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CHAPTER ONE

THIS IS, WITHOUT any doubt whatsoever, the worst day of Ryan’s life.

The worst-est. That’s not a word. But that doesn’t really matter because he’s about to die in a ditch. Unfortunately, that’s not some sort of exaggeration. He’s in a ditch. Well, he’s in a car, but the car is in a ditch with him in it. So, yeah, very much literally in a ditch.

Ryan deserves to be in this ditch.

He deserves whatever comes next.

Lil Nas X is playing quietly as Ryan assesses just how fucked he is. Do his limbs work? He wiggles his toes. Yeah, okay. Toes. Still there, still working. That’s something. You can’t feel your toes when you’re dead, so it’s reasonable to assume that he’s still alive since his toes work as they should.

There’s still the ditch issue, though.

Ryan probably won’t be able to get his car out of here without some help. He’s not entirely sure his car is still in one piece. The airbags went off, so he can’t get a good look at the damage. His car is fucked to hell, isn’t it? He totally deserves pain and suffering, but his poor car does not. This car deserved to survive him, but unfortunately, nothing survives him.

Everyone has a purpose in life. Ryan’s purpose, apparently, is to destroy good things .

He stares down at his hands. Wiggles his fingers. Those work, too. Maybe he’s not about to die, which would be great because dying was not on the agenda. Winning back his boyfriend was on the agenda. Technically ex-boyfriend because Kaden did break up with him over text two hours ago. Ryan drank a beer about it and decided that sorry I don’t think I wanna do this anymore wasn’t good enough for him.

So he hopped in his car.

He did think about staying home because the snow was getting pretty bad, but who breaks up over text? Kaden could have at least called him. They could have talked it out, whatever the problem even was—Ryan wouldn’t know, though, cause it’s not like Kaden told him.

Fuck, honestly, trying to win him back was a terrible idea in the first place. Ryan should have some self-respect; he shouldn’t even want to win back a guy who dumped him over text. Only assholes do that. Right? Or maybe that’s just how things are done now and Ryan is being old-fashioned when he wants to be broken up with in person.

Yeah, he changed his mind. He doesn’t want to be broken up with in person, he wants to tell Kaden to go fuck himself in person.

He can’t, though.

Because of the ditch he’s in.

Does he need to call the police? Someone has to pull his car out of here. He looks around for his phone. It was in the cupholder before he started sliding, but it’s now on the passenger side, down on the rubber mat and out of reach.

“Shitting fuck shit,” Ryan says and fumbles for the seatbelt buckle. Since both his fingers and toes are working, it’s probably okay to move.

Hazard lights come on behind him and a moment later a woman with big eyes and a pink hat appears by the window and pulls open the door. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” Ryan says. Apart from the obvious ditch situation.

The woman nods. “I called 911. Don’t move, just wait until they get here. ”

“I’m not hurt. I wasn’t even going that fast,” Ryan says. He doesn’t move, just to be safe. And he doesn’t want to put this nice lady through any more distress. She was going somewhere. Home? Grocery shopping? To a boyfriend who loves her and didn’t just dump her ass? Either way, this absolutely wasn’t how she expected her day to go.

She eyes him, like she’s trying to figure out if he’s lying, or maybe like she’s wondering why he looks familiar. Everyone in Toronto watches hockey. Everyone and their pets and their potted plants. She may have seen him on the posters or on TV.

She doesn’t say anything else because an ambulance arrives with the police in tow. Snow swirls into Ryan’s car when she steps aside to make room for a paramedic. A scruffy, tall-dark-and-handsome snack of a man. Ryan cannot call this guy a snack—he’s supposed to be straight. Straight people don’t call other men snacks.

Unless that straight person is called Davis Carrolton. If your name is Davis Carrolton, you’re so deeply rooted in straightness that you can say the gayest shit in the world without anyone batting an eye. Sometimes, Ryan wishes he was more like Carrot.

Aw crap, he’s going to have to tell Carrot that he drove into a ditch. Ryan will never hear the end of this.

“What’s your name?” the hottest man alive asks.

“Ryan.” Does he have to mention his last name? People know him. This will end up on the internet somehow. Fuck, he shouldn’t have had that beer. No way is he over the legal limit, he’s not drunk, his car just slid into a ditch because it’s the snowpocalypse out here. Fuck. Whatever. “Ryan Harris.”

The paramedic doesn’t react to that at all. He just keeps asking his questions. “Do you know what year it is?”

“Twenty-uhhh…” Ryan knows what year it is. “2022.”

“Are you allergic to any medication?”

“I’m okay,” Ryan says. “I just… the car started sliding.”

They insist on taking him to the hospital, even though there’s nothing wrong with him. Ryan doesn’t kick up a fuss because that would also end up on Twitter somehow. Slaw slipped on a patch of ice outside a bar a few weeks ago and it was everywhere . Sometimes the guys still call him Slippin’ Slaw.

Ryan has been through concussion protocol. He plays hockey. Going through concussion protocol is some fucked-up rite of passage, just like getting hit with the puck somewhere unfortunate and playing through an injury during the playoffs.

He does not have a concussion. Just a cut on his forehead from the airbag that’s easy enough for them to patch up.

The doctor knows who Ryan is.

