Page 13 of Puck Wild (Storm Warning #1)
"There's one guy who reminded us tonight that ugly goals count double. Showing up matters more than showing off."
He wasn't looking at me, but I knew who he was talking about.
"Cereal." Coach used the old nickname and tossed the puck to Evan, who caught it with reflexes that would make a cat envious. "This one's yours to give."
Evan stared down at the black rubber in his palm. The room held its collective breath.
He stood and walked directly to my stall.
He didn't say anything at first. When he held out the puck, I saw it was completely blank. No label. No Sharpie inscription. No "Game Winner - 10/15" or "First Goal - J. Riley" or any of the usual hockey memorabilia bullshit.
It was a puck. Raw. Unmarked. Real.
"You earned it," Evan said quietly.
His hand brushed mine when I took it from him. That wasn't an accident.
I swear the floor tilted. The noise of the locker room faded to background static. Evan's gray eyes were darker than usual, focused entirely on me.
"Thanks" was the only word I could force out.
He nodded once and returned to his stall, leaving me sitting there with a game puck, my first in Thunder Bay.
The celebration continued around us, but I barely heard it. I turned the puck over in my hands, feeling its weight and perfect imperfection. No label meant no categorization. No filing system. No way for Evan to organize it in his carefully controlled world.
He'd given me something that existed outside his rules.
That was everything.
It was my big night, and I couldn't disappoint the team. I had to show my face at the post-game celebration at The Drop.
It was the kind of dive bar that existed in every hockey town—sticky floors, neon beer signs, and a jukebox full of classic rock songs from the 80s. Half the team showed, riding the high of a decisive win.
I nursed a beer in the corner booth, watching Pickle attempt to teach the bartender his victory dance while Hog held court at the dartboard. The puck sat heavy in my jacket pocket, a constant reminder of the latest moment that had tilted my world sideways.
"You're quiet tonight, Vegas."
Kowalczyk slid into the seat across from me, his beer barely touched. He was one of the veterans, a guy who'd seen enough hockey to know when someone was processing something more than one game.
"Just tired," I said.
"The good kind?"
I stared at the neck of my beer bottle. "Different tired."
He nodded. "First real goal'll do that to you. Makes it feel possible, you know? Like maybe it's not only borrowed time."
His comment hit me harder than he knew. Borrowed time—yeah, that was it. The team, the acceptance, and whatever was building between Evan and me.
"Maybe."
By eleven, the celebration had wound down to the usual suspects—Hog challenging anyone brave enough to arm wrestle, and Pickle scrolling through his phone, watching replays of his goal from six different angles. I made my excuses and headed home.
The apartment was dark when I got home. Evan's door was closed, with a thin line of light visible underneath. I suspected he was updating his post-game spreadsheets.
I stood in the hallway, puck still in my pocket, wondering whether I should knock. I could thank him properly for being such a gentleman in the locker room. Instead, I went to my room and pretended I wasn't disappointed when his light went out twenty minutes later.
At 3 AM, I was awake, staring at the ceiling. The puck sat on my nightstand. Unmarked. Unorganized. It was the most beautiful thing Evan Carter had ever given me, and he didn't even know it.
My phone buzzed with notifications I didn't want to read—probably screenshots of the local sports blog calling tonight "Riley's Redemption" or some other clickbait headline that would make me want to throw my device into Lake Superior.
I'd mistakenly read my own press in the past. It never ended well.
I rolled onto my side, facing the nightstand, and reached for the rubber disc. It was heavier than I remembered, solid in my palm. Real in a way that most things in my life weren't.
As I stared at it in the dim light, a spiral began.
What if this is just another setup?
I'd been here before—riding high on something I thought was genuine, only to watch it collapse under the weight of my own stupidity.
Love on Ice had started in a positive light.
I had three weeks connecting with Derek, the quiet guy from Manitoba who made me laugh without trying.
We'd snuck away from the cameras to talk about stupid romcoms and what we wanted after the show ended.
We shared the belief that we didn't expect to find something real in the middle of manufactured drama.
Then, the producers decided our storyline was "too boring for television." They edited our conversations into manipulative game-playing. They turned genuine tears into crocodile performances. They made me into a villain who broke hearts for sport.
I watched Derek's face change during the finale. He realized the producers were repackaging everything he felt into dramatic content, and I couldn't save us. He wouldn't even look at me during the reunion show.
And "Puck Life"—damn, "Puck Life." That disaster had started as therapy, a way to own my narrative before someone else twisted it. I'd written decent verses about the pressure of being a gay hockey player and trying to find your own story in the jungle of overgrown myths.
The studio producers convinced me to "punch it up." Make it funnier. More viral-ready. So, I added the auto-tune, the smoke machines, and the bedazzled jersey, turning frustration into a joke that nobody got.
The agent's voice echoed in my head like a ghost: "You're not serious enough for the NHL, Riley. Fix that, or find another dream."
I sat up in bed, heart hammering against my ribs.
After catching my breath, I told myself Evan was different from Derek. He saw through my performances, called out my bullshit, and demanded authenticity. That also meant I had nowhere to hide when I inevitably screwed whatever we had up.
And I would screw it up. I always did.
I slipped out of bed and padded to my desk, bare feet silent on the cold hardwood. My notebook sat where I'd left it, dog-eared and stuffed with fragments of thoughts I wasn't brave enough to finish.
I opened it to a blank page and stared at the white space until my eyes watered. Finally, I started writing.
They weren't polished lyrics designed to go viral. It wasn't clever wordplay that deflected real emotion. It was the raw, bleeding truth that lived under my skin:
Gravity keeps pulling me down to the places I’ve been where I broke what I touched and I touched everything
You move like precision like someone who knows where all the pieces belong and I’m chaos in cleats
Alphabetized your cinnamon never alphabetized me but maybe that's the point— some things can’t be filed
What if I’m the storm that ruins your quiet? what if quiet is what I need to learn?
I set the pen down. The words were naked on the page, stripped of the armor I usually wrapped around anything real.
Through the thin walls, I heard the shower turn on. Three-fifteen a.m.—ridiculously late or early for Evan. He probably couldn't sleep either.
I closed the notebook and walked back to bed, but I didn't lie down. Instead, I picked up the puck again, turning it over in my hands like a prayer bead.
The weight of it was perfect. Regulation size and regulation heft. No different from a thousand other pucks I'd touched in a lifetime of hockey.
Except this one mattered.
This one came from hands that alphabetized spice racks, baked stress cookies, and rapped his knuckles against my shin pads in moments that meant everything.
"Don't label it," I whispered to the darkness. "Don't make it real."
But it already was real. I sighed and climbed back into bed.
The shower shut off. In a few minutes, Evan would pad back to his room in that gray hoodie he wore like armor, and I'd have to pretend I wasn't lying in bed thinking about the precise way his fingers had brushed mine.
I'd have to pretend we were still only teammates learning to coexist.
I'd have to pretend the unlabeled puck on my nightstand wasn't the most honest thing anyone had ever given me.
Outside, Thunder Bay slept under October stars; somewhere in the distance, Lake Superior whispered its secrets against the shore.
I held the puck against my chest and tried not to think about how many ways I could ruin the beautiful, terrifying thing growing between Evan and me.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it.
And I couldn't stop wanting it anyway.