Page 1 of Cross Ice

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CHAPTER ONE

Nico

Steam from the shower still clung to my bathroom mirror. Through the condensation, the tattoo on my left pec was barely visible, but I knew the words by heart. Five years ago, when I’d signed my first big contract with the San Jose Lasers, I’d had them inked there.

One life to live. One life to love.

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Everyone thought it was about hockey—living without regrets, playing every shift like it was my last. Which was true enough. But the tattoo meant something else too, something I’d never admitted out loud.

My phone sat on the counter, its screen still lit with the Instagram post I’d been reading obsessively for three days. Marco Morelli and Étienne Savard, of the Colorado Glaciers. Both of them together, smiling at the camera cheek to cheek. The hashtag was simple: #lovewins

Scrolling through the comments again, I found thousands of them. Mostly supportive. Some hateful, but fuck those people.

Griffin Lapierre had come out first, back in October. That had been huge; the first active NHL player to do so. Brave as hell. One player against the entire hockey world, and he’d done it.

But Morelli and Savard? Something about that finally clicked for me in a way Lapierre’s coming out hadn’t.

Maybe knowing there were more queer players in pro hockey than just Lapierre made the difference. Maybe I realized that if Morelli and Savard could survive being on the same team, in the locker room together every day, then I could handle being out in my own city.

Or maybe I was just tired of hiding.

My reflection wavered in the steam-covered mirror, there but not quite clear. Like everything else about me. Thirty years old. Elite power forward. First line. Excellent contract. Endorsements. Everything I’d worked for my entire life.

Everything except actually living any of it as myself.

Road trips had always been my solution. Different cities meant apps, hookups with guys who didn’t know who I was. Never in San Jose. Never where it could get back to the team, to my family, to the media. Closeted throughout my entire career—juniors, college, every single day in the NHL.

My parents didn’t know. Miguel, my brother, didn’t know, and he was in the league too, playing for Vancouver. We’d grown up breathing hockey together. Hockey was our language, our bond, our entire world. How was I supposed to tell him I was gay when that world had taught us both that gay meant weak, meant other, meant not one of us?

One life to live. One life to love.

“Fuck it,” I said to my empty bathroom.

Friday night, just after the New Year. No game until Saturday night. The evening stretched ahead of me, and I was done wasting them.

A gay club. Here, in San Jose. Not as Nicolás Briggs, NHL player with seven hundred and fifty thousand social media followers and a Wikipedia page. Just as Nico, the man who’d been hiding in plain sight for fourteen years.

The decision settled over me, terrifying and liberating at the same time. My mind immediately started spinning. What if someone recognizes me? What if this ruins everything? What if⁠—