Page 8 of Lovesick (The Minnesota Mustangs #1)

Harlan discards his own helmet, shaking out his hair and leaning on the butt of his stick.

“You’re being too hard on yourself. Sure, you’re captain and you’re responsible for a lot of the plays, but we as your teammates have to hold our own weight too.

You can’t be expected to succeed if people aren’t willing to cooperate. ”

The influx of ice-cold liquid slops heavily into my empty stomach, but I bask in the way it soothes me like a balm. Bowing my head, I squeeze the bottle and spray a rivulet down my neck, feeling the coolness trickle under my jersey and douse the internal bonfire crackling in the hearth of my ribs.

“I don’t know if I can do this, man. I wasn’t even captain at my old school. Everything’s so serious now. I have people counting on me, I have scouts watching me—one wrong move and I’ll screw the whole thing up.”

I take a seat on the bench, still reeling from the aftershocks crawling up my arm. My eyes lower to a sizable chunk of ice pockmarked from one too many blades, forming a divot that sits between uneven edges. My reflection is a mirage, distorted by the blinding fluorescents and the unbuffed surface.

“If you keep punishing yourself like this, the grief is going to kill you. The truth of the matter is that you’re setting yourself up for failure, which will indirectly impact your performance,” Harlan explains matter-of-factly, a frown twisting his lips.

It’s a juxtaposition to his normally cheery demeanor—the one that’s kept me levelheaded through Knox’s relentless assholery and Coach’s equally relentless harping.

For the first time this practice, I welcome the smile that materializes between my cheeks. “When did you get so smart?”

Harlan taps his head. “Psychology major.”

“Ah, my built-in therapist,” I muse, pretending to clutch my heart.

Harlan and I only met over the summer, but we hit it off right away.

He was the first guy on the team to come up and welcome me.

I learned quickly that I have to earn my place here.

I don’t blame the other guys for having their reservations.

I’m the new kid who’s disrupted the entire balance of things, but I’m going to prove to everyone—including Knox—that I’m the right fit for captain, and that with a lot of hard work and overtime, I’m going to lead the Mustangs to the Frozen Four.

I don’t think Harlan views hockey through a life-or-death lens. He’s ridiculously smart, and even though a career in psychology isn’t necessarily the most lucrative, he has plenty of options to succeed in other fields. Engineering, chemistry.

After I dive-bombed my first practice with the Mustangs, he offered to buy me dinner.

I’m not sure if it was out of pity, but crab Rangoon was involved, so I clearly wasn’t going to decline.

He told me that hockey was an extracurricular for him—a way to express himself beyond equations or essays, a place where he was more than just his brain.

He liked the aspect of being a part of a team.

He also played minor league when he was little, and it was the one sport that he wasn’t terrible at.

He was the first person to give me a chance, and I’ll forever be grateful. I don’t have the legroom to pursue a different career like he does. My whole life has been on the ice. It’s my focus, my passion, and the driving force behind who I am.

Hockey means everything to me. This sport is my lifeblood, so failure isn’t an option.

It also doesn’t help that I’m only here because of an athletic scholarship.

Yep, my shit-for-brains dad took all the money with him when he left during my childhood, and my mother doesn’t have enough in savings to pay tuition for such a prestigious school.

Enter: Coach Lawson. My saving grace, my angel in disguise.

He scouted a few of my community college games, and he offered me the chance to show the world that I was more than some poor kid who got dealt life’s shitty hand.

I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.

He saw a light in me that I didn’t even know existed, and after living the majority of my life in darkness—deprived of the love that my dad locked away—I yearned to be seen.

Merit saw me just like Coach did. The real me.

I rub the back of my nape with my gloved hand—a nervous tic that I’ve perfected ever since I was a child.

Whether I got caught eating my cousin’s birthday cake when I was seven, or I got caught shoplifting Trojan condoms from a gas station when I was sixteen—peer-pressured, of course—I was never great at hiding my emotions.

And Harlan, with his overly analytical eye, is immune to my poor suppression tactics.

“Something else is bothering you,” he comments, taking a seat beside me.

My jaw tightens out of reflex. “It’s nothing.”

“Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Drop it, Har.”

“Where did you go last night?” he interrogates, and not in a pushy way. More like an I-want-to-know-what’s-actually-going-on-with-you way. His morality is sickening sometimes.

