Page 32

THIRTY-TWO

RILEY

Puck Kings

Mavvy

Don’t forget about book club tonight, kids.

Me

Might be late. I have a therapy session. I’ll head over after.

Huddy Boy

Madeline made cookies. I’ll make sure to save you one.

G-Money

What kind of cookies?

Huddy Boy

Chocolate chip.

G-Money

Damn. Peanut butter is my favorite.

Easy E

The world doesn’t revolve around you, Everett.

G-Money

What’s with the attitude problem, Richardson?

Easy E

I’ve been having some issues with Tella. The engine is acting up, and seems like there’s a problem with the chain and drive systems. I’m worried she’s not going to make it!!

Sully

It’s an inanimate object.

Easy E

She’s the LOML!

Mavvy

Wow. Over all of us?

Easy E

Obviously. I can replace you all.

G-Money

That’s not nice. No sleepover during our away game next week. I’m revoking your privileges.

Easy E

Lot of big words coming from the guy from the Florida education system!!

G-Money

You know what?

Never mind. Canada sounds like a dream.

Huddy Boy

Ethan, be nice. I hope Tella is okay.

Easy E

Thank you, Huddy. At least someone cares about me.

The rest of you can fuck off!

* * *

“Riley.” Dr. Ledlow beams at me and points at the couch across from the chair he’s sitting in. “It’s good to see you. Have a seat.”

“Thanks.” I drop onto the leather and stretch out my legs, massaging my right thigh. “What’s up?”

“How’s you’ve been?”

“Busy. I, ah, am working with the Stars in a sort of coaching capacity now. Coach got approval from the league for me to be a team official instead of the roster for the time being, so I don’t get to hide out in the tunnel anymore. I’m behind the bench now.”

“Are you enjoying that role?”

“More than I thought I would,” I admit. “It’s nice to feel like I have a purpose, and it’s even nicer to feel like I have a purpose that involves hockey. I go to practice. I talk about lineups and help my teammates run drills. I know it’s not going to be a long-term thing, but I’m falling back in love with the sport I spent weeks grieving because I thought I lost it. There’s a little bit of whiplash.”

“That’s understandable. You’re nervous it’s a Band-Aid that will get pulled off and wondering what happens if and when the wound is open again.”

“How the fuck are you so good at this?”

“My student loans don’t let me be not good at this.” He rests his foot on his knee and makes a note in his folder. “Let’s talk about your physical health. No more assistive devices. No more limping. When you walked in here, if I didn’t know you had a prosthetic, I never would’ve guessed you were using an artificial leg. I take it you’ve been going to your rehabilitation sessions like the team asked?”

“Yeah. I know I was stubborn in the beginning, but turns out, if you do something you’re supposed to do, you get better at it.”

“Wow.” Dr. Ledlow smiles. “Funny how that works.”

“Sucks, honestly.” I snort. “I’m learning to be comfortable. I’m adapting to this new body of mine. I still struggle occasionally when I don’t have my prosthesis on. Seeing myself in a mirror is… hard. Especially as someone who’s constantly seeing pictures and videos of what they looked like before.” I reach for the glass of water he set out for me and take a sip. “I’m not sure it will ever be normal.”

“It might not be, but that doesn’t take away from the progress you’ve made. You can be comfortable but not content. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.” He underlines something on the document in his lap and looks up at me. “We’ve gone a couple months without talking about the heavier stuff because our conversation hasn’t led to it, but given our interactions when you first started meeting with me, I’d be remiss if we didn’t spend a minute or two talking about?—”

“My mental health,” I say, and he nods. “It’s up and down. In the last few months, it’s been more up than down, but the downs hit me out of nowhere.”

I rub my jaw, thinking about last night and how I couldn’t get my sneaker on my prosthetic foot. It took me twenty minutes and a shoehorn before I finally chucked it at the wall and gave up. There’s the mood I was in last week, a beautiful January day where everything pissed me off: the sandwich I had for lunch, how scratchy my sheets felt against my leg, the pillow that didn’t help with the crick in my neck.

There’s no rhyme or reason for any of it. Some days the irritation and depression last for twenty minutes. I’ll take a bath, and it’ll disappear. Other times it stretches for hours, and I turn off my phone, lie in bed, and stare at the wall. The only good thing during those rough stretches is Lexi. I can always count on her to send me a funny text. I’ll get a meme that compliments my dick or a selfie of her in the athletic trainer’s room, Liam flipping off the camera behind her.

She’s a good friend.

