Page 73 of Across the Boards

Instead, I find Jensen standing on my doorstep, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“Hey, man,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment. “What’s up?”

“Coach sent me,” he says grimly. “Extra sessions in net for you. He says if you’re going to space out during games, you need double the reps in practice.”

I groan. “Now?”

“Now.” Jensen looks apologetic but firm. “He was pretty insistent. Something about making sure you’re ‘fully focused’ for Miami.”

Translation: Coach doesn’t trust me to keep my cool against Jason, so he’s going to run me into the ground to make sure I’m too tired to start anything.

“Let me grab my keys.” I step back, waving him in. “Did he send anyone else, or am I getting special treatment?”

“Kelly is meeting us there. Guess Coach figures if one of Jason’s old buddies is on the ice, you’ll have to behave.”

“Fantastic,” I mutter. Kelly is exactly who I want to spend my Saturday afternoon with—a guy who still texts regularly with Jason and makes no secret of his loyalty.

“Look on the bright side,” Jensen offers as we head to his car. “Extra ice time means less time to obsess over what’s-her-name.”

“Elliot,” I correct automatically.

“Right. The hot neighbor who has you skating into boards and missing defensive assignments.”

I shoot him a look. “She’s not just ‘the hot neighbor.’”

Jensen raises his hands in mock surrender. “Sorry, sorry. The intellectually stimulating, emotionally complex hot neighbor who has you skating into boards and missing defensive assignments. Better?”

Despite everything, I laugh. “Much. And for the record, she’s also funny. And kind. And passionate about books. And completely unimpressed by hockey.”

“Sounds terrible,” Jensen jokes. “I can see why you’re so miserable.”

“I messed up,” I admit, buckling my seatbelt as Jensen starts the car. “Kept something from her that I should have been upfront about.”

“The fact that you moved next door to her on purpose?” At my startled look, he shrugs. “Tommy talks. A lot.”

“Great. So the whole team knows I’m a pathetic stalker.”

“Not the whole team. Kelly wouldn’t care enough to listen. And nobody thinks you’re a stalker.” He pulls out of the complex parking lot. “Though the moving-next-door thing is a little intense, I’ll give you that.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I protest. “The complex is in a good location, the price was right, and yes, knowing she lived there was a factor. But I wasn’t planning to show up on her doorstep in the middle of the night with a boombox or anything.”

“Good call. Those things are heavy.”

I slump in my seat. “I should have told her from the beginning. I just... couldn’t figure out how without sounding creepy.”

“Probably because it is a little creepy,” Jensen points out, not unkindly. “But the question is, does she like you enough to get past it?”

“I have no idea.” I stare out the window at the passing landscape. “I hope so.”

The thing I haven’t told anyone—not Jensen, not even Tommy—is how much those brief conversations with Elliot had meant to me. How, in thirty minutes of talking about books, she’d seen me more clearly than women I’d dated for months. How she’d asked me what I wanted to do after hockey, the first person who’d ever acknowledged there might be more to me than the sport.

I’d told her I wasn’t sure, but I liked the idea of coaching kids someday.

“That makes sense,” she’d said thoughtfully. “You explain things well. You have patience.”

It was such a simple observation, but it had stayed with me. Through trade negotiations, through playoff runs, through the grind of seasons away from Phoenix. The idea that someone had seen something in me beyond my slap shot and defensive positioning.

“Well, in the meantime,” Jensen says as we pull into the practice facility parking lot, “you can channel all that angst into stopping pucks. I expect your best effort, lover boy.”

---