Page 87 of Thoroughly Pucked

“Sure, but cigars aren’t always cigars. Why plants?” she presses.

Because my dad wasn’t into them. Because they weren’t sports. Because it was no one else’s thing in my family.

Ah, fuck it. She deserves to know. As we stop at the corner of a bustling street, traffic whisking by on a Wednesday night, I turn to the redhead with the beguiling brown eyes. They’re big and deep, and they make me open up to her. “Because they were all mine,” I say with a shrug. The shrug is for me—resignation to the effect she has on my closed, cold heart.

“When I was a teenager, I needed something that had nothing at all to do with hockey,” I add. There, I said it. “An interest that was entirely separate from the ice.”

“You needed an escape,” she says thoughtfully.

“Yeah, I did.” I scratch my jaw, weighing how far I want to go. This is getting heavy. This is getting close to the stuff I keep locked up tight. The nightmares, the twinge in my knee, the sense of dread as the season marches unstoppably closer. I want to play hockey. Truly, I do. But I want it to be fun. I just don’t know if it is anymore. I meet her gaze again. “Sometimes I still do.”

“We all do, bro,” Dev says with genuine understanding.

I’m not sure he ever needs an escape from hockey. He’s lived it and breathed it since my dad coached himin juniors, when we were younger, and I helped my dad. Dev was eager, relentless, always ready. There was never ever a day in his life when Dev wasn’t theput me in, coachguy.

I was that guy for a long time.

But I’m different now. Eventually, Father Time catches up to all of us. It’s happened to the greats in football, basketball, and hockey. It’s the one phenomenon no man is immune from.

“We all do, don’t we,” I echo, since it’s easier than pointing out the differences between us. As we cross the street—and maybe it’s psychosomatic—my knee barks, then I look at Dev, spry, five years younger.

Maybe he is right about dog years.

“I think I was expecting you to say your grandma liked plants or you had an aunt who was a botanist,” Aubrey says, picking up the plant thread. “But it’s very you that you found this interest on your own.”

I fight off a smile. She observes me too closely, sees me too well. That awareness makes my pulse race a little faster. I do still want to jump over the boards and slam my stick against the puck, but that desire is mixed with others now. With unexpected new ones. Like this—I want to see her at a game, skate over to her, and press a sweaty, exhausted kiss to her pretty face at the end of a hard-won victory.

Things that’ll never happen.

I shove those thoughts aside when my phone pings with a text. I swipe it quickly, nerves prickling. Maybe it’s Garrett again.

But it’s a text from Hollis, and there’s a videoattached. “Hollis sent me something,” I say, intrigued since the thumbnail is him and Jack.

I waggle the screen at Aubrey and Dev, and we stop in front of an awning in front of a bar. I hit play. “Thought you might want to know your cat and I are besties. Check him out,” Hollis says, then strides across my home with my cat riding his shoulders.

“You have a parrot cat,” Aubrey says, awed.

“Evidently.”

“Does he do other tricks?”

“He’s never done a single trick for me,” I grumble, but with begrudging admiration for Hollis’s determination to teach a cat.

A second video lands.

I shake my head, but I’m laughing. I can only imagine what he’s sending now. I hit play once more.

“High five,” Hollis says to the cat, who’s sitting across from him at the kitchen table. The cat lifts his paw and high fives my cousin.

“Ohhh! He is the cat charmer,” Dev declares.

“Dude, you’re killing me,” I say to the video.

Hollis turns to the camera almost like he’s heard me. “Sorry,” he says with zero contrition. “Should have called it the high paw.”

He smiles and the video ends.

“Your teammate is too charming,” Aubrey says to Dev, then to me, she asks, “And the cat? Is he named Jack because he has only one eye? Like Calico Jack the pirate?”

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