Page 53 of Cold Comeback
That heartbeat cost us. The opposing forward read the gap, intercepted my delayed reaction, and buried a wraparound while I was still deciding whether to commit.
"Fuck," Knox muttered from the bench.
Coach's whistle shrieked. "Again!"
The next round wasn't better. I overcompensated, playing too aggressively and taking a risky pinch that left us short-handed when I couldn't get back—another goal against.
Thatcher skated past me during the line change, close enough that our shoulders brushed. "You okay?" he asked quietly.
The concern in his voice nearly broke me. "I'm fine."
By the time practice ended, the locker room felt like a crypt. The Reapers had somehow turned into the victims. The guys packed their gear in silence, the usual post-practice chirping replaced by careful glances and whispered conversations.
I sat in my stall, mechanically folding towels with mathematical precision, trying to project normalcy. "Team meeting in three hours," I announced to the room. "Game prep."
Nods all around. No questions. No jokes. They filed out one by one until only Thatcher remained, sitting across from me with his gear bag half-packed.
"Gideon—"
"See you at the meeting," I cut him off, not looking up from my towel.
He sat there for another moment, then left without another word.
On game days at home, I had a routine I could execute in my sleep. Same pre-game meal. Same arrival time. Same warm-up playlist in my headphones.
When I stood to deliver my pre-game speech—the captain's address that was supposed to fire up the team and set the tone—the words sounded like they came from someone else's mouth.
"Play our system and support each other. Sixty minutes of our best hockey."
Generic captain-speak. Safe, boring, and uninspiring. The kind of speech that gets polite nods and blank stares.
Knox caught my eye and frowned. Linc shifted uncomfortably. Even Bricks, who usually hung on every word from leadership, looked confused.
I floundered before we even took the ice.
The game was everything I'd feared it would be.
In the first period, I played like I was thinking three moves ahead and two moves behind simultaneously. Every decision carried the weight of my captaincy, my reputation, and my efforts to keep my personal life from destroying my professional one.
The opening faceoff set the tone. I won the draw clean, but instead of immediately moving the puck up to Linc like we'd practiced a thousand times, I held it for a beat too long—caught between the play I should make and the fear of making any play at all. Norfolk's center stripped it from my stick and sent it behind our net.
"Move it, Cap!" Knox barked from the blue line.
When Thatcher carried the puck up the left side on a clean breakout, my instincts screamed at me to support the rush and get open for the trailer pass. Instead, I hesitated, wary of what it would look like if I helped him succeed.
By the ten-minute mark, I'd missed two simple outlet passes and fumbled a routine poke check at our blue line. The home crowd grew restless. On the bench, Coach kept glancing at me.
The second period brought a different kind of disaster.
I overcompensated for my tentative first period by playing like I had something to prove to everyone in the building. Started throwing hits at everything that moved, chasing their skill players into corners like I was twenty years old and trying to make the team.
The aggression worked for eight minutes. I caught their winger with a clean check along the boards that had the crowd on its feet. Stripped the puck from their center at center ice and fed Pluto for a scoring chance. For a moment, I was the captain they needed me to be.
Then Norfolk's power play unit came out.
Their left wing—a kid who couldn't be older than twenty-two—made a move at the blue line that left me flat-footed. Instead of reading the play and adjusting my position, I panicked. Lunged for a hit that was never there. Caught him with my elbow up, two seconds after he'd released the puck.
The referee's arm went up immediately. "Number six, Richmond, two minutes for interference!"