“Some people think of recovery as a straight, flat line. A direct route from point A, which is the onset of grief, and B, which is a new normal. That’s not true. It’s more like rolling hills and valleys. There will be highs and lows, but they lead to the same place. And sometimes, you’ll have a flat line for months before a bump in the road shows up and you have to climb up another hill.”

“I have seventy more years of going uphill? I can’t wait.”

“It can always be worse. You could have eighty.”

I bark out a laugh. “Touché, Doc.”

“We have to address the elephant in the room.” Dr. Ledlow caps his pen and steeples his fingers under his chin. “Before, your depression was bringing on suicidal thoughts. After one of our first sessions, your mother pulled me aside to tell me she found a bottle of medication in your bathroom with a substantial amount of pills missing. I’ve been doing this long enough to know it’s easy to mask the pain by smiling and pretending like everything is fine on the surface when you’re battling an army of demons internally. Hell, I’ve done it myself. Do me a favor for a second. Forget I’m your doctor. Forget I’m a medical professional. Right now, I’m a man asking another man how he’s really doing, because we don’t get asked it enough.”

I clear my throat and lean forward in my chair. I can’t remember the last time someone asked me that. Has anyone asked my teammates that? Like, really asked them? I probably should. It seems pretty important.

“I’m not going to lie. I was having those thoughts,” I say quietly. “Frequently. That pain—physically and mentally—was… I can’t even describe it.” I turn my head and stare out at the window. “Every day I was in that hospital, I thought how easy it would be to just end it all. It’d free up a bed for someone who would actually recover. My parents wouldn’t have to give up weeks of their life to help me move around my apartment because I couldn’t fucking walk. Would I have gone through with it? We’ll never know. I’m not… that’s not something I want to do anymore. I’m not kidding when I say the hard days are still so fucking hard no matter how much I smile around my friends, but I’m hanging in there. I’m reading again. I picked up a paintbrush for the first time in forever. I’m finally starting to see who I could be without hockey, and I’m trying to find something new to live for after the greatest thing in my life was ripped away from me. I realize there are people who would miss me, and I’d miss them.”

“Your parents? Your teammates?”

“And other people.”

“Ah.” Dr. Ledlow smiles. “A girl or a guy.”

“Yeah.” I sigh. “A girl.”

“Want to tell me about her?”

“We’re friends. All we’re ever going to be is friends, and I’d rather have her in my life as that than not have her in my life at all.”

“You care about her,” he says.

“I care about a lot of people.”

“You really care about her.”

“I guess I do.” I drum my fingers on my thigh. Lexi and I got together last week, a quick meetup at my place on her way home from a Pilates class. She was sweaty. I was horny. And I’m slowly but surely getting the hang of this friends with benefits thing. “She’s done a lot for me. Everyone has.”

“How are you really doing, Riley?” he presses, but nothing about it feels forceful.

“I’m…” I trail off and blink back tears. I pull off my glasses and hurry to wipe my eyes, but Dr. Ledlow doesn’t say anything. “I’m okay. I’m closer to good than not, and that’s lightyears better than where I was before. A work in fucking progress, I’d say, but also someone who knows they have a bigger role here and is no longer in a hurry to leave.” I pause to swallow the lump in my throat. “Thank you for asking.”

“We’ll stop there for today. You’ve made some big steps over the last six months, and I’m really proud of you.”

“Thank you for being patient with me,” I mumble. “I know I haven’t been easy to work with.”

“I’m always going to be patient with you, Riley. Not because it’s my job, but because it’s the right thing to do as a human being.”

“You’re way too good at this, Doc. Your ability to analyze me even when I don’t think I’m being analyzed is scary.”

“All in a day’s work,” he says.

I stand and hold out my hand, smiling when he clasps it. “I’ll see you next month?”

“You have my number if you need me before then.”

“Thanks, man. I appreciate your time.”

“My pleasure.” He shakes my palm. “And Riley? If something makes you happy, I think you should go for it.”

“Would you go for it knowing there was no shot at something coming out of it?”

“Your doctors said you shouldn’t have survived, but here you are. Aren’t you glad they went for it even though the odds were stacked against them?”

“Bastard.” I tip my head back and look up at the ceiling. “We’ll see.”

“Can’t wait for an update. Be well, Riley.”

I wave and take the elevator down to the ground floor, his words ringing in my ears in the backseat of an Uber all the way to Hudson’s place.

* * *

“Order, order!” Maverick yells. He knocks a rubber mallet on the living room coffee table. “Can everyone please shut the fuck up so book club can commence?”

“I’ve been waiting for this one.” Grant rubs his hands together and grins. “A dark romance where she falls in love with the stalker but only after she makes him crawl on his knees and beg for forgiveness? It’s like the author wrote this shit just for me.”

