Page 4 of The Bro-code

I’ve always liked a party and I’m not one of those guys who looks down on the puck bunnies.

Those girls are awesome, dedicated, beautiful and always available.

I’m not trying to be a douche here, I’m pretty sure many collegiate athletes can relate. Every major sport has their version of the “bunny.”

Some call them jersey chasers, but I don’t like the negative connotation that name carries. I like to call them super fans.

They love an elite athlete and this particular elite athlete loves his super fans right back.

Like I said, life was sweet.

I’ve never had a problem academically, I have a photographic memory and it takes me reading something once to remember it forever.

At the risk of sounding like an arrogant douche, I don’t think my generation has seen a better center on the ice.

I know it, my coach knows it and the NHL knows it too. After our Frozen Four win, I was a first round pick for the Hartford Heroes and life was perfect.

My future team wanted me to keep playing at collegiate level to hone my skills and I was happy with that.

College was too much fun to leave so soon and I loved my teammates and my Gamma Delta Tau brothers.

Don’t ask me how in the space of a year I went from the most loved athlete on campus—and in the neighboring town of Hemlock Beach—to the most hated person in Hemlock Beach in the history of the low country.

Of course it was because of a girl.

The head coach’s daughter.

If you’re imagining the oldest story in the world, the kind of forbidden story that all the romance novels are ripe with, you’d be totally wrong.

I didn’t fall in love with Alexis Jones and we didn’t have a secret love story behind her father’s back.

It’s simpler than that and I’d look even worse than I did if I had fallen for someone who was off-limits.

Saying that Coach Jones had warned the entire team to keep our hands off his daughter is an understatement.

But do these kinds of warnings ever work?

Yeah, I know.

Telling a bunch of young, hot blooded athletes not to touch a beautiful, equally young and hot blooded girl, who happens to be majoring in physical therapy and is doing a placement with the team, is like waving a giant red flag in front of a bull.

By winter break, everyone on the team had figured out that our goalie Jeremy was boning the coach’s daughter.

What does that have to do with me?

Jer was my roommate and I stupidly covered for them.

Everything seemed fine until the two star crossed lovers quarreled.

Alexis thought it was a good idea to use me to make Jeremy jealous.

In my defense, I was naive.

I offered her a shoulder to cry on—a very platonic, strictly as a friend shoulder to cry on, let me add—and when she suggested we did some shots just to loosen up, I stupidly agreed.

Somehow that backfired when after finishing an entire bottle of tequila, Jeremy found us in a compromising position.

My protests that nothing happened fell on deaf ears and when the story reached Coach Jones’s ears?

---