Page 68 of The Best Friend Power Play

After fifteen minutes, Coach calls time on me. Because, yup, that's the extent of my training.

I watch the rest of the session from the sidelines.

Chronic pain is such a strange thing. As an athlete, my body is my machine. I've honed it. My training, my diet, my sleep patterns, everything is calibrated and controlled. So when my body's not working like it should, it really messes with me.

And speaking of things that are messing with me…my thoughts drift to Hannah.

That's a different type of messing, though. The kind of messing I can get behind.

Because spending the summer with her is turning out to be filled with more surprises than I expected.

And they're all good surprises.

Kissing her.

Seeing her in my shirts—now an everyday occurrence, I'm happy to report.

But maybe the best thing of all is watching her having some fun. She deserves this hot girl summer. I know she misses the twins, and she's uncertain what her future holds—something I totally relate to—but she's loosening up, having a great time, and maybe even discovering a new side to herself, too.

Whenever something takes over your life, whether it's children or sport or career or anything, you change in response. And part of that change causes you to suppress, or at least temporarily shelve, certain aspects of who you are.

You have to.

You can't go out every night and party and come home at two a.m. when you're responsible for two teenagers in the same way you can't skip training or focus on anything other than hockey during the season.

I'm not saying Hannah is a suppressed party girl, but she has given up a lot to take care of her younger siblings.

Like dating.

She had one or two boyfriends in high school, but it was never serious, and since then, there's been no one.

I'm curious about what aspects of herself she'll discover next.

Is being a stickler for organization and writing a list for everything who she really is, or was it something she developed to help manage her life?

Is she more spontaneous than she gives herself credit for? After all, she did drop to her knee and propose to me. That was a very un-Hannah thing to do.

Is running her mom's flower shop her passion, or is there anything else she wants to do with her life?

There are so many areas of her life I'm excited to see her explore.

The training session ends.

I skip the contrast water therapy most of the guys do and have a massage instead.

After we finish our post-training routine, I join Fraser, Donovan, Slater, and Milo in the dining hall.

We catch up on how everyone has spent their summer so far.

It's not lost on me that of the five of us, the three with girlfriends—Fraser, Slater, and Donovan—look and sound the happiest.

I shoot a glance at Milo, who looks as grumpy as ever, and after that very restricted training session, I'm hardly a ray of sunshine myself.

I eat my food and say nothing. I'm happy for them—I am. But if I'm being completely honest, I'm also a little jealous.

All three guys are hyper-focused athletes dedicated to the game, yet when their girlfriends call or text, they get all giddy with delight, like a kid on Christmas morning.

I've never had that.

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