“I’m sure she had you in mind the whole time.” Hudson offers me a beer, and I shake my head. “I thought this one was just okay.”

“Okay? Okay? He buys her whatever she wants. He threatens the guy at the bar who harasses her. He’s a nice dude who makes sure she’s safe when she rides on the back of his motorcycle?—”

“There were motorcycles in there?” Ethan asks, looking up.

“Did you even read the book?” I ask.

“Nah. I got busy.” He smirks and flips through the pages of the paperback. “I’m a popular guy, Mitchy.”

“I did not need to know that.”

“If I have to see pictures of the jewelry on his dick, you all get to know how popular he is,” Grant says. “Imagine being in line at the grocery store and Ethan’s penis pops up on your phone.”

“I just gagged.” Liam scrunches up his nose and takes a sip of his water. “Please refrain from any further conversation on phallic tendencies. It’s cold as shit outside, and Piper has the car tonight. I don’t want to walk home, but I will.”

“Such a prude.” Ethan throws a pretzel at Liam’s head, and he catches it without even looking up. “Someone else convince me to read this book.”

“She also crawls to him .” Maverick grins. “That’s an underrated microtrope if you ask me.”

“Remember that other book where the guy tells her to lose her ring and crawl? Hell.” Grant fans his face. “I wish I had the balls to say that to a woman. I wouldn’t be able to get the words out.”

I wonder if I could get Lexi to crawl to me. She’d probably put up a fight and flat-out refuse in the name of feminism, but I bet I could convince her by crawling to her first. I’m all for an equal power dynamic if it means watching her temporarily hand over control again.

Fuck .

“Mitchy?” Hudson taps my shoulder, and I blink. “You good?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Distracted.” I flash them a smile. “I liked the book more than I thought I would. He’s a nice stalker; he makes breakfast for her before sneaking out of her house, and does her laundry when she’s at work.”

“A respectful king,” Maverick agrees.

“And short. We need some excitement for the shorter guys out there,” Grant adds. “We deserve love too.”

“You’re five eleven,” he deadpans.

“Compared to you fuckers I’m a goddamn shrimp.”

“Your posture is horrible,” Ethan says around a cookie he shoves in his mouth. “You need to stand up taller.”

“I never thought I’d be taking notes on how to be a good partner from a stalker romance, but here we are.” Hudson smiles. “I did Madeline and Lucy’s laundry the other day while they were on a field trip because of that scene in the book, and she burst into tears when she got home.”

“Women.” Grant sighs. “So complex. So brilliant. We’re so undeserving.”

“Do you think Coach dates?” Ethan asks from out of nowhere. “I could see him being stalker-adjacent.”

“I don’t want to imagine Coach doing anything with anyone. The same way I don’t need to hear about all of your personal business.” I tap the title. “We should read book three next month.”

“All in favor?” Maverick asks, and everyone’s hands go up in the air. “Done. Motion for book three to be February’s pick approved.”

“I’m going to be pissed if it sucks,” Ethan says.

“You’re not even going to read it,” I answer. “So you don’t get an opinion.”

“Ooh, Mitchy is feisty today. And smiling from ear to ear.” Ethan pinches my cheek. “Did you get laid, Ri? The only time I look like this is after I get some good?—”

“No,” I say, smacking him in the chest with a pillow. “I had a therapy appointment and it went really well.”

“I’m proud of you.” Hudson nudges my foot with his. “I know you have someone to talk to, but if you need another outlet for your grief, I’ve been there. I’m always here with a set of ears if you need to vent.”

“Thanks, man.” I pat his thigh. “I appreciate that.”

“Bonding over their past traumas and coming back stronger on the other side,” Grant whispers to Ethan. “Doesn’t make them any less manly.”

“We can hear you, Grant,” Hudson says.

“That was the point, Huddy.”

Maverick looks at me from across the room. “I know we’ve said it before, but it should be said again. We’re really glad you’re here, Mitchy.”

“Otherwise, we’d be stuck reading some book where a guy fucks his motorcycle because that’s apparently what Ethan is into,” Grant says.

“Okay, fuck all of you assholes.” Ethan stands and flips us off. “See if I pass you the puck at our next game.”

The room descends into chaos. There’s an argument about paperbacks and hardcovers. Ethan and Grant try to make a castle out of all the paperbacks we brought and Maverick and Hudson argue about his bookshelf needing to be rearranged. A video game controller gets tossed in my hand and someone pulls up NBA 2K on the big television, and I really can’t stop smiling.

This is my home, exactly where I’m supposed to be.