Page 19 of Ice Cold, Red Hot
I always brought it when I was on the ice—in practice and at games. But now? I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she’d looked bent over the pool table, while talking to him. Her perfect round ass in my face while she promised him another date… it infuriated me. It turned me on. It made me want to go complete caveman and haul her out of there on my shoulder, lock her in my room and never let her out.
She was mine.
Only… she wasn’t.
And she couldn’t be.
But I was having a difficult time with reality.
So I funneled it into the game.
“Renshaw!” Coach’s voice cracked through the rink like a whip. I skated to the boards, chest heaving, adrenalinestill riding me high. He didn’t even look up from his clipboard.
“You’re skating like you're being chased.” He finally glanced at me, brows lifted. “Everything okay?”
I shrugged, tugged at the collar of my jersey. “Yeah. Just dialed in.”
He squinted. “Dialed in’s good. But you’re two strides away from charging someone into next week just for breathing near the puck. Remember, we have an enforcer. And it’s not you.”
I didn’t answer, just met his stare. He waited.
After a beat, he nodded, the edge of his mouth twitching. “Whatever’s driving you right now, use it. Don’t let it use you.”
Coach let me off the leash during our away game at Essex, and I made them bleed for it.
I was faster than I’d ever been—tighter, meaner. Every shift, I hit the ice like it owed me something. Like I could take all the frustration boiling in my chest and carve it into the ice with my blades.
Two goals. One assist. A bone-rattling hit in the second period that got their captain pulled off the ice and the Essex crowd foaming at the mouth.
Coach called it my cleanest, dirtiest game of the season.
Reporters tried to talk to me afterward. My teammates patted my back and called me a monster.
I showered in silence, stared at my own reflection in the cracked mirror of a grimy locker room bathroom, and felt... nothing.
She was so deep in my head I couldn’t think of anything else, even then. The crowd roared, the bench explodedwhen I scored, but the one person I wanted to see it—wasn’t in the damn building.
And that did something to me.
Because I was winning.
And now that I’d met her? It didn’t feel like enough.
I didn’t go to section that week—I couldn’t take seeing her there. I knew I’d do something stupid, or say something stupid… and when Friday night rolled around, I made sure I was far away from the building at seven when I knew Ethan was due to pick her up for their date.
Griff, Burns, and Tucker went with me to the Burger Bunk and then we had a couple pints at MacDougals, but I was terrible company. Naturally, they were kind enough to point it out.
“Dude. You’re playing like you’ve got something to prove—in a good way, I mean. But you’re a huge pain in the ass off the ice. What the fuck?” Griff was shaking his head at me as I downed my second beer and ordered a third.
“It’s nothing.” I was finding it hard to look him in the eye.
“It’s her.” Griff didn’t ask. He knew, and that pissed me off even more. When I didn’t answer, but pounded half of the third pint, he stilled my hand, forcing me to look at him. “What is the deal with this girl? Why is this different?”
Could I tell him? Dudes didn’t really share the kinds of words that came to mind when I thought about Celeste.Soulmate. Meant to be. Mine.
“I met her this summer,” I finally said. “We spent some time together.”
Griff’s eyes grew wide as he processed this. He knew exactly what “spending time” meant in this context.
