Page 81 of Breaking the Ice

What hewantedwas to lean in. To justtakethis time.

But he couldn’t. He was frozen in place, by all of Gavin’s stupid rules.

Zach steeled his brain. His heart. “Let’s not do this again if you’re not going to change your mind,” he said with as much cold certainty as he could find.

Gavin straightened and looked away, and Zach said, before Gavin could apologize, “I’d better go make sure Finn’s okay.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you should,” Gavin said.

And that was the end of it again.

If Zach had a stick in his hand to break, he’d have done it, right against the boards.

But he didn’t, so he took one breath and then another, until his heartbeat was almost steady, and went to look for Finn.

“Team’s looking great,” Sidney said, setting his fork against his plate, “but I worry about that second team power play.”

They’d exhausted polite small talk fairly quickly, and Sidney hadn’t wasted any time bringing up the team.

Gavin barely tolerated these weekly lunches with Sidney. Zach had offered to come a bunch of times, but he never felt comfortable bringing him along, because this not only felt like Gavin’s responsibility but Zach had so much on his plate already. He had classes and homework and also all the work he did with the team.

“Yeah, that’s a concern,” Gavin said as calmly as he could.

“Not that I imagine you aren’t doing everything you can,” Sidney said, patting him on the shoulder and sounding jovial and easy. “But whatisthe plan? Next year, you’re losing a bunch of players. Who in this young group is gonna step up?”

Gavin’s hand, resting on his lap, clenched into a fist until he forced it to relax, one fucking molecule at a time. He was probably frowning, but he wasn’t sure it was avoidable.

Sidney was annoying; there was only so much he could do about it.

“That’s a great question,” Gavin said. “We’re looking at this last stretch of regular season games closely.”

He knew it was a political, noncommittal answer. A fuckinggarbageanswer, but the truth was he didn’t know.

Even if Brody played his senior year, like he’d committed to doing, before he went to med school, he was going to lose Ramsey. Mal and Ivan, for sure. There was almost no way whoever drafted Elliott would let him go back to college for another year. He was too good, too explosive.

They weren’t even done withthisyear yet, and already people wanted answers to questions he’d barely started asking. And it wasn’t just Sidney, though he was definitely the bluntest.

“I’m sure,” Sidney said.

“Jones was barely on anyone’s radar last year,” Gavin reminded him, probably not as gently as he could have. He could hear the edge in his voice, and he already knew he’d be going to the gym after this to work out some of this frustration before practice. He told himself it was just this interminable lunch, but he knew that wasn’t all of it. It was Zach, so close to touch, and yet untouchable.

“Because Nichols was playing him wrong.”

“You’ve been talking to Zach, I see,” Gavin joked awkwardly.

Sidney shot him a look. “There’s a reason Nichols isn’t in your chair right now.”

Gavin decided this would be a terrible time to broach the idea he’d been toying with—moving Mal to the second power play team, even temporarily, hoping that his leadership and drive might give some of those guys a taste of where they needed to be.Whatthey needed to be.

“Right,” Gavin said. He finished up the last of his steak and hoped that now that their food was gone, he could make an excuse to get out of here sooner rather than later.

He’d known who was going to freak out about this idea—Elliott, first off, and Malcolm second off and probably the whole team for good measure—but he hadn’t anticipated that Sidney would also lodge his own protest.

Fucking awesome.

“Any plans for the holidays?”

Gavin had been doing a shit job of pretending that Christmas wasn’t coming up in a few days. It was always one of the hardest times of the year—it had been Noelle’s favorite holiday—and when he’d been living at the cabin, it had been so easy to pretend it just wasn’t happening.