for the fans. Marketing is full of fun.”
“Fun for children, but not fun for professional hockey players,” I said.
“It’s nice to see you too,” Bob muttered. “I’ll get straight to the point. We have a proposal for you.”
I groaned. “Let me guess. There’s an event at a taco stand tomorrow night and I have to be there.”
“Grayson…”
The negative energy that had been fueling my funk now had a physical target in Bob, so I let my anger rise. “You know, I don’t mind doing all your bullshit during the season. But we have the playoffs coming up. You’re supposed to get off our asses and let us focus at this point in the season.”
Without warning, a woman stepped from behind a locker. A woman I’d done my best to forget about for the past month.
“You don’t mind the bullshit during the season?” Josie teased. “Could’ve fooled me.”
