Page 101 of Oh, Puck!
I know exactly why Dad's calling. He's not calling to check in on the game, or to ask how the road trip's going, or any of the normal shit a father calls his sons about.
He's calling because Zoey told him she knows.
About Brianna. About the yoga studio. About thirty years of a marriage he treated like a hobby he could pick up and put down whenever it suited him.
And now he wants to get ahead of it.
After all these years, he finally wants to call his boys before Mom gets there first, before the truth arrives at their door dressed up as a rumor he can spin into something smaller. Something survivable.
Fuck that.
I've been carrying his damn secret since I was twelve years old, and I am not about to hand it over in a locker room forty minutes before a must-win game.
"You good, Cap?" Beck asks, and for once there's no joke riding underneath it.
"I'm good," I lie. "Get your skates on. We've got a game to win."
Coach Pearson claps his hands together from the center of the room before either of my brothers can push further, and the whole team falls into silence.
"Alright," he says, voice like gravel dragged over concrete. "Last night we played like a team that forgot how to play hockey. Tonight, we remember."
Nobody laughs. Nobody even breathes too loud.
Last night was the worst game we've played all season. So much for turning a new leaf.
Here's the thing about the last three nights I haven't told a single living soul, not even the idiots I share a locker room with.
I've spent every single one of them in Josie Whitfield's bed.
Not just sleeping beside her, her back curved into my chest, my arm slung heavy over her waist, listening to the soft, even rhythm of her breathing until I finally drift off myself.
But we've also had sex in places that, if I'm being completely honest with myself, we absolutelyshould nothave.
In the hotel stairwell, because the elevator was too slow and neither of us could wait. I had her back pressed to cold concrete while I had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep her quiet enough that housekeeping didn't hear us two floors down.
Then we couldn't help ourselves in the back of the team van at a rest stop outside Sacramento. The windows fogged up while both of us prayed to God that Tyler didn't decide now was the moment to come looking for his missing charging cable.
And last night, in her hotel bathroom with the shower running the entire time. I've still got the bruises on my shoulders from where I had her up against the tile, pounding into her until she was shaking.
It has not been subtle. It has not been careful.
But ithasbeen the best three nights of my life, and I've spent every single moment since walking around half-hard andcompletely useless to anyone who tries to make conversation with me.
Which might explain part of why tonight, standing at center ice with the visitor's crowd roaring for blood, my legs feel like they're moving through wet cement.
"Move, Declan!"Coach's voice rattles me into action from the side of the rink. "Dosomething,for the love of God!"
I shake my head hard enough that my helmet knocks against my skull, trying to physically dislodge every single filthy, distracting thought currently occupying real estate in my brain.
Josie's mouth. Josie's laugh. The way she said my name last night.
Focus, Morrison.
It's not that I don't want to be here. God, that's the last thing this is. Two months ago I wanted nothingmorethan to disappear into an easy, meaningless season.
Now I actually give a damn, and somehow that's worse. Because giving a damn means there's something to lose.
We're down two-nothing by the second period, and it's not even that the other team's outplaying us. It's that we're not playing at all. We're a team scattered into six different men skating the same ice without ever actually being on the same page.