She says, “Good game yesterday” while she’s disinfecting the cut.

Ryan stares at the writing on her coat—her name is Dr. Watson.

Ryan does not ask her where Sherlock is. “Thanks,” Ryan grits out instead. He’s a big baby when it comes to injuries. He hates blood. Being a hockey player, blood is kind of part of his job, because he’s constantly banged up in some way or other. Ryan should have thought of that before he picked hockey over everything else. It’s not that he’ll faint or anything, it’s just gross. The hospital smells like a hospital. Also gross.

“Don’t even need stitches,” the doctor says. “Guess you’ve had worse.”

“Yeah, the broken clavicle last season really sucked,” Ryan says. He liked that one better, though. No blood.

“You’re alive,” someone says. Carrot. He’s frowning at Ryan with his arms folded across his chest. Not happy to be here, then.

Ryan didn’t call him; he asked one of the nurses to do it. He’s like a dog who broke into the pantry, tipped over a potted plant and dragged a roll of toilet paper across the house. He knows what he did. Ryan deserves to be stabbed by all the daggers Carrot is glaring at him right now just as much as he deserved being in that ditch. Carrot did tell him not to go out into the snow.

He came to pick him up anyway. Ryan’s car is… maybe not in a ditch an ymore, but probably not in any condition to be driven anywhere. Ryan didn’t get a good look at the front before they whisked him away. He assumes it resembles a crumpled bag of chips.

“Very much alive,” Dr. Watson confirms.

Ryan gives a weak thumbs-up.

“Nothing’s broken?” Carrot asks. “No internal bleeding? No concussion?”

“You’re making it sound like I was in a pile-up or something.”

“You drove your car into a ditch.”

“The car drove itself into a ditch,” Ryan says. He didn’t do it. The car just had a mind of its own all of a sudden.

“Told you to stay the fuck at home, but you had to…” Carrot trails off into a sigh, because Carrot is a good bro who’d never tell Dr. Watson that Ryan just had to drive to Kaden’s place to convince him that they could still work as a couple. Because as soon as Ryan steps out of their apartment, he’s straight. Maybe he should hit on Dr. Watson like a real straight dude.

Shit, what is wrong with him, of course he shouldn’t.

Maybe he does have a concussion.

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says.

He really is sorry. He’s glad nobody got hurt, other than his car. All he wants right now is to go home and crawl into bed and forget about all of this.

Since Ryan plays hockey in Toronto, he doesn’t get to forget about it.

Articles about his accident start floating around before he even gets home. Within the following days, some asshat finds out that Ryan was—he wasn’t drunk. But the asshat who gets to write whatever he wants as long as it generates clicks makes it sound like he was totally wasted.

Obviously, no one gives a shit that Ryan had one beer. He still has his license and there was barely any alcohol in his blood. But now he’s the guy who drunkenly drove into a snowstorm for no good reason.

And, obviously, he refused to tell people where he was going. When the police asked, Ryan said he was going to a friend’s house. They thought he was a Pennsylvania dumbass who doesn’t know how to drive in the snow. They do get snow in Pennsylvania, but obviously not as much as Toronto.

Either way, the media gleefully pounces on his mistake. Ryan has to apologize over and over; has to hang his head in shame for the cameras. And he really is a little bit ashamed of himself, but what the team PR expects of him is absolute clownery and Ryan is fucking tired.

“I’m fucking tired,” he tells Carrot three days after the accident.

“Give it time, they’ll find someone else to shit on,” Carrot says.

He is, of course, correct.

They always find someone else to shit on.

Ryan would prefer it if they found someone else to shit on right now though.

They have a game that night, but Ryan isn’t playing. Officially, they want to rest him after his car accident. It feels like a punishment. It is a punishment. The media will most certainly frame it like a punishment.

In the room, some of the guys aren’t as talkative around him as they used to be. He’s become a distraction—he’s become one of those guys. Like it wasn’t bad enough that they’re having a terrible season, now he went and threw a scandal into the mix. Although Slaw, at least, thanked him for his service because they’ve stopped writing about whether or not Timothy Cole deserves to wear an A for the team because of his abysmal performance this season. In all honesty, Slaw’s performance is fine. It’s completely fine. Maybe he’s not a hundred percent all day every day, but it’s not like he’s dragging the team down or whatever it was that the media ghouls were saying about him.

Ryan should have known that getting torn to shreds on every possible platform and sitting out a few games wouldn’t be the entirety of his punishment. When it comes to hockey, Toronto doesn’t do things halfway.

Since Ryan has been here for his entire career, ever since he got drafted five years ago, he should be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It does drop somewhat unexpectedly. About a week after the Ditch Incident, their GM decides that Ryan’s not worth the trouble and sends him packing. Ryan deserves that, too.

“Where?” Ryan asks when they pull him off the ice during morning skate. He’s so proud of himself that his voice doesn’t crack. He’ll cry at some point today, but he has no idea if it’ll be in the showers or at home when he packs his most important stuff or on the plane he’ll undoubtedly have to get on in a few hours or in some hotel room that his new team will stick him in for the time being.

“Cardinals,” is the answer he gets.

Ryan almost laughs. Of course. The team that’s known for taking in strays that nobody else wants.

Ryan isn’t a budding star player anymore. He’s a stray now.