Page 38 of Triple Pucked
I ignore the screaming pain in my muscles, bloody welcoming it.
I’m not meant to hurt myself (it’s been negotiated and written into my contract), but D’Angelo can’t complain about working hard in practice to be respectful to the new coach, right?
D’Angelo fixes his icy glare on me. “Slow down. You’re not a bird about to take flight.”
D’Angelo is leaning against the rink’s boards in Rebel Arena, standing next to the new coach. They’re talking in low voices, pointing out the players and taking notes.
It’s like they’ve always known each other.
Something pulls in my chest.
If I couldn’t still feel the heat on my arse from where D’Angelo pulled me into an empty closet in the corridor outside the lockers, yanked down my hockey pants, and swatted my arse crisply enough to make sure that I’d feel it as I skated, I’d feel cold right now.
Alone.
As it is, I can still sense D’Angelo’s hands on my arse. D’Angelo is with me, even while his shoulder is touching the new coach’s, which makes me want to scream.
I need to be touching him. I need him to be touchingme.
I bite my tongue, relishing the sharp bite if I can’t have D’Angelo’s.
I’m breaking the rules of my contract but if I don’t, then the tears in my eyes are going to spill over, right in front of everyone.
Lucas wouldn’t let me live it down.
He’d probably make a meme out of it.
I wish that I was a bird, as D’Angelo called me.
It feels bloody brilliant to skate recklessly fast, as if I could take flight.
Faster and faster and…
Sweat drips down the back of my neck. I clutch tighter onto my stick.
Dad saving all week to have enough money to take me to the rink, when I’d been newly adopted as a kid, had offered me the same escape.
It saved me.
Every day was a battle to obey the strange rules of the world that I’d been thrown into, which was different in every way from the one without rules that I’d come from.
Feral.
I was exhausted from being told tosit still, pay attention,andstop talking.
At the same time, I buzzed with energy and the drive tomove.
I never understood how calm, silent, and still my brother could be. Eden escaped into his books, which scared and confused me. Mum quietly baked with him.
It was Dad who understood that I needed the thrill on the ice.
Dad worked overtime for months to afford my first pair of skates.
Yet he also bought Eden a pair.
What will Dad think of me if I abandon my own brother?
I promised him that I never would.