Fuck. I forgot that I ditched him halfway through the night. God, what kind of friend am I? I don’t think I even remembered to text him my whereabouts. Granted, he was talking to some girl, but I should’ve kept him informed. I’m lucky he didn’t come back to the apartment.

“I’m sorry, man. Time got away from me. I was, uh, with someone,” I answer, purposefully omitting crucial details. The less he knows, the better. Crew Calloway doesn’t catch feelings, especially not after sleeping with a girl one time.

Harlan scours my face for any cracks in my poorly constructed facade, and much to my dismay, he cherry-picks the truth out of the smallest fissure. “So this is about a girl. Was it the one with brown hair by the bar? You kept staring at her the whole night.”

My cheeks burn with embarrassment as my voice rises to prepubescent levels. “What? No! I wasn’t doing that. I was watching the…the game! Yeah, the game. I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”

He chuffs a laugh. “Crew Calloway, King of the Flings, is flustered over a girl ?”

“She’s not just a girl,” I mutter under my breath.

“So you admit it—there was a girl involved!”

Shit. He’s got me there.

I deadpan, “Fine, yes. There was a girl. We hooked up. She got the hell out of dodge this morning. End of story.”

Confusion bleeds across Harlan’s features. “Wait a second, she left before you could kick her out?”

I don’t appreciate the inflection there, but I digress.

“I wasn’t going to ‘kick her out.’”

“Ohhh, right,” he humors me, rolling his forest-green eyes. “Just like you weren’t going to kick out that girl from the club, or the girl from the car dealership, or the girl from Hobby Lobby.”

Ah, Hobby Lobby Holly. Went for popsicle sticks, left with her riding my stick. Good times.

I’ve been body snatched—it’s the only possible explanation. My palms are sweaty, my heart won’t stop pounding, and I think my indigestion might actually be butterflies.

AHHH! I don’t want these mushy-gushy feelings. I’ve lived by the three F’s my whole life: flirt, fuck, farewell. And it’s worked for me every time. The three F’s do not consist of flirt, fuck, fawn.

“I actually wanted her to stay,” I admit quietly, even though my head is screaming at me to get a goddamn grip.

Harlan stares at me in complete shock, looking like a deer in headlights. “Shit.”

“I know,” I groan, planting my face in my gloves. “I’m fucked.”

My best friend offers me a supportive shoulder pat, but it’s about as soul-killing as the death blow that Merit dealt me before leaving me in the dust with my balls out and everything.

Be realistic, Crew. The possibility that you’ll see this girl again is slim to none. You don’t know anything about her. You had a great night together, and that’s all it’ll ever be. You need to move on. You have so many more important things to think about right now.

You’re right, Crew. Thank you for talking some sense into me.

“Maybe you’ll see each other again. I mean, you never know. If she was at Dusky’s, she’s probably a local.”

“Or she’s a tourist who went to the most popular bar in our Podunk town,” I reply pessimistically.

Harlan’s about to rebut my statement before Coach Lawson cuts off our unauthorized intermission, his burly arms crossed over his barrel chest, and his dark eyes dialed in on me specifically. His irises are like stagnant pools of murky lake water, and they have every intention of drowning me.

“Calloway!” he shouts despite being directly next to me.

I flinch. “Yes, Coach?”

“I’d like to invite you to dinner tomorrow night. I want to discuss some logistics before the season starts, and I want to thank you for all your hard work this preseason.”

Dinner. With Coach Lawson. Yeah, that’s totally not intimidating at all.

I haven’t spent one-on-one time with him outside of practice.

Nothing ever warranted us speaking in leisure, but it feels like I’ve just infiltrated the goddamn Pentagon.

Coach is one of my inspirations. In hockey, in life.

Not only that, but he’s sort of like the father figure I never had.

There’s this added pressure weighing on my chest to make him proud, and I don’t think I can survive an alternate timeline where that isn’t a reality.

And, I mean, I’d be shark chum if I had the gall to refuse his gracious offer, so all I can say is, “I’ll be there.”

Realistically, we’re going to partake in good food, conversation, and maybe a pep talk that eradicates this parasite of worry gnawing away at my bones.

This is a chance for me to deepen our relationship outside of hockey—to gain his trust and prove to him that he made the right choice in backing me.

What’s the worst that could happen?